Arquivos de setembro de 2011
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Uma flor para Chico
29/09/2011 14:58 | Autor: Flora Thomson-DeVeaux
"On this day in 1952, Brazil came to a stop."
That was my fun fact of the day on Tuesday. I don't know what sort of reaction I was expecting to get out of people, but when I told my rowing instructor as he was helping me into the boat, his face suddenly got very grave. I felt the need to offer up supplementary information. "On September 27th, 1952, Francisco Alves died in a car accident on the way back from São Paulo." He was staring at me with a very serious expression. I was about to offer more details when he cut in. I thought he was going to reveal that he was a long-lost relative of Chico Alves', or that he was Chico's biggest fan. — Leia o post completo.
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Delicadeza no Engenhão
28/09/2011 10:59 | Autor: Flora Thomson-DeVeaux
It couldn’t have been otherwise.
The 21 years in which Botafogo went without winning a single title are one kind of tragedy; one could argue that Sunday’s game was one in the much purer sense, if on a massively smaller scale. First act ends up, second act takes a gut-punching nosedive. Unity of action, unity of place, and unity of time. Aeschylus would have been proud.
What brought it on, of course, was our hubris. — Leia o post completo.
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From Ataraxia to Zarelho
22/09/2011 15:26 | Autor: Flora Thomson-DeVeaux
I’m in love with my newest acquisition, a sort of proto-thesaurus which I found at a sebo in Centro – a Dictionary of Synonyms in the Portuguese Language. The book is highly eccentric in a number of ways: first of all, it’s divided into I. VERBS and II. WORDS (NOT VERBS), apparently because Portuguese doesn’t have a way to distinguish between nouns and adjectives? (It definitely does, for the record.) — Leia o post completo.
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Um conto de duas cidades
20/09/2011 14:29 | Autor: Flora Thomson-DeVeaux
Last Tuesday morning found me standing at a bus stop on Rua Jardim Botânico, bleary-eyed and rumpled, but bound for São Paulo. All because I’ve been trying to be more impulsive lately. The Friday before, I was checking my email at PUC and saw that a dear professor of mine was giving two talks at USP the next week. And Antonio Candido was giving the opening talk at the Sérgio Buarque de Holanda conference! I did a bit of agonizing and deliberating and asking to be let out of classes and trying to find plane tickets for less than R$500 (complete failure on that front), but by the next day I had bus tickets to the Drizzly City. I yanked myself out of bed at 5 a.m. on Tuesday, the day of the conference, and made my way to Rodoviária Novo Rio. By midafternoon I was in another world. — Leia o post completo.
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Back to school
14/09/2011 15:47 | Autor: Flora Thomson-DeVeaux
Maybe not in terms of workload, or reading difficulty, or even the fact that all my classes are in Portuguese. PUC is hard because it feels like high school. I know that it’s only been two years, but I’d completely forgotten what it was like to be in a classroom and feel that nobody wanted to be there. “You have the right to miss up to 25% of the classes,” one history professor explained wearily as students texted in the back of the room. “If you copy from Wikipedia on your midterm, we will find out,” said another. At one point during a Brazilian literature course, the professor was resolutely talking over at least 3 different whispered conversations; in a 4-person history seminar, the benevolent old professor actually had to shush 50% of the class. — Leia o post completo.
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I-Juca-Pirama
13/09/2011 18:07 | Autor: Flora Thomson-DeVeaux
It was supposed to be a nature walk. That’s all I’ll say.
We met in front of the bondinho station at 8 a.m., the city still a bit shrouded in fog. We were the first group to go on a nature walk organized by the study abroad program – the guinea pigs, as it turned out. Everyone was rather sanguine about it, expecting some sort of a stroll and maybe a bit of scrambling over rocks. I very nearly wore jeans and Converse, but at the last minute sacrificed my sartorial dignity and laced up the massive blue sneakers I only wear when there is Exercise to Be Done. — Leia o post completo.
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Swearing allegiance to the Rei
08/09/2011 15:59 | Autor: Flora Thomson-DeVeaux
My fate as a Brazilianist is currently hanging in the balance. More accurately, it rests in the white-clad, superstitious hands of Roberto Carlos. The first time I heard the name Roberto Carlos, I had to look it up for a translation – a short, surreal piece by Marina Colasanti, which made an impression on my creative writing class. That’s a lie, actually; I’d heard of Roberto Carlos first a semester earlier, when I saw the film Pixote. But the reference was glancing, in any case. I gleaned that he was a prolific pop singer, looked up a few videos, winced, and got back to translating. — Leia o post completo.
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Tudo bem? Tudo bom. Você? Tudo ótimo.
06/09/2011 18:14 | Autor: Flora Thomson-DeVeauxHere’s something for the Brazilians in the peanut gallery to ponder. This has been bothering me for quite some time. Do you realize exactly what you are affirming when you say that tudo está bem? Tudo is a big word to be throwing around every time you greet someone. Tudo. Everything. Every last thing, from the weather to the state of international relations to your grandmother’s dog. Tudo, in the history of the world, has literally never been bem, bom, or ótimo. Not even close. At the very least being able to say “tudo bom” smacks of provincialism, or a serious lack of introspection. Really? Tudo? — Leia o post completo.
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chicken-hearted
01/09/2011 12:28 | Autor: Flora Thomson-DeVeaux
Midnight on a frigid Tuesday, sitting at Garota da Gávea, nursing a chopp and slowly expanding my colloquial Portuguese/Northeastern slang repertoire. (Newest acquisition – when you’re not up for doing something, you’re sem saco. And, yes, that pretty much means what you think it means. Also, apparently just yelling “égua!” at people is a thing?) It’s a bone-chilling night by carioca standards, and someone discovers that our breath is even starting to fog up. General delight and novelty. — Leia o post completo.
