Lorrie Moore HOW TO BECOME A WRITER

First, try to be something, anything, else. A movie star/astronaut. A movie star

missionary. A movie star/kindergarten teacher. President of the World. Fail miserably. It is best if you fail at an early age -- say, fourteen. Early, critical disillusionment is necessary so that at fifteen you can write long haiku sequences about thwarted desire. It is a pond, a cherry blossom, a wind brushing against sparrow wing leaving for mountain. Count the syllables.

Show it to your mom. She is touch and practical. She has a son in Vietnam and a husband who may be having an affair. She believes in wearing brown because it hides spots. She'll look briefly at your writing, then back up at you with a face blank as a donut. She'll say: "How about emptying the dishwasher?" Look away. Shove the forks in the fork drawer. Accidentally break one of the freebie gas station glasses. This is the required pain and suffering. This is only for starters.

In your high school English class look only at Mr. Killian's face. Decide faces are important. Write a villanelle about pores. Struggle. Write a sonnet. County the syllables: nine, ten, eleven, thirteen. Decide to experiment with fiction. Here you don't have to count syllables. Write a short story about an elderly man and woman who accidentally shoot each other in the head, the result of an inexplicable malfunction of a shotgun which appears mysteriously in their living room one night. Give it to Mr. Killian as your final project. When you get it back, he has written on it: "Some of your images are quite nice, but you have no sense of plot." When you are home, in the privacy of your own room, faintly crawl in pencil beneath his black-inked comments: "Plots are for dead people, pore-face."

Take all the babysitting jobs you can get. You are great with kids. They love you. You tell them stories about old people who die idiot deaths. You sing them songs like "Blue Bells of Scotland," which is their favorite. And when they are in their pajamas and have finally stopped pinching each other, when they are fast asleep, you read every sex manual in the house, and wonder how on earth anyone could ever do those things with someone they truly loved. Fall asleep in a chair reading Mr. McMurphy's Playboy. When the McMurphys come home, they will tap you on the shoulder, look at the magazine in your lap, and grin. You will want to die. They will ask you if Tracey took her medicine all right. Explain, yes, she did, that you promised her a story if she would take it like a big girl and that seemed to work out just fine. "Oh, marvelous" they will exclaim.

Try to smile proudly. Apply to college as a child psychology major.

As a child psychology major, you have some electives. You've always liked birds. Sign up

for something called, "The Ornithological Field Trip." It meets Tuesdays and Thursdays at two. When you arrive at Room 134 on the first day of class, everyone is sitting around a seminar

table talking about metaphors. You've heard of these. After a short, excruciating while, raise your hand and say diffidently, "Excuse me, isn't this Birdwatching One-oh-one?" The class tops and turns to look at you. They seem to have one face -- giant and blank as a vandalized clock. Someone with a beard booms out, "No, this is Creative Writing." Say: "Oh -- right," as if perhaps you knew all along. Look down at your schedule. Wonder how the hell you ended up here. The computer, apparently, has made an error. You start to get up to leave and then don't. The lines at the reistrar this week are huge. Perhaps your creative writing isn't all that bad. Perhaps it is fate. Perhaps this is what your dad meant when he said, "It's the age of computers, Francie, it's the age of computers."

Decide that you like college life. In your dorm you meet many nice people. Some are

smarter than you. And some, you notice, are dumber than you. You will continue,

unfortunately, to view the world in exactly these terms for the rest of your life. The assignment this week in creative writing is to narrate a violent happening. Turn in a story

about driving with your Uncle Gordon and another one about two old people who are accidentally electrocuted when they go to turn on a badly wired desk lamp. The teacher will hand them back to you with comments: ''Much of your writing is smooth and energetic. You have, however, a ludicrous notion of plot.'' Write another story about a man and a woman who, in the very first paragraph, have their lower torsos accidentally blitzed away by dynamite. In the second paragraph, with the insurance money, they buy a frozen yogurt stand together. There are six more paragraphs. You read the whole thing out loud in class. No one likes it. They say your sense of plot is outrageous and incompetent. After class someone asks you if you are crazy.

Decide that perhaps you should stick to comedies. Start dating someone who is funny,

someone who has what in high school you called a ''really great sense of humor'' and what now your creative writing class calls ''self-contempt giving rise to comic form.'' Write down all of his jokes, but don't tell him you are doing this. Make up anagrams of his old girlfriend's name and name all of your socially handicapped characters with them. Tell him his old girlfriend is in all of your stories and then watch how funny he can be, see what a really great sense of humor he can have.

Your child psychology adviser tells you you are neglecting courses in your major. What

you spend the most time on should be what you're majoring in. Say yes, you understand.

In creative writing seminars over the next two years, everyone continues to smoke

cigarettes and ask the same things: ''But does it work?'' ''Why should we care about this

character?'' ''Have you earned this cliche?'' These seem like important questions. On days when it is your turn, you look at the class hopefully as they scour your mimeographs for a plot. They look back up at you, drag deeply and then smile in a sweet sort of way.

You spend too much time slouched and demoralized. Your boyfriend suggests bicycling.

Your roommate suggests a new boyfriend. You are said to be self-mutilating and losing weight, but you continue writing. The only happiness you have is writing something new, in the middle of the night, armpits damp, heart pounding, something no one has yet seen. You have only those brief, fragile, untested moments of exhilaration when you know: you are a genius.

Understand what you must do. Switch majors. The kids in your nursery project will be

disappointed, but you have a calling, an urge, a delusion, an unfortunate habit. You have, as

your mother would say, fallen in with a bad crowd.

Why write? Where does writing come from? These are questions to ask yourself. They are like: Where does dust come from? Or: Why is there war? Or: If there's a God, then why is my brother now a cripple?These are questions that you keep in your wallet, like calling cards. These are questions, your creative writing teacher says, that are good to address in your journals but rarely in your fiction.The writing professor this fall is stressing the Power of the Imagination. Which means he doesn't want long descriptive stories about your camping trip last July. He wants you to start in a realistic context but then to alter it. Like recombinant DNA. He wants you to let your imagination sail, to let it grow big-bellied in the wind. This is a quote from Shakespeare.

Tell your roommate your great idea, your great exercise of imaginative power: a

transformation of Melville to contemporary life. It will be about monomania and the fish-eat-fish world of life insurance in Rochester, N.Y. The first line will be ''Call me Fishmeal,'' and it will feature a menopausal suburban husband named Richard, who because he is so depressed all the time is called ''Mopey Dick'' by his witty wife Elaine. Say to your roommate: ''Mopey Dick, get it?'' Your roommate looks at you, her face blank as a large Kleenex. She comes up to you, like a buddy, and puts an arm around your burdened shoulders. ''Listen, Francie,'' she says, slow as speech therapy. ''Let's go out and get a big beer.''

The seminar doesn't like this one either. You suspect they are beginning to feel sorry for

you. They say: ''You have to think about what is happening. Where is the story here?''

The next semester the writing professor is obsessed with writing from personal

experience. You must write from what you know, from what has happened to you. He wants deaths, he wants camping trips. Think about what has happened to you. In three years there have been three things: you lost your virginity; your parents got divorced; and your brother came home from a forest 10 miles from the Cambodian border with only half a thigh, a permanent smirk nestled into one corner of his mouth. About the first you write: ''It created a new space, which hurt and cried in a voice that wasn't mine, 'I'm not the same anymore, but I'll be O.K.' ''About the second you write an elaborate story of an old married couple who stumble upon an unknown land mine in their kitchen and accidentally blow themselves up. You call it: ''For Better or for Liverwurst.''About the last you write nothing. There are no words for this. Your typewriter hums. You can find no words.

At undergraduate cocktail parties, people say, ''Oh, you write? What do you write about?''

Your roommate, who has consumed too much wine, too little cheese and no crackers at all,

blurts: ''Oh, my god, she always writes about her dumb boyfriend.''

Later on in life you will learn that writers are merely open, helpless texts with no real

understanding of what they have written and therefore must half-believe anything and

everything that is said of them. You, however, have not yet reached this stage of literary

criticism. You stiffen and say, ''I do not,'' the same way you said it when someone in the fourth grade accused you of really liking oboe lessons and your parents really weren't just making you take them.Insist you are not very interested in any one subject at all, that you are interested in the music of language, that you are interested in - in - syllables, because they are the atoms of poetry, the cells of the mind, the breath of the soul. Begin to feel woozy. Stare into your plastic wine cup.''Syllables?'' you will hear someone ask, voice trailing off, as they glide slowly toward the reassuring white of the dip.

Begin to wonder what you do write about. Or if you have anything to say. Or if there even

is such a thing as a thing to say. Limit these thoughts to no more than 10 minutes a day, like

sit- ups, they can make you thin.You will read somewhere that all writing has to do with one's genitals. Don't dwell on this. It will make you nervous.

Your mother will come visit you. She will look at the circles under your eyes and hand you a brown book with a brown briefcase on the cover. It is entitled: ''How to Become a Business Executive.'' She has also brought the ''Names for Baby'' encyclopedia you asked for; one of your characters, the aging clown-schoolteacher, needs a new name. Your mother will shake her head and say: ''Francie, Francie, remember when you were going to be a child psychology major?''

Say: ''Mom, I like to write.''

She'll say: ''Sure you like to write. Of course. Sure you like to write.''

Write a story about a confused music student and title it: ''Schubert Was the One with the

Glasses, Right?'' It's not a big hit, although your roommate likes the part where the two

violinists accidentally blow themselves up in a recital room. ''I went out with a violinist once,'' she says, snapping her gum.

Thank god you are taking other courses. You can find sanctuary in 19th-century ontological

snags and invertebrate courting rituals. Certain globular mollusks have what is called ''Sex by the Arm.'' The male octopus, for instance, loses the end of one arm when placing it inside the female body during intercourse. Marine biologists call it ''Seven Heaven.'' Be glad you know these things. Be glad you are not just a writer. Apply to law school.

From here on in, many things can happen. But the main one will be this: You decide not to

go to law school after all, and, instead, you spend a good, big chunk of your adult life telling people how you decided not to go to law school after all. Somehow you end up writing again.

Perhaps you go to graduate school. Perhaps you work odd jobs and take writing courses at

night. Perhaps you are working and writing down all the clever remarks and intimate personal confessions you hear during the day. Perhaps you are losing your pals, your acquaintances, your balance.You have broken up with your boyfriend. You now go out with men who, instead of whispering ''I love you,'' shout: ''Do it to me, baby.'' This is good for your writing.Sooner or later you have a finished manuscript more or less. People look at it in a vaguely troubled sort of way and say, ''I'll bet becoming a writer was always a fantasy of yours, wasn't it?'' Your lips dry to salt. Say that of all the fantasies possible in the world, you can't imagine being a writer even making the top 20. Tell them you were going to be a child psychology major. ''I bet,'' they always sigh, ''you'd be great with kids.'' Scowl fiercely. Tell them you're a walking blade.

Quit classes. Quit jobs. Cash in old savings bonds. Now you have time like warts on your

hands. Slowly copy all of your friends' addresses into a new address book.

Vacuum. Chew cough drops. Keep a folder full of fragments.

An eyelid darkening sideways.

World as conspiracy.

Possible plot? A woman gets on a bus.

Suppose you threw a love affair and nobody came.

At home drink a lot of coffee. At Howard Johnson's order the cole slaw. Consider how it looks like the soggy confetti of a map: where you've been, where you're going - ''You Are Here,'' says the red star on the back of the menu.Occasionally a date with a face blank as a sheet of paper asks you whether writers often become discouraged. Say that sometimes they do and sometimes they do. Say it's a lot like having polio.''Interesting,'' smiles your date, and then he looks down at his arm hairs and starts to smooth them, all, always, in the same direction.

From ''Self-Help,'' a collection of short stories by Lorrie Moore. Copyright 1985 by M. L. Moore.

Lorrie Moore was born in Glen Falls, New York on January 13, 1957. She attended St Lawrence University in Canton, New York, from 1974 to 1978 receiving a BA and graduating summa cum laude.She attended Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, from 1980 to 1982 receiving an MFA. She is currently Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin at Madison where she also lives with her husband and son.

Lorrie Moore has been the recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts award in 1989, the Rockefeller Foundation fellowship in 1989, and the Guggenheim fellowship in 1991. Her workfrequently appears in Fiction International, Ms, The New York Times Book Review, Paris Review,The New Yorker, and others. Her publications include: Self-Help (1985); Anagrams (1986); The Forgotten Helper (1987); Like Life (1990); editor, I Know Some Things: Stories About Childhood by Contemporary Writers (1992);Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? (1994) and Birds of America (1998).

"As cidades invisíveis" de Italo Calvino

O inferno dos vivos não é algo que será; se existe, é aquele que já está aqui, o inferno no qual vivemos todos os dias, que formamos estando juntos. Existem duas maneiras de não sofrer. A primeira é fácil para a maioria das pessoas: aceitar o inferno e tornar-se parte deste até o ponto de deixar de percebê-lo. A segunda é arriscada e exige atenção e aprendizagem contínuas: tentar saber reconhecer quem e o que, no meio do inferno, não é inferno, e preservá-lo, e abrir espaço." 

- trecho fnal do livro -  

Canção Óbvia - PAULO FREIRE

Escolhi a sombra desta árvore para
repousar do muito que farei,
enquanto esperarei por ti.
Quem espera na pura espera
vive um tempo de espera vã.
Por isto, enquanto te espero
trabalharei os campos e
conversarei com os homens
Suarei meu corpo, que o sol queimará;
minhas mãos ficarão calejadas;
meus pés aprenderão o mistério dos caminhos;
meus ouvidos ouvirão mais,
meus olhos verão o que antes não viam,
enquanto esperarei por ti.
Não te esperarei na pura espera
porque o meu tempo de espera é um
tempo de quefazer.
Desconfiarei daqueles que virão dizer-me,:
em voz baixa e precavidos:
É perigoso agir
É perigoso falar
É perigoso andar
É perigoso, esperar, na forma em que esperas,
porquê êsses recusam a alegria de tua chegada.
Desconfiarei também daqueles que virão dizer-me,
com palavras fáceis, que já chegaste,
porque êsses, ao anunciar-te ingênuamente ,
antes te denunciam.
Estarei preparando a tua chegada
como o jardineiro prepara o jardim
para a rosa que se abrirá na primavera.

Paulo Freire
Genève, Março 1971.
In: Freire, P. Pedagogia da Indignação. São Paulo: UNESP, 2000.

One Art

 

 

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

 

Lose something every day.  Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

 

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel.  None of these will bring disaster.

 

I lost my mother's watch.  And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

 

I lost two cities, lovely ones.  And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

 

---Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied.  It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

 

 -- Elizabeth Bishop

I'm black, born and raised in the United States.

 

Writers Like Me

Oliver Munday

 

By MARTHA SOUTHGATE

Published: NEW YORK TIMES, July 1, 2007

 

I am a 46-year-old writer of "literary" fiction. I've had three novels published — the first for young people, the last two for adults. All have won minor prizes, been respectfully reviewed and sold modestly. I've been awarded a few fairly competitive fellowships and grants. The business is full of fiction writers like me. With one difference: I'm black, born and raised in the United States. At the parties and conferences I attend, and in the book reviews I read, I rarely encounter other African-American "literary" writers, particularly in my age bracket. There just don't seem to be that many of us out there, and that's something I've come to wonder about a great deal. And so I got on the phone with some editors and African-American writers to talk about it.

For many writers, middle age is when they hit their stride. Robert Gottlieb of Knopf, who has been Toni Morrison's editor for many years, said, "Many very fine writers take time to get there." Looking at the white American fiction writers who have the most cultural prominence, one quickly sees a large group in their 40s or 50s (Michael Chabon, Jonathan Franzen, Rick Moody, Jane Smiley, Michael Cunningham et al.) who have generally had four or more major works of fiction published. Gottlieb points out that Morrison's first two books sold adequately, but it wasn't until her third novel, "Song of Solomon," published the year she turned 46, that she had a commercial breakthrough. "It was larger and more ambitious, demonstrating a new power and authority, and the world noticed," he said. "Some careers start with a bang — 'Invisible Man,' 'Catch-22.' Others take time to find a significant readership — Anne Tyler, Toni. And sometimes I feel that those are the healthiest ones."

But when you look at the careers of African- American writers, you don't always see that healthy arc. Ralph Ellison, for example, seemed to lose his way completely after "Invisible Man." These days, there are only a few names of black authors born in the United States, beyond Morrison's, that the average reader of serious fiction might easily drop — Colson Whitehead, ZZ Packer, Edward P. Jones. Of these three, only Jones is over 40.

In some ways, the American literary scene is more racially and culturally diverse than ever. A few examples: Of the 21 writers on Granta's recent Best of Young American Novelists list, six (including Packer and Uzodinma Iweala) are people of color (many colors: black, South and East Asian, Hispanic), and seven were born or raised outside the United States. Indian writers born or educated here, like Jhumpa Lahiri, Vikram Chandra and Kiran Desai, win critical acclaim and big sales. "Girlfriend," "urban-lit" and other branches of commercial genre fiction by African-Americans have continued to enjoy a boom since the door-busting success of Terry McMillan's "Waiting to Exhale" in 1992. But black authors writing in an ambitious, thoughtful way about American subjects are harder to find — even when they do get published. Malaika Adero, a senior editor at Atria Books, said: "Literary African-American writers have difficulty getting publicity. The retailers then don't order great quantities of the books. Readers don't know what books are available and therefore don't ask for them. It's a vicious cycle."

Though the publishing industry remains overwhelmingly white, editors say they are always looking for good, marketable work by writers of any background. Morgan Entrekin, publisher of Grove/Atlantic, which recently published Michael Thomas's first novel, "Man Gone Down" — one of the few novels by an African-American to grace the cover of this publication of late — said: "I don't tend to approach the black writers we publish as African-American. I see them as writers first."

But there's colorblindness, and then there's blindness. Christopher Jackson, executive editor at Spiegel & Grau, a division of Random House, tells a story about being mistaken for Iweala at the launch party for Granta's Best of Young American Novelists issue — even though Iweala is more than 10 years Jackson's junior, had just left the stage as an honoree and, frankly, doesn't look much like Jackson. Let's face it, something like that is awfully unlikely to happen to a white editor or writer. It's hard to say whether this obtuseness translates into a lack of interest in African-American work, but some black writers think it might. The novelist Tayari Jones, author of "The Untelling," said: "I know that there are very few black authors who publish the fourth novel. Hardly any of us are considered prestige authors, so no one is going to sign us up for our names alone." Calvin Reid, a senior news editor at Publishers Weekly, who often covers African-American publishing, agrees that black writers stuck in the midlist face an uphill battle, but he sees it as a business reality, not a racial thing: "If you have two or three books out and you've never sold more than 3,000 copies, people make decisions based on that."

Things are tough all over, but arguably tougher for some. For many black writers, a writing life very rarely unfolds the way it does for so many white writers you could name: know you want to be a writer from the age of 10, get your first book published at 26, go on to produce slowly but steadily over a lengthy career. Even Morrison didn't follow that timeline: her first novel wasn't published until she was nearly 40 and had worked for a number of years as a teacher and then an editor at Random House. And she didn't quit that day job until urged to do so by Gottlieb in the mid-1970s, after "Sula" was published.

So what's holding us up? Sometimes it's just the ordinary difficulty of juggling family, writing and earning a living. But African-American writers also speak of a larger problem of what I'd call internal or cultural permission. It's just plain harder to decide to be a writer if you don't have a financial cushion or a long cultural tradition of people going out on that bohemian limb. Consider the case of Edward P. Jones. He published his first book, "Lost in the City," in 1992 (he was 41 at the time) to much critical acclaim and a number of significant honors, if not huge sales. He returned to his day job at Tax Notes magazine, where he remained until he was laid off 10 years later. He then wrote "The Known World" in about six months — though he told me he'd been thinking about it nearly those whole 10 years. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize.

When asked why he didn't make the leap to full-time writing sooner, Jones spoke firmly: "If you're born poor or you're born working-class, a job is important. People who are born with silver spoons in their mouths never have to worry. They know someone will take care of them. Worrying about not having a job would have put a damper on any creativity that I would have had. So I'm glad I had that job."

The problem isn't just money, says Randall Kenan, a 1994 Whiting Award winner who published two critically acclaimed books of fiction in 1989 and 1992, and two nonfiction books since 1999: "I think among middle-class black folk, it's still a struggle to validate literature as a worthy way to spend your time." ZZ Packer, the author of the story collection "Drinking Coffee Elsewhere," who is currently at work on a novel, said the situation is somewhat different for those who are younger. (She is 34.) "People who came half a generation before us were the first ones to begin to go to elite colleges in larger numbers," she said. "They were beholden to a lot of their parents' expectations, namely, that if you go to a prestigious school, you're going to become a doctor or a lawyer, you're not going to 'waste your time' writing. People who are around my age have seen blacks in the Northeastern establishment for a while. ... They don't always feel the same obligation to ditch their dream for something more practical."

It saddens me to think of the dreams that have been ditched, the stories that haven't been told because of racism, because of fear and economic insecurity, because that first novel didn't move enough copies. I hope to see the day when there are more of us at the party (and the parties), when the work of African-Americans who tell our part of the American story well receives the celebration, and the sales, it deserves.

 

Martha Southgate's most recent novels are "The Fall of Rome" and "Third Girl From the Left."

true criticism is more than just an opinion.

 

 Los Angeles Times : May 20, 2007

Not everybody's a critic

Sure, anyone with a blog can express an opinion about a book, but true criticism is more than just an opinion.

By Richard Schickel, RICHARD SCHICKEL is a film critic for Time magazine and a frequent book reviewer for The Times. His most recent book is "Elia Kazan: A Biography."

 

 

THE MOST grating words I've read in a newspaper recently were in a New York Times report on the shrinkage of book reviewing in many of the nation's leading newspapers.

The piece suggested that this might not be an entirely bad thing. Into the breach, it argued, will charge the bloggers, one of whom, a former quality-control manager for a car parts maker, last year wrote 95 book reviews for his website.

"Some publishers and literary bloggers," the article said, viewed this development contentedly, "as an inevitable transition toward a new, more democratic literary landscape where anyone can comment on books."

Anyone? Did I read that right?

Let me put this bluntly, in language even a busy blogger can understand: Criticism — and its humble cousin, reviewing — is not a democratic activity. It is, or should be, an elite enterprise, ideally undertaken by individuals who bring something to the party beyond their hasty, instinctive opinions of a book (or any other cultural object). It is work that requires disciplined taste, historical and theoretical knowledge and a fairly deep sense of the author's (or filmmaker's or painter's) entire body of work, among other qualities.

Opinion — thumbs up, thumbs down — is the least important aspect of reviewing. Very often, in the best reviews, opinion is conveyed without a judgmental word being spoken, because the review's highest business is to initiate intelligent dialogue about the work in question, beginning a discussion that, in some cases, will persist down the years, even down the centuries.

I know the objections to this argument: Most reviewing, whether written for print or the blogosphere, is hack work, done on the fly for short money. Anyone who has written a book has had the experience. Your publisher kindly forwards the clippings, and you are appalled by the sheer uselessness of their spray-painted opinions. Looked at this way, you could say that book reviewing is already democratic enough, thanks much. It's more than ready for the guy from car parts.

But instead, let's think about what reviewing ought to be. For example, French critic Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, a name not much bruited in the blogosphere, I'll warrant. In the middle of the 19th century, his reviews appeared every Monday for 28 years. He was a humane, tolerant and relentlessly curious man who once summarized his method in two words: "Just characterization."

That "just" did not mean "merely." It meant doing justice to the work at hand and to the culture in which it appeared. Another way of putting that is that he wrote with a blogger's alacrity but with a thoughtful critic's sense of responsibility to, yes, "the great tradition" the author aspired to join.

Think also of Edmund Wilson, the best book reviewer this country ever had — alert to the possibilities, both moral and aesthetic, of the "classics and commercial" (to invoke the title of one of his collections) that passed before him. His method was usually rather reportorial — generally he let his opinions emerge indirectly, not as fiats but as muted implications of the way he read (and quoted) the work at hand. He was not a showy, or even particularly quotable, critic. But the clarity of his prose remains exemplary.

Finally, there was George Orwell, scrambling to make a living by writing reviews for London's intellectual press for maybe $20 or $30 a piece. He was more pointedly political than Wilson, and more attuned, perhaps, to the vagaries of trash culture, but his defense of honest vernacular prose in the face of bureaucratic (and totalitarian) obfuscation remains a critical beacon.

All of these men wrote ceaselessly, against deadlines and under economic pressure, without succumbing to the temptation of merely popping off or showing off. None of these men affected the supercilious high Mandarin manner of, say, George Jean Nathan — as annoying in its way as hairy-chested populism is in its.

And all three wrote for intelligent readers who emerged from their reviews grateful to know more than they did when they started to read, grateful for their encounter with a serious and, indeed, superior, mind. We do not — maybe I ought to make that "should not" — read to confirm our own prejudices and stupidity.

I don't think it's impossible for bloggers to write intelligent reviews. I do think, however, that a simple "love" of reading (or movie-going or whatever) is an insufficient qualification for the job. That way often leads to cultishness (see the currently inflated reputations of Philip K. Dick or Cornell Woolrich, both easy reads for lazy, word-addicted minds).

And we have to find in the work of reviewers something more than idle opinion-mongering. We need to see something other than flash, egotism and self-importance. We need to see their credentials. And they need to prove, not merely assert, their right to an opinion.

At the recent Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, there was a fascinating panel featuring writers whose books were written in what time they could spare from their day jobs. Inevitably, blogging was presented as an attractive alternative — it doesn't take much time, and it is a method of publicly expressing oneself (like finger-painting, I thought to myself, but never mind).

D.J. Waldie, among the finest of our part-time scriveners, in effect said "fine." But remember, he added, blogging is a form of speech, not of writing.

I thought it was a wonderful point. The act of writing for print, with its implication of permanence, concentrates the mind most wonderfully. It imposes on writer and reader a sense of responsibility that mere yammering does not. It is the difference between cocktail-party chat and logically reasoned discourse that sits still on a page, inviting serious engagement.

Maybe most reviewing, whatever its venue, fails that ideal. But a purely "democratic literary landscape" is truly a wasteland, without standards, without maps, without oases of intelligence or delight.

Your 'how-to' guide to avoid offending anyone

times , February 21, 2007

A Politically Correct Lexicon

Your 'how-to' guide to avoid offending anyone

By Joel Bleifuss

 

In the late '70s, "politically correct," "PC" for short, entered the public lexicon. Folks on the left used the term to dismiss views that were seen as too rigid and, also, to poke fun at themselves for the immense care they took to neither say nor do anything that might offend the political sensibilities of others. "You are so PC," one would say with a smile. In the '80s, the right, taking the words at face value, latched on to the term and used it to deride leftish voices. Beleaguered progressives, ever earnest, then defended political correctness as a worthy concept, thus validating conservatives' derision. Today, on both the left and the right, being PC is no laughing matter; three decades of culture wars have generated a bewildering thicket of terminology.

To help me parse what's PC and what's not, I had help from people attuned to the nuances of words, particularly those that describe race, ethnicity and sexual identity. Rinku Sen is a 40-year-old South Asian woman. She is the publisher of Colorlines, a national magazine of race and politics, for which she has developed a PC style manual. Tracy Baim is a 44-year-old white lesbian. She grapples with the ever-evolving nomenclature of sexual identity and politics as the executive editor of Windy City Times, a Chicago-based gay weekly. Lott Hill is a 36-year-old white gay male who works at Center for Teaching Excellence at Columbia College in Chicago. He interacts with lots of young people—the font from which much new language usage flows.

African American: In 1988 Jesse Jackson encouraged people to adopt this term over the then-used "black." As he saw it, the words acknowledged black America's ties to Africa. "African American," says Hill, is now "used more by non-African-American people, who cling to it because they are unsure what word to use." Sen says, "African American" is favored by "highly educated people who are not black. Whether one uses 'black' or 'African American' indicates how strong your social relations are with those communities." And Chris Raab, founder of Afro-Netizen, says, "People who are politically correct chose to use African American, but I don't recall any mass of black folks demanding the use of African American."

Asian: The correct term to use for anyone of Asian ancestry. When accuracy is desired, nationality of origin is appended to "American," as in "Korean American." Sen, who describes herself as South Asian or Indian American, says that there is "some push around not conflating everybody into Asian. This is mostly an issue among new immigrants. If there hasn't been time for a generation, it seems to be hard to move those folks to the Asian category."

Bitch: A word, says Baim, which is "absolutely being reclaimed by a younger generation of women who are asserting their sexuality and control of their sexuality." Successfully repurposed by Bitch magazine over the past decade, 'Bitch' is now becoming passé as less edgy writers like Cathi Hanauer, author of The Bitch in the House, adopt it. Similarly, though more slowly, "slut," "whore" and "cunt" are being reappropriated. "The young people use those terms all the time teasingly and sometimes to even refer to themselves," says Hill. "It is more common to hear someone say 'I am a slut' than 'I am a whore.' " "Cunt" is gaining currency among some young lesbians, though Baim says it is a word that gets stuck in her throat. "While it is a reclaimed word, it is one I can hardly say, the same way some older blacks have trouble saying the n-word."

Black: At Colorlines "black" is used with a capital B, while The Associate Press Stylebook advises use of the lower case.

Boi: A word, says Hill, that is "used by young queer people to refer to either young gay males or young females who are presenting as males."

Brown: A general term for people who are not white. Colorlines uses "brown" in a casual or playful way. "We might have a headline 'Brown People to the Back' in a story about restaurant hierarchy," Sen says. Sometimes used to refer to Latinos, as in the "black-brown" coalition that helped elect Harold Washington mayor of Chicago in 1983.

Chicano: Correct term for people of Mexican ancestry, popularized during the civil rights movement. "We use it to refer to U.S.-born people of Mexican descent," says Sen. "Mexican American is the more distant, politer thing to say."

Dyke: A word lesbians have reclaimed. Hill, however, says that among the young it is "on its way out."

Fag (faggot): The new "queer." "Like the n-word, it's a word that can be said by gay people," says Hill. "I hear 'fag' a great deal, especially among queer-identified young people, like 'don't be such a fag' or 'you are such a fag.' "

Feminist: "A word that the younger generation doesn't always embrace," is how Baim, 44, describes it. A lot of young women, she says, are "feminists but they don't want to be pigeonholed." "Feminist somehow became a tainted word along the way," says Hill. "I have heard a lot of people say, 'this sounds feminist' or 'I used to be a feminist.' "

Gay: The word used to refer to males and, inclusively, to the whole gender-bent community. "College-age people are more likely to refer to themselves as queer," say Hill. "People out of college are more likely to refer to themselves as gay."

Girl: "'Girl' is used by older women," says Baim. "It is kind of nice because it used to be used derogatorily and now it is used in a fun way."

GLBT: Shorthand for GLBTQ2IA.

GLBTQ2IA: The acronym for Gay, Lesbian, Bi, Transgendered, Queer, Questioning, Intersex, Allies. "This is coming from the youth movement, the college campuses, it has not seeped into the whole community at this point," says Baim, who at the Windy City Times uses GLBT, an acronym the New York Times has not yet seen fit to print.

Guys: Very controversial. Used, especially in the Midwest, when referring to a group of people. "In Chicago that word gets used a lot," says Hill. And Baim says, "I use it all of the time." Some feminists, like Andi Zeisler, the editor of Bitch, find "guys" problematic. "We assume the descriptor 'guys' denotes a quality of universality," she says. "It would be hard to imagine a group of men being addressed by their server as 'hey you gals' and not taking offense, but the reverse happens all the time."

Hir (Hirs): Gender neutral for him and her. At Wesleyan University, incoming freshmen are instructed to use gender-neutral pronouns in campus correspondence. As one person wrote on the university's online Anonymous Confession Board, "I am usually attracted only to people of hir original gender, rather than hir intended gender. As such, I'm afraid that I'm, like, viewing hir wrong, or not respecting hir wishes or something."

Hispanic: "We never use Hispanic," says Sen. "It privileges the European roots of the identity of Mexicans born in the United States." Hispanic, however, is the preferred term of people in the Southwest whose families are descendents of Spanish colonists.

Indian: The preferred term for Native Americans. "Indians either use their specific tribal name or use Indian," says Sen. "You use the qualifier American when you need to distinguish from Indian Indians."

Latino: (capital "L," with "a" or "o" at the end used to connote gender) Politically correct term for those from Spanish or Portuguese speaking cultures. "We use it instead of Hispanic when we want to refer to many different national groups where there has been an indigenous-European mix," says Sen.

Lesbian: "The younger generations are less connected with the terms 'gay' and 'lesbian'," says Baim. "Lesbian is out of favor as a self-identifying label, it means something political, something more rigid than the younger generation is comfortable with."

Macaca: The latinization of the Bantu "ma-kako," meaning monkey. According to the Global Language Monitor, former Sen. George Allen (R-Va.) helped make this the most politically incorrect word of 2006 by using it to refer to an Indian American.

Native American: Some Indians object to the term, seeing it as a way to linguistically eradicate "Indian" and thus the history of their oppression by whites. "I almost always hear Native American, and in the more enlightened conversations there is usually 'indigenous' thrown in there somewhere," says Lott. Sen says, "Native American seems to be a more distant construction, developed by academics."

Nigger: "It is a word that white students struggle with and black students use pretty freely," says Hill. "Young people are much more open to using it, especially young people who are black or who have been exposed to more diverse groups of people." While Sen says, "I can't imagine a political or a social multiracial situation where it would be appropriate, but I know that is because I am too old. The word is so prevalent in the popular youth culture, grounded in hip-hop, that I wouldn't like to predict where that debate is going to end up. But if the popular culture ends up agreeing that it is okay to use, then I think there are a lot of pretty scary implications."

Queer: Anyone who falls outside the lines of straight. "It has been reclaimed far ahead of faggot or dyke," says Baim. "It is our buzz word," says Columbia College's Hill. "It is how we avoid saying all of those letters [GLBTQ2IA]." REM lead singer Michael Stipe, for example, is queer, not gay. "For me, queer describes something that's more inclusive of the gray areas," he told Butt, a pocket-sized Dutch "fagazine." "It's really about identity I think. The identity I'm comfortable with is queer because I just think it's more inclusive."

Transgendered: (trans) A person who is not presenting as their biological gender. "It is fascinating how transgendered is becoming like an octopus with all the tentacles of identity and personal design. The transgendered movement is burgeoning and fluid, they are creating all of these new ways to define who they are," says Baim.

Ze: Gender neutral for he or she. As Mary Boenke writes on the PFLAG (Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) Web site: "When talking with Leslie Feinberg, noted transgender author, I asked Leslie which pronouns to use. Ze shrugged hir shoulders and said ze didn't care."

Joel Bleifuss is the editor of In These Times, where he has worked as an investigative reporter, columnist and editor since 1986. Bleifuss has had more stories on Project Censored's annual list of the "10 Most Censored Stories" than any other journalist.

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Archaeologists dig up 2nd-century bath complex in Rome

Archaeologists dig up 2nd-century bath complex in Rome

By Marta Falconi
The Associated Press

Thursday, July 19, 2007

 

Archaeologists in Rome on the ruins of a recently discovered 2nd-century bath complex.

 

ROME: Archaeologists said Thursday they have partially dug up a 2nd-century bath complex believed to be part of the vast, luxurious residence of a wealthy Roman.

The two-story complex, which extends for at least 5 acres (2 hectares), includes exceptionally well-preserved decorated hot rooms, vaults, changing rooms, marble latrines and an underground room where slaves lit the fire to warm the baths.

Statues and water cascades decorated the interiors, American archaeologist Darius A. Arya, the head of the excavation, said during a tour of the digs offered to The Associated Press on Thursday. Only pedestals and fragments have been recovered.

Arya spoke as students and experts were brushing off earth and dust from ancient marbles, mosaic floors and a rudimentary heating system, made of pipes that channeled hot air throughout the complex.

"The Romans had more leisure time than other people, and it's here in the baths that they typically spent their time," Arya said. "Because you could eat well, you could get a massage, you could have sex, you could gossip, you could play your games, you could talk about politics - you could spend the whole day here."

However, he added, "to have a bath complex of this size, this scale, it's very unusual."

The complex is believed to be part of a multiple-story villa that belonged to the Roman equivalent of a billionaire of today, a man called Quintus Servilius Pudens who was friends with Emperor Hadrian, Arya said. It is not clear if the baths were open to the public or reserved to distinguished guests of the owner.

"These people lived a magnificent existence and were able to provide entertainment," to others, said Arya, who is also a professor at the American Institute for Roman Culture.

Excavations at the Villa delle Vignacce park lasted a total of 10 weeks, and it is planned to continue, he said. Future decisions, including whether the site will be opened to the public, are still to be made.

Ancient Romans put a great deal of emphasis on bathing, turning the art of the soak into a ritual.

Meeting at communal bath houses, they would go through a series of rooms of alternating temperatures at a leisurely pace, dipping themselves in hot and cold baths. It was a social event, but also a way to purify their bodies of toxins and a form of relaxation.

O novelo da novela

O novelo da novela

Roberto DaMatta

'Vovô - perguntou umas das minhas netas -, por que a gente vê e acompanha as novelas?' A indagação se endereçava não tanto ao avô que, sendo professor, autor de livros e 'antropólogo-antropófago' (de idéias, é claro), tinha a obrigação de saber a resposta, mas a todo grupo que, de olhos vidrados, assistia a mais um capítulo de Paraíso Tropical em mágica sincronia com milhões de outras pessoas.

De fato, tirante a novela, o carnaval, o futebol e os eventos não previstos pelas rotinas - como a visita do papa que faz o mais empedernido materialista dialético e o mais enfurecido ateu virar 'católico' -, só o vergonhoso cotidiano dessa atividade contraditória que chamamos de 'política', faz com que alguém entre em sincronia com seus semelhantes no Brasil.

Achei a pergunta pertinente porque ela deixava de lado o julgamento de valor. O seu centro não era saber se a novela era boa ou ruim, se diminuía ou elevava os espíritos (como gosta de colocar a esquerda estrelada que odeia, mas vive da televisão; e agora vai montar uma indefinível 'TV pública'), mas queria discutir o poder de atração dessa forma de narrativa feita de situações em série, ligada entre si por meio de ganchos retóricos repetitivos, como o arcaico folhetim, mas contada por meio de imagens sucessivas e planos rápidos, palavras, gestos, montagem e música, como o moderno cinema.

Respondi que a novela atraía e enredava porque - como o Brasil das pessoas comuns, o nosso Brasil - ela contava muitas histórias ao mesmo tempo, combinando múltiplas vidas, profissões, personagens, destinos, relações e situações. São tantos contextos e personagens que alguma coisa acaba nos agarrando, promovendo uma densa identificação. Seu poder de 'dar o que falar' e de agregar o público era proporcional aos dilemas que ia apresentando paulatina, ciclicamente. De modo que quando um caso de amor terminava, a narrativa desvendava um ato criminoso, e assim por diante. Era uma forma de arte que simultaneamente prometia as certezas que aliviam e sustentam o voyeurismo, mas não deixava de garantir o inesperado, que é o sal da boa trama.

Por causa disso - acrescentei entusiasmado como sempre, mas sem ver que ninguém estava prestando a menor atenção ao que dizia, pois continuavam colados a telinha -, há em toda novela um núcleo articulador - uma rede central de intrigas - que serve de referência ao que se passa ao seu redor. Tal núcleo, ou centro dramático, pode ser uma academia de ginástica, uma empresa, um casarão, uma fábrica ou um clube, mas dentro desse quadro, o miolo é sempre uma família. Um grupo construído por laços de carne e sangue, atribuído pelo destino (ou por Deus), e dado a cada um de nós por nascimento. Esses laços - enfatizei olhando firme para dentro dos olhos de minha neta - que, no Brasil, são vistos como indestrutíveis e baseados em lealdades perpétuas, estão em oposição permanente com as relações individuais fundadas em escolhas, feitas fora da casa, por meio daquilo que se chama de liberdade.

É o conflito entre essas lealdades de sangue (dadas pelo nascimento), e os interesses individualizados, descobertos pelo amor e pelo erotismo que, com suas ricas variações, forma o tema central das novelas. A história é velha como um mito, todo mundo sabe o seu final e, no entanto, como ela é contada (e não vivida), como é algo a ver visto de fora para dentro (e não ao contrário), todo mundo assisti com interesse.

Ora, completei, esse embate entre a obrigação (que tem a ver com o dever para com a família) e a escolha individual (que promove riscos, pois está centrada num distanciamento do grupo em que se nasce) é muito brasileiro. Fala de como os laços de sangue são tão poderosos quanto as tais 'empresas' ou 'grupos' empresariais que, não apenas na novela, mas no Jornal Nacional, fazem manchete com seus conflitos sucessórios e suas sagas matrimoniais.

Deste modo, novela vai, novela vem, e o drama é sempre o de honrar os laços formados na casa e de ser, na rua, um indivíduo bem-sucedido. Coisa complexa quando sabemos que as normas da rua promovem uma apreciação igualitária das ações e, as da casa, o contrário. Assim, o mandão hierarquiza; mas seus filhos, mulher ou empregados são governados pela igualdade.

'Mas vovô, isso acontece em todas as histórias...' - retorquiu minha neta.

Sem dúvida... Mas em outros trópicos, o ponto todo é romper com a família e individualizar-se completamente, entrando de cabeça num mundo no qual não se tem nenhuma relação pessoal. Mas na novela, tudo pode ocorrer, menos cortar relações. Nosso romance não é biográfico. Não narra a saga de um descobrir-se individualmente, como as histórias inglesas e alemãs. Nele, a regra é o equilibrar-se no fio de navalha constituído pelo individualizar-se sem, em nenhum momento, livrar-se desses laços de família que são leves como as penas de um pardal, mas pesam como chumbo.

ESTADO DE SP,

16 de maio de 2007

'Brasil está destinado a ficar estacionado'

March 25, 2007  -  Estadão

'Brasil está destinado a ficar estacionado'

Desencantado com o País, príncipe francês dizia em 1838 que aqui só a natureza prestava

Lilia Moritz Schwarcz

O Brasil sempre significou um bom espelho invertido a atazanar a imaginação dos franceses. Enquanto 'eles' tinham muita 'civilização e pouca natureza', 'nós' éramos o local da 'grande flora, mas da falta de civilização'. Por isso, a narrativa de viajantes setecentistas, como Léris, Gandavo ou Thevet, acabou por germinar todo um imaginário acerca dessa colônia perdida na América; uma espécie de paraíso perdido. Tal simbologia tenderia a se arraigar ainda mais quando Rousseau, pautado na leitura dos viajantes do 16 e no ensaio de Montaigne, chamado Os Canibais - verdadeiro tratado elogioso sobre a maneira como os tupinambás faziam a guerra -, cunhou a idéia do 'bom selvagem'. É fato que esse era um modelo e não uma realidade empírica, mas a imagem romântica colou-se ao nosso território, associado à idéia do sublime e do maravilhoso. Sublime era a natureza, porém estranhos eram seus homens - nus e de costumes bizarros, ou ainda misturados em suas crenças e raças.

A vida dos franceses nesses trópicos americanos não seria, porém, fácil. Com a vinda de d. João ao Brasil em 1808 e com a declaração de guerra à França no mesmo ano, os compatriotas de Napoleão passaram a ser tratados como inimigos e sofreram, eles sim, um bloqueio transcontinental. A situação só começaria a mudar a partir de meados de 1814, quando, após o Congresso de Viena, o príncipe regente português anunciava que as relações entre os países seriam, a partir de então, 'amigáveis'; o que permitiria o livre trânsito de franceses em Portugal e também na rica colônia americana. Data desse momento o começo das novas relações oficiais franco-brasileiras, assim como se aceleram as trocas culturais, econômicas, científicas e comerciais entre as duas nações.

Entrariam no Brasil de d. João, de Pedro I e, sobretudo, de Pedro II viajantes, naturalistas e curiosos franceses que pareciam querer redescobrir um país descoberto há muito tempo. Para os franceses, que conheciam a América espanhola por intermédio de Humboldt mas desconheciam o Brasil, esse era o país mais 'exótico' do continente - com canibais, serpentes e natureza singular - mas, paradoxalmente, o mais 'civilizado': uma monarquia cercada de repúblicas.

É imbuído do desejo de entender uma nação tão particular que aporta no Rio, em 1838, o terceiro filho do rei-cidadão Luis Filipe de Orleáns; monarca que governou a França de 1830 a 1848. François Ferdinand Filipe Louis Marie d'Orleáns, futuro príncipe de Joinville, era na época um jovem tenente da marinha, e com apenas 20 anos mal sabia que, no futuro, iria se casar com a irmã de Pedro II, d. Francisca, que nesse momento achou desengonçada e com dentes horríveis.

Esta primeira viagem ao Brasil foi talvez aquela que causou maior impacto ao príncipe. François esteve no País de 1º de janeiro de 1838 a 22 de fevereiro e relatou as impressões da estada em um livro que está sendo lançado pela José Olympio, Diário de um Príncipe no Rio de Janeiro (84 págs., R$ 19). Nele, legou um relato espirituoso e escrachado, correspondente à atitude do viajante que traz sempre em sua mala os próprios costumes e traduz tudo a partir de suas lentes culturais, que o fazem oscilar entre o deslumbramento, o choque, a imaginação e a rejeição.

E no caso de nosso príncipe não seria diferente. No ano em que François desembarca, vivíamos a maior das crises regenciais. Feijó se demitira em 1837 e fora substituído interinamente por Pedro de Araújo Lima, que não dera conta de debelar as rebeliões do período: a Cabanagem no Pará, a Farroupilha no Rio Grande do Sul, a Revolta dos Malês na Bahia, além da Sabinada que eclodira em novembro daquele ano na mesma província. Não sem uma ponta de sarcasmo, Luis François refere-se a d. Pedro como 'o pequeno imperador', lamenta o estado de 'abandono e isolamento' do futuro monarca e de suas irmãs, assim como aposta que o País não ficaria integrado e coeso por muito tempo. 'As províncias comerciais do Pará, de Pernambuco e da Bahia vão separar-se, a do Rio Grande do Sul já se libertou e Santa Catarina seguirá seu exemplo. Restará então um império composto do Rio, São Paulo, Goiás e Matocross (sic) e alguns lugares cujo nome esqueci.'

François conhecia pouco mas julgava muito. Já na chegada, começa a debochar do jovem d. Pedro dizendo que, desde que havia sido anunciada sua visita, o futuro rei todo dia alertava as irmãs: 'Vistam-se depressa que o príncipe vem aí.' E a recepção do nobre francês não seria das melhores: um calor insuportável, 'negros pavorosos de raça cafre ou moçambicanos horrorosos', ameaças de tempestade e nuvens de mosquitos por todos os lados. A visita ao Paço de São Cristóvão também não o impressionou. Ao contrário, quando François desembarcou diante do Palácio Imperial, 'uma multidão enorme aí se comprimia, pois nesse país não há nenhum traço de polícia'. Isso sem esquecer da nota de escárnio diante do fraco cerimonial da corte: 'Uma carruagem atrelada a seis mulas escolta uma cavalaria cujas trombetas produzem sons como de chifres de boi.'

E era chegada a hora de encontrar a família imperial: 'Finalmente percebo uma figura miudinha, da altura da minha perna, empertigada, emproada: é sua Majestade!!' O pior é que a conversa não andava - 'nada o divertia'. Até o regente, percebendo o constrangimento, tentou puxar conversa com o príncipe francês. Parece que ninguém se entendia: o príncipe brasileiro falava sem parar, o francês respondia 'a torto e a direito' e nada descontraía o ambiente. 'Voltei como vim', escreveu o príncipe de Joinville, desfazendo do jovem rei, segundo ele, louro e miúdo como a família austríaca, 'mas com modos de um homem de 40 anos'. A visita a d. Pedro terminara: 'Logo me retirei cheio de piedade por essas pobres crianças abandonadas a quem dão apenas aquilo que é preciso para viver e que são perseguidas por uma nuvem de gente sem moral que deixa o país que lhes foi confiado dividir-se e cair em uma rápida decadência.'

Os costumes também faziam rir a esse representante da Monarquia de Julho. No baile que recebeu, estranhou as roupas da nobreza, e as danças lhe deram uma 'vontade inextinguível de rir'. O jeito foi ficar sentado no sofá, 'morrendo de tédio'. O príncipe só dava sinais de apreciar, mesmo, a vegetação local; na verdade, sua grande missão nessa viagem. Partiu com muita bagagem ('porque num país como este é preciso levar tudo'), viu matas admiráveis cheias de pássaro, o Pão de Açúcar, o Corcovado, atravessou rios de água fresca e montanhas arborizadas, além de ter praticado a caça; atividade dileta dos Orléans. O Brasil lhe parecia, sob esse ângulo, 'um país virgem', o que só fazia aumentar sua saudade da França.

Também não deixou de reparar 'na diferença de cores de toda essa gente'. O império americano era mesmo um 'laboratório de raças' aos olhos desses viajantes. Entabulou conversa com alguns proprietários de terra a respeito do tratamento, castigo e governo dos escravos e, aí sim, desfez dessa 'pobre civilização'. Por essas e por outras é que asseverou que 'o País, por causa de sua situação, população e personalidade dos habitantes, estava destinado a ficar estacionado por muito tempo'. Tudo lhe parecia indecente: estradas, roupas, os negros que dançavam com lascívia, a escravidão e a preguiça. E a conclusão era uma só: 'A viagem foi interessante, me fez conhecer bem o Brasil, mas me desencantei ...'

No entanto, até que a viagem trouxe rendimentos pessoais. François saiu do Brasil levando um leão que crescia e a cada dia ficava mais dócil; um gato tigrado; um sarigueia com seus filhotes no bolso; gazelas; macacos; papagaios; coelhos; uma preguiça e seu filho: 'O animal mais incrível que jamais vi.' Nosso príncipe virou feriado, ganhou medalha com a imagem de um índio ao centro e mereceu uma chuva de fogos de artifício. Essa gente era provinciana, mas sabia se divertir de vez em quando. François até que aproveitou de seu baile de despedida e dançou até as 4 e meia da madrugada, quando d. Pedro já se encontrava, faz tempo, embaixo dos lençóis: 'Dançamos um cotilon no meio do qual soltamos o leão dancei até cair morto.' Não obstante, partiu dizendo que daqui só a natureza prestava.

Mas vida de príncipe também é sujeita a reviravoltas. François acabaria por mudar de opinião, ao menos com relação à (outrora desengonçada) irmã de d. Pedro: d. Chica virou beldade. Por sinal, ele teve de esperar muito para que seu pedido de casamento fosse atendido e voltou mais duas vezes ao País. O bom humor do príncipe também seria afetado pelo destino da 'Monarquia de Julho' e pela destituição da dinastia de Luís Felipe de Orléans, que terminou seus dias com a revolução de 1848, a qual levou toda a sua família ao exílio na Inglaterra. O mundo andava convulsionado e também a civilização dos franceses não era lá essa coisas.

Diário de um Príncipe no Rio de Janeiro é um monumento ao bom humor. Pena que nessa edição faltem os desenhos, aquarelas, estampas e caricaturas que compõem o documento original; que pode ser encontrado no Museu de Petrópolis. Ninguém vê com olhos livres e sem filtros e nosso príncipe estava coberto deles. Mas esse diário não só testemunha a crise que viveu o Império durante as regências, como é original na sua escrita divertida; oposta aos documentos sisudos, que sempre legam uma visão enaltecedora e oficial. Nesse caso, tudo é palco para o deboche.

No fundo, nosso príncipe gozador só pretendia passar pelo Brasil: seu destino sempre foi a França. Diz ele na despedida: 'Velas ao vento, presentes a serem distribuídos e um baile à francesa a me esperar, assim como a honra nacional e nossa bela família.' Quem diria que todo esse cenário iria desabar em menos de 10 anos. Castelos são muitas vezes cenários frágeis.

Lilia Moritz Schwarcz é professora titular do Departamento de Antropologia e autora, entre outros, de As Barbas do Imperador

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Hora de unir a obra de Bento Prado

 

ESTADO DE SP - 21 de jan de 2007

Hora de unir a obra de Bento Prado

Notas de aulas, trechos de conversas: as muitas idéias e conceitos do filósofo foram em grande parte passados de forma oral

Renato Janine Ribeiro

Na adolescência tive uma professora estupenda, que me incutiu amor pelas coisas do conhecimento: dona Lia de Almeida Prado, que lecionava latim e português no Colégio Alberto Levy, em São Paulo. Quando prestei o vestibular de filosofia eu sabia que um irmão seu era professor destacado no departamento da USP, embora relativamente moço, mas demorei a conhecê-lo. Não cheguei a ser aluno de Bento Prado - nem de Giannotti, os dois cassados nossos de abril de 1969: eu entrava no segundo ano, eles não lecionavam no primeiro e, na verdade, pude ter apenas três aulas com Bento antes que a Voz do Brasil anunciasse a sua exclusão, arbitrária e criminosa, da universidade.

Assim, nunca fui próximo dele, que agora se extinguiu novo, aos 60 e poucos anos. Quando voltou à universidade, foi pela Federal de São Carlos, dirigida por um grande reitor, Saad Hossne, que se antecipou à USP na reintegração dos antigos cassados. Ficou em São Carlos, assinando seus textos de "Vila Pureza". Mas seus textos não foram, não são, pelo menos por ora, muitos. Espero que a família e os mais chegados providenciem a edição do que ficou inédito.

Só que o inédito de Bento nem sempre é um texto por ele escrito. Ao contrário de Giannotti, que publicou e publica em dimensão comparável à fama de que desfruta, Bento editou relativamente pouco. Paulo Arantes, num artigo que já tem anos, comentava a freqüência com que Bento presenteava algum aluno com um artigo inédito, após uma longa conversa. Deve haver inéditos dessa ordem. Mas também há notas de aula, lembranças de conversas e, embora possa parecer um pouco arcaizante a sugestão de que para o acesso às idéias de Bento seja preciso passarmos pelos depoimentos, como os que Diógenes Laércio coletou sobre os grandes pensadores antigos, é fato que muito da intervenção de Bento foi oral.

Era um grande conversador, que com facilidade imaginava idéias. Freqüentava não só a literatura, mas também o cinema e até o romance policial. Com ele, os gêneros se misturavam. Retirava conceitos e filosofia de quase qualquer matéria. Num ambiente em que os conceitos se prendem muito aos autores, em que a filosofia se tornou refém da história da filosofia (é assim que eu e alguns colegas vemos os impasses da filosofia no Brasil), Bento Prado era exemplar, porque, conhecedor profundo dos pensadores passados, circulava em meio a eles e a outros criadores como se todos fossem vivos.

Sua própria produção publicada o atesta. Tive a honra de editar seu Bergson pela Edusp, há uns vinte anos. Dirigia a comissão de publicações da Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas e nos empenhamos em fazer que teses notáveis, ainda inéditas, viessem a lume. Acabamos convencendo a Editora da USP, que até a época só atuava em co-edição, isto é, não tomava a iniciativa de editar mas ia a reboque de editoras comerciais, a criar uma série de teses das áreas de Humanas, que na verdade durou pouco. Cada faculdade escolheu um livro e a FFLCH, por seu tamanho maior, teve direito a um quinhão mais amplo, onde por sinal também figurou Antonio Candido.

Digo isso porque Bergson foi um dos filósofos mais afeitos à literatura, às artes, que houve. Pensador algo esquecido ao longo do século 20, foi contudo alguém que, 100 anos atrás, ajudou a estabelecer ou reforçar os laços entre o filosofar e o criar artístico. Também é significativo que Bento, a par dessa tese de livre-docência defendida nos anos 60, dedicasse especial carinho a dois outros tipos de escritos.

O primeiro são os escritos em torno da literatura, que aparecem em Alguns Ensaios, que publicou nos anos 80, e são complementados em edição posterior, na qual surgem novos artigos, tendo como eixo a ligação da filosofia com a literatura - por exemplo, de Guimarães Rosa com Heidegger. O segundo são os ensaios que dialogam com questões candentes de nosso tempo. Aqui, destaco duas vertentes. Uma é a do senso comum. Trata-se de um debate lançado entre nós especialmente por seu amigo e colega Porchat, que ao se tornar cético passou a celebrar as qualidades do senso comum sobre as da pretensão filosófica. Como muitos sabem, o diálogo aqui é difícil, não pelas personalidades (eram amigos), mas pela dificuldade de alguém de tradição européia continental, isto é, alemã até meados do século 20 e francesa desde inícios do mesmo século, fazer-se entender de (ou entender) alguém de tradição anglo-saxônica.

Porchat, formado embora na escola francesa (de Goldschmidt), fez-se próximo da visão mais prática dos anglo-saxões (um exemplo notável dessa diferença de posições saiu neste jornal há duas décadas, quando Gérard Lebrun resenhou o livro de Olivier Todd - jornalista francês de simpatia inglesa - sobre a filosofia de seu quase-pai adotivo, nada menos do que Jean-Paul Sartre, a quem Todd respeitava como pessoa mas cujas idéias não lhe pareciam simplesmente fazer sentido). Bento tinha escuta. O livro de ambos é um dos mais empolgantes da filosofia brasileira nos anos 90, debatendo eles com alguns colegas sobre a visão filosófica e a do senso comum sobre o mundo.

Falando em escuta, outra vertente que empenhou Bento foi a da psicanálise. Não só porque seu departamento em S. Carlos a trabalha em relação com a filosofia, e pelo conhecimento que sua esposa, Lucia Prado, tem do assunto, mas talvez porque esse movimento de idéias tão decisivo do século 20 apontasse bem os limites do diálogo. Em suma, tivemos em Bento alguém da boa tradição socrática (do diálogo, da conversa, da intervenção tanto mais forte porque oral), mas também com a suspeita que Freud deita sobre o diálogo, ao criar formas de escuta mais carregadas de dúvida.

Um comentário final e inevitável é: como Bento se dava num mundo em que cada vez mais se preza a publicação, a produção? Feita a ressalva de que a filosofia praticamente nasce com um grande mestre hiper-oral, Sócrates, é preciso também lembrar que Bento foi assessor do CNPq (onde deixou a lembrança de um "homem único, extraordinário, de fineza rara, inteligência aguda e espantosa simplicidade") e presidente da associação de pós-graduações em filosofia. Transitou no oral e no informal, mas também na instituição.

Mas creio sobretudo que há um grande erro em pensar que nosso tempo se divide entre o "publish or perish" de exigências que não levam em conta a qualidade e uma criação inefável, imensurável, de quem nunca presta contas em público. Primeiro, publicar trabalhos ruins não é valorizado por nenhum grupo científico. Segundo, personalidades como Bento são raras e não servem para justificar a improdutividade de quem nada faz. Mas termino, com o risco de me repetir: é hora de coletar as memórias, aulas, presenças de Bento Prado. Isso não é repetir Diógenes Laércio. Afinal, temos livros tanto de Hegel quanto de Heidegger, escritos a partir de notas de alunos. Se não me engano, a certa altura um estudante presenteou Bento com um livro pronto, do próprio Bento, que reunia aulas dele. É disso que, agora, precisamos.

Renato Janine Ribeiro é professor de Ética e Filosofia Política na USP e diretor de Avaliação da Capes

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i carry your heart with me - E E Cummings

 

 

i carry your heart with me (i carry it in
my heart) i am never without it (anywhere
i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing, my darling)
                                    i fear
no fate (for you are my fate, my sweet) i want
no world (for beautiful you are my world, my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

 

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

 

i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)

"Não sou profeta, mas Portugal acabará por integrar-se na Espanha"

 

 

"Não sou profeta, mas Portugal acabará por integrar-se na Espanha" JOÃO CÉU E SILVA (texto e foto)

Este foi o regresso mais longo de José Saramago a Portugal desde que a polémica que envolveu a candidatura do seu livro O Evangelho segundo Jesus Cristo ao Prémio Literário Europeu o levou para um "exílio" na ilha espanhola de Lanzarote. A atribuição do Prémio Nobel parece tê-lo feito esquecer essas mágoas, mas não amoleceu a sua visão da sociedade e da História, que continua a ser polémica. Como se pode ver nesta entrevista. Durante dois dias, o Nobel da Literatura português sentou-se no sofá e analisou o estado do mundo. Na única entrevista que concedeu durante a temporada passada na sua casa de Lisboa, falou muito de política, mais de literatura e também da vida e da morte. Pelo meio ficou o anúncio da criação da fundação com o seu nome e a revelação de que está a escrever um novo livro. A união ibérica Este regresso a Portugal é um perdão? O país não me fez mal algum, não confundamos, nem há nenhuma reconciliação porque não houve nenhum corte. O que aconteceu foi com um governo de um partido que já não é governo, com um senhor chamado Sousa Lara e outro de nome Santana Lopes. Claro que as responsabilidades estendem-se ao governo, a quem eu pedi o favor de fazer qualquer coisa mas não fez nada, e resolvi ir embora. Quando foi do Prémio Nobel, dei uma volta pelo país porque toda a gente me queria ver, até pessoas que não lêem apareceram! E desde então tenho vindo com muita frequência a Lisboa. Vive num país que pouco a pouco toma conta da economia portuguesa. Não o incomoda? Acho que é uma situação natural. Qual é o futuro de Portugal nesta península? Não vale a pena armar -me em profeta, mas acho que acabaremos por integrar-nos. Política, económica ou culturalmente? Culturalmente, não, a Catalunha tem a sua própria cultura, que é ao mesmo tempo comum ao resto da Espanha, tal como a dos bascos e a galega, nós não nos converteríamos em espanhóis. Quando olhamos para a Península Ibérica o que é que vemos? Observamos um conjunto, que não está partida em bocados e que é um todo que está composto de nacionalidades, e em alguns casos de línguas diferentes, mas que tem vivido mais ou menos em paz. Integrados o que é que aconteceria? Não deixaríamos de falar português, não deixaríamos de escrever na nossa língua e certamente com dez milhões de habitantes teríamos tudo a ganhar em desenvolvimento nesse tipo de aproximação e de integração territorial, administrativa e estrutural. Quanto à queixa que tantas vezes ouço sobre a economia espanhola estar a ocupar Portugal, não me lembro de alguma vez termos reclamado de outras economias como as dos Estados Unidos ou da Inglaterra, que também ocuparam o país. Ninguém se queixou, mas como desta vez é o castelhano que vencemos em Aljubarrota que vem por aí com empresas em vez de armas... Seria, então, mais uma província de Espanha? Seria isso. Já temos a Andaluzia, a Catalunha, o País Basco, a Galiza, Castilla la Mancha e tínhamos Portugal. Provavelmente [Espanha] teria de mudar de nome e passar a chamar-se Ibéria. Se Espanha ofende os nossos brios, era uma questão a negociar. O Ceilão não se chama agora Sri Lanka, muitos países da Ásia mudaram de nome e a União Soviética não passou a Federação Russa? Mas algumas das províncias espanholas também querem ser independentes! A única independência real que se pede é a do País Basco e mesmo assim ninguém acredita. E os portugueses aceitariam a integração? Acho que sim, desde que isso fosse explicado, não é uma cedência nem acabar com um país, continuaria de outra maneira. Repito que não se deixaria de falar, de pensar e sentir em português. Seríamos aqui aquilo que os catalães querem ser e estão a ser na Catalunha. E como é que seria esse governo da Ibéria? Não iríamos ser governados por espanhóis, haveria representantes dos partidos de ambos os países, que teriam representação num parlamento único com todas as forças políticas da Ibéria, e tal como em Espanha, onde cada autonomia tem o seu parlamento próprio, nós também o teríamos. Há duas Espanhas Os espanhóis olham-no como um deles? Há duas Espanhas neste caso. Evidentemente, tratam-me como se fosse um deles, mas com as finanças espanholas ando numa guerra há, pelo menos, quatro anos porque querem que pague lá os impostos e consideram que lhes devo uma grande quantidade de dinheiro. Eu recusei-me a pagar e o meu argumento é extremamente simples, não pago duas vezes o que já paguei uma. Se há duplicação de impostos, então que o governo espanhol se entenda com o português e decidam. Eu tenho cá a minha casa e a minha residência fiscal sempre foi em Lisboa, ou seja, não há dúvidas de que estou numa situação de plena legalidade. Quanto aos impostos, e é por aí que também se vê o patriotismo, pago-os pontualmente em Portugal. Nunca pus o meu dinheiro num paraíso fiscal e repugna-me pensar que há quem o faça. O meu dinheiro é para aquilo que o Governo entender que serve. Mas não pode negar que o olham como um deus... Não diria tanto... Mesmo sendo a crítica espanhola tão positiva em relação à sua obra? Também já foi uma ou outra vez um pouco negativa - talvez devido às minhas posições políticas e ideológicas - mas de um modo geral tenho uma excelente crítica em toda a parte, como é o caso dos EUA, onde é quase unânime na apreciação da minha obra.

The democracy of Don Quixote

Issue 135 , June 2007

The democracy of Don Quixote

by Jonathan Rée

Novelists have always turned their hands to essays, and the essay-writing novelist remains a literary force to be reckoned with. The two forms share an inherent pluralism and scepticism that makes them natural allies of democracy

Jonathan Rée is a freelance historian and philosopher

In or around 1605, European literature changed. No one realised it at the time, but when Don Quixote set off to save the world, a new kind of writing was born. The old forms of storytelling—the epic, the romance, the oral tale—would from now on be pitted against a boisterous young rival. Before long it would be universally acknowledged that a reader hoping to enjoy a good story must be in search of a novel.

The novelty of the novel is of course connected with the rise of printing, and the growth of a literate public with time and money to spare. Beyond that, the sheer scale of the form allows storylines to be extended and multiplied as never before, crossing and re-crossing each other with ample scope for coincidence, surprise and contingency, and hence for the depiction of characters with whom, as William Hazlitt put it, the reader can "identify." But the most momentous way in which novels distinguish themselves from other kinds of storytelling is that they give a central role to a supernumerary character—the narrator—whose task is to transmit the story to us. All kinds of stories invite us to imagine the characters they portray, and involve ourselves in their fortunes and their follies; but to engage with novels we need to go one step further and imagine the people telling the story, or even identify with them.

The art of reading a novel involves a dash of experiment, conjecture, even risk. It requires readers to try out different narrative perspectives, styles, even personalities, and so to explore the inherent variousness of experience, and to recognise the vein of arbitrariness that runs through any possible version of events. Novels, in short, are implicitly pluralistic. In this respect they resemble essays, which, as it happens, came into existence at more or less the same time (Montaigne launched the form in 1580, with Bacon following in 1597). Essays tend to be classier, more learned and more demanding—there is no essayistic equivalent of the "popular novel"—and even when written in a perfectly casual style, they are likely to be strewn with half-concealed quotations or allusions to flatter or perhaps annoy the smarter class of reader. As exercises in hesitation, exploration and experimental self-multiplication, they are like novels, only more so. You might even say that the novel aspires to the condition of the essay, and there is certainly no shortage of novelists who have aspired to be essayists too. Think of Eliot or Henry James, Woolf, Forster or Orwell, or Mann, Sartre, De Beauvoir, Camus and Mary McCarthy. And as the four recently published books now lying open on my kitchen table demonstrate, the essay-writing novelist is still a literary force to be reckoned with.

In his luminous new collection, The Curtain (Faber & Faber), Milan Kundera argues that the special virtue of the novel lies in its ability to part the "magic curtain, woven of legends" that hangs between us and the ordinary world. The curtain has been put there to cover up the trivia of our lives, the forgotten old boxes and bags where "an enigma remains an enigma" while ugliness flirts with beauty, and reason courts the absurd. These neglected spaces were redeemed for literature, according to Kundera, at the moment when Cervantes got his readers to imagine Don Quixote as he lay dying while his niece went on eating, the housekeeper went on drinking and Sancho Panza went on being "of good cheer." By inventing a narrator through whose consciousness such dumb events could be worked up into an affecting "scene," Cervantes created a form of literature that could do justice to "modest sentiments"; and so a new kind of beauty—Kundera calls it "prosaic beauty"—was born. Henry Fielding took the technique further when he created a narrator who could charm his readers with benign loquacity, and Laurence Sterne completed the development by blithely allowing the story of Tristram Shandy to be ruined by the character trying to recount it.

If Cervantes rent the curtain that separates us from the prose of ordinary life, Kafka tore it down completely. After Kafka, according to Kundera, the novel entered a realm where reality could never "correspond to people's idea of it"; from now on the novel would be a constant witness to the "unavoidable relativism of human truths."

Kundera suggests that no one can become a novelist who has not passed through a long night of lyrical self-absorption to emerge on the other side in a state of bewildered, uncertain enlightenment. Novelists are specialists in the kind of moral wisdom which knows "that nobody is the person he thinks he is, that this misapprehension is universal, elementary, and that it casts on people… the soft gleam of the comical." And this gentle scepticism has political implications too, as Kundera notes when he recalls the "Manicheism" that deformed his native Czechoslovakia when he was a student in Prague after the second world war. Politics at that time was not a forum where perplexed citizens could engage in a collective search for freedom and happiness, or truth and reconciliation, but a battlefield where militant partisans would try to vindicate their correct views about everything and punish anyone who saw things differently. Kundera joined the Communist party, where he was taught that art must take sides in a historic "battle between good and evil," but he was never quite convinced. (In 1950 he was expelled from the party for his obtuseness, but eventually gained readmission, only to be expelled a second time in 1970, after which he escaped to France and set about rebuilding his literary life in a second language.) "Art is not a village band marching dutifully at History's heels," Kundera now says, and politics itself will suffocate without access to the forgiving fluidity of the novel. "The novel alone," as he puts it, "could reveal the immense, mysterious power of the pointless."

Jm Coetzee approaches politics with a similar combination of irony, seriousness and principled reticence. His political attitudes may be connected with the difficulties of being a liberal white South African, but they have their intellectual origins in his prodigious work as a novelist. His latest collection of essays, Inner Workings (Harvill Secker), keeps returning to the question of "the novel form," and how Cervantes created it in order to demonstrate the power of the imagination. One of the great virtues of the novel, according to Coetzee, is to teach us that there is no perfect way of carving up the world or recounting its stories. This is a lesson that bears on politics as well, counting against any political aspiration that arises from nationality, identity or tribal loyalty.

But Coetzee does not confine his attention to novelists, and an outstanding essay on Walt Whitman allows him to explore a conception of democracy that he himself would evidently endorse: democratic politics, he suggests, is "not one of the superficial inventions of human reason but an aspect of the ever-developing human spirit, rooted in eros." Those who make a fetish out of politics, he implies, are in danger of foreclosing on democracy. Take Walter Benjamin, for example. Coetzee, refusing to treat him with the awed indulgence that has become customary, contends that when Benjamin decided to become a good communist, it was not through an imaginative appraisal of political options, but was simply "an act of choosing sides, morally and historically, against the bourgeoisie and his own bourgeois origins." And if there was something silly and unconvincing about Benjamin's Marxism—"something forced about it, something merely reactive"—it could perhaps be attributed to a certain literary narcissism. "As a writer, Benjamin had no gift for evoking other people," Coetzee says; he had "no talent as a storyteller," and no capacity for the kind of compassionate intelligence implicit in the art of the novel. In a perverse attempt to opt for political realism rather than literary imagination, Benjamin managed to cut himself off from both.

Susan Sontag would have agreed with Coetzee about the political significance of literature. The novel, as she remarks in her last, posthumous collection At the Same Time (Hamish Hamilton), exists to recall us to a sense of the interminable diversity that is the basis of what she calls "politics, the politics of democracy." In a substantial essay on Victor Serge, she praises him for having combined political militancy with a serious engagement with the art of writing. As a mature novelist, she says, Serge was able to deploy "several different conceptions of how to narrate," elaborating a capacious "I" as a device for "giving voice to others." It was through his narratorial doubles that he liberated himself from what he called the "former beautiful simplicity" of the fight between capitalism and socialism, so as to produce books that were "better, wiser, more important than the person who wrote them."

Sontag herself never found it easy to reconcile the languorous pleasures of imaginative writing with her impulse to political plain speaking. "The wisdom of literature is quite antithetical to having opinions," she said, and "a writer ought not to be an opinion-machine." But she remained an irrepressible opinionator, and in At the Same Time—which contains much that she might have revised if death had not intervened—she sometimes lurches into monologues, adopting an unappealing tone of dogmatism, petulance, hyperbole and egocentricity. She finds it hard to talk about writers without telling us who is or is not "great" or "supremely great," as if world literature were a competitive sport, and she the ultimate umpire. And her fury at the condition of the US—she speaks of a "culture of shamelessness," marked by an "increasing acceptance of brutality" in which politics has been obliterated and "replaced by psychotherapy"—seems to have made her forget her own better self, and her neat summation of the wisdom of the novel: the generous knowledge that whatever may be happening, "something else is always going on."

Kundera, Coetzee and Sontag are, one feels, the kind of writers who might have steered clear of politics if they had not had it thrust upon them; but Mario Vargas Llosa has, on at least one occasion, gone out of his way to achieve political power. He won literary fame in the early 1960s and pursued a charmed career as a writer not only in his native Peru, but also in Britain, Spain and the US. But in 1990 he took a vacation from literature in order to campaign for the presidency of Peru. He came quite close to winning—some say he would have done if his work as a novelist had not been held against him—and if he had done, Peru might have enjoyed an experiment in pluralistic centre-right liberalism instead of the disastrous ten-year kleptocracy of Alberto Fujimori. After his defeat, Vargas Llosa returned with relief to his old preoccupations, and in Touchstones (Faber & Faber), his new collection of miscellaneous writings, he elaborates on the case for the political relevance of the novel.

The longest item in Touchstones is a piece of reportage rather than an essay: an account by Vargas Llosa of an extended visit to Iraq in 2003, chronicling his reluctant conversion from visceral opposition to the western invasion to firm if wary support. He was well aware that thousands of Iraqis were dying, and many coalition soldiers as well, and that the deaths were bound to continue for years; but politics is about comparisons, and he is persuaded that the death rate under the occupation is considerably lower than under the old regime. Beyond that, apart from a scary encounter with an enraged imam, he kept encountering an elated sense of freedom that was more than merely political. "As novelists know very well," he says, "fantasies generate realities," and in Iraq he sensed a gradual awakening from the paranoid fictions that flourish under a dictatorship.

Vargas Llosa's optimism about Iraq may seem excessive, but it is bound up with a subtle understanding of the political responsibility of the novelist. He writes admiringly, for example, about Isak Dinesen; she claimed that she had no interest at all in "social questions," but Vargas Llosa finds more political vitality on every page of her Gothic Tales than in any old-fashioned "literature of commitment," which, as he puts it, "revolved maniacally around realist descriptions." He traces the same kind of practical fertility in a vast range of 20th-century novelists, from Conrad, Mann, Woolf, Orwell and Hemingway to Henry Miller, Camus, Grass, Nabokov and Borges. A society that ignores imaginative literature, he argues, is liable to succumb to the bovine complacencies and populist idiocies of nationalism, and so to degenerate into "something like a sectarian cult."

Vargas Llosa's prose is sometimes slow-paced, but it speeds up when he reflects on the "collectivist ideology" of nationality. "There are no nations," he says, at least not in a way that could "define individuals through their belonging to a human conglomerate marked out as different from others by certain characteristics such as race, language and religion." For Vargas Llosa, nationalism is always "a lie," but its rebuttal is to be found not so much in high-toned internationalist universalism as in the dissociative particularities of literature, and especially in a well-narrated novel. The novel, he thinks, articulates a basic human desire—the desire to be "many people, as many as it would take to assuage the burning desires that possess us." Alternatively, it stands for a basic human right—the right not to be the same as oneself, let alone the same as other people. And the defiant history of democracy began not in politics but in literature, when Cervantes first tackled "the problem of the narrator," or the question of who gets to tell the story. No doubt about it: Don Quixote is "a 21st-century novel."