so i just counted and i have only 40 days left in brasil. i can’t believe it. aside from the phillies and obama news, i’ve kinda checked out of north american reality, particularly the fact that it is winter. as the days get hotter and hotter here i continue to forget that i will be returning home to the cold, to christmas, and a new year. i was kinda freaked out today when i went to the mall in shorts and flip-flops and saw santa claus, a huge xmas tree and all those dazzling lights. january will be certainly be rough. alas, i didn’t write all this to lament that my time here is coming to an end. rather, i wanted to remark that i’ve been noticing some changes. i’ve been feeling really confident about my portuguese lately. although every now and then there’s a tough accent and/or slang-filled convo that might make me stumble, i’m doing a lot better. conversing more fluidly, which is a nice change. you could say that after 4.5 months, i’m settling…so, hmm forty days. that seems like such an important number. i have a list of things to do, which i could post here, but i won’t. i’d rather just get them done. so, até mais.

ripped this piece of lovely from a NYT review of Bolaño’s last book 2666. i’m already up to my ears in books i need/want to read, but after i finish the murakami, this is next:

“He talked about the stars you see at night, say when you’re driving from Des Moines to Lincoln on Route 80 and the car breaks down, the way they do, maybe it’s the oil or the radiator, maybe it’s a flat tire, and you get out and get the jack and the spare tire out of the trunk and change the tire, maybe half an hour, at most, and when you’re done you look up and see the sky full of stars. The Milky Way. He talked about star athletes. That’s a different kind of star, he said, and he compared them to movie stars, though as he said, the life of an athlete is generally much shorter. A star athlete might last 15 years at best, whereas a movie star could go on for 40 or 50 years if he or she started young. Meanwhile, any star you could see from the side of Route 80 . . . might have been dead for millions of years, and the traveler who gazed up at it would never know. It might be a live star or it might be a dead star. Sometimes, depending on your point of view, he said, it doesn’t matter, since the stars you see at night exist in the realm of semblance. They are semblances, the same way dreams are semblances.”

a poem by natasha tretheway that i ripped from her essay in the atlanta journal-constitution. not sure if i’m crazy about it as a whole, but there are some bits that i enjoyed.

My Mother Dreams Another Country

Already the words are changing. She is changing
from colored to negro, black still years ahead.
This is 1966 —- she is married to a white man —-
and there are more names for what grows inside her.
It is enough to worry about words like mongrel
and the infertility of mules and mulattoes
while flipping through a book of baby names.
She has come home to wait out the long months,
her room unchanged since she’s been gone:
dolls winking down from every shelf —- all of them
white. Every day she is flanked by the rituals of superstition,
and there is a name she will learn for this too:
maternal impression —- the shape, like an unknown
country, marking the back of the newborn’s thigh.
For now, women tell her to clear her head, to steady her hands
or she’ll gray a lock of the child’s hair wherever
she worries her own, imprint somewhere the outline
of a thing she craves too much. They tell her
to stanch her cravings by eating dirt. All spring
she has sat on her hands, her fingers numb. For a while
each day, she can’t feel anything she touches: the arbor
out back —- the landscape’s green tangle; the molehill
of her own swelling. Here —- outside the city limits —-
cars speed by, clouds of red dust in their wake.
She breathes it in —- Mississippi —- then drifts toward sleep,
thinking of someplace she’s never been. Late,
Mississippi is a dark backdrop bearing down
on the windows of her room. On the TV in the corner,
the station signs off, broadcasting its nightly salutation:
the waving Stars and Stripes, our national anthem.

miriam makeba 1932-2008

saw her first in sarafina! when i was a kid, one of my favorite movies.

If no one else does, I’d like to create an anthology of Obama poems, and include this one, by Thomas Sayers Ellis:

The Obama Hour

Finally, one of us is properly
positioned to run. By “us” I mean Black,
by “positioned” I mean White
and by “run” I mean Race and its varied speeds of darkness,
the way “silver writes” faster than revolution
and the lit and darkening skin of the sky.
The triumphant exasperation, though, belongs
to the word “finally” with its slanted f
signifying relief, a “‘bout time” up from the reservoir
of coded sighs we make to mask time,
Colored People’s Time, our well-known resistance
to the Romanized face of the clock. To discuss running,
running the country, a black man running,
an African running America, you must discuss Race
including the difficult qualifying times
between the theft of our arrival and all hate crimes.
Race as gift, as campaign donation, and gifts matter.
It’s racist to erase Race (because “erase”
means Blackness, ethnic cleansing,
get rid of the Blacks); and worse to hack off history
or any limb at anytime, except for purposes
of assimilation and modern design.
In place of the usual halo of numbers, orange balls and spindles.
Lazy, often late for work, our walk a discourse,
shifting, like the unemployed shadow of a brother leaning on a corner.
But America prefers Religion to Race
and a clock has disciples, hours,
cuckoos and cock-a-doodle doos.
The people “go to sleep” and the people “wake up” to nature,
nations and denominations of,
not the bedside duet of alarm and digital glow.

i just got goosebumps. so much to look forward to upon my return.

oh, how i wish i was in america, just for today. i posted about obama on my portuguese class blog. probably not useful for anyone who doesn’t understand it…but here it is anyway.

xai might recognize the photo…