I forgot to mention a few crucial details about Jacinto Lucas Pires’ reading (see Thursday, June 23 entry). That’s what happens when you scribble notes on every random slip and find them much later. Humans’ urge to write throughout history proves that we instinctively know time is not linear, though in most other ways, we act like it is. Jacinto’s observations on writing in general and writing in and about Lisbon:
On understanding why Saramago and other writers of that generation preferred writing in freehand versus on a keyboard: “I prefer the movement of the arm like I’m painting these poems.”
On a particular kind of longing: “Saudade do futuro.”
On the intentions of his own writing: “Putting big ideas in small stories” and, citing de Lillo, to reach “that place in the head we call the heart.”
Check out his story “L” in excellent English translation (which he read) from his latest collection.
Sat. 6/25. This is one of the perhaps two days where a few of us went off the program schedule. Lisbon was in the grip of the closest thing I’ve personally experienced in Portugal to a heat wave, Mediterranean style of course (i.e. baking daytime temps in the low nineties, with little humidity but the sun making up for it by turning up the wattage)—and four of us, Melissa, Jacob, Marisol and me, sluggish from the previous night’s partying and continued sleep deprivation, missed the big group train to seaside Cascais. Not a problem since all the group apparently did there was walk, no beach time. Melissa had intended anyway to spend the day at her family’s in the Lisbon suburb of Sao Pedro for a poolside BBQ, and, after waiting over an hour for a rail ticket on a queue clotted with beachgoers (to Cascais of course), all the rest of us wanted was pool and cold adult beverages too. We kept ourselves awake on the train ride to S.P. playing the “up her bum” alphabet movie game starring Angelina Jolie (ask Melissa or Jacob about it, because they always won), a diversion we would later tone down to a G rating when we played it poolside with Mel’s 9 year-old cousin.
Brazilian hospitality and conviviality meets Portuguese small town somnolence is one way to describe this lovely, lazy day we spent drinking beer and lemonade, eating barbeque, feijoes, and farofa, drinking homemade wine, playing darts and fusball, and lounging around a 60 degree pool (refreshing) with interesting people and various tabby cats. Another is, to paraphrase Marisol’s Benter’s memorable line, “Beautiful brown people in bikinis the size of wash cloths.” Well, that was really only the men…
Sun. 6/26. OK, so this was the second day some of us went off schedule. Although my cultural consciousness tweaked a little at missing the Jose Saramago themed trip to the Mafra Palace, a humongous Baroque/Neoclassical palace/monastery that is one of Portugal’s prime touristic jewels, I justified it in two ways:
1. I’ve been there before, as a teenager, on a family trip. OK, so I don’t remember much because after a while then all of the country’s Baroque, Neoclassical and Gothic masterpieces started to blur into a general category I now call “Europe,” but, still, I’ve been there. Mafra, in fact was a prime feature of my adolescence. Initiated by King Joao V in the early 18th century after God, the Pope, but really his put-upon (literally from what I hear about royal conjugal visits) wife, Mary Anne of Austria, starting popping out heirs, the palace took the better part of fifty years to complete. Hence, my mother’s constant question to my brother or me during our prolonged adolescent hair-grooming sessions in our locked bathroom: “What are you doing in there, constructing Mafra?”
2. The second day I was in Lisbon, even before the official start of Disquiet, I attended Jose Saramago’s memorial service. One year after his death, his ashes were interred under an olive tree brought from his hometown, his lovely, gracious window Pilar (see the documentary Jose and Pilar) presiding over press and public with regal poise. So you see, I got my dose of Saramago, royalty and fulfilled promessas.
So the morning and early afternoon of this second and final Sunday I’d spent on this particular visit to Lisbon passed in a soft blur of sleeping in, showering, grooming, and hanging out in the Living Lounge’s lounge. Sally Ashton, a bit nervous about the reading she was doing in the evening with Josip Novakovich, popped in and asked us a few questions.
At 4:00 p.m. we assembled in the stifling movie room/auditorium (aka a long table and fifty chairs) to hear Sally and Josip. Sally went first. The room was an airless oven but to her credit, Sally kept us engaged with some lovely poems, particularly one about Facebooking another Sally Ashton, an appropriate heteronymic exercise considering we were steps away from Fernando Pessoa’s birthplace. Unfortunately, by the time Josip began reading, my (and a few others’) sleep tax collector made his daily visit. Josip read a short piece, and then began a long, interminable, monotonous reading of something about Putin, an imprisoned American, Siberian tigers, a blonde and constantly insinuated but never consummated sex. At least I didn’t stick around long enough to find out. I forced myself out of my chair before lack of sleep and oxygen did it for me. The hallway was so much cooler. Josip’s reading finally ended. Someone then thought to open the windows.
Thank God, because we might not have physically survived long enough to watch the next item on the agenda, Nick Oulman’s wonderful documentary Com Que Voz (With What Voice). Oulman’s film is a touching but unsentimental profile of and homage to his composer father Alain Oulman. Oulman revolutionized traditional fado by introducing two contrasting tones into the music, an innovation Amalia Rodrigues took full advantage of and made her signature sound. The film is equally a loving and unsparing profile of Oulman’s mother, his parents’ marriage, and what happens when creativity is a stronger entity in a relationship than affection or family ties.
Thursday, July 14, 2011
Saturday, July 09, 2011
You Must Finish!
It’s been a week to the hour since I’ve been back from my Lisbon adventure and only now am I beginning to emerge, to face the question of, What is real life anyway? And to also see with more clarity than ever that I must finish. Frank X. Gaspar exhorted those of us in Disquiet’s Luso-American writing workshop—“You must finish your projects!”—as if our lives depended on it. Because, in fact, our lives do. (Although the smartass in me wants to retort, would Finnish-American writers finish?”).
And so, I will finish this Lisbon 2011 blog, even if it kills me, even if I am late for my Gotham Girls roller derby bout in Manhattan tonight.
A week out it’s hard to remember details, and cryptic jottings in three different notebooks don’t help. What stands out are moments: Almodovar film-like flashes. Like the one of me sitting with fellow writers and friends at one of Antonio’s fabulous 9-Euro four-course/unlimited wine dinners at the Living Lounge hostel. Across the table is a Spanish family of four. The tall teenage son plays basketball. The lanky father pours us all wine and appreciates the women at the table. The green-eyed, olive-skinned pre-teen daughter smiles shyly. The talkative raven-haired mother replies, when I note my parents are Portuguese and I am American, “Pero, tienes la cara de pura Espanola!” Then, when I add that I really want to learn Spanish, “Claro!” as if, of course, why waste time on Portuguese? Who cares what Cervantes said about the “softer language.” We conquered them anyway. th th th
After dinner, a handful of us—Melissa, Jacob, Marisol, Marge, Sally, Traci, Amy, Linette, me and Carlos, sleep-deprived, high culture saturated, and grooving on each other’s company, get punchy. We make space in the hostel’s living room—or rather, the narrow swath between the dining table and the sitting area expands—and we begin to groove on the tunes pouring out of DJ Tight Jeans Italian Shoes Carlos Q. The Spanish family hovers as Traci, who could have been the stunt double for the two dancers who perform various times for Stephen Dorff's character in the Sofia Coppola movie, “Somewhere,” schools us all on how to really dance to Lady Gaga and Katy Perry. The Spanish family watches and smiles. The Spanish father would pour us all wine if there were any left in the box (and believe me, this is no insult: The boxed wine there would rate as a $50 bottle in the U.S.).
Suddenly, a group of Swedes shows up (or was that after? wait, I’m getting ahead of myself).
We dance until the hostel front desk guy tells us to tone it down. We decrease the decibels by one or two. The Spanish family takes this as their cue to call it a night. Amy and Traci, mindful of the last green line metro back to their digs across the city, peel away from us. Sally and Marge too call it a night and go to their rooms upstairs. We diehards continue, and I revel in the most exercise I’ve gotten since I arrived and was promptly bombarded with wine, cheese, bread, beer, bicas, and pastries, leftovers of which I carry in the new hamster folds of my midsection. Lord have mercy. Despite our having lowered the volume earlier, it has somehow creeped back up, way beyond its original max. DJ Carlos shimmies and spins in the center of our circle and we howl. The Ironbound boy’s got moves. Ah yes, this is when the Swedes, who have been sitting chatting on the couch, glancing at us now and then, get up the nerve and join our Solid Gold retro tribute. The nightclerk, beside himself now, has had it, comes very close to tossing us out. I glance at the doorway as he is motioning frantically and notice the little Spanish girl half hidden behind the post, her green-eyed gaze intent on us rowdy Americans. Above her, her mother’s very Spanish face appears and the little girl is gone in a blink.
No matter where we were or what we did, the days had this intense, mercurial quality that a chronological accounting doesn’t do justice to, but here’s a brief continuation anyway:
Thurs. 6/23. National holiday. I slept in and gathered with the Disquiet group in the evening at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa uptown to hear the talented 37 year-old writer Jacinto Lucas Pires read a story from his latest collection. Although, of course, Pires writes in Portuguese, he read the excellent English translation and spoke writing in and about Lisbon with an a Latin expressiveness that we fell in love with. I looked for his collection in bookstores a few days later but only came across one of his earlier books, “Azul-Turquesa,” which I’m reading now. It didn’t occur to me until his reading that Pires had actually sat at dinner in the Coliseo with a few of us and another prominent writer, Rui Zink, a few days earlier. In Lisbon, one takes such things for granted.
Fri. 6/24. Workshop in the morning and an excursion in the afternoon to the Arpad Szenes/Vieira da Silva Foundation, which is essentially a museum showcasing the work of, respectively, the Hungarian painter and the Portuguese painter. Artists, married partners, and mutual muses, they split their time between Paris and Lisbon. I had never heard of either, but their works were captivating, and Vieira da Silva’s line paintings capturing the winding freneticism of Lisbon in particular were a revelation.
The pair were close friends with the Mozambique-born Portuguese poet Alberto de Lacerda (1928-2007), and appropriately, the event that followed the museum trip was a tribute to de Lacerda at the Fundacao Mario Soares. De Lacerda clearly had a poetic muse in Walt Whitman, and, although the presentation by Luis Amorim de Sousa, a close friend of the poet, and addenda by Alfredo Caldeira and Scott Laughlin, were robust, at no point did anyone mention De Lacerda’s homosexuality, which seemed to be an important factor for a poet whose work so modeled Whitman’s sensual, corporeal expansiveness. This omission was especially glaring in light of the fact that: two of the de Lacerda poems read were clearly love poems to men, and an important component of the earlier discussion and presentation of Szenes and Vieira da Silva’s work was the impact of their marriage, their love story, on their work. Hmm…
To be continued...
And so, I will finish this Lisbon 2011 blog, even if it kills me, even if I am late for my Gotham Girls roller derby bout in Manhattan tonight.
A week out it’s hard to remember details, and cryptic jottings in three different notebooks don’t help. What stands out are moments: Almodovar film-like flashes. Like the one of me sitting with fellow writers and friends at one of Antonio’s fabulous 9-Euro four-course/unlimited wine dinners at the Living Lounge hostel. Across the table is a Spanish family of four. The tall teenage son plays basketball. The lanky father pours us all wine and appreciates the women at the table. The green-eyed, olive-skinned pre-teen daughter smiles shyly. The talkative raven-haired mother replies, when I note my parents are Portuguese and I am American, “Pero, tienes la cara de pura Espanola!” Then, when I add that I really want to learn Spanish, “Claro!” as if, of course, why waste time on Portuguese? Who cares what Cervantes said about the “softer language.” We conquered them anyway. th th th
After dinner, a handful of us—Melissa, Jacob, Marisol, Marge, Sally, Traci, Amy, Linette, me and Carlos, sleep-deprived, high culture saturated, and grooving on each other’s company, get punchy. We make space in the hostel’s living room—or rather, the narrow swath between the dining table and the sitting area expands—and we begin to groove on the tunes pouring out of DJ Tight Jeans Italian Shoes Carlos Q. The Spanish family hovers as Traci, who could have been the stunt double for the two dancers who perform various times for Stephen Dorff's character in the Sofia Coppola movie, “Somewhere,” schools us all on how to really dance to Lady Gaga and Katy Perry. The Spanish family watches and smiles. The Spanish father would pour us all wine if there were any left in the box (and believe me, this is no insult: The boxed wine there would rate as a $50 bottle in the U.S.).
Suddenly, a group of Swedes shows up (or was that after? wait, I’m getting ahead of myself).
We dance until the hostel front desk guy tells us to tone it down. We decrease the decibels by one or two. The Spanish family takes this as their cue to call it a night. Amy and Traci, mindful of the last green line metro back to their digs across the city, peel away from us. Sally and Marge too call it a night and go to their rooms upstairs. We diehards continue, and I revel in the most exercise I’ve gotten since I arrived and was promptly bombarded with wine, cheese, bread, beer, bicas, and pastries, leftovers of which I carry in the new hamster folds of my midsection. Lord have mercy. Despite our having lowered the volume earlier, it has somehow creeped back up, way beyond its original max. DJ Carlos shimmies and spins in the center of our circle and we howl. The Ironbound boy’s got moves. Ah yes, this is when the Swedes, who have been sitting chatting on the couch, glancing at us now and then, get up the nerve and join our Solid Gold retro tribute. The nightclerk, beside himself now, has had it, comes very close to tossing us out. I glance at the doorway as he is motioning frantically and notice the little Spanish girl half hidden behind the post, her green-eyed gaze intent on us rowdy Americans. Above her, her mother’s very Spanish face appears and the little girl is gone in a blink.
No matter where we were or what we did, the days had this intense, mercurial quality that a chronological accounting doesn’t do justice to, but here’s a brief continuation anyway:
Thurs. 6/23. National holiday. I slept in and gathered with the Disquiet group in the evening at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa uptown to hear the talented 37 year-old writer Jacinto Lucas Pires read a story from his latest collection. Although, of course, Pires writes in Portuguese, he read the excellent English translation and spoke writing in and about Lisbon with an a Latin expressiveness that we fell in love with. I looked for his collection in bookstores a few days later but only came across one of his earlier books, “Azul-Turquesa,” which I’m reading now. It didn’t occur to me until his reading that Pires had actually sat at dinner in the Coliseo with a few of us and another prominent writer, Rui Zink, a few days earlier. In Lisbon, one takes such things for granted.
Fri. 6/24. Workshop in the morning and an excursion in the afternoon to the Arpad Szenes/Vieira da Silva Foundation, which is essentially a museum showcasing the work of, respectively, the Hungarian painter and the Portuguese painter. Artists, married partners, and mutual muses, they split their time between Paris and Lisbon. I had never heard of either, but their works were captivating, and Vieira da Silva’s line paintings capturing the winding freneticism of Lisbon in particular were a revelation.
The pair were close friends with the Mozambique-born Portuguese poet Alberto de Lacerda (1928-2007), and appropriately, the event that followed the museum trip was a tribute to de Lacerda at the Fundacao Mario Soares. De Lacerda clearly had a poetic muse in Walt Whitman, and, although the presentation by Luis Amorim de Sousa, a close friend of the poet, and addenda by Alfredo Caldeira and Scott Laughlin, were robust, at no point did anyone mention De Lacerda’s homosexuality, which seemed to be an important factor for a poet whose work so modeled Whitman’s sensual, corporeal expansiveness. This omission was especially glaring in light of the fact that: two of the de Lacerda poems read were clearly love poems to men, and an important component of the earlier discussion and presentation of Szenes and Vieira da Silva’s work was the impact of their marriage, their love story, on their work. Hmm…
To be continued...
Wednesday, June 22, 2011
Who the Hell Has Time to Write?
no update since friday because as soon as the rest of the International Literary Program (ILP) people arrived on saturday, all bets were off. between eating, attending programing, workshopping (my group on writing the Luso-American experince with Frank X. Gaspar), hoofing it all around alfama, baixa-chiado, and other lisbon neighborhoods, getting to know talented writers from all across the USA (and some Portuguese ones too, including Rui Zink), eating some more, who the hell has had time to actually write, let alone sleep!
but this is about writing, and the writing is and will be.
brief rundown of happenings since last post:
sat night: get-to-know-ya group dinner at cervejaria trinidade, well known semi tourist trap former convent-brewery. good food but pricey. i had bacalhau in natas.
sun: gathering at the Centro Nacional de Cultura (CNC) to get the lay of the workshop land, then a sun-baked tour as an anglo herd through the alfama up to the plaza of S. Jorge church, whose vaulted gothic coolness invited a few of us in to contemplate after beers. then, trolley 28 back down to rua garrett and then back to the CNC for finger sandwiches and adult beverages, which, though tasty and appreciated, didn´t sate. bunch of us staying at the living lounge hostel had the homecooked 9 € dinner offered every night, and talked into the wees.
mon: snacks and chat with roommates at Pessoa´s Cafe´Brasileira before first workshop session. Frank X. set a tone of line edits bad, project purpose and how to fulfill it good. big picture stuff. finish finish finish your manuscript and get it out into the world will become his mantra. after workshop, CNC staff took us on a very portuguese (i.e. felt like reading footnotes) Fernando Pessoa walking tour. everything would be revealed about the man right down to his preference in underwear. i was dehydrated, hungry and still recovering from jet lag, so i cut out. back to the hostel to clean up for cocktails at the u.s. embassy.
or so my roomies and i thought. it wasnt the embassy but the private residence of the deputy counselor. this we learned after blowing some precious alloted euros on a cab ride to the embassy, where one of us then bothered to look at the program for the actual address, on the other side of town. more euros gone. the reception was lovely, but come on usa govt, why so unimaginative in the finger foodies? the same server with the same platter of drying pate on mini toast hit the group i was in four times before i suggested we move. a good move because we got to talk to the wonderful Rui Zink. the pate lady appeared again. soon, the alcohol dried up and that was everyone´s cue to leave. Frank Sousa, of Tagus press, wanted to go to the best (according to him) place for rotisserie chicken in town on the street of Portas de S. Antao. amy, melissa and i horned our way in. we were hungry, dammit. at the cab corner, i pulled a nyc move and snagged the first cab that came down the hill, practically tossing out some guy who tried to sneak in. no way buster. tony, frank x. and i ended up in the cab, me sitting in the front seat playing translator and listening to the cabbie sing the praises of Radio Amalia, which he had on, and offering up advice on the best places to eat and hear fado in town, which all the cabbies do. they´re all informal tour guides.
at the chicken place, i fell off the wagon and renounced my pesco-vegetarianism for the night. and you would too! the two Franks, Rui, Traci, Tony, Amy, Melissa and I gorged on frango, portuguese fries and got silly, a great way to get to know artistic eminences (i.e. me).
tues: are you kidding? i´m too exhausted from living la vida lisboa to get up at 11 am for a lecture and discussion about the state of portuguese publishing. please...i´ll sleep till 1pm instead then get up to go with roommated melissa to Maragrida Vale de Gato´s (name means Valley of Cat. may ask her later if she ever wished it was Vale das Bonecas) translation workshop at the Nova Universidade de Lisboa. holy shit, will that Margarida be impressive and that workshop more intellectually stimulating than a grad course at home. we will have our work cut out for us synthesizing theory and translating poems either into English from Portuguese or vice versa. Restitution indeed! I will choose to tackle Frank X. Gaspar´s poem´Ernestina, the Shoemaker´s Wife´. i´m not a wife but i wear shoes. I will buy a pocket dictionary at the rare book dealer´s table near the entrance and look up ´sapateiro.`
after the workshop, we proceed to the Luso-American Development Foundation (FLAD) near the basilica of Estrela to, in order of importance 1. filch as many of the free cookies, coffee and juice as possible, 2. hear Frank X. read his poetry and 3. listen to a panel presentation on the state of Luso-American representation in US publishing. afterwards, a bunch of us hoof it back to the street of the chicken place, this time to eat fish. an amazing brazilian street singer-guitarist entertains us. i buy a fedora.
wed: workshop in the morning, publishing panel in the afternoon, 20 minutes wait in the post office where there are no people on line to buy post card stamps, pit stop at a liquor store fora port wine tasting, off to hotel plaza lisbon to hear the franks talk about Tagus press and how it and the world needs our work, back to baixa-chiado for dinner sandwich on rua s. nicolau near the hostel, stroll to Praca Comercial and a toe dip in the Tagus, pastries at another of Pessoa´s cafes, to hostel to get comfortable, talk shop with colleagues, and now this, the writing i´ve made time for.
until we say bom dia again!
but this is about writing, and the writing is and will be.
brief rundown of happenings since last post:
sat night: get-to-know-ya group dinner at cervejaria trinidade, well known semi tourist trap former convent-brewery. good food but pricey. i had bacalhau in natas.
sun: gathering at the Centro Nacional de Cultura (CNC) to get the lay of the workshop land, then a sun-baked tour as an anglo herd through the alfama up to the plaza of S. Jorge church, whose vaulted gothic coolness invited a few of us in to contemplate after beers. then, trolley 28 back down to rua garrett and then back to the CNC for finger sandwiches and adult beverages, which, though tasty and appreciated, didn´t sate. bunch of us staying at the living lounge hostel had the homecooked 9 € dinner offered every night, and talked into the wees.
mon: snacks and chat with roommates at Pessoa´s Cafe´Brasileira before first workshop session. Frank X. set a tone of line edits bad, project purpose and how to fulfill it good. big picture stuff. finish finish finish your manuscript and get it out into the world will become his mantra. after workshop, CNC staff took us on a very portuguese (i.e. felt like reading footnotes) Fernando Pessoa walking tour. everything would be revealed about the man right down to his preference in underwear. i was dehydrated, hungry and still recovering from jet lag, so i cut out. back to the hostel to clean up for cocktails at the u.s. embassy.
or so my roomies and i thought. it wasnt the embassy but the private residence of the deputy counselor. this we learned after blowing some precious alloted euros on a cab ride to the embassy, where one of us then bothered to look at the program for the actual address, on the other side of town. more euros gone. the reception was lovely, but come on usa govt, why so unimaginative in the finger foodies? the same server with the same platter of drying pate on mini toast hit the group i was in four times before i suggested we move. a good move because we got to talk to the wonderful Rui Zink. the pate lady appeared again. soon, the alcohol dried up and that was everyone´s cue to leave. Frank Sousa, of Tagus press, wanted to go to the best (according to him) place for rotisserie chicken in town on the street of Portas de S. Antao. amy, melissa and i horned our way in. we were hungry, dammit. at the cab corner, i pulled a nyc move and snagged the first cab that came down the hill, practically tossing out some guy who tried to sneak in. no way buster. tony, frank x. and i ended up in the cab, me sitting in the front seat playing translator and listening to the cabbie sing the praises of Radio Amalia, which he had on, and offering up advice on the best places to eat and hear fado in town, which all the cabbies do. they´re all informal tour guides.
at the chicken place, i fell off the wagon and renounced my pesco-vegetarianism for the night. and you would too! the two Franks, Rui, Traci, Tony, Amy, Melissa and I gorged on frango, portuguese fries and got silly, a great way to get to know artistic eminences (i.e. me).
tues: are you kidding? i´m too exhausted from living la vida lisboa to get up at 11 am for a lecture and discussion about the state of portuguese publishing. please...i´ll sleep till 1pm instead then get up to go with roommated melissa to Maragrida Vale de Gato´s (name means Valley of Cat. may ask her later if she ever wished it was Vale das Bonecas) translation workshop at the Nova Universidade de Lisboa. holy shit, will that Margarida be impressive and that workshop more intellectually stimulating than a grad course at home. we will have our work cut out for us synthesizing theory and translating poems either into English from Portuguese or vice versa. Restitution indeed! I will choose to tackle Frank X. Gaspar´s poem´Ernestina, the Shoemaker´s Wife´. i´m not a wife but i wear shoes. I will buy a pocket dictionary at the rare book dealer´s table near the entrance and look up ´sapateiro.`
after the workshop, we proceed to the Luso-American Development Foundation (FLAD) near the basilica of Estrela to, in order of importance 1. filch as many of the free cookies, coffee and juice as possible, 2. hear Frank X. read his poetry and 3. listen to a panel presentation on the state of Luso-American representation in US publishing. afterwards, a bunch of us hoof it back to the street of the chicken place, this time to eat fish. an amazing brazilian street singer-guitarist entertains us. i buy a fedora.
wed: workshop in the morning, publishing panel in the afternoon, 20 minutes wait in the post office where there are no people on line to buy post card stamps, pit stop at a liquor store fora port wine tasting, off to hotel plaza lisbon to hear the franks talk about Tagus press and how it and the world needs our work, back to baixa-chiado for dinner sandwich on rua s. nicolau near the hostel, stroll to Praca Comercial and a toe dip in the Tagus, pastries at another of Pessoa´s cafes, to hostel to get comfortable, talk shop with colleagues, and now this, the writing i´ve made time for.
until we say bom dia again!
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