Teaching genre in Recife

Last post from Brazil

2007-08-19T11:19:00.001-03:00

Here are some scenery pictures from Santa Catarina Island, taken yesterday as we drove around. The first was taken at a scenic overlook called Morro das Pedras (hill of the rocks), looking northeast back at another part of the island. The second was taken further south, from the beach at Pântano do Sul, looking further south toward the end of the island. There are sandy beaches nearly all around the island, mountains and lakes in the middle, and smaller islands offshore. This is winter, of course, so nothing is particularly busy, but in the summer high season it's clearly a beach-resort area.
We have been looking somewhat anxiously at the track of Hurricane Dean in the Caribbean, but it looks like it is moving slowly and nearly due west and so will not be threatening the Texas coast when our plane lands in DFW tomorrow at about 6:00 am. The direct threat seems to be to the Yucatan sometime on Tuesday.

SIGET IV, Tubarão, Santa Catarina Island

2007-08-18T22:41:00.000-03:00

Carl and I are in Florianópolis for the night and leave for the U.S. tomorrow. Our hotel has high-speed internet, so we just checked our return reservations and learned that we've both been upgraded to business class for the return flight. The Brazilian gesture for this is a thumbs up. We drove up from Tubarão with Chris Anson today, had a great lunch with him at a place on Santa Catarina Island recommended by Tom Huckin. Here's a picture of the fabulous South Atlantic oysters at Casa do Chico in Lagoa da Conceição. We left Chris at the airport, rented the same car he had had, and spent the afternoon driving around the island.

The conference, SIGET, was an interesting experience. It's the fourth genre conference here in Brazil, held at two-year intervals. SIGET stands for Simpósio Internacional de Estudios de Gêneros Textuais, and it was sponsored by the graduate program in linguistics at UNISUL, or Universidade do Sul de Santa Catarina (University of the South of Santa Catarina, a private university). Most of the participants were from Brazil, and there were about an equal number of invited speakers from Brazil and from elsewhere. There were a number of recurring themes in the presentations: genre systems, digital genres, genre change and evolution, and the relationship between text and context. I had a chance to talk extensively with Amy Devitt, Paul Prior, and Tom Huckin, and to meet Brian Street and Mary Lea (both from England). It was also good to see John Swales and Vijay Bhatia after a long time.

Tubarão is a town you wouldn't go out of your way to visit; there are no particular historical or geographical features except for the river that runs through it. The way from our hotel to the university required us to cross the river on a pedestrian bridge that would both roll and pitch, depending on the rhythm and intensity of the traffic on it at any given time. Here's a picture of Carol Berkenkotter and Amy Devitt arriving at the university on the bridge. We had one lovely day there but then it turned cloudy and cool, about 17–18 C.

On the river bank Tom Huckin noticed some capibaras, usually described as the world's largest rodent. I saw a group of about six one evening. Here's a picture—a bit blurry, but it gives you the idea; the large animal in the foreground was about 18 inches high. We also discovered that one of the trees along the river was an evening roost for about a dozen of of some kind of ibis; they would gather in the top of a particular tree (identifiable at other times only by the guano underneath) and squawk noisily. I took a picture, but the light was so dim that it didn't come out well.

The last day of the conference, yesterday, was Angela's birthday, and some of us gathered to celebrate after the last session of the day, which was the session I was in. I should note that the conference schedule had us working from 9:00 am to 10:00 pm for three days straight, so this birthday celebration started at about 10:30 and lasted until after 1:00 am. Here's a picture of Judith, Chuck, me, and Angela—these were the people central to my experience in Recife and UFPE.

On to Tubarão

2007-08-13T23:12:00.000-03:00

We leave Recife tomorrow morning on a 6:35 flight, through Rio, to Florianópolis, and then go by bus to Tubarão for the SIGET conference, the 4th International Conference on Genre Studies, which is hosted by the Universidade do Sul de Santa Catarina. I don't really expect to have internet access there, so this may be the last entry until I get home on August 20.

I had hoped to do entries on flowers (there are some in bloom here, but not a lot), birds (haven't seen many), and the city of old Recife, where Carl and I spent some time today. I may get to this later. And I hope there will be different things to say about the south of Brazil, which is at latitude 28º 28' 00" south, or about the same as Tampa in the northern hemisphere. It's several thousand miles from here.

One more picture. Here's the poster for the day-long conference on Digital Literacy at UFPE last Thursday. I think there were about 90 registered participants, including many of the students in my class. We had the luxury of simultaneous translation, in both directions, provided by Fatiha Parayba, also a student in my class and an experienced translator. During my presentation, I had to be asked to slow down so she could keep up.

More about Portuguese language

2007-08-13T08:16:00.000-03:00

I'll confess that I haven't listened to my Portuguese conversation lessons for the past week—I never got beyond lesson 12 of the 16. I've been too busy, and the shorter my time here gets, the less motivation there is to get back to the next lesson. But I have learned some things about the language recently.

Portuguese apparently has the greatest number of phonemes of any of the Romance languages (for those of you who never took linguistics 101, a phoneme is a meaningful unit of sound, a difference in sound that makes a difference in meaning). This helps to explain my frustration with the unpredictability of pronunciation. Unlike Spanish, Italian, and even French, you cannot reliably tell how to pronounce a Portuguese word from the way it is spelled. All those diacritical marks on the vowels mark differences that are very difficult for the American-English ear to detect, whereas in Spanish, particularly, each vowel has a single value. The classic example is the difference between grandfather (avô) and grandmother (avó). Judith Hoffnagel, who has lived here over 30 years, says she still can't tell the difference in running speech.

This claim about the phonemic variety of Portuguese was told to me by Eddie Edmundson, a British native who has lived in Latin America for much of his life, working with British cultural organizations and now retired. His wife, Verônica, was in my class at UFPE. The two of them took Chuck, Carl, and me on a tour of Olinda and Recife last Friday. Here's a picture of the five of us on on the patio of the Catedral da Sé in Olinda, with Recife in the distant background.One other feature makes Portuguese unique among the Romance languages, and that is the fact that it doesn't use the pagan names for the days of the week. In Spanish, for example, lunes, martes, miércoles, jueves, viernes refer to the moon, Mars, Mercury, Jove, and Venus, as do the English names (though ours refer to the Germanic names for the gods). Instead, Portuguese calls Monday the "second-feast," segunda-feira, the second day after Sunday, domingo, the lord's day, and so on, except for Saturday, which remains sábado, the sabbath. These names come from the medieval church calendar, apparently from the time of Pope Sylvester I (314–335), who determined that Sunday, the day of the resurrection, was the first day of the week, and Saturday, the Jewish sabbath, was to be a day on which Christians execrate the Jews. Why Portuguese retained these church names for the days and the other Romance languages did not, I haven't been able to discover.

There's an interesting website about the history and dialects of Portuguese from a larger site called Orbis Latinus, about Romance languages.

Food note: seafood

2007-08-12T15:52:00.000-03:00

One of the first things I had on arriving in Recife was argulha, needlefish. This is a small fish with a swordfish-like appendage on its nose (which you can see in the photo). The fish is gutted, flash-fried, and served whole as an appetizer with lime juice and salt. You eat these like corn on the cob, but some people eat almost all of the skeleton and others are more dainty about crunching all the little bones.

I've learned the word for scallops, vieira, because I'm allergic to them, but they don't seem to be served here very often, even in the frequent mixed seafood stews. Perhaps they are a colder-water creature.

One fish you do see quite often, both in salads and in hot dishes, is bacalhau, salt cod. Cod is a cold-water fish, from the North Atlantic. The Portuguese fishing fleet caught cod in the North Atlantic, salting it down for the trip home, and the Portuguese colonizers brought their taste for it to Brazil. There's a certain lack of economic logic to the popularity of bacalhau in Brazil; as Peter Robb points out (in A Death in Brazil, see earlier post), the farther it gets from its source, the more expensive it becomes, and why, if you're living in the tropical South Atlantic, do you need preserved fish? Moreover, cod is no longer a cheap, plentiful fish, even in the North Atlantic. Robb's explanation is that eating bacalhau is an indicator of class affiliation (or aspiration): poor people eat fresh fish, rich folks eat imported bacalhau, which also marks you as Portuguese rather than índio or black.

Last day of class

2007-08-11T18:43:00.000-03:00

The last day of class was Tuesday, and toward the end there was a frenzy of picture-taking with multiple cameras. The students gave me some wonderful souvenirs to help me remember them and my time here in Recife.
In the picture are (back row) André, Ewerton, Douglas, Ana Regina, Suzana, Joanes, Maria Aldenora (hidden), Cecília; (middle row) Adriana, Karina, Cícero, Noadia, Márcia, me, Verônica, Maria das Graças, Simone, Fatiha; (in front) Victorino. (I hope I got all the diacritical marks right.)

The final papers were due yesterday, and I am almost finished reading them.

Books on Brazil

2007-08-11T17:40:00.000-03:00

Before I left home, I purchased some books about Brazil to take with me. I haven't been able to do as much reading as I'd thought I might, but what I've read so far has enriched my understanding of where I am and what I'm seeing.

Little Star of Bela Lua, by Luana Monteiro (HarperCollins, 2006). The author was born in Recife and raised in Boa Viagem, the neighborhood where my hotel is. She now lives in Madison, Wisconsin, and writes in English. This book, her first, is a collection of connected short stories about the Pernambuco region. It combines realistic descriptions of the area with portrayals of the interior landscape of the people of this region, their history, spiritual lives, and the collision of rural and urban cultures.

A Death in Brazil, by Peter Robb (Picador, 2005). I'm still reading this one, but it turns out to be more locally relevant than I had realized. In the foreground is the story of Brazilian politics in the 20th century, including the rise of current president Luis Inácio Lula da Silva. He was born and raised in a small town in the interior of Pernambuco, and his political rival, previous president Fernando Collor, came from Alagoas, the state just south of Pernambuco. But Robb also discusses the history, culture, and cuisine of Brazil, as well as his own experiences here. He calls Brazil "the oddest and most thrilling country in the Western Hemisphere" (p. 43).

Brazil, by John Updike (Random House, 1994). I haven't read any Updike in a while, and I found this adaptation of the Tristan story both intriguing and infuriating. Perhaps it was Updike's foray into a kind of magical realism that annoyed me (because it seemed too convenient for the plot), but the identity themes of rich and poor, black and white, male and female are certainly important to understanding this country. Here's a review from the New York Times, the year that it was published.

I also purchased, but have not had time to do more than glance at, The Brazilians, by Joseph A. Page (Da Capo Press, 1995), and The Brazil Reader: History, Culture, Politics, edited by Robert M. Levine and John J. Crocitti (Duke University Press, 1999). Well, I've got a fair amount of time in airplanes and airports coming up, so I should be well prepared.

Lecturing and touring in João Pessoa

2007-08-10T15:13:00.000-03:00

On Wednesday, Chuck Bazerman and I both gave lectures to the graduate program in foreign languages in the Department of Linguistics Universidade Federal de Paraíba in João Pessoa, the capital city of Paraíba state. The city was named after the populist politician João Pessoa after his assassination in 1930. Like Recife, João Pessoa is right on the coast, with several miles of beachfront, but unlike Recife, the city has limited construction so that there are few high-rise buildings right on the beach. The city also has several large nature preserves and prides itself on being one of the "greenest" cities in the world. The best information I've found about the city is at Wikipedia.

For our talks there was an audience of about 50 people, both students and faculty; the level of English was quite high, and there were good questions and discussions afterwards, with a surprising amount of interest in the rather formal presentation I gave of parts of the paper about genre change and stability in blogging. Chuck talked about the history of writing and its connections with social systems, with lots of eye-catching images in his slides. His talk was related to his edited Handbook of Research on Writing, which has just been published by Routledge.

Our academic host was Dra. Bêtania Passos Medrado from the graduate specialization in English Linguistics and Literature in the Department of Modern Foreign Languages (I'm afraid this link will go just to a main page, from which finding the specific program description is difficult). After the presentations, she and several other faculty took us (Carl was with us) on a sight-seeing tour, which included a view from what is claimed to be the eastern-most point of the Americas, Cabo Branco (White Cape). The photo shows a somewhat unkempt sign making this claim, and if you enlarge it you can see that the longitide is 37° 47' 40" West, and the latitude is 7° 09' 28" South. However, according to World 66 (an open-content travel site, so take it for what it's worth), erosion and movement of sand on the coast has moved the actual easternmost point somewhat to the south of this location.
We also went to the Centro Cultural de São Francisco in a church that has been converted to secular use. The church was originally built by the Franciscans in the late 16th century, and the current baroque structure was begun in the 17th century and completed in the 18th. It is considered to be one of the most important baroque structures in Brazil. The main altar and a side chapel are well preserved, with much of the ornament imported from Portugal (decorative tiles, carved altarpieces, and statuary) and some created in Brazil from indigenous materials, such as the choir stalls and carved exterior doors. Part of the structure is now a museum of contemporary and folk art, which was also interesting. Here's a picture of the oldest part of the structure, the courtyard of the contiguous St. Anthony's Convent. If you zoom in, you can see the well preserved Portuguese tiles both above the colonnade and behind it on the lower level.

Food note: fruit

2007-08-07T23:06:00.000-03:00

When you go into a restaurant of any pretensions, the first thing that comes around after the menu (or even before) is a plate of fruit. What you are being offered is a your choice of fruit for a fruit drink, with the caipirinha as the model. The classic caipirinha is made from cachaça, the sugar cane spirit that is all over Brazil, with lime, a bit of sugar, and ice. It can also be made with other fruit, and the fruit tray in this picture has a mango in the center, and clockwise from the strawberries, limes and passion fruit, the cajú, a pinha, a cut graviola (this is a fairly small one), and grapes.

The cajú is quite interesting, as well as being attractive. The red-orange part is technically not the fruit, but a false fruit or peduncle. It is spongy inside with no internal structure, seeds, or membranes, and has a bland, somewhat astringent taste. The brownish thing on the top is the real fruit, which we call the cashew nut, and the Brazilians call a castanha. The nut itself is inside a coarse hull, which is quite poisonous, as it contains urushiol, the same irritant that is in poison ivy. The cajú, a small tree, is native to this part of Brazil, and the fruits are sold in grocery stores and by roadside vendors.

The tourist

2007-08-05T16:59:00.000-03:00

Carl arrived today after an uneventful trip—his flight from São Paulo was slightly delayed, but it flew, and it landed safely. Angela and I picked him up at the Recife airport. He'll have to be pretty much of a bystander, an accompanying spouse, for my final week in Recife and during the conference in Tubarão the following week. So he brought some work to do and some books to read.

Meanwhile, back on campus …

2007-08-05T09:38:00.001-03:00

In case there's anyone out there who thinks I'm spending too much time on the beach or on tourism, I thought I'd document some of the time I spend on campus at UFPE. Here's a picture of the building I work in: a Centro, I gather, is much like a school or a college in a US university; this one comprises eight departments, including Letters, Communication, Music, and Design.
I work in the office of Prof. Luis Antonio Marcuschi, a German-trained text linguist who first brought my work to the attention of Angela Dionisio. Unfortunately, he is quite ill and is not teaching, so I have not met him.
My class now has 16 enrolled students and 5 auditors, plus the occasional visitor. Here's a picture taken just before one of our breaks, when the discussion got particularly animated. There are other students around to the left that the photo didn't catch.
This coming week, my last here in Recife, will be a very busy one. Chuck Bazerman will be here, and we have several events together. On Monday, my class will meet as part of an open forum discussion with the two of us about Plagiarism, Originality, and the Internet. I will discuss the class I have taught at NC State that I call Problems of Authorship: Plagiarism, Ghostwriting, and Collaboration. On Tuesday, I have the last regular meeting of class (and I have papers to read and return before then!). Then on Wednesday, Chuck and I will be driven to João Pessoa, north of here in Paraíba state to give presentations (and for a little tourism). We come back that same day because Chuck has a talk scheduled in the evening. Then on Thursday is an all-day seminar on digital literacy (Letramento Digital) that includes several other faculty from UFPE and from other regional universities. I will again give my paper-in-progress on stability in internet genres. I will write more about these events as they happen, if I can find time.

Here's the notice about these events from the the PPGL program website.

Itacoatiaras and Preguiças

2007-08-03T22:34:00.000-03:00

On the way to Campina Grande last Sunday, we stopped at an archaeological site in Paraíba state near the town of Ingá. At the end of a small road on the open hillsides is a small natural history museum and a rocky area near a stream with carvings on a vertical rock face about 8 feet high and 30 feet long. These inscriptions, the Itacoatiaras (an indigenous word), are complex and non-representational, and apparently have not been interpreted. (You can see them if you click on the picture to enlarge it.) The site has been part of the Brazilian Instituto do Patrimônio Histórico e Artístico Nacional since 1944. According to BrazilViagem.com, they are considered one of the most important set of pre-historic inscriptions in the world. The Paraíba Portal has some photos and information (in Portuguese), and I gather that they are thought to be by indigenous peoples but haven't been dated, and I don't know when archaeologists found out about them.

In the museum, which seems to be a converted farmhouse, are some fossilized bones, many quite large, but no complete skeletons. The exhibits are hand labeled and set on low benches with no protection from humidity or admirers. Several are labeled as from the Preguiça Gigante. Angela said preguiça means "lazy one," and that it referred a large animal that was very slow and lazy. At first, I took that as an informal description, but then I realized that it names the prehistoric giant sloth. Apparently there are quite a few fossil beds in northeast Brazil but it wasn't clear to me whether these fossils were discovered at the site of the inscriptions, or nearby, or somewhere else altogether.

Campina Grande

2007-08-01T08:35:00.000-03:00

The trip to Campina Grande on Sunday and Monday was a good one. It gave me a chance to see some of the countryside in the interior (although given the size of this country, we didn't get very far into the interior). It was a four-hour trip to the north and west over roads that were sometimes very good 4-lane divided highways and sometimes 2-lane roads full of potholes (and yes there were also 4-lane roads full of potholes). Angela knows this route very well because much of her family lives there, and she grew up on a farm near Campina Grande. (She's very good at avoiding the potholes.)

Campina Grande is in the state of Paraíba, the one just north of Pernambuco. Pernambuco is a land of sugar cane. The economic engine of colonialism and growth (and slavery) here was sugar cane, and Recife was the export center. The fields in Pernambuco are still a monoculture of sugar cane. When you cross over into Paraíba, you leave the sugar cane behind quite suddenly. There's a change of landscape, soil, and weather, and the agriculture is cattle, corn, and soybeans. Pernambuco is hilly, but Paraíba is more rugged, with stony outcroppings and low mountains.

Campina Grande is a city of 350,000 (according to the CityBrazil website), and the Universidade Federal de Campina Grande is considerably smaller than UFPE in Recife. My invitation to speak was from the graduate program in language and teaching in the Center for Humanities. Here's the web notice of my talk (I don't know how long this link will stay active). My paper was on the questions that blogging raises for genre theory, and I think it was a little too much theory—and too much English!—for some of the audience, most of whom were master's students in the language and teaching program. But there were some good questions at the end, with the translation help of a faculty member there who is fluent in both English and Portuguese, about how internet genres like the blog can be used to help students learn about the phenomena of discursive change and stablity that had been my theme.

One of the things I noted on the trip there and back was the role of the federal government here in Brazil. Road construction is done by the federal government, not the states, and the occasional traffic stop is conducted by federal police. And so is the commercial air system, which is why President Silva replaced the Minister of Defense after the recent accident in São Paulo. The public schools and the universities are run by the federal government, with national standards and procedures and bureaucratic intricacies that Angela has become all too familiar with in bringing in international guest faculty. Academic program evaluation is also done centrally, program by program, not institution by institution, with numerical ratings given for a 3-year cycle. Getting a high rating for means more travel money for faculty, more scholarships for students, and more prestige and visibility.

The best picture I got on this trip was not of the countryside or of Campina Grande but of Angela and her niece, Bianca, at lunch when we arrived. Bianca was the second person I met when I arrived in Brazil, because she had then been staying with Angela in Recife during a school holiday. She makes an excellent executive assistant for Angela, answering the cell phone in the car, remembering appointments, and back-seat driving.

Good news on climate change from the Southern Hemisphere

2007-07-31T06:36:00.000-03:00

"Brazil, Alarmed, Reconsiders Policy on Climate Change." This morning's NY Times reports that there are signs of change in the Brazilian government's resistance to managing deforestation in the Amazonian rain forest.

This week's schedule

2007-07-29T09:27:00.000-03:00

Today, in about 30 minutes in fact, Angela is driving me to Campina Grande, where I will give a talk to the faculty at the Universidade Federal de Campina Grande tomorrow morning at 8:30 am. It's a several hour drive north, in the state of Paraíba. Here's a nifty map of Brazil that allows you to select the state, region, and city. Follow the bread-crumbs to find different parts of Brazil.

So it will be a busy week, with class on Tuesday, another workshop-presentation to the ESL undergraduates on Wednesday, and class on Thursday.

I have read the dozen student papers that were submitted last week, responding to my request that they describe the probable antecedent genres of some genre with which they were familiar. There were a number of interesting discussions, of chat-room classes, of "asking-for-alms" papers passed out on busses, of fairy tales, the student seminar presentation, the "ping-pong" journalistic interview, and others. Some were difficult to read because of the language problem. Two were submitted in Portuguese, and I ran them through Apple's Sherlock translation, which produced texts that were worse than the worst student attempt at English. But the level of discussion and analysis was generally quite rewarding.

Olinda

2007-07-29T08:50:00.000-03:00

Yesterday, Abuêndia Peixoto Pinto, one of Angela's colleagues who teaches English and psycholingistics and works with the undergraduate teacher-preparation program, took me on an outing. We went to Olinda, the colonial town just north of Recife. Olinda was settled in 1537 by the Portuguese and conquered by the Dutch in 1630, who were in this area for about 30 years (it was the Dutch who built Recife, moving their operations from the hill on which Olinda sits down to the rivermouth and harbor site that became Recife). You can still see some Dutch influence in the domestic architecture of the old part of Olinda. There are numerous churches dating to the 16th and 17th centuries, an old slave market (which has been turned into a craft market for tourists), and lovely views from various vantages and praças (plazas) on the hill.

Abuêndia and I had a snack of tapioca (this time com coco, with coconut) at the praça near the Catedral da Sé (the seat of the archbishop of Pernambuco) and were serenaded by two repentistas, shown in the photograph. Repentista singing is a tradition of on-the-spot improvisation characteristic of the Pernambuco region. Abuêndia told me that they were describing us as two "intellectual ladies" with contrasting color of hair eating our tapioca snacks, etc. The singing was passed back and forth from one to another, and the melody was repetitious and chant-like. She seemed a bit annoyed at them, so they may have been saying other things, as well. Or perhaps she was annoyed because you have to pay them before they will go away.

There were many traditional crafts for sale (as well as cheap tourist goods)—costumed figurines from the carnaval, which is a huge deal here, jewelry made from local seeds and other plant materials, lace and embroidery, wood carving, and others. One of the most common is wood carvings of rows of houses painted in bright colors, representing the houses on the steep and winding cobblestone streets of the old part of Olinda. I bought one of these and the craftsman told me it was made from the bark of the cajá tree, harvested in a nondestructive way (I believed him, but have no corroboration). The material is light and cork-like and, he said, easy to carve.

Politics in the Amazon

2007-07-27T08:54:00.000-03:00

This story from the NY Times today, "In the Amazon: Conservation or Colonialism?" reports on controversies over conservation efforts in the Amazon rain forest. It's a good reminder that things can look different to people in the southern hemisphere, that Brazilian politics have their own complications, and that the loss of U.S. credibility has consequences far beyond Iraq.

A local phenomenon

2007-07-26T22:26:00.000-03:00

Yesterday, Angela decided it was the day to take me to the museum-workshop of Francisco Brennand, an artist born in Recife who has achieved a worldwide reputation. He works primarily in ceramics but is also an accomplished painter. He comes from a prominent local family that owned a ceramics factory, producing the tile that is ubiquitous in floors, walls, kitchens, bathrooms, as well as other ceramic products. The factory has moved elsewhere and for over 30 years Francisco has converted the factory into his workshop and gallery, producing an amazing environment of tile and sculpture. It's impossible to describe--"fecund" is a good start--but his website shows many of the structures and objects to great effect, and the photo below puts me into the picture. Eggs are a recurrent theme.

The meal described in the previous entry was at the cafe at the Brennand museum, and the plates on which we were served were of his design, made in his workshop. You can purchase tableware like this or floor and wall tiles for your home—for a significant price.

Food note 2

2007-07-26T08:51:00.000-03:00

One of the common ways of using the abundant fruit of Brazil is in fresh fruit drinks. Here's a picture of a drink made from pineapple and mint (abacaxi com hortelã, accent on the last syllable of both words). I think you just toss the ingredients into a blender with more or less sugar. I've had this twice, and it's very refreshing. I've also had one made from the acerola fruit, a small red fruit very high in vitamin C (this one really does need some sugar, but the abacaxi com hortelã does not).

The sandwich here is carne seco (sun dried meat), a common product of Pernambuco.

The picture below is of the appetizer we had for this lunch, called tapioca. It's a kind of quesadilla, with a crust made from tapioca flour and filled with cheese (or other ingredients, such as tomatoes and onions). Not what Americans who remember school lunches in the 1950s and 60s think of as tapioca. Note the plate in this picture. I'll write about that later. (I missed a chance to take a picture of a seafood stew last Sunday, a moqueca, characteristic of the Bahía area south of here.)

On being helpless

2007-07-25T10:05:00.000-03:00

Last night I did Lesson 8 (of 16) of Pimsleur's Portuguese I, introductory conversation. We finally got to two important sentences: "I want a beer" and "Where is the bathroom?" The other useful statement I've learned from this course and have actually used successfully is "I don't speak Portuguese."

I am frustratingly dependent on Angela for many practical issues. For example, the hotel sends someone in every day to clean (washes the dishes, makes the bed, sweeps the floor), but the sheets on the bed and the towels in the bathroom weren't changed after a week. So I put the dirty towels on the floor and the clean sheets, which someone had thoughtfully delivered, on the bed. The housekeeper changed the bed and put the dirty sheets on the floor with the towels. Who is supposed to wash the linens? This is something I can't negotiate in Portuguese, so Angela is trying to straighten things out between the hotel, the rental agent (a totally separate person), and the university (who is supposed to be paying the rental agent).

Other little things I have had to negotiate by myself: how to open the milk carton (no instructions, no "affordances"), how to flush the toilet (again, not totally obvious!), how to get and pay for food in the cafeteria in the hotel (that's one where I could watch others and learn from them).

Music notes

2007-07-23T18:41:00.000-03:00

I haven't heard any live music here, but I hear quite a bit of recorded music—every time one of the CD-monger carts goes down the street there's a snatch of something at high volume. I've purchased several CDs in bookstores that Angela has taken me to (she's had university-related errands to run and has taken me along). Two bookstores are in the huge shopping center called Shopping Recife and we went to another yesterday in a small shopping center that's been built in the old customs-house of the port in the old part of the city.

All the bookstores have a feature in the music areas that I've not seen in stores in the US. It's a set of headphones attached to a scanner that will read the barcode on the CD package and play 30-sec samples from each track on the CD for, apparently, any CD in the inventory that you pick up. They sell imported music from the US and Europe, but an important category is what they call MPB (Music Popular do Brasil). Here you find samba, choro, forró, bossa nova, and many other traditional and contemporary styles that I can't remember.

I've purchased a collection of choro, which is a "lament" with more Portuguese than African roots, played by guitars and other stringed instruments; a collection of samba standards performed by Beth Caravalho, apparently the best samba singer ever; a disk of music from the Pernambuco region by Antonio Nóbrega, a Recife native; a collection of the best of Caetano Veloso (the only Brazilian musician I'd really heard of before I came, except for Jobim); and some jazz by Alberto Rosenblit. I also have a collection of the best of Elis Regina, which Angela left for me when I moved into the apartment here.

Walking the beach

2007-07-21T20:58:00.000-03:00

I've taken several walks along the beach in the week that I've been here. The entire coastline in the Recife area is extensively built up, with apartments and hotels lining the beachfront. Most buildings are 12–20 stories high, many quite attractive, but the newer ones, including many under construction, run 30 stories and more. In the Boa Viagem area where I am, the buildings are all across the street from the beach, leaving the water side as an extensive, linear public park with a wide walkway between the street and the sand. In some places the beach is quite wide, with palms and other trees, as well as shrubs and groundcover before the sand begins, as well as playgrounds, tennis courts, seating areas, public showers and bathrooms. There are also sets of chin-up bars, push-up bars, and varying inclined concrete pads for sit-ups. People (well, young men) use these. South of my hotel, the beach becomes narrow and sometimes steep and in some places has been hardened with boulders to prevent further erosion.

In the late afternoons when I've been out, there are people of all ages, shapes, colors, degrees of fitness, and degrees of prosperity on the walkway (in Spanish this would be called a paseo, but I don't know the Portuguese equivalent). Most people seem to be Brazilians--at least I feel like the most conspicuous gringa, though there are a few other people who are pale of skin and hair. Many are dressed in athletic clothing and are bent on exercise, others stroll and talk, some ogle the others, and some are aiming to sell food, drink, or CDs. Children skate and skateboard, old men play dominoes, and where the beach is wide enough there are games of soccer and volleyball. Every several hundred yards there's a concrete bungalow with a circular thatched roof that serves as a food concession, selling fresh coconut milk in the coconut, soft drinks and liquor, and packaged snacks. Other entrepreneurs with pushcarts sell fresh peeled oranges, roasted corn, and things I don't recognize.

The walkway is lined with trees—the only one I recognize is the coconut palm. There is some kind of tree with broad leathery leaves that remind me a bit of southern magnolia leaves, though the tree shape is very different. There are some lovely trees that look at first like pines, with long, feathery needles, but on closer look, the needles are segmented like those of a cypress and the bark has a shredded texture, also like cypress.

I do not have any pictures of the beachfront because I'm afraid to bring my camera with me. I've been advised not to take anything I don't want to lose. I haven't seen any skullduggery, nor have I felt at all threatened, but given what my students were talking about the other day, as well as the advice from Angela and Judith, I won't get any pictures until I have company for one of my walks.

Food note

2007-07-20T21:56:00.000-03:00

Here's a delicious snack or dessert—fresh papaya with lime juice. The drink beside it is characteristically Brazilian, a soft drink called guaraná, made from an Amazonian fruit. It's a little on the sweet side, but very refreshing. Actually, now that I find the Guaraná home page (there had to be one, didn't there?), I see that the berry has more caffeine than coffee beans do. I've been drinking more caffeinated coffee here than usual (decaff is impossible to find), and though I've had only one or two of these guaraná drinks, I see I'll have to be careful about it because I routinely have difficulty sleeping and don't need to make things worse.

Another way to learn Portuguese

2007-07-20T10:38:00.000-03:00

The first few days I was connected to the internet here, everything looked the way it always does. But then, after several days of being connected through the hotel's ISP, providers like Google and Blogger seem to have decided that I speak Portuguese, so I am now seeing the Portuguese interfaces.

Also, the Windows computer in the office I'm using at the university (borrowed from someone who's not around) speaks Portuguese. As a Mac user, I find Windows confusing even in English. Word's spell-checker objects to almost every English word, and the auto-correct feature insisted on turning "an" into "na," which means "in the" before a feminine noun.

And then there's the keyboard. None of the punctuation marks are where they're supposed to be because of the keys for Portuguese diacritical marks, and the shift keys and delete keys are just out of reach, so keyboarding is pretty frustrating.

What I'm learning from my students

2007-07-20T10:11:00.000-03:00

Tuesday's plane crash in São Paulo is on everyone's mind here. The newspapers on Wednesday all had enormous front-page photos of the conflagration, and there's much talk about blame and the lack of political will to improve the air traffic system. I have not watched any television here (this is a habit I brought from home), but I imagine it's a major preoccupation on tv, as well. Here are some follow-up stories from the New York Times and BBC.

Yesterday in class, students were giving group reports in which they used Bitzer's vocabulary to identify recurrent situations in Brazil and genres associated with them. Two of the four groups chose aircraft accidents. Other situations they discussed included assault and armed robbery, social violence, and various inadequacies of the public health system in Brazil. Once the trend of the discussion became clear, one student noted that it would be surprising if I ever came back to Brazil. Just to round out the selection of topics, others included the opening of the Pan American Games in Rio last Saturday and the job application and graduate school application processes. But it was impossible to miss the trend--there was some cynicism about the prospects for improvement but mostly a dissatisfaction that comes from high expectations and pride in their country.

Interesting (to me) facts about Portuguese

2007-07-18T17:30:00.000-03:00

The name of the city I'm in, Recife, means "reef" in Portuguese, and there are dark stony reefs in the ocean that show at low tide from my hotel window—you can see the reef in the photo. They stretch along parts of this area of the coast. It is apparently safe to go swimming inside the reef, but not outside, and not in areas where there are no reefs, because of the danger of shark attacks. Along the beach, there are signs at regular intervals warning about this, with the words "perigo," danger, and "tubarão," which I infer to mean shark. This is interesting because the other city in Brazil I'll be visiting later, where the genre conference is being held in August, is the city of Tubarão.

Finally, I learned that the Japanese word for thank you, "arigato," which I learned when I was in Japan in June, is derived from the Portuguese for thank you, "obrigado/a" (as in obliged, with the common l–r substitution that Portuguese makes from other Romance languages). Apparently this word was adopted from the Portuguese explorers of the 16th century because the Japanese had no word for thank you.

Time to listen to my next lesson in conversational Portuguese.

Plane crash in São Paulo

2007-07-18T08:45:00.000-03:00

Here's an alarming report from the New York Times about a plane crash in São Paulo last night. The domestic airline industry and air traffic control have been in some turmoil recently. This is not the airport where I landed on Sunday (there are several in São Paulo) but it is the airline I flew from SP to Recife and on which I will return.

Getting this started

2007-07-17T21:32:00.000-03:00

My adventure in international teaching started today, with the first meeting of my class at the Universidade Federal de Pernambuco in Recife, Brazil. The course, "Where Do Genres Come From?" is a special winter offering by the Programa de Pós-Graduação em Letras (PPGL) in the Centro de Artes e Comunicação, that is, the graduate program in letters, which includes both literature and linguistics and has a strong emphasis on teacher preparation and pedagogical research. I have students in both master's and doctoral programs. We meet from 2:00-5:00 pm on Tuesdays and Thursdays for four weeks.

The academic schedule here in the southern hemisphere has a short session in mid-July between the two main semesters, May-June and August-November. My course is a special offering with the major concession that I teach in English, since I know almost no Portuguese. I have about 20 students and several auditors, many of whom teach English as a second language and all of whom have studied English.

I arrived in Recife two days ago, Sunday afternoon, after about a 24-hour journey: Raleigh to Miami to São Paulo to Recife. The big news for me on Saturday when I started was that I finally got the upgrade to business class on the international flight that had been requested months ago, and it included an upgrade to first class on the Raleigh-to-Miami flight. In business class, they fed us very well and it was actually possible to sleep on the overnight flight. In tourist class, there was beverage service and snacks for sale.

Recife is about 8º south of the equator, right on the coast, and winter here is about 25–30ºC, breezy, sunny, and somewhat humid. It's two time zones east of Eastern, but with no daylight savings, it's only one hour earlier. The sun sets at 5:15 or so and it's pitch-dark by 6:00. There is no lingering twilight (or dawn, probably, but I haven't watched it) because of the latitude, and I am reminded of the line from Kipling's "Mandalay" (ok, I googled this to be sure) that "the dawn comes up like thunder." In this case it would be that the dark comes down like thunder.

I have a small sixth-floor apartment in a high-rise residential hotel a block from the beach, with an ocean view between two other high-rises that are right on the beach. There are two AC units, but I prefer to leave the windows open to the breeze and the street noises, which include music, traffic, voices, and--Sunday night during and after the Argentina–Brazil soccer game—a lot of whooping and hollering and firecrackers. And always behind everything else, the sound of the surf.

I am driven around by my academic host, Professor Angela Dionisio, and another colleague, Professor Judith Hoffnagel. They have helped me purchase groceries, taken me to restaurants, and provided translation at crucial moments. I arrived back at the apartment this evening after 5:30 to discover that the power was out, apparently just in my room, and it took some doing for the hotel people and me to get this resolved with very little language in common. My rusty Spanish helped a little, and I am trying to get my ears used to the different phonetic system in Portuguese and the ways that cognates work.

I was slower getting this started than I had intended, and already many details that seemed fascinating when they happened are old news to me now, but it's time to quit for now. I had originally intended to publish this blog on the NC State University blog server, but have not been able to login there (possibly because of the foreign ISP?) and my messages to the Help desk have not been acknowledged (again, possibly they look like spam).