skip to main |
skip to sidebar
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. 
