My little champion is in a new, more active phase–wanting to sit up, noticing everything in her world, and not letting me get much reading done. But I still hold out hope that I will be able to pick up a book or two (or three) and actually finish them, even it it takes me many months of five-minute reading intervals. I have so much hope, in fact, that i just bought three books that I am very excited about. All three are by women I have been lucky enough to know and have the utmost respect for. By reading their books, I’ll get to know them a bit more, which makes me really happy. The books are: WILD by Cheryl Strayed, THE REEDUCATION OF CHERRY TRUONG by Amy Phan, and ARCADIA by Lauren Groff. A real bounty.

Last week was our first time traveling with baby. James and I flew to São Paulo for 6 days to attend the 11th annual Brazilian Barista Championship. Three of the Baristas used our coffee brand, Yaguara, for the competition.

The event took place at Universidade Cruzeiro Sul with 15 baristas representing different regions of Brazil. There were 14 judges (12 from Brazil, 1 from USA, and 1 from Mexico). The competition lasted 3 days. The winner of the Campeonato represents Brazil at the World Championship in Vienna in June.

The baristas had 15 minutes to prepare three kinds of drinks: 4 espressos, 4 cappuccinos, and 4 servings of an original “signature drink.” There were technical judges, who scored contestants on how they worked their machines, tamped their coffee, frothed their milk, etc. And there were sensory judges who scored on overall drink quality and taste. The kind of coffee the competitors used also affected their scoring.

We thought it would be a great marketing opportunity for our Yaguara brand, and it was. We met lots of people in the Brazilian Speciality Coffee world. What we hope to do is to give our agricultural product (coffee) more value by turning it into a brand rather than just a raw commodity. We are doing this slowly but surely through our packaging, our roasting, our commitment to quality, and by atteding and sponsoring events like the Barista championship.

After the competition, we took some time to visit other roasters and coffee shops in São Paulo. We met with Isabela Raposeiras who is the owner of a small specialty coffee roasting business. She is a former Brazilian Barista Champion and is fairly well known throughout the world for her work buying, roasting, and serving (she recently opened a coffee shop) the best coffees in Brazil. She is a tastemaker in the the world of specialty roasted coffee in Brasil.

We visited Isabela’s “roasting lab” in SP. It is in a two-story house with an area for roasting and an area for serving drinks. Like other specialty cafes in SP, she serves coffee for around R$11 (aeropress, latte, filter, etc). However, she is one of the few in Brazil serving coffee in non-espresso form. We sampled 2 of her coffees. One, from Fazenda Ambiental Fortaleza, was exceptional; very fruity and clean which is rare for a natural. The other coffee was okay, nothing like the FAF.

We gave Isabela some Yaguara coffee and we sampled it as an espresso and aeropress. Our Torra Media espresso (prepared on a La Marzocco) was delicious. She said the quality was far above anything she tasted all week. Isabela said there was a slight bitterness in the aftertaste, but nothing that would affect the quality of the espresso.

After Coffee Lab, we visited Suplicy and Santo Grão, two famous specialty coffee shops and roasters. Suplicy is a traditional coffee shop in that it served only coffee and pastries. Its decor was very modern and clean. It had a nice ambiance, very good location, and a beautiful pink Probat roaster in the store.

Santo Grão is both a restaurant and a coffee house. They have a brass Lillo roaster in the back, and they serve espresso drinks, and excellent food.

Traveling with the baby was certainly different! We had about three times more luggage, and we had to adjust our schedule to suit her. No late dinners or very long days. But it was nice in that, having the baby made us slow down and enjoy the city, rather than just working nonstop.

We also went to São Paulo’s Liberdade neighborhood and had some fantastic food. São Paulo has a very large Japanese population. Liberdade is the city’s Japanese neighborhood, with lots of markets, shops,and family restaurants. On the farm raw fish is not an option. We eat mostly veggies, meat, and potatoes. So it was incredible to eat sushi!

Here is a great interview with Michael Ray, Editor of Zoetrope: All-Story. Here is an excerpt about leaving mystery in stories.

“Something I talk to writers about during the editorial process is reserving room in the story for the reader to participate in its understanding. As a writer, if you immerse yourself too much in the story, you risk standing between your story and your reader. The best stories stand outside their authorship, becoming interesting and powerful to people who don’t know the author, or really care about the author—or the fact that the author wrote this.

With the present educational system for writers—workshops, M.F.A.s—stories can get too worked over. In that environment, writers can become disproportionately focused on one particular impact they intend for a story to have upon a reader; they work the story to have that impact. They workshop it; other people give them advice; and they work it over and over and over.

These stories can be really polished but ultimately unsatisfying, as they lack any true sense of discovery. As a reader, you can watch the story’s various mechanisms working toward one end; and I think you then instinctively resist that end, or that feeling the writer is working so hard to create. And you know you can read the story again and its only potential is to affect you in exactly the same way. It’s been so sharpened to a single point, and that’s not the way life happens.

Think about great music. You can listen to something over and over and discover something new every time. Part of creating that [as a writer] is not working so hard to have one impact . . . not leading somebody to one specific understanding. It’s like putting blinders on somebody in trying to get them to see this one purpose, and in the process you’ve blinded, or blunted, that person’s capability to see all the other impacts the story might have.

This is something I talk a lot about with writers; especially if you’re publishing in a magazine like ours, you can rely on a sophisticated readership—people who really want to engage in stories; and if you can write the whole story to the point there is only one way of understanding it, [you may need] to strip back that exposition to a point where the does become a little bit of a risk [of understanding]. The more that process of understanding can happen off the page, in the reader’s head, the more the reader internalizes the story, imbuing it with emotions beyond anything you could fully describe.”

I recently read “Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches From the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture.” It’s a book about how and why little girls are systematically bombarded with Disney princesses, the color pink, sexualized dolls like Bratz and Monster High, baby beauty pageants, and the like.

Emília is only three months old and yet I felt compelled to read this book. Why now? It might be because we are already faced with questions about her femininity, and she is barely out of her newborn-looking-like-a-bald-alien phase.

Here, it’s common to pierce a baby girl’s ears at birth. So common that hospital nurses often offer their services (for a small fee) to do the piercing. I have pierced ears. I have nothing against earrings. But my husband and I didn’t want to pierce Emília’s ears. It’s not that I didn’t want my daughter to suffer the pain of piercing–as a newborn she’d never remember it. I simply wanted her to be a baby. No jewelry. No make-up. No accessories. Just a chubby, temperamental, lovely baby. This has proven difficult to explain to the many well-meaning people who comment on why our baby’s ears are not pierced. “Why not?” they ask in a shocked or reproachful tone, as if James and I had announced to them that we’d decided never to bathe our daughter.

So, I was thinking about femininity when I read a reference to Peggy Orenstein’s book in the New York Times. The book is a quick read. It’s interesting, at times funny, and at times a little preachy and over-the-top. There are many moments when Orenstein’s conversations with her own daughter rubbed me the wrong way, in that I felt she overvalued the masculine: Tonka trucks and dragon bike helmets are good while fairies and princesses are bad. But overall Orenstein makes some really valuable points about how, over the past 20 years, Disney princess culture has been aggressively and strategically marketed to little girls, how oftentimes shopping is the only path to intimacy between mothers and daughters, how “wholesome” dolls like the American Girl collection are often too expensive for most little girls to own, and how associating the color pink with little girls is a relatively new phenomenon.

“In the era before Maytag,” Orenstein writes, “all babies wore white as a practical matter since the only way of getting clothes clean was to boil them…when nursery colors were introduced, pink was actually considered a mire masculine hue, as pastel version of red, which was associated with strength. Blue, with its intimations of the Virgin Mary…symbolized femininity.”

There is a photo of my grandfather from around 1903. In it, he must be about three years old. He wears a dress and has long hair. Back then, androgyny was the norm for children of a certain age. Now, even hospital bracelets in the maternity ward are pink or blue.

I have not banned pink from Emília’s nursery or her wardrobe. Why would I? Our house on the farm is painted dark salmon pink. We have some lovely and fragrant pink tea roses outside of our door. I own pink shirts and a hot-pink purse. I like to shop, wear nice clothing and make-up, have mani-pedi’s, get my hair cut and styled, wear jewelry. But I do not believe that these things make me feminine–they do not define me as a person or as a woman. But how to communicate this to my daughter? There are so many mixed messages for girls (and women) today: Cherish your body, but don’t obsess. Looks don’t matter, but you have to work-out. Clothing is superficial, but take pride in your appearance.

In her book, Orenstein cites studies saying that children are vulnerable to long-term, consistent influences of marketing and advertising. If little girls are constantly bombarded with make-up kits, princess garb, dolls called “Bratz,” purses that have the words “spoiled” and “fashionista” scrawled across them, will this mean that they will grow up with a warped sense of femininity? Will they believe that that being a girl means being a spoiled fashionista? According to Orenstein, the answer is yes. In our modern culture, Orenstein writes, little girls “learn how to act desirable but not how to desire, undermining rather than promoting healthy sexuality.”

If we buy Emília a Barbie, are we promoting unhealthy sexuality? If we tell her she is beautiful, is this wrong? What girl, or woman for that matter, doesn’t want to be called beautiful? If Emíla wants to be a fairy princess for Halloween, should we force her to be a pirate? What if she genuinely likes princesses? What worries me about Orenstein’s anti-princess sentiment is the following: if, as parents, we constantly assume our daughter is falling prey to some Disney marketing scheme, and that her desires are not her own, then I’m not trusting her ability to know herself or to express her own likes and dislikes.

Here in Brazil there is an African religion called Candomblé that is quite popular, especially where we live in the northeast. According to one Candomblé origin story, when the great god Oxalá made the world, he initially created 17 lesser gods or orixas. One was a goddess named Oxum. The other sixteen gods ignored her, not knowing that when Oxalá “chose all good things/ He also chose their keeper/And this was a woman.” So, as long as Oxum was ignored, nothing the other sixteen divinities did on earth was successful. There was no rain, no birth, no health, no love. Eventually they went to Oxum and asked for her help, and her forgiveness. Like a princess, Oxum wears a gold crown and a beautiful yellow gown. But she is also worshipped for being a loving mother, an old crone, a seductress, a coquette, a guardian, an angel of mercy, a laughing nymph, a feared and respected goddess. Oxum carries both a mirror and a knife. On a superficial level, the mirror is a symbol of her vanity, the knife of her capacity for vengeance. But looking deeper at the goddess, the mirror is a symbol of self-knowledge and honesty. The mirror is also a way to look behind her, to see her enemies. Or her past. Apart from self defense, the knife serves many functions–cooking, skinning, hunting, cutting hair and cloth. If only the Disney princesses could be as versatile as Oxum. This is what I hope to communicate to Emília–femininity takes many forms. Femininity can be powerful.

By the end of her book, Orenstein gives good advice. Stress what your daughters body can do rather than how it is decorated. Praise her accomplishments, not just her looks. Make sure she is media literate–that she understands what is an advertisement and what is not. Make sure she knows which women are real and which are fictional.

The Sucupira trees are all in bloom, dotting our farm with purple. Sucupira is a species of hardwood that is listed as a vulnerable species in Brazil. On the farm we have many Sucupiras (one of the benefits of shade-grown coffee)! Each tree in bloom has about 20 hummingbirds around it, and underneath it a carpet of purple petals.

As sucupiras da fazenda estão todas florando. Sucupira é uma espécie de árvore brasileira. Conhecido para sua madeira muito dura, que ainda é usada em construção civil, Sucupira consta da lista de plantas ameaçadas no Brasil. Na medicina popular, seu óleo aromático volátil, produzido pela casca e pelas sementes, é utilizado contra o reumatismo. Já os nódulos da raiz, chamados de batatas-de-sucupira, são usados contra o diabetes. Como nossa prática na fazenda é de proteger árvores, temos muitas Sucupiras. Cada árvore tem uns 20 beija-flores ao redor dela, curtindo as flores. Veja as fotos!

So, I’m a mother now. James and I welcomed a fat, healthy, and lovely baby girl who we named Emília, after my grandmother.

I just finished reading three nonfiction books. I read them all at the same time, alternating between them depending on my mood. The first was “Furious Love: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, and the Marriage of the Century”. I read an article in Vanity Fair about Elizabeth Taylor and became mildly obsessed with her. (Other famous women I’m mildly obsessed with- Laura Bush and Ruth Madoff. If anyone writes anything about these two, I’m reading it.) The Burton-Taylor book wasn’t an incredible piece of writing, but the story of their relationship was intense and completely engrossing.

The next book was “The Wizard of Lies: Bernie Madoff and the Death of Trust.” about the Madoff Ponzi scheme saga. I never fully understood the Madoff scandal, and this book details the scheme from beginning to end. There were some dense sections explaining OTC trades and derivatives, which made my brain hurt. (Whenever this happened, I’d switch back to reading about Elizabeth and Richard, and their days aboard their yacht and their quests to buy the world’s biggest diamonds.) Overall, the Wizard book was interesting and well-written. But I wish it had focused more on Madoff and his family (Ruth! Where are you!), and dug deeper into why and how Madoff lied for so many years.

The third book in my nonfiction binge was “Truth and Beauty” about the close friendship between Ann Patchett and Lucy Grealy. This was a haunting and, at times, frustrating portrait of a friendship.

I liked reading these books together; they were a nice compliment to one another. As different as they seemed at first, all three books explored the ideas of obsession and human frailty. We often lie to ourselves, and to others, in order to love and to feel loved. In Taylor and Burton’s case, the obsession and lies centered on each other (and alcohol). In Madoff’s case, the obsession was with perpetuating a lie, and with being seen as a trusted man. And in Patchett’s case, the obsession was her friend Lucy, and the lie she told herself was that she could protect Lucy from the world, and from Lucy herself.

Sadly, every sire’s reign must come to an end. This happened with Barto (Sir. Bartolomeu) recently, when he started shooting blanks and none of our sows were getting pregnant. Barto is a gentleman and a calm, kind soul and we’ll miss him. The sows will miss him, too, I’m sure. To make it up to the ladies, we decided to replace our kind, forthright Barto with Sílvio. Sílvio Berlusconi is a 75% Duroc stud (thus the red hair) who is suave, slim, and up to the challenge of having five wives. (See him in the photo above, giving Mona some loving kisses?) Sílvio is Prada to Barto’s Pendleton. He is Rémy Martin to Barto’s Sparkling Cider.
What time is it at the pig pen?
It is Bunga Bunga time.

Coffee harvest 2011 is in full swing. It’s winter so there’s lots of rain and everything is damp (our shoes, our sheets, our books, our clothes). Coffee beans are turning red on the trees. We’ve got our crews picking coffee, and every night our machines hull the fruits from the beans. I found this cool graphic of the insides of a coffee fruit. Here are the labeled parts:

Structure of coffee berry and beans:
1: center cut
2:bean (endosperm)
3: silver skin (testa, epidermis)
4: parchment (hull, endocarp)
5: pectin layer
6: pulp (mesocarp)
7: outer skin (pericarp, exocarp)

First Lesson

by Philip Booth

Lie back daughter, let your head
be tipped back in the cup of my hand.
Gently, and I will hold you. Spread
your arms wide, lie out on the stream
and look high at the gulls. A dead-
man’s float is face down. You will dive
and swim soon enough where this tidewater
ebbs to the sea. Daughter, believe
me, when you tire on the long thrash
to your island, lie up, and survive.
As you float now, where I held you
and let go, remember when fear
cramps your heart what I told you:
lie gently and wide to the light-year
stars, lie back, and the sea will hold you.

No, we don’t normally paint our sows’ hooves hot pink.

Our sow, Mona, recently started limping and acting very crabby and agitated. Usually, Mona is our calmest sow, always ready to be brushed and petted. Upon investigation, we saw that her back hooves were overgrown and one had a crack in it. A cracked hoof is bad because bacteria can enter through the crack and, at worst, cause a systemic infection. Mona’s leg wasn’t discolored but it was slightly swollen and tender to the touch (she made this abundantly clear). We called our vet and he arrived with a Dremel rotary tool and sedatives. The rotary tool was basically an electronic nail file, which we would use to file down any overgrowth on Mona’s hooves. Mona is 300 kilos (around 660 lbs) and we were pretty sure she wouldn’t let us file her hooves without some drugs. The hardest part was getting Mona to even allow the vet to touch her (she is very sensitive to new faces, even those she’s met a few times). But, after about one hour, all of her hooves were filed and her cracked hoof was slathered with antibiotic ointment and wrapped in gauze.

We had to give Mona medicine each day for about a week. And also we had to spray all of her hooves with a hardener/hoof protector. The challenge was that this hoof medicine was in a spray can, and Mona hates the sound of spraying. (My only guess is that, to her, the spray sounds like a hissing snake.) The only way to treat Mona’s hooves was to paint the medicine onto them.

Each morning I gave Mona a good brushing to calm her. (She was still jittery from the vet’s visit, and I don’t blame her. Who likes to be corralled, sedated, and then have their nails filed against their will by a strange man?) As soon as Mona rolled onto her side, I brushed her with one hand and painted her hooves with the other. If I stopped brushing, she’d get suspicious and roll over and snort at me. After about 30 minutes each morning, she was all painted and ready for the day. The medicine just happened to be hot pink, which is a great color on Mona, don’t you think?

Get ready for a crabby post. Are you ready? Here it goes:
Why are there so many ellipses being thrown around? It seems like every other email I receive has at least 10 ellipses scattered throughout the text. I’ve also seen them cluttering more formal means of communication (letters, business texts, even messages of condolence).

Why on earth have ellipses become stand-ins for proper punctuation? Here’s what the proper use of ellipses suggest to me: extreme hesitation, the trailing off of a thought, uncertainty. The Chicago Manual of Style supports this, saying, “Ellipsis points suggest faltering or fragmented speech accompanied by confusion, insecurity, distress, or uncertainty.”

So an ellipsis can be used to indicate a pause, especially if there is uncertainty in the writer’s train of thought. But ellipses do not stand in for commas, periods, dashes, and other necessary elements of punctuation.

I’m not a grammar expert. I don’t hate all ellipses, either. I just hate the fact that they are abused. Why? Because those poor, abused ellipses are not confident or decisive. They are the opposite: hesitant and uncommitted. They communicate, at best, an extremely insecure writing style and, at worst, utter laziness.

The book Punctuate it Right says this about writers who use ellipses to imply that they have more to say: “It is doubtful that they have anything in mind, and the device seems a rather cheap one.”

Maybe this post is snarky. I’ll admit to snarkiness on this particular subject. I’m just tired of seeing the ellipsis used as a placeholder for thoughts that aren’t properly formed, or as the replacement for other, better punctuation. Over time, I don’t want us to lose the marvelously pliant comma or the succinct and utilitarian period. They deserve a place in our everyday communication.