I recently wrote a feature essay for Real Simple magazine. The essay, and some lovely farm photos by Frederic Lagrange are in the August 2010 issue.

Eu escrevi recentemente uma matéria para a revista americana Real Simple. A matéria, com belas fotos do fotógrafo Frederic Lagrange já está nas bancas dos EUA!

“Just as definitive death is the ultimate fruit of the will to forget, so the will to remember will perpetuate our lives.”

José Saramago passed away yesterday, according to a post on his foundation’s website.

Here’s the first portion of an autobiography written when Saramago received the Nobel Prize in 1998:
“I was born in a family of landless peasants, in Azinhaga, a small village in the province of Ribatejo, on the right bank of the Almonda River, around a hundred kilometres north-east of Lisbon. My parents were José de Sousa and Maria da Piedade. José de Sousa would have been my own name had not the Registrar, on his own inititiave added the nickname by which my father’s family was known in the village: Saramago. I should add that saramago is a wild herbaceous plant, whose leaves in those times served at need as nourishment for the poor. Not until the age of seven, when I had to present an identification document at primary school, was it realised that my full name was José de Sousa Saramago…”

O escritor José Saramago morreu na sexta-feira, aos 87 anos. A escritora Nélida Piñon definiu como “imortal” e “eterno” o escritor português. Saramago sempre viverá nos seus livros.

Maria, Tamires, Frederic, James, me & Yacob on the farm

In preparation for an essay I wrote for an upcoming edition of Real Simple Magazine, photographer Frédéric Lagrange and his assistant Yacob Vincent visited the farm to shoot some photos of all of us. It was a great shoot, and the dogs (especially Lorenzo) were top-notch models. Lorenzo (who literally trembles and then hides in the bushes when we tell him it’s bath time) decided to swim in our pond (???!!!) for Frédéric. He performed some water ballet, waving his paws and flicking his tail, as if this kind of thing was perfectly normal.

Many thanks to Real Simple, Fréderic, and Yacob for the photos. I hope they turn out well!

“Starlings in Winter” by Mary Oliver

Chunky and noisy,
but with stars in their black feathers,
they spring from the telephone wire
and instantly

they are acrobats
in the freezing wind.
And now, in the theater of air,
they swing over buildings,

dipping and rising;
they float like one stippled star
that opens,
becomes for a moment fragmented,

then closes again;
and you watch
and you try
but you simply can’t imagine

how they do it
with no articulated instruction, no pause,
only the silent confirmation
that they are this notable thing,

this wheel of many parts, that can rise and spin
over and over again,
full of gorgeous life.
Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us,

even in the leafless winter,
even in the ashy city.
I am thinking now
of grief, and of getting past it;

I feel my boots
trying to leave the ground,
I feel my heart
pumping hard, I want

to think again of dangerous and noble things.
I want to be light and frolicsome.
I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing,
as though I had wings.

As you set out on the way to Ithaca
hope that the road is a long one,
filled with adventures, filled with understanding.
The Laestrygonians and the Cyclopes,
Poseidon in his anger: do not fear them,
you’ll never come across them on your way
as long as your mind stays aloft, and a choice
emotion touches your spirit and your body.
The Laestrygonians and the Cyclopes,
savage Poseidon; you’ll not encounter them
unless you carry them within your soul,
unless your soul sets them up before you.

Hope that the road is a long one.
Many may the summer mornings be
when—with what pleasure, with what joy—
you first put in to harbors new to your eyes;
may you stop at Phoenician trading posts
and there acquire fine goods:
mother-of-pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
and heady perfumes of every kind:
as many heady perfumes as you can.
To many Egyptian cities may you go
so you may learn, and go on learning, from their sages.

Always keep Ithaca in your mind;
to reach her is your destiny.
But do not rush your journey in the least.
Better that it last for many years;
that you drop anchor at the island an old man,
rich with all you’ve gotten on the way,
not expecting Ithaca to make you rich.

Ithaca gave to you the beautiful journey;
without her you’d not have set upon the road.
But she has nothing left to give you any more.

And if you find her poor, Ithaca did not deceive you.
As wise as you’ll have become, with so much experience,
you’ll have understood, by then, what these Ithacas mean.

By CP Cavafy, born April 29, 1863
Translated by Daniel Mendelsohn

My friend Aryn’s amazing collection of short stories was released on Wednesday.

Aryn Kyle, whose first novel was hailed as “reason for readers to rejoice” (USA TODAY) turns her gift for storytelling to the lives of girls and women in this spectacular collection. In “Nine,” a young girl given to exaggeration escapes a humiliating ninth birthday celebration with the help of her father’s new girlfriend. The dubious benefits of sleeping with one’s boss are revealed when a bookstore manager defends an employee from an irate customer in the hilarious “Sex Scenes from a Chain Bookstore.” A raid on a neighbor’s meth lab strengthens the unlikely friendship between a solitary woman and the goth teenage girl who lives in the apartment below her in “Boys and Girls Like You and Me.” And in a notable exception to the rule, “Captain’s Club” features a boy whose devotion to a lonely woman transforms his cruise vacation.
In moments electric with sudden harmony or ruthless indifference, the girls and women in this collection provoke, beguile, entertain, and reveal a poignant and searingly accurate portrait of the female heart. With her keen eye for character, her humor, and her uncanny grasp of the loneliness, selfishness, and longing that permeate the female experience, Kyle has secured her reputation as a major young talent.

The Baroness / A Baronesa

English
I got some really great news this week. A Brazilian designer named Adriana Gontijo liked The Seamstress so much she used the book as the inspiration for her 2010 Fall/Winter clothing collection. Gontijo’s label, A Rosa Vermelha, produces women’s clothes made from sustainable and vintage fabrics. Adriana has named her dresses and blouses after characters in the book. The Baroness dress has a youthful elegance, like the Baroness herself. The Lindalva dress is fun and spirited, just like the character. I was really happy and honored to know that another artist has taken inspiration from the people and places in the book. I actually like fashion, even though I never get to wear spiffy clothes on the farm. To see all of Adriana’s designs, visit A Rosa Vermelha’s blog. (But I’ve included pictures here, of course!)

Vestido Lindalva / The Lindalva

Blusa Degas / The Degas Blouse

Blusa Coelho / Coelho Blouse

Long ago, there had been a fire,
And they’d all gone into it,
My brother and sister,
a few
friends, too, and my parents
piecemeal.
And the fire
flooded up at first
like
brilliance from the wood
like
both a burning fount
called up
by great thirst
and the thirst it quenched.

It raged and then it didn’t.
Then there was only
A lull of embers,
vague flares
like wakened absences
of fire dying down
to ash,
and then ash-blunted
scrape of bronze
on stone,
a weight
of ash to lift,
and then the ash haze
left there in the shovel’s wake.

How long have I been here
Keeping the dark
in sight
my mind the place in which
the dark’s grown
conscious of itself in the dark?

Come to me now, love.
I need you.
Come here.
How cold it’s gotten.
Let my name in your voice be
the fresh disturbance,
the rippling
of char-scented air;
your touch the tinder.

–”Hearthkeeper” by Alan Shapiro

While browsing this other blog I like called Information is Beautiful, I came across the work of graphic artist Stefanie Posavec. According to David McCandless, the blog’s author and designer, Posavec’s work “is concerned with the unveiling of things unseen.” One of Posavec’s projects: to visualize the structure of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road. Being an amateur book diagrammer myself, I was intrigued. [Warning: Nerd Alert] After I read any novel I particularly like, I try to diagram its structure, making charts or graphs or weird timelines. These drawings are basically unintelligible to anyone but me, of course. When I’m stuck on my own work I do the same kind of drawing, hoping that a visual representation will help me fix whatever it is in the structure that’s baffling me. Sometimes it works. Often it doesn’t, but a) it’s fun to do and b) doing it makes me feel like I’m actually working. So when I saw Posavec’s diagrams of On the Road, I immediately got a huge crush on her. I mean, these illustrations are BEAUTIFUL. In a Literary Organism, she makes lines divide into chapters, blooms into paragraphs, sprouts are sentences. All are color-coded according to the book’s key themes. There are other graphic representations of the book’s rhythms, sentence structures, and word usage.

Here’s a blog with high-res images of Posavec’s work. And here’s her website.

Para vocês que falam Português, tem uma ótima entrevista com o escritor Carlos Herculano Lopes. Ele escreveu vários livros, entre eles: A Dança dos Cabelos, Memórias da Sede, Sombras de Julho, e Coração aos Pulos. O seu romance mais recente, O Vestido (Romance. São Paulo: Geração Editorial, 2004), baseado no poema “Caso do Vestido” de Carlos Drummond de Andrade, foi adaptado para o filme de Paulo Thiago em 2004.

Eu tive a oportunidade de falar com o Carlos alguns meses atrás, quando ele me entrevistou para um artigo no jornal Estado de Minas. Veja aqui a entrevista com Carlos no YouTube.

E, porque não posso resistir, aqui está o Caso do Vestido do outro Carlos!