Brazil, le Brésil, Brasil

I am keeping up my interest in Brazil by reading Dom Casmurro, by Machado de Assis. It’s pretty good. 

Brazil is a big and interesting country. It is — finally — about to create a big middle class, in the way that USA had done in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. The best thing about a big middle class is that it demands stability of its government and of its society; in turn that makes widespread prosperity possible. Back in the 1970s–1980s Brazil had been notorious as a pathetic economic basket case, and a tyranny, too.

In this century, the country has a solid economy. It has an elected government which represents the aspirations of its middle class. Its banking system has finally learned how — and why — to make installment loans to middle-class persons, so that they can buy cars on credit.

For these — and many other reasons — Brazil is poised to become a big economic power in the world.

That will be a development which will take many persons by surprise, because the country has not enjoyed the non-stop attention from the world’s press that China and India have received.

Indeed, coverage of Brazil by the world’s news media — and especially by North American media — is generally poor, because of pervasive bias towards Spanish-speaking news. Most reports about “South America” are really reports about Spanish-speaking countries, ignoring the largest and — by nearly any standard — the most important country on the continent. It would be like “News from North America” which featured items only from Canada and Mexico.

This is not surprising given the history of Spanish colonization of North America, and the large number of Spanish-speakers there.

It is easy for a Spanish-speaking reporter to cover news from countries which speak Spanish. Portuguese, on the other hand, is different enough from other Romance languages that spoken Portuguese sounds exotic to ears accustomed to Spanish, Italian, or French.

And that is not even to touch upon the profound differences of history, culture, and mentalité between the brutal Spanish colonial inheritance and the Luso-Brazilian legacy.

People still condescend to Brazil — when they think about it at all. However, in the next lustrum (five years) that will have changed.

The Romantic Agony, by Mario Praz

This morning, I reached over to the shelf next to my bed, pulled down my copy of The Romantic Agony by Mario Praz, and read the author’s “Note to the Second Edition.” It explains that the book had been out-of-print; and that this new edition would, while correcting some inaccuracies, put paid to the “legends” about it, namely that it is “… the ‘best reading in God’s world’ for a sexual delinquent … .”

I looked at the chapter headings — “The Beauty of the Medusa,” “The Metamorphoses of Satan,” “The Shadow of the ‘Divine Marquis’,” “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” “Byzantium,” “Swinburne and ‘Le Vice Anglais’” — a catalogue of provocations; ingredients for literary notoriety.

The Romantic Movement is not my favorite subject. However, for better or for worse — I think, worse — nearly all contemporary popular culture is built upon Romantic mud. One cannot make head nor tail of our own era’s common coin without understanding the Romantics.

The reason I purchased the book is not so lofty. Mario Praz is a marvellous writer: if his name is on the cover, it’s worth reading. This the man who, in his book on décor, wrote, “Some days I simply must have Empire.”

This is one of the few volumes which I have bought for stock: usually I buy only books I plan to read next. I won’t be reading this next, but … some days I simply must have Praz.

The Romantic Agony by Mario Praz, translated by Angus Davidson, second edition (Cleveland and New York: World Publishing, 1965, reprinted from original published in 1951 by Oxford University Press).

The Great Gatsby is the perfect summer book

The Great Gatsby is the perfect summer novel. If you read it in school, read it again; but forget about all the silly Big Themes of which teachers are fond.

The problem with all the Great Book twaddle with which the book’s reputation has been embalmed, is the sneaking suspicion that, without the critical apparatus, the book wouldn’t be, all by itself, much fun to read — that it is one of those books that is Good For You, like oatmeal, or broccoli, and needs to be sugar-coated to go down easy.

Nothing could be farther from the truth.

The Great Gatsby is first of all a crime novel — in roaring ’twenties New York, a bootlegging gangster is murdered after he puts the moves on a rich socialite. That’s the story.

Yes, it does contain a hundred or so pages of the most magnificent modern prose; and yes, one of its tastiest surprises is how after reading such a slight story about insignificant, mundane people, doing foolish things, one puts the book down feeling so very moved.

It is a great book but without seeming so. Only afterwards does it linger in the memory and grow in significance, not to Literature (whatever that is) but to the reader’s own soul, and reflections on her life.

Get the book and read it — it’s in print, in a handsome edition set in beautiful type.

Social media are not mass media

This isn’t broadcast.

Twitter and Facebook are venues where social media happen — more like parties, not really “media” at all in the sense that television or radio are media.

Participation is itself the medium. It is not enough to come to the party and merely talk about oneself — that is the way of broadcast, not social media.

To be successful — I mean, to be influential — first of all, put on a party hat. (Stow the megaphone — it won’t be needed.)

Then — as at any party, casually — mingle. Engage with other participants, listen to what they have say, and respond; one must provoke — and respond to provocation, too.

“Come into my parlor,” said the computer to the specialist

Social media: No place for specialists

In America, advertising, publicity, and marketing are considered distinct specialties.

But social media chew up specialists and spit out their bones:

• Social media look more like publicity than advertising;
• Social media work more like marketing than publicity; and
• Social media use electronic media more like advertising, than marketing or publicity do.

To be effective in social media, advertisers are going to have to act more like publicists, and think more like marketers.

And — Heaven help publicists and marketers — after careers spent in the deep but narrow crevasses of their specialties, it will be a long climb up and out.

---

“‘Come into my parlor,’ said the computer to the specialist.” Page 20, The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects, by Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, coördinated by Jerome Agel. New York: Bantam Books. 1967

A Secular Age, by Charles Taylor

I have started to read Charles Taylor’s 874-page book, A Secular Age. I do not know whether I will agree with Mr. Taylor’s opinions, but I am pleased to read a thorough discussion of “secularism.” The book was published in 2007, so it is a little bit surprising to read the first sentences of the Introduction,

What does it mean to say the we live in a “secular age?” Almost everyone would agree that in some sense we do …

I guess that because the author came of age in the twentieth century — the first half of which was indeed a secular age — he would suppose that the present era is more like its predecessor than different from it.

However, I disagree with that. My own observations are that the world — especially the United States — since the end of the Second World War has gradually discarded secularity except as a specialized scientific and technical discourse; that this twenty-first century is an age of faith, not of secularity.

The idea that the present age is “secular” is — at best — a received idea; at worst — a conceit among those persons of faith who — for their own purposes — prefer to characterize faith as beleaguered, rather than triumphant, as it is.

The strange thing is that many — perhaps most — persons who value a secular society, are in the grip of the same, mistaken notion. That mistake has led them to be complacent in the delusion that a secular society is theirs to keep or to lose. In fact it has been lost, and its defenders — if they ever rouse themselves — will be hard put to recover some little lost ground.

Taming the Gods: Religion and Democracy on Three Continents, by Ian Buruma

Listen to Ian Buruma talk about his book, Taming the Gods: Religion and Democracy on Three Continents

Conor Cruise O’Brien on Edmund Burke

Read Conor Cruise O’Brien on Edmund Burke

The French: Portrait of a People, by Sanche de Gramont

I have recently finished reading The French: Portrait of a People, published in 1969 by Sanche de Gramont, a French aristocrat who worked in USA as newspaper reporter.

About ten years later, the author rearranged the letters in his surname into an anagram, Ted Morgan, and legally changed his name to that; took out American citizenship, and published a string of best-selling biographies.

The book is fun, because — although the author knows France very well — he doesn’t much admire it. Most histories of France are uncritical, or even partial: they smooth over contradictions instead of explaining them. Not so this book — I have finally gotten some candid explanations about France and the French, and I like that. I had lived in France, and many of the things I had observed did not square with commonplaces.

The writing is exceptionally fast-moving and gripping — must be on account of the author’s ten years as a reporter. This is an important quality for a book that is 470 pages long.

EPUB is the ebook standard for Apple’s iBookstore

The iBooks app for iPad takes advantage of the popular EPUB format for electronic books.

EPUB is the same format used by the popular Stanza [free, iTunes link] app for iPhone and iPod touch. It’s a free and open standard format created by the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), and it’s designed for reflowable content that can be optimized to whatever device is being used to read a book file. The IDPF has championed EPUB as a single format that can be used by publishers and conversion houses, as well as for distribution and sale of electronic books.

The format is meant to function as a single format that publishers and conversion houses can use in-house, as well as for distribution and sale. It supports digital rights management, something that’s sure to warm the cockles of the hearts of publishers, but there’s no DRM scheme that is currently specified as part of the format.

Other ebook readers that currently use the format include the Barnes & Noble Nook, the Sony Reader, iRex Digital Reader, and the iRiver Story. [More]