"no dream. no dreamer."

nary an hour passes when some fragment of me
doesn't range back across the years - decades now -
in search of communion with hours lauded even then.
this high ceiling is not the same as that
of those liminal years, cannot even
pass itself off as such.
the trappings are all wrong, the bodies
(mine included)
bear no resemblance to those imagined
or dreaded or anticipated.

the fanged, tartared maw of history
stretches wide, cold as midsummer AC
and unforgiving as the thousands
and thousands
and thousands of cigarettes
this corpse in waiting has consumed.

no remorse, as metallica taught me:
not just for the smokes, but the carpeted nights
and the internet searches,
the sleep terrors and the shiner bock, the
extension of consciousness beyond
what speech and flesh and warm concrete
could only point to ("god" bless them all).

nary an hour passes when some fragment of me
doesn't range forward in time - entire minutes and hours -
in search of the new liminal,
moments when words like lucid dreams
arise among the living, the awake
and inevitably point back to the past,
beyond ceilings,
beyond bodies, beyond concerns,
beyond AC.
as if such a simple horizon was all there was to it.

Muse India: Goan Literature in Portuguese

At long last, the issue of Muse India dedicated to Goan literature in Portuguese has been released, and I'm pleased to announce that several of my translations of Laxmanrao Sardessai's poems have been included. You can, and should, check it out here.

In late summer 2015 Dr. Paul Melo e Castro, one of the editors of this particular issue, contacted me after reading my translation of Laxmanrao Sardessai's "O mistério aclara-se" and asked if I'd be interested in contributing. I was, and what started as a handful of translations for Muse India has become a much larger project: I've translated what I believe to be all of Sardessai's poetry, and the collection should see the light of day soon. I'll provide more details once they're nailed down, but suffice to say I'm excited. (Have I posted this before? It feels like I have. Apologies for any redundancy.)

There's another project in the works, too, but that one hinges on some complicated issues, so I'll refrain from doing much more than acknowledging its existence at the moment.

Well, back to work. Enjoy the new issue of Muse India. Portuguese-language writing in Goa, even before 1961, was rather sparse, and time certainly hasn't changed that. Nevertheless, I think it offers a pretty fascinating glance not just at daily life in the oldest European colony in Asia before and after Liberation, but the relationship between colonist and colonized, and how identities- religious, national, ethnic- are formed and, ultimately, brought to the brink of extinction.

Obrigado, caro/a leitor/a!

DAS

李長吉的 ”龍夜吟" / Li Changji's "Dragons at Night"

Once more I return to 李長吉 Li Changji, AKA 李賀 Li He. This poem was particularly difficult: it's somewhat longer than what I'm used to, and I made the mistake of reading a lot of characters according to their modern, or sometimes merely different (in classical Chinese terms), usage. Fortunately, J.D. Frodsham's translation was there to put me on the right track, only for me to deviate from it when I felt doing so benefited the translation.

Some notes on the poem follow, but first I want to discuss the title. Frodsham's "Song: Dragons at Midnight" works well enough in the context of his naming convention for Li's poems, but 夜 encompasses more than just midnight, and I can't imagine beginning a recital of this, or any, poem with a phrase dependent on a colon. Since Li has a considerable number of poems that he refers to as "songs" (喑， 曲， 歌， 樂) because they're probably meant to accompany popular tunes of his day, I've opted to put that element of the title aside. Doing so raises the issue of just how musical my translation is, or rather isn't, but I'm more concerned with conveying the poem's palpable feeling of being trapped by emotion and environment.

By the way, today (September 7) is Camilo Pessanha's birthday. I don't know if he ever read Li Changji, but I suspect he would've liked his work immensely.

Enjoy, dear reader/看官/caro leitor!

微臣
史大偉

-----


李長吉
龍夜吟


鬈發胡兒眼晴綠，高樓夜靜吹橫竹
一聲似向天上來，月下美人望鄉哭
直排七點星藏指，暗合清風調宮徵
蜀道秋深雲滿林，湘江半夜龍驚起
玉堂美人邊塞情，碧窗皓月愁中聽
寒砧能搗百尺練，粉淚凝珠滴紅綫
胡兒莫作隴頭吟，隔窗暗結愁人心


Li Changji
"Dragons at Night"



A curly-haired foreign boy, green-eyed
Plays the flute in the still night amidst tall buildings

Each note approaches the heavens
In the moonlight, beautiful women long for home, weeping

Lined up across seven holes, fingers conceal stars
Unnoticed, gong and zhi notes merge with the cool breeze

On the road to Shu, deep autumn, forest thick with clouds
At midnight dragons rise from the Xiang river, startled

For beautiful women the imperial harem feels like a frontier fortress
Bright moonlight through jade windows, gloom in the audience hall

A hundred feet of silk beaten upon cold blocks
Tears form pearls on face-powder, drop onto red thread

There are no foreign boys to play the hilltop song
Behind dark lattice windows, somber hearts bound together

-----

What I've translated as "foreign", 胡, is used to describe Turkic peoples from west and north of China. 宮徵 Gong and zhi are the first and fourth notes, respectively, of the pentatonic scale, which wouldn't have taken so long to find out if I'd bothered to read Frodsham's notes sooner. 蜀 Shu is one of the Three Kingdoms, about which there's been a certain well-known romance written; it's also the abbreviation for its present-day descendant, 四川 Sichuan province. The Xiang river runs through 湖南 Hunan province, and 湘 is the abbreviation for Hunan.

玉堂, literally "jade hall", showed up in one dictionary as "imperial harem", which seemed a fitting counterpoint to 邊塞, "frontier fortress" - I read a lot of uneasy relationships between people (especially women) and architecture in this poem. The bit about silk and blocks refers to the fulling of cloth; Frodsham says "the sound of silk being beaten on the fulling-blocks in autumn, to make winter clothes, is a familiar symbol of parting and sorrow." He also calls 隴頭吟 the "Long-tou tune" without explaining what "Long-tou" might mean. I've chosen to translate it as "hilltop" because 隴 can mean hillock or mound (or even "burial mound"), and 頭 head or top. Of course, that doesn't help if one wants to know what the "hilltop song" is.

I've made the decision to treat most of those referred to in the poem in the plural, rather than as individuals. Doing so deepens the poem's wistfulness, and makes sense in the context of the imperial harem and its occupants. While this poem's far from uplifting, it's definitely given me a better appreciation of Li's skill. There's a lot going on here, and one day I'll understand more of it.

Tesouros deixados nos livros

Há uns dias, recebi o primeiro volume do que espero seja uma obra-prima, nomeadamente "A Ditadura Envergonhada" de Elio Gaspari. O livro (e os seus quatros volumes acompanhantes) conta a história da ditudura militar no Brasil entre 1964-1985, um assunto do que não sei nada. Que sorte que tenho milhares de páginas para ler.

Mas não estou aqui a fim de falar da ditadura, ou do trabalho de Gaspari. Preferiria fazer uma breve menção das coisas, além do texto, que se pode encontrar dentro de um livro. No caso de "A Ditadura Envergonhada", há uma dedicatória, de uma Senhora C. ao Senhor G. (Não vou escrever os seus nomes completos, porque o livro foi um presente, e quando um presente afasta-se para o sertão do mercado, sempre existe a possibilidade bem incómoda do doador o descobrindo.) Também achei um marcador das páginas, feito de um pedaço de cartão com as palavras "Pharmacia & Upjohn"- antiga fusão das empresas Pharmacia e Upjohn, hoje em dia parte de Pfizer- impresso nela.

Quando leio dedicatórias em livros em segunda mão, sempre tento de imaginar as circunstâncias em que foram escritas. Foi o livro um presente bem escolhido, ou uma escolha de último minuto? E os marcadores das páginas- por que o leitor escolheu este pedaço de cartão em vez de um bilhete, ou uma folha de papel, ou outra coisa? Fez ele leu o livro? Que pensou dele?

As notas marginais, as dedicatórias, os marcadores das páginas, todos são tesourinhos deixados, de propósito ou por acaso, pelos leitores. Tais coisas revelam-nos pequenos detalhes da vida do leitor (o simplesmente dono) anterior do livro, e enriquecem a nossa experiência de leitura. É fácil lembrar que a leitura é uma conversação entre autor e leitor, mas a oportunidade de ouvir (ou, corretamente, ver) o bate-papo entre o autor e um leitor diferente é um único prazer. Por isso, prefiro comprar livros usados, e sempre deixar os meus próprios presentes para os futuros leitores.

Boa leitura, amigos!

Reflections upon the Warrior's Spell: Tasmania's Tarot

On my way back from Macau last summer I had a 15-hour layover in San Francisco. I dropped my bags off at the left luggage desk and took the train into the Mission, where, among other things, I loitered at Borderlands Books (and missed meeting Nick Mamatas by a few scant minutes), ate vegan food and drank beer that wasn't Tsingtao or San Miguel at Gracias Madre, and visited Aquarius Records for the second and equally triumphant time.

As you might expect, I found a number of albums worth purchasing at Aquarius, home of killer poetic album descriptions, and and the staff was kind enough to pack 'em up and ship 'em to Texas for me. Among those albums was Tarot's The Warrior's Spell, a compilation of their cassette-only demos (something I didn't know at the time, but would come into play when, a year later, they'd release their first full-length: see below). Like so many underground metal releases, the album art struck me as what I can only describe as amateurishly perfect. The title itself had the same effect: as a lifelong D&D player, the notion of a "warrior's spell" was just wrong, since spells are strictly within the purview of magic-users and (ugh) clerics, but it sounds cool, so who cares?

Here's the write-up from Aquarius Records:

The wizened seer tentatively flips the last card, her eyes illuminated by the dancing firelight. Her eyes widen as she gasps, before letting out a croaking grotesque cackle. "In your future...I see... MUSTY TASMANIAN WIZARD ROCK!" Well, congratulations! It must be your (Magician's) birthday, because no finer fate can await gods nor men than the prospect of delving into this arcane helping of mystical, mythical, organ-driven heavy folk prog from far off Tasmania. The Warrior's Spell comes hurtling across the astral plane courtesy of Tasmania's Heavy Chains Records (undoubtedly one of our fave new sources for weird & wonderful heavy rock and metal, along with Minotauro, having recently brought us the Outcast ep and latest The Wizar'd album), and conjures all of the torchlit corridor mystery & dusty crumbling aroma of some of our favorite proto-metal, proto-doom & witchy folky proggy rock bands, all swirling Hammond organ, plucked acoustic strums, seriously epic heavy riffing, plaintive flutes & distant nasal vocal prophecies. Uriah Heep is obviously a major touchstone here, the album title and cover clearly paying homage to the technicolor fantasy wonder-realm of Heep's 1972 opus The Magician's Birthday specifically. But just us clearly one can hear the sepia-toned Medieval echoes of Rainbow and the crackly mournful dirge of Pagan Altar. Tarot also shares their vocalist with another one of our favorite obscure quirky heavy acts, The Wizar'd! And while here he sounds significantly less theatrical and maniacal than in his other wilder doomed project, his more restrained approach in Tarot lends the music a much more sombre, majestick, archaic air. Very highly recommended for fans of all of those aforementioned groups as well as anything from early Wishbone Ash to Witchcraft to Comus to The Lamp Of Thoth to the Darkscorch Canticles compilation. Consider us well and truly... under the spell!!!


The Aquarius dudes nail the feel of the music itself, but like the Astral Rune Bastards record I wrote about a while back, listening to Tarot conjures up more than lyric-related imagery. The Warrior's Spell, less polished than the full-length Reflections (itself quite faithful to the analog sound of its influences, even though it was recorded with modern equipment), is particularly good at evoking the sort of scenes that one might imagine giving birth to the music itself. It's more than nostalgia for the days of '70s metal and hard rock, which neither I nor the members of Tarot ever experienced. It's the feeling of letting your imagination wander deeper and deeper into the fantastic as you kick back in your bedroom or basement with some albums borrowed from your buddy (say, Uriah Heep's The Magician's Birthday, like Aquarius Records suggested, or Reflections, Tarot's newest), a stack of Moorcock and Clark Ashton Smith paperbacks, the first edition AD&D Players Handbook, and maybe a joint or two.

People have been enjoying this kind of experience, with any number of aesthetic tweaks, forever, and it's one I continue to seek out. Heavy metal and the other trappings I mentioned above remain my primary method of doing so, and Tarot's ability to provide a killer soundtrack means that I can spend many an afternoon or evening lost in contemplation of not just wizards, fate, solitude, but a version of the 1970s that never quite was, or maybe just bled across time and space into our present day and the minds of a few dudes from Tasmania.

Check out Reflections here and The Warrior's Spell here, and get your fix of sweet riffs and organ lines. Don't forget to eyeball that album art while you're at it.

Later!

D.A.S.

Laxmanrao Sardessai: "18 de Junho"

The 18th of June is Goa Revolution Day, which has been celebrated since 1980. It marks the day in 1946 that the movement for independence from Portugal came into its own. Public meetings, such as the one addressed by Ram Manohar Lohia and Julião Menezes on 18 June 1946, were illegal under colonial rule, and therefore suppressed. For the next 15 years the Portuguese authorities faced a rising tide of resistance to their rule, in forms ranging from peaceful satyagraha and the formation of anti-colonial political parties to direct action carried out by the Azad Gomantak Dal. In December 1961, the Indian military finished what others had started and launched Operation Vijay, which swept into Goa and, in three days, put an end to 450 years of Portuguese rule. Goa was annexed to India, along with Damão and Diu, the even smaller remnants of the Portuguese Estado da Índia.

The Goan writer Laxmanrao Sardessai was jailed twice by the Portuguese for his involvement in the Goan independence movement. In the early 1960s, the newly-minted union territory of Goa faced the prospect of being merged into the neighboring state of Maharashtra, which Sardessai vehemently opposed and agitated against. While the following poem commemorates the historic actions of 1946, it was published during the period in which Sardessai wrote poems in Portuguese (as opposed to short stories in Marathi, which made up the overwhelming bulk of his literary output) as part of his campaign against merger. These poems were published in the Portuguese-language newspapers A Vida and O Heraldo, the latter of which continues today, having switched to publishing in English in 1983.

Enjoy, folks, and here's to the continuing struggle against colonialism in all its forms!

D.A.S.

"18 de Junho"

Laxmanrao Sardessai

publicado no jornal A Vida, 18 Junho 1966

Porque será, ó 18 de Junho,

Que estás tão desolado?

Será porque vês

Extinguir-se, lentamente,

A chama que te animara

Há vinte anos

E o sonho que teus sequazes

Sonharam

Duma Goa livre e bela?

Será porque tanto sangue

Que teus heróis verteram,

Foi em vão

E só lhes trouxe

Miséria e lágrimas

E nova escravidão?

Será porque medrou nesta terra

O mal e esvaiu-se o bem

E os vermes tripudiam

Sobre a carcassa?

E estertores retumbam

Nos lares?

E terroriza a queda

Dos valores morais?

Será porque corações inocentes

Choram a maldade dos potentados?

Será porque os ídolos de barro

Sorriem para escárneo

Dos bons e pacatos

E os criminosos se arvoram em juizes

E os justos se tornam cobardes?

Não chores, não, ó 18 de Junho,

Tu inspiraste um povo inteiro

A sofrer e morrer

Por um ideal!

Do teu seio sairá, em breve,

Outro 18, belo e radiante,

Que verá teus sonhos

Tomar vulto e brilhar

Como minaretes dourados

Nos céus azuis desta terra,

Hoje calcada,

Ó dia glorioso

Somos teus filhos.

Filhos de Revolução

E tu és nosso pai

Pai de heróis,

Que sabem sofrer por um ideal.

***

"18th of June"

Laxmanrao Sardessai

Published in the newspaper A Vida, 18 June 1966

Why is it, oh 18th of June,

That you are so forlorn?

Is it because you see

The flame that animated you

Twenty years ago

Being slowly extinguished

Along with the dream that your followers

Dreamed

Of a Goa free and beautiful?

Is it because so much of the blood

Your heroes shed

Was in vain

And only brought them

Misery and tears

And a new slavery?

Is it because evil has thrived in this land

And good has evaporated

And the worms rejoice

Over its carcass?

And death-rattles resound

In the homes?

And the decay of moral values

Terrifies you?

Is it because innocent hearts

Weep at the wickedness of the rulers?

Is it because clay idols

Smile in mockery

Of the good and peaceful

And criminals pretend to be judges

And the just become cowards?

No, do not weep, oh 18th of June,

You inspired an entire people

To suffer and die

For an ideal!

From your breast will soon come

Another 18th, beautiful and radiant,

That will see your dreams

Take shape and shine

Like golden minarets

In the blue skies of this land,

Today downtrodden

Oh glorious day

We are your children.

Children of the Revolution

And you are our father

Father of heroes,

Who know how to suffer for an ideal.

Feliz Dia de Portugal, de Camões, e das Comunidades Portuguesas!/Tradução do poema "Só Gosto" de Vimala Devi

Aqui no Texas o Dia de Portugal, de Camões, e das Comunidades Portuguesas está quase no fim. Por isso, ofereço-lhes uma tradução de um poema da escritora portuguesa Vimala Devi (o pseudónimo de Teresa da Piedade de Baptista Almeida), que nasceu em Goa e escreveu com Manuel de Seabra a obra-prima dos estudos da língua portuguesa no antigo Índia Portuguesa: A Literatura Indo-Portuguesa. Posso dizer que ela era uma das vozes mais fortes da literatura goesa na segunda metade do século XX. Agora ela vive em Espanha, onde escreve em espanhol, catalão, e esperanto.

Nunca traduzi um poema tão curto. É, num sentido, mais difícil do que um verso mais longo.

Adeus, amigos!
D.A.S.

***

"Só Gosto"
Vimala Devi


Do Céu, com estrelas.
Da Terra, sem gente.

-----

"I Only Like"
Vimala Devi


The sky with stars.
The earth without people.

Camilo Pessanha: "Floriram por engano as rosas bravas"

Apresento-lhes mais um poema daquele homem entre mundos, Camilo Pessanha. Geralmente dizemos que uma pessoa está entre dois mundos, mas no caso de Pessanha temos um homem entre um conjunto de muitos mundos contrários: os do Ocidente e do Oriente, do metrópole e da colônia, dos deveres do funcionário público e do estetismo, do exílio e do integração. Obviamente, esta série de díades não basta para esboçar um retrato completo de Pessanha (ou, na verdade, qualquer pessoa, coisa, ou ideia, porque não vivemos num mundo binário).

Este poema é, espantosamente, um que nunca li até há poucos dias. Pensei que tinha lido todos os poemas de Clepsidra, mas estava enganado. A ortografia é moderna, mas a pontuação da versão portuguesa está em acordo com a versão de 1920 de Edições Lusitânia (que não usa o circunflexo no seu nome!). Como de costume, não ha título próprio, e por isso uso a primeira linha do poema.

Agora, na cúspide do verão, pode-se dizer que um poema sobre a neve do inverno não faz sentido, mas que poderia fazer? Espero que vocês gostem do poema e a sua tradução para inglês. Vou escritar mais em breve, porque o dia de Portugal, de Camões, e das Comunidades Portuguesas (10 de Junho) está a chegar!

Obrigado e adeus, caros leitores!

Abraços,
D.A.S.

-----

I give you another translation of a poem by that man between worlds, Camilo Pessanha. We usually speak of a person being between two worlds, but in Pessanha's case we have a man between a set of conflicting worlds: East and West, homeland and colony, the duties of the public servant and and aestheticism, exile and integration. Obviously this series of dyads doesn't suffice to sketch a full picture of Pessanha (or, really, any given person, thing, or idea, because the world isn't binary).

Surprisingly, I hadn't read this poem until a few days ago. I thought I'd read every poem in Clepsidra, but I was mistaken. The spelling is updated, though the punctuation remains true to that found in the 1920 Edições Lusitânia (which on the book's title page doesn't use the circumflex!) version. As usual, the poem doesn't have a proper title, so I've used the first line instead.

Now that we're on the cusp of summer, a poem about the snows of winter might not make sense, but what can you do? I hope y'all enjoy the poem (in both of its forms), and I'll be writing again soon, as Portugal Day is coming up on the 10th.

Thanks for reading, and take it easy, folks.

Yours,
D.A.S.

-----

"Floriram por engano as rosas bravas"
Camilo Pessanha


Floriram por engano as rosas bravas
No inverno: veio o vento desfolhá-las...
Em que cismas, meu bem? Porque me calas
As vozes com que há pouco me enganavas?

Castelos doidos! Tão cedo caístes!...
Onde vamos, alheio o pensamento,
De mãos dadas? Teus olhos, que um momento
Perscrutaram nos meus, como vão tristes!

E sobre nós cai nupcial a neve,
Surda, em triunfo, pétalas, de leve
Juncando o chão, na acrópole de gelos...

Em redor do teu vulto é como um véu!
Quem as esparze — quanta flor — do céu,
Sobre nós dois, sobre os nossos cabelos?

***

"By mistake the wild roses bloomed"
Camilo Pessanha

By mistake the wild roses bloomed
In winter: the wind came and stripped away their leaves...
What are you pondering, my darling? Why do you silence
The voices with which you fooled me just now?

Lunatic castles! How soon you fell!
Where are we going, lost in thought,
Hand in hand? Your eyes, which for a moment
Looked deeply into mine, how sad they are!

And over us the snow falls, bridal,
Deaf, triumphant, petals lightly
Covering the floor in the acropolis of ice...

It is like a veil over your face!
Who scattered them — so many flowers — from the sky,
Over the two of us, over our hair?

杜甫的“春夜喜雨” / Du Fu's "Enjoying the Rain on a Spring Night"

We've been getting a lot of rain here lately, and I mean a lot. Houston's northern and northwestern suburbs are flooding seemingly every other week, and the city itself is perpetually waterlogged. The combination of El Niño, a local culture with a boundless appetite for more suburbs and their attendant oceans of concrete, and a city government that bends over backward for property developers has made Houston more prone to flooding than ever. The shortsightedness of it all is appalling, but, alas, not surprising.

Anyway, the recent rain inspired me to translate the following poem by 杜甫 Du Fu, the famous Tang dynasty poet. I've been trying to improve my classical Chinese lately so I can read 澳門記略 (AKA "the monograph on Macau", an 18th-century account of the city written by two Qing mandarins). The "brocade city" mentioned in the poem's last line is a reference to the city of Chengdu. None of the translations I've read, such as this one by Brendan O'Kane or Mark Alexander's use 重 quite the way I've chosen to, but I think it works.

Enjoy the poem, stay dry, and demand better flood control and city planning from your elected representatives. May the flowers bloom riotously after the rain, wherever you may live.


微臣
史大衛



春夜喜雨
杜甫

好雨知時節 當春乃發生
隨風潛入夜 潤物細無聲
野徑雲俱黑 江船火獨明
曉看紅濕處 花重錦官城



"Enjoying the Rain on a Spring Night"

Du Fu


Good rain knows its time
It starts to fall when spring comes

Following the wind, it slips into the night
Making things damp with hardly a sound

Black clouds all along the back roads
A lone boat's lamp bright on the river

Dawn finds this place red and wet
And the brocade city heavy with flowers

歐陽脩 - 清明 Ouyang Xiu - "On the Pure Brightness Festival"

Today is 清明節 the Qingming Festival, also known as the Pure Brightness Festival or, more to my taste, Tomb-Sweeping Day. Celebrated in China and overseas Chinese communities, it's a day to remember one's ancestors, clean their graves, and make offerings to them. To mark the occasion, here's my translation of one of the poems from the Song Dynasty poet 歐陽脩 Ouyang Xiu's "West Lake is Good" (西湖好) series. There's no precise title for this poem, by the way, so as usual the first line provides the name by which it's usually known. Ouyang, by the way, is one of a very few two-character 姓 xing, or family names.

Enjoy, folks, and burn some incense for your departed loved ones.


微臣
史大偉


***

清明上已西湖好
歐陽脩


清明上已西湖好
滿目繁華
爭道誰家
綠柳朱輪走鈿車

游人日暮相將去
醒醉喧嘩
路轉堤斜
直到城頭總是花


"On the Pure Brightness Festival"
Ouyang Xiu


During the Pure Brightness Festival, West Lake is good
Bountiful flowers fill one's eyes
Who would bother to speak?
Green willows and red wheels of ornamented carriages, fleeting

At sunset visitors see each other off
Sober or drunk, they make a racket
The road veers off, the dike is uneven
All the way to the city, flowers everywhere

Miscellanea

I'm not pleased that it's been a month since I last posted, and the posts I have in the works are, well, still in the works, so here are some links and such, just like a traditional weblog might offer.

-Carpenter Brut is one of my favorite musical acts as of late, and always makes good videos. Turbo Killer is great example of why that is. Foxy dames made even more so by the glowing inverted crosses on their foreheads, weird dudes sporting gas masks or shotguns, sweet cars, cruciform spacecraft, and a general air of glorious trashiness- if that ain't good viewing, I don't know what is. Carpenter Brut's other videos are worth your time, too.

-I missed 2016's annual literary festival in Macau, the Rota das Letras, but reading about it online introduced me to the poet Matilde Campilho. A native of Portugal who spent a few years in Brazil and as a result has acquired, from what I can tell from some of the interviews with her I've listened to, a Carioca accent when she needs it, I've found myself intrigued by her work. As someone who's studied Portuguese with teachers from Brazil and Portugal, I've tried to find the sweet spot between the two accents (which, like English, are really groups of numerous regional accents), so it's cool to actually hear a native speaker of Portuguese do the same and do a good job of it.

-If you're interested in leftist politics (the real kind, not those of the Democratic party here in the States), Jacobin magazine is an accessible start. The graphic design is eye-catching as hell, too. There's also Salvage, edited by China Mieville (among others). Unsurprisingly, it's a denser read, but no less rewarding for it. "Bleak is the new red."

-This may be the last night of the year we can have a fire or turn on the heat here in Houston. (Observation; no hyperlink provided.)

-If Internet history and pre-WWW protocols (which, alas, I mostly missed upon my initial visits to the World Wide Web back in '96 or so, but which I utilize now) are your thing, make sure your browser is gopher-capable and visit Floodgap's gopher server, which serves as a clearing-house of modern gopher activity.

And on that note, I'm out. This corpse is tired. Boa noite, amigos: I'm gonna listen to Carbon Based Lifeforms' "Photosynthesis", reminisce about my buddy Pete's first post-college digs up in Dallas and the gloriously pre-2001 tech crash nature thereof, and call it a night.

It feels good to just write shit again. I need to do it more often.

No 90o aniversário da morte de Camilo Pessanha

No dia 1 de Março, 1926, o poeta português Camilo Pessanha faleceu em Macau. Hoje, 90 anos depois da morte do autor de Clepsydra, ele está homenageado na Rota das Letras, o Festival Literário de Macau. Eu li que os estudantes da Escola Portuguesa de Macau vão fazer romagem à sua sepultura e declamar poemas; estou de acordo com essa ideia.

Apologies for the silence as of late. I've been pretty busy with one thing or another: trying to find an agent or publisher for my novel, working on a project I don't want to discuss until I have a better idea of its future, attending Owlcon, and studying Portuguese online via the Instituto Camões, which has already proven to be a welcome challenge. I'll try to get back to writing here more often.

Até breve, caros leitores!