Ricardo Sternberg's Jubilation

Ricardo Sternberg

Ricardo Sternberg reading his poems

Rosa Sarabia, Josiah Blackmore, Vivaldo Santos, and Michael Lista (from right to left)

Ricardo Sternberg and family (Mara, Miguel and Chrissy)

Vivaldo Santos, João Pedro Vicente Faustino, Ricardo Sternberg and Hudson Moura

Victor Rivas, Manuela Marujo, Ana Paula Ribeiro, Vivaldo dos Santos and Margarita Feliciano

Fabiano Rocha, David Fernandez and Hudson Moura

Sanda Munjic, Laura Colantoni, Ana Perez-Leroux, Christine Sternberg, Rosa Sarabia and Josiah Blackmore

"This Airy Charm: An Appreciation of Ricardo Sternberg, on the Occasion of his Retirement" by Michael Lista

The most famous retirement in literature is a magician’s. The final act of The Tempest is an extended swan song not just for Propsero, but for the sorcerer who conjured him. When I first encountered the name Ricardo Sternberg, it was in the pages of Carmine Starnino’s seminal collection of essays A Lover’s Quarrel, and it was evident that some of Prospero’s rough magic was at work on the critic, a man who to many in the world of Canadian letters is something of a Caliban. At the time, Starnino went in for more conspicuously explosive language, bored of the lexically inert inheritors of Al Purdy. But Sternberg’s poems are less pyrotechnics than smoldering coals— which as it turns out is where the real heat is anyways. His poems are peopled by mermaids and angels, are visited by daemons and devils, and journey enchanted seas to imaginary islands. In other words, they charm.

Magic, by definition, is an exemption to the natural order, and the first thing readers notice and admire about Sternberg’s poems is the overwhelming sense that they shouldn’t work as well as they do. Their constituent parts are too simple; the language is that of everyday speech, sparingly multi-syllabic and rarely sending you to the dictionary. Faulkner once said something like that to Hemingway and intended it as an insult, but as Hemingway knew, it’s hard to cast a spell on someone whose nose is in the OED. And that’s just it: Sternberg’s poems operate the same way that spells do. He describes his own technique as “slowly blowing breath/ into each syllable,” and even here we can see the magic at work: the expertly weighted lines balanced by alternating alliteration, the bookending L sounds, the enjambment machine-tooled to correspond to the length of a breath. But what puts the lines over is that the mechanics of the artistry are hidden in the rafters, leaving only the illusion onstage. The sense is less that the magic has been muscled into place than that Sternberg has divined the secret connections between the words, unlocking their hypnotic qualities. As Quintilian said, “the perfection of art is to conceal art.” The effect is a feeling that the laws have been upended, of discovering that the magician’s coin has vanished from his hands and, abracadabra, appeared behind your ear.

We ask Sternberg the question we ask the magician: how did he do it? One of their tricks is that Sternberg’s poems do what Frost thought a good poem should: “Like a piece of ice on a hot stove,” Frost wrote, “the poem must ride on its own melting.” What does that mean? Like a spell (think of the spells of the witches of Macbeth, for example), the poem must be self-contained, self-actualizing, and self-consuming, enacting the recipe it mnemonically encodes, and using only its own materials for transportation. A perfect example is these lines of Sternberg’s, about a group of sailors lost at sea: “We sailed as we could:// now for the sake of sailing/ the silk sheen of the sea,/ its blue susurrus.” Listen to how the lines treadle themselves up and down as a ship does over a swell. And like its sailors venturing into the unknown without a map, the alliterative “s” sounds build toward the perfectly placed “susurrus,” a word that not only means, but sonically recreates, the inhuman babble of the open ocean. Like the entropic piece of ice, or a spell, the sense of the poem consumes itself at exactly the moment its power is fully realized.

In his review of Sterberg’s masterpiece of a second book, Map Of Dreams, Starnino characterizes the incantatory qualities of Sternberg’s verse as being consistent with prayer. This, I think, is untrue. Prayers, though they may share an origin with spells, operate in a fundamentally different way. Whereas spells are seductive, prayers are ingratiating; whereas spells are charming, prayers are obsequious. A prayer’s goal is grace, which is a god’s beneficence that’s bestowed despite the prayer. If a spell works, it’s only because its craftsmanship and delivery were unimpeachable. Spells have a materiality, an efficacy, an accountability that prayers lack, what Sternberg himself calls his “algebraic incantations.”

Most important of all though is that while the object of a prayer is an inscrutable god, whose reaction we can’t gauge, the object of a spell is the physical world, and often a human being. The magician, then, unlike the supplicant, can’t ever take his audience for granted. And unlike the petitioner, the magician knows when he’s failed. One of my favourite Sternberg poems, “The Alchemist,” from his debut The Invention of Honey, homes directly in on poetry as magic:



You will find

the laboratory

 far simpler these days;

uncluttered.

The cauldron is gone,

the endless bubbling,

the stench, the maze

of pipes, the shelves

of exotic ingredients

that, however combined,

could not transmute

baseness into gold.

That is all done with.

Sold or given away

to whoever would have it.

The thin blue flame

went out.



But I have abandoned

more than tools.

The obstinate ideas

have been driven out

and I am now plagued

by something different

whose needs are simpler:

pen and paper and time

to apply one to the other.

There is no conjuring

but that which a pen

might drum

across the surface;

there is no incantation

but that which language

performs upon itself:

word linking with magic

word, the whole sustained

by the musculature of syntax.



Mystery is what remains

constant; mystery of magic

and of failure:

my nightmare of metal

forever dull,

replaced by this page

that remains blank

though I write upon it.

As far as I’m concerned, you can’t consider that poem a failure. But then why does the mystery of poetry remain constant? Why does Sternberg write, cryptically, that the page “remains blank/ though I write upon it”? Is the blank page the part of it that remains unwritten upon? No. The page remains blank even when it’s black with ink, because the true surface of the poem isn’t the page; it’s the person who’s reading it. Like a spell, the poem is inert until it’s cast on its intended target: you.

Like any magician worth his salt, Sternberg can conjure from thin air. In his poem “Onions,” he’s got voodoo for your Vidalia, writing: “The opacity of onions/ is deceiving.// The onion is a crystal ball/ that makes you cry/ for future sorrows.” In “Buffalo,” Sternberg is cheeky about his conjuring, writing, “I have wrestled a buffalo/ into this poem/ the least I could do/ for an endangered species.” And then, in a trick straight out of Inception, he writes, “the reader is to blame/ who brings red into this poem.”

But as everyone from David Copperfield to David Blaine knows, the crowds come for the disappearing acts. Like any top-hatted illusionist, Sternberg starts with birds. In “Oriole Weather,” he wonders if orioles fly the skies over his home. Later he writes, “But oriole, the word,/ flutters around me now/ as it has all week/ unaddressed/ until at last I write// south// and it goes.” Poof. But zooming out, and surveying Sternberg’s oeuvre as a whole, we can see that a grander, more fundamental disappearing act has been taking place beneath our noses. Beginning with his third book, Bamboo Church, magic itself, as a subject, was being transformed. In his first two books, The Invention of Honey, and Map of Dreams, the fantastical, by occupying the foreground of the poem, remained hypothetical. An early poem in Bamboo Church alerts us to the fact that by submerging magic in its particulars, he’s made it general. Here’s “Quark”:





Consider the quark: its existence

            is posited by scientists entranced

            by a nothing which is there;

            a particle that does not share

            the known properties of materiality:

            there but not there: a ghost entity.



            Cyril of Thessalonika argued the case:

            God withdrew and thus freed space

            for the expanding universe. Absence

            was his gift which makes his presence

            this oxymoron worthy of contemplation:    

            the Zero at the core of all creation.



Like Coleridge attending scientific lectures to replenish his stock of metaphors, by hitting the books, the purview of Sternberg’s sorcery has penetrated the natural world more deeply than ever before. And buried here in the irony of quantum mechanics—that at the centre of everything is nothing—is an even deeper irony: by becoming more secular, the God withdrawn, Sternberg’s poems became even more magical.

His best trick he saves for last: love. When a magician aims his gifts at our hearts, we call the voodoo charisma. I’m spelling it out here because as you may have noticed, Canadian writers are notoriously short on charisma, and maybe as a result, are famously unsuccessful as lovers. It’s not pretty; if someone isn’t getting a hook in the eye, then they’re staring a little too long and immodestly at a bear. Sternberg, unlike the rest of us, has moves. To my mind, he’s the best living poet of love in our country. Bookending his oeuvre are dances. His first book’s first poem, “The True Story of My Life,” is the dramatic monologue of a young prince being groomed for an arranged, aristocratic marriage. After lessons in “personal magnetism,” and dancing—most notably “the courtship dance”—the prince absconds with, and elopes, a commoner. In the final, title poem of his most recent book, “Some Dance,” we find the prince and his bride again, the poet and his wife, as they wash the dishes and dance in their kitchen. Across the distance between these two poems, we can trace Sternberg’s imaginative journey, from the mythical, enchanted beginnings to the secular magic of dancing in a darkened kitchen. Even there, the conjurer can wring a spell out of a hand towel: “You wash and rinse,/ I dry and stack.”

How does Sternberg do it? Here’s a thought. Magic, like love, and like poetry, is a contract. We furnish the conjurer, the poet, and the lover, with the raw material of our imagination, which is their quarry and their stage. We supply the lock in which their key is turned. Sternberg can transport us because he can look into us, deeper than did ever plummet sound, and see the imaginary islands to which we dream to travel—in poetry, in magic, and in love. The world conspires against all three. Today may begin his retirement, but in Ricardo Sternberg is a Prospero whose staff won’t break, whose books won’t drown.

Pesquisa no Brasil / Researching Brazil

Researching Brazil is an integrated platform for organized access to portals, full-text collections, print reference resources, current news, and journal indexing in Brazilian Studies created and maintained by Luis A. González, Librarian for Latin American Studies at Indiana University.  The Researching Brazil Bibliographic Index currently covers 120 history and social science journals published in Brazil.  The fully bilingual index of 2000+ citations of articles allows searching for keywords in both English and Portuguese.  The index also provides direct links to available full-text journal articles:   http://www.indiana.edu/~liblatam/researching-brazil/

Flores Raras @ Media Commons

Reaching for the moon (Flores Raras, Brazil, 2013) Directed by Bruno Barreto

Q&A with Hudson Moura

DATE: Monday, December 1

LOCAL:  University of Toronto Media Commons, Room 1

130 St George St, 3rd Floor

TIME:  5:00 p.m.

LANGUAGE: English and Portuguese

It is 1951. New York poet Elizabeth Bishop is looking for new inspiration for her work. She travels to Rio de Janeiro to visit Mary. Bishop’s moving poems are at the core of a film which lushly illustrates a crucial phase in the life of this influential Pulitzer prize-winning poet. Based on the true love story of  Bishop and Brazilian architect Lota de Macedo Soares. Initial hostilities make way for a complicated yet long-lasting love affair that dramatically alters Bishop’s relationship to the world around her.

In Vanda’s Room @ Media Commons Theatre

Luso-Brazilian Film Screenings: Diaspora & Exile @ the Media Commons Theatre presents

In Vanda’s Room

(No Quarto da Vanda, Portugal, 2000)

Directed by Pedro Costa

Introduced by Kass Banning (Cinema Studies Institute)

PLACE: Media Commons Theatre (Robarts Library, 3rd Floor)

DATE: November 27, 2014

TIME: 6:30 p.m.

With the intimate feel of a documentary and the texture of a Vermeer painting, Pedro Costa’s In Vanda’s Room takes an unflinching, fragmentary look at a handful of self-destructive, marginalized people, centered around the heroin-addicted Vanda Duarte. French philosopher Jacques Rancière identifies in the film a force that lies in the tensions between the settings of a miserable life and its inherent aesthetic possibilities: Pedro Costa “films are about a situation seemingly at the heart of the political issues of today: the fate of the exploited, of people who have come from afar, from former colonies in Africa, to work on Portuguese construction sites; people who have lost their families, their health, sometimes even their lives, on those sites, and who yesterday were dumped in suburban slums and subsequently moved to new homes—better lit, more modern, not necessarily more livable. There is no aestheticizing formalism or populist deference in the attention Pedro Costa pays to every beautiful form offered by the homes of the poor, and the patience with which he listens to the oftentimes trivial and repetitive words uttered in Vanda’s room […] The attention and the patience are inscribed, instead, in a different politics of art. This politics is a stranger to that politics which works by bringing to the screen the state of the world to make viewers aware of the structures of domination in place and inspire them to mobilize their energies. […] The politics here, rather, is about thinking the proximity between art and all those other forms which can convey the affirmation of a sharing [partage] or shareable [partageable] capacity.” Jacques Rancière

Language

All movies are in Portuguese with English subtitles.  Each movie will be introduced and contextualized by Luso-Brazilian studies specialists, and a Q&A session will follow each screening.

Free Admission

Admission to this event is free, but please take the time to complete our event registration form:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1SQsj-bbJVo76aOU42BjYsQhVdNGnLVsnXShVd74rd7I/viewform

Organizers

Hudson Moura (Department of Spanish & Portuguese, University of Toronto)

Fabiano Rocha (University of Toronto Libraries)

Photo exhibit by the Portuguese Canadian History Project / Exposição de Fotografia do Projeto de História Luso-Canadiana

A Universidade de Toronto, a Universidade de York e o Camões, Instituto da Cooperação e da Língua têm o prazer de o/a convidar para a exposição de fotografia criada pelo Projeto de História Luso-Canadiana.

A exposição ficará patente ao público no foyer do Victoria College, entre os dias 19 e 21 de novembro.

A inauguração será assinalada por uma palestra a cargo de Emanuel da Silva (13:00-14:00, sala 323).

A entrada é livre e todos são bem-vindos!

XI Portuguese Language Week – Nov 10-14, 2014

                                                                                   Will of D Afonso II , june 27, 2014

                                                                           Testamento de Afonso II, 27 junho 1214

 8 SÉCULOS DE LÍNGUA PORTUGUESA-1214-2014

10-12 Novembro – Exposição TEMPO DA LÍNGUA & ETIMOLOGIA DAS PALAVRAS FAVORITAS– Victoria College, 2º Andar

11 Novembro – Lançamento do blogue SOTAQUES – sotaquesuoft.utoronto.ca

12 Novembro – MESA REDONDA DE ESCRITORES (Erika de Vasconcelos, Carlo Matos, Irene Marques, Emanuel Melo)- Capela do Victoria College, 2º andar,  Sala 213, 17:00-19:00

Esta atividade é realizada em colaboração com o Camões Instituto e a Universidade de York e está inserida no programa “Entre Margens e Memórias: Representações da Diáspora.”

13 Novembro – Encontro com a INVESTIGADORA Anabela Mimoso – Victoria College, Sala 211, 10-12am

14 Novembro – Entrega do Prémio PEDRO DA SILVA, cortesia da Caixa Geral de Depósitos Toronto

Encontro com as ESCRITORAS Aida Baptista e Anabela Mimoso – Citizenry Café (982 Queen Street W), 18:00-20:00

Esta atividade é realizada em colaboração com o Camões Instituto e a Universidade de York e está inserida no programa “Entre Margens e Memórias: Representações da Diáspora.”

“Entre Margens e Memórias: Representações da Diáspora”, Nov 2 – Dec 1 2014

The University of Toronto, York University and Camões I.P. extend you a warm invitation to attend the events which make up the program “Entre Margens e Memórias: Representações da Diáspora”. It includes talks, film screenings and exhibits and aims at promoting a critical and open reflection about the Portuguese-speaking Diaspora.

Click on the link for the Calendar of Events

Entry is free and all are welcome!

Uma tarde com o escritor Gonçalo M. Tavares

No dia 23 de outubro, os alunos do PRT320 e PRT420 tiveram a oportunidade de ouvir e colocar questões ao escritor G.M. Tavares. O escritor falou, de forma acessível, para o nosso público, composto por alunos de Português Segunda Língua. Leitura como primeiro passo para a escrita, a leitura indispensável dos clássicos e a obrigatoriedade de ouvir a opinião dos professores na seleção de títulos entre os milhões existentes.

Notas da conversa com o escritor G.M.Tavares:

O que é a escrita? O que é ser escritor?

Nao há ligação entre matéria e palavra. Por exemplo: a palavra cão não morde. A palavra mesa não serve para colocar nada em cima. O alfabeto nada mais é do que uma combinação de traços. O traço é comum à literatura, ao desenho e outras artes. A língua é muito abtracta, são traços, é quase um código morse. Como é que eu com traços e formando palavras consigo fazer ver, acreditar, sentir? É muito complexo. O leitor conseguir ver é que faz a qualidade da escrita. Quando o leitor se emociona ao ler um livro, estamos a emocionar-nos com traços. O meu livro O senhor Valery é uma homenagem a vários escritores, artistas. São histórias muito curtas. Tento escrever o mais sintéticamente possível, oito palavras em vez de quinze, se for possível. O meu objetivo é diminuir ao máximo o número de palavras dizendo o que quero dizer. Escrevo primeiro a “massa bruta”. Depois, passadas semanas, de 4 ou 5 páginas reduzo tudo para metade duma página.  Às vezes demoro 3 semanas, um mês a rever as 10 páginas que escrevi à mão. Ao fim desse mês, em vez de 10 páginas, tenho ½  página. O que me interessa é concentrar a energia toda do texto em poucas palavras. Creio que isso contribui para maiores interpretações da leitura. No livro O Senhor Brecht as histórias são muito curtas, resultado de muito trabalho. Meia página pode dizer muito.

(Leu O Desempregado/ O cantor/ O homem mal-educado)

Eu acho que se deve intervir politicamente de forma literária. No texto Avaria eu intervenho sobre a pena de morte. Eu acredito que através da caricatura, da ironia se pode intervir, se pode pôr em causa muita coisa.

(Leu O estrangeiro/ O mestre/ A revolta)

No estrangeiro, por exemplo, pode comparar-se com o professor de línguas. Gosto dos meus textos muito pequenos que podem ser usados como debate. Se se conseguir encurtar o texto, fica muito mais para interpretar.

Porque levo tanto tempo a publicar?

O próprio tempo ajuda a selecionar. O que me parece muito bom hoje, daqui a uma semana ou um mês já me parece menos bom. Escrevo, ponho numa gaveta e daqui a 3 ou 4 anos volto ao texto.  Encontro muitas coisas que já não gosto, corto, seleciono.

Geralmente quando acabamos de escrever um texto achamos muito bom. Temos que criar distância, ser críticos de nós mesmos. Pôr tempo no meio é essencial.  Tento ser leitor e ver com olhos críticos e corrigir.

A literatura não é como o teatro,  permite não fazer uma estreia antes do tempo.

Há quem diga que não se deve escrever quando se está apaixonado. A emoção não deixa ver. Quando se escreve poesia debaixo de emoção e se dá a ler o mesmo texto a outra pessoa, geralmente essa nada vê daquilo que pensamos estar a transmitir. Quando se sente e se escreve, não se tem sentido critico.

Exemplo: o diário é um registo escrito importante para a pessoa. A escrita literária é para os outros, a pessoa não está na mesma situação. Ou a pessoa quer escrever paar si  - e o diário é bom exemplo, - ou para os outros, quer perturbar os outros, são coisas completamente diferentes.

Os surrealistas defendiam a escrita espontânea, automática, quase nada ficou do surrealismo a não ser na pintura.

Ler – por onde se deve começar?

Deve começar-se por textos simples, i.e., que não utilizem palavras complexas. Eu gosto de O Senhor Valery porque mesmo uma criança pode entender.

Para mim a leitura está associada ao prazer, é quase uma excitação. Está associada a toque. Eu leio sempre de lápis na mão. Não consigo ler sem um lápis. Ler não é passividade, para mim é uma atividade. Para mim, não é tempo passivo. Fisicamente eu leio debruçado soobre o livro. Quando estou cansado eu não leio, vejo televisão.

Se a pessoa está a ler um livro que não lhe dá prazer, deve deixar esse livro e passar a outro.

Deve ler-se os clássicos. Se o livro é bom e a pessoa não quer ter o trabalho de ler, está a ignorar as várias gerações. Exemplos: Crime e Castigo, Alice no Pais das Maravilhas, A Montanha Mágica, O grande sertão.

Deve ouvir-se as gerações anteriores e confiar na opinião daqueles que continuam a selecionar esses livros.

Em tantos milhões de livros para escolher ler, é bom ouvir a opinião de outros. Deve poder escolher-se à vontade mas dentro de uma lista proposta por alguém que lê e pode saber mais. Não se perde tanto tempo.

O que é um livro?

Não é uma capa. Um livro é algo que trata a lingua de forma diferente, é exigente, muda a velocidade da leitura. Se compararmos com um artigo de jornal, por exemplo, o texto literário tem que ter outra natureza.  Um livro deve inaugurar um mundo qualquer diferente.

Há uma diferença entre informação e cultura. A internete por exemplo dá a informação imediata, mas a cultura ensina a relacionar. A interneta com os “links” destrói a ideia do livro. O livro ajuda-nos a fazer ligações, ajuda à concentração.

A palavra concentração vem de “com um centro”. Só pode haver um centro, a leitura é um processo de concentração. A leitura eletrónica muda os centros, faz perder a concentracão.

Quando e como escrevo?

Quando escrevo, desligo a net, o telemóvel, fecho a porta, estou 4 a 5 horas fechado no meu “bunker”, os meus pais por exemplo quando querem comunicar comigo mostram a sua compreensão e amor, colocado-me papéis escritos debaixo da porta. Fico num estado meio hipnotizado, de zombie, vou tomar café à cozinha, mas nao falo com eles, com ninguém.

Geralmente na primeira hora não consigo escrever nada, só à terceira hora começa a sair qualquer coisa. O ritmo é muito importante, tem que se ter tempo, horas seguidas para se escrever.

O papel do livro é importante, o brilho é mais difícil de ler, no écran há um brilho que obriga a parar.

Escrever exige tempo. Eu não acredito que quem queira mesmo escrever não o encontre. Tem que se dizer não a muitas coisas. Tem que se dizer não às pessoas de quem gostamos muito.

Agora há mais tempo. Basta pensar no tempo dos nossos avós, o tempo que precisavam para cozinhar por exemplo. É injusto dizer que não temos tempo se pensarmos nas gerações dos nossos avós. Eu não concordo que a vida seja mais ocupada agora.

Como é que sabe que o que se escreve tem valor? Porque demorei tanto tempo a publicar?

Mandar o livro concorrer a prémios é uma boa maneira. Os amigos e familia vão sempre achar que o que escrevemos é bom. Temos que ser criticos de nós mesmos. Temos que deixar passar tempo. Só me atrevi a publicar quando me senti preparado para o que pudessem dizer. Muita pessoas publicam um livro e nunca mais publicam nada. Umas vezes porque foram tão elogiados que não se atrevem a escrever outro com medo de não ser capaz de repetir a proeza. Outros porque foram tão criticados que perdem a confiança.

Eu não concordo com aqueles criticos muito exigentes que acham que é preciso destruir para estimular a pessoa a fazer melhor. Acho criminoso destruir o sonho de uma pessoa que quer escrever. Devemos ser generosos para que a pessoa não abandone a escrita. Uma pessoa que tira o sonho a outra devia ser presa.

É importante ler? Que livros mais me influenciaram?

Ler é a primeira parte, escrever é a segunda,

Gosto de escritores do imaginário e também dos realistas. Algusn escritores e artistas que me influenciaram: Virginia Wolf, Voltaire, Pessoa, Musil, Kafka, Clavino, Borges. Eu leio, leio todo o tempo. Tenho milhares de livros e leio sempre.

Tragédia literária é o que muitas vezes acontece com a poesia. Fernando Pessoa é a antītese da poesia emocional.

Os professores deviam dar aos alunos uma lista de livros obrigatórios.

(Contou o episódio do irmão a fazer doutoramento em Matemática  Aplicada em Harvard cujo professor na primeira aula deu uma lista de livros clássicos a todos os alunos. Um atreveu-se a perguntar a razão de ter que ler aquelas obras literárias se eram alunos de Matemática e o professor respondeu que se recusava a falar com pessoas que não tinham lido pelo menos aqueles livros.).

Viagens e leitura mudam a cabeça das pessoas. Se a pessoa não viaja e não lê, passados dez anos, está com a mesma cabeça.

Notas Completas aqui!

Luso-Brazilian Film Screenings: Diaspora & Exile @ the Media Commons Theatre

The Department of Spanish and Portuguese in collaboration with the University of Toronto Libraries would like to invite you to the Luso-Brazilian Film Screenings: Diaspora & Exile that will be held in the last 3 Thursdays of the month of November at the Media Commons Theatre (Robarts Library, 3rd floor).

PLACE    Media Commons Theatre (Robarts Library, 3rd Floor)
DATE    November 13, 20, and 27, 2014
TIME:    6:30pm to 9:30pm

Screening 1 (Nov 13, 2014):    Foreign Land (Terra Estrangeira, Brazil/Portugal, 1995) Directed by Walter Sales and Daniella Thomas. Introduced by João Pedro Vicente Faustino (Camões Instituto)
Screening 2 (Nov 20, 2014):    Beyond the Road (Além da Estrada, Brazil/Uruguay, 2012) Directed by Charly Braun. Introduced by Hudson Moura (Department of Spanish & Portuguese)
Screening 3 (Nov 27, 2014):    In Vanda’s Room (No Quarto da Vanda, Portugal, 2000) Directed by Pedro Costa. Introduced by Kass Banning (Cinema Studies Institute)
 Language

All movies are in Portuguese with English subtitles. Each movie will be introduced and contextualized by Luso-Brazilian studies specialists, and a Q&A session will follow each screening.

 Free Admission

Admission to this event is free, but please take the time to complete our event registration form:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1SQsj-bbJVo76aOU42BjYsQhVdNGnLVsnXShVd74rd7I/viewform

 Organizers

Hudson Moura (Department of Spanish & Portuguese)

Fabiano Rocha (University of Toronto Libraries)

 Contact

For further information regarding this event, please contact fabiano.rocha@utoronto.ca

Critical Review: Sleepwalking Land

by Kelsey Cunningham (Major in Portuguese)


Sleepwalking Land directed by Teresa Prata (Terra Sonâmbula, Portugal/Mozambique, 2007), shows the viewer the necessity of stories and dreams to survive the brutality of warfare.

Mudinga, a 12 year-old boy who cannot remember his past, wanders with Tuahir, an old man, through the countryside of Mozambique. The pair travel aimlessly, gathering food and attempting to avoid the marauding gangs that plague the country. On their travels, they find a burnt-out bus littered with carbonized bodies.    Among the remains of the assault on the bus, the pair find a suitcase full of notebooks alongside the body of a man shot through the heart. The notebooks tell the story of war from a civilian victim’s perspective; Mudinga reads the pages aloud, giving voice to Kindzu’s own story of bitter loss and the physical and emotional wounds of war. Through these pages Mudinga also discovers possible clues to his identity and the identity of his mother. As Mudinga reads Kindzu’s diary aloud to the illiterate Tuahir, the audience wonders if perhaps the boy is inventing some of the story in order to justify his own hopes. As the plot progresses, reuniting Mudinga with his mother becomes the reason for the pair to go on.

A Sleepwalking Land is indeed the sense one gets from the depiction of Mozambique from this film, but the film does not mention any specific political group or even show any national symbols such as a flag or map. The film is meant to speak to the civilian casualties and suffering of any war, a place filled with sleepwalkers; people who are forced to hold on the dreams as their physically deprived and mentally drained bodies are tortured by the realities of human cruelty. Weakened but afloat in their own dreams, they are like the shell of a worn out bus drifting into the ocean; clinging to the last available shred of hope, as absurd as it may be, while slowly sinking into the abyss of inevitability lest they run ashore some unlikely salvation. The last scene captures the liberating power of dreams and stories beautifully as Mudinga approaches the abandoned ship where his potential mother has made her nest far away from the pain of land.

Both Sleepwalking Land novel and film are available at Robarts Library.

Explore our Portuguese Collections. Follow these links: Books & Films


                                                                                       

INTERACTIVE NARRATIVES NEW MEDIA AND SOCIAL ENGAGEMENT

Read the Proceedings: interactiveconference.spanport.utoronto.ca

Watch Conference’s video: http://youtu.be/AotT8fhop-s



First Day – Thursday Evening – October 23rd

Media Commons Theatre Robarts Library (3rd Floor)

130 St George St, Toronto (St. George Subway Station)

18:30-19:00 Registration

19:00-19:30 Opening Remarks

19:30-20:30 Crowdsourcing Documentary Making: Social Protest, Social Media and Engagement – Greg Elmer (Ryerson University)

Special Screening: Preempting Dissent (2014, 41’)

_____________________________________________________________

 Second Day – Friday – October 24th

Room 119 – Emmanuel College

75 Queens Park Crescent E, Toronto (Museum Subway Station)

10:00-10:20 Registration & Coffee

10:20-12:00 Panel 1: New Narratives and Self-Interactivity

Moderator: Hudson Moura (Chair, Organizing Committee)

Florian Hadler & Daniel Irrgang (University of Arts Berlin, Germany) – Nonlinearity, Multilinearity, Simultaneity. Notes on Epistemological Structures

Tom Van Nuenen (Tilburg University, The Nederlands) – Journey as a post-literary travel tale.

Kris Fallon (UC Davis, USA) – Streams of the Self: The Instagram Feed as Narrative Autobiography

Siobhan O’Flynn (University of Toronto) – Narrative Strategies and Participatory Design: Framing New Methodologies for Narrative Studies

12:10-14:00 Lunch

14:00-15:20 Panel 2: Social and Interactive Multimedia Projects

Moderator: Martin Zeilinger (OCAD University, Canada)

Heidi Rae Cooley & Duncan Buell (University of South Carolina, USA) – From Ghosts of the Horseshoe to Ward One: Critical Interactives for Inviting Social Engagement with Instances of Historical Erasure (Columbia, South Carolina)

Rafael Antunes (Universidade Lusófona, Portugal) – Blue Pencil: Experiences in Transmedia

Mariana Ciancia, Francesca Piredda & Simona Venditti (Politecnico di Milano, Italy) – Shaping and Sharing Imagination: Designers and the transformative power of stories.

Coffee Break (20’)

15:40-17:00 Panel 3: Documentary and Social Interactivity

Moderator: Robert Davidson (U. of Toronto, Canada)

Ben Lenzner (University of Waikato, New Zealand) – Emerging Forms of Citizen Video Activism: Challenges in Documentary Storytelling & Sustainability

Begoña Gonzalez Cuesta (IE University – Madrid, Spain) – I-Docs and New Narratives: Meaning Making in Highrise

Janice Xu (Holy Family University, USA) – Telling the Stories of Left-behind Children in China: From Diary Collection to Digital Filmmaking

_____________________________________________________________

Third Day – Saturday – October 25th

Room 119 – Emmanuel College

75 Queens Park Crescent E, Toronto (Museum Subway Station)

10:30-12:00 Panel 4: Remediation, Art and Activism

Moderator: Marta Marín-Dòmine (Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada)

Benj Gerdes (Long Island University – Post, USA) – Broken Screens
(and the Publics who don’t view them)

Isabella Trindade (Ryerson University, Canada) – In-between: between the concrete and the virtual, the physical and the imaginary

Charo Lacalle (Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain) – Analysing women’s web comments on television fiction

12:00-14:00 Lunch

14:00-15:20 Panel 5: Film and Interactive Narratives

Moderator: David Sweeney (The Glasgow School of Art, Scotland)

Sandra Lim (Ryerson University, Canada) – Xapiri: at the juncture of history, experience, and technology

Kalli Paakspuu (York University, Canada) – Off the Wall with Shchedryk

Alexandre Coronato Rodrigues & Roselita Lopes de Almeida Freitas (ESPM – São Paulo, Brazil) – Collective Authorship In Real Time

Coffee Break (20’)

15:40-17:00 Panel 6: Theatre, Multimedia and New Narratives

Moderator: Sandra Lim (Ryerson University, Canada)

David Sweeney (The Glasgow School of Art, Scotland) – Crossing Boundaries: National Theatre Live, Backstage Access and Maximum Visibility

Daisy Abbott (The Glasgow School of Art, Scotland) – Old plays, New Narratives: Fan Production of New Media Texts from Broadcast Theatre

Aida Jordão (York University, Canada) – Inês de Castro on YouTube: Re-gendered Narratives

17:00-17:20 Closing Remarks

_____________________________________________________________

Organizing Committee:

Hudson Moura (Chair) (Assistant Professor, Department of Spanish and Portuguese – University of Toronto)

Ricardo Sternberg (Professor, Department of Spanish and Portuguese – University of Toronto)

Regina Cunha (Ph.D. Candidate, Communication & Society Research Centre – CECS, Universidade do Minho, Portugal)

Cecília Queiroz (Director, BRAFFTV-Brazilian Film and TV Festival of Toronto)

Organizers:

Department of Spanish and Portuguese – University of Toronto

BRAFFTV-Brazilian Film and TV Festival of Toronto

Sponsors:

Department of Spanish and Portuguese – University of Toronto

Office of the Principal – Victoria College



Download Program – Download Program (PDF 1.5MB)