Coming up -- views on Rio+20 and the People's Forum

I'm thrilled to have the opportunity to be in Rio de Janeiro this June, where I'll be gathering perspectives on the United Nations Conference on Sustainability and Development, or Rio+20, and the parallel People's Summit, which will bring together social movements and sectors of civil society engaged in environmental justice activism.  The focus of my time there will be to document arts and cultural programming around the events, with the goal of further considering how Brazilian artists are engaging with environmental issues and presenting new perspectives on some of the key concepts at play, including  increasingly and urgently contested ideas of nature, conservation, development, sustainability, ecology, and environmental justice.  This research is part of an ongoing book project on the representation of nature and landscape in contemporary Brazilian poetry and visual arts.

I'll be regularly posting news, findings, and images here.  In the meantime, here are links for the multilingual websites for the two summits.  They are well worth exploring. 

For the official UN Summit:
http://www.uncsd2012.org/rio20/index.html

And for the (from my perspective, more interesting) People's Summit:
http://cupuladospovos.org.br/en/

http://rio20.net/en/

 More soon in the lead-up and after arrival!

Actualities and Potentialities of Barthe's Mythologies, II

This myth of the human "condition" relies on a very old mystification, which consists in always placing Nature at the bottom of History.  Any classical humanism postulates that if we scratch the surface of human history, the relativity of men's institutions, or the superficial diversity of their skins (but why not ask the parents of Emmett Till, the young black murdered by white men, what they think of the great family of men?), we soon reach the bedrock of universal human nature.  A progressive humanism , to the contrary must always consider inverting the terms of this old imposture, constantly scouring nature, its "laws" and its "limits," to discover History there and finally to posit Nature as itself historical.

Actualities and Potentialities from Barthe's Mythologies (New Translation by Richard Howard and Annette Lavers) I

The strike signifies that man is total, that all his functions are connected with one another, that the roles of man in the street, taxpayer, and soldier are much too fragile to oppose the contagion of facts, and that in society all are concerned by all.  By protesting that a strike is a disturbance to those it does not concern, the bourgeoisie testifies to a cohesion of social functions which it is the very goal of the strike to manifest: the paradox is that the petit bourgeois invokes the naturalness of his isolation at the very moment when the strike overwhelms him with the obviousness of his subordination.

Quick Translations of Gerald Stern (on occasion of his visit to Smith next week)

The Snow on the River

Snow on the river is my guess though any

change in temperature would do and sometimes

filth alone and as for the cracking, that comes

now in March and sometimes even earlier,

one cloud bumping into another as

we used to say, two sticks curling, then exploding,

some seamy actor from the ‘50s mixing

one smoke with another, his gum popping.

(from Everything is Burning, 2005)

A Neve no Rio

Neve no rio é meu palpite embora qualquer

mudança na temperatura iria servir e às vezes

só sujeira e quanto à estalada, isso vem

agora em março e às vezes até antes,

uma nuvem se esbarrando numa outra como

a gente dizia, duas varas se curvando, e explodindo,

algum ator brega dos anos 50 misturando

uma fumaça com outra, seu chiclete estralando.

From Where I Sit

From where I sit, given the time of year,

the light comes only between the trees, but there is

water, and at four in the evening, given our

latitude and the direction we face, the sun

lights up what seems, from where I sit, more like

a pool and I am changed for a minute, though it

is a river, you can depend on that, I crossed

from time to time and lived on for a while

and was assured that way the hundreds of nights

I walked my mile and ended up at the hot

waterfall and the gears of the nineteenth century

above the high brick wall I rested under.

(from Save the Last Dance, 2008)

De Onde Estou Sentado

De onde estou sentado, nesta época do ano,

a luz vem só entre as árvores, mas tem

água, e às quatro da tarde, na nossa

latitude e ao rumo que encaramos, o sol

ilumina o que parece, de onde estou sentado, mais com

uma piscina e estou transformado por um minuto, embora

seja um rio, isso pode acreditar, eu atravessava

de vez em quando e morava nele por um tempo

e eu era sossegado assim as centenas de noites

eu caminhava minha milha e terminava lá na

cachoeira quente e nas engrenagems do século dezenove

em cima da alta parede de tijolo sob a qual eu descansava.

uh-oh

a sign the writing is slipping into some new realm of abstraction:  had to confirm that "thingish" is in fact a word ......

Water/Fall -- Sanderson Brook

When in Rio 3

"A Falta que Nos Move" (The Absence that Moves Us) -- film by Christiane Jatahy. Dogma-like, formalist exercise, drawing film closer to its theatrical roots. High-brow reality t.v. brought to the screen? Reflection on the narcissist vacuum facing post-utopian artistic/intellectual life?  Worth (re)viewing.