6: "To Sao Paolo, via Buenos Aires"

The past two weeks have stretched out and felt like two months.

Friday, June 5th, I gave my second public lecture. “How I Wonder What You Are”, I called it. A response to an argument I’d had with my cousin, while sitting on the cut grass of a backyard at a family reunion last summer. We had been talking about films…“Wall-e”, “Bringing Up Baby”, “Four Months, Three Weeks, and Two Days”, “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly”, among others.

We got to talking whether it’s worth it to analyze films, to talk about them at all, instead of just being quiet and trying to feel wonder, awe. He showed me Walt Whitman’s poem, “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer”.

The lecture I gave put together a lot of different things I’d read or seen in the past year.

I gave it in the Complejo Perón. About 25 people showed up. They liked it and followed it much better than the first one.

That night I went to a peña at UADER, with Daniel and some of his friends. The next night I visited Santa Fe, across the river, for the first time. I walked through the downtown, the pedestrian mall, stopping at some book stores and a Havana café, then spending the night at a professor’s house, with Daniel and his classmates, eating pizza, drinking, playing guitar, singing, talking. We took a 5AM bus back to Paraná.

* * *
I’d been assigned the cover story for the July issue of Barriletes, to write 2000 words about the Wal-Mart protests and reclamos and criticisms of the store in the U.S.

Because of classes, cooking, listening to new music, drawing, and…waiting, I didn’t get started on the story til Wednesday night.

Thursday morning I took a bus to Buenos Aires, for a Fulbright ETA conference in Sao Paolo, Brazil.

In the afternoon I walked through Palermo and stopped by Papelera Palermo, to buy some notebooks. I spent the night at Kathryn’s, again. Her mostly French roommates made a Christmas-in-June dinner. We started at 11 at night, eating cheese-stuffed dates and bruschetta. Then we had salmon stuffed with cream cheese and a starchy, crunchy vegetable. Next was the main course…roasted duck, in a sweet sauce with carrots and onions, served with rice and a baguette. Then some creamy brie cheese and bread. Then a lemon cake and cream. Then chocolate truffles.

There were long pauses in between each course, time to smoke a cigarette, chat, take pictures, drink some red wine. Everyone exchanged gifts afterwards. The best one was a second-hand black sweater with “Memento Mori” poorly stitched into the chest in white yarn.

We finished eating at 2. Kathryn and I went to bed by 4, waking up at 7 to go to a hotel and meet other Fulbrighters.

I wrote the first part of my piece at Kathryn’s Friday afternoon. At night, Hallock and I got dinner together, then tried to see some Buñuel shorts at an art theater. They were cancelled because of projector problems, so we walked around and talked instead.

Saturday we flew to Brazil, spending the night in a hotel near the airport, eating dinner at a steakhouse where they hurry around with the meat on skewers, placing different cuts beside you every few minutes.

Sunday we got to downtown Sao Paolo, our hotel a block away from where they’d had the Gay Pride Parade, the largest in the world. By the time we got there the parade had ended. Thousands of people were still around, drunk, wild, screaming, happy, pleased.

Barricades were knocked over. Girls were kissing girls, guys kissing guys. People were passed out on the ground, or sitting with their head between their knees. Vendors were selling corn-on-the-cob and beer and drinks out of Styrofoam boxes. Some people were dressed up in costumes and in drag. Others were topless.

There were some police around, making sure nothing got violent. It smelled like piss and vomit in a lot of places.

I went back to the hotel, to my room up on the sixth floor, and finished the rough draft of the Wal-Mart piece.

Monday we visited the U.S. Consulate and had some bureaucratic meetings and video conferences. That afternoon we took a bus up, over the mountains, through the jungle, and to the ocean. We stayed at a resort on the sea for the next four days.

There were ETAs from Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and Brazil, and most of the time was spent presenting what our trip’s been like and what we’ve been working on.

They pampered us, serving us big meals and coffee and snack breaks every hour. We had nice cabanas, freshly painted, solidly built, hammocks in front, and more beds than people in each one.

The hotel was a short walk from the beach, which was surrounded by the green mountains, and looked out to an island in the distance.

I had long talks some of the other Fulbrighters, hearing where they’d come from, what they were up to, where they were headed.

B___, from the east coast, had been writing for the AP and the Wall Street Journal before he came to Chile for the grant.

M___, from the south, grew up on a commune, has hitchhiked through South America, and has now started a music project in a Brazilian prison with support of the Minister of Justice of her host city. She also teaches music lessons and plays her flute with a band of elderly men. She’s also translating a book of poetry by a Chilean author.

M___, now from Chicago, studied physics and philosophy at Yale, has been living with Carmelites in Hyde Park, and is thinking of joining a seminary.

B___, from California, did a Peace Corps tour on a farm in Nicaragua and is now in Brazil working with an NGO.

R___, a Fulbright director from Washington, had done two Peace Corps tours when he was young – one in Ecuador and one in Panama. He and a buddy drove motorcycles home from Panama to Ohio when the latter tour finished.

They served us rice and beans, roast beef and fish, potatoes and salads, and fruits like mangoes, bananas, passion fruit, apples, kiwis, papayas, melons, and grapes, and many others I can´t name. And coffee. And guarana soda. And desserts of flan, quiche, pineapple sprinkled with lime, fruit salad, chocolate mousse.

At night you could see the milky way up in the sky. The sand and the water had phosphorescent algae that glowed when you shook your hands and feet. Lightning bugs were flying around, too, making us think we’d seen shooting stars. We stripped down and went into the water in our underwear.

On Thursday we took motorboats to the island. We played catch with a Frisbee, swam in the ocean, ran along the shore trying not to let our feet get touched by the waves. Stephen and I climbed up some rocks and took pictures and looked out to the ocean, seeing other islands – with their forests and mountains – nearby and far-off on the horizon.

We danced a lot, too, at a local bar, and with a guitarist who came to the hotel, and with a capoeira group the final night. A lot of the locals showed up when the music started playing, kids and adults. They were nice to us, patient with us, trying to get us to move, to show us Samba and other steps. They looked a lot different, talked and acted differently, than Argentines.

Friday we took a bus back to Sao Paolo, to the airport, and said goodbye. I spent another night in Buenos Aires, tried to catch-up on some writing in the afternoon, then got on a bus back to Paraná Saturday night.

5: "It´s All Shutdown"

I moved last Sunday.

That afternoon, after packing, taking a cab down the street, and unpacking, I went to a concert at Elefante – a hipster art space a couple blocks from the pedestrian mall.

There are drawings and paintings on the walls, a painted mannequin torso on the floor. They play Cut Copy before shows start. They’d been screening John Waters and Russ Meyer films Sunday nights.

Juanito el cantor came from Buenos Aires.

After the show I walked to my old house and returned the key. On my way home, along plaza San Miguel, I ran into Gabriel. He was the union member I’d talked to at a Wal-Mart protest a couple weeks back. We had met once to talk about the recent protests – reclamos. I was working on a new article about it for Barriletes. I had called him the past week to get together again, but he hadn’t gotten back to me.

This happens a lot in Paraná, bumping into people, especially when you want to see them. The downtown is so tiny and dense that, even with 250,000 people, you´re always saying hello to somebody.

We planned to meet Tuesday, after my classes.

I had two lit lectures to give. One class heard my final lecture on Huck Finn. In the other, I compared Bradbury’s “Usher II” story from “The Martian Chronicles” with Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher”. I said that Bradbury’s story takes a psychopathic, decadent Poe character and turns him political, has him give a polemic on censorship, book burning, all that.

I went to a café to read and wait for Gabriel. I sent him a text, telling him where I was.

He called me, said he couldn’t come. They were at Wal-Mart. “It’s all shutdown,” he told me.

I rushed home, changed clothes, took off my watch, put on my boots. I grabbed my camera and notebook and recorder and hustled to the store, past my old house.

I could hear the explosions, the fireworks, as I got close to the store.

I got to the end of the neighborhood, over a rise, towards the shantytowns. There were two clouds of black smoke rising between the afternoon sun.

I got up to the protesters, found Gabriel. The entrances were blocked with burning tires. No cars were let in, only foot traffic.

The chief of police was there, wearing a striped sweater and aviators. The head of the SEC – the service-workers union – was there, too. A big, bald, clear-eyed guy named Rupert. He said there were complaints because they were blowing off fireworks so close to a gas station.

“But that’s a secondary concern,” he said.

Seven people were fired that morning, including a pregnant woman.

The SEC picketers were going to spend the night out front. A truck pulled up and a metal barrel was hauled up to the line. I asked Gabriel what it was for.

“Choripan,” he said. That’s chorizo served in a bun. To eat. To feed everybody. He made a joke about roasting marshmallows over the tire fire.

I headed home after dark. My new roommates are Claudio and Daniel. A friend of theirs who had just got back from working in Bariloche, a resort town, came over to eat.

I cooked for the first time in the new apartment. I brought my laptop into the kitchen, put it in on top of the broken refrigerator, and listened to MGMT as I chopped tomatoes and carrots and onions and garlic. My mom had sent me her minestrone soup recipe earlier in the day. Zucchini is out of season here, so I used a squash called zapallo anco, instead.

We sat down, the four of us, to eat, at 11PM. The way my mom makes it is to toast some bread, cover it with mozzarella, then put it in the base of the bowl and pour the minestrone over so it all melts.

Claudio and Daniel washed up. Their friend went home. I ate a pear for dessert and wondered if I’d be going back to Wal-Mart the next day.

4: "To Córdoba"

Holy Week was coming. I decided to travel.

I called another Fulbrighter in the province, Amanda. We got a hold of Hallock, the ETA in Córdoba province.

I figured they’d be up for camping, hiking, doing something outdoors. Amanda had done bee research in the Mexican desert. Hallock had been a sled dog guide in Alaska.

Amanda came to Paraná from tiny Gualeguay Wednesday night. We got pizza and drinks near the bus station. She was the first Fulbrighter I had talked to since we had all left Buenos Aires and begun working.

We took an overnight, six-hour bus to Córdoba, the second big city of Argentina.

We got out of the bus terminal and walked downtown, to the main plazas and the Jesuit quarter. The sun was rising, the sky lightening. We stopped in a café and talked for a couple hours.

We met Hallock at lunchtime. He had taken a bus from Río Cuarto, the city where he works. We ate at a Lebanese restaurant then got on a bus for La Cumbre, a mountain village in the Sierras outside the city.

We arrived after dark and hiked to the edge of town, to a campsite at the foot of a big, lit-up Jesus statue. The next day we took a trail that runs behind the the monument, over a couple dry, grassy hills, past a ranch and a creek, and down to a dam. We got a ride back to town in the back of a pick-up. We had clear, warm, bright weather.

We took another afternoon bus, to Capilla del Monte, a mountain village that´s had a lot of UFO sightings. We stayed at a municipal campsite, crowded with holiday travelers.

Saturday we got up at 9. The sun rose and made the tent too hot. We took a cab outside town, to Uritorco, the tallest peak in the range, about 2000 meters high. The cabbie said a Buenos Aires family bought the mountain and charges admission.

We paid the 20 pesos entrance and hiked to the top. It took us a couple hours, with a steady pace. We stopped for a break now and then, to drink some water, look around. At the top we ate crackers and cheese, salami, and apples and oranges. We took pictures. We talked about college, about what we’re doing now. The breeze dried our sweat and cooled us before the descent.

We camped one more night, then returned to the capital in the morning. Hallock left early. Amanda and I stayed another night, checking out museums, going to “A Woman Under the Influence” at an art theater in the evening. It was Easter Sunday. The bars were crowded. People were out.

3: "Thursday Philosophy" [Now With More Paragraphs!]

I met Sergio soon after arriving. He studies philosophy at UADER, a third-year student. He’s from a small village in Entre Ríos and rents a room from a family here in Paraná. He works construction on weekends to help with rent. Our classes are in the same building – the Escuela Normal – so we’ve been bumping into each other here and there.

Last weekend he went back home to help his family get ready for winter. He said they slaughter a cow and preserve the meat, making salami and such. I asked if I could go with next time and see it. He said sure, they’d be doing more in the next few weeks.

We’ve gotten the habit of meeting on Thursdays. I have a conversation class at three in the afternoon, then literature at four. He has mythology at seven, so we’ve been meeting in between, drinking mate, eating churros, talking. His friend Darío has come along, too. He’s another phil major who also has mythology at seven o’clock.

The afternoons are getting cooler as the fall’s coming, and it’s hard to find a warm place to go where you don’t have to buy something. But it’s still enough to sit outside in the patio of the school. They’ve brought a chocolate liquor the past couple weeks, to sip on between the yerba. Maybe that helps.

This week I brought a translation I made of a Times op-ed, a letter from Mark Taylor at Columbia. It’s called “End the University as We Know It”.

It says grad school is the Detroit of academia, that grad students are being duped and ripped off and hyperspecialized off into irrelevance. Taylor wants to mix everything up: end tenure, create alt dissertations, have problem-solving programs instead of discipline-centered departments.

Sergio really liked this when I mentioned it to him last week, so I wrote up my Spanish version of it. He read it aloud, fixing my rare or wrong usage as he went, snapping the sheet of paper in skeptical delight when he got to line about “ever-increasing specialization”.

He brought the Argentine version of Le Monde diplomatique – el Dipló, as it’s called. It’s got translations of the French and some local articles and notes. He showed me an article about a six-day sit-in in Chicago last winter, at Republic Windows & Doors.

I had never heard about it.

I talked about my ideas for the lecture I’m giving in a week, about interpretation and wonder, about what happens when we stop beholding something and start thinking about it, abstracting it. When we got up to leave I asked a question that’d struck me lately – that if the lack of Spanish philosophy has something to do with the Inquisition and kicking the Protestants out of Spain.

2: "Friday Lunch"

My class schedule runs from Monday to Thursday, so I've always got a three-day (if not often four-day) weekend. I had met a student of the National University a few weeks ago, after a screening of a documentary while we hung out at the AGMER union hall. Daniel and I bumped into each other again, at the Barriletes community center, again for a film screening.

He lives off the same street as me - La Prida - but on the other side of downtown, where it becomes La Paz. He lives in a house with Claudio, a social sciences student at UADER (Daniel studies communication), and Guillermo, a pediatrics doctor in residency at the hospital down the street. The house is spartan, with peeling, unpainted walls, light bulbs dangling from holes in the ceiling. It's got a patio on the first floor, and a big rooftop, with a brick barbecue. The PC in the front room can play music that reaches through the bedrooms and into the kitchen, where we eat lunch.

I woke up at 11:30, about my usual time these days. I got dressed and left, arriving a little late, past noon. Daniel was cooking. The past couple times Claudio had cooked, making pizza from scratch, frying it in a skillet on the stove as their oven doesn't work. Martin, a friend from UNER, was over, too. The food was ready - bow tie pasta with a sauce of tomatoes, squash, and onions, and a baguette on the side.

We ate. We talked. Claudio had loaned me some music last time. One of the groups was Sumo, a short-lived rock group from the 80's. I asked Claudio if he'd ever listened to Joy Division. He said there was some link between the bands, somebody had a girlfriend or boyfriend between the two. Martin asked me about Obama, about the perspective of Latin America from the U.S., about academia there. We finished lunch and ate bananas for dessert, then smoked some Marlboros and cleaned up the kitchen. Claudio boiled water and filled a bottle for his yerba mate, to bring with him to afternoon classes. I left with Martin. We live near each other and walked home together.

Dispatches from the Provinces of Argentina

I am in Paraná, Argentina, the capital of Entre Ríos province, a city of 250,000 that overlooks the Paraná River. This part of the country is called the provinces – las provincias – as opposed to the capital, Buenos Aires, the cosmopolitan life. I have a Fulbright ETA scholarship for 2009. I arrived here in late March and have now settled and gotten used to being here. I work at the Autonomous University of Entre Ríos (UADER), which was once a “terciary” school – a teacher training college – but was recently turned into a university. It is the only provincial university in Argentina; the rest are national.

My blog posts will have four paragraphs, and maybe a photo or video. This will keep my posts short, and make them easier, simpler to write. Maybe the brevity will do something for my style.

I am not going to explain much, then, in these posts. Who is who or where something comes from. That will just have to come from reading each entry over time. Instead, I’m just going to relate some things I’ve done, seen or heard.

My life has been quiet here – I live in a house a few blocks from downtown, with a professor, her husband, and their 5 year-old son. But I’m also one of the only foreigners in town. Every day I’ve been here I’ve only been with other Argentines. So though much of what I do might be…daily, routine, it’s a routine of another place, people.