www.landofmilkandmoney.com

Die Zeit ist da!

As of today we are merely two weeks away from the release of my novel, Land of Milk and Money, published by Tagus Press of the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth. The university has a robust program of Portuguese studies and the theme of my novel made it a natural for the “Portuguese in the Americas” series, of which my book is #18. (Collect them all!)

Of course, if my novel were only thematically significant, then it would not be likely to attract much attention. I have it on good authority, however, that it is also a rollicking good yarn. Bestselling author John Lescroart read the entire manuscript and proclaimed it excellent. Here's what he provided me for a cover blurb:

In Land of Milk and Money, the author mines rich family history to create a full-blooded tale that patient readers will find insightful, rewarding, and entertaining.

That's not bad, is it? In the note that accompanied the blurb, Lescroart said, “Really excellent work. Congratulations.”

Well-known California author Gerald Haslam also provided a cover quote:

One of the West’s singular migrations—from the Azores to California’s Great Central Valley—is given faces and voices in Land of Milk and Money. Along with its triumphs, the Francisco family embodies the challenges to an immigrant family in a new land, including the often-ignored difficulties posed by success and the loss of the old culture. A must read.

Got that? It's a must read! (And we can trust Gerry Haslam because he's one-eighth Azorean.)

Getting a novel published is a success in and of itself, especially considering that math professors are not known for their literary accomplishments. Nevertheless, it would please me greatly if Land of Milk and Money were at least a modest success, forcing Tagus Press into more than one printing. You can help, of course.

The next time you pop into your friendly neighborhood bookstore, please be sure to inquire sweetly:

“When will you have Land of Milk and Money from Tagus Press in stock?”

I would much appreciate it. No doubt hordes of inquisitive blog readers could give the book quite a boost.

I hope, too, to see some of you at book events in various parts of California. A few are already lined up and others are being sought. See the Events page at www.landofmilkandmoney.com for current details. I look forward to meeting you!

Mass marketing

The Church is my bulwark

Over the years I have been to a handful of book-launch parties. The most recent—and most impressive—was for the hardcover debut of John Lescroart's The Hunter. There was food, live music, book-signing (of course), and an overflow crowd of a couple hundred people. On the other hand, I've been to book events where chairs are set up for forty and only a quarter of them get used. That can be dispiriting.

Naturally I'm concerned that my own book events—which begin next month (watch this space for more specfics)—not be wash-outs. I want crowds of eager people to hang on my every word and congregate in lines to get my autograph. Of course I do!

Sensible people know that this is not a particularly reasonable expectation for a no-name, first-time novelist, especially one whose publisher is a small academic press. Although one can never tell what strange things might occur against all expectations (after all, people bought Twilight), sometimes a bit of divine intervention might help.

Exactly! And that's what I got!

Later this summer I will be featured at a book-launch event that is expected to draw 300 people. They will treat me with the utmost respect and consideration and it's likely that several will buy my book and get my autograph. The event can hardly go wrong, for it will be sponsored by the Roman Catholic Church.

Perhaps you are goggling in perplexity. Perhaps I took you by surprise, despite the giveaway title of this post. Why on earth would the Church be so nice to one of its lost sheep? I'll explain.

If my novel were not about a significant era in the history of Portuguese immigration to the West Coast, it would not have found a publisher so quickly. The university press that is bringing it out has a special interest in the Azorean diaspora and the professor who is its founder and senior editor was himself an Azorean immigrant to California. One of his older brothers became a priest (as so often happens in Portuguese families). As a favor to his younger brother, the priest is hosting my book-launch event. When the senior pastor of a parish crooks his finger in summons, the parishioners turn out in droves—especially in a parish full of doughty Azorean-Americans. If Father says he expects about 300 people to show up, then they'll show up. One needn't doubt it for a moment.

Has Father read my book? I don't know and I haven't asked. It probably doesn't matter. My novel treats the Church rather gently, given that the cast of characters is replete with devout Catholics. (The book is also dedicated to the memory of my baptismal godmother.) Sure, the character based on me clearly lapses in his religious practice as the plot progresses, but he's not the central figure in the novel and he doesn't spend any time on a soapbox denouncing the Church. Furthermore, his best friend heads off to enroll in a seminary.

I think Father can read my book without adding to his gray hairs. What's more, he gets to preside over a celebration of Portuguese-American culture and history, things dear to his heart. In return, I may have to sit through a mass or two. Not a problem.

Oh, and Father would appreciate it if I were to say a few words to the assembled throng in Portuguese.

Oh.

This is going to take a little work, after all.

The disconnections

Hawking my wares

I have a long list of summer events in California's Portuguese-American community. It looks like I'll be doing a modicum of traveling this summer to promote my book at some of them. Since the small university press that is publishing the novel is without a generous travel budget or promotional expense account, this is going to be a shoestring operation. Every bit of free publicity is going to be valuable and social media will play its part.

Last year I started to try to drum up endorsements of the type that might play well as cover blurbs or as quotes in promotional materials. While my favorite quote is my sister's prediction that I'm going to get into “a lot of trouble” (but it's fiction—honest!), I also managed to get positive comments from a few real-life professional authors. Just enough to give my work a smidgen of credibility.

Of course, not everyone who I approached was interested in plowing through a 350-page manuscript from an unknown author. (Imagine that!) I did, of course, offer more modest samplers of selected pages, reducing the time commitment substantially. Clever writers, however, figured out that the best way to reduce the time commitment was to politely (or brusquely) decline the privilege entirely.

A couple of my friends were classmates with Joan Didion at UC Berkeley, working with her on student publications at the university. “Go on, write to her!” they said. “What could you lose?” Nothing, certainly. Which is also what I gained. The inquiry via Didion's publisher was absorbed into a black hole of silence.

I got a more substantial reaction from Joyce Carol Oates: a terse note from her assistant explaining that Prof. Oates reads only the papers of the students in her writing class and if only I had inquired before sending a packet of pages, I could have saved myself the trouble. Heck. I knew that! I sent the pages in the long-shot hope that they would be tempted to peek at them (and discover a masterpiece!) before consigning them to the recycle bin. The professor's gatekeeper, however, discharged her responsibilities meticulously. That is, of course, why she has that job.

In October, as I recounted previously, I boldly bothered Jonathan Franzen during his speaking tour of northern California. When he admitted to reading “just about anything,” I naturally thanked him and promptly shipped off a few dozen pages in care of his publisher. As the weeks went by, it seemed that I had run into another Didionesque black hole, but this week I discovered otherwise.

It simply takes Franzen a lot of time—unsurprisingly—to plow through all of his fan mail. He did, however, eventually run into my packet, opened it up, found the stamped, self-addressed postcard that accompanied the sample manuscript pages, and decided it was worth taking a couple of minutes to scrawl me a note and drop it in the mail. He said my novel was “a worthy and entertaining project”! Huzzah! Another useful book blurb! From the bestselling author who garnered the National Book Award for The Corrections!

Um. Not really.

Franzen was being polite. A more extensive quote from the postcard makes this clear:

[Your novel] seems like a worthy and entertaining project, but I'm afraid it's too far from the mode of fiction I produce & support for me to be able to help you. I appreciate your thinking of me, though.

Shucks! See how much better that is when trimmed down to five words? Or, with a judicious ellipsis, even better: “a worthy and entertaining project ... I appreciate.”

If only I had a conscienceless public relations person (is that redundant?), we could make hay of this. But no.

Speaking of hay, though, reminds me. Jane Smiley isn't returning my messages!

A tale of two churches

Catholicism in transition

This is the weekend when Catholics in the United States begin to use the third edition of the English-language Roman missal, which makes several changes to the text of the mass. It is, overall, a more traditional translation, reinstating such things as the thrice-spoken “mea culpa” (rendered in English as, “through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault”) and reverting to “And with your spirit” as the rendering of “Et cum spiritu tuo” (instead of the more mundane “And also with you”). Except for the hardcore ultramontanes who still pine for the old Tridentine mass in Latin, most conservative Catholics are gleeful, correctly seeing the new translation as further evidence of reactionary retrenchment in the Church—and a further diminution of the influence of Vatican II. Can veils for women be far behind?

In the past few months I have had occasion to step into two Catholic churches. (Before anyone asks, I will note that in neither case did anything shatter or burst into flames.) Both churches are modern constructions and had some notable features in common. In particular, they represented a big step back toward a more traditionally Catholic presentation, a far cry from the nearly featureless dark-paneled rectangular box that is St. Aloysius in Tulare.

I visited Our Lady of the Assumption on the occasion of a Portuguese festa in Turlock. The pastor's brother gave me a tour of the facilities. As someone old enough to have been an altar boy in the days of the Latin Mass, I have seen enough Church history to recognize a regression toward the mean. I told my guide that his brother's church represents a successful fusion of modern construction with traditional decor. My guide beamed, acknowledging that the Portuguese community in Turlock had aimed at that exact result when planning their church.

More recently I joined some family members at Holy Spirit Church in Fresno for the baptism of a nephew. The christening would follow the conclusion of the mass service, so I thought I was safe when I made a late arrival and loitered in the lobby. However, my eagle-eyed sister was too alert for me, noted my presence, and came out to collect me and take me inside. (As previously noted, no supernatural phenomena attended my entry into the sacred circle of mystical incantations and wafer transubstantiation.) The first thing I noticed was that Holy Spirit departs from the traditional parallel rows of pews in the same way as Our Lady of the Assumption. Unlike the Turlock church, however, the Fresno church has placed its crucifix so that it is invisible to those sitting in the side pews. From that perspective, where I was sitting with my sister's family, you might as well have been sitting in an Episcopal church. Holy Spirit's altar was a Protestant-compatible table and I'm sure the motley collection of art screens behind it provided ample peek-a-boo opportunities for the servers (both altar boys and altar girls at the service I attended).

The churches in Turlock and Fresno had another thing in common, and I regret not having any photographs to show you. Both of them have the Stations of the Cross (the “Via Dolorosa”) represented in mural form as a kind of frieze on the interior wall above the main entrance. In traditional churches, the fourteen Stations are usually wall plaques depicting the crucifixion of Jesus, seven of them equally spaced on the north wall and the other seven on the south wall (many old Catholic churches were preferentially oriented so that the altar was at the east end). The mural in Our Lady of the Assumption is dark and stark, graphically conveying the pain and anguish of the Savior's execution. I commented to my guide that it seemed more intense than some parishioners might prefer. He admitted that a few people in the community had lobbied to have the mural painted over after it had been unveiled, but that it was now generally accepted. The artist had had plans for other artwork in the interior of the church, but those had been shelved after the mural of the Stations of the Cross had been judged to sate the community's appetite for the artist's work.

By contrast, the Stations mural in Fresno's Holy Spirit is an exercise in kitsch, a truly unfortunate and distracting collection of excessively bright images in different sizes, cartoonish in conception and execution. The color palette appeared to be inspired by sidewalk chalk. If any venue cries out for disciplined and respectful depictions, I should think a church interior does. While the Our Lady of the Assumption mural pushed hard against the bounds of tradition in its display of angst (Jesus is amazingly serene in most of the crucifixion scenes in Stations of the Cross), the composition had a unity of purpose and conception. The Holy Spirit mural was a collage of disparate scenes united by garish colors and amateurish execution.

The results were occasionally unintentionally amusing (unless the artist was being deliberately subversive). The fifth Station depicts Simon of Cyrene, an innocent bystander, being impressed into service to help Jesus carry the cross lest the condemned prisoner die of exhaustion before the authorities get to nail him to it. The Holy Spirit mural makes it look as though Jesus is copping a feel of Simon's butt. In the tenth Station, Jesus is stripped of his garments. This scene in the Holy Spirit mural is so badly composed that it could be subtitled “Jesus flashes his Roman guards.” Both of the guards have stunned expressions on their faces, so they appear to be quite impressed. I made it through the service without chuckling aloud, but I suspect it looked like I was having a better time than the mass warranted.

It will take a few Sundays for practicing Catholics to work the kinks out of the new Roman missal, but I expect the complaints to be few. Regular mass-goers will quickly pick up on the changes and infrequent attendees (Easter and Christmas, anyone?) won't care. For former Catholics who outgrew religion and “put away childish things,” it's mostly a matter of curiosity and perhaps just a bit of nostalgia. The third edition of the Roman missal is yet another signpost that conservatives are in the ascendant in the Church, but we already knew that, didn't we?

Addendum

In searching the web for photos of the Turlock and Fresno churches, I ran into the following dyspeptic reaction to Our Lady of the Assumption, posted by someone who thinks highly enough of himself to use “St. Christopher” as his handle:

What madness! A Catholic Church that has mostly Portuguese Mass. Oh yes — a TLM [traditional Latin mass] thrown in, at the Chapel at odd times on Sunday. Having cultural loyalty is a fine thing, and Portuguese is a wonderful language — but this focus on whatever is prevalent (Klingon Mass, anyone?) obliterates the meaning of what the Mass is supposed to represent. There is no question but that the Church must return to Latin, and a single, uniform Order of the Mass, as soon as is possible. Let those that wish to participate in something else, go to something else.

Is there any chance that “St. Christopher” might consider taking his own advice? No one is making him attend a Portuguese-language mass. For my own part, however, I think it might be fun to attend a Klingon mass. Once, anyway.

Post-Addendum

The diligent searching of my friend Gene O'Pedia has uncovered a pair of on-line images of the Holy Spirit mural. The colors are more muted in the photos than they appeared to me in real life, but I recognize the compositions and can confirm that these are the Stations of the Cross that I saw in Fresno. Their resolution is not high enough to zoom in too closely on the panels of particular interest, but they can still convey a sense of what I was talking about. The first image depicts, right to left, Stations 6 and 7 (“Veronica wipes the face of Jesus” and “Jesus falls for the second time”). The flat perspective of Station 7 (not Station 5, as I said above) makes it look like Jesus is patting Simon on the behind. The other photo shows Stations 10 and 11 (again, right to left: “Jesus is stripped of his garments” and “Jesus is nailed to the cross”). Again, the resolution is limited, but you can just tell that the two Roman soldiers are gaping at the undraped Jesus in Station 10. It's a fine example of religious kitsch.

What's in a name?

The quest for catchy

Earlier this month I received a very welcome e-mail message from the general editor of a university press:

We are very interested in publishing your novel

I stared at the screen for a while. Time was frozen and it took several seconds to thaw and allow me to catch my breath.

That morning I had been shrugging on my coat and preparing to pick up my briefcase when my computer beeped to indicate the arrival of new e-mail. It was time to go to school for my first class of the day. I glanced at my watch and decided I could take a few seconds to see what had dropped into my in-box. It ended up, of course, stretching into several minutes. I composed a quick thank-you-thank-you-thank-you note and then dashed off to school.

It was observed that I was unusually high-spirited during the morning's classes.

The general editor sent me a summary review from the manuscript editor he had commissioned to plow through my tome. Key phrases jumped out:

Not only is the story itself generally well told, but it effectively conveys significant aspects of Azorean-American life in California.... [T]he courtroom scenes are especially well managed.... [M]y overall evaluation of the ms remains fully positive, and I look forward to the opportunity of sharing my thoughts with the author directly.

The ellipses, of course, conceal the manuscript editor's tiny little quibbles (“the book is at least 15-20% longer than the central narrative thread warrants,” “though the story of Paul's evolution from child prodigy to mathematician is well-enough told and does present a focal point for an alternative assimilation narrative, I'm not altogether persuaded it fully coheres with the rest of the book,” “something might be done to differentiate the speech of less well-educated from better-educated characters”). Hardly worth mentioning!

He also didn't much care for my working title. Thus my faithful readers get to join in part of the fun. What should my book's title be? For some useful background, here's is a plot summary that I used to pitch the book:

This is the story of the Francisco family, Portuguese immigrants from the Azores who settle on a dairy farm in California’s Central Valley. Their plans to eventually return to the Old Country fall by the wayside as their success grows and their American lives take root. The legacy of one generation becomes a point of contention as the members of the next generation begin to compete to inherit and control their heritage, which includes herds of cattle and tracts of farm land. The death of Teresa Francisco, the family’s matriarch, sets off a string of battles (both personal and legal) between brothers, spouses, in-laws, and cousins.

Yes, Teresa is based on my grandmother, the linchpin of my family and the vital center without whom the family flew to flinders. A wily old lady, she drew her will to force her two sons (my father and my uncle) to cooperate as co-executors of the estate. As the elder son, my uncle was deeply aggrieved that he did not get to call the shots himself, but I'm certain it was no accident that my grandmother chose to clip his wings in the way she did.

Unfortunately, there was also a lawsuit. My father and uncle had an older sister who predeceased her parents. She was my much-loved aunt and godmother (and is the dedicatee of my novel). Her widower, my embittered uncle-godfather, resented receiving nothing from the estate (although his children got quite a lot) and bankrolled a legal challenge to the will. The battle left scars that remain to this day, nearly thirty years later.

That was the raw material I drew upon to write my novel. Since I was not privy to all of the backstage maneuvering and scheming, I had to speculate on motivations and make up events to fill in the gaps in my knowledge. Real-life people provided the models but their fictional representatives were not obligated to conform to the originals that inspired them. It's a novel. It's based on a true story, but I made it up. So far, the readers of the manuscript have been all over the map in guessing what parts are “real” and what parts are purely fanciful creations of my fevered imagination. For future readers, I'll admit that the accidental circumcision episode is quite true to life. Hey, if Laurence Sterne can write about such an event in Tristram Shandy, why can't I? (Mom wishes I would drop that section, but my manuscript editor favors “holding on” to the damaged foreskin—in what I'm sure was a deliberate choice of wry language on his part.)

But let's go back to titles. Here's an alphabetical roster of some of the candidates we have considered thus far. Which, if any, do you favor? If you wish to nominate other possibilities, I'm eager to hear them. I look forward to seeing what pops up in the comments.

• California Dairy
• California Gothic
• Cow
• Cow Boys
• Crying Over Spilt Milk
• Curdled Milk
• Dairy Family
• Dear Dairy
• Don't Have a Cow
• Have a Cow
• Land of Milk and Money, The
• Milk of Human Kindness, The
• Moo Cows
• Past Your Eyes
• Promised Land
• Raw Milk
• Sour Cream
• Spilt Milk
• Split Milk

In the meantime, I am trimming and editing the manuscript with an eye toward an April 1 deadline. If I can deliver a satisfactory revision by that date (or close to it), the university press will put my novel on its publication calendar and it could see print as early as January 2012.

Darn. Too late for Christmas!

Of two minds

Reflexive code-switching

Quentin Crisp once gave some encouraging advice about maintaining one's residence: “There is no need to do any housework at all. After the first four years the dirt doesn't get any worse.”

I have occupied my current domicile for more than a quarter-century, so I'm well past that initial quadrennium. Unfortunately, I do not have Crisp's strength of character. Once or twice a year I feel compelled to do—or at least try to do—some serious cleaning. The big problem, of course, is the clutter created by my ever-growing collection of books and papers.

At the conclusion of every semester, I feel the pressure of the responsibility to tidy up after myself. Stacks of books need to be picked up from tables and chairs and floors (and any other surface that is at least approximately flat) and shelved (occasionally with some attempt at an organizational rationale). Stacks of papers need to be picked up from those same locales and sorted into the filing cabinets or recycling bins.

The room I call my library is usually an especially grueling undertaking. It has long served as my home's emergency reservoir, its pressure-release valve, a place where random items get shoved out of the way. The shelves of the library's bookcases are packed to overflowing—those shelves that I can see, anyway. The lower ones are obscured by stacks of miscellany. I recently made an effort to cleanse the Augean library.

A funny thing about housework: I sometimes find myself channeling my paternal grandmother, who was always tidy as a pin (whatever that means). Hands on my hips, I'll gaze into the turmoil of the library and say, “Credo! Tal lástima!” Loosely translated, it means, “Can you believe it? What a disaster!” Another good word is porcaria, which means filth and evidently owes something to pigs (porcos).

In this frame of mind, it's easier to get down to work, occasionally muttering Avó’s favorite imprecations to myself under my breath. It's just a little weird, but it's okay. Whatever works. But I noticed something the other day that gave me pause.

I dug my fingers under a stack of old school papers and tugged at it, preparatory to lifting it up and moving it to a desk for sorting. My right hand slipped and I received a sudden and sharp paper cut on my index finger. I cried out involuntarily, but I did not shriek “Ow!” or “Ouch!” What I said—rather loudly—was “Ai!”

I was in Portuguese mode and I used a Portuguese cry of distress. As I sucked on my finger, distressed but bemused, I pondered this curious occurrence. Cries of pain, you know, are reflexive. You don't think about them. You just say them. (Thus a painful mishap could give away an undercover operative in a foreign land.) I tried to remember if this had happened before, but I could not recall for certain. I imagine it was standard operating procedure when I was little and Portuguese was my principal language, but my childhood memories are not that detailed.

In graduate school a few years ago, I learned for the first time about code-switching, the blurring of the boundary lines between languages in the speech of multilingual people. For me, it was just a new name for a phenomenon I had long been familiar with. Sometimes we grind the gears in our language transmission box as we shift among the languages we know. Since English has long been my dominant tongue, I don't experience this as often as I did in my youth, but apparently it's still there. Or, at least, my first language remains so embedded in my nervous system that I can still use some elements of it reflexively. I just need to be in the right mode.

Grandma would be so proud. (But not about the state of my library.)

Fan letter from Spain

The Portuguese diaspora

It was almost two years ago that a visitor to this blog posted a comment:

You can't imagine how much I identify with you when you talk about your family. I'm Portuguese (living in Spain for the last 10 years) and I too have part of my family scattered around the world, mainly due to the big emigration that happened during the 50's and the 60's.

That was the beginning of a series of entertaining observations and comments by João Paulo. Last January, when I bemoaned my lack of success in getting a literary agent to take on the job of getting my book manuscript published, João Paulo gave me another thumbs up:

Por favor avisa se decidires publicar o livro. Sabes que adoro as tuas histórias de família.

For those of you who cannot read Portuguese (not that I'm particularly good at it), I think it says, “Please let me know if someone publishes your book. You know that I love the stories about your family.”

I promptly replied:

If it gets published, João, I will be sure to make it known. Perhaps it will need a translation into Portuguese!

That's when João Paulo took an exceedingly dangerous step:

I'd be honoured. And if you don't publish it, I would love to read it anyway.

You would? Really? I wrote João Paulo a personal e-mail message and offered to let him read the manuscript. He replied quickly, accepting the offer. I sent him the pdf.

Then, silence.

Damn.

I was certain I had overwhelmed him with my 380-page tome. While several of my friends had read the manuscript and given me comments and suggestions, others found the effort too onerous and declined the honor. I figured João Paulo had not bargained on getting as much as he had received. And he was a busy man.

No problem. I understood.

But I was wrong. João Paulo was just biding his time, dealing with the demands of working in Spain while using his free time to visit family and friends in Portugal. He had printed out the manuscript and bound it for convenient reading, but it had to wait for a window of opportunity. The window arrived in November. Soon thereafter, a new message popped into my in-box. It was a fan letter!

I have just finished reading your book. WOW! JUST WOW!!!! I read it in just 4 days. I couldn’t stop!

I have to admit that I like the way this starts. He did, however, offer a cautionary note or two.

So, let me tell you my impression on your Masterpiece.

The book does not have an easy start, mainly because of the avalanche of characters. You deliberately included a list of the main characters in boxes on the page before page i (which is very handy and I used it constantly) and a list of the Dramatis Personae that is difficult to manage when you’re looking for someone while reading the book but it’s totally necessary. I just think it needs some categorizing instead of being a simple list of characters.

Yeah, I'm going to have to do something about those crowd scenes, and do a better job of distinguishing the characters. It's a family-based drama where characters have similar behavior patterns and similar names, but distinctions must be drawn—and not just the distinction between good guys and bad guys, both of which abound.

Apart from that, the book is absolutely brilliant. The court scenes are hilarious and if I did not know that it is a true story I wouldn’t believe that the petitioners' attorney could be that stupid (or incompetent). You have a done great job carefully delivering it piece by piece to keep the reader asking for more. I cheated a bit because I could not wait to know what happened when you took the stand (or rather, Paul took the stand) and skipped a few pages forward (but after reading it twice and laughing out loud I went back to read what I had skipped).

Yes, it is as obvious as it can be that the character Paul is based on me. (Paul is my confirmation name and a family name as well.) The novel is, however, a work of fiction. In real life I have never testified in a trial. The nice thing about fact-based fiction is that you can move the characters around to smooth out gaps in the narrative while the real-life history lends the story structure.

The whole book is a great story and looking back at it the feeling is amazing. You have created a coherent story out of three generations in a span of 60+ years with characters so well-defined that it’s almost like I’ve known these people all my life. Your extended vocabulary is a great treat but has forced me to use the dictionary more times this week than during the last few years.

I suspect that a potential publisher will be less than charmed by that last observation. Does “You're going to need a dictionary!” make a good cover blurb? Probably not.

João Paulo then gave me a lesson on Portuguese grammar and usage. Although he praised my rendering of Azorean dialect phrases (“I can’t read them without a grin on my face because you’ve written them exactly the way Azorean people pronounce and it’s almost as I can hear someone from Terceira or São Miguel speaking”), he pointed out the proper way to use the presente do conjuntivo and the pretérito perfeito. Now it's my turn to need a dictionary! João Paulo flatters me and does me a kindness when he assumes I can follow all that.

Although the manuscript has already gone through multiple readings and proofings, João Paulo picked out a few more errata (one peripheral character's name was rendered in three different ways!). He offered some more cautionary notes, suggesting that I had been unduly cruel in my descriptions of certain individuals. The cousins on whom they are based might take offense (or would, if they could read). I confess that he's probably right and I expect to drop a couple of paragraphs and pull a few adjectives before I'm done with the manuscript.

Then João Paulo closed on a high note:

All I all, I loved reading your book. As I said, I read it in four days and I just couldn’t stop. It’s funny, it’s got rhythm, great characters, a beautiful story and a perfect ending. I thank you for the opportunity you gave me to read it and I really hope someone prints it because it is well deserved. I’m saying this not only as a Portuguese emigrant (which has a special meaning to me, of course) but because it is very well written and is one of the best books I’ve ever read.

I promptly sent João Paulo's entire message to the editor considering my manuscript. He needs to know about my European fan base!

Portuguese-American writing

Not under the influence!

Numbers are my vocation, but words are my avocation. There is always a book on my nightstand and a few (or several) minutes of relaxing reading before turning in is my reliable preventive for insomnia. There is always a book (at least one!) in the back seat of my car, just in case I need a luncheon companion. And there is always a book lying on the table next to the recliner in the living room, where I'm likely to pick it up in favor of the television remote control.

This habit of constant reading goes back at least to my grade-school days. It became such a pronounced trait of my childhood that adults occasionally tried to intervene and encourage me to “put that book down and go have some fun.”

Silly adults.

Of course, if you don't take their advice, some people (especially if they're grown-ups and you're a kid) will take more intrusive steps, e.g., confiscation. Dad, for example, didn't like it when I read in the car on the way to Sunday mass. He caught me smuggling a copy of Tarzan of the Apes into the back seat one morning and insisted that I hand it over. (I lost ten minutes of reading time on that trip that I'll never get back!) Something similar happened when I tried to take a book with me to an Oakland Athletics game at the Coliseum. I was supposed to “enjoy” myself watching grown men swing sticks at balls and run around a square. Thank goodness I managed to grab a copy of the Oakland Tribune at the stadium, which I pointedly read throughout all nine innings. (Poor Dad. The things he had to put up with.)

My habit has survived all attempts to suppress it. If anything, it's grown. My taste in reading is broad. The sidebar of this blog demonstrates that, having played host to titles that involve science, history, biography, politics, mystery, science fiction, and fantasy. I don't, however, make a point of keeping up with the modern novel or current bestsellers. I prefer to meander my own way through the embarrassment of literary riches without worrying about what's popular at the moment (or whether Oprah likes it, which is often the same thing).

Although the scope of my reading has been broad, I did not stumble across much Portuguese-American literature. I had not specifically sought out works by others who shared my ethnic heritage, but—had I thought of it—I would have expected to run across the occasional Luso-American writer. But I didn't.

And, before you mention him, I'll point out that John Dos Passos doesn't really count.

I casually assumed—never having thought too hard about it—that we had been assimilated beyond recognition into the mainstream of English literature.

But I was wrong, as I discovered after cranking out a book-length manuscript stuffed with Portuguese-American anecdotes and realizing I needed to do a proper literature search to learn whether my book might find a niche. Once I actually started paying attention, I learned that Reinaldo Silva had written an entire book titled Portuguese American Literature. Silva's book revealed that I had been anticipated in my literary endeavors by Alfred Lewis (Alfredo Luís) and his Sixty Acres and a Barn. Then there's Charles (Carlos) Reis Felix, the author of Through a Portagee Gate, and the award-winning Katharine Vaz, author of Fado.

Who knew we were a genre?

See how I said “we” right there? Cheeky.

I started digging into the Portuguese-American oeuvre. Sixty Acres and a Barn was a quick and enjoyable reading experience. Lewis was writing a version of his own experience of coming to the United States as a young man and earning his keep on a dairy farm in Central California. He told a story of new experiences and old traditions—and the conflict between them. When I finished the book, it seemed to me that Lewis had blazed a trail that I was following with my own novel, which is based on the history of my grandfather's dairy farm and family, also in California's central valley. Lewis, however, was recounting a more circumscribed story and his timeline was earlier in the 20th century than mine.

Then I picked up Through a Portagee Gate and was instantly grateful that I had not read it earlier. Had I already been familiar with the work of Charles Reis Felix, I would not have been able to avoid the conclusion that he was a powerful influence on my writing. Instead, reading it after the completion of my manuscript, Through a Portagee Gate became a strong validation of what I had done. Without rashly suggesting that I am Felix's equal in prose style, I can at least lay claim to sharing an innate predilection for episodic achronological storytelling.

Felix has an ear for dialog that I envy and his prose rings with authenticity. I have since read other works by this author, including Tony and Da Gama, Cary Grant, and the Election of 1934. I can recommend them to anyone who enjoys a good book, especially someone curious about the Portuguese immigrant experience.

Finally I turned to two collections of stories by Katharine Vaz, Our Lady of the Artichokes and Fado. Where Felix tells stories, Vaz weaves spells. Where Felix is more likely to startle you with some spot-on account of some characteristically Luso-American quirk (yes! we are so like that!), Vaz surprises us with intrusions of fantasy into the mundane. “How to Grow Orchids Without Grounds: A Manual” was an entertaining and peculiar story about clandestine nocturnal plantings of orchids and the varied reactions of those who discovered these unsanctioned efflorescences. But it suddenly got really weird when a character's nail clippings came to life and ran off to see the world. I could not help but think that Vaz was resorting to a magical gimmick (“magical realism”?) to wrap up a story whose denouement was giving her trouble. In fact, it reminded me of Graham Chapman walking into a Monty Python skit in his military uniform and wrapping it up by announcing that it had become too silly to continue.

Overall, I find Vaz a fascinating writer who fills her tales with authentic Portuguese touches. At the same time, she bends the English language to her will, creating odd phrases and metaphors that strike the eye and ear in amusing ways. I'm often tempted to read her work aloud. Here's a sentence I like from “The Man Who Was Made of Netting”:

There was a lightness about Daisy that was not weightlessness but a grip on the power of light.

The use of “light” is nicely ambiguous, drawing on both of its principal meanings: illumination and mass measure. You hear a kind of echo in your head when you read it. And “grip” and “power” are both strong words that reinforce each other, slightly startling in the context of describing a young girl.

But here's one, also from “The Man Who Was Made of Netting,” that doesn't work (at least, not for me):

Her weeping at her grandpa's funeral had broken Manny in so many places that he sometimes felt gusts of wind were bandages, scarcely holding him together.

Huh? Vaz is trying to piece together things that won't adhere to each other. Manny is broken? Okay. Wind holds him together? More likely blow him apart. Vaz doesn't give us enough to work with, no good way to reconcile the counter-intuitive linkage between shattered fragments and gusts of wind that (magically?) gather the pieces together instead of scattering them. I don't get it, but I'm sure Vaz will not be disturbed by my occasional confusion or lack of comprehension. Besides, I admire her rhetorical bravery even when I don't like (or, perhaps, understand) the results.

I have so far read only her short stories. She has written novels that may yet end up on my reading list.

The past year has slightly diminished my ignorance when it comes to Portuguese-American literature. The next year will diminish it further. And—who knows?—perhaps next year I will be a part of it.

Freaky Friday

Saturday was pretty weird, too

The four high holy days always find me back at Mom & Dad's in California's Central Valley. It's the ingrained behavior of a dutiful son. Besides, I don't want to miss the nice dinners that occur at Easter, Thanksgiving, and Christmas (even if the religious aspects may get a big cloying). I can visit with family members and catch up on the latest developments—and latest additions (six of them in the last six years). Name tags might help.

I did say four, but I mentioned only three. Were you keeping count?

The fourth high holy day is a slightly movable feast that occurs between the end of summer school and the beginning of the fall term. It's associated with the birthdays of my mother and my goddaughter. A joint birthday party is held on some convenient weekend (bundling in some other, less significant, fall birthdays). The combination of both Mom and Becky reaches critical mass for me, so it's practically a command appearance. And there's usually a nice picnic, cookout, or barbecue, so it doesn't fall too far short of a holiday feast.

Timing is everything. This year I rashly headed south on a Friday. My usual pattern is an overnight Saturday-Sunday visit, but the birthday celebration was being held at my youngest brother's home on Saturday. It was easier to travel down on a Friday, stay at Mom & Dad's, and then head north for home after the Saturday event.

That meant, of course, that I was at my parents' on Friday evening, which for them involves a standing dinner date with a coterie of friends. The Four-Wheelers have scarcely a four-wheel vehicle left among them, advancing years underscoring the imprudence of gadding about in Jeeps and muscle trucks, but the label has stuck. Having devolved into a kind of once-a-week supper club, the Four-Wheelers assemble religiously on Friday evening to break bread and bust the chops of the great Communist-Democrat conspiracy to destroy America.

Naturally Mom & Dad insisted I join them as their guest at the Four-Wheelers gathering. Oh, goodie.

On the road again

We did not go directly to the restaurant selected for that evening's event. My parents chose to leave early to allow time for a social call at the home of my father's widowed first cousin. My octogenarian father insists on being the driver instead of a rider, so I climbed into the passenger seat and Mom relegated herself to the back seat. (This is the configuration they insist on whenever I'm down there.)

Fortunately, Dad has preserved an unblemished driving record and is still fairly trustworthy on the road (except when he wants to show off how much horsepower he has under the hood, but then he has to listen to Mom grumbling like Marge Simpson from the back seat, so he usually refrains). On this particular occasion, Dad waxed eloquent about the many improvements being made to long-neglected county roads. Miles of old macadam were being built up, repaved, and restriped. The smooth, dark surface flew past beneath the car's tires as Dad nattered away.

Then he abruptly shut up, pressed his lips grimly together, and squeezed his hands like vises on the steering wheel. A bright green sign had come into view. The road projects Dad so dearly loved were being funded by President Obama's stimulus package. Apparently he had forgotten about the sign that said, “American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.” He waited tensely for his radical-communist-socialist son to make some mocking quip and he did an unusually good job of keeping his eyes on the road—a good way to avoid seeing the small smile on my lips.

I let a few seconds trickle by. They were long seconds. Then I let him have it:

“The curves are nicely banked, too. You won't have to worry about standing water during the rainy season.”

No, the tension didn't suddenly drain out of my sire, but he did ease up just a fraction and began to tell us of the days when the roads were all dirt or gravel and how he could date the period because he remembered riding through the area with his uncle, who returned to the Azores when Dad was still a young child.

The maestro

We reached his cousin's house. She and my father are first cousins by virtue of having fathers who are brothers, hence sharing a family name. She had always been ferociously proud of her Ferox heritage, even to the point of making invidious comparisons between the accomplishments of her father's family and those of her husband's. It seems especially odd in retrospect, given that her husband built up and maintained a dairy farm every bit as large and as successful as our family's.

But de mortuis nil nisi bonum. Her late husband had achieved a posthumous canonization in her mind and become the exemplar of Azorean pluck and diligence. Dying in a nasty farm accident can do that to one. We all spoke glowingly of his accomplishments during our short visit and admired the memorial display of photographs in the living room, many months since he shuffled off the mortal coil. There is no nice, neat “closure” after such an unforeseen end to a six-decade marriage, so Dad's cousin is certain to mourn for however many years are left to her.

We made small-talk and she got distracted, which I'm sure was at least part of the reason my parents wanted to visit her. My rare appearance could also be counted upon to cause some gushing from Dad's cousin, because my professorial rank (even in the modest station of a community college) apparently evokes prideful recollections of our mutual family heritage. The label faz tudo is applied to someone who “does everything” (the literal translation of the phrase). My father and his cousin share a faz tudo great-grandfather who sported the island nickname of “mestre Francisco.” (Nicknames are important in the Azores, where it seems that ninety percent of the men share the names António, Francisco, João, José, and Manuel.) The most mundane translation of mestre is “teacher,” but to American ears that lacks the weight of the Portuguese connotations, which are better matched by “master” or even maestro.

It took no effort on our part to get Dad's cousin to recount once more the legend of mestre Francisco, who bundled up his family in the 1860s (or thereabouts) and sailed to Brazil. “Sailed” is not quite right. Francisco and his family booked passage on a paddle-steamer, which unfortunately broke down before making port in Rio de Janeiro. The ship remained becalmed in the Atlantic for two weeks while the crew unsuccessfully sought to repair the damaged drive train for its paddles. Eventually my great-great-grandfather presented himself to the captain and offered his services. In desperation, the captain let him try his hand at repairs. The mestre then spent two long days working on the ship's warped and broken gears—wooden gears—while his son fetched tools and supplies for him. When the mestre succeeded and the ship steamed into Rio, the captain gave him letters of introduction that set him up in business as a highly recommended craftsman in Brazil. Mestre Francisco prospered in Rio and eventually took his family back to the Azores with a tidy nest egg.

This was the first time I had heard the story from Dad's cousin, although it was familiar to me from tellings by my paternal grandparents. It was a good story, foreshadowing as it did my own grandfather's decision to gather up his family and seek his fortune in the New World—except that the mestre returned to the Azores after his Brazilian sojourn while my grandfather's family put down American roots too deep to transplant back to the islands. I had included it in my unpublished novel, taking advantage of the parallelism between the lives of my grandfather and my great-great-grandfather. To my surprise, the version told by Dad's cousin included details that I thought I had made up in fleshing out the tale in my manuscript. Perhaps I had heard them before and had forgotten. In any case, I was smiling at the end of the story. Our cousin showed us a photograph of her grandfather, who as a boy had helped his faz tudo father repair a paddle-steamer.

The theme of man-versus-machine runs through the manuscript of my novel, which should not surprise anyone familiar with farm life. While my great-great-grandfather experienced it in a different context, farmers spend daily life among potentially lethal devices. This my father's cousin knows all too well, but she was cheered by our visit and I kept to myself my thoughts about the travails of mestre Francisco amidst the gearworks of a paddle-steamer and the fate of our cousin's husband amidst heavy farm equipment.

She waved happily at our car as we left and turned back onto the communist-funded county roads.

Dinner among the ruins

The Four-Wheelers circulate among a handful of favored restaurants. I was familiar with the evening's choice. My family used to go there frequently during my adolescence. The subsequent forty years have not been kind to it. The plastic booths, Formica tables, and linoleum floors all look to be what's left of the originals, however patched or worn they may be. A policy of deferred maintenance has been religiously adhered to, although I assume certain minimum steps have been taken to assuage the concerns of the local health inspector.

I was surprised to see no condemnation notice posted in the window.

The real proof of a restaurant, of course, lies in its meals. Therefore, in fairness, I have to report that my cheeseburger earned a passing grade. In the tradition of old-fashioned family restaurants, the portions were generous, too. My parents and their friends—at least, those not under doctor's orders—ate hearty.

By happenstance (I think), I was seated near one end of the table, sitting next to Chuck and opposite his wife Darla. Chuck's name is familiar to me, since it appears on most of the execrable, crazy-ass, wingnut spam that my father sometimes forwards to me. (It's the kind of dreck immortalized at MyRightWingDad.net.) No doubt Dad has complained to Chuck and the other Four-Wheelers that I do not belong to their coterie of conservative conspiracists, so Chuck looked just a little uncomfortable at my presence.

I was, of course, as sunny and cheerful as ever. Darla seemed rather taken with me. Chuck eventually relaxed a bit, perhaps surprised that I had not insisted on singing the Internationale before dining or interrupting all conversations with pithy quotes from Chairman Mao. Nope. I just hunkered down and endured the occasion, munching on my burger and refraining from any action more overt than declining to guffaw with everyone else when a quip was made about the obvious hoax that is global warming. Hilarious. (They are, of course, also concerned about the completely unrelated gradual decline in average rainfall in California as average temperatures tick upward and both plant and animal species adjust their preferred ecological niches northward.)

Chuck and Darla are exactly the sort of people that Mom & Dad would have once avoided with a disdainful sniff and backward tilt of the head. I forget exactly who has what, but Chuck and Darla have seven marriages between them. The family values clique is overloaded with people who apparently value marriage over and over again. To quote Candide's Doctor Pangloss:

Why, marriage, boy,
Is such a joy,
So lovely a condition,
That many ask no better than
To wed as often as they can,
In happy repetition.

A brilliant exposition, even if I do say so myself.

The dozen or so people in attendance at the Four-Wheelers' dinner had a good time and no one appeared to glance askance at me too often. Even so, I expect the conversation was much more mild-mannered than usual and I would love to have an audio recording of the next week's event. No doubt Dad hung his head and confessed he did not know where he had gone wrong.

Silly Saturday

Since so little steam was let off at Friday's dinner, I suppose the built-up pressure was too much to withstand by Saturday morning. Dad was in high dudgeon.

“I see where Obama has endorsed the Ground Zero mosque!”

I was having breakfast in the kitchen. Mom was sitting at the table with me. Dad was yelling from the adjacent dining room, where the computer is set up.

“Indeed?” I said. “I hadn't heard.”

I turned back to the Fresno Bee, not intending to say more. There was no point in mentioning that it wasn't really a mosque and wasn't really at Ground Zero. But now it was Mom's turn.

“That's not a surprise. He's a Muslim, after all.”

I started. This was much worse than usual. Caught by surprise, I was unusually blunt.

“No. He's not. Don't say stupid things, Mom.”

Her feathers were ruffled, but she wasn't backing down.

“He is, too! He's even admitted it himself!”

“Don't be silly. He's done no such thing.”

“I heard him myself!” she declared.

Now I was angry.

“No. You. Didn't. You can't have heard it because he never said it.”

Dad is fairly hard of hearing (especially when he wants to be), but we had raised our voices. Naturally he came to his spouse's rescue. Obama's voice came booming out of the speakers of Dad's computer:

“I know, because I am one of them,” said the president's voice.

I got up from the breakfast table and stalked into the dining room.

“Now this is just crazy! I'm supposed to take an out-of-context excerpt as proof of this idiocy? What's the antecedent of the pronoun, huh? What does ‘them’ mean, huh?”

I get like this sometimes. It's not one of my more attractive features and I am usually careful to avoid intellectual bullying, but I was white hot. It also feeds my father's martyr complex about the over-educated with their fancy degrees looking down their noses at him. When I catch myself doing it, I try to ease up, but I didn't parse my question into little one-syllable words for Dad. My father's not stupid and his vocabulary was equal to the task. Was he just a bit shamefaced when he scrolled back the video clip?

Dad had the YouTube video “Obama Admits He's a Muslim” on his computer screen. He had neglected to play the preceding six seconds of the president's address to the Turkish assembly. Now it came out of the speakers:

Many other Americans have Muslims in their families, or have lived in a Muslim-majority country. I know because I am one of them.

“Some proof!” I scoffed. “He's just saying he has Muslims in his family and has lived among them—things everyone has known for ages! Some proof!”

But Dad left the video run a bit longer. Unsurprisingly, there was the truncated clip from candidate Obama's interview with George Stephanopolous:

You're absolutely right that John McCain has not talked about my “Muslim faith.”

The quotes aren't visible in spoken dialog, of course. (If only he had used “air quotes”!) But the intent was obvious (even if not to poor little George) and I wasn't having any of it:

“Good grief! Obama was just saying the McCain wasn't going around claiming that Obama was a Muslim, unlike some of McCain's supporters. That's all! Damn! It's embarrassing when my parents go around saying stupid things!”

I marched off before it got any worse.

Later, of course, I wondered if Dad even bothered to read the candy-ass cover-your-ass disclaimer at the beginning of the video. I suspect he just bleeped across it:

Legal Disclaimer: The writers, producers, editors, and publishers of this video are not stating, claiming, or implying that Barack Hussein Obama is a Muslim, or that Obama himself claimed or admitted to being a Muslim. Rather the writers, producers, editors, and publishers of this video are only examining the evidence surrounding the rumor that Barack Hussein Obama might be a secret Muslim.

Yeah, right. This is about as persuasive a disclaimer as those at the beginning of half-hour paid-programming adverts for miracle cures:

The statements made in this program have not been evaluated by the FDA. The products offered here are not claimed to diagnose, treat, or cure any disease.

Now let's learn how to cure cancer!

(Naturally my mother has a copy on her shelf of a pseudoscientific cancer-cure book by renowned health expert Suzanne Somers. I'm afraid, she's a sucker for this kind of nonsense, which infuses the health-related stories on most of the right-wing news sites. It's not just the left-of-center Huffington Post.)

Fortunately, the cooling-off period took hold and the afternoon birthday party came off without a hitch (even if I had to circle a couple of identical-looking blocks in my baby brother's neighborhood before finding the home I visit an average of less than once a year). Most of the attendees were lineal descendants of my parents or spouses of those descendants, but my sister and brother-in-law brought an old friend of theirs who quickly button-holed me and quizzed me about my novel. He had read my sister's copy of the manuscript and wanted to know when it would see print. Out of my parents' earshot, I explained that it was under review and no decision would be made till later in the year.

One of my cousins was also present. I took the opportunity to inoculate him against possible future distress in the unlikely event that he ever starts reading books—in particular, mine. I mentioned that I had written down many of the family stories in fictional form. I recounted our visit the day before to Dad's cousin and her retelling of the mestre Francisco story. I explained that I covered the big family blow-up from nearly thirty years ago, when we battled over our grandmother's estate. My cousin shook his head in recollection of those dreadful days. And he seemed unperturbed at the thought that his counterpart was in the pages of my book.

“If you wrote it as fiction, then people can't assume that real people did what your characters do.”

Yeah. Do please keep that in mind. Did I mention your father is the bad guy?

Bless me, Father, for I have sinned

Sinners in the hands of an overworked God

It was my grandmother's idea. That's what made it so surprising. You expect the matriarch to be punctilious in her devotion to rituals of the family's longstanding religion. The Ferox clan had been fiercely Catholic for hundreds of years.

Nevertheless, she was getting a bit exasperated with the long lines of breast-beaters at the confessional in the back of the church. As we sat patiently in the pews, it seemed that once again the over-zealous penitents would delay the start of Sunday morning mass by relating to Father every minuscule detail of their trivial trangressions. Perhaps they derived a thrill by imagining themselves to be living sinfully sordid lives.

“I know how to speed it up,” said my grandmother.

My ears pricked up in sudden attention. This was unusual.

“Speed it up? How, Avó?” (That's the Portuguese word for grandmother.)

My grandmother looked me in the eye, her lips quirked in a shape that was not entirely unlike a smile.

“Father should stand up in the front of the church and read a list of sins. Just the most popular sins. Stealing. Cursing. Drunkenness. Adultery. Each time he calls out a sin, you raise your hand if you committed it. When he's done with the list, he gives everyone absolution and we all say five Our Fathers and five Hail Marys. Very fast. Start mass on time.”

My smile was less subtle. In fact, I was grinning back at my grandmother like an idiot.

“That's a great idea, Avó! I'm afraid, though, that it wouldn't be as fast as you hope. People would slow it down by looking around all the time and checking out each other's sins.”

Now my grandmother's smile was breaking out into the open.

“No, of course not,” she said. “Looking around. That would be a sin.”

Problem solved.

I told Father about it later. The old Irishman laughed till his face turned purple. He never gave it a try, though. Too bad. I was willing to say an extra Our Father and Hail Mary if I got to look around.

Não conta

Innumeracy abroad

My faithful reader and commenter João Paulo has shared with me the results of a 2008 hearing in the 8th District of Lisbon's Civil Court. (How else would you translate 8.^o Juízo Cível da Comarca?) My ability to read Portuguese is limited and not enhanced by the legal terminology in the report on the court's proceedings, but I think I've puzzled out the key points.

Here is the summary of the court's decision:

8.^o Juízo Cível da Comarca de Lisboa

A fls. 189 vem o executado apresentar um requerimento intitulado de "oposição a penhora", em que alega ter sido ordenada à penhora de 1/6 do vencimento que aufere, sendo que atentas as despesas correntes que apresenta ter, o deixa numa situação de grave carência económica.

Conclui, pedindo a isenção de penhora.

Notificado o exequente, vem este requerer a manutenção da penhora.

For ordenado a elaboração de um relatorio sócio económico do executado, o qual se mostra junto a fls. 213.

Apreciando.

O Tribunal deve ponderar entre o interesse do exequente em ver o seu direito assegurado, e o do executado em cumprir o pagamento da quantia a que se encontra vinculado, interesse esse que tem de ser proporcional.

Pese embora os factos relatados pelo executado, e sendo certo que não competindo ao Tribunal restringi-lo de refazer a sua vida como entender, também não pode o Tribunal prejudicar os compromissos anterioremente por aquele assumidos.

Assim, determina o Tribunal proceder à redução da penhor dò vencimento do executado para 1/5 do vencimento.

You see, some hapless guy got slammed with a “penhora,” which translates into English as “distrainment”—the seizure of personal property to enforce the payment or discharge of an obligation. In this particular case, the subject of the distrainment had suffered the seizure of 1/6 of his assets (garnishment of his wages). He petitioned the court for relief, claiming that he was suffering grave economic hardship.

The court solemnly pondered the petitioner's request, noting the necessity of proportionately balancing the petitioner's well-being against his responsibility to discharge his legal obligations. Upon consideration, the court ruled that the distrainment of 1/6 of the petitioner's assets had been too severe and ordered a relaxation of the order. The new order instead stipulated a seizure of 1/5 of his assets.

And thus is justice done by those with limited skill in matemática.

Muito obrigado, João Paulo!

Who was that masked Hispanic?

I know you are, but what am I?

Yes, we live in entertaining times. The Republicans wallow in the Slough of Despond (taking such comfort as they can in the mud they find there) and the right-wing is contorted in angst and paranoia. (Are they really paranoid if we're out to get them?) In past years, it seemed that no GOP talking point was too absurd to be treated with respect by the supposedly mainstream media. Now, however, it appears that the Republican noise machine may have blown a gasket or two. When they pumped up the propaganda organ to attack President Obama's first nomination to the Supreme Court, quite a few people recognized hot air when they saw it.

Nice.

In particular, the snide attacks on Sonia Sotomayor's “first Hispanic” status deflated rather quickly. It must be quite embarrassing to lecture someone for not doing his homework, only to find out that your “correction” needs correcting. In case you missed it, the argument was that Benjamin Cardozo was actually the first Hispanic justice on the Supreme Court. He served on the high court from 1932 to 1938. Here's a comment from Israel Jewish News that was cheerfully picked up by Free Republic:

Uh, I guess that Obama's PR team isn't capable of looking back in Supreme Court history 70 years? I know the drive-by media can't possibly do any research—that's nothing new. If Obama told them he was going to put the first person on the moon, they would probably just report it without remembering we already did that too.

---

Was Justice Cardozo a twofer? Hispanic as well as Jewish? It's a bit of a puzzler, because if Cardozo is considered Hispanic, then so am I.

And I doubt that I am.

Wikipedia cites a biography of Benjamin Cardozo as the source for the claim that the Cardozo family considered itself to be descended from the Marranos of Portugal. These were Jews who converted to Christianity (as least in appearance) to avoid expulsion from the Iberian peninsula (the western end of Europe that comprises both Spain and Portugal). There's no particular reason to doubt the Cardozo family folklore. The last name is common enough in Portuguese circles (although the “Cardoza” variant is dominant).

It's quite possible, therefore, that Benjamin Cardozo was descended from Portuguese Jews. Does that make him Hispanic? It gets down to a matter of conflicting definitions.

My own family would deny being Hispanic, although we might concede being Latino. That opens up a whole new controversy, of course.

“Latino” can be construed as referring to Latin America. That would leave out the Portuguese. It could also be construed as referring to descent from Latin-based Roman culture. If one tries to pare that back to those cultures that retained Latin-based languages, we have the nations whose primary tongues are the Romance languages of Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French, and Romanian. Good luck sorting that out.

In this country, one sometimes hears the term “Luso-American” applied to people of Portuguese descent. (Or, as my college roommate liked to render it, “Loser-Americans.”) It's not very common, however, and I know of no consensus among the members of my ethnic cohort concerning a preferred nomenclature. We aren't a particularly overt minority.

Sonia Sotomayor, on the other hand, is a thoroughly unambiguous case. The Supreme Court nominee is a puertorriqueña who will clearly be the high court's first Hispanic/Latina member. The critics who advance the name of Cardozo as a counterexample are just plain wrong, but I understand their point. They're gleefully mocking the Obama administration for failing to perform the due diligence that would have discovered a false fact. The Bush administration, after all, used to find false facts all the time.

It was sort of its speciality.

To have and to hold

What's mine is mine

My grandfather liked to think he ran a taut but happy ship, but he was still surprised to hear the tuneless whistling coming from behind the dairy barn. He circled the building to where he found Josezinho pitching hay into the manger of the calf pen. Josezinho noticed the presence of his boss and paused for a moment, leaning on the handle of his pitchfork.

“Bom dia, patrão.”

“Bom dia, Josezinho,” replied my grandfather. “You seem especially happy this morning.”

“Yes, patrão. I have good news. Very good news.”

Josezinho pulled a carefully folded letter out of the pocket of his jeans and passed it to his boss. It was postmarked the Azores, and it was from Josezinho's wife, who was awaiting her husband's return after he had made his stake in the United States. Forty years earlier my grandfather had faced a similar prospect, joining the stream of Azorean men who came to the U.S. to earn enough American dollars to return to the Portuguese islands as men of substance. In Grandpa's case, however, his wife had vetoed the idea of his going by himself. Grandma's insistence on accompanying her husband had transplanted the entire family to California, inadvertently setting the stage for their permanent residency in the U.S. Now my grandfather was one of the well-off American employers who could pay munificent wages to immigrant workers.

He unfolded the letter and scanned it quickly. For several seconds Grandpa was speechless. He looked back up at the smiling Josezinho with a puzzled expression on his face.

“You see why I am happy, patrão? I have a son!” Josezinho's grin broadened.

My grandfather cleared his throat.

“Yes, Josezinho. Yes. Your wife says she had a healthy little boy who is doing very well.”

“Yes, he is strong, like his father!”

Grandpa paused for a long painful moment.

“Josezinho— You must know— Uh, yes.” Grandpa took a deep breath and tried again. “Josezinho, you know how long you've been working for us.”

“Of course, patrão. I remember very well. It will be two years next month.”

My grandfather waited for Josezinho to grasp the nettle, but his hired hand was still beaming.

“But, Josezinho, you haven't been with your wife in almost two years. I'm very sorry, Josezinho, but there is no way that boy can be yours. How could you not see that?”

Josezinho stood up straight in his righteous wrath, took back his letter, and answered his boss emphatically.

“What do you mean, patrão? She is my wife! She had a son. That boy is mine! You see that calf right there?” Josezinho pointed at one of the young cows he had been feeding. “You call that your calf, don't you? Because its mother is your cow. Same thing. My wife has a son, so it is my son!”

Josezinho sniffed indignantly and took hold of his pitchfork again, stabbing it into a bale of hay and breaking it apart so that he could resume his feeding of the calves. My grandfather stood regarding his employee for a while longer and finally nodded his head.

“All right, Josezinho, all right. Thank you for explaining. Congratulations on your son.”

Somewhat mollified, Josezinho gave his boss a curt nod in acknowledgment and redoubled his hay pitching. Grandpa turned and walked away, waiting till he rounded the barn before shaking his head in bemusement.