It's a very sunny day and fortunately not as nearly a hot a day as one of two hellish ones in the past week. After deliberating on how to navigate the U-Bahn on the way to university on those days, I ended up merely staying at home. Barack Obama, of course, had no such luck; his visit coincided with the first of these days, so he got to enjoy the 34°-in-the-shade mark as well as the humidity which had mounted for the past week or so beforehand. Since the speech was held before a preselected audience I didn't go hear it, and besides the anticipation was much greater in 2008, so I contented myself with watching the news coverage.
In the past week I read two or three romance novels online, translated from English into the Portuguese. After a while it was clear that they were homemade translations, so the English syntax and idiom was intact and probably confusing for a Portuguese reader. But it seemed more important to learn the vocabulary than any grammatical idiosyncracies, so I copied-and-pasted much of the books into Google Translate and inched through them. This pace was only really a bit disturbing when I encountered a prolonged childbirth scene; in the English original I would have sped through it, but in this particular situation little was left for me to do but to slog through it bit by bit and end up feeling pretty queasy despite holding the general conviction that it is shallow to be bothered by the miracle of existence etc. At the end of the days I almost felt as if I could write in Portuguese
mas acho que é melhor não ter muita temeridade and
por isso I
usei Translate to check, which is a very good idea because my first attempt at a sentence was mostly Spanish with incorrect Italian thrown in.
*
After that preoccupation ended, I finally had the time and inclination to catch up with the American news again, which is even more of a circus than anywhere else so there are always good tidbits to be found. This time what occupied my thoughts most was the news of the iffy racial philosophy of a Food Network television chef, in her deposition for a court case in which she and her brother are accused of creating a terrible work environment.
For one thing, since she made a name for herself as a 'Southern' style cook, and some of her supporters are trying to excuse her peccadilloes on the grounds that she grew up in a time and a place where the 'N' word isn't so uncommon, I'm probably not the only one who sees broader ramifications regarding the centuries-long cross-Dixie squabble. For one thing, in a sense much of the outrage which Southerners expend in internet comments (Gawker and elsewhere) on arguing that Yankees mischaracterize and exaggerate the quantity and quality of racism in the South, is being temporarily forgotten; this tradition of racism — much denied — is suddenly being reclaimed from the historical ether.
Posts
