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>> This is KZSU Stanford.
Welcome to entitled opinions.
My name is Robert Harrison.
And we're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
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Again, that's the Stanford campus where ideas are bursting forth
under the spring sun just about everywhere.
And again, that's Robert Harrison as in Robert Pogue Harrison,
the middle name being the Gaelic word for kiss.
When I was younger, I tried hard to get people to call me Pogue,
but only one person ever obliged, and she wasn't even Irish.
She was Lebanese.
Hi, Dagidat, if you're tuning in from London.
Robert Pogue Harrison was also my father's name.
Everyone called him Pogue when he was growing up.
Then he went into the army, and the Irish Americans made jokes
about Pogue Mahone.
When he got back home from the war, he wanted to be called Bob.
I'm not my father's son in that regard.
Anything but Bob, if you please, you can't nuance the name Bob,
no matter how hard you try.
♪ The silence must be clear ♪
♪ All day when I'm with her ♪
♪ When I come to winter ♪
♪ The silence never took me home ♪
Our topic today is nuance,
which might sound like an eclectic one for a radio show, but stay tuned,
because the guest who joins me in the studios of KZSU,
María Hosha, recently discourced about nuance in our philosophical reading group,
and the radio host immediately thought, "Yes, that's an outstanding theme for a radio show,
and she's exactly the person to engage it."
In the group, we were discussing the French writer, philosopher Alberkamun,
who once wrote in a letter that we must struggle for nuance.
What he meant by that, among other things, is that we must struggle against
dogmatic ideologies, fundamentalisms,
and totalitarian forms of thinking,
all of which are poor in nuance, or downright hostile to nuance.
If by nuance we mean subtle gradations or variations in color, tone, meaning,
or rhythm, it might seem strange that Camru championed it,
for he was a famously solar creature who worshiped the blinding light of a southern Mediterranean sun.
There is no nuance in the desert, Lawrence of Arabia once declared,
referring to the stark alternation between light and dark, day and night.
Of course, that statement of Lawrence is itself without nuance, isn't it?
Surely in the desert sunsets are more nuance than anywhere else on earth,
except perhaps the open sea.
On the other hand, it is undeniable that clouds typically introduce nuance
into the light that suffuses an atmosphere.
As the English painter John Constable knew so well when he spent years
studying and painting cloud formations in the early 19th century.
It's not by chance that the word nuance comes from the Latin newbies or cloud.
Clouds are the very stuff of nuance.
Words worth.
"Fleecy clouds resting on the hilltops are not easily managed in picture
with their accompaniments of blue sky.
But how glorious are they in nature?
How pregnant with imagination for the poet.
Such clouds cleaving to their stations or lifting up suddenly their glittering heads from behind rocky barriers.
Or hurrying out of sight with speed of the sharpest edge will often tempt an inhabitant
to congratulate himself on belonging to a country of mists and clouds and storms
and make him think of the blank sky of Egypt and the cerulean vacancy of Italy
as an unanimated and even a sad spectacle."
It's a suggestive contrast that words worth draws between English mist and Egyptian solarity,
but again we must struggle for nuance.
That means resisting stark oppositions.
As I said, the desert has its own kind of nuance, different in quality than newbial nuance.
If the desert appears as a place without nuance to the western eye,
that's because it tends to view the desert abstractly as infinite sky, endless expanse of earth,
and bottomless silence.
But if you turn your eye and ear away from the emptiness of sky, earth, and silence,
and if you focus them on what's happening in and around the square meter of sand around your feet,
you'll find that the desert, in fact, purulates with phenomena so discreet as to be practically invisible to the uninitiated eye.
Likewise, the desert's silence is never truly vacant but always alive with subtle swirls, echoes, and jinni whispers.
The enemy of nuance is abstraction.
The struggle for nuance is in some ways a struggle against the conceptual abstractions of philosophy.
I'll bet come you learn the hard way that it is very difficult to nuance what you want to say in philosophical language.
Literature, on the other hand, is the medium of nuance itself.
For literature is the living flesh of philosophy.
Not its figurative representation, but its incarnate nuance truth as it were.
That is why my guest and I will be making special appeals to literature in our conversation today,
but first let me introduce her to you.
Maditya Hosha is a new hire for us here at Stanford.
She arrived here in January from her native country of Brazil to join the Stanford faculty as an assistant professor of Brazilian literature and culture in the Department of Iberian and Latin American studies.
She received her PhD in literary theory and comparative literature in 2003 from the University of San Paolo.
Her forthcoming book, "A Bridge Between, Brazilian Fiction and Philosophy" will be coming out shortly.
I'm delighted to have her with us and to give her a baptism by fire here on entitled opinions.
Maditya, welcome to the program.
Thank you Robert. I'm very happy to be here with you.
So am I.
Maditya, many of us who are not from South America think of rainforests and tropical jungles above all when we think of your home country of Brazil.
And I for one think of the rainforest as a place of nuance, Patixilos.
Not only because in the forest, sunlight is filtered by clouds, foliage and luxurious canopies, but also because the forest is a place where so many things blend together in color, tone and appearance while at the same time remaining distinct.
In the forest, things can hide by remaining discreet, barely distinguishable from the surrounding environment.
So the first question I'd like to ask is whether you think it's accurate to say that Brazil by virtue of its very geography and ecology is indeed a place of nuance, Patixilos.
Okay, that is a great and beautiful question.
And I will start talking about my city, Sam Paolo, who is the opposite sense of the forest.
So in fact, when we think about Brazil, we need to remember that Brazil has many diverse eco-resions.
And of course, the Amazon rainforests is one of the most important today for all our survival in the world.
But your question is important because I agree that Brazil is a place for nuances and plenty of nuances.
And do you remember that Camille when he said we need to struggle for nuance?
He said nuance not as an abstraction, but as something as vital as men himself.
And I think that in Brazil today, there are two forces in conflict.
The first one is the force and the importance of nuance in terms of biodiversity, in terms of ecology.
And the other force is the force of monocultures that are distracting the biodiversity of Amazon rainforests of seahad, do of septan, etc.
So by monocultures, you mean actually a biologically diverse environment which is transformed into, for example, ranch lands or cultivation of just one single kind of crop.
Exactly.
To be coffee or something of this one.
Yes, it's in fact today the most important plantation are soybeans and sugar canes and bio-diseo.
Biodeas, yes.
And for example, the seahad place that is our savannah.
Yeah, in fact you brought me a visual map here which I'd like you to maybe say something about what you call the echo regions or the biomes of Brazil.
Because I'm not sure that many people are aware of just how diverse are these bio regions because we think of the Amazon as the dominant, but they're actually several of them.
Perfectly. So what we call biome or echo region in Brazil we have Amazonia and 60% of Amazonia belongs to Brazil territory.
Okay.
And we have the biome name in seahad, do.
And the seahado is our savannah and the seahado is a very rich place of biodiversity of animals and birds and plants.
But it's almost destruct by almost 60% destruct and only 1% is still protect.
Only 1% is protected.
And where is it in Brazil, the savannah biome, is it south of the Amazon?
Yes, exactly. It's the central Brazil.
Central Brazil.
Yeah.
Exactly the central Brazil where for example the city of Brasilia, our capital was constructed and inaugurated in 1960s.
Okay.
And the seahado and the north we have the kachinga and kachinga the name is a two-piname that means white woods because it's our semi-arid, our desert.
Okay.
And white woods because the trees lost their leaves.
Okay.
And the other very, very important biome in Brazil is the Atlantic Forest.
The Atlantic Forest only remains 7%.
What is the Atlantic Forest?
The Atlantic Forest is the forest we found along the coast of Brazil where the cities were constructed.
So 70% of Brazilian leaves along the Atlantic Forest in the coast.
And Atlantic Forest, what we name matter, at the land chicken, is so important as Amazon.
In terms of the diversity we found in a little space, we can found 400 species of plants.
So it's incredible.
And only remains 7%.
But even this 7% is strongly important.
And another bioma is the Pantanau, is the water land.
And as in Florida we have here the...
Yeah, we call them wetlands.
Wetlands, wetlands.
Very, very important.
So with this we can understand the diversity of the forest.
So it's quite extraordinary because of this mixture of environments and biomes, eco regions.
Would you say that there's something comparable in the people of Brazil in terms of miscegenation or admixture?
Yeah.
Ethnically, culturally, racially and so forth.
Oh, absolutely.
There is nowadays a very strong discussion about affirmative action in Brazil and affirmative action in the universities.
Because we are people that always represent ourselves are mixed-reses.
A mixed-reses between white, Indians and blacks.
And we have a very new ones' terms to describe each blend, each mixture.
So for example, between white and black, we have Cabo Clue, we have Mamilouco, we have Caffusu,
and so forth.
So diverse name is to describe our mix.
It brings something to my mind about the fact that in English for example we have one word for snow and the Eskimos or other people who inhabit the northern regions might have 20 words for what we see as only one phenomenon.
Yeah, so that's nuance also.
So we're agreeing that nuance has something to do with admixture, blending, gradation.
Yes, variation.
And variation.
Yeah.
So are there any other characteristics about Brazil?
We've talked about the geography and the population.
That also makes it particularly hospitable to the phenomenon of nuance in the cultural mentality, for example, when the French used to call East-Wad de Montalite.
I think maybe we can speak about music, Brazilian music.
It's our, I think that mostly of our mentality was expressed in music in songs and lyrics.
And we can remember, for example, the blend produced by Bosanova movement.
And between Samba, popular song, Brazilian popular song, blended with cool jazz and classical music.
And this very, I think it's important song, because it's very nuanced.
The instrumentalization and the way to sing.
It's very loose.
It's very sweet, very calm.
And it's a kind of gift that Brazil offered to the world.
And it's success, proved that.
Along with a fabulous style of playing soccer, which I think is many people around the world love to watch Brazilian soccer.
Because if we can speak about nuance in soccer, it's definitely the Brazilian team that has that.
You brought some examples of Brazilian music and also Bosanova.
Yes.
Maybe we could play.
Yes.
Of course.
Just one comment about football.
Yes.
Because we are talking about the struggle between diversity as nuance, variations and monocultures in Brazil today in terms of geography.
And it's true.
So our friends have converged nose better than I, for example, that Brazilian football today has lost some of its nuance.
And so I think that balance between nuance and the loss of nuances is important in Brazil even for football.
I agree with you.
In fact, we're talking about Brazil today, but obviously our topic about nuance and the threat to nuance, diversity and miscegination.
All this has a global extension in the threat that is posed by monocultralization, not only in the sphere of agriculture, but also in the cultural sphere, might be associated with Americanization or Westernization or the reduction of diversity of the sameness is something that
people and cultures, the world around are facing.
Perfectly.
But yes, we can hear the song about the song.
What did you bring exactly?
I brought the song written by Tom Jobeen.
Tom Jobeen is our musician and magician.
And he died some years ago.
And he was the proponent, Prince Pro-Pro-Pro-Peneant of Bosanova together with Jon Jobeer to and
the Vinisou Jimoris.
But this song, precisely this song is a song brought in the 1980s when Tom Jobeen was fighting for ecology.
And the name of this song is Passarin.
Passarin is an effective way to talk about birds.
And one of the diversity we found in Brazil is an enormous varieties of birds.
And so this song speaks about the fire in the woods, in the forest.
And he tries to say little bird, light away because the forest will take fire.
And my love too and feeling the happiness and everything.
So we'll give it a listen.
Maybe we won't get through the whole song, but we'll listen certainly to part of it now.
Okay.
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So Marilia, Passanova, what is it exactly?
I mean, this is an example of Passanova, I suppose.
Yes, yes, yes. So it's this written me totally related to the lyrics and this kind of instrumentation.
And this is Passanova, the new bit created, in fact, it created the historical moment of Passanova
was the end of the 1950s. And that song, it's after that historical moment, but it's still
in the end of the
And New Orleans place, obviously it is a musical genre that's based on New Orleans now.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Because it's full of gradation and I think that sweetness, that the
de-cerate, it's very nuanced, it's produced by New Orleans, it's not something that I think
like rock, music.
It's not like the kind of Passanova that you can get from Western style music, which borrows
the Passanova and gives a very kind of a nuanced version of it, like the following.
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That's just to give you a contrast of what's going on.
Non-new on, so Passanova is all about good. So what is this exactly?
This is a live performance of Break on Through to the Other Side by The Doors. Oh, okay.
The listeners of this show know that I have a particular sort of affection for The Doors, the General.
Me too, yeah.
And it's true that they have an extraordinary drummer, John Densmore, who took a song which should have had a completely different kind of beat, a more standard rock beat.
And he borrowed the, you know, what the Americans call the Passanova, the Passanova beat, and gave it something to that song which does add an element of nuance, believe it or not, into what would have otherwise been maybe of more straightforward and banal kind of rock song.
Yeah, good.
And I presume that there's many different kinds of music, the same way there are very different kinds of biomes and Brazil, very different kinds of musical genres.
Oh, of course. Oh, yeah, it's even the hip hop and the Brazilian rock and many nuances of the kind of samba, samba, camsang, shuru, and many different rhythms and music and
music and Brazil, it's very stronger by its music.
And before we go on to talk about Brazilian literature, maybe we could hear one more thing that you brought in, which is a very different musical genre, I believe.
Yeah, it's exactly.
I brought music collected by composer named Martin Wyme Randa in the Ama Parr region in the north of Amazonia.
And the frontier with Guiana, it's an Indian who is singing and it's the kind of song produced in the forest by what we call shamans.
And you know, to enter the forest, Indian tribes, it's a ritual. We respect a lot this environment of the forest.
And that song precisely is related to the morning time.
And it's beautiful because it's come together with modern orchestration, with a piano together with the traditional Indian song.
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