Vamos Ao Brasil/Let’s Go Brazil
‘The darkness is my cultural broth.’
This last week I’ve been rereading The Stream of Life (Água Viva in Portuguese) a short essayistic fiction by Clarice Lispector, a long-time favourite writer of chronicles (crônicas) and radiant, often experimental, prose. It turned my thoughts not only Brazilwards, but also got me thinking about new forms of writing—not so much how to disseminate existing genres in the digital environment, but more how might we develop our thinking and our writing praxis to create new forms and genres. I’d like to explore more digital writing possibilities, but my big, recurring stumbling block is that I don’t want to spend masses of time learning IT stuff or wrangling software. I’ve got a reasonable, middling level of technical competence, but I’m a writer: I need to spend my time writing. I guess that means I need collaborators …
Rio de Janiero at dusk
Anyway, you can read an early online essay of mine, Vamos Ao Brasil/Let’s Go Brazil here. The technical design was done by Alex Munt and Steve Collins, and it was published in Macquarie University’s online journal, Scan, in 2006.
I wrote Vamos Ao Brasil/Let’s Go Brazil almost 7 years ago, so of course, when I read the piece now there are things I would do differently—isn’t that always the way?
Noëlle Janaczewska 