It is always humbling to learn aspects of american cultural history from Heitor. It was equally humbling to mention the subject to my erudite friend Eric and have him respond, without skipping a beat, with the name of Oscar Micheaux, the most well known director in this genre. I'm not surprised that Eric knew about Micheaux; I am well accustomed to the fact that Eric is a font of information about most things cultural. What flustered me was that he didn't even have the decency to stumble around for a few seconds trying to find the name buried somewhere in his memory. It was right there.
During the last couple of weeks a cultural center downtown had a showing of some of these old films which still survive, and last night there was a lecture/discussion about them with a professor from Columbia University. And this was humbling too, because the guy spoke what I considered perfect Porutuguese. He gave his lecture and did the entire q and a session without an interpreter. Damn! Heitor, trying to be nice, assured me the guy's Portuguese wasn't perfect, that he used a few Spanish words as well as a few false cognates.
But I loved his fearlessness, whether he was speaking perfectly or not. And I understood him. As far as I was concerned, he was the best Portuguese speaker in the room. It reminds me what one of my former advanced students said, i.e.it was much easier for him to have conversations in English with people for whom English was a second or third language. I felt like I could have spoken some kind of bastardized Portuguese with this guy all day long.
Final humbling experience of the night. After the lecture, the professor, the curator of the show, a representative from the U.S. consulate and Heitor went out for dinner and drinks. Because no other partners or spouses were represented, I chose to come home and order Chinese food. The woman taking the order on the phone, having trouble understanding me, asked "do you speak English?"
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