the last book I ever read (The Anthropologists by Aysegül Savas, excerpt nine)

from The Anthropologists by Aysegül Savas:

On the phone, I told my mother that we were assembling a portfolio for a loan application.

I can’t believe it, my mother said. I would never have expected it of the two of you.

Our families had a foundational myth of me and Mama that was different from our own. My mother believed that our love for each other had something to do with the way that we tolerated each other’s mess and procrastination, even enabled it. For my father it was the fact that we lived so modestly, with a great tolerance for discomfort. He couldn’t understand why our couch was so narrow, our bathroom so cramped, our meals so meager. For Manu’s parents, we were united in our love of old things. The first time they visited us in the city, soon after we’d moved into our apartment—which we’d furnished with a farm table, a chest of drawers, a wardrobe, and a record player—they said that the place was like the village homes of a century ago. It wasn’t a compliment. To them, old things did not have the charm they did for us. Aged objects pointed to hardship, to ways of life they did not need to romanticize, because they had experienced them firsthand. Their own home resembled the lobby of a three-star hotel.

the last book I ever read (The Anthropologists by Aysegül Savas, excerpt eight)

from The Anthropologists by Aysegül Savas:

When Ravi arrived, he greeted Lena briefly, before joining another conversation. Lena came up to me.

You’re such a good housewife, she said.

It was the sort of comment she and I would have laughed about, but I didn’t find it funny after a day of cooking. In fact, I was finding it harder to laugh with Lena. She could probably sense this because she was all the more sarcastic.

the last book I ever read (The Anthropologists by Aysegül Savas, excerpt seven)

from The Anthropologists by Aysegül Savas:

The apartment was old, but more charming than decrepit. Wooden beams crossed the living room ceiling; there was a tiled fireplace in the bedroom, though is was out of use. Still, we could fill the hearth with candles. I had already made a mental arrangement: many white ones of different sizes. I could suddenly see us there with our own couch and dishes and towels. I wondered whether this was how some women felt about the prospect of having a child: that they could easily imagine a space for it.

the last book I ever read (The Anthropologists by Aysegül Savas, excerpt six)

from The Anthropologists by Aysegül Savas:

I’d planned to go home once my grandmother was out of the hospital, but then I realized that I couldn’t leave the city: our residency permits had expired and our new ones still had not arrived.

Don’t worry about it, my mother said, each time I apologized for not being there. We have everything sorted out.

That made me even sadder, as if my arrival had never been expected and they’d never really counted on me to help.

the last book I ever read (The Anthropologists by Aysegül Savas, excerpt five)

from The Anthropologists by Aysegül Savas:

The sun had set by the time we got on our bikes. We took the scenic route back, the wind biting our cheeks. It started to rain softly and the lights of lampposts blurred in front of us. We passed many neighborhoods, a tour of our various years in the city: the year we moved, the year we had no friends and went to every museum, the year we met Ravi and ate out with him almost daily.

That night, when we’d changed for bed and Manu set on the floor rolling a joint, I could barely recall anything from the brunch.

Did you have a good day? I asked.

Great, he said. I loved our ride back.

It might go on my list—the scenic bike ride. But I didn’t know whether it was sturdy enough to stand its ground, the two of us biking around a foreign city.

the last book I ever read (The Anthropologists by Aysegül Savas, excerpt four)

from The Anthropologists by Aysegül Savas:

Tereza called to ask whether we would like to come with her to a concert; she had extra tickets from a charity she had been a member of for years. The program was Brahms and Dvořák and Paganini, she said, none of which sounded very interesting to us. We told her we’d be happy to go.

the last book I ever read (The Anthropologists by Aysegül Savas, excerpt three)

from The Anthropologists by Aysegül Savas:

The following morning when Sara woke up, Manu and I were already in the living room, drinking coffee. It pleased me that Sara felt comfortable enough to sleep in. Somehow this seemed like a sign that our lives were real.

the last book I ever read (The Anthropologists by Aysegül Savas, excerpt two)

from The Anthropologists by Aysegül Savas:

She had been married and divorced three times. I knew this because Ravi and I had fetched out every item of personal history we could from the internet, and photos of the Dame as a young woman, looking fierce and intelligent, even at the risk of eclipsing her beauty. Years ago, she’d made a documentary about a group of women—artists, cooks, socialites, pigeon-feeders—whom she filmed in their bedrooms and studios and on the street. I loved this film, its humor and stubbornness. The way it didn’t smooth out the women’s madness. There were scenes of the object cluttering their homes, slow shots of their thickened hands, their creased faces like lines of a poem. On-screen, the women were restored to a state of dignity that might have been refused them in their lives. I had always thought that the film was a kind of self-portrait, a collage of what the Dame valued in herself and how she wanted to be seen.

the last book I ever read (The Anthropologists by Aysegül Savas, excerpt one)

from The Anthropologists by Aysegül Savas:

I mumbled in agreement, because I didn’t want her to think I was strange. This was a fear of mine: that my family would think I was becoming a stranger.

Instead, I told my grandmother I had a photograph of her on my desk. The one of her reading under a tree.

I was sixteen years old, she said. I was the best writer in class. No one could write an essay like I did. And I was awarded a prize for my singing.

She sighed, meaning that she had wasted her life.

the last book I ever read (The Carnation Revolution: The Day Portugal's Dictatorship Fell, excerpt fourteen)

from The Carnation Revolution: The Day Portugal's Dictatorship Fell by Alex Fernandes:

The 6 November meeting of the Revolutionary Council is the flame that ignites the tinderbox the country seems set atop. Prime Minister Pinheiro de Azevedo demands action that allows him to govern under the current state of anarchy that prevails in Lisbon. One of the decisions taken that evening, then, is to silence the bombastic and provocative Rádio Renascença once and for all. At 04:30 on 7 November, under orders of the chief of staff of the Air Force, Morais da Silva, a squad of paratroopers and police sets off a bomb against the antennae of the occupied radio station, taking it off the air. The action sets off a wave of protests among the increasingly politicised and radicalised paratroopers who, since their involvement in 11 March, have veered progressively more to the left, and feel once again as though they are being tricked, used as fodder for reactionary aims. On 8 November, General Morais da Silva and Vasco Lourenço visit Tancos to try and justify the action and calm the paratrooper regiment, but the meeting is disastrous–a soldier takes the microphone and calls the general ‘bourgeois’, and there is a mass walkout to a parallel meeting. It’s an embarrassing display of insubordination that leads Vasco Lourenço to turn to his colleague and state, ‘I’m never coming anywhere with you again.’ That very day, in protest at the level of discipline in the lower ranks, 123 officers walk out of the Tancos Paratrooper School and leave it under the command of sergeants and privates. Soon after, the occupants of the school pass a motion repudiating the bombing of Renascença. On 11 November, two of those sergeants arrive at the COPCON headquarters and offer their units to Otelo, in exchange for COPCON’s support in the paratroopers’ struggle. Otelo agrees; soon after, there is a confrontation between the COPCON commander and the Air Force chief of staff, when Morais e Selva begins the process of dissolving the paratrooper units altogether.

the last book I ever read (The Carnation Revolution: The Day Portugal's Dictatorship Fell, excerpt thirteen)

from The Carnation Revolution: The Day Portugal's Dictatorship Fell by Alex Fernandes:

Much as with both 25 April and 28 September, the power of radio proves decisive in shaping the day. As the details of the coup attempt become known, Rádio Renascença–a station whose workers had been on strike for twenty-two days–breaks its silence and opens up its frequencies to Rádio Clube Português–and there is an immediate appeal to the population to mobilise. Colonel João Varela Gomes, through his role at the head of the 5th Division, breaks protocol and also begins calling for mass mobilisations through the radio. It’s partly due to this that by the time the paratroopers surrender to RAL1, the area outside the artillery compound is surrounded by vocal members of the population, chanting ‘The people are not with you’ and convincing the soldiers that they’re on the wrong side. And just like the last coup attempt, barricades go up on the outskirts of Lisbon, set up by civilians hoping to stop any units that might be on their way to the capital. In Tancos, Spínola realises, as late afternoon rolls around, that his knowledge of what forces he had on the ground was mistaken–his coup has failed. The general, defeated, bundles his family and numerous officers into helicopters and makes a swift escape to Spain. Other conspirators make their way to the Spanish border by car, or are otherwise detained by COPCON forces, or hand themselves in. In the latter case, Major Mensurado, commander of the paratrooper units that laid siege to RAL1, leaves his men licking their wounds after their surrender and travels to COPCON. It’s abundantly clear that the paratrooper regiments were tricked–they had been sent to RAL1 on the false information that the unit was involved in a vast conspiracy of left-wing slaughter, and did so believing the orders were being sent through the proper channels, through the chiefs of staff and even General Costa Gomes himself.

the last book I ever read (The Carnation Revolution: The Day Portugal's Dictatorship Fell, excerpt twelve)

from The Carnation Revolution: The Day Portugal's Dictatorship Fell by Alex Fernandes:

In the chaos of the day, the exact timeline of events is murky. There are conflicting reports on exactly when the population surged on the PIDE headquarters, and reports of gunfire throughout the day and of emergency cars driving wounded civilians away from the action in the mid-afternoon, likely the result of various failed popular incursions on the building, pushed away by the violent response. It’s generally accepted, however, that at around 20: 00, a group of around six hundred civilians from Terreiro do Paço congregate once again in front of number 20 António Maria Cardoso, baying for the heads of those inside, with shouts of ‘Assassins!’ and ‘Death to PIDE’. PIDE’s first response is to set loose an attack dog, which the crowd manages to scare off with sticks and rocks. Then, paving stones are prised from the ground, the mob putting their hands to anything they can hurl at the building, lashing out in hatred. And then–at around 20: 10–agents of the political police open fire from the upper windows and balconies, into the centre of the crowd, following a direct order from Fernando Silva Pais. The bullets meet bodies, dozens of them, as the civilians scatter and dive. They kill Fernando Carvalho Guesteira, seventeen years old, a waiter. They kill José James Hartley Barneto, thirty-eight, father of four, a clerk at the National Confectioners’ Guild. They kill João Guilherme Rego Arruda,* twenty, a second-year philosophy student. And they kill Fernando Luís Barreiros dos Reis, a 23-year-old off-duty soldier who happened to be taking a holiday in Lisbon on the day of the coup, and who, joining his voice with the civilians around him, becomes the first and only military death of 25 April. The hail of PIDE bullets doesn’t discriminate–the lucky ones are the men and women who dive behind parked cars or into alleys, taking grazes or even a few bullets in the back or even coming out unscathed altogether. In addition to the four dead, the PIDE bullets injure upwards of forty-five more–the vast majority in their late teens and early twenties.

the last book I ever read (The Carnation Revolution: The Day Portugal's Dictatorship Fell, excerpt eleven)

from The Carnation Revolution: The Day Portugal's Dictatorship Fell by Alex Fernandes:

In her song ‘Cheira a Lisboa’, Amália Rodrigues, Portugal’s undisputed queen of Fado, sings that Lisbon smells of the coffee shops of Rossio. This early afternoon, just gone noon, Rossio smells of gasoline and blistered asphalt as Maia’s convoy enters the square and begins to veer left, trying to fit its enormous frames into the narrow Rua do Carmo. The square seems to vibrate with the rumble of the M47 tanks. Maia spots a column of infantrymen from the 1st Infantry Regiment, packed into the backs of transport trucks, rolling into the square from the other end. He exits his jeep to speak with the commander. It’s another push from the government–they’ve been sent to stop Maia’s column, but the commander says they’re with the revolutionaries. Maia orders them to follow along, and the convoy gains several dozen more heavily armed soldiers. Celeste Caeiro is here now, among the crowd, clutching her bunch of carnations in her hands, her eyes wide as she watches her city taken over by machines of war she’s only ever seen on grainy footage of military parades. One of the M47 tanks passes a few feet in front of her, and the man atop it looks down, smiling.

‘What are you doing here?’ she asks the man, with a sudden surge of courage.

‘A revolution!’ he replies.

the last book I ever read (The Carnation Revolution: The Day Portugal's Dictatorship Fell, excerpt ten)

from The Carnation Revolution: The Day Portugal's Dictatorship Fell by Alex Fernandes:

On the morning of 25 April 1974, Celeste Caeiro is on her way to work. Celeste is forty years old–short, with a tight mop of greying hair and thick round glasses, she heads from her tiny downtown apartment to the self-service restaurant Sir on the ground floor of the Franjinhas, where she works as a cleaner. Celeste knows the owner is preparing a celebration of sorts–the restaurant first opened exactly one year ago. The cunning marketing strategy for today, she’s heard, is to offer gentlemen customers a free glass of port, and give ladies a carnation. The flowers arrived yesterday, dozens of large bunches in anticipation of the lunch rush. As she arrives, Celeste is surprised that the restaurant is dark, the door closed, with no sign of the cheerful decorations she was expecting. She pokes her head in and sees the owner hunched by the radio, which is tuned to Rádio Clube Português, the room strewn with large unopened bunches of red and white carnations. His expression is grim. ‘What’s wrong?’ she asks.

‘We won’t be opening today, Celeste.’ He gestures at the radio. ‘Something’s happening in the centre, some sort of military operation. They’re telling people to stay home.’ They stand for a few moments in the dark restaurant, listening as the radio plays the military tunes the MFA has lined up for the gaps between their missives. ‘You’d better go home too, Celeste,’ the owner says. ‘Here–take some of these with you.’ He gestures at one of the large piles of flowers strewn around him. Celeste grabs a bunch and leaves, facing the notion of an unexpected day off, curious about the events that have caused it. She walks to the metro station at Marquês de Pombal and travels two stops down, to Restauradores.

the last book I ever read (The Carnation Revolution: The Day Portugal's Dictatorship Fell, excerpt nine)

from The Carnation Revolution: The Day Portugal's Dictatorship Fell by Alex Fernandes:

Dina holds it together enough to crack a joke. ‘You mean we’re not going to the opera tomorrow?’ He’d forgotten. They have tickets to La Traviata. It’ll have to be for another time.

Otelo kisses his sleeping eight-year-old son on the head, and embraces his wife one final time. ‘Until Friday, my love. I’ll be here to have lunch with you.’ He exits the house with his uniform in a bag. He remembers, too late, he’s left his pistol behind. Walking back into the house, he sees his wife on their bed, arms wrapped around her knees, sobbing heavily.

the last book I ever read (The Carnation Revolution: The Day Portugal's Dictatorship Fell, excerpt eight)

from The Carnation Revolution: The Day Portugal's Dictatorship Fell by Alex Fernandes:

Portugal and the Future (Portugal e o Futuro) hits the shelves on 22 February, and it’s an immediate bestseller. Costa Gomes’ review turns out to have been burying the lede. Spínola reaffirms his statements on the solution to the colonial problem being political and explicitly not military, and goes one step further, stating that that political solution must base itself on the self-determination rights of the respective African peoples. He doesn’t advocate for full independence, but rather a federated system with each of the nations governed by representatives of the black majority–avoiding by all means the creation of ‘new Rhodesias’. Spínola also acknowledges that, given the nature and development of the conflict, it might already be too late. The PAIGC, for example, had declared formal Guinean independence in late September of 1973, a claim already recognised by a plurality of world nations that flipped the framing of the Portuguese presence from territorial defenders to unwanted invaders. Even Spínola’s intermediate solution might be unachievable. Among the staff officers, Spínola’s book unlocks an avenue of thought and furious discussion that many at that point still consider treasonous–decolonisation. Regardless of the viability of his plan or conclusions, having a prestigious senior officer make a compelling case for national self-determination, in a book published on Portuguese soil, sends shock waves through the military establishment. It seems, for the first time in decades, possible to discuss the Homeland and its History.

the last book I ever read (The Carnation Revolution: The Day Portugal's Dictatorship Fell, excerpt seven)

from The Carnation Revolution: The Day Portugal's Dictatorship Fell by Alex Fernandes:

On 22 December, the government publishes new legislation that effectively repeals Ordnances 353/73 and 409/73, reverting access to the permanent staff to officers who had completed ‘normal training’, through the regular Military Academy courses. A week later, new guidance comes out massively increasing staff officer salaries across the board–the largest pay rise any of the officers have seen in many years. It’s a bribe–at least that much is obvious to the MOFA executive. To their surprise, however, the government payout only elicits a few raised voices from the officer base declaring victory and questioning the Movement’s need to exist. Focusing energy on to the issue of prestige has struck a chord–and it doesn’t take much to convince their colleagues that the ordnances were only a symptom of a greater problem, one that a pay rise also doesn’t fix. The new laws also create the role of vice chief of staff of the armed forces, a position, second in the military hierarchy, conjured from thin air almost exclusively to deal with the question of António Spínola. The general had returned from Guinea in early November and spent several months in an administrative limbo while the regime figured out what to do with him. Spínola’s highly crafted image, of a respected and effective military man and politician, means the usual route of pushing him into a National Assembly role or a senior post in military academia is likely to ruffle feathers. It’s clear to anyone who’s paid attention to the general’s ascent that his goal is the presidency, but Tomás taking a third term means the second best choice, for now, is to make him the second most powerful military officer in the country. When Spínola takes on the role officially, on 15 January 1974, he delivers the speech he had warned Vasco Lourenço to watch out for one month before. Among the bureaucratic platitudes and thanks, one line in particular stands out: ‘The Armed Forces are not the Praetorian Guard of Power.’

the last book I ever read (The Carnation Revolution: The Day Portugal's Dictatorship Fell, excerpt six)

from The Carnation Revolution: The Day Portugal's Dictatorship Fell by Alex Fernandes:

Portugal’s need to plumb the depths of its manpower to feed the war machine means that, since 1961, a conscription system has been in place, pushing the vast majority of young men hitting the age of twenty into a two-year mandatory stint in the Army and thus into the thick of the war. In 1971 the conscription age is lowered to eighteen–and by 1973 a significant majority of Portugal’s male population of ‘recruitable’ age is fighting overseas. A proportion of that conscripted stock is put through a short officer training course and allowed, for the duration of their two-year service, to hold officer rank and command a company. Many of these militia officers are held in some degree of contempt by the full-time staff officers, not having undergone the full four-year training and not having initially chosen the military as a career. Their relationship to the war is different by default, being able to return home after their two-(or, later, three-) year service rather than thrown, repeatedly, into the relentless meat grinder the African front has become for the majority of full-time officers in the Portuguese military. It’s militia officers that make up the bulk of those addressing the Congress of Overseas Combatants–their return to civilian life means pushing the argument for continuing the war effort, under the guise of ‘not betraying the Fatherland’, is easier. As the war progresses and the officer stock depletes, those conscripted officers who had done their duty in the early to mid-’ 60s and returned to civilian life are occasionally called back in to fill the vacancies, after another short training course. Some are made to do so ten years after their initial conscription, when they are handed the rank of captain and sent, terrified, unprepared and unwilling, into the front to command a platoon of forty men in the African bush.

the last book I ever read (The Carnation Revolution: The Day Portugal's Dictatorship Fell, excerpt five)

from The Carnation Revolution: The Day Portugal's Dictatorship Fell by Alex Fernandes:

Back in Portugal, Marcelo Caetano’s limited reforms fail to quell the growing unrest among the population. The resistance to the regime and the war hits a new tenor when several of the radical left organisations that sprang up in the late ’60s and early ’70s begin to put their ideas of violent resistance into practice. The country is rocked by bombings of ships bound for Africa, airbases and bureaucratic institutions, organised by the Revolutionary Brigades and the PCP-aligned Armed Revolutionary Action (Acção Revolucionária Armada, ARA). Among the plethora of new organisations undertaking direct action against the regime is the Unity and Revolutionary Action League (Liga de União e Acção Revolucionária, LUAR), a group formed by many of the perpetrators of the hijacking of TAP 114 and led by Hermínio da Palma Inácio himself. LUAR makes a grand entrance on the scene by robbing the Bank of Portugal in the town of Figueira da Foz, proclaiming in printed missives that it intends to use the captured funds ‘For the liberation of the people’ and sparking a continent-wide chase led by PIDE/ DGS and Interpol. The various attacks add another dent to the already stretched infrastructure of the colonial war–but it’s not all explosions and bank robberies. In July of 1972, following another of the regime’s sham elections in which Admiral Américo Tomás is elected president for the third time (and unopposed for the second), the Revolutionary Brigades dress two pigs in admirals’ uniforms and release them in Lisbon, one in Rossio and the other in Alcântara. The pigs are oiled and the police, unable to hold on to the slippery swine, resort to gunning them down in the street. BR follow the stunt by setting off petards loaded with pamphlets decrying the elections in Portugal as a ‘mockery’: ‘Besides that, Tomás’s election is filth. Hence the pigs, symbols of Tomás and the pigs who elected him.’

the last book I ever read (The Carnation Revolution: The Day Portugal's Dictatorship Fell, excerpt four)

from The Carnation Revolution: The Day Portugal's Dictatorship Fell by Alex Fernandes:

The high Catholic moralism of the Portuguese state had prevented anything close to a ‘sexual’ or ‘feminist’ movement from emerging openly within Portuguese society. In 1968 an outbreak of student protests at the Superior Technical Institute (Instituto Superior Técnico, IST) had declared, among other things, a ‘sexual revolution’ –an indication that, perhaps late in the global context, at least among the youth the moralist grip of the state was beginning to slip. One of the more dramatic confrontations of Marcelo Caetano’s tenure is the case of the Three Marias, which manages to cause waves across the international community. In 1972 Maria Isabel Barreno, Maria Teresa Horta and Maria Velho da Costa, in a window of more lax censorship, publish Novas Cartas Portuguesas (New Portuguese Letters, or The Three Marias as it appears in English translations). Novas Cartas Portuguesas is hard to classify–it flits between poetry, essays, letters and fragments, but these combine to paint a harsh picture of the Portuguese woman under the Estado Novo, reflecting on the brutality of the regime and the Church, and the female condition in Portugal. It is almost immediately banned–described as ‘immoral’ and ‘pornographic’ by the state censors–and the Three Marias are arrested, placed on trial at Boa Hora Tribunal and sentenced to prison. The resulting wave of condemnation from international feminist movements, which includes protests outside Portuguese embassies in places like New York, adds another uncomfortable layer to the international scrutiny Portugal is already under.

the last book I ever read (The Carnation Revolution: The Day Portugal's Dictatorship Fell, excerpt three)

from The Carnation Revolution: The Day Portugal's Dictatorship Fell by Alex Fernandes:

Setting their ambitions even higher, the DRIL committee in Venezuela concoct what becomes known as Operation Dulcinea. The name is Galvão’s idea–a reference to a 1943 play Dulcinea, or D. Quixote’s Last Adventure. The plan is based around the fact that the Portuguese cruise liner Santa Maria is soon to make port in nearby La Guaira. The ship, a large luxury vessel making a leisurely journey to Miami, carries over 350 crew and 1,000 passengers. In January of 1961, in the ports of La Guaira and Curaçao, DRIL arranges for twenty-five Portuguese and Spanish rebels to secretly board the Santa Maria, including Pepe Velo, Henrique Galvão and his second in command Camilo Mortágua. They also manage to smuggle aboard fourteen weapons. The plan is to commandeer the Santa Maria and sail the ship to the island of Fernando Po, from where the rebels can coordinate an invasion of Angola and establish a government dedicated to overthrowing the Iberian fascisms. The hijacking doesn’t go to plan–the rebels are twitchy, operating in the dark, and in the commotion four people are shot, including the ship’s third pilot Nascimento Costa, who ultimately succumbs to his wounds. The remaining crew are gathered together and told the ship is under the command of a revolutionary force led by General Humberto Delgado, and cautioned not to resist. The Santa Maria is renamed Santa Liberdade by the rebels, but its lofty goals are swiftly put aside. In order to save one of the wounded crew, the revolutionaries are forced to change course for the island of Saint Lucia. This isn’t done for entirely humanitarian reasons–Galvão’s time on the ship leads him to conclude that it is inadequate for launching a military attack, and the mission is better off reverting to a propaganda campaign. In any case, landing at Saint Lucia removes the element of surprise. Within hours of the landing, the world knows of the hijacking. On board the ship, the rebels’ radios are tuned to the world’s news stations as the navigator plots an unpredictable trajectory, making their journey more difficult to track by anyone giving chase. For the passengers, apart from the initial shock of the piracy, life on the ship goes on very much as before–only a few days after the hijacking, the orchestra is back to doing its evening performance, and the pool is once again full.

the last book I ever read (The Carnation Revolution: The Day Portugal's Dictatorship Fell, excerpt two)

from The Carnation Revolution: The Day Portugal's Dictatorship Fell by Alex Fernandes:

Galvão’s escape becomes PIDE’s number one priority for several weeks. The nurses at Santa Maria hospital are brutally interrogated, the captain’s family is tailed and even his former lovers are pursued through Lisbon on the chance Galvão might try to reignite an old flame. The fugitive, however, moves quietly between flats in Lisbon, ferried around in secret by a network of loyal friends. A few weeks after his escape, Galvão makes his way into the Argentinian embassy disguised as a delivery man, and formally requests asylum. This causes a diplomatic furore, but one that the Argentinian government is willing to bear. Galvão stays in the small embassy for several weeks; granted access to a typewriter, the old captain spends his hours writing letters and pamphlets that he is convinced will do serious damage to the regime if they are given a proper airing, and distributes them to fellow conspirators throughout Lisbon. As much as Galvão is eloquent and charismatic, he is also somewhat of a fantasist–as well as circulating his pamphlets, Galvão insists that his associates should distribute a collection of his poems (which he claims will galvanise the youth), as well as photos of himself standing at the window of the Argentinian embassy, looking sombre in a suit and tie, accompanied with snippets of text against Salazar. Galvão would happily spend his days fomenting a rebellion against the regime from this small room in the centre of Lisbon, but this is clearly untenable for the Argentinian diplomatic staff. After days of furtive negotiation, the regime allows Galvão to travel to Buenos Aires under Argentinian protection, on the condition that he be prevented from continuing his political work in Argentina. This decision, one arrived at from diplomatic necessity, plagues Salazar–in a conversation with his foreign minister, the now elderly dictator fumes: ‘We’re going to regret this a thousand times. He is much more dangerous than Delgado.’ On 11 May 1959, Henrique Galvão is put on an Argentinian Airlines flight, beginning his 29-hour journey to Buenos Aires. Left behind are his wife, his adopted daughter Beatriz, his pet sparrow and a trail of broken-hearted mistresses. He will never see Portugal again.

the last book I ever read (The Carnation Revolution: The Day Portugal's Dictatorship Fell, excerpt one)

from The Carnation Revolution: The Day Portugal's Dictatorship Fell by Alex Fernandes:

The resulting workers’ mobilisation turns out to be explosive, literally. On the morning of the 18th, a PCP activist lobs a bomb onto a railway line on the eastern outskirts of Lisbon, causing a train to derail and immediately alerting the government’s military forces that the action is under way. The capital is rocked by more explosions, on Travessa do Cabral in central Lisbon and underneath a tram on Avenida da Liberdade. These actions, however, are not the triumphant herald to anything that could be described as a general strike. There are hubs of action in some Lisbon neighbourhoods, as well as in various towns and cities up and down the country–but the total participation doesn’t rise above a few thousand. In the town of Marinha Grande, workers manage to occupy the town hall and the GNR barracks, but a lack of organised leadership and a real plan for what to do next means the police take control of the situation in a few hours, scattering the armed strikers into the surrounding pine forests. Syndicalists in Almada and Barreiro, south of the Tagus, bring the railways to a halt, and in the town of Silves the cork manufacturers hoist a red flag above the workshops. Ultimately, however, this first salvo from the workers’ movement meets the same end that befell the various republican uprisings: failure, arrests, increased government repression, death. This is the first real test of Salazar’s mettle as de facto head of state, the first glimpse into how the Estado Novo deals with dissent. His answer to 18 January is the creation of the Tarrafal penal colony, its construction proposed in 1934 and the first prisoners shipped out in 1936. Of the 152 men imprisoned when the Swamp of Death is inaugurated, over a third are there due to their actions in January 1934.

The particular brand of fascist authoritarianism implemented by Salazar notably differs from the regimes in Italy and Germany in a few key ways. The violent goons that put Mussolini and Hitler in power are not required for the creation of the Estado Novo, and Salazar remains opposed to an independent paramilitary force–or street thugs outside of his control. Yet the Portuguese far right are itching to imitate the Brownshirts. Salazar sees an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone, directing the ebullience of the would-be street fascists against what he sees as the real enemies of the state. In the mid-1930s the Portuguese press is awash with articles decrying the dangers posed by next-door republican Spain, as well as the increasing influence of the Soviet Union. The year 1936 sees the creation of two organisations designed to combat that influence: the Portuguese Legion, a formal militia integrated into the state through the Ministry of the Interior, and the Portuguese Youth (Mocidade Portuguesa), in essence a youth extension of the former, modelled partly on the Hitler Youth. With these two organisations the Estado Novo can keep a close eye on the more extreme fascist elements in the country, and has another tool of repression against what Salazar calls ‘the great heresy of our time’: communism. From late 1936 public servants are required to make a statement under oath that they repudiate ‘communism and all subversive ideas’.

the last book I ever read (Easily Slip into Another World: A Life in Music, excerpt fourteen)

from Easily Slip into Another World: A Life in Music by Henry Threadgill and Brent Hayes Edwards:

I was always fascinated by the famous closing section of Ulysses, where Joyce dispenses with conventional punctuation. There are pages and pages of what a junior-high-school grammar teacher would call run-on sentences. But it works. And as a reader, when you realize that it works, it can feel transformative. Magical. There’s a thrilling defiance of the conventional rules, a bold transgression of the way things supposedly have to be done. And yet you encounter order and sense anyway—maybe even new or redoubled layers of resonance and meaning, because it isn’t done the same old way.

the last book I ever read (Easily Slip into Another World: A Life in Music, excerpt thirteen)

from Easily Slip into Another World: A Life in Music by Henry Threadgill and Brent Hayes Edwards:

My research drew on an eclectic range of sources. But the thing that opened the door for me was studying the music of Edgard Varèse. Going back to my time in college in Chicago, I had always been interested in his music. What was fascinating was that he was thinking about musical organization in innovative ways that didn’t emerge from serialism, which was the dominant experimental vocabulary of his time. Varèse didn’t follow the twelve-tone model of Schoenberg and Webern and their acolytes. He went his own way.

Varèse spent a great deal of time thinking about development techniques: ways to build and extend musical structures out of initial configurations. He writes about a technique where he flips the intervals between two notes to create harmonic derivations. In the major/minor world of diatonic harmony, one starts with a given tonal center—G major, say—and then the music proceeds through a set of operations in relation to that, moving to the relative minor, modulating up a half step, creating tension and release by resolving back to that center. But this isn’t what Varèse was after. Neither was he simply doing an inversion, where, for instance, you have a C major triad and you can flip the lowest note in the chord to the top, so that rather than C-E-G you end up with E-G-C and you’re still maintaining that C major tonal center.

The derivations Varèse was experimenting with aren’t the product of diatonic harmony, the product of extensions or substitutions of a given tonal chord. Instead, they were solely a matter of the intervals. He called the variations of this procedure “infolding” and “outfolding.”