In mid July, while I was looking at the beautiful but sad\u00a0 pictures of children taken by our photographer Miguel Boyayan for this\u00a0 edition’s cover \u00a0– prepared by the assistant science editor, Maria Guimar\u00e3es – the following verses came to my mind\u00a0 in a relative jumble: “a womb however vacant \/ that involves only emptiness\/ concave will become convex”. They are from a poem Alto do Trapu\u00e1 by Jo\u00e3o Cabral de Melo Neto and made a deep impression on me when I was somewhere between my 14th and 17th year, when\u00a0 I had a fantastic Portuguese teacher called Zuleica Barreto. Actually, I was lucky to have had great Portuguese teachers at the Col\u00e9gio de Aplica\u00e7\u00e3o at\u00a0 the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA) for seven years at secondary school, at that time comprising gin\u00e1sio and colegial [roughly equivalent to junior high school and high school].The one who struck me the most, however, was Zuleika, with her vast knowledge of every text we studied, interspersed with a fantastic and ironic view, combined with a capacity to share this with us and spurred\u00a0 in us as teenagers a burning passion for literature – to this day I still feel deeply and irremediably close to the Paulo Hon\u00f3rio that we heatedly dissected in the dry and rough environment of S\u00e3o Bernardo. This was the Paulo Hon\u00f3rio created by Graciliano Ramos, it is true, but, I suspect, transfigured and illuminated in a special way by Zuleica, so that our avid eyes could reach fearlessly into the characters – core.<\/p>\n
Very well: at some point on our shared path through the classrooms, ready to embark upon the tough journey of a parched death and life, Zuleica wanted to introduce us to other less well known works by Jo\u00e3o Cabral, of whom she said “he is the poet”, to give us an idea of her immeasurable admiration for him. That was when Alto do Trapu\u00e1 appeared, in whose images I promptly recognized an unparalleled poetic strictness, a penetrating precision, in his presentation of these men of “vegetable-like torpor” who peopled the misery of the northeastern scrub savannas.<\/p>\n
And so many years later, when I had only barely started recalling the verses of the poem, Mayumi Okuyama, our art editor, with the prompt adhesion of Maria Guimar\u00e3es, proposed that we should use it as an illustration for the cover feature on malnutrition<\/a> (page 42). Or, better said, on the proven evidence that malnutrition during childhood leads to hypertension, obesity and diabetes during adolescence and adulthood. To my mind, this made sense, but due to space limitations we were unable to publish the full poem. We\u00a0 have included some short excerpts for the reader, with a promise to post the entire poem on our website<\/a>.<\/p>\n If science, by circuitous means, led us to poetry in this edition, it also proposed more direct links, let us say, with music. “The music of life – biology beyond the genome”<\/em> (Oxford University Press), the most recent book by Professor Denis Noble, a cardiovascular physiology expert and currently one of the main adversaries of genetic determinism, is sufficient reason for our special editor Carlos Fioravanti’s report on the resumption of an integrated approach to the functioning of the body<\/a> (page 56). Fioravanti has just returned from Oxford, where he completed a program of intense study from January to July at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.<\/p>\n As for the afflictive hissing of asthma, it may disappear altogether in the not very distant future, thanks to a vaccine based on proteins from the schistosomosis worm. The article, on page 48, is by Ricardo Zorzeto, our new science editor<\/a>.<\/p>\n In other pages of this edition it is technology that leads us to music or, more precisely, to recognizing the limits of\u00a0 acoustics in\u00a0 concert halls where we enjoy concerts\u00a0 and other musical performances. The technology editor, Marcos de Oliveira, tells us starting on page 72 how a group of researchers from the University of S\u00e3o Paulo developed a software program to analyze the sound performance in halls, theatres and auditoriums.<\/a> The software, which can be downloaded from the internet free of charge, indicated that the Municipal Theatre and the S\u00e3o Pedro Theatre in S\u00e3o Paulo were the two music venues with the best sound. For connoisseurs , it should be clear\u00a0 that the Sala S\u00e3o Paulo concert hall has not been tested yet.<\/p>\n Where\u00a0 humanities are concerned, editor Carlos Haag focuses on recent studies on luxury consumption<\/a>, which is also seen as a major category and one that leads us to reflect on the correlations and conflicts among Brazil’s social classes, as he shows us how and why it does not stop growing in this country. On the other end, he examines some recent research that reveals the extreme complexity of the identity of low income transvestites<\/a> and their difficulty in surviving without alarm in large\u00a0 Brazilian cities.<\/p>\n