EXCERPT I know, my dear Bento. You don’t believe me. You don’t believe that Spinoza went to Brazil. A beautiful lie. A big lizard-tongue lie. And, as Clarice says, writing’s ‘not worth a damn’. So what about the spinozo-marxo-heideggerian-hegelianism of the philosophers, the little monster of the classrooms? A tiny spinosaurus, a spinozasaurus, stupid, inoffensive, but still surly, inevitably, at being so inoffensive and so paltry. A little anomal…. Well, yes he did. He did go there. This was confirmed by the Museu Nacional do Brasil. An establishment specialising in spiked, plated, horned, crested, and feathered lizards. The proof? The meticulously detailed account is officially recorded, in the first person, by Paulo Leminski fils (a professor of History and Writing) in Catatau. I got this personally from a friend at the Parc de Belle Vue. And all the rest. So, since we have some explaining to do, let’s dot the is and cross the ts. ‘Catatau’, n.m.: the sound of a crashing fall, a collapse. In Portugal: a beating, or a penis. A wank and a dick. In Brazil: a big thing or a little thing. In Bahia, something ugly. A big or small spinosaurus, very ugly. Black and scabby? Or a buzzing discussion, a swarm of polyglot, glossolalic, onomatopoietic words, names, and phrases.…