The New Fervor: An Interview with Kelvin Matheus Rosa

Kelvin Matheus Rosa is a teacher, writer, English literature scholar, and gamer from Brazil.

Chase

What are some of your favorite books? What makes them great?

Kelvin

I can’t escape the vortex of some writers. I can’t NOT talk about Infinite Jest, because I obsessively studied it in my Master’s degree, so it basically gave me my research career as I understand it today, and some insights it gave me about irony and how free prose can actually be when you get down to it. I was always a conceptual edgelord that thought myself in some way impossible to be understood by my peers, and this book helped me look into that and work on myself to be more approachable and empathetic to people.

Other books that changed me are The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas, by Machado de Assis, Brazil’s most canonical and imminent writer, from the turn of the 19th Century. This book reads like a postmodern experiment sometimes, with an entire chapter dedicated to only punctuation as a way to write a sex scene indirectly, and very existential meanderings. Not a lot of plot actually happens. I read it in high school, because you can’t get through high school without being imposed SOME reading of Machado de Assis in Brazil. This book put me in the path to study literature in university, definitely.

When I started writing, I was a teenager, and the voice that got stuck in my head was The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I remember it being the first series of books I bought for myself. I got interested because of Ye Olde Internet Memes about the number 42, and the Whale and the Flower Pot, when I was listening to a popular Brazilian pop culture podcast, back in the turn of the 2010s. It was real cheap, and I still have that edition. I totally copied Adams’ writing style when I started my fiction writing.

Another book of Brazilian literature that changed the way I think about writing is Grande Sertão Veredas, translated (kinda badly) to “The Devil to Pay in the Backlands.” It’s a kind of modernist western epic that uses the Portuguese language like nobody ever did. The writer is from Minas Gerais, the same state as I am, attended high school in what today is one campus of the university I went to, and we share the same last name, that is, Rosa, or “Rose,” a kinda common last name to have in Brazil. This book is almost untranslatable, and I love talking about it, because it manages to have a good fucking plot and characters while also being very experimental with syntax, and it never falls into incomprehensibility.

I also wouldn’t be a writer if it wasn’t for Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman. I read pirated versions of Sandman, Watchmen, Swamp Thing and more when I was a teenager, during class, on my laptop my mom gave me as this last gift before my family fell into the financial hard times that preceded my parents’ divorce. I think I became a goth because of them, lol. I love Jerusalem and The Ocean at the End of the Lane.

I would recommend any English speaker to look for the work of Machado de Assis. I don’t know how much of the cultural context is lost during the reading, but he is probably the most important writer of the Portuguese language (I would never put a Portuguese writer in that spot). He was really ahead of his time, trying to empathize with women as three-dimensional people, instead of projecting masculine idealism in them, he was in favor of animal rights, against the institution of slavery (Brazil was the last country in America, maybe in the world, if I remember correctly, to criminalize slavery), and was a learned black man writing at the turn of the 19th Century. He has been comically overlooked by the literary world, and there was some TikTok trend b.s. that recently gave him some spotlight.

Chase

What is fiction to you?

Kelvin

It’s when you make shit up and talk about it, preferably writing that shit down so you don’t forget it. It has been an obsession since I was in catechism and started making up comic books with silly characters to escape the boredom. Maybe it was one of God’s little ironies that not paying attention to religious studies made me closer to him for the rest of my life. I think there is something very sacred about art. You know how it goes: desire for transcendence and stuff.

Chase

Does the author have any responsibilities? If so, what are they?

Kelvin

That’s a hairy question.

I think the social responsibilities of a writer are the same as any normal person sharing the world with other people. Don’t promote hate speech, don’t offend minorities to feel like you’re better than them, don’t hurt your fellow men. Art can show a lot about a person that the person wasn’t even really thinking about. I don’t think art should be specially politically motivated: not more than any other act in the world is always politically motivated when you analyze it. It could be, if a person lives in a politically motivated way, because it will always reflect the person and the way they shape the world and stuff.

I don’t think artists should be held to a higher degree of responsibility than a normal person, because we need to normalize art as not the domain of specialists, but just something people do because it is important and feels nice. The thing is: everyone should be held accountable to their political actions and beliefs, and we know the world has become politically more divided and so on. So of course the author has responsibilities, because they are just people, and everyone has responsibilities, but those are not special responsibilities art implies, just the everyday stuff we should strive for: living a good life, making the world better than it was before we got there, trying to help your fellows to be more happy and relieve their burdens as much as we can, sharing experiences and stuff.

But it is a personal responsibility to indeed make art instead of fucking around on the internet, for example. Otherwise you are not being a writer, just thinking about it.

Chase

Can you tell me about your teaching career and your life in Brazil?

Kelvin

I graduated as an English teacher, and it was a better career move than focusing on literature 100%. I have been giving twice a month writing workshops to a couple of friends with an intense creative drive, but who could never really get down to finishing their projects. It has been really, really cool, and I’ve been learning a lot.
I have been teaching English to 5 year old kids in a local, kinda fancy Catholic school; I kinda fell into this job and it has helped me pay my bills.

I don’t know if I will ever become, like, a full time professor or whatever. My ambitions lie in paying my bills and having peace of mind to write my fiction and stuff. I would definitively love to give more private lessons in writing, and to think of myself as a real good teacher of English and writing, but I’m still very young, learning the ropes, and I think of myself as someone still starting their career.

Brazil is a funny country. Our quality of life is not bad, but our purchasing power is really undervalued. I think it’s less unstable than the US, although things like food and entertainment are cheaper there, and a lot of people here really like the idea of living in foreign countries. We are under a more stable government after the local Worker’s Party, a kinda-left-leaning but actually very center-left party got back in power after a coup in 2016 and four disastrous years of an incompetent right-wing shitstorm. I don’t wanna think about the next elections, and we tend to be more stable with this party in power: it basically rebuilt our education and healthcare system from the early 2000s to the 2010s, but you know how politics goes. I have a lot of criticisms of our government, and won’t accept the criticism when it comes from the right, lol.

I really like how approachable people in Brazil can be, and how physical contact is kinda normalized as a sign of affection. I also love the language I was given by geography. Brazilian art also kicks ass, although the cultural institutions are kinda underpowered. I went to a really cool comic book fair in the capital of my state last month. A lot of the culture only happens because of government funded events and calls, our literary culture is basically what happens inside big public universities, with like, a few private elite universities in the same circle. It’s a good country to be a punk, but not very good to be a professional and institutionalized artist. The entertainment industry is also very weak, culturally speaking, and there are basically two genres of pop music: funk and sertanejo, that are offshoots of hip-hop and country music under the sausage-making machine of Adorno’s most pessimist predictions, fuelled by the advertising money of beer companies and extractivist agropecuary lobbying: the Big Evil Corpos of the country.

Chase

How can we stomp out fascism?

Kelvin

That’s a hard question.

I think fascism is a failure of imagination, and is highly fueled by how religious institutions manage to radicalize politically and are never held accountable. At least in Brazil, because religion is very important here.

Christianity must shake off fascism: it has this tendency to be very paranoid about the change of times. Christianity must change, otherwise it will be ruined under the weight of greed.

Schools also need to stop being ruined on purpose by right-wing politicians, so they can do their work correctly. The educator Paulo Freire is a Brazilian legend in teaching, and he did amazing work before being silenced by the Brazilian dictatorship. He taught adults from rural communities to read, and his teaching principles were very community-based and good for stomping out fascism. Everyone should look more into him. I grew up in a kinda right-wing Catholic house but not reaaally right-wing, and both my parents distrust right-wing speech, it’s kinda funny to try and put it in these terms. I’m actually still a Catholic and try real hard to make sense of Christianity and politics. Like, I feel like people simplify God too much. Brazil has, just as the US does, a mix of rural lifestyle with right-wing politics. But we are still an extractivist economy, so people act like privileged export-based coffee broker economy is the flagship of a strong economy and the same thing as protecting local producers. The old guard of agropecuary in Brazil has political leverage and was directly involved in the political coup the US financed in the 60s. The entire world was getting in the hippies, we spent the 70s being oppressed and censored. I mean, there was Nixon too, so I don’t think it was THAAAAAT different. But it’s kinda funny we still had psychedelia and rock and roll, and major acts managed to do fine as long as their politics wasn’t explicitly socialist. But what I love the most about Brazil is that we had a very postmodern literature in the turn of the 19th to 20th century and a late modernism way into the late 50s and early 60s. John Barth had already destroyed the world and we were still producing literature that tried to cause a metaphysical transcendent insight. Like, I talked about Guimaraes Rosa, and also Clarice Lispector, who is more well-known and commonly translated. Affection has always been like, the driving cultural force of Brazil, where capitalism failed, the center left failed, what bound families was always very strong affect, a lot of physical contact.

Chase

Are you working on any writing projects at the moment? Do you like to talk about your WIPs?

Kelvin

I’ve been writing this post-apocalyptic novel (my very first novel!) about a girl living in a Kombi, fighting against her past traumas and trying to have a good time. I started thinking about it as my first real writing project back when I was like, 15, and I’ve only now managed to start writing it, more than 10 years later. It’s been real fun, and kinda scary and important on a personal level.

I have also been on and off writing about literature and videogames (my real lifelong passion) for a local newspaper, on their online platform. There are like, four different projects shelved in different states of completion. I have been thinking a lot about editing and improving the work I did in fanzines, in the Uni days, and trying to publish it with any publishers that show interest in it: short stories and poetry, mostly. I kinda gave up on poetry, though. It’s complicated.

So yeah! I am writing Strawberries on Asphalt, this novel about this very angry girl in a post-apocalyptic setting kinda-inspired by The Dark Tower (I read it until volume 4 back in high school and never managed to read the entire thing), Tank Girl, Berserk, but also kinda optimistic and fun, trying to figure some personal shit out by way of pop fiction. Let’s see where that goes.

Chase

Can you tell me about your lifelong passion?

Kelvin

Dude.

You have asked about the importance of videogames in my life.

I cannot talk enough about this. I have been actively investigating this question since I started writing, because I started writing with a Super Smash Bros. fanfic and a videogame review blogspot, while a pre-teen.

I was imitating an older blogger I fell into by one of these coincidences in life. These days he’s kind of a loner misogynist weirdo. I met my online best friend because we were both followers of this toxic Transformers fanboy that had a more “successful” and popular blog.

I grew up in Brazil, and I inherited the old SNES and Nintendo 64 my grandma bought for my uncle, my mother’s baby brother. He never knew his own dad, and he bullied me as a kid. He was a real headache for my mom and dad, who kinda-raised him in his late twenties. I remember him smoking in secret in my family’s garage, and I remember him playing hardcore Japanese action/adventure games like Megaman, Metal Gear Solid, Castlevania Symphony of the Night, Legend of Zelda, Devil May Cry, Resident Evil. He helped raise me into gaming, and I developed my own taste from there.

I am also pretty sure I fell in love with researching art and ended up with a master’s in literature because I was obsessed with Super Smash Bros. and wanted to know every single damn game that was referenced there. This is how I also played Earthbound and Mother 3 as a pre-teen. My review of Earthbound is the oldest piece of writing I still have from my blog.

Earthbound is about a young boy from a city where a UFO lands close to his house. I am from Varginha, a city in the state of Minas Gerais that is known for the Varginha Incident: the most famous alien report of my country.

And in the following game, Mother 3, it was the first time I saw a father get out of his mind, get violent, physically hurt a friend, and get taken to jail, because of a huge trauma after hearing of his wife’s death, in front of his kids.

I remember going with my mother and father to the local police department, and my mother pressing charges, but I think she gave up. We went back home. My father went back home, but he was almost detained. That was before the divorce. After the divorce, they only shared the same space I think like four or five times in almost ten years.

It will be ten years in like, December of this year, actually, I think. I went to college the following year.

Earthbound and Mother 3 taught me metafiction could be fun, but also sensitive, weird and deeply personal. It was kinda my antidote for the soul-killing irony that, according to my research, David Foster Wallace was so worried about. The kind of antisocial solipsistic ego-fueled pessimism in the heart of every incel, transphobe, and Trump voter.

I have a Super Mario Bros. 3 cartridge for NES framed in glass hanging in my bedroom wall like it was a fucking antiquity that should be in a museum.

Brazil had a really strong culture of emulation, pirate CD burning, and lots of small mom and pop shops were sustained by burning discs to be sold for youngsters with jailbroken PS1s, PS2s and XBOX 360s at the price of like, a cheap burger. One for 5 reais, 3 games for 10 reais. They are sometimes still sold in small plastic cases, and nobody buys them anymore.

I just recently bought a jailbroken used Nintendo Switch from a friend of mine, and have been considering more and more writing a book of personal essays (as millennials always want to) about that kind of stuff. I can measure my life in Nintendo games.

I think that’s kinda it.

Hope I answered it more or less.

Chase

I want to ask about irony because it came up a couple times. This is something I am interested in too. It scares the shit out of me for many different reasons. And social media to me—maybe irony seems to be subsiding or maybe I’m not seeing it as much because I am properly tuning my feed—has turned into this pataphysical kabuki theatre irony machine. What is to be done about this? What is sincerity in our age of entanglement?

Kelvin

Irony is twofold: when you are oppressed by a majority, it is still better to be ironic with your boss than to risk getting fired by your boss. It can be used to help us resist the overwhelming discourse of the majority. Now, irony is also a strong force in media that tries to push things onto you (like buying shit and co-opting with marketing in general).

I would not put irony or sincerity in opposition, though. This guy, Kleber Kurowsky, did a PhD on Wallace and was very concerned with criticizing what is called “new sincerity.”

In my master’s I offered the term “fervor,” that I read in an essay by Adam Zagajewski, as opposed to irony. I like this idea a lot. “Sincerity” is too concerned with “not lying” but irony isn’t about that. You can also use irony to empathize, not only to deconstruct, by the way, and a good joke can do wonders in that sense.

We need fervor, we need passion. People that are ironic about politics are usually ok with things just running their course and trying to put themselves above the situation as if one could be “too good for that.” And we all have selfish egos. Yesterday I ironized my mom when she was criticizing me for something silly and I didn’t want to turn that into a whole conversation. The narrative ironies of life can also be beautiful: like giving up on dating only to then fall in love, or getting your dream job opportunity at the same month you decide to move for another reason. This kind of “life plot irony” can be very cruel, or very beautiful, and life is like that sometimes. But most of all, I think being able to show defenselessness is the most important thing about the whole “anti-irony movement.” So what if you’re a dork? Embrace the inner goblin.