The Lecture Nut

This is an essay by Vanessa Barbara originally published in Portuguese. Translated here without consent.

Last December, Brazilian writer André Czarnobai—Cardoso—published a short essay entitled “Pasfundo calipígia.” If I am not mistaken, this was the first time the term “lecture nut” was used in print. Immediately, it gained scholarly significance and became popular on Brazilian university campuses, stimulating dormant nuts and alerting the public health system to the problem.

The lecture nut is the individual who, during a lecture, raises his hand to ask a completely random question. Or to make a long and meaningless remark about anything that comes to mind. He is the delight of bored listeners and the nightmare of speakers, who spend the entire event waiting for his inevitable appearance, as if ready to face death itself.

There are myriad categories of lecture nuts, which attentive eyes and ears can identify in any event of argumentative or reflective nature in which the audience can speak.

There is the classic nut: the one who stands up, gives a long speech on any subject, rarely addresses the topic being discussed, and concludes without asking any specific questions. His only goal is to intellectually impress the plebs, including the official speaker. He always asks permission to “make a remark.”

There is the militant nut, who always seizes the opportunity to blame the exploitation by the ruling class, even when the subject of debate is tapestry and embroidery.

There is the disoriented nut, who understood nothing of the lecture—and hasn’t since second grade, when the teacher told him that the sun is bigger than the earth—and who, after going around in circles, asks an obvious question.

There the one who’s careful to include the word “surreptitiously” in his speech: the vernacularist nut.

A careful classification of our object of inquiry cannot omit the conspiracy nut, who, according to members of the conspiracy itself, is “the one who believes that the press meets every night with the government or the opposition to get the bag of money.”

Or the sycophant nut, who spends the thirty seconds allotted to him telling in ten minutes how divine the speaker is. The Deleuzian nut, who doesn’t know what he is talking about but uses the word “rhizome” a lot. And the poor poor pitiful nut, who apologizes for not knowing how to express himself, which does not stop him from not expressing himself for endless minutes.

After saying “I would like to make a remark,” anyone can use the expression “in the key of…”. As in this typical remark, “Journalism, understood in the key of sociology, is undoubtedly a rhizomatic occupation, in terms of its coming-to-be.” There are few who say that something happens because of something else. It is always “on account of” the something else in question.

For Cardoso, it is uncommon for a lecture nut not to be lying in wait whenever he is lecturing (or sitting on a panel, having a debate, or even sitting in the audience). The most recent case occurred at a meeting of bloggers and editors in São Paulo. On that occasion, a colleague who had been listening attentively—but silently—until then asked for permission to speak. “First of all, I would like to say that I am not a blogger, I don’t read blogs, I don’t understand anything about these things, but I too have the right to an opinion,” he said by way of introduction.

And the nut went on: “I am a community doctor, I organize soirées in the suburbs, and I want to say that I disagree with everything that’s been said here. Everyone is sucking up to Companhia das Letras,” a local publishing house.

And he added: “The publisher’s blog is very ugly. It doesn’t look like a blog. It looks more like a website, and I don’t think anyone wants to read about the behind-the-scenes of how books are made.”

In a few minutes, he brazenly refuted everything that had been postulated up to that point. This is the majestic nut, who listens to the lecture with an air of superiority and finds it’s all big, fat stupidity.

A good lecture nut is always the last to speak, since he spends all his time digesting what has been said. Only then can he make a statement that’s unrelated to the topic, mistaken, ill-intentioned, or just plain unintelligible. According to journalist Matinas Suzuki, the character contemplates the discussion with contempt, waits patiently for his turn, and then disagrees with virulence. “Correct me if I’m wrong,” he says at one point, to sound democratic. “I agree with everything you said, but the other way around,” he continues. Or yet: “My comment includes and expands on my colleague’s,” in a typical condescending comment of the student movement meeting nuts.

One must distinguish between the lecture nut and the student movement or union nut. In the latter, there is no speaker; everyone has the right to sign up and speak without necessarily having to stick to a theme.

According to one survey, one of the best-known representatives of this category in the 1970s was Gilson, an economics student at the University of São Paulo. He was a chubby Trotskyite with a thin voice and sparse mustache. The other was Reinaldinho, a social sciences student who, no matter what the topic, always found a way to insert the phrase: “The concrete is the synthesis of several determinations.” That is true. Even Marx knew that. But to repeat the idea in all the assemblies of the student movement of the 1970s would be too much even for Engels.

Although these two categories of nut (“lecture” vs. “student movement”) are distinguished for obvious reasons, there is the possibility of infiltration of lecture nuts into a typical student/union assembly. The infiltrator is usually the one who takes the microphone without the consent of the others and announces, “Point of order!” even if the request is unfounded. From then on, the performance is unrestrained.

That’s how lecture nuts are: reckless, unpredictable, ruthless, devoid of any sense or clue. Cardoso also recalls a debate in Curitiba, in southern Brazil, when “a gray-haired man with a shoulder bag in front of his chest and the look of a yoga teacher proclaimed that ‘the Internet is like a magic cow from which everyone gets the milk they want.’“

Unfortunately, that is all he remembers from that long and bizarre remark.

There are those who come across a contemplative nut, one of the most difficult to deal with, especially when you’re chairing a panel for the first time. That’s what happened to writer and editor Emilio Fraia, who chaired a debate between filmmaker Hector Babenco and writer William Kennedy in São Paulo on August 11, 2010, while nervously flipping through dozens of yellow papers.

“First, this lady raised her hand and said, ‘I have a question,’“ Emilio Fraia said with the acuity of someone struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder. “Then she said she didn’t know why she was there. She saw there was a lecture and walked inside. The girl was from another state, Minas Gerais, and had been alone in a hotel room for four days. “But I really like what Mr. Kennedy said about being rejected by thirteen publishers before being published. I’m an artist.”

At that moment, boos from the audience began, “Question!” Undaunted, she made no bones about it, “I have a work based on color and…” More boos and jeers.

At the end of her speech, Fraia could show no reaction. He turned red, paralyzed. “Until the lecture ended on its own. That was the end, nothing could happen after that speech,” he says.

Another recent case of a contemplative nut occurred recently during a lecture by writer Fred Vargas in Rio de Janeiro about the story of Cesare Battisti, an Italian revolutionary who received refuge from the Brazilian government. One man came forward and spoke for twenty minutes about his activism in northeastern Brazil in the 1950s, without mentioning Battisti’s name once.

With that kind of nut in view, cartoonist Laerte Coutinho confessed to wondering what the nuts themselves would take away from the experience. “I think it all comes down to their own participation,” Laerte philosophized. And she added a theory: of the debates, the lecture nut might only remember their own performance. “Remember that time in Curitiba when I raised my hand and compared the Internet to a magic cow?” the subject would say delightedly at the meeting of a hypothetical Unified Lecture Nut Support Group.

What few know is that the origin of the lecture nut goes back in the history of thought. “I believe it first appeared in the Greek agora: Democracy is full of lecture nuts,” posits editor Milton Ohata.

In the play The Clouds (423 B.C.), for example, the playwright Aristophanes pokes fun at the Sophists—the most prominent lecture nuts of classical Greece. At that time there were already “prophets, chiropractors, hairy young men, dithyrambic poets, astrologers, charlatans, impostors, and many others,” says the script. People who have surrendered to the rapture of discourse and the lust for articulation, a bunch of skillful swindlers, verbose and shameless. Like Chaerephon, a disciple of Socrates, who once raised his hand and asked the master, “From which end of the mosquito does the buzzing come?”

In ancient Palestine, perhaps during the Sermon on the Mount, there were probably lecture nuts ready to act. One of the questions thrown at the Son of God that doesn’t appear in the canonical record would have been, “So, how do you like it here in Capernaum?”

Speculation aside, one thing is certain: it was a Pharisee lecture nut who approached the Messiah with a malicious question and received in response, “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and unto God what is God’s” A divine response to a malicious interlocutor.

This brings us to the difficult role of the panel chair. It is well known that the chair has few options when confronted with a lecture nut. One is to take a predetermined escape route, throw her arms in the air, and leave the audience to its fate. The second is Emilio Fraia’s preferred solution: complete and resigned paralysis, followed by an early end of the lecture and acceptance of ruin. In a slightly more elegant variant, the facilitator can utter an embarrassed “That’s indeed a question” and end the lecture with a certain air of mystery.

The third way out is to play crazy and ignore the speech altogether. This tactic is defended by seasoned speakers such as journalist Humberto Werneck. During a talk about his book O Santo Sujo(The Dirty Saint) in Belo Horizonte, a young man requested the floor and didn’t ask any questions—he rambled on about things no one understood. “I think he was a little crazy, and I didn’t do anything wrong waiting for him to empty his verbal pool. It took several minutes. The guy finished with no question mark. I thanked him for his participation and moved on to the next questioner,” he says, without embarrassment.

The fourth and last possible reaction is the most artistic and professional of all. Experienced chairs such as art critic Alberto Tassinari are skilled in this technique. He says he has a lot of patience when a nut says something, “because it always touches on something that can be answered, and the dialog ends up oscillating between, on the one hand, its intrinsic rationality and, on the other, the irrationality that comes from outside, out of time, and renders almost everything useless.”

Professor Samuel Titan Jr. of the University of São Paulo is part of the same team. “My favorite nut starts by asking to make a remark and immediately embarks on self-promotion, which can be pseudo-academic, pseudo-literary, or of resentful nature (in the variables of race, gender, class, sexual orientation or all of the above),” he reveals with the wisdom that comes from experience.

In these cases, he advises that the only way out of the situation is to “respond with something that has nothing to do with what the person said, but that has something to do with what you were trying to say, all while looking into the creature’s eyes and using some difficult words to see if they feel intimidated – generally, they don’t.

One must look at these things philosophically, says Titan, who dealt with a fine representative of the species a few months ago.

The episode occurred on March 25, 2010, at Casa do Saber, a cultural center in São Paulo, during a debate on literary essays. Present were architect Guilherme Wisnik, artist Nuno Ramos, Matinas Suzuki Jr. and, as mediator, Samuel Titan Jr.

The video recording of the colloquium is a tragicomic masterpiece. By a happy coincidence, the camera remains focused on the four speakers during the long peroration of a girl in the audience, who must have taken a breath before standing up. Each of the aforementioned intellectuals reacts in his own way, scratching his head, rubbing his nose, looking up and trying desperately to keep his composure in the face of such an alarming occurrence.

The intervention takes place in two phases. In the first, which lasts almost five minutes, the girl shows her energy: “My question is about places and borders,” she begins, in a didactic tone that assumes prior reflection on the subject. “I see the essay as a free spirit of thought expressed in written form. So I think it deserves a place of prominence, but from what I see in the discussion, from the debate among you, there is a question of place and borders when we talk about a place called ‘among us,’ or when we talk about Brazil, the world, and, going even further beyond those borders, reality itself.”

Dominated by an understandable gut reflex, Nuno Ramos begins to drink water compulsively. Samuel Titan alternates between vigorous head scratching and distracted removal of the skin around his fingernails. In everyone’s heart, there is hope that the question will not be long in coming. The girl continues, “I see the essay as this free spirit of written thought, because it goes beyond written thought, reaching into reality, with all this freedom of connections between subjects, and not just intellectual or conceptual or academic subjects, but the events of reality itself.”

Oddly, the four speakers lean on their left elbows, leaning back in their chairs and folding their arms as if to defend themselves against the avalanche of concepts mercilessly thrown at them.

And the girl continues, “So I see a way to resolve these dilemmas, these questions that have been presented, and considering what has been discussed among you, that writers should present themselves as free spirits.”

It is worth pointing out that she refers to the discussion and promises to stick to what has been debated, as if to distract the audience. But then she continues, “Creating as if a wave, the essay as a stone that falls into the water and creates waves of not only what it sets out to do, but going beyond. Going beyond the subjectivity of the person who writes, or the arsenal of limited academic knowledge, so the Brazilian essay itself must take the stance of breaking through that boundary and placing itself as a point of convergence of forces that are present in the world today, politically, literarily, scientifically, artistically.”

After that questionless speech, Samuel Titan interrupts the girl and does what he can to get the debate going. The speakers comment on an alleged “comfort zone” in Brazilian essayism, a term the girl happens to mention in her own context. It looks like the debate is off to a good start. But it isn’t: in a moment of inattention of the chair, the girl from the audience catches him off guard and manages to resume her reasoning: “I have seen some very rich things,” she interrupts, and again abuses the adverbs: politically, literarily, scientifically.

This is the second moment of her treatise, in which she concludes, in summary, that it is necessary to cultivate an essay “that also dilutes, also fights surreptitiously. There has to be the courage to get out of the comfort zone, break through those boundaries to create new ones, and make a difference in reality.” This is how her speech ends, and with it the debate.

After seeing Nuno Ramos drinking so much water, one feared that he might have a congestion.

The legend is diffuse, but it must have happened in the 1960s during a lecture by Professor Bento Prado Jr. at the Department of Philosophy. At the end of his explanation, in which the professor quoted the philosopher Plotinus several times, a student respectfully raised his hand and said, “Excuse me, Professor. Isn’t this Plotinus the same as Plato?” To which the master replied, “No, Cretan.”

As proof that times change but nuts remain, writer Antonio Prata recalls a recent nut at the University of São Paulo. His nickname: Saint Augustine. “He was a hairy, bearded, dirty guy, who always came in with some newspapers that we did not know if he read or slept with,” he describes. He had read only one thing in his life: Saint Augustine. “And no matter what course it was, no matter how long he had to wait, at some point he would find the connection. He wouldn’t ask a question, he’d throw up, “Professor, professor, these things you are talking about—Descartes, Plato, Adorno, neoliberalism, land reform, strikes, sunscreen—doesn’t it have to do with that concept of Saint Augustine?”

It’s the monothematic nut, with obsessive-compulsive tendencies.

It is worth mentioning that not even the great personalities are immune from the verbal assault of a deranged spectator. The story goes that during a meeting of the Latin American left in Paris at the time of the military dictatorships, a lecture nut went on a rampage against writer Mario Vargas Llosa. A bearded man rose from the audience and shouted: Mientras Obregón se moria en la selva por el pueblo peruano, tu, que hacias?

The audience fell silent. Without trembling, Vargas Llosa answered that he taught Spanish literature at a university. And he returned the question: Y tu, que hacias?

Yo tenía la hepatitis, said the bearded man.

A popular category is that of the lyrical nut. “That guy who wants to read a poem, a short story, the first chapter of a novel, at any cost. I’ve had people take the microphone from my hand and start talking,” said writer Marcelino Freire. For him, poets are the worst: they always ask for the microphone.

Cartoonist Laerte particularly appreciates the super-specialist nut, who knows his own work better than you do and points out inconsistencies and contradictions in what has just been said. This type can bring advantageous profits, and it is even possible to implant one of them to perform in your own lecture—the fellow raises his hand and says that in this passage you have certainly made a covert reference to the idea of witzelsucht as discussed in Heidegger. Genius, great thinker, you answer with an “mm-hmm” out of modesty and move on to the next question.

For the critic Rodrigo Naves, who teaches a course in art history in São Paulo, the most common nuts are the needy, who talk about their affective, existential and marketing problems. “There’s one Asian man that I have seen speak on three different occasions,” he says, himself an occasional lecture nut, of the aggressive kind, albeit in recovery. At one point, Naves got up from his chair and said indignantly of the lecturer’s opinion, “No, no, no. No, no, no, no,” as only a good professional in the business could express it.

There is a subgenre of latent nuts that, according to journalist Elio Gaspari, are those who go to conferences, listen carefully to everything, but their business is the food offered at the end of the event. “I met one such nut in the United States, a very elegant man who wore a three-piece suit. The joke was that one day he would ask a question reciting all the lectures he had heard,” he says.

The most recent formal record of a lecture nut occurred on August 10, 2010, after a discussion between cartoonists Gilbert Shelton and Robert Crumb in São Paulo.

The wacky intervention appeared in the Estado de S. Paulo newspaper, reported by Jotabê Medeiros: “A crazy man shouted from the top of the mezzanine and asked which dead personality Crumb would have a beer with.” Crumb replied, “I don’t drink beer with dead people. In fact, I don’t even drink beer.” At another point in the evening, the cartoonist asked a fan to contain his anger. “‘Shutupfuckoff!” he growled, and the boy laughed.”

Blessed be the anonymous nut, the voluntary nut, the one who gets up indomitable in the middle of a lecture and sets off toward consecration. Cursed be the written questions, the rules against audience participation, the impatient boos, the obligatory applause sign, the people who throw tomatoes at those who disrupt the progress.

Damned be the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, who in a book thanks his students for their “silent but perceptible” reactions, which allowed him to develop his thinking without too much trouble.

Long live those who attend lectures only to kill time, and yet do not miss the chance to express themselves, because they are interested in sharing their opinions with others. Long live the lack of sense, shame, and respect for the authorities present.

Everyone has a lecture nut inside, waiting to emerge. We are only repressed by the shackles of composure, mental sanity, and adulthood, which make it impossible for us to be protagonists at conferences of great moments in the history of human argumentation—like in 2005, at a literary fair, when a 5-year-old audience member raised his hand and asked author Luis Fernando Veríssimo, “Do you like grape juice?”