And start all over again....

Pick myself up, etc.. (popular song). Well, even though I have not managed to finish the dissertation for which I gave up my blog in order to concentrate on writing, I am still hanging around in academia and even, somehow, my marraige. Several friends have revealed their own blogs which is fascinating when you know them well, but I feel too mindful of my daughters and my own privacy to inhabit Facebook. So I have decided to recommence this anonymous 'publicity' journal, because I want to carry on publicising the wonderful creative and academic achievements of friends, and accounts of films, seminars and conferences that I go to, which are too often unpublished and lost. It will still be a place for me to work out a few ideas and thoughts of my own.
I am just writing some thoughts for a Brazilian friend who is embarking on an academic career in film studies, and found myself returning to a poem by Manuel Bandiera (He is a 20th century Brazilian poet whose picture is on the right side of this blog). I first looked at this poem in relation to thinking about urban imagery and spaces in relation to Recife for my Amarelo Manga work. But my friend is considering ideas about 'realism', and did a paper about the film Children of Men and realism in Science Fiction film. Anyway this is the poem in English translation by Richard Slavitt - I don't agree entirely with his version, but that is the business of my paper !

Reality and Image

The skyscraper soars into the clear air washed clean by the rain
and descends to its reflection in a mud puddle in the courtyard.
Between reality and image, on the dry ground between the two,
four pigeons go for a walk.

It does seem almost universal, but I should contextualise it and say it was written in 1947, when the poet was living in an apartment block in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, which was then a fairly new experience, and so I suppose a specific time and place to comment on urban living. And it is so popular in it's apparant simplicity that it has been recently used (2006) in Brazil's final school examination for university entrance - the Vestibular. And for those of you who relate intellectual and artistic activity to European trends, it does have a wiff of French contemporary 'existentialism' philosophically speaking, or religious 'spirit' for those whose leanings in semiotic interpretations are so inclined.
My analysis is picking at the 'visual' - textual to 'mind's eye' puzzle. So I will try and let you know if I succeed next time. And hope I get this loaded up !!!