Shallow and inconsequential

Taking the more serious mode

...or road. I am writing this in the morning when I should finish my dissertation. I have done the printing off some useful procrastination kickers from the internet. I have got dressed and had 2 cups of tea, a banana, 2 plums and a hot cross-bun with blackcurrent jam (no wonder the weight stays 0n!). It is early enough to take the bus to Bury and sit in the Library there...

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But on Tuesday at the Departmental Book Launch I met a fellow post-grad who has finished his PHD and has his viva in 2 weeks time !!!
But I know that it has taken 4 plus years, cost him relationships,some of his hair and sent him to the depths of despair at times. But he is finished, and so should I. Any way he has been researching in Recife like me, and knows my subject Amarelo Manga, so he asked me an intelligent question about it, and I could answer, so I just know it is time to wrap it all up. But yesterday I could not force myself to write, especially as it was very sunny outside, and is again today. Eventually I went out to met my nephew in Cambridge to see Be Kind, Rewind, which I justified as kind of the same rethinking of film cultures that I find in AM, but of course it is gussied up as a feel good movie and a laugh with the leading actors, so the reviews do not really tackle the internal criticism inplicit in the title of rethinking the whole grip of the Hollywood dream machine on our expectations of movie culture. I must see if there are any more considered discussions about this film.But not as a distraction from my own writing, you understand. Just as an added understanding....



Introspective as some of the discussions were on Tuesday (there were lots of anthropologists and people from other universities there), I found myself in serious conversations about New Zealand with a couple of people who had spent some time there. One is doing a PHD on tattos and Polynesia. They both had reservations about the country and the people which were more incisive than the usual gushing about the scenery and the food. That made me feel more emotionally settled about my own mixed feelings about my friends and relatives still there.

My younger sister who completed her Masters with a first last year while holding down a full time job (admittedly below her professional capability, and in the same university) is treating me to a weekend in Birmingham (no laughing, our mother was born there). And she also lives away from New Zealand because she finds Europe more interesting. But she has been looking at writing about women in sport, which is actually something that is much more equal and better done in New Zealand these days. Every experience and location has its influence. But mine is now Brazil and I want to spread the word. So I have a major incentive to be finished and give her something to read from me. And there is more, but I realise that I am in danger of putting all my limited social life online and unmasking all my friends and enemies. So to the serious work...


The picture by the way, is from an old CD of National Geographic pictures, available for use on web-sites it says, but marked by that publication's habit of cute pictures of natives in the Amazon that is quite naive tourist and racially demeaning too. But as his face is hidden and he represents a metaphor for my own instincts at the moment I will risk the anthropologists critique. Sorry to anyone who feels offended by the idea of attributing internal feelings onto other peoples in the photographic representation, but that is part of my dissertation writing too. Just to clarify to myself. Stop digging a hole, girl !!

Red Shoes, Black Shoes.

Red Shoes

I don't actually want this particular picture of red shoes, although they are similar to a pair I actually own. I was trying to find on the website http://www.spaininfo.co.uk/ a picture I had on their printed brochure of a girl in a red dress trying to choose from a dozen boxes of red shoes - a tribute to shopping in Spain that did not seem to be on the website. Not that I doubt the Spanish shops, just that a trip to Lisbon via Madrid on a tight budget en famille 5 years ago did not allow me to find out, and that is the only time I have been in Spain.
Although as my current escape dreams are full of solitary travelling lately, I have been toying with the idea of flying to the Algarve (cheap) and using a rental car or the local buses to travel around Southern Spain. I have a vain hope that in mid-winter the reputation of Alhambra as tourist ridden may prove unjustified.

However I digress from shoes. I already own 2 pairs of fancy red shoes and acquired 2 more pairs of be-jewelled party shoes in the sales. 1. a wonderful beige velvet with open toe and jewels and 2. a more strident purple silk with diamante stars, both now squirreled away in my fancy clothes suitcase and away from the accountant's gaze (aka known as my husband). The cost was low, about £40 for the two. The pleasure and the guilt strange (due in part to my huge credit card hangover - even at 0%). So what was the attraction of choosing red shoes? After all I rarely wear them. It was the idea of family, fantasy, generations and shoes.



Black shoes

My oldest daughter was home last weekend for the large Catholic funeral of the father of a school friend who had been in Australia for exactly four days when the call came to say he had died of a heart attack on a French golf course. His wife, owner of a recently acquired post-graduate certificate as a theatre nurse was in pieces in grief. As was my daughter's friend. Fine art graduate and lover of fashion as my daughter is, she set out for the funeral from the bus-stop outside our house in London fashion black layered coat,leggings, scarf and dress, and had a lift down to Newmarket within a minute, probably on account of her wooden style high heeled black shoes. She had the sense to take the other woman at the bus stop with her, although the male driver was almost certainly a neighbour - we all know the vagaries of our local buses, so seldom seen on time, not to gallantly give those waiting at the bus stop a lift whenever we can. She returned some hours later in a black patent pair with high heels and jaunty brass gold buckles, as 1980s a pair of shoes as I have seen in a while. She claimed that the discomfort of the other shoes had led her into New Look to find them for only £15. As she left early the next morning with her father and one of our larger suitcases for her flight to Whistler later that night, I discovered she had left the new shoes for me to find. Clearly unsuitable for her ski holiday ! And a generous gift from a girl, taller, thinner, blonder and half a shoe size larger than me. But they fit !!! I feel like a queen. Why was it such a lovely gift, shoes only worn to one funeral ? And why was I, sober matron that I should be, so cheered by a pair of jaunty buckles and a high heel ? If I desire the shoes, will some one desire me? I know a nice footman who might! Is shallow female desire so materialistic and body personalised?? She who would normally read a book instead? Madame Bovary was never more satisfied with fashion over thought. Does my daughter know how I think myself young these days.

I return today revitalised and anxious to go back to my academic writing and thinking. And ignoring the very sick feeling in my stomach at the thought of disappointing the accountant who wants me to stop. Incompatibility after 30 years stalks our household. I am very afraid. But too afraid to talk. Because he cannot argue in terms of Virginia Woolf.

This Mrs Dalloway is metamorphosing. I am very afraid of becoming Madalena.

BROKEN DREAMS

Just after my last blog I discovered that my lovely Sony Vaio laptop had accidently been crushed. I have now had five weeks getting my data off the damaged hard drive and lost all my bibliographic listings (in Endnote) and some of my Mindmaps. I am back online with a second hand Dell, and mananged to reload most of my software and original word and pdf docs. I also lost my personal photographs which was a huge blow. I feel a bit jinxed, especially as the culprit won't own up. But the insurance claim is in, so I may get a few pennies. Not enough to buy a lovely new Vaio with mobile internet access though.

Anyway, here I am with a few things to catch up. Firstly to say that I went to a very good seminar at the Latin American Department at Cambridge University where I met a husband and wife team of economists from Recife, with some very exciting work on inequality in Brazil, and especially on education, which made me think very hard about my original feelings about Brazil and why I am studying it. I need to put something together about this next time.

And then I had a very interesting telephone conversation with my Brazilian film academic about the poem that I mentioned last time. We were discussing the translation of the poem which can alter the 'feel' of it, and why I felt it was rather cinematic. Now I need to edit my writing about it and put it up on this web.

And next Tuesday, 26th February 2008, the Portuguese and Brazilian Studies Department at King's College, London is having a collective Book Launch and Film screening, especially the book from their recent research on the Cultures of the Lusophone Black Atlantic / edited by Nancy Naro, Roger Sansi-Roca and David Treece, and several other recent publications. Film Screening is Jongos, Calangos and Folias. Black Music, Memory and Poetry. Starts with the film at 5pm. See www.kcl.ac.uk/schools/pobrst for details.