Wedding Anniversary

Today I have been married for 28 years. And today I cannot see how I can carry on with it. I am tired of the ties that bind, especially the economic ones.
Tired of always having to compromise and put others first. The accountant and I are on divergent paths. The supportive railway tracks are cracking up.
I have been away from home for two long periods already in the last 3 years. Now the walls of my house are caving in again and I need to leave once more.
This is more than depression and empty nest syndrome. This is bad.

Two days at home without academic stimulation and I am crawling up the walls. I missed an opportunity to go to London to a seminar on the work of Derek Jarman. See

http://www.serpentinegallery.org/2008/02/conference_against_the_grain_1.html

I am interested in his film Blue, but I think it is showing at the exhibition of his work at the Serpentine Gallery. It felt a bit silly to go to the seminar without seeing the exhibition. I was interested in hearing differing critical viewpoints in the area of visual art and film. One of the speakers was Laura Mulvey.

Bad news for a globalised hybridity study really. And for the image of myself in this blog which I realise is very much an English lady, with all the limitations that implies. Is leaving your husband like childbirth - not understoood as dangerous to the mind until too late ?

I return to the subject of the hour. Overall musing about this dissertation. These are the pieces that are not usually revealed by writers of any type. NOT having a clear overall view of the topic for one thing. Mixing the personal with the impersonal for another. More mind mapping I think.

Big Flakes of Snow - and Amarelo Manga and hybridity

Why does a snowy view always make it seem like a holiday ? and why does the expectation of snow always seem like a good thing …. Or am I just a very flaky sort ?

No snow to speak of, and yet I am still pondering and distracting myself with the thought, even though I am supposed to be writing about Recife, a city which I am certain has never seen a snowflake.

Let us banish the doubts and evaluate the results of my mind mapping on Hybridity. I did a strong speaking out loud simplification, but did not record it.

So do I do as I suggested and continue mind mapping work that I have already carried out?

Or do I start doing some editing of work I already did in the past, given that I only have about 500 words to begin with for my descriptive understanding of the process of hybridity anyway.

It would be nice to map out particular places in the whole dissertation where I am likely to refer to hybridity. Maybe ask myself why this particular theoretical descriptive idea can be of use in my dissertation as a whole. A question never particularly asked in this theory – response method before, because the nature of the dissertation is to ‘look to the text’ (or meaning?) of the work under examination in order to elucidate a contribution to academic learning. This is a film which at heart is critical of the influence of culture, and of ‘textual’, and ‘semiotic’ descriptions. So a textual or semiotic approach has not really seemed appropriate. It is not entirely a fictional piece, in the sense that it captures and uses realities of previous cultural history as well as cinematic shots of the real contemporary streets of Recife and its people. It is very difficult to honestly extricate this film from the social and cultural context in which it is both made and which it seeks to expand knowledge of. Paying attention only to the narrative and the characters is to miss half the meaning of the film. I check and find I had the same kind of discussion with myself, and as I recall, with a couple of Brazilian academics in May last year.
I did decide early on to pay considerable attention to the ‘geography’ of the film. In part this was because the city of Recife is familiar to me, and I can spot the particular locations and the significance of how some of them presented. In addition, rather than an associated ‘semiotic’, even a visual reading of some of the locations and events, it became apparent that some of the scenes were essentially recreations of previous literary descriptions of the city from some of it’s most famous writers and their most well known works. But I did not really understand the subversive nature of the yellow metaphor in the film until I read Tempo Amarelo, the book by Renato Carneiro Campos that is quoted in the film. About RCC -

http://www.alepe.pe.gov.br/perfil/links/RenatoCarneiroCampos.html

Why I worry about blossom on trees

It is the begining of March. And at the end of my garden are two wild mirabelle plum trees, one that produces tiny yellow fruit and one that has red. We make jam and sometimes I bottle them in the old fashioned way that my parents did. The blossom is white, and early. So early that all week I have worried that the frost and snow and heavy storms of this week will kill the blossom and we will lose the fruit.

Where I grew up as a teenager in Central Otago, New Zealand , there was many acres of fruit trees - plums, greengages, and apples, but even more cherries, peaches, nectarines and above all many varieties of apricots which thrived in the hot summers. But the winters were severely cold and frosty, and the orchardists protected the fragile blossom by burning pots of oil under the branches – a messy system that required alarms to awaken the family to refill the frost pots during the long night. Nowadays a system of pumped water sprays are automated to sprinkle the trees and freeze a glassy shell over the blossom and buds at the exact 1 degree Celsius that would prevent any further damage to the fruiting of the tree. Environmentally more friendly to the air, but the water is available due to the flooding of the river valley for a dam and irrigation systems in a very dry region.

The resources of my East Anglian garden can offer no such protection to my potential plum crop this year. So I can only hope that the snow comes before the frost and allows the buds to be protected under a white blanket. What makes me worry about natural things that cannot be altered like this ?