lobsters

We've started to talk about photography and memory in class, and we'll be moving onto personal photography - and this is by way of an introduction, to show how one very ordinary corner (here, bedroom - but also think desk top, kitchen counter, car trunk on a bad day, etc) might work to bridge these terms.   Because our possessions signal ourselves, our current lives (which are always already past), our choices, our tastes (or, if not our possessions, they may only give an indication of our current environment - this is a hybrid, since the mirror and lamp and rather covetable oriental cabinet belong to our house sitters and will disappear off to their own futures in the summer).   They may also literally signify memory - that's my 2009 journal sitting there, still as up to date in terms of its daily entries as is this blog, which is something of an unprecedented miracle - or the Roni Horn catalogue (see yesterday - relic of an exhibition visit earlier in the year, and also playful with the idea of memory slipping around and not turning up where one expects to find it).   The peacock jug was bought as a Christmas present for someone - and then I kept it when I thought I'd like it more than they would (a good call).   But that takes me back fifteen years or so.   And then when I look back at this picture, maybe I'll remember that another book on the bedside table is Fred Ritchin's new book, After Photography, which is deeply unsettling in the ways in which it makes one question the reliability of digital photographs as trustworthy records.

And then there's the tee shirt.   To be honest, this whole post is really an excuse to write about the tee shirt (posed on the cabinet - even at this stage of the semester, the bedroom isn't looking quite that manic...).   Maybe buying the tee shirt was an excuse for writing a blog entry? For the tee shirt bears on it the picture of a lobster.   It comes via Etsy from Xenotees, in Philadelphia (donation from each tee shirt sale to feral cats).   This lobster is on a leash, and the leash is made up of a Gerard de Nerval quotation, that reads "J'ai le gout de homards, qui sont tranquilles, serieux, savent les secrets de la mer, n'aboient pas..." - that is, "I like lobsters, who are quiet, serious, know the secrets of the sea, and don't bark..." (there's a short story in the current New Yorker by Woody Allen in which two men, reincarnated as lobsters. savage Bernie Madoff in a restaurant, but that's just incidental).   De Nerval, of course, used to walk his own lobster regularly, in Paris, on a leash.

And why did I buy this tee shirt?   I once - when I was an undergraduate - went to a themed dressing up party - a "decadence" party - as Gerard de Nerval, with a plastic lobster (begged from a fishmongers' stall in Oxford market) on a long brown velvet leash (I also once went to a Bad Taste party as a flock of flying china ducks, but that's another story).   I was very fond of my plastic lobster.   And my mother, who didn't share my emotional attachment, Threw Him Out when Clearing Out My Room after I left home.   Clearly, there is a lot of trauma associated with these crustaceans, which I will now have to exorcise.