not getting excited

I've been passing this hoarding for a week now on my way home (underneath it says that Bill Posters Will Be Prosecuted, but I doubt that Bill will get into all that much trouble).  It's hard to say quite which aspects of the advertising for this new adaptation of Wuthering Heights turn me off the most: the mock Victorian mirror vignettes? The lettering, like the cover for some really bad supernatural drama set in a New England boarding school?  The vague sense that the mirrors are hanging on cheap Victorian boarding house wallpaper?  I will be phenomenally surprised at myself if I go to see this: thank goodness I haven't taught a course on Fiction Into Film in living memory, and so don't feel semi-obliged to go and see whether, in all its awfulness, it would make a good compare-and-contrast with the 1939 version with Laurence Olivier as Heathcliff, or (quickly glancing at Wikipedia), the Hindi or the Urdu or the Filipino or Japanese or any of the previous English language versions.  Of course, checking all of this out makes me feel fleetingly nostalgic for that course ...

 

full moon and blossom

I haven't had the greatest success, tonight, with taking a picture that captures both moon and the Asian pear's luminous blossom well: I've tried both my iPhone and a camera, and have come to the conclusion I need to spend more time practicing ... in any case, it's a beautiful night out there, apart from the deep roar of motorcycles down on the 5.  Sometimes, from the garden, one hears the traffic so loudly, and at other times one's hardly aware of it at all: it's best when the neighbor has her fountain on, which distracts the ear.  Memo to self: I keep meaning to get a fountain ...

 

sky slices

Why, yes, it was warm enough to go out to brunch today and sit outside, and then later the temperature went up to 85 degrees.  This is, of course, as much a result of global weirding as is all that snow and ice and bomb cyclones, and I'm not the biggest fan of hot - really hot - weather in any case, but I'm not arguing with the pleasures of eating on a patio in January.

 

sidewalk scene

Seen this evening in Mount Washington, and very, very bizarre.  It doesn't seem to have been deliberately posed, but it's a strangely satisfying juxtaposition.

 

roots

 

It was the end of a long dental journey today.  Over the last couple of years I've needed some failed dental implants replaced - technology not being what it is now, well over twenty years ago - but this long, expensive, and at times inordinately painful process came to an end this afternoon.  I'm told that yes, I can now bite into a carrot.  You can't believe how exciting this is as a possibility.  I had plenty of time - as I've had over the years - to contemplate the window sill of my wonderful dentist, but it was only today that, for the first time, I realized that the roots of these orchids bear an uncomfortably close resemblance to tooth roots.

an off-duty mascot

Strapped into a Facilities van on campus: here's the Trojan Warrior who (with a human inside him) makes an appearance at the Galen Center for basketball games. I've never seen him at volleyball, for which I'm thankful: he's lumpy, ugly, and in some way I can't put my finger on, faintly embarrassing.  Aesthetically embarrassing, I guess.  And he's also more or less indistinguishable from a Rutgers Scarlet Knight - just with more "gold."  His slump is doubtless a response to the current underperforming women's basketball team, who keep being Not Quite Good Enough on offense - not at all good enough, for the most part.  It was a sad, surreal sight.

 

time, passing

This blog is fifteen years old today.  I'll leave you a moment to think about that: 6,373 consecutive days of taking a photograph, and writing something - even if only a sentence - and posting it.  

It started, of course, as a teaching-related exercise: I didn't think it right to ask my students in my "Writing and Photography" course to write a blog if I didn't have any experience of doing so myself.  I think I told them they need only write a couple of entries a week: I embarked on it as a daily exercise, and never looked back.  It's a strange way of keeping a public diary, because of course it's highly selective and self-censoring, but it's also very effective as a memory placeholder.  Memory, indeed, featured centrally in the course itself - I think I envisaged myself writing a book on photography and memory (hardly original as an idea ...) which then morphed into one on writing and photography, which then, in turn, morphed into Flash!  

But I'm still drawn back to that theme of memory, even if only at a personal, non-academic level.  I was ruffling around in a box of old photos in my office today and found this - which I don't, indeed, remember.  The fade-away on the right hand side seems the perfect visual analogue for recollections fading away ... and also, as a big-time imperfection, surely was the reason why this wasn't kept alongside the small, familiar collection that lived in a wooden box on the other side of the room from the window you see here.  I guess it's 1961: I'm wearing my new school uniform - I do remember my father posing me, presumably at the same session, on the house's doorstep - and there's Rama, barely visible, turning his big blue Siamese eyes towards me on the sitting room window ledge.

What I admire about my father's photographic skills is how he's used the lighting to make the room seem large and elegant.  We'd only moved in fairly recently (where and when did the curtains get sown?), and didn't have much money, didn't have much by way of furniture apart from what had been bought in junk shops up in Cumberland.  There's no sofa, no rug.  But it looks quiet, settled, idyllic.  It also looks, and was, a long time ago.