jug handle

No, not one of the strange driving features on NJ roads, but a big jug of white carnations on our dining room table - the jug came from a store by Sunset Junction, in Silver Lake, that has a wonderful selection of eco friendly and eco/nature themed household treats.

I simply couldn't stand another day hunting down an image in Murray, although I did look, hard, on my way up to Au Bon Pain and back for something serviceable. I'd started to read Kathleen Stewart's Ordinary Affects, which has been haunting my desk for some time (since I have to give an MLA paper to do with affect, and I'm supposed to be writing a chapter for an edited volume on the novel and the ordinary/everyday, this seems like killing two birds with one stone). It's a book composed of some 120 or so vignettes of ordinary life and speculations not just upon them, but on the very nature of the ordinary, and hence feels like a close relative of this blog. Of course, I left the book on my desk... but the passage that caught my eye in relation to trying to find a subject for an image of the day had to do with the particular power of the found object, the unexpected revelation of something special in the apparently ordinary bit of discarded junk or trash or roadside detritus - and then (this is the noteworthy bit) the way in which we seize on such things not just because of a love of surprise, but because of our love of a bargain, of something for nothing. I'll go back into this tomorrow (unless something else visually compelling forces itself on me): I think that there's a good deal of material I want to think through here in terms of my own practice.