lunch # 1

In what's going to be a very busy week, I'm setting myself a routine: unless something spectacular happens to disrupt things, the daily photograph will be of my lunch. I only decided upon this most of the way through an apple, which looked especially fetching on my shiny desk top - and had absent-mindedly eaten the rest down to the core before I realized that I might want to try for a more focused image.

But there is a further point here - in preparation both for my MLA paper (which also has involved virtual rustling around in the beautiful on-line archive of the New Yorker, for 1945-6) and for a chapter I need to write, I want to think about the everyday (somewhat belatedly, to be sure - sometimes it seems as though thinking about this has become a very everyday occurence in and of itself), and I've been grounding myself in Ben Highmore's Everyday Life and Cultural Theory, which opens with various alternatives - whether the everyday is calmingly ordinary, a source of pleasure, or a form of boring incarceration in the routine and mundane. These are, of course, issues which have been very germane to the writing of this blog during the year, and now that I turn the corner into December, and start to reflect a bit more about what it's meant to put it together over the year, as an every-day practice, the daily recording of something both quotidien yet changing, mundane yet a (potential) source of pleasure, seems a suitable thing to do.