chalky

This is the residue, I'm sure, of some student group meetings with school students on campus at the weekend (it's so good when job candidates ask one about community engagement and outreach at USC to be able be genuine in one's enthusiasm for how much goes on.  Even if that involves chalking the footpaths).  Curiously, this didn't make me think about the piece I should be polishing up on pavement artists, but rather of some lines from the Introduction to Zahid Chaudhary's Afterimage of Empire (which we'll be discussing in class tomorrow):

         Habit is critical to the business of perception, because it is what allows us to filter out objects

         from consciousness in order to get through the day; if every object were subjected to our

         attention we could never move forward.

(echoes of George Eliot; squirrels' hearts, etc. here, of course).  But rereading these lines brought me up sharp against the raison d'être - or one of them, perhaps the main one - for this blog: to subject things to my attention that I might pass over without, as it were, seeing.  In other words, what I'm up to - at best! - is habit-breaking in my own seeing.