lily 2

A little bit further towards full bloom. The trouble with this sequence is that there is not - or is not, as yet, a whole lot to say about it. But it offers the opportunity to turn back to David Shields' Reality Hunger, and to one of the aphorisms, or miniature essays, under E, subtitled "reality". Which ought to make one's antennae quiver, given the direction of the whole book - maybe this is the important, key chapter? But why E? (R, which might have been a long time to wait, is for "autobio"). I'm tempted to find a reference to Georges Perec's La Disparition, which was written without the letter "e" at all, but that might be stretching it. Section 137:

"Why do you take photographs so constantly, so obsessively? Why do you collect other people's photographs? Why do you scavenge in secondhand shops and buy old albums of other people's pasts?

So that I'll see what I've seen."

But this, of course, isn't Shields at all, but Janette Turner Hospital, in The Last Magician. So one might rephrase this: in what way is a photograph a quotation? Why do you scavenge obsessively in other people's written works? So that I can see what I've seen...? Is this the nature of the intertextual? It seems to be not at all true of today's particular mode of taking photographs (with a macro lens, with a 550EX speedlite, extracting one little frame of lily) - this is what the lens sees, focused on one part of a flower: this is not what the brain registers the eye as seeing, for it scans backwards and forwards and gives depth to the image).

a week of lilies

Coming up - a week of lilies. Or a week, rather, of this lily - I want to trace its emergence from day to day. This is one from the same batch of which I bought 24 or so for Christmas gifts for the English Department staff - and all through this semester, depending on when they started to water them, and how light their offices are, they've been bursting into spectacular blooms. So this should develop into white and pink stripes: rather than 13 ways of looking at a - well, wood pigeons, jays, starlings and grackles were the birds of choice outside today - feathered object, here will be five or six observations of an amaryllis.

not a tourist

and yet, very hard not to look upwards in New York today, on my way to a meeting (having been told way back in the late 70s that the way to recognize a tourist in New York was that she or he was always looking upwards, I've spend decades familiarizing myself with manhole covers and steaming vents and occasional shop windows). It was snowing, and snowing - 21" by the time that I left the city for a snowy, but less extravagantly snowy, New Jersey. NY was curiously schizophrenic in the snow - large flakes coming down, tree branches heavy with the stuff, like a schmalzy movie - and then definitely a day to look upwards, because ankle deep grey slush is far from appealing.

And I was nearly the victim of many flash bulbs - but failed to get the timing quite right. The building that I was in also houses the NY office of the Governor of New York - and David Paterson suspended his election campaign today, so the news media, complete with arc lights and doubtless many other implements of glaring illumination were parked outside.

cocktail sticks

that once had lychees impaled upon them. I totally recommend Boi, a Vietnamese restaurant on E 44th St in NYC - not least for the Ram - boi - tini, composed of rambutan juice and vodka. And lychees. The content of these delectable drinks is not responsible, I swear, for the strange and tilted angle of this image - it's just not always easy to take photos in restaurants without calling attention to the activity, and looking like some gauche and goggle-eyed bridge-and-tunnel person. Which of course - in terms of transportation - one is, but it's good, for an evening, to pretend not to be.

found art

On top of a free newspaper bin by the side of the steps up to New Brunswick railway station, here are various smashed frames, or forms, that seem as though they might once have represented something, but the elements (and this is even before the next, prophesized, Major Blizzard hits New Jersey) have turned them into broken, crumpled windows, or diagrams of edifices, or sheer abstract pieces that have given up the fight to mean anything. I haven't had much time to read further in Shields' Reality Hunger today (and should I be reading from the front? - which I will, when my time unfolds into a manageable expanse again - dipping in both seems like cheating, but also in keeping with his whole commitment to the fragmentary) - but I'll pluck out his comment (p. 166) that "Life is, in large part, rubbish. the beauty of reality-based art - art underwritten by reality hunger - is that it's perfectly situated between life itself and (unattainable) 'life as art.' Everything in life, turned sideways, can look like - can be - art."

Yes, of course, I know that he intended - surely - that "turned sideways" in a figurative sense. But of course I couldn't resist that literal challenge (and think this is an improvement), especially as this very choice of image depends on the recognition, and transformation, of actual "rubbish" in the first place.

cake, generically

Quite wonderfully, around three o'clock this afternoon, there was a shuffling outside the door of my office, and in came all the staff - all bar Cheryl, who was tied up with a visitor - bearing a just very slightly belated birthday cake (I didn't announce my natal day yesterday, but various people in the know from FB came by to wish me a Happy B, and the secret had escaped) - with my name piped in turquoise icing on the chocolate covering. And cards. And singing Happy Birthday. And asking me if we sing "Happy Birthday" in England - which of course we do, and it had never struck me to think we mightn't. Interestingly, though (meaning I didn't know this till I looked it up on Wikipedia), the melody is is an American one, written - or at least borrowed - by schoolteachers Patty and Mildred J. Hill in Louisville, KT in 1893 for the words "Good Morning to All," and their students - apparently - liked it so much that they changed the words when they then started to sing it at birthday parties. It appeared in Children's Praise and Worship in 1918, and Coleman's American Hymnal in 1933 (surely a bit lightweight for a hymn?). But when was it imported into England? I couldn't find anything that said: I must ask my parents (both born in 1923) if they remember singing it in their childhoods.

The cake was, in a sense, generic - but I'm also starting to think about the genre in which I write about it, about "Happy Birthday," about ordinariness, or the extraordinary within the ordinary - in part prompted by the present to myself that Amazon delivered today, David Shields' Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (I'd forgotten I'd pre-ordered it was back in November - it was another good surprise of the day). 618 paragraphs, or sentences, or bits, arranged - yes! - under alphabetical headings: meditative, aphoristic - just about my favorite experimental style: think Benjamin (and yes, Shields' appendix does, indeed, lay bear the underlying tissue of quotations embedded in the loosely connected structure) meets Georges Perec. He's posing the question of what constitutes an appropriate literary form for the C21st century; keeps (but bear in mind I've only given it the most cursory skimming: I can't wait to read it properly) coming back to the advantages of the lyric essay. He considers Facebook and MySpace's utility as "crude personal essay machines" - he's thinking especially about the informational pages, the instant status updates. "Every page is a bent version of reality - too unsophisticated to be art but too self-conscious to be mere reportage. In this new landscape, everyone gets a channel. It seems to be the ultimate destiny of every medium to be dragged down to the lowest common denominator, which is at once democratic, liberating, exhilarating, bland, deafening, and confusing. User-made content is the new folk art" (p.94). Folk art? Is this the connection between my blog and "Happy Birthday," perhaps?

undercover

If ever a picture needed an explanation and contextualization, this is it. It looks like another entrant in an occasional series of bed pictures - but its curious lumpiness is a direct effect of the building work going on in our attic (where we seem to have grown a little square tower, like some Victorian gothic excrescence). For the cats have to be corralled all day, and have, by now, developed the habit of taking themselves up to the bedroom after breakfast. Only the noise was especially bad today (electric saws, hammers, staple guns, bad rock music), and we found that LucyFur had buried herself firmly and securely under the covers. That sleeping tabby mound on the far side is Lola - not exactly unperturbed, but at least daring to be visible.