buds?

Well, maybe buds.   Last day of February.   Standing on New Brunswick station platform, waiting to meet visitor off train, and trying to kid myself that maybe it smells of spring.   Surely those tiny - what would one call them? - nodules at the end of these branches might be called buds?

Really, there's something sublimely dull about this photograph, but it was a very full day.

language

One can hardly argue with the text: language is used to conquer the silent and the unknown (interesting that this should come first - one could argue that shouting, or playing loud music, or miaowing would do just as well); language allows us to express and control emotion; to reveal and camouflage our thoughts and emotions; it lets us make and avoid contact; it permits us to assert social and community identity.   Hmmm - I guess I'd have said first that it allows us to communicate (if only with ourselves) - but this is a pretty good list - leading towards the fact that it allows us to control and be controlled by the world (and yes, the page goes on).   The page, indeed, goes on, untorn, and unblemished.   But it's lying on its own, like an individual performance of linguistic virtuosity, in the middle of a Rutgers carpark.   I wish that I could report that someone was lying around in wait behind the parked cars, videoing people who stopped and read it - surely that would have enacted some point about language's power?   But alas, it was lying orphaned and unloved: a discarded, lost, stray text.

reflections on Manhattan

Hanging in La Guardia Gardens, just south of Washington Square, this large shiny ball looks far less Christmassy in reality than it does here.   It was a quick dash to NYC, with an errand to carry out - I couldn't really stay longer because of having to head out and buy flowers for tomorrow's house showings (yes, I know that they sell flowers in NY, but I couldn't really face carrying increasingly droopy armfuls of them on New Jersey Transit).   But as it was sunny I ignored the subway as much as possible, and walked back to Penn Station from Chelsea, thinking the whole way how much I love the city, and have done since I was first electrified by it in 1979.

And it was full of its usual quirkiness - the man bicycling down 5th Ave. with two hockey sticks; the red-tailed hawk lazily circling round and round over Washington Square looking for pigeons; the manic leafleting by representatives of Jews for Jesus.   And then there was the phenomenon of "Staying Alive."   I first heard the jagged sounds of the Bee Gees as I stood waiting to cross at some lights - apparently coming from a cab that was stationary in traffic.   A little further up, from another cab - which seemed to me weird, that they would both have the same radio station on - but coincidences happen.   And then, I became convinced that it was wafting up from underground - a Saturday Night Fever fest on the subway?   Then, the tune was coming from a Fed Ex van.

It was quite some time later that I realised that the iPhone in my pocket had jammed on, with "Staying Alive" on endless repeat in the form of a YouTube video (quite what that was doing on my iPhone at all is another problem).   I have a nasty feeling that a number of people who passed me may well have consigned me to the role of NY eccentric: someone who can't walk around without broadcasting the Bee Gees to anyone who happens to be in the vicinity.

bug

A bug.   A bug in a mug.   Not snug in a mug - oh, enough, enough.   I just wasn't very happy to have this fly onto my office desk when I was tidying it.   It's not a coffee mug - more a paper clip mug, so it wasn't too disgusting, but I think it's yet another example of Union Street wildlife, of which there was plenty today.   Since the temperature hit a wild 59 degrees, the squirrels were up and scampering in the walls (I always pretend that they're racoons, and indeed occasionally they may be, only at the moment they sound fairly small - just energetic).   It's one of my favorite mugs - an Oxford Women Students suffrage mug: one that always makes me think that I was born out of my time, and that really, it would have been better spending one's radical youth on this, rather than occupying the Examination Schools in the determined attempt to make the university give us a student union (tidying papers in the basement last weekend, I found the roneoed days' programs for that - evening disco and all).   

repetition

Yes, it's another flower picture.   Yes, it's another example of what one comes up with when one's tired and headachey after a day's teaching and one hasn't been reading or thinking about the visual, except in the contexts of administration and grant writing and the like.   And yes, it's a comment on the fact that once again, early in the morning, there's a house showing, and everything has to be shiny and dusted or hidden away, and flowers have to be prominently arranged in every room, and the right lights left on, and Lola's favorite stuffed sock hidden away in case a prospective purchaser treads on it, and the bathroom mirrors shined, and the trash taken out, and the litter tray raked and groomed, and the kitchen floor swabbed, and the towels straightened, and all the other rituals.   None of the above (apart from the turning on of lights) will help the fact that it's going to be a wet, windy morning in late February - hardly NJ at its most seductive.

cats, eyes, flash

Today's problem is not one of how to fit two cats comfortably on a radiator (for that has been solved by picture 2), nor how to finish re-reading Our Mutual Friend for class tomorrow, given that it's already 11.05, and that problem may have already been consigned to the realm of the insoluble ... no: it's back to the strangeness of cats' eyes in flash photography.   DandeLion's eyes are notorious for their spooky orange stare: tonight, I find that Lola (as befits the nautical emphasis of OMF) has eyes that seem to be fitted out like lights on board a ship: green on the starboard side, and red on the port bow.   Very peculiar.   LucyFur, sensibly, has three-quarter closed hers against the glare.

stair window

A new year ... new beginnings ... new etc etc.   So there's also something slightly valedictory about posting an image of the evening light falling on the stairwell of the Union Street house, suddenly transforming its crumbling and peeling self into something very tranquil and beautiful.   I do feel sorry for the house, and hope that it's rescued before it crashes to the ground like something out of Little Dorrit - but I was most encouraged that someone had at least come and done something about the dangling guttering and the flapping flashing that I'd called in last week.