Household Opera

OK, one more photo post...

...because photography is fun. (It's the hobby that sort of crept up on me while I wasn't looking. Unlike knitting or blogging, I didn't really intend to get into it.) These irises were calling to me yesterday, and I'm very glad I stopped on my way home to take some pictures:

There's a poem in Alice Oswald's new book Weeds and Wild Flowers that describes a yellow iris as a woman with "one / gold-webbed glove, / one withered hand." I hadn't even noticed the withered blossoms on these irises, curled like fists, until I uploaded this image to my computer and looked at it full-size.

One more from the same set, for good measure:

We now return to the regularly scheduled wordy blogging...

More botanizing

More spring foliage imagery. I just can't help myself; it was a beautiful day today, and the leaves on the trees are still that supercharged fluorescent green that always leaves me a little startled that such a color is actually found in nature.

This post is for frizzyLogic, whose photographs of London plane trees and their "baubles" were in my mind today after I noticed that the sweetgum tree outside my office was producing little green bobbles of its own. 

Incidentally, Wikipedia tells me that the spiky fruit of the sweetgum is sometimes called a "gumball." Hee.

I've been staring at the buds on that tree since March, waiting for them to open. Longest. Winter. Ever. But as of last week, there are finally leaves.

The oaks around campus are also leafing out like crazy:

(Actually, I think this image is one of the better pictures I've taken lately. It doesn't quite get the intensity of the colors, but I really like the way the composition turned out.)

Walking around, looking for places to stop and take pictures of leaves, I keep thinking of George Herbert's poem "The Flower," especially the parts of it that stayed with me during some of the worst moments in grad school:

Who would have thought my shriveled heart
Could have recovered greenness? It was gone
         Quite underground; as flowers depart
To see their mother-root, when they have blown...
.................................
And now in age I bud again,
After so many deaths I live and write;
         I once more smell the dew and rain,
And relish versing. Oh, my only light,
                      It cannot be
                      That I am he
         On whom thy tempests fell all night.

May we all recover greenness, however and wherever we manage to find it.

Trying to revive this blog, a bit.

Somehow I managed not to post anything here for two months. Partly I've just been busy; partly it's been a rocky couple of months. Nothing dire, I hasten to add, but there's been illness and death in my family, and personal angst of the mundane and unbloggable kind, and all that combined with what's seemed like an interminably cold, gray, rainy winter — not to mention the ever-sourer national mood, which seeps into everything, much like the miserable weather — has added up to a general grimness about the mouth and a damp, drizzly November in the soul. Which hasn't exactly been blog fodder.

But at least some of that has been changing: the sun is out, at last, and my favorite cherry tree on campus burst into full bloom this week. I went by it with my camera this afternoon, because the flowering won't last much longer. So here, by way of starting up the posting again, are some pictures. There'll be some words too, in a little while.

A #Reverb10 photo post: Moment

I've been neglecting the blog again. Too many things I might blog about (fun with productivity tools; gender in social networks; the latest outcroppings of my commonplace book project; when all else fails, random favorite poems), too little time. But a bunch of people I know in the blogo/Twitterspheres are doing Reverb 10, and I've been playing along as I write my daily 750Words brain-dump. Most of what I'm writing probably won't see the light of day; it's too personal for my blog standards. But we'll see.

Today's prompt was "Moment": Pick one moment during which you felt most alive this year. Describe it in vivid detail (texture, smells, voices, noises, colors).

While it may be cheating a bit to post photos when specifically prompted to write a description — particularly when the photo doesn't really do either the view or the moment justice — this was a really damn fine moment, and I don't want to forget it.

I took this picture during the all-too-short Lake District segment of the Great UK Trip this summer, while standing next to the Castlerigg Stone Circle outside Keswick. The sun was just coming out after two days of rain and overcast, and it hit this valley just so. I stood there slack-jawed, staring at it for the longest time, surrounded by grazing sheep and picture-taking fellow tourists in equal numbers.

I could probably say any number of things about how my sense of landscape aesthetics has been conditioned by the same Romantics whose Lake District footsteps I'd been treading in. But mostly I couldn't shake the sense that I had, somehow, always known this place, and that my imagination had lived there for years, even though I'd never been to England or seen that view reproduced anywhere. At any rate, it lives there now:

There are some places that you just love at first sight, you know? Even if you only see them from a distance on a long walk where sooner or later you have to head off in the opposite direction. But someday I'm going back, and staying for much longer, and climbing those knobby hillsides every day. And if I ever develop a yearning for a quiet rural life, this is where I'm going when I retire.

My UK trip, in pictures

So here is the blog post about what I did on my summer vacation, complete with pictures. (In another life I was somebody's aunt who brought out the slide projector at every family dinner.) The full(ish) set is up on Flickr if you're curious.

First stop: Edinburgh, for Material Cultures 2010, which was one of the best academic conferences I've been to in recent memory: a nice mix of historians, literature scholars, librarians (I wasn't the only one!), independent scholars, and the occasional bookseller; a lovely atmosphere of friendliness; excellent keynotes and really interesting papers; and, not least of all, food, drink, and dancing. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

First there was sightseeing on a rainy Scottish summer day:

Greyfriars Kirkyard and the Castle.

Then there was conferencing:

Old College and Playfair Library, University of Edinburgh.

There was also a dinner with Scottish country dancing, which was great fun; and a whisky tasting, which was followed by haggis at Greyfriars Bobby's Bar. (Verdict: not bad, though I could've done with a bit less mashed potato.)

And I sneaked away from the last conference session or so to climb Arthur's Seat:

 

Then it was on to the Lake District, which gave me a whole new appreciation for the earlier generation of Romantic poets. I mean, wouldn't this make you want to write poetry too?

And now it's all in my head, for moments when I'm in vacant or in pensive mood. (That was the lovely thing about this trip. So much fuel for the imagination, which I hadn't even realized was getting pinched and starved from neglect.)

I didn't quite make it all the way up Helm Crag. But I promised myself I'd go back someday and try again.

My favorite walk was near Keswick: first the Castlerigg Stone Circle, then a stroll through the fields and woods back into town:

(I think I loved the view in the second of these three pictures best of all. It's hard to say why—and it might have just been the sun finally coming out, and the feeling of discovering something I hadn't been primed for by a guidebook—but that valley is going to stay with me for a very long time. More images for the inward eye. It's really hard to talk about these landscapes without coming over all Wordsworthian.)

And then I went to London, where, on top of all the other marvelous things about three days in London, I got to see a couple of friends from whom I'm usually separated by several time zones in different directions. There were visits to the Lambeth Palace Library, the Tate Britain, and the British Library's excellent map exhibition.

There was an excursion to the Keats House near Hampstead Heath.

There was a Sunday morning at St. Paul's Cathedral...
where we heard Mozart's Great Mass in C Minor. Which, even with the soloists facing away from where we were sitting, was as magnificent as you might imagine.

There was a splendid blogger meetup with Lady P and Krista, during which we went for a stroll along Fleet Street, then stumbled across Samuel Pepys' birthplace (at which all of us shrieked a little bit), then went for a ride on a London bus...

...and then went in search of William Blake's house in South Molton Lane, only to discover that it's now a waxing salon.

We consoled ourselves with insanely extravagant cocktails in the bar of Claridge's Hotel, which, as Lady P put it, is the kind of place where Bertie Wooster might pop in at any moment for lunch with one of his aunts.

I kept trying to superimpose, onto the London in front of me, pretty much every canonical work of British literature I'd ever read with a London setting or by an author who lived in London: trying to imagine John Donne haunting the Inns of Court, for instance, or Mrs. Dalloway making her way up Bond Street. Or all the 17th- and 18th-century booksellers in St. Paul's Churchyard. It didn't always work; as with Helm Crag, I'll just have to try it again someday not too far off.

And then I went home, only to wake at 5 a.m. the morning after, wondering what continent I was on. I'm already plotting how soon I can go back, and which of the places I didn't get to see on this trip I can manage the next time.

On walkability, part 2: Giving people something to look at

(This is part 2 in an irregular series of posts about walkability. For those of you just tuning in, part 1 is here.)

You don't always hear about aesthetics being a factor in walkability; usually the discussion is focused on distances between places that people need to get to, and obstacles in the way of their walking to and fro. But I've thought for a long time now that the look of a walking route is important. A street with nothing but blank walls, or parking lots as far as the eye can see, makes for a dull, boring, dispiriting slog; a street with interesting buildings or bits of greenery or lots of shop windows or good views makes the same distance seem much less, because there's always something interesting to look at. All the places I've lived in have illustrated this to greater or lesser degrees. Charlottesville has glimpses of the Blue Ridge Mountains everywhere you go; Ann Arbor has beautiful old houses*; Baltimore has fabulous bits of kitsch and wackiness (including things like Elvis shrines and painted window screens).

In Philly, there were some streets that I always found dull and highway-esque (especially certain stretches of Market Street in University City), but there were others that harbored weird and delightful surprises for anyone strolling by: a street of tiny houses, a building covered in mosaic tiles and mirrors...

...a Stikman or a mystery tile embedded in the street:

...an old bay window with a fancy vintage sign:

New London has its points of visual interest, too: there are the views of the Long Island Sound that you get when you head south from the Connecticut College campus...

...the riverfront, with docks and ferries and the Groton Monument across the river:

...the pretty old buildings along State Street (Bank Street, too):

But there are also plenty of places where the historic buildings give way to endless I-95 on- and off-ramps. It's hard to get very excited about my walk home from work when the view of the Sound gives way to the view of, well, this:

Even with the sunset light on it, that's a vista that I got tired of really fast. A big stretch of my homeward walk goes through gas-station-and-interstate territory, and I walk it with my headphones plugged in, tuning out the visuals as much as I can, because they're just depressing. (Which is not to say that I walk along ignoring traffic. I'm not suicidal.) And there's really no other way between campus and New London proper. Interestingly, there's a group of people currently tackling this very issue. I missed their first open forum, but I'm hoping to go to the next one.

No one group of people is responsible for creating the kinds of visual details that make walking pleasant rather than boring; architects and designers and planners and business owners and arborists and home owners and street artists and a host of others all contribute. There's no one way to go about making a place visually interesting, and band-aid solutions (a grassy median here, a mural there) aren't going to make an ugly place all that much less ugly. But we can at least think about building environments that aren't meant to be driven through at top speed and never looked at.

* That house in the photo was my favorite building in all of Ann Arbor, and I used to walk past it whenever I could because I loved it so much.

Autumnal dreaming

I went to see my family in Baltimore for Thanksgiving weekend. The day after Thanksgiving, we went for a walk up and down Roland Avenue, one of the main north-south streets in Hampden, where I spent most of my childhood. Just as we were leaving, I remembered my camera. I took a bunch of pictures, and one in particular stood out. Through a gap between the houses near 38th Street, a yellow ginkgo tree stood out against a dark cloudy sky:

You can't see it, but one end of the Johns Hopkins University campus lies between the houses in the foreground and those tall brick apartment buildings in the background. My mother and I moved to one of those buildings (the Ambassador, which also featured briefly in a Homicide: Life on the Street episode) during my first couple of years in high school.

It's far from the best picture I've ever taken, but I've been staring and staring at it since I got home and uploaded it to my computer. There's something about the light that I managed to capture — that oblique late-fall light that you see at three or four in the afternoon this time of year, not yet winter sun but getting there — that brings back every fall from those years in Baltimore. The shortening days with the golden hour stretching earlier and earlier into the day, the somber sky and the last bright leaves, another school year well underway, another Halloween retreating into the past, the promise of snow somewhere in the near future. The little rowhouses transformed for a moment. And the unimaginable farther-off future like those buildings in the distance, with their windows glinting in the late-afternoon sun.

It's a mood I associate with the endless reading I did at the time, the trips to and from the public library as the evenings got darker and colder, and, a few years later, reading F. Scott Fitzgerald and T.S. Eliot and any number of others. Around the time my mother and I moved to the Ambassador, which you can just see a bit of in this photo, I was reading The Great Gatsby at school and starting to forage through the "serious" bookshelves at home. Looking at the gold tree and the far-off roofs brought a bit of Fitzgerald's "Winter Dreams" (another school reading from those years) to mind: "Fall made him clinch his hands and tremble and repeat idiotic sentences to himself, and make brisk abrupt gestures of command to imaginary audiences and armies. October filled him with hope which November raised to a sort of ecstatic triumph." And even though Fitzgerald's hero strikes me as kind of irritating on rereading it twenty years later, I remember the feeling. It hasn't entirely gone away, either.

All those years in the Midwest made me hate November, which was always drizzly and gray and signaled the start of another endless, dark, depressing winter. But I think I just rediscovered what I always loved about it.

My Seattle trip in pictures

My camera is finally working again, and I've just gotten around to uploading the pictures I took in Seattle during ACRL. Herewith, a long-overdue summary of the non-conferencey parts of the trip.

Spectacular views of the Rockies from the plane on the way over:

Below the surface of the city on the Underground Tour:

Historic coffee technology on display (holy steampunk, Batman!):

RARRRRR! (It's a monkfish at the Pike Place fish market.)

Inside the Seattle Central Library, an all-red floor that's pure Stanley Kubrick, a clever call numbering system, and a glowing yellow escalator:

And a view of the library's reference desk, a.k.a. the "Mixing Chamber," from on high:

I would have taken pictures of the Experience Music Project and Science Fiction Museum, especially the latter, but that evening was when I dropped my camera. I'm glad I got to geek out at the Central Library before the Camera Incident happened.

Snowpocalypse now!

The big snowstorm took its time getting to Connecticut, but it's definitely here. The College closed early today so that people could go home before the roads got too messy. When I heard the forecast this morning, I grabbed my camera, and I've been carrying it around taking pictures all day.

Downtown, all was quiet, but the sky looked threatening.

The view from one of my windows after the snow started seriously coming down.

Even in the smaller-size photo, you can see how heavily it's snowing.

Car tracks in the snow.

We've already got at least a couple of inches on the ground, and both the ground and the air have gotten noticeably whiter in the space of the last hour. Tonight is definitely not a night to leave the house. More pictures tomorrow morning if it's not all a slushy mess by then.

Pictures from my walk home

I had my camera with me yesterday, and the light was so irresistible as I walked home that I kept stopping to take pictures.

There's a little cluster of milkweed growing near my shortcut off campus, and the seeds have started coming loose.

Some of the trees are turning red. This one seems to be turning from the inside out.

I'm not sure what kind of tree this is, but I love the yellow berries.

The light was hitting the trees at just the right angle. I've always loved this time of day.

Even rust-stained concrete under the highway looks completely different.