Carnage and a Space Dog

I came across this gruesome scene outside a charity shop on Finchley Road yesterday morning. What could have happened here? It looks like a gigantic object fell from a great height onto these unsuspecting pedestrians, at least one of whom was wearing no pants. It's a mystery.

I also found a really good clay flowerpot, which was sitting next to some trash bins. I left it there because I couldn't very well take it to work, figuring if it was still there when I walked home I'd grab it. It was, and I did.

So you could say I had a productive day.

Oh, I did other things too. I worked in the Lower School twice yesterday, and I'm embarking on a new project to help them get their board games organized. For example, they had two "Monopoly Junior" games that had become intermingled over time, and I spent about an hour counting out all the pieces so that we had one complete game. (The second game wound up being just bits and bobs, not enough to play, so maybe we'll save it for spare parts.) As I said to Dave when I got home, "For this I went to college?"

Here's a new artwork in the Lower School hallway. (I recommend clicking the picture to enlarge it for full effect.) It says "respect" on that sunray leading to the...dog?...carrying a forked stick and wearing two neckties. At first I thought the background was outer space, but then I saw fish and what looks like lots of little bacteria floating around. Clearly someone is studying surrealism.

Thanks for indulging my musings about my childhood yesterday. In the interest of fairness I should mention that my parents did at least two other things for me photographically when I was a kid -- they enrolled me in summer camp, where photography was an activity I studied, and I got experience both taking and processing photos there. They also signed me up for a weeklong kids' photography course at the local university when I was in eighth grade. I was hardly deprived. My main gripe is that it took so long for them to give me a decent camera, but I suppose I could have saved up for one if I'd been really committed. My weekly allowance was something like $1.50, with occasional $10 or $20 payments when I mowed the lawn -- so it would have taken years, but it was theoretically possible!

Our tube strike is continuing. Every time I pass the crowded bus stops and busy overground stations -- the overground rail network is not closed -- I thank goodness I can walk to work.

Youthful Obsessions

Here's our pink anemone, a late-summer bloomer that's doing really well this year. I was admiring it the other day when I spotted a tiny flower crab spider perched on its uppermost petals. Can you see it, on the closest flower?

Here's an extreme (and slightly blurry) close-up. These spiders lurk on flowers, waiting for bees or other pollinators to fly in for some nectar. When they do, the spiders grab them with those long front legs and eat them. Nature red in tooth and claw!

I ordered a book of Stephen Shore's early photography last week, and it arrived yesterday. Shore is one of my favorite photographers, shooting the kinds of seemingly banal streetscapes that I appreciate -- finding the beauty in the ordinary. He recently released a book of images he made as a teenager in the early '60s, walking around the streets of New York, and wrote an accompanying essay in which he recounted how he got interested in photography. Apparently an uncle gave him a photo processing kit for his sixth birthday (!) and his parents allowed him to turn his bathroom into a darkroom. From then on, he processed his family's photos and when he was eight years old, his family gave him a Ricoh camera. Four years later, they gave him a Nikon SLR. A neighbor gave him a book of Walker Evans' photographs.

"My natural way of learning was to become interested in something and throw myself into it, to become obsessed for a period of time and then move on to something else," he wrote. He never had much interest in formal education, but when his parents sent him to a boarding school in the Hudson Valley he met a teacher who was also a photographer, and who encouraged him. He moved back to Manhattan for high school, wandered the city taking pictures, and famously had the chutzpah to schedule an appointment with Edward Steichen, the director of the Photography Department at the Museum of Modern Art. Steichen bought three of his photographs for the museum, and his career was launched.

I'm telling you all this because what struck me, as I read this essay, was the way the adults in his life encouraged him from a very young age -- sometimes to an extraordinary degree. His father was a handbag manufacturer, his mother a homemaker, yet they gave him expensive cameras and allowed him to transform their house. They indulged his obsessive learning style.

I can't help but contrast this with my own parents. They also gave me a camera when I was very young, a Magimatic, and my dad had built a darkroom in our house where he showed me how to process pictures. But after their divorce and my dad's remarriage, they both became strangely reluctant to encourage my interests in photography. My dad took pictures with me a handful of times, allowing me to use his Minolta, but I begged for a decent camera for years and didn't get one until my senior year of high school. And although I was never very interested in photo processing -- I was happy to let the drug store do it -- I would have enjoyed more darkroom time.

I shared Shore's obsessive learning tendencies, but unlike his parents, mine reacted to them negatively. They got exasperated if I spent too much time on any one hobby, and frustrated if I neglected my schoolwork. During a period in my early teens when I was consumed with taping music off the radio, I remember my mother saying, "I don't know why you have to become so obsessed with everything." That criticism nagged at me. And yet, what if they had indulged those obsessions? What if they'd encouraged me to learn about recording, how it worked, how to manage levels, how to splice and edit? Maybe I'd be a sound engineer. Or maybe not.

I don't think they were bad parents. I'm not saying that. I did get encouragement in some hobbies -- beer can collecting, stamp collecting, shell collecting, and yes, photography. But I think they were consumed by their own lives and dramas -- particularly my mother -- and my father was constrained by a self-imposed need to treat me, my brother and my step-siblings (the children of his second wife) fairly and equally. He was reluctant to spend too much time or money on any one of us, because he'd have to do the same for the others. (It's not coincidental that the hobbies he most encouraged, like collecting beer cans, were those I shared with my siblings.) Shore, as an only child, didn't have that kind of competition.

I guess all I'm saying is, I wish my parents had seen my youthful obsessions as a good thing, rather than an annoyance. And I wish they'd paid more attention to helping me channel those obsessions in productive ways. I still might not be Stephen Shore, but I've always felt like I missed a crucial early stage in developing my photographic interests, particularly. Then again, I suppose there are plenty of people who come to things late in life and excel nonetheless.

No Blood Moon for Me

Another of our orchids is blooming. This is the one I found while walking Olga at Fortune Green a couple of years ago. This is its second round of blossoms for us, and they're a nice contrast with the yellow-green orchids I found later that same year, which are also blooming up a storm at the moment. You can see the head of the glass pheasant popping up in the bottom of the frame there.

Yesterday was pretty quiet. I spent a lot of time reading. I had vague plans to take a walk last night up to Parliament Hill to watch the lunar eclipse, or "blood moon" as it's popularly known, but I got engrossed in a movie and forgot! Dave and I rented "Eddington," which I heard about through the QAA podcast. It's a movie about a small-town sheriff in New Mexico who becomes consumed with right-wing paranoia during the Covid-19 pandemic, and I enjoyed it. It reminded me of "Urbania," a movie I saw years ago that made references to every urban myth at the time, thereby satirizing the whole phenomenon. "Eddington" refers to just about every element of online debate in 2020, from the advisability of masking to Black Lives Matter to fears of Antifa and wokeness. It's meant to be over the top -- there's even a literal dumpster fire -- but it gets seriously, violently crazy at the end. So, yeah, who needed a "blood moon"?

In the afternoon our phones both simultaneously went off with a loud tone we'd never heard before -- a sort of high-pitched alarm. It turned out to be a test of a government emergency alert system, but you'd think someone could have warned us it was coming. I thought Medvedev had finally followed through on his threats to start dropping nukes. (Here's what it sounded like, if you're interested.) It was similar to those "Amber Alerts" I get when I visit Florida -- government alerts about missing children that come through the phone with an alarm -- which always startle me.

Apparently our tube strike is happening today as planned. Fortunately I walk to work so it won't be a huge issue for me, but I feel sorry for people who have to travel any distance. I assume a lot of people will be working from home. Apparently the strikers want a shorter working week, among other things. Their work week is already 35 hours but they say this contributes to on-the-job fatigue. I have a feeling this may be a difficult argument to make to the rest of us, who work 40 hours, but I suppose they would argue there are differences in the intensity of the job. (Tell that to anyone who's had to manage a room full of seventh graders!)

Finally, Dave and I made some plans for October break. We're going to take a sleeper train to Penzance, in Cornwall, for a short stay. The main purpose of the trip is the train experience, and we're only going to spend two days in Penzance itself. But it should be fun, or at least interesting. Up to now, the farthest west we've ever been in that direction is Salisbury, so this will be new territory for us!

Goldfish Revisited

I'm getting a bit of a slow start this morning because I slept a little later than usual. Last night Dave and I went to see our friends Gordon and Donna in Leyton, East London, and we were there until about 11 p.m. That is a positively insane hour for me these days, so now I need some recovery time!

Yesterday was pretty slow, consumed with reading and household errands. I did all the usual stuff -- laundry, gardening -- and read about 30 more pages of John Rechy's "City of Night," which I hadn't picked up all week. I like this book -- I keep thinking it must have created a heck of a scandal when it was published in the early '60s -- but I can see it's going to take me some time.

We didn't head out to Leyton until about 5 p.m., and neither of the most direct tube lines -- the Jubilee and the Central -- were running. I don't know if that was a prelude to the tube strike, which is supposed to start today, or an unrelated problem. We caught the overground instead, which got us to Stratford without too much trouble, and then we started to hoof it to Gordon's. We passed an idling taxi and grabbed that to save ourselves the walk, because Dave was carrying a banoffee pie and schlepping that around East London wasn't the easiest thing. The taxi let us out on Leyton High Road so I could photograph the buildings above, which I've been meaning to do for a while. Isn't that a crazy paint job?

Anyway, Gordon made dinner and we had a great time catching up. I asked if they'd recently seen the neighbor boy with the goldfish, and they weren't sure who I meant, so I read them the last few paragraphs of my post from January 2012. We had a good laugh. That kid is in his mid-20's now. How time flies. But I have never forgotten Alan John the goldfish!

Over the Fence

Thank goodness it's the weekend! This has been a long week, with some very busy days. Yesterday, fortunately, was much easier -- I spent several hours in the library's poetry section, weeding old books and trying to make room on the shelves for fresh material.

Many people don't understand book weeding, or question why we do it. But even in areas like poetry, where the information contained within the pages of the books doesn't age, the books themselves do. Libraries eventually find themselves with a lot of old, yellowed, sagging, marked-up poetry books, and libraries that have a carefully edited collection are actually used more effectively than those with shelves and shelves packed full of aging material. As both of my bosses have often said, we are not an archive. Our books are meant to be used.

So, yeah, I weeded out a lot of books -- mostly huge, dense anthologies and literary criticism from the 1960s through the '80s, most of which hadn't been checked out for many, many years. Some were never checked out. Now there's room to breathe over there and the shelves look much fresher. As I've written before, I love weeding -- it plays to my desire for organization and simplifying.

I'm getting more used to my new glasses but I still don't love them. I find I only use the top part of the bifocal lens. The bottom part might be useful if I'm trying to read tiny print on a jar, for example, or maybe on a pharmaceutical package insert. But for my day-to-day work mostly on computers, the top part is fine.

This week I had the garden cam pointed backwards, at the junction of the wooden fence and the brick wall at the back of the garden. This is where animals come in and out of the garden, and I wanted to see how they do it. Here's a quick video that answers the question -- for both foxes and cats. There's a similar point on the other side, and in this way the animals can treat all our gardens as one big hunting and/or exploring ground.

The other day I talked to my quiet neighbor, who lives in the house physically connected to ours on one side. She is a model neighbor -- we never hear her and she keeps pretty much to herself. But as I was moving around the rubbish bins the other day she stopped and asked who was living upstairs. So I gave her the updates about the Russians moving out and this new family moving in, and how pleased I am because they're so quiet compared to the Russians. She agreed, and it never occurred to me that of course she'd been hearing them too through the common wall. Things are much more peaceful for both of us these days!

(Photo: A study in squares and rectangles, taken as I waited for the tube one morning this week.)

Cat Napkin and Free Speech

Can you stand another bee photo? I took this one a few days ago of a bee trying valiantly to visit the long, trumpet-shaped flowers on Nicole the Nicotiana. It was quite windy and the bee was having trouble landing on them. I'm not sure those flowers are really made for bees as opposed to ants or something smaller, but somehow it managed and hopefully benefitted. I would think a Nicotiana would make some pungent honey, as aromatic as those plants are. Even just touching it leaves my hand strongly but not unpleasantly scented, and feeling a bit sticky.

As a follow-up to my previous post about covering books, I thought you'd like to see what I'm dealing with in terms of quantity. These are the books I covered yesterday, both hardbacks and paperbacks. This is how they usually come to me, in stacks with the spine labels printed on top. I covered all of these and it took me a couple of hours. Whew!

Covering can be a weirdly soothing process, a task that requires skill and attention but not a lot of brain power. I can daydream a bit while I do it. But as some of you suggested in the comments, it also becomes tedious when there are a lot of books to do -- and also kind of painful, because it requires a good grip and a firm hand to smooth down the plastic covering, especially on the paperbacks. My hands are always sore after I cover a stack of books.

Anyway, enough of that.

A student gave the head librarian a cupcake yesterday on this napkin. I thought it was pretty cute so I thought I'd share it. The librarian also gave me the cupcake, which wasn't bad!

This reminds me that The New York Times had an article the other day about "junk journaling," in which people -- all women, in the article -- create collages in notebooks with found items like stickers, labels, napkins, stamps, ticket stubs, whatever. I suppose I'm junk journaling here, in a virtual sense. I've always saved stickers and labels and other bits of trash and stuck them into my journals, way back to when I was a kid in the '70s. I had no idea what I was doing had a name. (Granted, my collages were not as dense as those produced by some of the junk journalers highlighted in the article!)

Dave was away last night for Back-to-School night, in which parents come to the school, see the facilities and teachers, blah blah blah. There was another one scheduled for next week but now that's been postponed because of a planned tube strike beginning Sunday.

As long as we're talking about current events, did you see that comedian Graham Linehan was arrested for some anti-trans tweets he made several months ago? This has caused quite a furor and a discussion about the limits of policing speech in the UK. Although Britain values free speech, there is no written constitutional guarantee like there is in the USA and there are limits to what can be said without legal repercussions. I can't walk up to a person on the street, for example, and use racist language against them -- that's an offense for which I can be arrested. Linehan was arrested, as I understand it, because his tweets recommended punching trans women if they're in female-only spaces -- that specific suggestion of violence is what got him into trouble, though he says he was "joking." (Ha. Ha.)

I think what Linehan said was odious and offensive, but I do think the police went too far in arresting him. His threat, such as it was, was non-specific and not directed toward any individual. I tend to have a rather maximalist view of free speech, that people should be allowed to be assholes if they want -- and perhaps this is my American perspective since free speech in the USA is more legally absolute than here.

But I question why people say the things they do. I don't know why we all can't be more considerate of each other, live and let live, and stop trying to game the Twitter algorithm by being the most offensive person in the digital room and thereby getting more views and retweets. As the saying goes, "If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all."

A Harvest, and Covering Books

We got these tomatoes from our tomato plant (or, as the British say, "tomahto plahnt") last weekend. Unlike our first harvest these weren't at all mealy and in fact we found them really good. I only wish we had more! I think the plant still has some green ones on it but who knows how well they'll ripen as the weather cools. Dave's co-worker gave him this plant last spring, so frankly anything we get is a bonus.

OK. Some of you asked for details about covering books. I'm going to do my best to make this interesting.

When we add a book to our library -- whether purchased or donated -- it goes first to the cataloging clerk. That person, my co-worker, enters the book into the online library catalog using international library references that guide its placement, within a certain Dewey decimal category, for example. Her cataloging ensures that someone searching for a book about a certain topic or by a certain author will be able to find it. The clerk prints a spine label bearing the book's call number -- usually a sheet of them at a time, for a stack of books -- and then hands everything to me.

If the book is a paperback, I start here. First I attach the spine label, which you see I've already done. Then I use scissors and a plastic smoothing tool to wrap the book in special library-quality book covering. It's an adhesive plastic a bit like contact paper, but made specially for books.

If I do a good job (which I always do!) the book winds up looking like this. It takes a little more than seven minutes (I timed myself) to wrap the adhesive plastic around the entire book, smoothing out any air bubbles with the tool, and to trim the corners and edges. Sometimes books need more than one spine label, if they're for a certain age group or fall into a certain category like a graphic novel.

I also stamp the book with the name of our library, inside the front and back covers, as well as the date it was acquired. I attach a "date due" slip inside the back cover, and that's where I stamp the due date when the book is checked out. (Most libraries don't stamp due dates anymore but we still do. We're old-fashioned like that. It helps kids know when the book is due and helps us see at a glance how often it gets read.)

Hardcover books are a whole 'nother thing. I take the dust jacket off the book, affix the spine label to it, and cut a different kind of book cover to fit it.

This cover is a sort of clear plastic envelope with a paper backing, and an adhesive strip at the top. The dust jacket goes inside it, facing the plastic, then the adhesive strip is uncovered and the clear plastic is folded down and secured to the paper backing to create a pocket around the dust jacket. Can you envision that? Sometimes part of the paper needs to be trimmed away to better fit the dust jacket, in which case the plastic folds down farther. It's basically one-size-fits-all.

Then the corners of the covered jacket are taped to the book using special book tape, which secures the cover to the book itself.

And voila! The book is covered, and after stamping it's ready to be checked out.

I'm sure this process still isn't entirely clear, but I couldn't take a photo of every single step because a) phones are prohibited at our school starting this year, so I had to be furtive about using mine at my desk, and b) I need two hands for most of the steps so I had no way to hold the camera.

If you want more information about the products used during this process, you can see them at library supply sites like this one.

Covering a single book is no big deal, but often the cataloger hands me a stack of 20 books at a time, and covering those can take a few hours -- especially since I'm also dealing with kids and re-shelving and doing all the other things that are part of my job.

Fun, right? Aren't you glad you asked?