The Tashelhait Video

This is a house just down the street. I first photographed it in June, when the wisteria and bear's breeches were so leafy they practically engulfed that lion. (I could have sworn I blogged that photo, but I can't find it now -- so here it is on Flickr.) Now, autumn has thinned the vegetation quite a bit. I dig those purple flowers painted on the wall, which you couldn't even see six months ago.

On Sunday, as a school project, Dave and I made a short video of me speaking Berber. You may remember that I speak a dialect called Tashelhait, which I learned when I lived two years in the south of Morocco. Well, there's a foreign language club at school, and the kids are collecting information about all the languages that other students, faculty and staff members speak. As you can imagine, I am the sole Tashelhait speaker in the building. Those of us who are the only speakers of a given language were asked to make a video so others could hear it.

Now, it's been years since I spoke Tashelhait actively, and I was never truly fluent. But nonetheless I had Dave film me saying some basic things -- greetings, introducing myself and naming some common nouns. (I even introduced Olga in Tashelhait.) It's funny -- the rhythm of the language came back pretty quickly, and even certain words that I hadn't thought of in ages. I guess it's all still in there somewhere!

I'm not going to put the video online, because I'm sure to a native Tashelhait speaker I sound pitifully bad. But it was fun to reawaken that part of my brain, and funny to think that even now, 21 years after I left the Peace Corps, I'm still accomplishing one of its goals -- helping to share the culture of the country where I lived.

Lost in Chelsea

I went to the Science Museum in Kensington yesterday to see an exhibit by Alec Soth, an American photographer who I didn't know before but whose work I now admire. Soth has documented the lives of people in the Mississippi valley, hermits living "off the grid," lovers and erstwhile lovers in Niagara Falls, and Americans of all stripes, in large-scale, carefully composed photos of technical beauty. It was a fascinating show.

Before I went in, I wandered around South Kensington myself to take some of my own pictures. I was surprised to see Christmas decorations are already up, though I suppose I should expect that by now.

Jesus was handing out blessings at the Mormon church center on Exhibition Road...

...and the ceiling of the nearby Science Museum included a massive light fixture made of bicycles, which I thought my brother would appreciate.

After seeing Soth's work, I kept walking. I intended to make my way through Knightsbridge, Belgravia and Mayfair to meet Dave and our former neighbors, Chris and Linda, for dinner near Piccadilly Circus.

I passed Harrod's, which had this retro-girl-group themed window. But then somehow I got turned around and wound up walking south, deeper into Chelsea. (I almost never get lost, but the fact that it was dark and I was carrying only a mini A-Z, which has type too tiny for my tired eyes, left me in peril. I guess I'm getting to the age when I need to carry reading glasses!)

I wound up accidentally circling back to South Kensington, where I caught the tube to Hyde Park Corner. I then walked through Mayfair and into Soho.

The Christmas lights are up in Bond Street and Carnaby Street. (Yes, I know, I've used that focus-on-the-iPhone photo technique before). By chance I landed in the middle of a huge crowd gathered for the lighting of Regent Street. A jazzy band on stage played "Charade" and I stayed long enough to absorb the festive atmosphere and start to feel a little claustrophobic. I didn't wait for the lights to come on. I kept walking.

I finally met our dinner party at Zedel, a French Art Deco restaurant, and we had a fun evening. Chris declared the Regent Street lights looked like rubbish, so maybe it's a good thing I didn't stick around. But then, he proudly tends toward the cynical.

I was overdue for a photo walk, and now that the days are getting shorter, it was an opportunity to do some night photography!

Apocalypse Now

When I sat down to write yesterday morning and saw the news about Paris, I was immediately struck dumb. Nothing I could say seemed adequate.

That's still true.

On a very practical level, I wondered how it would affect my French classes yesterday at the Alliance Française. Our teachers are all from France, and I debated whether to go as usual and what to say when I got there. But when I arrived I found everyone in attendance, and as it turns out, the attacks never came up in class. I guess we all made a concerted effort to go on as usual. Which is the best response to terrorism, really.

The only indication that it was an unusual Saturday was a little cardboard sign propped against the front door, featuring the Eiffel Tower peace sign and the words "Bon courage."

As I get older, I question the social role of religion more and more. Particularly monotheistic religion. I mean, I understand that what happened in Paris isn't based in a healthy religious perspective. I understand that a lot of religious organizations do good things. But still -- this notion that My God is Correct and Yours is Not is so poisonous, no matter whose God is being discussed. Religion creates us-and-them where there should be no such divisions. And it certainly creates culture clashes within Europe, where much of the non-immigrant society is essentially post-religious.

I just can't help thinking we'd all be better off if we could just get past theistic religion, and relate to each other as sentient, reasonable beings in a secular world -- a world of trees and animals and water and earth that we must take care of because there's no one or nothing else. There's room for spirituality in that kind of world, a generalized appreciation for the beauty and mystery of time and life and death and everything we don't understand, but there is no divinely proclaimed right-and-wrong and no guiding hand -- which seems to terrify some people.

Adding to yesterday's gloomy pall, I rented "Apocalypse Now," which I hadn't seen in decades and didn't really remember very well. At first blush it seemed like a poor choice, but in some ways it was actually the perfect choice, with its central questions of morality and deviation from the civilized path. Really good filmmaking, but so disturbing. Dave left the room about halfway through.

So then we finished the evening with "Inside Job," about the banking world and the activities that led to the economic crash of 2008. Not exactly cheerful, but at least a little less visceral.

(Photo: Creeper vine in Tottenham, early October.)

Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité!

Echoes

Working in a school library, it's probably inevitable that I occasionally think about the librarians I knew during my own school years in Florida. There was Mrs. Lawson, my elementary school librarian, who wore her glasses on a chain and told us to take care of books and not leave them out in the rain. (Even then, it struck me as absurd that anyone would have to say that, and yet the other day someone returned a book to our present-day library that had, in fact, been left out in the rain.)

There was Mrs. Bruggink in middle school, and I am not at all sure about the spelling of her name. Weirdly, while I vaguely remember the appearance of that library, I have no specific memories of using it -- but I'm sure I did. I think those two years have essentially been erased from my brain by middle school PTSD.

And there were the ever-cheerful Mrs. Bellotti and Mrs. Pickens in high school. (Both here and in middle school the library was known as the IMC, or Instructional Materials Center. Apparently the term library had fallen out of favor circa 1980.) The funny thing is, in my memory, Mrs. Bellotti was the head librarian and Mrs. Pickens the aide. Doing my own job, I often cast my memory back to high school and thought, "What would Mrs. Pickens do?" Except that I couldn't remember her name -- so I dug out my yearbook the other night and was surprised to find that I've had it backwards all these years. It was actually Mrs. Pickens who was in charge. Mrs. Bellotti is my true role model. According to the yearbook she, like me, worked hard to know the names of all her students.

It's funny to think that the kids I work with now may be forming lifelong memories of me. They may not remember my name, but they'll have the image of the bald guy at the circulation desk who presided (occasionally grumpily, but hopefully not tyranically) over the room. It's a legacy of sorts.

Speaking of growing up in Florida, I talked to my mom last night. When she answered the phone I could hear her voice echoing in the house around her, and sure enough, she said the movers had come and the place was completely empty. She laughed because she'd eaten a drumstick and didn't even have a trash can to discard the bone. She planned to spend the night crashed on the floor (!) and get up this morning for the closing and the drive to Jacksonville.

The good news is, she said my brother rescued my houseplants. Woo hoo!

(Photo: An apparently vacant restaurant in Camberwell called Octopussy -- echoes of James Bond.)

Getting Things Done

OK, I called the drinks guy in Tampa for our party in December. I e-mailed him a statement of what we need -- 67 bottles of beer and 14 bottles of wine, according to an oddly precise online drinks calculator, plus bubbly for 40 people. He's supposed to get back to me with an invoice.

So we've made progress.

I've also been trying to think of all the other things that have been nagging at me. Like the fact that the dividends for my New York Times stock (paltry as they are) have been coming in quarterly checks to my mom's house. It's silly for my mom to have to go to the bank each quarter to deposit a $3.20 paper check. Besides, she's moving! So I registered online with the company that manages the stock account and set up direct deposit, as well as paperless document delivery, which -- I know -- I should have done years ago.

I renewed my Royal Photographic Society membership, which was about to expire. I did my French homework. I sorted all the coins in our coin bowl and deposited them in the bank -- £62 worth. (The British don't roll coins like we do in America. Instead they put them in special little baggies. Just FYI.)

Dave and I tried to reserve a rental car for our Christmas trip to Florida but we were presented with the staggering price of $850!! So we may have to rethink that one. I bet we could take cabs everywhere and not spend that much money.

In any case, I am getting things done. The funny thing about to-do lists, though, is that they keep expanding, pouring forth like ticker tape.

(Photo: Pavement markings in Tottenham, early October.)

Late Night Thinking

I slept in this morning until 6:30. Pretty much unheard of for me. I'm going to be late for work if I don't get a move on.

I slept in because I went to bed a bit late and I woke up in the middle of the night, and lay awake for an hour and a half. I was thinking about my mom and the sale of our family home, and the fact that she's closing that sale and moving in two days. Also, I was thinking about how I have to place our drinks order for our Florida party in December and I've been dithering over when to call and what to get. I need to just do it.

There's nothing more boring than lying awake stewing about things at 3 a.m. So rather than talk about that, let's look at pictures of autumnal wood.

Dave and I watched the last episode of "Downton Abbey" last night. It certainly was a fast-moving conclusion, and while it didn't quite wrap everything up in a tidy bow, at least we're left with a sense of an ending. (To borrow a phrase from Julian Barnes.)

I'm kind of glad it's over, honestly. I've been feeling for a while that Downton had run its course. I'll miss Maggie Smith, though.