'ello!!!

westminster abbey. chelsea football match. cambridge.

westminster abbey-tombs of charles dickens, charles darwin, isaac newton, elizabeth I, bloody mary, and many many others. also saw the coronation chair, which is very unassuming.

chelsea football-so much fun!!!!!!! our seats were around the boundary between chelsea supporters and the bolton (the opposing team's) section. i learned some new words and hand gestures. we won 4-0; every time they scored it was o so exciting!!!

cambridge-the university is like 800 years old!!! that's i think about twice as old as harvard. very beautiful school, in a nice quiet little college town. we went punting! that's when you're in a boat in very shallow water and use a stick to propel the boat forward. much fun was had.

one more thing

'There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, "Morning, boys, how's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, "What the hell is water?"'

david foster wallace, 'this is water'

today

today i saw the following things.

homeless man sitting on a bench doing the crossword puzzle in front of an archway
through which i walked passing a little girl being pushed in a stroller singing twinkletwinklelittlestar echoing in the tunnel
then on the other side some ducks dunking their heads in the water and shaking their heads like wet dogs
while a little kid with an expensive camera tried to get a closeup shot of one of them and
a white fluffy puppy followed a woman but kept getting distracted by the smells and sniffed the kid standing in front of the peter pan statue while his mother took a picture and yelled at him to smile and counted to three

(the batteries in my camera died. i saw these things and couldn't photograph them.)

one day i was running and there are all these little private gardens in chelsea and i looked through the gate of one of them and saw an adorable little girl running through the field, chasing nothing i think, and reached out with both hands to catch a brilliantly orange leaf falling and making the motions of a skier floating down back and forth and back and forth. then i wished i had my camera. but sometimes, especially with dogs, and small children, there's what ani difranco refers to as 'the kind of beauty that moves'. then it doesn't matter whether or not you have a camera.
but i'm not going to worry about that too much.

puppy!

hyde park & kensington gardens.

walked to peter pan and back; it occurred to me the irony of my east end picture (the first one in my last post)...it was sort of an accidental picture, in that i meant for it to be of the guy with the cigarette giving me a dirty look, but my timing was off and instead i got this old old pub with a church behind it. the irony is that the pub was once frequented by prostitutes, including several of jack the ripper's victims, and the romanesque church in the background looks so perfect and pure.
anyway, today i took a long walk through two beautiful parks and took a few pictures. lots of children and PUPPIES!

passersby

east end. brighton.

the east end is pretty awesome. brighton is AMAZING. so many great lil shops and a beautiful beach and adorable alleys.
i'm sick. for the first time in ...a long time. sat on benches a lot while in brighton, hence all the people watching pics. spending today in bed!

'Let her go then. Colonel Forster is a sensible man, and will keep her out of any real mischief; and she is luckily too poor to be an object of prey to any body. At Brighton she will be of less importance, even as a common flirt, than she has been here. The officers will find women better worth their notice. Let us hope, therefore, that her being there may teach her her own insignificance. At any rate, she cannot grow many degrees worse without authorizing us to lock her up for the rest of her life.'
jane austen

and in the end...

abbey road.
where elliott smith recorded Figure 8.
and some other things happened.

time passes.

since my last post:
greenwich (prime meridian).daytrip to paris.
















































surprisingly, not much to entertain at the moment. very busy with schoolwork and thinking a lot about pynchon and his ideas on conspiracy theories and why people believe in karma and again how spaces (jacob's room) reflect on us and how the spaces around me affect how i feel and why i forget things so easily and why i need to move so fast and feel like time is passing so fast i can't keep up. less space in london, people get closer to you and are not afraid to push you. i don't like the idea of karma. actually, i hate the idea of karma.
missing my parents, my dog. my boyfriend. taking less pictures but very happy to be in london.

'Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the gloves herself.'

st paul's (blitz pic)

here's a poem

Diving into the Wreck

First having read the book of myths,
and loaded the camera,
and checked the edge of the knife-blade,
I put on
the body-armor of black rubber
the absurd flippers
the grave and awkward mask.
I am having to do this
not like Cousteau with his
assiduous team
aboard the sun-flooded schooner
but here alone.

There is a ladder.
The ladder is always there
hanging innocently
close to the side of the schooner.
We know what it is for,
we who have used it.
Otherwise
it is a piece of maritime floss
some sundry equipment.

I go down.
Rung after rung and still
the oxygen immerses me
the blue light
the clear atoms
of our human air.
I go down.
My flippers cripple me,
I crawl like an insect down the ladder
and there is no one
to tell me when the ocean
will begin.

First the air is blue and then
it is bluer and then green and then
black I am blacking out and yet
my mask is powerful
it pumps my blood with power
the sea is another story
the sea is not a question of power
I have to learn alone
to turn my body without force
in the deep element.

And now: it is easy to forget
what I came for
among so many who have always
lived here
swaying their crenellated fans
between the reefs
and besides
you breathe differently down here.

I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or weed

the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and away into this threadbare beauty
the ribs of the disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative haunters.

This is the place.
And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body.
We circle silently
about the wreck
we dive into the hold.
I am she: I am he

whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes
whose breasts still bear the stress
whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies
obscurely inside barrels
half-wedged and left to rot
we are the half-destroyed instruments
that once held to a course
the water-eaten log
the fouled compass

We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.

adrienne rich

back to chelsea

day 4. tintern abbey.stonehenge.

we arrived at tintern abbey this morning, even though it has absolutely nothing to do with our curriculum. we read wordsworth's 'tintern abbey' on the way there. it was very pretty and cool to see but after three days of looking at 'wet castles' it wasn't too extraordinary. what i did like is that it was surrounded by trees, which made it feel more private than the other touristy places we've visited. anyway, it was in wales, and it was cool to see welsh written everywhere. also, some comical pictures cautioning us to avoid tripping on the stones and stairs. see below.
we got back on the bus and drove to stonehenge, which is pretty much on the side of the highway. our bus driver said that no matter what the weather is like in the rest of england, it will be worse at stonehenge, and he was right. it was wet and cold and windy.
they reminded us not to be disappointed by stonehenge, because the stones are not as large and imposing as people assume. i was not disappointed; it was very cool to see, and i was surprised to learn that each stone weighs about 5 tons and come from 150ish miles away. it was built in about 2000 bc. ish. ....and that's pretty much all we know about stonehenge. we went there because it's supposed to be where merlin helped the king build a monument to honor knights killed in battle, but that happened in like 400 ad. go figure.
on the way back to chelsea we watched a movie about queen victoria called 'young victoria'. it was very well done; it was very sad to hear that after prince albert died, queen victoria laid out his clothes for him every morning until she died, and wore mourning clothes for the rest of her life.

cornwall & wales trip day 3

day 3. glastonbury abbey & tor.bristol.

we woke up in the filthy hostel, where laura said my favorite line: 'i don't wanna go see another wet castle.' we were out of that hostel like bats out of hell. we went to glastonbury to see glastonbury abbey, where king arthur supposedly was buried-12th century monks found bones there alongside a cross that said 'here lies buried the renowned king arthur with guinevere his second wife'.
glastonbury tor is basically a steep hill with a tower on top. it was build as a monks' retreat, and it took us some will power to climb the stairs to the top. i took a picture of everyone in front of the tower.
this trip, and a lot of tourist areas we've been to, have a lot of stairs. our thigh muscles were aching. but what i noticed about this hill and also the high ground that tintagel castle was on was that it gets very windy up there and birds like to show off their mad skills. enormous (for my standards) black birds would stop in front of us and fly in midair like hummingbirds, then swoop down in such a way that made me extremely jealous.
we walked around glastonbury, which was hippie town. lots of hippies. got back on the bus and drove to bristol. the intimate pub atmosphere was nowhere to be found in bristol, which kind of reminded me of chicago. it was cool to see, but the night life was not what i would expect from a british town. lots of scantily clad women. it wasn't a place to hang out and have a beer, like you'd expect from a town with lots of pubs; it was a place to get drunk. however, the hostel was extremely nice and classy, and we all appreciated this considering our experience the previous night.