What I do here.

onions on Marchmont Street yesterday in the December midday sun

What on earth, you might well be wondering, am I doing over here? This year, I blew town without handing out my address and phone number to most people. I didn't even realize I'd done that until about a month into this next year overseas. I'm still not quite sure what that means, to be honest.

On the first group trip to London, in October, I travelled here with the students: they gathered on the train platform in Exeter; I arrived on a train from Topsham; I handed out a bunch of paper; a London-bound train pulled in from Plymouth; we all got on and three hours later disembarked at London Paddington. I took everyone to lunch and to a museum; we reconvened a few hours after that for a play; most of us came back to our hotel together on the Tube. And since then, I've deliberately made things get a bit more fluid and dispersed each time we've gone on trips.

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On not creating.

This term, lots of things seem to have gone off the rails (ironically, or perhaps not ironically, as I now spend so much time on literal rails, traveling back and forth to and from school). I realize that I'm not taking nearly as many photographs as has been my wont for years now, and when I do take them, I don't get them onto my computer with any kind of expediency; some of the ones that came in on this morning's sync were of Topsham in mid-November. In fact, I'd say that most days it doesn't even occur to me that I'm not loading up my photos and offering you at least one of them; nor does it occur to me, most days, that I'm not writing anything for you. And then I remember the way in which writing in this space felt like such a liberation, such a return to who I was, when I began here six years ago. And then I think, six years. That's a powerful amount of time.

Yesterday, for the first time in awhile, I thought, "I'm going to take that picture, and I don't care what it looks like that I'm taking it, and I don't much care how it turns out." It seems daft to try consciously to return to a state of creative unconcern and abandon, so I'm still trying to figure out how to let that happen: turn my head in another direction, aim the camera, and hope that I won't worry the whole time about my crooked horizons or the fact that I'm not a renowned street photographer?

I knew that during my Exeter year, I would have chances to think about my work in the world and what I believe it to be. I knew--even talked out--how some of those chances would feel at least a bit dislocating, since they would require me to talk to relative strangers about things that are essential to me but decidedly nonstandard in my professional world--and still very much in process even within my own head. And my attempts to prepare myself did not actually prepare me for answering the inevitable questions: "What are you working on?" and "What's your project?"

I give one answer and hold the real answer in reserve for now.

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And speaking of surreal.

I'm seeing a play with my students in London tomorrow, and I came up a day early in order to scope out another show--and, at long last, to get to the London Library and all its labyrinthine stacks to do some work. On my walk from the hotel to the Underground, just when I reached the postmodern hulk that is the Brunswick Centre, I noticed a tree that has gone into blossom again because it's been so warm here. All week I've been noticing this: trees that are fringeing into leaf again at their branchtips, hedges and bushes that have shot out fiery gold or blood-red extensions of themselves, ready for spring. I have worn my winter coat precisely twice this fall, once in October and once in November. Even crossing a footbridge over the Thames tonight, I wasn't cold in my spring overcoat and a wool scarf.

I find that part of me is already bracing for the extreme winter weather that I have no doubt is going to get unleashed on us within a few weeks.

The surreal seems always near.

It might be partly because the people to whom I'm closest here are 20 and are thus people to whom I'm only close in a highly bounded and delimited way, and it might be partly because so many aspects of the culture in which I'm living do feel downright alien to me, but frequently I feel as though my life is taking place in a parallel universe. It's not that I'm not living fully or that I'm feeling disengaged; it's that the ways in which I am engaged, the things that keep me nattering on in my own head for hours on end, are things that have very little--in a direct sense, anyway--to do with the life going on all around me. It's a funny effect, funny enough that when people I encounter during my days do engage with me, it seems strange. Today, I carried a new copy of The Invention of Hugo Cabret with me to school so that I could read it on the train home. I stopped at the Exploding Bakery, part of the plaza at the Central Station, and as he was bagging my little quiche and making change from my £5 note, the guy behind the counter asked me about my "weighty tome" and we had a little conversation. It's been funny in the past week or so to realize how much it feels unusual to spend significant amounts of time (especially social time) with other people--even though everyone is friendly and I generally don't feel lonely. I saw the new Wuthering Heights the other night and then went out for dinner with the two people I'd seen the film with, and the whole night felt, again, as though it were happening in a parallel world. 

For the record, of all the things I've had a student reveal after words (spoken with a sheepish sideways glance) like "Well, I didn't go out this weekend because...", a freshly acquired, still-healing tongue stud might be both the most unexpected and the best.