Random Photos

There are days--like today--when I wonder how I ever was able to blog during the school year, especially given the number of courses and students I taught, supervised and mentored, the volume of essays and creative work I used to read, the committee duties, etc., and then I think about how tough it is these days, even just finding time to post photographs like the ones below; perhaps my blogging muscle has started to wear down a bit and the fibers are no longer there, or I need a bit of a break to build up new reserves, recalibrate my approach. Who can say? I still do have many blog post stubs waiting to go, from one about Amiri Baraka's homegoing ceremony, to one heralding Black History Month, to one about Twelve Years a Slave, to one about the Jordan Davis murder, to another about the passing of Stuart Hall, to yet another about Martin Heidegger's "black notebooks," but when I'll get to them, as well as to numerous other more personal posts, remains uncertain. Instead, it's back to reading student essays and materials for class, and in lieu of more, here are a few more recent random photos, which I suppose suggests that Twitter, with its imposed concision, and Tumblr, in which words need not be present at all, may have it right after all.

At Cornelius Eady's 60th Birthday Party, in Brooklyn,
Cornelius and band performing

Now-shuttered Broken Angel Arts

Center in Brooklyn; supposedly it may

become a luxury condo building

At Patricia Spears Jones's birthday celebration,
Café Loup, West Village

The stuck snowplow, Jersey City 

Icy light-rail stairs (we were
supposed to ski or snowboard down
them, I suppose), Jersey City 

Gas-masked man, New York Public Library 

Artist Mike Cloud, lecturing
at This Red Door

The Manhattan Bridge, during
one of the successive snowstorms,
from Brooklyn 

More snow falling so thickly that
it rendered Manhattan invisible

Inaugural poet Richard Blanco, reading
at the Writers @ Newark Series

Writer Andrew Solomon, reading
at the Writers @ Newark Series 

The fog that curtained much of
the area, nearly effacing the horizon
between sky and the Hackensack  

A tour group, in the West Village

A New York juxtaposition: a homeless encampment
beneath scaffolding for a new office building & tower 

On the Bowery 

On the Bowery 

Street art, Manhattan

Street art, Manhattan