“How many people turn on the radio and leave the room, satisfied with this distant and sufficient noise? Is this absurd? Not in the least. What is essential is not that one particular person speak and another hear, but that, with no one in particular speaking and no one in particular listening, there should nonetheless be speech, and a kind of undefined promise to communicate, guaranteed by the incessant coming and going of solitary words”
Maurice Blanchot Everyday Speech 1962
“What happens when nothing happens?”
Stephen Johnstone Intro to Recent Art and the Everyday in The Everyday: Documents of Contemporary Art 2008
“The banal, the quotidian, the obvious, the common, the ordinary, the infra-ordinary, the background noise, the habitual? (…) How are we to speak of these common things, how to track them down, how to flush them out, wrest them from the dross in which they are mired, how to give them meaning, a tongue, to let them, finally, speak of what it is, who we are”.
George Perec, Species of Spaces, 1974
Bird Diary entry Mon 21st winter solstice northern hemisphere West London
7.20 am
Sun rising – prussian blue lightening to cobalt, and light blue in east. Very cold – minus 2′, patches of snow now re-frozen and all water solid ice. Few birds – cold and silent. Then two small sounds – ‘chck’ing and a 2 or 3 note whistle. Blue tits? Yes. Blackbird? High air, clear, cloudless, sharp as a knife. Planes fly over irregularly (Heathrow flight path).
Must re-familiarise myself with the birds here. Crows (Carrion crow), pigeons and seagulls common as usual.
Blue tit (Cyanistes caeruleus)
Carrion crow (Corvus corone)
Pigeon (Columba livia)
Herring/Atlantic gull (Larus argentatus)
Bird diary entry Wed 16th Dec 09
Tsim Sha Tsui, Kowloon en route to UK
Low cloud cover, mild, 20’c, rain showers, tops of sky scrapers in cloud. Pigeons swoop from roof of hotel – fast and high. Birds of prey hover over Kowloon Park.
Bird Diary entry
Sunday 13th Dec 6.50am Coburg nr the Merri Creek
Doves – constant regular surprisingly penetrating call; fairly close though not in this garden; no other birds close. Blackbird trill in distance. A crow calls 1,2,3,4,5. (Crows vocal at Annalea’s yesterday). Pretty quiet; mild, low cloud cover. One myna calls 1,2,3. Couple of lorikeets fly over. Doves continuous. Then one wattlebird in distance.
Car passes.
Clock ticks.
Wattlebird, myna – small chucks and squeaks. Doves – ‘uh-orrr-or uh-orrr-or uh-orrr-or’ a rougher sound than pigeons.
Then
An upset smaller bird, later realised it was a honeyeater; repeated agitated ‘cheep’ing, nesting?
Then the larger whistlers sing – pied butcherbird and magpies carol further in distance. An echoey spatial quality to their songs – lovely tone, choral.
All the songs start then stop. There is no general build up or chorus amongst the birds, unlike early Spring. Dispersed, individual phases of song. Small individualised, incidental it seems, no crescendo. All except doves which remain a constant, although even they pause after about half an hour.
Singers:
Spotted Turtle-Dove (Streptopelia chinensis)
Common Blackbird (Turdus merula)
Little Raven (Corvus mellori)
Common Myna (Acridotheres tristis)
Rainbow Lorikeet (Trichoglossus haematodus)
Red Wattlebird (Anthochaera carunculata)
White-plumed Honeyeater (Lichenostomus pencilatus)
Pied Butcherbird (Cracticus nigrogularis)
Australian Magpie (Gymnorhina tibicen)
