Superstitious or what? Dawning like other days. Up at the crack of (early to sleep after perusing some Plato (The Symposium)). Birds cranking away. No particular breeding time, apparently when it rains it means raucous amorousness. No rain, but just the arrival of daytime. Something to crow about.
Jumping around today. Met one faculty member at COFA, then on downtown to meet Ian Gwilt over at the University of Technology. Catching up and mapping out the states/conditions/problematics of university educational institutions among other issues. There’s a nice exhibition of large-scale portrait prints at the UTS:Gallery (digital prints, I wonder — very sensuous paper surfaces) from Jon Lewis of images he made in Bougainville. And later, meeting Anna, finally, to have the beginning of a more long-term conversation. There was one point that we skimmed across — the idea of setting up a consulting framework for corporate advising — because the problems in any social structure may be the same. Academic, corporate, creative, politic. And so on. Beginning to expand the scope of foot-travel, changing routes, checking things out slowly. Still have not internalized any form of orientation. The harbor lies east-west, and there are a variety of towering office and apartment blocks, and the downtown skyline. But the topography is contorted and wrinkled like the Coast Range immediately south of San Francisco proper, and so, no easy sights to maintain. With only a one-page Google printout of the immediate neighborhood, the mapping-dependent side of orienteering is limited. Get lost. That and get to the beach. Tomorrow. Bondi. Or bust.
Now and then — but this is rare — one hears such words as piper for paper, lydy for lady, and tyble for table fall from the lips whence one would not expect such pronunciations to come. There is a superstition prevalent in Sydney that this pronunciation is an Australianism, but people who have been Home — as the native reverently and lovingly calls England — know better. It is ‘costermonger.’ All over Australasia this pronunciation is nearly as common among servants as it is in London among the uneducated and the partially educated of all sorts and conditions of people. That mislaid y is rather striking when a person gets enough of it into a short sentence to enable it to show up. — Mark Twain in The Birth of Sydney