Thursday, February 15, 2007

What's on my desk?

As good a way as any to get this blog back to life...

On my desk you'll find:

A few Books:

  • Howard N. Fox, Eleanor Antin, L.A. County Museum of Arts, 1999.
  • P. Chabot & G. Hottois (eds), Les philosophes et la technique, J. Vrin, 2003.
  • Technology and Culture, vol. 48, n. 1, Jan. 2007.
  • Jeff Horn, The Path Not Taken, French Industrialization in the Age of Revolution, 1750-1830, MIT Press, 2006.
  • David A. Kirsch, The Electric Vehicle and the Burden of History, Rutgers U.P., 2000.
  • Christophe, L'idée fixe du Savant Cosinus, 1900 [reprint Armand Colin, 1946].

Two Atlases, for Paris and Metro Philadelphia and a map of the Père Lachaise cemetery.

Several packs of photographs: 3×4" prints of XIXth Century works of arts, 4×6" prints of Amsterdam, Philadelphia and Paris, 7×11" prints of many different places, plus one framed picture of Gamkaskloof, South Africa.

A pile of xeroxed archive documents concerning an XVIIIth Century gun foundry.

Lots of personal documents that ought to be stored, archived, destroyed or maybe answered, who knows. Among those: my passport, several train tickets and a heap of bank statements.

A few electronic devices among which a Canon Lide 80 scanner, a Garmin etrex GPS, a Palm Tungsten craddle, an Apple Ibook and a Dell laptop, plus various peripherals: earphones, mouse, and all kind of cables; and the old Texas Instrument 57-LCD I've had since high school.

Many pencils and pens of various types, thickness and hardness, plus rulers and dividers, all stored in a large beer mug. Also: a magnifier, scissors and two penknives.

A belt with the great buckle I got for my birthday last week. A pair of leather gloves. My keys. My watch. A few coins. A lamp

That's it - my desk. What's on yours?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

From left to right: my list of deadlines, the lamp I stole from my first dorm room, Tom Lowenstein's book "Ancient Land: Sacred Whale" Harvill Press, 1999, my black plastic binder with all the stuff for classes and on-going projects, cables for my laptop, Le Petit Larousse dictionary, print-outs of poems by Michael Heller, pens and pencils in a Napoletan jar, my Apple Ibook, pens and pencils in a small black pouch with my pink breast cancer survivor's pin brooch, the Oxford mini dictionary and the Littré dictionary, green dotted post-its, miscellaneous papers (a calendar with pictures of a Greek island, plane tickets, letters, my latest parking ticket...), my handbag, announcements for the next campaign of promotions at work, two books of poems by Michael Heller ("Exigent Futures", Salt 2003, and "In the Builded Place", Coffee House 1989), more letters, a notebook, MLA's latest issue of Profession, a UCSD copybook. That's it--but not for long, I have to do some tidying in a hurry!

Madame Poppins said...

En réalité, ce n'est pas tant ce qui se trouve sur mon bureau qui importe, c'est ce qui ne s'y trouve pas : pas de billets d'avion pour quinze jours de vacances sur une île lointaine, pas d'oeuvre d'art qui ravirait mon regard, pas de chéquier avec lequel assouvrir toutes ses envies....

Heureusement, mon ordinateur me permet de "voyager" !