The PENguin Blog

Stay tuned, but first I gotta grade some papers.

Thursday's excursion with our students was closer to home than last week's London and was, in fact the programme we had planned for our second week, which was snowed out. This entry comes to you from Dublin where Sharon and I are spending the weekend, so it will be brief. Bristol is an ancient city, as old as Bath and just down the Avon River from it. As a seaport town, it has strong ties to America and to the New World. We began with a brief coach tour of the city, a walk across Isambord Kingdom Brunel's early suspension bridge across the Avon gorge. From there our guide Felicity, who also led us through Bath on our first week, took us on a brief walk through the city pointing out the essential sites. At noon we broke up for three and a half hours, much of which time Sharon and I spent in the Bristol Cathedral, parts of which date back to Norman times. I took more than 160 images, but will not subject you to all of them. Here are a selection of just a few, mostly without c...

Well, the Bonhams and Butterfields Limited Edition pen auction on which I worked for several months last fall has come and gone, and while I was not able to attend, the reports are that it was a success, surprisingly so in this economy and preceded, as it was, by another prestigious pen auction just two days before. I've just gotten the final results of the auction. You can find them here: http://www.bonhams.com/cgi-bin/public.sh/pubweb/publicSite.r?sContinent=EUR&screen=ResultsXML&iSaleNo=17340 I want to thank Martin Gammon for giving the the chance to work on the auction, and to think him, Ivan Briggs, Patrick Sumner, who took some stunning photos, and Bekka Saks as well as the rest of the folks I worked with for welcoming me and providing lots of support. It was a great experience and I look forward to working with these folks again.

I’ll spare everyone all the cliches about how wonderful London is, but they are all true. One of the components of the San José State University Study Abroad program I am leading is an Anthropology course made up of excursions (think of university level Ms Frizzle and the Magic School Bus) throughout southwest England. Last weekend (Thursday through Saturday) we were off to London. Traveling by train from Bath Spa Station to London’s Paddington, we journeyed down in the morning and set off almost immediately for a tour of the Museum of London. This as our introduction to the city. For many it was, of course, a first visit. My colleagues Andy Fleck and Mari Brookes know the city well, for me it was the first visit in almost thrity years and I was struck by how greatly London has changed not only from 1980, but from Sharon’s and my first visit in 1971. As a result, many of the images you will see below juxtapose what I call old and new London. The postmodernist architecture of the ...