Words

Fumbling In A Darkened Room

Sun, 22 Feb 2009 13:27:59 -0600

I don’t know if this is me officially giving up on my Vonnegut essay, or just what it is. He’s a pretty okay writer, and just reading his stories, and paying attention to how he did things has taught me volumes about putting ink on paper (or, pixels on screens, as the case may be). But beyond that admission, I don’t know if I have it in me, at this point in time, to write a prose ode to the man. The impatient among you can go here instead. The man is a little more enamored with Mr Vonnegut than I am, but it still makes for a good yarn.

I will probably get around to writing something about our favorite fluffy-headed Hoosier in the future, but for now, I’m going to talk to you all about something else.

I don’t know why I like taking pictures, it’s just one of those things that I’ve always wanted to do. I suppose I could blame my grandpa, who seems to take a camera everywhere, and has an archive of slides and prints to prove it. I could blame my father, who is the first person that I can consciously remember taking pictures. He had an Olympus OM2n, which seemed to me to be the most wonderfully advanced piece of equipment ever; the living embodiment of the old Arthur C. Clarke adage viz. magic and technology.

And perhaps, in the end, that’s what attracts me to photography. It’s the magic of the thing. Oh, I know about silver halide suspended in gelatin, about the pinhole camera, and the camera obscura, and about “View from the Window at La Gras”, but knowing doesn’t make the process any less magical when you open the shutter and make your exposure. It’s a moment where all understanding of theory and practice is surpassed by a simple act of faith; the belief that everything has worked correctly; that the meter was reading accurately; that the shutter remained open for the correct length of time; that the aperture closed to the specified diameter; that you as a photographer have done everything that you can to make that exposure the best that you can make it. But you don’t Know. It might be something to squirrel it away in a drawer for later use as bookmark, or it might be something you could sell to National Geographic. You can’t know. Not until you get the film back from the lab, or, pull it from the spool, still wet from developing, to hold to the light for the first time. From the first camera I even owned (a hideous brown Kodak 110 that would drop a red stripe over the finder when the lens was covered) to the rolls I shoot now, there’s still the same giddy anticipation in opening the envelope to see how well, or poorly, I’d done.

There are many things to be said for digital photography. Some of them are even good things. I’m not a Luddite, I own a digital camera that will do whatever I need it to do. But it will never be magic. Not like my dad’s Olympus. Rather, it is a tool. A tool made from black plastic, with a big, bright LCD that shows you exactly what your photo looks like, instantly. No waiting, no guessing, no pleasant surprise waiting for you under the loupe. Instead shoot, look, and shoot again - filling our computers with hundreds of identical images that we will never look at again. It’s Functional. Nothing more.

Oh, sure, it’s a godsend for the humble press photographer who’s trying to meet a deadline, a wonder for the wedding photographer who can know right away if a shot needs to be reshot or not, to say nothing about the hassle and expense of buying and storing film. But, I still can’t help but pity the child who will never know what it is to get an envelope back from the photo lab, and be pleasantly surprised by what’s inside.

That’s why I continue to shoot film. It’s why I have two rolls of Tri-X, and a roll of Kodachrome in my fridge right now, and it’s why I’m looking at tanks and reels, changing bags and developers. It’s because I can. It’s because I think magic is worth a bit of a wait.

Rubber Ducky, You’re The One

Sun, 16 Nov 2008 02:24:55 -0600

Okay, my Vonnegut book report has been eaten on several occasions, in a procession of increasingly improbable dog attacks. But, a rewrite is coming along. Coming along very well in fact.

In the meantime, here’s some assigned reading of your own, and some homework.

First, from Harper’s, a monthly periodical of some note which is (I am told) only read by old women, an article entitled “Moby-Duck: Or, the synthetic wilderness of childhood”, by Donovan Hohn. Hohn writes about the phenomena of the Friendly Floatees, their impact on the study of ocean currents, and on his thoughts as he travels to see people involved in the story, while musing on the sea, society, imagination, childhood, human nature, and synthetic yellow ducks.

A sample:

Second, a short story, or if you prefer, a novella, by Mr Evelyn Waugh, entitled Love Among the Ruins. A Romance of the Near Future. This might be a little harder to find. It might even require a trip to the library, as the most I can find of it online is a wildly inaccurate Wikipædia article, and websites offering editions for sale. I know it is included in the recent Back Bay Books collection of Waugh’s stories, as I am the proud owner of one of these volumes, but wherever you find it, I urge you to read it and react, as you see best fit, as Waugh takes a page out of Mr Orwell’s book, and has a go at writing dystopicly. It’s certainly funnier than 1984, but, it also seems more likely.

Third, think about what you’ve read, mull it over in your mind until it’s good and soggy and will sift easily though your wits, enabling you to extract the pearls from the tares. This done, wonder why I urged you to waste your time in this manner, speculate why I linked these two things in my mind, and then let me know what you think about it all.

Next time, for certain, Vonnegut.

Words

Sun, 5 Oct 2008 05:21:54 -0500

Thora, in her last comment, suggested that I talk about several specific tinge, in an attempt to write more. When I relaunched this thing this past summer I was aiming for a post a week. Obviously I've not quite lived up to that goal, but that's not an excuse for just leaving this space empty and unused, no is it? And so, in keeping with some of Thora's suggestions, I'm going to talk about books.

See, this is the thing. There are lots of silly jokes that are made, waggish things that are said about English majors and their reading habits; how they begin their course of study loving to read books, and come out on the other side loving to read books about books; that going into an English program because you love reading is the worst thing that you could do, that it will sap all desire and joy from the experience through over familiarity, through close reading and critique, and ultimately leaving the student with the taste of ash in their mouth when reading and writing are thought of.

This might be true in other people, and, in truth was true of me to a certain extent: I could no longer read many of the books I had once loved without flinging them away in disgust and contempt. I'm sorry to say that many of the books that many of my friends list among their all time favorites no longer place in my hypothetical top forty. This isn't because I think myself smarter, better, or more cultured than any of them. Far from it! This isn't an elitist sort of thing, it's more a question of variety. Where once I liked books that fit neatly into a few predictable types and genres, years of reading have pointed me in new ways, or, at least beyond the boundaries that I was comfortable with before. Education pushed me into deeper water (as it should!) and I found that I liked it out there.

What I inaugurate with this post is a series of entries on authors or books that saved my love of books and kept me reading when otherwise I might have stopped reading fiction all together. It's not a list of "correct" books, many of the authors will never find themselves listed in Mr Bloom's cannon of Western literature, while others have, or are already considered "important" texts. This is just a list of works I enjoy, and an attempt to define in words the reason for their appeal.

So, if that's your particular cup of tea, feel free to stick around. If not, this too shall pass, there will be other things to read later on. For now it will be books, and for next time: Vonnegut.

In Which the Author Begs Forgiveness For Textual Messiness

Wed, 2 Jul 2008 01:11:23 -0500

I’ve come to the conclusion that I like the idea of `blogging far more then the practice. The idea that literally anyone can take up their virtual pen and give voice to ideas and feelings, which in turn can be heard by anyone else in the world, all for the price of admission, is something that is terribly appealing to my egalitarian sensibilities. Publication for the masses on a scale unrivaled since the heyday of the English broadsheet. After all, what could be better then the free exchange of ideas in a purely textual environment? It’s an arrangement that removes biases based on gender, cultural origin and hygiene taboos, leaving the idea to defend itself on its own merits alone.

It’s a lovely thing, really, an ideal that I welcome with wide embracing arms, even though I often find myself mentally unequal to the task of writing entries to here. You’d think that writing something here every week would be a simple task--and really, it isn’t that difficult a thing, but the difficulty lies in writing something that I feel to be worthwhile. In my mind, the printed word is something that carries a certain amount of weight--if someone went though the trouble to write, typeset, and print a given text, it must have something important, or, at least entertaining to say. Importance, weight, depth of feeling, social understanding, commentary, irony, wit, these are things that need to be found in a published work, and more often then not what I have to say lacks all of those things--leaving me with childish reactions to trivial occurrences, petty and ill-founded opinions on issues of the day, the minutiae of the work-a-day world, the stuff of life, the varied and unsurprising stuff of life that really makes it worth living and which fills the pages of other `blogs out there to great affect, all seem to me to be an ungrateful use of the medium. This isn’t to say that I don’t enjoy reading what others of you have to say, but rather, my feelings and biases vis à vie the printed word make me reluctant to give voice to anything that seems to be only of personal interest, or similarly unimportant to people outside of my immediate family and social circle.

In sort, I want everything that I say here to be a thing of beauty and a joy forever, and because that’s not possible, I end up saying nothing at all.
Understand, this is not because I don’t writing things. No-no. I have notebooks full of my scribblings. I always try to keep one of my notebooks and a pen with me, always ready to capture the moment with textual relish. At least that’s the theory. In reality, these notebooks are sad affairs - little books made dog-eared and scruffy from having everything else that I carry around with me stacked on top, filled with ink blotted pages of scrawled handwriting, struck-out, underlined, overwritten and revised into little mazes of ink on paper--it’s like an experiment in cryptography.

It follows then, that when such a small portion of what’s written is actually legible, that not much makes it to ‘print,’ and even then there’s trouble--I actually have two posts, as of this writing, waiting unfinished and half-formed in the wings, languishing in their liminal spaces, unprintable, simply because I can’t quite find the exact word, evoke the right meaning, or say what I want to say in exactly the way I want to say it. It’s like a willful writers block, or, a writers block that saps my will, or, just a plain old writers block.
Or, maybe I’m just afraid of failing, and looking the fool. But you know? It takes effort to fail. Maybe I could do a little more of that.

So, if you’ll hold on though some more of these terrible stream of consciousness things, I’ll see if I can’t turn out something that is a thing of beauty and a joy forever, and that is worthy of my conception of just what a `blog should be.

Not A Proper Update

Mon, 12 May 2008 21:34:58 -0500

I use iWeb to update this blog. I do this for a number of reasons: it works well when coupled with my .mac account, it's pretty intuitive to use, it's well designed and pretty to look at. It was also free.
But for all the perks, there are certain niggling little problems. Nothing terrible or completely off-putting, and nothing so serious as to make me want to go out and actually buy (read "pirate") a proper editor, but just serious enough to make me grind my teeth, rend my garment, or tear my hair in frustration.
My current bugaboo? Enabling comments. You would think that you could just add the feature to entries at will, especially because they do such a slick job of separating out all the entries into their own little spaces.
But no. It's an all or nothing affair, and it annoys me to no end, simply because the computer's being such a smug bastard about the whole affair.
Viz.
Computer: LOL, comments are all or none!
Me: ZOMG! Now I look like a total loser who has no comments on his page!
C:\ ROFLMAO! Suxx0rs!
Me: Arrrgh! You have failed me for the last time!!!11!!one!1
C: GTFO n00b!

And so it goes.

Proper update soon.