Another find.
“Hello, my friend. Come,
sit, take a load off, speak
to me, tell me of your troubles
and your woes. I want to
hear, I will listen, I am here
for you.”“I will have none of this.
Your words are empty,
your vows hollow.
Go on, leave
me to my solitude.
‘Tis far better to be lonely in
a sea of people than trust
the promise of you.”- Anonymous
Ahem. If it seems like I was recently betrayed, well, yeah. I was. So there.
Found this:
Doors slam with crashing finality
Their sounds audible only to me.
I can feel them close around me, shutting everyone out, everything down
Until there’s nothing more than just me
And the solitary echoes of my footsteps.
- Anonymous
Read this. It’s one of the most profound and articulate pieces of prose I’ve read lately and it resoundingly echoes the way I feel about photography.
http://www.joemcnally.com/blog/2010/11/08/the-real-deal/
I recently had to delete a bunch of images I took a few months ago. I wiped them from my library, then went into my vault and deleted them from there. Then I went into a bunch of backups and wiped them from there too.
I had some film negatives of the same subject and had to destroy them. I took a pair of scissors and cut them to ribbons.
The why is… well, it’s important and to some degree, it’s relevant but I can’t go into it. But forget the why.
It’s the ‘what’ that’s bothering me.
From Joe McNally’s blog:
What I truly believe about a powerful picture is that after viewing it, you are never the same. You have been changed, forever. You might not realize it at that moment, but you are. There’s been an interior, seismic shift in your emotional substrata. The plates tilted, just a little bit. These pictures linger, like a persistent thought. Or, like someone shouting to you in a rainstorm, it gets your attention, even if you can’t completely make out what it’s saying. Sometimes, they’re like a wound. Photographic scar tissue.
Amazing. Wish I could write like that
I Dream’d in a Dream
I dream’d in a dream I saw a city invincible to the attacks of the
whole of the rest of the earth,
I dream’d that was the new city of Friends,
Nothing was greater there than the quality of robust love, it led the rest,
It was seen every hour in the actions of the men of that city,
And in all their looks and words.- Walt Whitman
Ha! There’s a fuckin’ lie. Either that or Whitman had no idea what he was talking about.
This entry is about pain.
Dr. Michael Leong is an awesome guy. He works at the Pain Management Center at Stanford and has been helping me with my pain issues pretty-much since I left the hospital last August. I saw him again today (I do every month) and he asked me if I wanted to keep the prescription for my Oxy at its current levels.
I said no.
Unable to sleep tonight, I read Voltaire’s Candide. it has been a long time since I’ve read any Voltaire at all and having never read Candide, I was pleased to take the opportunity presented by a not infrequent bout of insomnia to rip through this tiny volume.
Candide, if you haven’t read it, is a story written “in ridicule of the notion that this is the best of all possible worlds,” according to Phillip Littel. Voltaire write it in three days and it is, to quote Littel again, just “a Hamlet and a half” in length.
It is also one of the most exasperating text I’ve ever read. Like watching a train crash, I read the whole thing in morbid fascination, hoping for an end that suited my silly upbeat sensibilities, but obviously, I didn’t find it.
What I found instead was an extremely liberating amount of respect for brevity. Voltaire managed to tell a story in less than a hundred pages what most authors would have expanded into a tome to vie with War and Peace – or an epic of sorts that spans multiple volumes. That wry bastard managed to, in two sentences, kill one of the main characters and then, with absolutely no apology or sense of plausibility, bring that character back to life.
My exasperation aside, I learned something incredibly important tonight. I learned about the power of brevity. I learned that one needn’t expound on those elements in a story that don’t serve to move things along or that don’t serve to address a specific plot point. Exposition is the stuff of filler, the thing that elongates a novel until it’s the same size as the other hardbound volumes on the bookstore shelf.
I don’t care for Candide as a story – my tastes, while accommodating the occasional bittersweet and even tragic storylines, don’t extend to cover the sheer despair of Candide, regardless of whether it’s meant to be a satirical comment on… well, whatever. I just didn’t like the story.
But I liked what I learned from Voltaire. I also learned, to my surprise, that it’s also okay to say, “I didn’t like it” about something that is considered to be one of the finest pieces of literature in the world. I can appreciate the work, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it. For that, I thank M. François-Marie Arouet. You know him as “Voltaire.”
“The average bhajiwala (vegetable vendor in a market) in India knows more about world politics and current events than the average American high school history teacher.”
- as told to my brother by a friend of his.
This is a common refrain I hear out of most Indians. The so-called apathy and ignorance of the average American when it comes to current events – both domestic and international – is almost the stuff of legend overseas. The average American – if such a construct exists – is purported to be utterly unconcerned with the rest of the world, uninformed to a fault and utterly apathetic to the pressing issues of the day.
Take a minute to watch this. Go on. Watch.
Okay, done? So here’s the deal.
Brit Hume is a journalist.
No no – indulge me. I know he works for Fox News and it’s hard to call anything that company does “journalism.” But Wikipedia calls him “an American commentator and television journalist,” so let’s say, for the sake of argument, that he’s a journalist.
He’s also a Christian. That’s nice. He’s obviously deeply religious and wears his faith on his sleeve. That’s fine too.
The problem is that he went on national television and announced his faith to the world while deriding another religion and openly calling for a prominent person of that other faith to “switch sides.”
Once he did this, he clearly demonstrated an utter lack of fairness and balance when it comes to any issue that touches on religion – which means that his objectivity as a journalist has now been called into question on practically every major news story of the day. From terrorism to a woman’s right to choose, we now know where Mr. Hume stands. If you’re not Christian, then you’re somehow lacking something of immense significance in your life, according to Mr. Hume. This is not just a simple human bias that all men and women suffer from – it’s a deep-rooted bigotry that no journalist can afford if he expects to be taken seriously in his profession. Mr. Hume has lost that credibility – not that I think he ever had it – and therefore ought to be fired so he can join the ranks of vitriolic fanatics peddling their screed on AM radio.
That’s it. It’s pretty simple, when you think about it…
So here it is – the list of what I’m reading and what remains to be read. The books in progress are marked [IP].