William Eggleston - Los Alamos Portfolio
I think this is the most fabulous “out the airplane window” photo I’ve ever seen. I love flying and am so looking forward to going to Arizona for the Scottsdale Arabian Horse Show next month.
Photo by William Eggelston. To see more from his Los Alamos portfolio, visit www.egglestontrust.com, go to Portfolios, and scroll down to Los Alamos.
Okay, so I “cheated” on my NaNo blogging commitment a bit over the weekend. I used pictures instead of words… I’m in the mid-month slump. So, to cheer myself up, I’m posting one of the NaNo pep talk emails from last year, my favourite one, written by Lemony Snicket.* Jonathan Swift, bless his heart, would be proud, I dare say.
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Dear Cohort,
Struggling with your novel? Paralyzed by the fear that it’s nowhere near good enough? Feeling caught in a trap of your own devising? You should probably give up.
For one thing, writing is a dying form. One reads of this every day. Every magazine and newspaper, every hardcover and paperback, every website and most walls near the freeway trumpet the news that nobody reads anymore, and everyone has read these statements and felt their powerful effects. The authors of all those articles and editorials, all those manifestos and essays, all those exclamations and eulogies – what would they say if they knew you were writing something? They would urge you, in bold-faced print, to stop.
Clearly, the future is moving us proudly and zippily away from the written word, so writing a novel is actually interfering with the natural progress of modern society. It is old-fashioned and fuddy-duddy, a relic of a time when people took artistic expression seriously and found solace in a good story told well. We are in the process of disentangling ourselves from that kind of peace of mind, so it is rude for you to hinder the world by insisting on adhering to the beloved paradigms of the past. It is like sitting in a gondola, listening to the water carry you across the water, while everyone else is zooming over you in jetpacks, belching smoke into the sky. Stop it, is what the jet-packers would say to you. Stop it this instant, you in that beautiful craft of intricately-carved wood that is giving you such a pleasant journey.
Besides, there are already plenty of novels. There is no need for a new one. One could devote one’s entire life to reading the work of Henry James, for instance, and never touch another novel by any other author, and never be hungry for anything else, the way one could live on nothing but multivitamin tablets and pureed root vegetables and never find oneself craving wild mushroom soup or linguini with clam sauce or a plain roasted chicken with lemon-zested dandelion greens or strong black coffee or a perfectly ripe peach or chips and salsa or caramel ice cream on top of poppyseed cake or smoked salmon with capers or aged goat cheese or a gin gimlet or some other startling item sprung from the imagination of some unknown cook. In fact, think of the world of literature as an enormous meal, and your novel as some small piddling ingredient – the drawn butter, for example, served next to a large, boiled lobster. Who wants that? If it were brought to the table, surely most people would ask that it be removed post-haste.
Even if you insisted on finishing your novel, what for? Novels sit unpublished, or published but unsold, or sold but unread, or read but unreread, lonely on shelves and in drawers and under the legs of wobbly tables. They are like seashells on the beach. Not enough people marvel over them. They pick them up and put them down. Even your friends and associates will never appreciate your novel the way you want them to. In fact, there are likely just a handful of readers out in the world who are perfect for your book, who will take it to heart and feel its mighty ripples throughout their lives, and you will likely never meet them, at least under the proper circumstances. So who cares? Think of that secret favorite book of yours – not the one you tell people you like best, but that book so good that you refuse to share it with people because they’d never understand it. Perhaps it’s not even a whole book, just a tiny portion that you’ll never forget as long as you live. Nobody knows you feel this way about that tiny portion of literature, so what does it matter? The author of that small bright thing, that treasured whisper deep in your heart, never should have bothered.
Of course, it may well be that you are writing not for some perfect reader someplace, but for yourself, and that is the biggest folly of them all, because it will not work. You will not be happy all of the time. Unlike most things that most people make, your novel will not be perfect. It may well be considerably less than one-fourth perfect, and this will frustrate you and sadden you. This is why you should stop. Most people are not writing novels which is why there is so little frustration and sadness in the world, particularly as we zoom on past the novel in our smoky jet packs soon to be equipped with pureed food. The next time you find yourself in a group of people, stop and think to yourself, probably no one here is writing a novel. This is why everyone is so content, here at this bus stop or in line at the supermarket or standing around this baggage carousel or sitting around in this doctor’s waiting room or in seventh grade or in Johannesburg. Give up your novel, and join the crowd. Think of all the things you could do with your time instead of participating in a noble and storied art form. There are things in your cupboards that likely need to be moved around.
In short, quit. Writing a novel is a tiny candle in a dark, swirling world. It brings light and warmth and hope to the lucky few who, against insufferable odds and despite a juggernaut of irritations, find themselves in the right place to hold it. Blow it out, so our eyes will not be drawn to its power. Extinguish it so we can get some sleep. I plan to quit writing novels myself, sometime in the next hundred years.
–Lemony Snicket
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*I don’t normally steal entire bits of writing and post them wholesale, but this (as far as I can tell) has not been ported over to the new NaNo 2011 site, and it deserves to be read. So it will have a home here until someone sends me a ‘please cease and desist’ notice.
This blog entry is part of Foxtail’s Post A Day efforts during November, undertaken in the “get-out-there-and-write-something” spirit of NaNoWriMo. Except, of course, I didn’t write this one.
I was at the Grand Opening for The Two Twenty last night, a very hip office/event/coffee/co-working space that is helping to revitalize 20th Street in Saskatoon.
I must say, the red carpet was a nice touch.
What I wanted to share from a design point of view was… the coasters. The schedule for the night’s entertainment (kind of a three-ring circus) was printed on these super-stylin’ coasters.
Coaster Program creds: Designed by the lovely and talented Carrie Catherine (@carriecatherine), and printed by MORE Promo (@morepromo) here in Saskatoon.
This blog entry is part of Foxtail’s Post A Day efforts during November, undertaken in the “get-out-there-and-write-something” spirit of NaNoWriMo
Illustration by Palmer Brown, from Beyond the Pawpaw Trees.
In response to my Planners vs Pantsers post, one of my friends (you can find her blog at Citric Sugar) noted that she knew a local playwright who wrote the first act, and the second act, then threw away his original first act so he could re-write it to match the second act.
That’s not a bad way to work, I think. I end up doing that fairly often myself. And you know what? It doesn’t bother me one bit.
Victoria Mixon (author of The Art and Craft of Story) calls this “building resonance“. This is from her guest post over at the Mystery Writing is Murder blog:
…more than anything else, readers enjoy resonance.
That’s when they get to the end of the story and find there, unexpectedly and yet inevitably, the beginning of it. That clue the writer planted on the early pages.
She’s talking specifically about mystery writing, but I think this applies in a much more subtle way to all great books.
It’s that wonderful, visceral sense of familiarity, that whisper in the back of the mind: this ending was inevitable. It’s the seductive implication that, if they’d just paid close enough attention (and they will the next time they read it, they promise themself!) they could have figured the ending out before we showed it to them. It’s that magical authorial sleight-of-hand, creating a positive emotional response in the reader by what we’ve left out as much as what we’ve put in.
One of my favourite reads as a kid was Beyond the Pawpaw Trees by Palmer Brown. It’s the story of Anna Lavinia as she journeys out from her home for the first time. From the beginning, there are bits and pieces written in that let you know that her father is gone and that her mother is not exactly happy. That’s not the direct point of the book though, the main plot line is that Anna Lavinia’s mother sends her off to visit her aunt, who lives in a faraway place. But at the end, Anna Lavinia has found her father, and returns home with him to surprise her mother, and all the little wrongs are righted.
Or how about Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are? The last five words of that book are a perfect example of resonance. After Max is finished with his rumpasing with the Wild Things, and returns home to his room, he finds his mother has left his supper out for him – “and it was still hot.”
This blog entry is part of Foxtail’s Post A Day efforts during November, undertaken in the “get-out-there-and-write-something” spirit of NaNoWriMo.
It’s almost November. I’m so excited I can hardly contain myself. No, really, I’m not being sarcastic here!
Why do I get excited about November? For starters, my “scheduled” year ends after the U.S. National Arabian Horse Show at the end of October, and doesn’t pick up again until mid-December. July had five weekends in it this year, which apparently only happens once every 300 years, and I said it STILL wasn’t enough. This is like summer vacation all over again.
But mainly, it’s the NaNoWriMo-ing that gets me excited. I participated last year (as a “rebel”, a PC term for those who participate but don’t exactly follow the rules), and will do the same again this year.
This is why I love November. It’s cold and miserable outside, the horses are furry and just want to eat, nobody in their right mind is worried about Christmas, and I get to selfishly indulge in NaNo, or some version thereoff. YAY!!
To celebrate this year (and because my poor, poor blog hasn’t seen a post during all of October), I’m doing a Post A Day during November. Some of it will be NaNo related goodies, some of it will be fun things I’ve been bookmarking all summer, some will be inspired by my trip to the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa, and the rest… well I guess we’ll just find out.
Cheers!
PS – (If anyone wonders what I was up to during October, you can check out the U.S. Nationals photo gallery on the Canadian Arabian Facebook page).
I found that quote on mirroring that I referenced briefly the other day:
We hold each other in place, in certain ways.
We mirror each other.
And we’re kind of constantly, to some degree, in a manipulative dance of getting other people to reflect back to us who we think we are or who we would like to be.
And people that are really friends won’t do that – and it can be pretty uncomfortable – the true gift is when someone won’t do that for you – but it opens up new areas of ourselves that are pretty spacious. And wilderness does that, because there isn’t that same kind of mirroring.
- Robert Kull
It’s from a CBC Tapestry epdisode called “Alone”, which talks to Robert Kull on the year he spent alone in the wilderness.
So, anyone who uses Facebook should understand this basic principle of sharing: when you want to tell someone about something cool that you found, you post a link.
Right?
So can someone please tell me why the media-savvy folks who send out press releases, in the vast majority of cases, do not include a direct link to where press release and/or relevant material can be found online? They’re shooting themselves in the foot.
I realize press releases run on a model of media relations which, many could argue, is fast becoming outdated. You used to blast out a press release, various media outlets picked it up, some of them made mention of your news, a few maybe even printed it more or less intact.
This has all transferred to email and the web. Fine. But for the love of god, can someone please tell me why, when I come across an interesting press release that has useful information that I’d actually like to pass on, there is NO link to where that particular release can be read online? And a generic link to your website is not good enough – trust me, after five minutes of hunting for your press release or a relevant news article, I’ve lost interest and moved on.
It’s your link that I’m going to share. For me to take the time to copy/paste/edit and post your press release on a website that I’m administering, it is going to have to be pretty darned good. So good, in fact, that I’m thinking Hey, I’m glad they sent this, because it saves me the trouble of writing an article about it. I’ll just post this one. But to pass on a link that might prove useful? No prob. The bar is significantly lower.
So please, make it easy for me to promote you. Gimme a link.
I’m at the AHA Region 17 show this week. For the first time, I’ve also got a horse here and I must say it’s made the show much more exciting!
So I’ve got a dressage test coming up today after a couple of flat classes. I’ve been saying all along that I really want to do well in the dressage and anything else would be a bonus. I guess I’ve been a teeny bit anxious about it because last night I had a dream.
First I dreamed that I was in the wrong ring for the flat classes, even though it was the posted ring. I convinced them they had to re-run the class I’d missed even though everyone else had gone back to the barn and had to be rounded up again. When that was over I went home, but I didn’t know what time my test was at. Various mishaps occurred (of course) which prevented me from leaving on time, so we decided to take a short cut down a back road on foot.
This really was a dirt trail and we ran into a barbed wire fence, and some cows who chased us, and then we got to the back of what I thought was a hotel on the show grounds. I managed to phone the show secretary who said yes I’d missed my class and no they would not refund my money because I hadn’t picked up a ticket.
Meanwhile it turns out that I wasn’t in a hotel at all but rather some knd of magic house where you could change things around just by thinking about them. So I ended up staying and years later a neighbor said I must be pretty happy with things, eh? And I wailed, “NO! All I want is to go back and do my dressage test!”!
And then I woke up.
Johnny Cash’s final set of recordings, American VI: Ain’t No Grave, was released in late February 2010. The producers are putting together a video for the title track and are inviting fans to contribute. What they have come up with is the Johnny Cash Project, a collective art project where you’re given a choice of three video stills and invited to re-draw one for use in the video. The online drawing tool is pretty basic and easy to use; you can more or less trace over the video frame that you’re drawing. A neat feature (when you’re finished) is the ability to play back a video of the drawing being made from scratch.
When it’s approved, the frame becomes a part of the new video. More info on the CMT blog.
I don’t know who the dude is that made this, or where it’s from, but He (or She) Is. My. Hero. Long live Calvin & Hobbes!