a smidgen

So I said this was going to be a photography blog. And… it is! Just not this post.

I’m not proud. It’s true, I’ve gotten further from my photography lately than I intended to– partially due to a lot of crises in my immediate surroundings, which we’ll relegate to description only in the abstract– but lately I’ve been getting closer to figuring out where I want to end up in the world. I have got a plan, even if the details are fuzzy.

A fuzzy detail.

In the meantime… Let’s go for the wide-angle. (Bad pun, bad! Go to your room, pun.)
Photography is still about sharing a perspective, however compact and intrinsically incomplete of a perspective it may actually be. So I want to share a few compact and incomplete observations with you all.

Intriguing Things:

• Blackbook Magazine
  You’d think I was new to this, the way I keep discovering new publications that really aren’t new to most people. But let’s face it, during the school year I’ve historically spent more time studying (or planning to study) than trolling the magazine racks.
  So there it was, on the shelf in Whole Foods. A genderless magazine, albeit with a woman on the cover, sedately titled “Blackbook.” As if it had seen the urge to be red, but moved on… to someplace perhaps a bit cooler, perhaps (speaking predominantly as a matter of temperature).
  I’ve been considering, lately, how the designation of a magazine as a “women’s magazine” managed by women can, in itself, say a lot about the nature of its outlook on gender relations. I’m not positive, but I’m beginning to suspect it’s something vaguely akin to being the little girl who puts up the “NO BOYS ALLOWED” sign on the treehouse door.  (And I should know, because I’m pretty sure I was that little girl.) There are a lot of very legitimate reasons she might do it, but let’s face it, divisive bipartisanship with a moat down the center never solved anything.

(Castlefight: An artist's rendition)

• The Thing Itself, by Richard Todd
  I haven’t made it this far through a non-fiction book since I was assigned to read the narrative of Frederick Douglass in high school. (Actually, that’s a complete fabrication. I’ll be telling you all about another one I’m enjoying within the next few weeks. But good grief, I remember disliking that book, and now I can’t even recall why. Oh, how the years fly in my old age…) Anyway, this one threatens wonderfully to blur the very lines of fiction and non-fiction, wielding subjective opinion as alternately the only truth we have, and the source of all falsehood. Todd fearlessly takes on the most challenging questions of reality and a lack thereof, and he does so without resorting to the infamous Matrix Route (although, as with any good meditation on the lack of spoons, it’s in there). Todd reminds us that there’s a very tangible history to the questioning of reality– I can’t do his book justice here, so I’m not going to try to summarize. But I’m glad someone is now on the bookshelves to remind that our own world, and not just those of alternate sci-fi universes or the alternate thinkspace of incorrigible Derrida worshippers, contains more than adequate reason to remain skeptical.

So this has been fun, but right now I have to go rescue my chair from what, without having yet looked out the window, sounds like a sudden onset of the rain-based end of the world.