Scrivener March 14th, 2008
- I have been pretty-much hired (i.e., we have a verbal agreement that I’ll do it but haven’t settled on how much I’ll charge, but I’m fairly certain we can work it out) to take photos at a child’s birthday party next month. Very cool.
- My friend Ellis showed me a few new tricks in Bridge to use when converting from camera RAW that will make a big difference in streamlining my processing. Almost exactly a year ago, I couldn’t do anything at all with Photoshop Elements, and now I’m starting to feel like I’m halfway competent with CS3.
- Earlier this week, I tried out an idea from jo(e) with the kids: speed cleaning (I can’t remember if it was in a post and I’m not going to hunt around for links right now). I set an alarm to go off in 10 minutes and told the kids that our job was to clean as fast as we possibly could for 10 minutes, then we could stop and have a snack. They had fun racing against each other and in less then 10 minutes they had done a pretty good job of straightening up their room and I had done a pretty decent job of straightening mine up. I’m planning to make this a weekly thing.
- Lots of exhausting dissolution meetings in the last week, so I’ve been pretty wiped out, but there has been progress toward an endpoint, which is a good thing.
- I have not improved much with the guitar of late, but I have stuck with it through all the chaos enough that I least I haven’t gone backward I think, and I think that’s not a bad accomplishment.
- I’m singing in the church choir, which is fun, but crazy-weird given that before a couple of weeks ago the only people I had ever sung to at all were my two kids.
- Apple pie and ice cream, always a good idea.
Scrivener February 29th, 2008
I spent last year, in my Project 365 learning new ways of seeing through photography. Lots of my fellow 365ers have said one way or another that they are looking to learn different ways of seeing, too.
You know what the difference, for me, between Project 365: 2007 and my self-portrait Project 366 is? This year, I am learning how to be seen. Which means, first and foremost, to be willing to see myself.
February Mosaic, originally uploaded by Scrivenings.
Created with fd’s Flickr Toys.
Scrivener February 27th, 2008
2.27: Me (Chuck Close), originally uploaded by Scrivenings.
I plan to do some more of these, with different artists.
Tags: airbrush, Chuck Close, emualtion, fragmentation, fragmented self, imitation, MoMA
Scrivener February 22nd, 2008
Last week, I was working on a freelance editing project while Eldest was home sick with strep throat and she asked me about what I was doing. I explained to her that I was going through this book that other people had written, checking it to make sure that everything was written correctly and making some suggestions for how the book could be better.
Eldest brought home her folder from school yesterday, with all the work she’s completed thus far in her gifted classroom’s unit on Dr. Seus, including an exercise about the word “idealist.” I couldn’t tell exactly what the process was whereby she arrived at the definition, but she defined an idealist as someone who wants things to be perfect and then, when asked to identify an idealist she knows in her life, she chose me as an idealist because I want to correct books to make them perfect.
Scrivener February 20th, 2008
Scrivener February 4th, 2008
I’ve been reading the His Dark Materials trilogy and really enjoying them. I sped through the first two, but now I’m kind of bogged down on the third one, not because of the book itself I think, but just because of my own energy recently. Anyway, there are lots of good things about the books, but one that stands out to me is this character of Will that Pullman has created, starting in the second novel: I think he has that boy down perfectly.
Right near the end of The Subtle Knife, Lyra asks him why he needs to find his father so badly, and he is unable to say much more than that he needs to take up his mantle, and then come these lines:
[Will] wiped the sweat out of his eyes with his right hand. What he couldn’t say was that he longed for his father as a lost child yearns for home. That comparison wouldn’t have occurred to him, because home was the place he kept safe for his mother, not the place others kept safe for him. But it had been five years now since that Saturday morning in the supermarket when the pretend game of hiding from the enemies became desperately real, such a long time in his life, and his heart craved to hear the words “Well done, well done, my child; no one on earth could have done better; I’m proud of you. Come and rest now….”
Will longed for that so much that he hardly knew he did. It was just part of what everything felt like.
Scrivener February 3rd, 2008
1.2: Fiction, originally uploaded by Scrivenings.
33/366
View On Black
Mark Strand, The Continuous Life
Fiction
I think of the innocent lives
Of people in novels who know they’ll die
But not that the novel will end. How different they are
From us. Here, the moon stares dumbly down,
Through scattered clouds, onto the sleeping town,
And the wind rounds up the fallen leaves,
And somebody–namely me–deep in his chair,
Riffles the pages left, knowing there’s not
Much time for the man and the woman in the rented room,
For the red light over the door, for the iris
Tossing its shadow against the wall; not much time
For the soldiers under the trees that line
The river, for the wounded being hauled away
To the cities of the interior where they will stay;
The war that raged for years will come to a close,
And so will everything else, except for the presence
Hard to define, a trace, like the scent of grass
After a night of rain or the remains of a voice
That lets us know without spelling it out
Not to despair; if the end is come, it too will pass.
