camera obscura (or breaking up is hard to do)

I shipped off the last piece of my Nikon camera set on Friday.

I have written here about how my interest in photography has lessened as my interest in writing this blog has increased. I wrote about how I recognized that I was so intent on getting the great shot that I failed to savor the moment at the ocean, or the waterfall, or wherever I was.

I decided that simplifying, and not carrying around a camera bag with multiple lenses was the right thing to do. I wrote about how I bought a Canon pocket camera for our Alaska trip, and while that got me some great pictures, it wasn’t quite what I wanted. I ended up with a compact digital, a Nikon P500, which provides me with a familiar feel and familiar functions, but in a much simplified manner, without the bag and multiple lenses. Even at that, we’ve gone on trips where I haven’t taken it out of its case.

I realized that I needed to get rid of my D70 and its multiple lenses. But realizing and doing are two different things. I  hung on it for a long time, not being able to let go, even though I knew I wouldn’t go back to using it. I even had all of lenses packed up in their original boxes and put into shipping boxes, ready to list them on eBay. But I just couldn’t bring myself to do that.

Finally I took a Sunday afternoon and listed everything. It all sold. And really, it was the right thing to do. I have my P500 for the shots I want to take, and I ended up with a nice balance in my PayPal account that I can use for fun indulgences like Amazon and iTunes gift cards. But mostly I know I can stand by the ocean and enjoy the moment and not feel like I’m missing some picture I really need to capture.

That’s a good thing.

literature has to be believable

I’ve written here more than once about how fiction often portrays reality, while memoir and autobiography often contain large doses of fiction. I was delighted, therefore, to hear Isabel Allende say this:

Literature has to be believable, which real life rarely is.

blogging in 2011

I ran my blogs for 2011 through the word frequency analyzer at Wordle. (Thanks to Quantum Theology for the idea.) I have to say I was a bit surprised at the results: the words that were there, and the words that weren’t, the words that were more frequently used and those less. Perhaps it will have an impact on my blogging in 2012. Or perhaps not. In either case it was an interesting exercise.

Oh, and comments are included as well. So if you’re a frequent or even occasional commenter on my blog you may see yourself here. (All personally identifiable information has been removed, of course.)

appreciated

I had a telephone conversation with an Episcopal priest last week. We’ve never met in person, I’ve never been in her church when she preached a sermon, and I’ve never held out my hands to her so she could put the wafer in them. But I feel I know her well. I have listened to many of her podcast sermons, and her words have always resonated with me. She tells the truth, and she tells it with clarity, but at the same time with wit and humor. Her sermons rival or exceed those of the most experienced and respected of preachers. It’s the sad reality, though, that she hasn’t been treated well at all by the Episcopal Church.

Which was the occasion of our phone conversation. I had wanted to express my outrage at her treatment in my blog, and in an email exchange she asked that I not do so. We talked on the phone so she could explain her feelings in a more personal way than could be done by email. I understood where she was coming from entirely.

In the course of our conversation she asked me if I was a writer. I appreciated that. A lot. I explained to her that I toiled in the fields of high tech, and perhaps while not my vocational calling, it pays the bills and allows for a nice life for Terry and me.

But to have someone whom I respect so much acknowledge my writing — well, that meant an awful lot to me.

Thank you, my friend.

the experience vs. the description

I have written a fair amount (some of you might say obsessively) about the art of non-fiction in general and autobiography in particular, and how works published under that rubric do not necessarily reflect events as they actually occurred. Sometimes this is deliberate on the part of the author. Other times there is not any kind of written record to which to refer and the author must rely on memory.

My current reading includes Driving Home: An American Journey by Jonathan Raban. Raban writes about how his travelling self will take notes, but that returning home his writer self will discard many of those notes and wonder why he didn’t more carefully document other things he saw and heard.

…journalists—wedded to the notepad, the tape recorder, the “verified quote,” the querulous gnome in the fact-checking department—may curl their lips in scorn at my habit of trusting the contents of my head more than I trust the documentary evidence of the notebooks. To them I’d offer this remark, made by the Barbizon school painter Jean-François Millet: “One man may paint a picture from a careful drawing made on the spot, and another may paint the same scene from memory, from a brief but strong impression; and the last may succeed better in giving the character, the physiognomy of the place, though all the details may be inexact.”

Yet another facet of the non-fiction prism which reminds me that the exact verisimilitude of what we read in such works cannot be relied on.

But people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, and I need to remind myself that I do the same thing. Perhaps not to the extent of John Steinbeck who, in the Log from the Sea of Cortez, wrote his wife out of the journey when she was in fact there every minute, cooking meals for the three men. But it is only a matter of degree.

Last week I dispatched some notes from Cambria. I mentioned an intestinal upset to which I devoted very little space in relation to the total blog post. In fact that intestinal nastiness informed our trip to a far greater degree than the note might have suggested, to the point that we had to forego dinner at our favorite Cambria restaurant, always the centerpiece of our visit, and considered coming home early. In this case, however, I didn’t want my personal ailment to distract you, good reader, from the picture of the place I wanted to paint.

I once pledged that everything I told you would be true, but warned that I wouldn’t tell you everything. That is still my philosophy.

I can’t think of a better way to do this.

hello from WordPress

Welcome to my new blog home on WordPress. Please update your news feeds and bookmarks.

Why the move? I switched from Blogger to TypePad several years ago when Blogger was undergoing a lot of instability. Generally I’ve been happy with TypePad, but the owner, Six Apart, was sold some months back. I’m not terribly confident in the new owner’s commitment to the blogging part of the business. I haven’t seen any updates to the system in several months, and technical support just isn’t what it used to be. In general, it’s simply no longer worth the money I’m paying them. WordPress has its premium features, but it looks to me as if you can get by just fine with what’s free.

So I look forward to hanging out with you over here at WordPress.

truth in nonfiction

…there is a vast misunderstanding abroad about how to read a memoir. To state the case briefly: memoirs belong to the category of literature, not of journalism. It is a misunderstanding to read a memoir as though the writer owes the reader the same record of literal accuracy that is owed in newspaper reporting or historical narrative. What is owed the reader of a memoir is the ability to persuade that the narrator is trying, as honestly as possible, to get to the bottom of the tale at hand. —one of the essays in Truth in Nonfiction edited by David Lazar

You know that this has rankled me. You know that I've said that I don't like it when memoirs and autobiographies take this approach. And you know that I have painfully accepted that this is reality.

Another essay in Lazar's collection discusses Lillian Hellman's Julia, which was published as memoir, but which everyone has long known to be strictly fiction.

On the other hand, a revisionist piece on Madeleine L'Engle in the New Yorker several years ago described how her kids didn't much mind her non-fiction, which, after all, was mostly about religion and spirituality, but allegedly couldn't stand her fiction because the personalities of the characters were too much like those in the family.

To look at memoir as literature rather than as journalism can perhaps be put into context by Karl Klaus in The Made-Up Self, where he reflects on a Joan Didion essay, suggesting that Didion chose to write "as if to suggest that the experience of seeking the truth might be as important as the truth itself. As if the question – and the inquiring mind working its way toward insight – might be as important as the answer."

That view reflects values I have held all of my adult life. Which makes the statement rather hard for me to argue with. And which, perhaps, circles back to the validity of the first quote.

the made-up self

Back in 2008 I wrote with some annoyance about authors whose books purported to be non-fiction narratives, but which, in fact, deviated greatly from events as they actually happened. Then, the next year, after having pulled out and re-read some of my essays from the mid-1970's, I had to admit guilt myself.

It was with great interest, then, that I discovered a book Carl H. Klaus published last year called The Made-Up Self: Impersonation in the Personal Essay. Klaus writes:

E. B. White in a letter about his work (August 15, 1969), frankly acknowledges that "Writing is a form of imposture: I'm not at all sure I am anything like the person I seem to a reader." And Nancy Mairs, whose self-revelatory essays in Carnal Acts might seem to be unrehearsed confessions, declares in "But First," that "I am not the woman whose voice animates my essays. She's made up."

I'm enjoying the book. It's interesting to delve further into this phenomenon.

semicolons

I haven't been one to use semicolons. I've actually been something of a snob about semicolons, suggesting that only the best craftsmen, for example, writers such a Paul Theroux, should be using them.

There was no good reason for this. I think it goes back to the late 1990's, many managers and a few companies ago. I was a technical writer and my manager gave me a suggested edit that included a semicolon. In that particular instance I thought it was a bad writing choice, and anyway that manager really irked me. I had a rebellious tendency to want to do the opposite of what she suggested.

Recently, though, I have found myself using semicolons upon occasion. A couple of months ago I used a semicolon in a PowerPoint slide, and last week I used one in an email to a former colleague.

That raises the question, of course, will I use semicolons here in my blog?

I don't know; I'm still considering the alternatives.

academic errors

I loved the Great Courses series on Cathedrals. It was fascinating and I learned a lot. But I was annoyed that the instructor didn't know the difference between a maze and a labyrinth. What is at Chartres is a labyrinth. There is a clear but convoluted path in and out. A maze has false directions and dead ends.

In the course Analysis and Critique, a series on writing, the professor said that the shelves at bookstores and libraries where "literally groaning" under the weight of books on management and leadership. I spent many years in the book business, several years as a store manager at B. Dalton. I was there when the store was closed and quiet, sometimes alone (in violation of company policy, but never mind that). Never once did I hear the shelves groan, even when we stocked Peter Drucker's heavy tome Management in the late 1970s.

It grates on me when academics who know better make such obvious errors.