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Soulard Past
Was a time I wandered around with a camera around my neck and acted like the “cool photojournalist” type. Another aspect of “career” I never acted on in any serious way.
Except the work. I loved the work. The images were all. (I’d read about Alfred Eisenstadt walking away from his position at LIFE Magazine when a new batch of editors started cropping his photographs with scissors. He told them it was in his contract that they run his work as he gave it to them, but they said “Pop, it’s just not done that way anymore, you gotta get with the times” and he said “No, I don’t” and quit. …
Why I Am (Partly) Not A Conservative
I try to ignore Glenn Beck. I think he’s pathetic. All he can do is whine about things he quite often doesn’t understand. For instance, his latest peeve has to do with being bumped out of line by science fiction. Yeah, that’s right. Glenn Beck’s book Broke has been number 1 on Amazon for a while and it apparently got beat out finally by a science fiction anthology.
His complaint that this is from “the left” is telling. First off he’s trying to make it sound like some profound philosophical issue, that a science fiction collection outsold his book on Amazon. …
Transparencies of Days Past
Gradually, given enough time, I’ll both learn proficiency with the new digital medium and transfer my best images from nearly forty years of photography. I’ve been doing this “in between” all the other things on my plate and it hasn’t had top priority, but once in a while I find some old negatives or, in this case, transparencies that make me wonder, for only a moment, why I’m doing anything else. I finish working something like this over…
…and I get a thrill such as I used to whenever I first made a new image that I thought was worth a damn.…
The Celebration of the Book, 2010
I’m taking some time to put on my President’s hat and talk about our upcoming event.
We’re a week away from the Celebration. October 23rd at Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri.
If you’ve been reading this blog any length of time, then you know about my involvement. For the last 8 1/2 years I’ve been working for it, trying to make it better, five of those years as president. We’ve done some pretty cool things in that time.
The Missouri Center for the Book has, like most such organizations, been undergoing some ups and downs the last few years. We have been reorganizing in order to be a more vital part of the literary and reading community in Missouri. …
56
It has been my practice to, as best as I can, as much as I’m allowed, ignore birthdays. My birthdays. I love the attention, don’t get me wrong, but I have always been a bit nervous about attention, especially undeserved attention. I mean, what the hell, it’s just another day of the week, a point in the arbitrary cycle of time humans impose on nature, and I’m just passing through. What’s so special about that?
Birthdays are markers, to be used by people to order their universes. It matters little to me that I am now 56 years old (fifty-six! shit, how did that happen? …
A Plague On Both Houses…With A Pastoral Addendum
Listening to election news lately is like keeping track of a Roller Derby game. They keep going around the same circle, bumping into each other, occasionally shouting unsubstiated things—at each other and the audience—and by and large just getting in each others’ ways. If you like that kind of sport, it can be entertaining. Otherwise…
So I’ve been working on new fiction and playing with photoshop and basically tuning it all out. As much as I hate to say it, I already know that I’m not going to vote for any Republicans, and most of the Independents are seemingly farther right. …
On The Way Home…
Stopped in the middle of one bridge to do this shot of another, early morning Monday on the way home.
…
On The Road Part Two
A quick follow-up to my abbreviated MadCon report just past. Harlan Ellison arrived at the hotel Thursday evening, around eight o’clock. Only a few of us were in the lobby. Allen Steele, Peter David, Donna, and myself. Peter David’s wife Kathleen and their daughter (who Harlan “terrorized” to our surprise and her later delight). From that point on it became a really good experience. All the rumors that had been floating around about Harlan’s imminent demise proved exaggerated. Though he didn’t look his best—clearly he has been ailing—and he arrived wearing a sweatshirt and pajama bottoms (Pierre Cardin, as he repeatedly joked, since he wore them all weekend), as the weekend progressed he came more and more alive.…
Home Again
We are returned from the wilds of Wisconsin.
In the last post I mentioned we were attending MadCon 2010 in Madison, touted as the last convention Harlan Ellison will ever do. Much speculation runs rampant over the internet about this and his own presentations at the convention will doubtless throw gasoline on the inferno. Having spent more than a small amount of time in his company this past weekend, I will report only that the rumors are pretty much exactly that. Those who know him, know what’s more or less going on, and those who don’t, unless they were present at MadCon and heard what he had to say, do not know what is going on, and after a few conversations with the man I will not post about it here.…