Long time ago, when I was but a teen, maybe right on the cusp, just getting interested in photography, my father and I sat up one evening to watch a PBS thing about Ansel Adams. To this day I cannot find that film—it included a project of his photographing a Hispanic family living on a scrub farm, very rural, lots of kids. He was working with both 4X5 and a Hasselblad. It was a detailed film, taking the viewer through the whole process, from shutter-click to processing, to printing. It had a substantial impact on me and I would like to find that film again, but I’ve even been to the Ansel Adams Museum in San Fransisco and they profess not to know what I’m talking about. …
Category: Personal
The Final Solution
No, this isn’t about The Holocaust (capital H) but about something more gradual, systemic, and pernicious.
Georgia is about to execute Troy Davis. He was convicted of killing a cop. There are irregularities in the case, namely a majority of “witnesses” have since recanted their testimony. The rest of the evidence is circumstantial at best, but the state of Georgia is going to kill him anyway. He was tried, found guilty, sentenced, and his last appeal was denied.
I have a simple, unsentimental reason for opposing the death penalty. You can’t take it back.
Here is a list of the people exonerated from Death Row since 1973. …
Bouchercon 2011
So I have now attended a Bouchercon.
I’ve attended so many SF conventions that they’ve become, if not normal, at least comfortable.  I pretty much know what to expect. Bouchercon, while in many ways similar to an SF convention, is different enough that I felt like a newbie and a bit like an outsider. I don’t know the players, I don’t know all the rules, and I didn’t know what to expect.
There were no costumes, no gamers, no room parties (at least not open room parties), no art show, and an absence of what I like to think of secondary and tertiary effluvia in the dealers room—that is, tables of jewelry and fake weapons and action figures and the like. …
New Directions
I’m attending Bouchercon this week, here in St. Louis. In the last few years I’ve been drifting toward crime fiction, partly in an attempt to cultivate new fields with a view toward getting my rather stagnant career moving, partly because I’ve always written something like it.
The Robot Mysteries were, as advertised, mysteries of a sort. Crime was happening in them, investigators investigated, macabre stuff occurred. There was a bit of it in Metal of Night and a couple of major thefts (and murders) were integral to Peace & Memory. Certain Remains was a mystery, even with noir elements, and the one, poor orphaned Terminator novel I wrote, Hour of the Wolf, was very noirish in tone.…
9/12
I didn’t write anything for yesterday’s commemoration. Many others, most far better suited to memorializing the day, said a great deal. My paltry mutterings would add little to what is, really, a personal day for most of us. Like all the big anniversary events, the “where were you when” aspect makes it personal and maybe that’s the most important part, I don’t know.
Instead it occurred to me to say something about the element of the disaster that puzzles most of us, even while most of us exhibit the very trait that disturbs us deeply in this context. One of the most common questions asked at the time and still today is in the top 10 is: how could those men do that?…
Fiction Matters
What I do puzzles some people. Always has, even before I was doing it. All those jokes about bookworms have a solid basis in real experiences—a great many people in our lives do not understand the importance of reading. Worse, they have no clue about the pleasures of reading, which often makes me very sad.
I was followed around the play ground at school once by three of my classmates who were determined to stop me from reading. I don’t even remember the book anymore, only that I had finally found a way to enjoy recess, one that took me out of the rough-and-tumble of schoolyard hierarchical nonsense. …
Carondolet Park
The heat wave finally broke and this past weekend we took the dog and went through nearby Carondolet Park, which over the years has become our favorite to stroll. Driving through I often see all kinds of photographic possibilities, and then, when I return with the camera, I can’t find most of them.
But I did get some this time, so I thought I’d just put up a selection. Something apolitical, pleasant, interesting, visually stimulating, etc.
So….
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No Longer Surprised
President Obama is withdrawing proposed tighter regulations on smog that had been part of his initial energetic approach to reform early in his presidency. No jobs have been created in the last month and congressional Republicans are shouting about regulations and the burden to business as the major reason.  I think they’re running out of excuses. I mean, we’ve rolled back taxes, rolled back regulations, given them money…and still no one is hiring. I don’t think anyone is going to.
Big business, including the banks, are sitting on huge piles of cash right now. Yet they won’t make loans. Not at levels sufficient to boost job growth. …
Revenge Porn
There is probably no way for me to write this without tripping over some bloodthirsty reactionary’s sensibilities, but you know, I don’t really give a damn.
In my home town, too.
A St. Louis publishing company has released a 9/11 coloring book. There is a reaction to it here. Wonderful cover.
Very patriotic. Nothing violent on the cover itself, but there are the twin towers and, I think, the proposed memorial tower.
Oh yes, and a cross. This is, after all, commemorating the assault by Muslims against Christians.
The subtitle is interesting: A Graphic Coloring Novel on the Events of September 11, 2001.…
On Symbols and Fair Use
When you have a dream about an argument, maybe it has some weight and should be written about. Recently, I posted a photograph on my Google + page. This one, in fact:
My caption for it was “What more is there to say?” Partly this was just to have a caption, but also to prompt potential discussion. As symbol, the photograph serves a number of functions, from melancholy to condemnation.
It did prompt a discussion, between two friends of mine who do not know each other, the core of which centers on the divergent meanings of such symbols for them and a question of sensitivity. …