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Things Seen on the Internet - #5

by scribeoflight

  • David Maisel :: Photography
    The photography on Maisel’s site is frequently very good, often very unusual. ‘Library of Dust’ is particularly intriguing.

July 1, 2009   No Comments

Two Photographs

by scribeoflight

I was going to write something along the lines of this:

I have stopped taking photographs.  Right now I don’t know where to point the camera, or when to press down on the shutter release.

But the words felt a little wrong: I am still taking some photographs, on occasion, and to say I have stopped wouldn’t be entirely true.  Yet I do feel that I am struggling to see things I want to photograph, struggling to put things into frames; and further to that, I am having trouble getting my head around the question of why I should even be spending time thinking about frames or looking for things at which to point a camera.  What is my aim, my purpose?

Here are two photographs, one that was taken a couple of weeks ago, and one that I took about an hour before writing this post:

A photograph taken on the road between Zhuhai and Doumen sometime during the June of 2009.

A photograph taken in my apartment in Lianyungang on the 30th of June, 2009.

I don’t know what they say, or what I want them to say.  I feel as though I’ve taken them before, and I most probably have.  Aside from their significance as documents, or depictions, of my personal experiences, neither of them is especially unique, or especially meaningful.

My voice doesn’t seem to be speaking through them.

Within me, though, are ideas, thoughts, feelings that I want to express.  I may not be entirely certain of their shape or composition, but those things are definitely there: I can sense them pushing out, exerting pressure.  And I want them to be expressed.

June 30, 2009   1 Comment

Awful People Can Do Beautiful Things

by scribeoflight

Wise words from Ta-Nehisi Coates:

[…] Woody Allen wooed his wife’s adopted daughter, and may well be a child molester.  But I think Bananas makes me laugh.  Mike Tyson is, among other things, a convicted rapist.  But I had not lived until I saw him demolish Trevor Berbick.  And so on…

I guess I could peel these people out my life.  I guess I could stop seperating [sic] art from men.  Regrettably, I think, I wouldn’t be left with much art worth admiring.  Sometimes awful people, do beautiful things [sic].  One doesn’t cancel the other.  And mourning the loss of human life, does not excuse the sins of that life.

People who don’t feel that way are welcome to their opinions.  I’m not sure why they insist that others share them.

I think the first time I had to grapple with this was when I studied T. S. Eliot at university.  I had read Eliot since secondary school, but during that time I had had only a passing awareness of his darker side.  It was while I was preparing papers on Eliot for my literature degree, a time when I was looking harder and closer at his work, and at the life behind the work, than I had ever previously looked, that I saw sides of the man (the man who was also the poet) that I found abhorrent.  At that time, young and full of fire (for reference, I am older, now, but still very fiery), I wanted my essays to critically eviscerate Eliot, to lay out on A4 paper all of the nastinesses I’d been told (told, in some cases, by critics who quite possibly had their own personal nastinesses lurking in the background) about this complicated man, this famous poet.  I wanted to tear into him because something about what he was, something about his beliefs, his ideologies, made me angry.

And yet the poetry and the drama (and even, at moments, the literary criticism) still stirred me, still provided me, on a daily basis, with new and powerful ways of seeing and feeling and thinking.   The literature created by T. S. Eliot has been a lodestone in my life, much of what I read or see or make pointing back, in some way, to that rock.  (And here it might be worth noting that the name of this blog, “erhebung”, comes from a line in a poem by Eliot.)  The picture I saw of the man was not the picture I saw of the poet; somehow there were, and there remain to this day, two Eliots in my mind: the one, glittering and evanescent, whose art is transcendent, uplifting; the other, dark and hard, whose views are unpleasant, cruel.  I had to reconcile myself with the fact that these two Eliots were irreconcilable; or, as Coates’ might put it, I had to content myself with the reality that sometimes beautiful things are made by awful people.

June 26, 2009   2 Comments

Things Seen on the Internet - #4

by scribeoflight

  • Film Comment - Bay Watch
    A look at the films of Michael Bay. A good read. The last line is amusing: “Some have complained that Bay’s budgets are too high. I think they’re too low. Just imagine what this guy could do with a billion dollars, NASA at his beck and call, and the state of Arizona at his disposal.” [But there seems to be an error, or maybe typo, about ‘Beverly Hills Cop III’.]
  • Climatologist James Hansen: we’re almost too late re: climate change
    From a passage quoted by Kottke: “Carbon dioxide isn’t just approaching dangerous levels; it is already there. Unless immediate action is taken-including the shutdown of all the world’s coal plants within the next two decades-the planet will be committed to climate change on a scale society won’t be able to cope with.”

June 26, 2009   No Comments

Things Seen on the Internet - #3

by scribeoflight

  • Edge: HOW DOES OUR LANGUAGE SHAPE THE WAY WE THINK? By Lera Boroditsky
    “For a long time, the idea that language might shape thought was considered at best untestable and more often simply wrong. Research in my labs at Stanford University and at MIT has helped reopen this question. We have collected data around the world: from China, Greece, Chile, Indonesia, Russia, and Aboriginal Australia. What we have learned is that people who speak different languages do indeed think differently and that even flukes of grammar can profoundly affect how we see the world.”
  • Popular Protest in China | Elizabeth Perry | The Browser
    “Elizabeth Perry was born to missionary parents in Shanghai in 1948, the year before the Chinese Communist revolution. A professor in the Department of Government at Harvard, and director of the Harvard-Yenching Institute, she is one of America’s leading China scholars. Much of her research has been focused on popular protest and grassroots politics in mainland China.”
  • China’s Environmental Crisis | Isabel Hilton | The Browser
    “When I lived in China in the seventies there were blue skies in the winter. Beijing in particular was famous for blue skies because they have a very dry winter, and so if you didn’t have a sandstorm you would see these lovely blue skies, very sunny and dry, if very cold. ”

June 25, 2009   No Comments

Things Seen on the Internet - #2

by scribeoflight

  • Hilobrow | Middlebrow is not the solution - TAKING THREE WOLVES TO THE MOON
    “With its ever-evolving set of reviewing, photo-posting, and other social networking offerings, Amazon is the prototype of the social media. It’s a publishing platform on its own, and its authors are neither independent of nor precisely parasitic upon the consumerist leviathan. Posting at Amazon, customers become like the remoras that clean the skin of sharks or the birds that purportedly feed from the mouths of crocodiles.”
  • Manuel Bromberg - snapshots of war | Art and design | The Guardian
    “For 60 years, photographs of the D-day landings by the war artist Manuel Bromberg have been kept in a box at his New York home. Published here for the first time, they reveal another, unseen side of the war, says Adam Levy - the detail often overshadowed by the bigger picture.”

June 24, 2009   No Comments

Things Seen on the Internet - #1

by scribeoflight

  • Is Poverty a Violation of Human Rights?
    Wilkinson looks intelligently at possible answers to a difficult question, and also at the implications those answers might have for everyone on the planet.

June 24, 2009   No Comments

Things Seen on the Internet

by scribeoflight

I installed the Wordpress plugin Postalicious months and months ago, but for some reason never really used it.  I think I thought it seemed a bit fiddly.  Then today I had another look at it, and I after figuring out what it all does decided to give it a try.  I really want it to work automatically, effortlessly, and if it doesn’t, if it starts to do strange, irritating things, I’ll probably just cut off its sweet little php legs and forget about it.

So, henceforth, if all goes well, posts entitled Things Seen on the Internet, followed by a date, (each sequentially numbered, probably) will contain links to interesting things (articles, essays, images, etc.) that have caught my eye during my wanders through the internets.

Here are two links (both quite interesting) to test the formatting:

June 23, 2009   No Comments

Find Your Shape

by scribeoflight

I wrote this on the 19th of June, ultimately opting to leave it as a draft:

Writing (or is it thinking?) seems difficult today.  I can’t figure out what I want to say, need to say, and this frustrates me.  I could write what I see: a mosquito circles endlessly around a spot in the middle of the room; sunlight starts to squeeze itself through clouds, the sides of buildings brightening slightly, colours and tones emerging; Liu Bing stirs in her sleep and starts to say something, but the words fall away before they can find their shape.

I could write what I see.  I think that this might be an option, but also sense it won’t be sufficient.  In the corner of my eye is the word “block”.  A framework needs to be created, scaffolding erected around the black slab blocking my way, that scaffolding then scaled, the obstacle evaded.

June 23, 2009   No Comments

Across the United States

by scribeoflight

Listen to David Lynch introduce Interview Project and I’m fairly certain you’ll instantly get caught on the project’s hook: video interviews conducted with random strangers encountered during a road trip across the United States.  According to the website there are going to be at least 121 of these interviews, but so far only about a dozen have been published; so, it’s probably going to be an epic ride.

(via Tiffany Jones)

June 23, 2009   No Comments

We Went to See the Sea

by scribeoflight

Yesterday we went to see the sea.  I took this photograph while we were there:

June 19, 2009   1 Comment

And So We Came

by scribeoflight

It’s been a long time since I last read Kim Stanley Robinson’s trilogy of novels about Mars, but they are books I frequently find myself remembering, and mulling over, and wanting to read again.  A month or so ago I managed to get hold of a copy of the first novel in the trilogy, and I’m looking forward to once again exploring Robinson’s world.  Here is the opening of that first novel, Red Mars:

Mars was empty before we came.  That’s not to say that nothing had ever happened.  The planet had accreted, melted, roiled and cooled, leaving a surface scarred by enormous geological features: craters, canyons, volcanoes.  But all of that happened in mineral unconsciousness, and unobserved.  There were no witnesses-except for us, looking from the planet next door, and that only in the last moment of its long history.  We are all the consciousness that Mars has ever had.

Now everybody knows the history of Mars in the human mind: how for all the generations of prehistory it was one of the chief lights in the sky, because of its redness and fluctuating intensity, and the way it stalled in its wandering course through the stars, and sometimes even reversed direction.  It seemed to be saying something with all that.  So perhaps it is not surprising that all the oldest names for Mars have a peculiar weight on the tongue-Nirgal, Mangala, Auqakuh, Harmakhis- they sound as if they were even older than the ancient languages we find them in, as if they were fossil words from the Ice Age or before.  Yes, for thou sands of years Mars was a sacred power in human affairs; and its color made it a dangerous power, representing blood, anger, war and the heart.

Then the first telescopes gave us a closer look, and we saw the little orange disk, with its white poles and dark patches spreading and shrinking as the long seasons passed.  No improvement in the technology of the telescope ever gave us much more than that; but the best Earthbound images gave Lowell enough blurs to inspire a story, the story we all know, of a dying world and a heroic people, desperately building canals to hold off the final deadly encroachment of the desert.

It was a great story.  But then Mariner and Viking sent back their photos, and everything changed.  Our knowledge of Mars expanded by magnitudes, we literally knew millions of times more about this planet than we had before.  And there before us flew a new world, a world unsuspected.

It seemed, however, to be a world without life.  People searched for signs of past or present Martian life, anything from microbes to the doomed canal-builders, or even alien visitors.  As you know, no evidence for any of these has ever been found.  And so stories have naturally blossomed to fill the gap, just as in Lowell’s time, or in Homer’s, or in the caves or on the savannah-stories of microfossils wrecked by our bio-organisms, of ruins found in dust storms and then lost forever, of Big Man and all his adventures, of the elusive little red people, always glimpsed out of the corner of the eye.  And all of these tales are told in an attempt to give Mars life, or to bring it to life.  Because we are still those animals who survived the Ice Age, and looked up at the night sky in wonder, and told stories.  And Mars has never ceased to be what it was to us from our very beginning-a great sign, a great symbol, a great power.

And so we came here.  It had been a power; now it became a place.

June 16, 2009   2 Comments

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