Such Great Heights - The Postal Service

I just learned this week that my final photography class was my FINAL class for me to graduate. This came as a bit of a surprise to me, but I couldn't have accidentally chosen a more perfect final class. The instructor was the kind of person who inspires and moves others to great achievement. On the first day of class she asked what we had all hoped to gleen from the class, and without revealing my answer, she has succeeded beyond her wildest dreams. So this post is dedicated to her; she's inspired me to such great heights.

"Everything looks perfect from far away." But wouldn't you rather see something beautiful instead?

Flawed Beauty

Tonight was my last art photography class where we revealed our final assignment; the summation of our experience of the class. If you've seen the Louis Malle film Vanya on 42nd Street, it was much like the final scene, (if you haven't seen it, rent it now!), where all the actors at the end of rehearsal come to realize they've had a profound experience and they depart, one by one, as the characters they depicted reluctantly slip from their faces and bodies. There is something special that happens when a diverse group of strangers get together, share ideas, learn, and come to some of the same conclusions of what constitutes beauty. The shot I've posted is a picture that, a year ago, I would have deleted immediately, failing to see anything beautiful in it. My friend, Kathie, said the same thing about her cover image on the Blurb book she created. Stunning, isn't it?

The trick now? To carry these ideas forward.

Scenes from the Weekend

Aside from Thanksgiving (which was divine), I had a pretty low-key weekend as I wrap up work on my photography class.  I learned much and am trying to fold it into my understanding of art. One thing that has changed is that I've become more of a flaneur. A flaneur is a person who simply wanders around as a detached observer, not with a specific purpose, but just to experience what comes. I walked through my neighborhood, noticing the strangest details, and subtle changes from one day, week and month to the next, and watching the patterns of life. If you have ever made a point of taking lots of pictures when you travel, you understand the importance of photography's role in capturing the experience itself, not just a beautiful picture. What if you could capture that feeling of freedom you experience when travelling and draw from it in your daily life?

Winter Eyes

It takes my eyes a while to adjust to the new season. Mother Nature has put on a more sombre dress, but not less beautiful. Winter's stark beauty has yet to be completely fulfilled; we need a layer of snow.

As my husband and I were putting our back yard to sleep for the winter, I speculated about how, as a child, I could spend hours in the cold, wearing my snow suit and insulated snow boots, sliding down a hill and climbing back up for another run until it was too dark to see. Today, standing there in my Converse high-tops and not feeling my feet, that seemed a lifetime ago.

This looks like a nice winter home for a mouse, don't you think?

No Surprises - Radiohead

How about some gentle music to counter the Black Friday frenzy around you? This fits for me; I bought a new car today because I pretty much drove my old one into the ground. It started giving me surprises, which I don't like from a car.  I've heard Radiohead described as the new Lennon & McCarthy. What do you think?

Happy Thanksgiving!

This is my final project for my art photography class. It has been a labor of love and, I think, an appropriate response to the eve of Thanksgiving. My life, and my work, is an homage to gratitude. I express my gratitude through images. Not just one day out of the year; gratitude is a habit that rewards us daily. It gives us both humility and strength. And I must say, I am grateful for my friends and family who support, encourage, challenge and inspire me continually. I am grateful for my health, which I know can be taken from me in the blink of an eye. I am grateful for this strange and wonderful world I was born into, which I sometimes forget exactly how to celebrate.  



And I am grateful for you, my friends, for coming back here again and again, offering me words of kindness and appreciation.  Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours!

The BBC's Top 100 Books

Perhaps you've seen your friends posting this on Faceook, but the BBC has created a list of the 100 most popular books, voted by the reading public. The BBC surmised that most people will only have read about six of them. On Facebook, the idea is to bold the titles you have read, and italicize the titles you have started but not finished. I found the list interesting and surprising - and missing a great number of important works. The criteria, as I have mentioned, is most popular as determined by the reading public, not the most important in terms of literary history as determined by scholars. Still, I found the list deficient and needed to tag onto the end a few of my own that I feel have contributed to the canon of great literature and influenced the literary conversation. Have you read more than six? What would you add? Or subtract?

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte (thrice)
8 1984 - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy (twice)
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy (twice)
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (twice)
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy (twice)
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma -Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy (twice)
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy (twice)
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno – Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert (twice)
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Other important books, according to me:
1 Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton
2 The Moon and Sixpence - Somerset Maugham
3 The Golden Bowl - Henry James
4 Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf
5 The House of Mirth - Edith Wharton
6 Howard's End - EM Forster
7 Out of Africa - Isak Dinesen
8 Death in Venice - Thomas Mann
9 Nana - Emile Zola
10 The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
11 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
12 Still Life - AS Byatt
13 A la recherche du temps perdu - Marcel Proust 
14 The Portrait of a Lady - Henry James

Chicago

I'm just back from a glorious week in Chicago and must say, in spite of all the wonderful food and fashion, am glad to be home. I stayed at a hotel on the corner of Michigan and Huron which is a prime location for shopping -- if you're not beset with a horrid cold. The most money that I spent was at Walgreen's on cold medicine. No new Tory Burch ballet flats or a ridiculous Ferragamo bag for me. But with a whirlwind schedule of meetings and dining out ... I had a lovely dinner at Quartino, which, if you live in Columbus you would be interested to learn that Cameron Mitchell lifted the concept for his restaurant Marcella's. Imitation is the best form of flattery, no?

I also only took about three pictures, literally, which is a shame. Luckily for me, one dinner event was held at the Museum of Contemporary Art where I got to see some pretty sublime art. One funny thing I overheard while there, "Columbus? This must be a real culture shock for you." Exciting, yes, but culture shock? You know, things have improved tremendously around here since we got electricity and indoor plumbing, oh, about a hundred years ago. But I love a town with a champagne bar, don't you?

Louise - Shannon Wright

Have you ever felt like the lead character in the movie Run, Lola, Run? That was me today, but in a good way; lots of photography, wrapping up the week, getting ready to go out of town, and lunch at The Happy Greek with new work friends. I'll choose a crazy, fun day over one of idleness any day!



Louise is one of my favorite names. I used to have a Louise Brooks hairstyle (I kind of miss it, now that I think of it). I give "Louise" as a middle name to coworkers as a gesture of fondness. They seem to understand.

Happy weekend!