Photo Errors

Well, I was going to post the fireworks photos I just spent half an hour photoshopping, but supposedly they have internal errors, which I think is a lie.

Mr. Ass came by for an impromptu dinner on Friday, the contents of which I will keep a secret since it will eventually have its own post, and asked me (as he always does) if I was writing. I said no, not really. That I had plenty of ideas with potential, but the actual sitting and writing of them escapes me, and has done so for months and months and months and months. He asked me what conditions were best for me writing and my first answer was this: 9 am, three years ago. It was a glib answer, but not entirely untrue. I have always written or had ideas for projects for my own pleasure and brain, but the school environment has proved itself to be where I am most productive. This, of course, suggests I'm a better student than I am a writer.

Years and years ago I acquired a photo album of a family from Chicago, most of the images from one of the two sons' younger years up through high school. The ebf, at a later point in time, bought the companion album to the first, with photographs of this young man as an older son. Something about the fact that these albums ended up in a junk store in Farmville, Virginia struck me. There had to be a story about how how this, seemingly loved, boy who, like them all, must have grown up to be a man didn't have any one to care about keeping this record of his youth. It was also clear that his mother was French, and I conjectured that his parents met through the war. So, I began to construct a story about the mother before she married an American and moved to Chicago. That, in turn, led me to begin the process of researching that era. To see if what I wanted her life to be would make sense with the actual conditions of time and place. I started her narrative in the first person, never sure how it would lead to what I considered the main thread: the boy. And I continue to do research and look at these images, but the narrative, the actual prose on paper or in the computer, doesn't exist.

My novel. The beast. So topical, four years ago, is quickly becoming less and less so. What I considered the whole story, I now feel, is in some ways just the beginning of another story, another story I don't know how to write. Not to mention the gaps in the existing document that need to be plugged. It is a sinking ship. A sinking ship that I love, and don't want to let go of because I see its merit, I see its worth, I see how much it could be if only I could get my act together.

Then there are the essays about photography and memory. K. and C. were in town Saturday until an hour ago, and when they first came I showed them my room and pointed out where they were in the mosaic of photographs and images I have pinned to one of my walls. I also mentioned that I had plenty of photographs from our college and post-college years, in nice little photo albums, for their perusal if they wanted. They were excited and I don't know if it was C. or K., but one of them used the descriptive label of archivist to my person. And that is certainly true, I do archive things (perhaps not up to a librarian's standards) but at what cost? Because, lately, I have been feeling that my memory and my insistent need to remember people and places is, at this point in time, working against me. This was something I touched on in an essay back in grad school, but more in terms of my days as a more creative/precise/driven photographer.

Things I'm thinking about, pretty much the same things I've been thinking about forever but getting nowhere with. And the feeling of getting nowhere, on so many fronts, has, I think, been wearing me down for so long that I think it's funny. Except, really, I think it's sad. And the obvious thing to do, in every aspect I am thinking of (writing, reading, meeting people, losing weight, publishing etc) is to just get on with it. Just start changing. And yet, my need to remember my past (successes and/or failures) takes up so much time and energy...that and I am quite stubborn and lazy when it comes to the present.