Relatively Speaking

Call me Blogger.

Some years ago--never mind how many--having taken on an editing project I came to have no taste for, I thought I would surf about the web and see the cyber part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and stirring the circulation of interest.

Whenever I find myself growing grim about the newspapers and news magazines I read; whenever it is a damp dreary election settling over the country, I account it high time to read political blogs, wherein lay deeper political truths and assessments, equaled only by the periodicals of our cousins in the UK.

Okay, enough of Moby-Dick, which is always good to revisit for its opening and for Father Marple's sermon. Were it not for Liz Kuball, I might still be using blogs to catch up on political news, contributing an occasional piece to the writer's blog Inkbyte, and content with my weekly book review at the MJ. Watching Liz set up her own site, to her own satisfaction, I became curious, then more than a little proud of her industry and talent. The thing that tipped me over was the added focus Liz showed in deciding which photographers she would link to and, indeed, which in turn linked to her. Bingo--a crash course in photography for me, a sort of cheat sheet of interesting sites to check in on from time to time.

By my reckoning, I begin my own blog on March 1 of this year, envious of Liz's resolve to post at least a picture a day. My goal for my own blog was to write myself out, to express all the theory and nostalgia and critical vector whirring around within me, curious to see how long it would take before I approached the daily blog with no preconceived notion of what would come tumbling forth, more or less like the contents of Fibber McGee's closet. This was my goal because of my conviction that this state, what I call the surprise state, is where creativity and originality begin, where one--well, where I take a theme and begin to work on it, improvising, inventing, surprising myself.

So far, so good. During this time I began checking writers' blogs, looking for that community just as Liz Kuball began checking out the photographic community. Ah, some lovely misadventres, not the least of which were individuals wanting to sell me various software to enhance my story-telling abilities, or editorial services to jump-start my narrative technique.
For every twenty writing blogs I read, I found perhaps a paragraph or two worth. I had become, to extend the metaphor I recently thought to forswear, a cyber Ahab, looking for interesting writers' blogs. Meanwhile, checking out Liz Kuball's links, I found any number of photographers who had ways of looking at people, items, and events that seemed to agree with my own.

On one particularly boring afternoon, I indulged myself by enjoying some of the images of the Alaska-based photographer, Ben Huff, who was being gently chided by a fellow from the sunnier clime of Australia. Checking out the work of pod, I was suddenly at another plateau, admiring some of his dramatically moody shots of buildings in varying shades of darkness. I said so in comments and checked back on him with some regularity. From pod, I got a nice referral to the remarkable Lettuce in UK, who seems to have abilities in everything she touches, with an uncommon grace in her ability to write about her life.

John Fox, a recent student in one of my classes, let it be known that he blogs, becoming one of the few consistently interesting writing blogs I have found. A chance encounter with a writing instructor in Oregon also produced some gold and the coincidence of our having done undergraduate at UCLA.

The happy conclusions from all of this activity is the sense of still being interested in Liz's link list, but of having found my own as well. There is the growing sense that looking at the images of some of these splendid photographers has literally had effect on the things I write and the way I put them down on paper. Oh yes, and this: I am eagerly awaiting a small package with an item I heard about third-hand, through a classmate of Liz at a photographic workshop. The item is a Panasonic DMC FX-30K Lumix.

I will know I have arrived at yet another plateau on this amazing journey when I am waved off a scene or challenged by someone who resents my attempting to capture an image on the Lumix instead of trying to remember it and catch it on the page.

Validictory

Tonight was the final class of the quarter for the short-story writing class, a group of eight, consisting of six who really wanted to move forth with writing and two who needed the unit credits to graduate. An atmosphere like the June marine layer off the Pacific advances on us as we talk, I in the spirit of giving away the store as it were, giving away gifts of technique that were passed to me or discovered by me in long afternoons and late nights of writing and chasing dreams off into the shadowy corners.

All eight of them had some tangible sense of breakthrough, saying things about their work that were discoveries of what a joy the work can be, a pain in the ass much of the time but a joy in the long, shimmering abstract. If it hurts so much, why do you do it? Who said it hurt at all? Who said the very act of reaching doesn't trump everything.

And so once again, a series of farewells, a wrench away from persons you had come to admire, each for that particular, individual spark of individuality.

Perhaps this is what drew you to the need for a quick fix, a shot of enthusiasm and joy to burn off the emotional equivalent of the marine layer that was sinking over the landscape. And so off to your newfound discovery, the photo blogs. Liz Kuball nails a shelf in the Italian Grocery on De la Guerra Street. Pod has a giraffe that for all its color and whimsicality, reminds me of his iconic band of Easter brothers, the foil-wrapped chocolate Easter bunnies. Lettuce has been busy in Suffolk, nailing landscape as though the shots were old lovers, radiant with the soft beauty of being loved. Shawn Gust blazes out of doors into the heat, eager to get away from the one lonely bottle of beer in the refrigerator, capturing the lived-in magic of place and the people who inhabit the places. Ben Huff, daring Alaska to be natural and forget the camera. And, by chance, a photographer from the Park Slope section of Brooklyn, not all that distant from DeKalb and Flatbush and Junior's cheesecakes, posting a shot of a typographical error in a sign in Starbucks and in the process, being hassled by an employee because Starbucks apparently has a policy of not wanting pictures taken of its premises.

Life, these estimable photographers seem to be saying, goes on in its whimsicality, leaving these flashes of immortality for us to process, reminding us for more times than we can count that it is not so much technique we strive to achieve but process, our way of recording the whimsy of life with our lenses, our pages, our poetry.

Anything You Say or Do May Be Used against You--in a Photograph

At first, I thought it a mere aberration, a case of localized paranoia come off its hinges.

In the process of gleaning images of local independent Mon-and-Dad groceries, Liz Kuball, her Canon 5D mounted firmly on a tripod, lined up a shot. But before she could make an exposure, an employee came out of the market, arms waving, demanding to know what Liz had in mind, why she was taking a photo of this particular market, and what Liz intended to do with the photo once it was executed. While Liz was trying to answer the questions, the employee whipped out cell phone and began giving her thumbs a workout on the keyboard, actually calling the owner of the market.

Liz did not get the hoped for shot.

Not long ago, several hundred miles to the north east, camera paranoia struck again in suburban Fairbanks, Alaska, photographer Ben Huff's sense of purpose and decorum shivering through the account he wrote of being accosted by a housewife.

In the notes to his book, Niagra, photographer Alec Soth wrote of coming under suspicion more than once while asking people to pose for him.

After the Ben Huff posting, I was driving through a funky section of Santa Barbara on Montecito Street that borders the tourist-commercial motel area along the waterfront and connects to the railroad station and a portion of Santa Barbara referred to by locals and Map-Quest as The Mesa. On the very block where Elizabeth Short once lived before taking off for Los Angeles, where she found a morbid kind of fame and fortune as star of The Black Dahlia murder case, is a series of cottages set off from the street. There is a Bauhaus feel to the cottages , which I had been passing for years without noticing. I made a mental note to call the scene to Liz Kuball's attention in connection with her long-term interest in funky, well-weathered buildings.

A week or so later, I drove Liz past the buildings and, without fanfare, asked her what she thought.

Stop the car, she thought.

Moments later, her 5D was bracketing shots. Sooner than either of us realized, a car that had been pulling out of the driveway of said cluster of cottages backed its way into the drive, whereupon the driver emerged, asking Liz if she could help her, which turned out to be stage one of warning Liz off the shoot.

I can better understand the paranoia when Liz entered a laundromat on the outskirts of Carpinteria, wanting to get shots for a series tentatively called Waiting: people and animals waiting for things, other people, other animals, destiny. Almost any laundromat in the Santa Barbara area has some percentage of a Latino clientele, a clientele that has some knowledge of or direct involvement with issues related to Immigration. I can understand why some customers were nervous, even suspicious of a Gringa with a camera.

I have neither enough case histories or details from which to build a hypothesis, even though I recall one sympathetic posting to Ben Huff's account, mentioning his own misadventures, but by now the anthropology/political science sides of my university specialization have had their curiosity piqued.

My experience has been that writers get the opposite response; if people get the motion that you're a writer, their first itch is to enlist you in a partnership where they tell you this marvelous story they've invented and after you "write it up," you're ready to split the profits fifty-fifty. The second itch is for them to simply tell you one story after another, hopeful, I've come to suspect, that you, writer that you are, will tell them, "Why, you should get those stories published." If they don't want you as a partner or for peer recognition and encouragement, they want to convince you that they are, depending on their gender, the intellectual superior to Natalie Angier or Christopher Hitchens. If they think they are funny, they will want you to recognize that they are the peer to Chris Buckley.

If you are a writer, they will follow you around and bare as much of themselves to you as the traffic will allow. If you are a photographer, they pose so outrageously as to render themselves useless to your intent, or they conversely become guarded, hostile, suspicious. If you are a writer, they want you to recommend them to your literary agent; if you are a photographer--well; you get the picture.

No. I guess you don't.