Last week I signed the contract for my next book of poetry. Time Slip will be a largeish book, 160 pages, containing excerpts from my first four books plus new work written over the last decade. The publisher is Guernica Editions of Toronto. I'm hoping it will be out in spring 2009 -- but the contract stresses in a couple of places that writers must be 'patient', so we'll see. I've done final revisions and sent back the galleys.
The cover will be a photo of mine of a small tree covered in ice along the lakefront in Toronto. I'll let y'all know when a publication date is confirmed. So to celebrate this occasion, here's a few random new photos.
Maybe you can tell me why I took them!
The big sparkly wave...
Always a bridal dress ... never a bride.
I tried to wash my shadow away, but it's still following me.
Greening the Silo -- an unfinished agricultural work by Gaudi.
Some summery photos... take your pick (or pick your berries)..
Beach umbrella bingo, part deux...
They's so fresh and fine...
Watery reflections on formal structures...
OK, I confess... this was a more than a bit Photoshopped. But the original pic was rather dull, especially the lighting... so I like this lbetter. Let's call it 'dream trees' -- along the West coast of Newfoundland.
I held a poetry-writing workshop recently. One of the exercises I tried on my participants was this: in order to practise generating new and more imaginative comparisons, take something (or someone) you feel strongly about. Put that person/thing in the opening half of a comparison, as in:
My house(friend/enemy) is like a.....
Now complete the comparison as many times as you can, letting your imagination go, and not discarding anything that comes to mind, no matter how abstruse. Once you're done, you can strip off all, or some, instances of the opening phrase and just use what works from the resulting list, as a list-poem on its own, as part of a longer piece, or for a few unusual metaphors/similes to liven up a related piece of writing.
So here's the puzzle, dear (and patient) friends. I'll give you the "after the like..." parts of my own response to this exercise. Tell me what these images suggest to you? I'll reveal my own starting point here in a day or two.
LIKE
Like slow eroding of rock the trickle of seconds paring away that adds weight a memory test of ten once-revealed objects what you can't resist a fan that chops air into antipasto a downhill race without skis a slowly-written truth a mirror that melts the form it holds weeds becoming the garden
Once upon a time, North America made some of the flashiest, most technologically advanced cars the world had seen. They were powerful, multicoloured, and seemed to have integrated parts from jet planes and rocket ships. They were almost as stexy as a steamy front seat during a teenaged drive-in movie date.
Although those days are gone, a bunch of lovingly-restored driveable surviviors -- from the 1920's to the late '60's -- visited the village I'm spending the summer in.
Here's a quick, nostalgic survey. How many models can you recognize??
"Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these."
So says the Bible, and rightly so. Flowers have it pretty easy. Everyone agrees they're beautiful; some even smell sweet without even trying. They do not work, pay no taxes, open and close when they feel like it.
It's time, I thought, to explore the darker reality. What is it really like, behind all the glamour and bee-loud colours, to be a flower? Are they really as carefree and blessed as they appear to be?
With those questions in mind, I took my trusty new cam in hand and interrogated some flowers. I didn't let them off easy -- no retouching of little blemishes this time. And here's what they answered:
Not entirely credible-- let's ask another one.
What little egoists -- for the second time, all the answer I got in response to my probing questions was "flower." Perhaps the third witness will be more specific:
Enough with the bit players-- we'll ask a real star this time, Ms. Holly Hock...
And there you go -- the definitive answer. Gee, this is amazing as Geraldo Rivera finding a couple of empty bottles in Al Capone's secret vault.
Currently
listening
:
Flowers
By
Rolling Stones
Release date: 2002-11-05
Transcendental Echinicea
Current mood: quixotic
Category: Art and Photography
Here's a picture of a busily blooming echinicea. It was beside the entrance to the Barley Days micro-brewery, which I sometimes patronize. I was taken with the intensity of the flower and snapped this shot. Since I'm still learning to control the exposures on my new camera, I got good colour and contrast range in the center, the very bee-buzzin' heart of the flower, but not on the petals around the outside. They washed out. So I fired up Photoshop, made a negative (inverted the colours), played with Hue and Saturation until I got the result below.
I find this more satisfying as a picture, partly because it no longer has the washed-out/overexposed petal areas. But this kind of manipulation raises a question which goes to the very heart of one's photo-ethics (or, if that sounds strange, try on "aesthetics."). Is it OK to tinker with a photo or not? If photos present us with reality, who am I to attempt to improve on reality? Certainly, I can't improve on nature, which I do photograph a lot. But a photograph is not "nature." It's already selective because of one's choices around framing, viewing angle, cropping, and so on. Even if the colour is as close to the original as possible, a photo is a slice or swatch deliberately sectioned out of the panorama that confronts us every day. We consciously noltice, psychologists tell us, only a small percentage of the stimuli that crowd our senses. To me, part of being a good photographer is opening my sensory (visual) gates, a bit, being willing to look for the transient light/shadow effects, reflections, and other subtleties that most people just ignore. The other issue is the photographer's intention or purpose.. If I were trying to achieve some kind of "standard" or "definitive" echinicea for a botany book, I wouldn't monkey with colour values or saturation; I'd try to do a better job (e.g., learn your equipment, moron --- Note to Self!!) of approaching the natural look of the flower. But I'm not doing that. This is my personal response, an attempt to suggest the very intense self of this bloom -- its highly seductive whorled center and stripy, come-hither petals -- that drive bees mad in the ultra-violet range. I can't photograph in UV anyway (which insects can see) so I might as well warp it as I see fit. And so it goes (to quote Kurt Vonnegut). Maybe I'm a fraud, as I'm willing to do digitally what I used to do in the darkroom with the time-honoured tricks of dodging, burning, shifting contrast, cropping, solarizing, et al. Or maybe I'm more interested in the artistic effect of the final product than attempting always to represent faithfully what I see. Lord knows, the world as it is is fascinating enough... perhaps the true issue here is that I don't always have the skill to capture it faithfully, so then I play with it licentiously. How about you?
Abstract/experimental shots
Current mood: amused
Category: Art and Photography
As you're probably aware by now, I like to fool around with cameras. Sometimes the world is so beautiful that a straight shot is all that's required -- other times, you feel the urge to monkey with it. This can involve anything from an unusual perspective or choice of imagery and framing to post-shot manipulation. A night-time image... cities throw so many signs, symbols and coloured lights at us. I thought this little group made interesting music, with some overtones about keeping one's balance and staying up to par.
As I probably mentioned in some earlier blog, an American photographer Alfred Steiglitz (Mr. Georgia O'Keefe to you) did a whole series of black and white cloud portraits that he called "Equivalents", in the belief that each cloud he caught was equal to a different emotion. Above is my attempt at "dreamy".
And this one is a trial run at "dramatic."
Almost a total accident -- taking a shot of my foot on the carpet (at a clown cabaret, if that has any relevance) I rotated the camera while using a slow speed. I quite like the result... you?
RIP: a great crime storyteller
Current mood: sad
Category: Writing and Poetry
I was saddened to hear that Dennis Murphy, one of my college colleagues, and a wonderful writer and storyteller, died last Sunday from lung cancer. He leaves his wife, Joanna, and son, Adam. (I didn't take this picture, but I like it). Dennis was Canada's pre-eminent crime fiction short story writer, having won awards for many of his stories. He was also an award-winning Canadian factual filmmaker with 150 films and television programs to his credit as a writer, director, producer or executive producer, including "Thirty-two Short Films About Glenn Gould" and "Noam Chomsky: Manufacturing Consent". Most significantly, he is the only writer to have won the Storyteller Magazine's annual Best Canadian Short Story two years in a row. Dennis' most recent manuscript - a fictional account based on the Franklin Expedition - is being considered for publication by Harper/Collins. I got to know Dennis first when I led some of the orientation sessions when he joined my college as a new full-time faculty member a year and a half ago. Then, we had further conversations, and discovered mutual friends and a shared taste for crime fiction, when I hosted a "webinar" a few months ago in which Dennis and four colleagues from the Centre for Creative Communications (a campus at my college) talked about how storytelling was important in various genres. His stories have appeared recently in the Ellery Queen Magazine and others --here's some of his accomplishments. Read one of these: Shortlisted, Best Short Story, CWC Arthur Ellis Awards 2004 for "Dead in the Water" (Storyteller, Summer 2003) Shortlisted, Best Short Story, CWC Arthur Ellis Awards 2005 for "Sounds of Silence" (Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, December 2004) Shortlisted, Best Short Story, CWC Arthur Ellis Awards 2005 for "Death of a Drystone Wall" (Storyteller, Summer 2005) Winner, Best Short Story, CWC Arthur Awards 2007 for "Fuzzy Wuzzy" (Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, August 2 I don't know if Dennis was a smoker (I suspect so, given his long association with journalism and TV production), but whether he was or not, please take this home: if you're still smoking tobacco, quit now. Kicking the addiction, however difficult, is less painful than dying too young, before you get to see your first novel in print. Enjoy the plots of Heaven, Dennis.
More from Newfoundland
Current mood: adventurous
Category: Art and Photography
It seems some of you liked my first set and said so -- since no good deed goes unpunished, here's another helping. This lonely tree posed near twilight. An historic lighthouse, on suitably craggy base.
Low tide, with dandelions. Low tide, with rock. Some startling botany -- the low, wind and saltwater-blasted junipers and other trees in the background that you find along the coast are called "tuckamore."
awake
breezy
artistic
amused
pirate
quixotic
sad
adventurous
