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by doug | September 15th, 2009 @ 5:43 pm
 I hope everybody has been enjoying the increased photo frequency over the past couple of weeks. It is a trend I hope will both continue and also even out over the days to come. My intention is to give writing and photography as equal time as possible – where, in theory, when I find one well of creativity dry the other will take up the slack. Everything here will still conform to my six major philosophical focal points, but a larger emphasis will be placed on ‘expression.’ That is, after all, the whole point here. Hopefully, even in the photographs, statements are (as is intended) being made re: the state of society, relationships, the self and so on.
Anyhow, I just wanted to address that. If I am letting my lens speak more than my pen these days, I hope some message is still being transmitted. And if it is also received? All the better.
More to come, everyone.
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(and come out to Sidewalk on the 25th-27th)
by doug | June 4th, 2009 @ 8:54 pm
Si pregunta el viajero si sostuvo
el tiempo, andando contra la distancia,
y vuelve adonde comenzó a llorar,
vuelve a gastar su dosis de yo mismo,
vuelve a irse con todos sus adioses.
- Neruda
Well, here it is. Finally. Looks pretty much like the old .net site, does it not? There are, however, some cosmetic changes at version 3.2 that will hopefully 1) be noticed and 2) make for a more pleasant reading experience. Most of the features are carryovers, of course. There’s still a link, for example, to my fotoblog at the top of the page. It has been re-christened the "foto gallery" and will be reserved for photographs I deem worthy of publication.
The "gallery" designation distinguishes the art from the non-art – the non-art being the newly unveiled daily snapshots section. These will be unaltered, un-photoshopped pics taken and posted on the same day. Every day. The inspiration for this new form of expression was this, admittedly depressing, set of polaroids. Read about it here, take a look at the set, be bummed out, and then appreciate the record this guy left behind. My snapshots will be digital (mostly from the little lens of my already-indispensible Blackberry) instead of instamatic, but the concept is intended to be the same.
At the risk of being labeled Captain Obvious over here, I will only point out that the other design changes – the single sidebar and condensed "links" sections, for example – have been made in hopes of creating and maintaining a cleaner, uncluttered site. It is still in flux, and will always be, but at least here there is a new launch pad to hurl my projectiles from. Anyway, we are officially open for business here at grammaticaster 3.2. Pop in occasionally and enjoy the confusing theme-jumble that is the running monologue of my internal existence.
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As an addendum, and on a totally unrelated note (as is par for the course), I wanted to share my latest musical obsession: Amanda Palmer and her band, the Dresden Dolls. I cannot stop listening to it. Her Who Killed Amanda Palmer? and the Dolls’ Yes, Virginia have been in constant, heavy rotation in the Volvo for the past three weeks. It is real. It is raw. It is emotional. It is sexy as hell. And "Ampersand" is the early favorite for my song-of-the-year. (Yeah, I know the album came out in ’08. Lay off.)
I think I discovered her about a week after the Dresden Dolls came to Birmingham. That, also, is par for the course.
Check out The Decemberists‘ Hazards of Love as well, if only for the brilliantly gruesome "The Rake’s Song" and the sweeping "The Wanting Comes In Waves." Excellent stuff. And a challenging listen, which is fine by me.
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Okay. I think that’s it for now. More to come, and more frequently. I swear.
by doug | November 14th, 2008 @ 11:19 pm
As it turns out, there are not that many thoughts to dump today – which I consider a good thing. The purpose of penning a weekly smattering of half-formed ideas was to give a forum to those subjects I had not had time to flesh out as stand-alone blog posts. So not feeling like I have unfleshed topics rolling around in my head must mean I have successfully purged via my daily postings. Works for me. But, since I did promise a dump, here are my random thoughts as of right now:
The reward for having to get up at the crack of dawn for the past two days to drive out to an audit in St. Clair County was that, after finishing up at the high school around 12:30 today, we got to go home. I spent the afternoon raking leaves into gigantic piles in the front and back yards. Tomorrow – the bagging begins.
And now I sit, relaxed, washed, rested, waiting for the wife to come home so we can go out to my favorite casual restaurant in Birmingham – Taj India. I think I could eat Indian cuisine every night of the week and never get tired of it. Tonight I want the curry to burn the eyes out of my skull.
There are what I hope are interesting blog posts to come – a new dream journal from this morning’s episode involving tea bags and old houses, a new recipe (with pictures) of a fish dish I am very excited about, a daily diary of what I will be doing with myself when my wife is in Phoenix all next week, more death, more religion, more poetry, more photography, and more politics.
Tomorrow is football day. Roll Tide!
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UPDATE: Taj was frigging amazing, as usual. Alas, my eyes are unscorched. Maybe next time.
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UPDATE: We just broke down and watched Little Miss Sunshine – the NetFlix movie we’ve had at our house for at least two months. I am happy to report that it was very funny. I feel bad that we waited so long to watch the damn thing. Now the fun part is seeing what the heck the next movie in our queue is.
I’m a consumer whore. Yay!
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UPDATE: I took the dog out a few minutes ago, and the wind and rain have combined to form some kind of unstoppable tree-de-leafing force. I am looking out the window. It is raining leaves. F#*k.
by doug | October 27th, 2008 @ 9:42 pm
I used to write at least a poem a day, and at my most prolific, I would probably write five to ten. Not that they were any good, mind you. Those bolts of inspiration hit at random intervals, and, looking back, even the pieces I thought were thoughtful and poignant at the time often look linguistically, structurally and intellectually flawed and self-absorbed now. That case was well-illustrated last night when, as I was attempting to find a good poem from 8-10 years ago to post here, I could not find a single one that was not utterly cringe-worthy.
Even so, as I have written before, and no matter how unfocused the final product may have been at times, I reflect on those fifteen or so years as bursting with flurries of creative energy. It wasn’t that I was happier then – in fact, reading through those notebooks last night, I was pretty much wallowing in self-pity most of the time… like I was emo before emo existed (preemo?). I wasn’t happier, but I was somehow more fulfilled. I felt more like a complete person. Now, ever since I ended my prolonged collegiate tour of duty and joined the working world, I cannot seem to recapture that insatiable urge to express myself in verse.
The blogging is having its desired effect in that regard, as I feel like I am slowly regaining my confidence as a wordsmith. One of Natalie Goldberg’s commandments (from the Bible of creative writing – Writing Down the Bones – and I am sure she would abhor my calling it a commandment) is to write every day. The more you write, the more confident you get – the more you hone your craft. But the blog is more of a journal… it is not quite artistry. (Take a gander at this fantastic essay on the what and why of blogging from The Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan.) I still haven’t gotten back in the groove of writing art. This is not poetry, it is only expression.
And that is why I am taking so much pleasure in my photoblog (and I would like to thank my gentle commenter, ancient scribe extraordinaire, and distinguished mayor of Everville, for making the suggestion – you are about to cost me a lot of money, my friend). I have always enjoyed taking photographs, but I never thought of my little pictures as art. Mostly they were hastily and cheaply taken snapshots of vacations, friends and family outings. But as I have been pouring over some of my more recent photos, judging their blogworthiness, retouching and posting them over the past couple of weeks, I have come to realize that I am generally performing the same function with photography as I am with poetry. Both media, for me, are methods of preserving moments in time.
I am sure we could spend many a post psychoanalyzing my need to preserve these memories. It probably involves my fears of loss, change, and death. Should we leave that for another time? I think we shall. My point here is not a gloomy one, after all. I am excited to be discovering these new outlets for my self-expression. I am looking into getting myself a real camera and setting up a DeviantART site where fellow artists can provide feedback and view full-size images of my work. I also bought a photography book. Yeah. This will be a more expensive hobby than blogging and poetry. Ah, well. It isn’t like I have anything else to do.
[That ominous sound you hear is the IRS laughing at my reckless naïveté.]
I hope you will enjoy the pictures, at any rate.
by doug | October 7th, 2008 @ 4:23 pm
I am not a photographer. I have not taken a class. I have not read any books. I have a simple little point & shoot digital camera that I occasionally use to snap pictures of things. Keeping that in mind, please feel free to browse over to my photoblog. You will notice the new link at the top of the page. There are a whopping two (2) photographs there now, but I intend to upload more as I have time. That blog, like this one, should be considered to be in a constant state of evolution.
Also, Miles wants me to inform you that he has added pictures to his page too.
by doug | October 3rd, 2008 @ 10:58 am
I think a week-in-review post might be in order. Oftentimes I find myself with an overabundance of potential blog topics and no time to flesh out all of those ideas into respectable articles. So, as this is, indeed, a receptacle – here is this week’s mental purge.
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Politics:
There is a lot going on this week – with the economic crisis topping the list. Although you will undoubtedly see political topics covered here, I must reiterate that I do not for one second believe that I possess either the depth or breadth of knowledge necessary to be a purely political blogger. I admire the policy wonks and full-time watchdogs, but I cannot be one of them. From time to time I will write a little something and even cross-post it for my ideological soulmates over at Kos, but the overarching purpose of this site is not to push a political agenda.
That being said, the most interesting electoral development (in my opinion) is illustrated by this newly-updated map. I give you this week’s number one reason why McCain should really not start cleaning out his Senate office desk just yet:
The McCain strategy has always included the assumption that Florida was safe. The Obama camp, meanwhile, was going forward almost as if they were conceding the state to the Republicans (being, demographically, an inherently hard sell for the Obama campaign). The conventional wisdom has been that, with the strong possibilities of pickups in the West and Midwest, they didn’t need Florida to win. If Florida continues to trend in this direction, there is no chance that McCain will pull the upset. It is a dagger to the heart. Without Florida, this is all but over for John Sidney, my friends.
The other big happening was last night’s vice presidential debate. Two debates have now gone by without me offering much in the way of commentary. Truthfully, I don’t feel I should have to. To all my conservative readers: I will not presume I have the ability to change your minds. But I urge you to shut out the political punditry – from the left and from the right, from Fox News and MSNBC, from Rush, Sean and Bill and from Keith, Rachel and Andrew. If you haven’t watched the debates, watch them like this – uncluttered by propaganda. These are the full CSPAN feeds from the first two debates (I’ll post the other two as well).
Make up your own minds – don’t let other people tell you what your opinion is. If that leads you to a decision that is different from mine, I have nothing but respect for it.
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Local:
Steve Chiotakis just signed off for the last time on WBHM. He’s off to Los Angeles to host Marketplace Morning Edition. So long and good luck. We will miss you here.
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Happy Birthday, Mom!
We are taking her to my favorite restaurant tonight – the Hot & Hot Fish Club. I still need to get her a present. A couple of her friends gave her an iPhone. How can I compete with that?
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State of the Blog:
Tomorrow will mark one whole month since I started this unwieldy thing. How is it going? For one thing, I never get the feeling of being finished with it. There is always some element that could stand to be tweaked. There is always a topic that I intend to expound upon (right now I’m planning a) a book review, b) a critique of Capitalism, c) an exploration of the psychology of death and dying, and d) what will most likely be a controversial theological discussion… these projects are in extremely early stages of development). As much as I want this blog to be a space for me to simply write freely and openly, I often seem to be more concerned with the technical side of things – which widgets should be in my sidebar, should my background be dark or light, what color should my hyperlinks be, and on and on. It is fun to customize the site and get it looking and working exactly the way I want it to, don’t get me wrong. But I look forward to getting to a place where I can just sign in, write a post, send it on its way, and sign off. That will most likely never happen. I am too much of a perfectionist (and a technophile, apparently).
Some blog design initiatives I am mulling over:
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adding a photo gallery
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polishing up the different pages (and adding more)
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including some interactive polls
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creating a resolution-tracking page (this would follow my progress toward various personal goals I have set for myself)
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learning how to use WordPress’s custom fields
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cleaning up the category and tag lists
Speaking of categories, let me clarify something I’m not sure if people are wondering about or not: the use of foreign languages. It is just intended to be a quirky nod to my love of words. Linguistics is a subject that fascinates me. My use of German, Dutch, French and Italian is simply for my own amusement. There may even be some made-up foreign words (“grammaticastung” for instance, does not mean anything). Just ignore it.
Finally, I’ve always missed the old social networking conventions like the current mood, books I’m reading, music I’m listening to, etc., even though they seem a little trite and overdone now. So I have decided to use the weekly round-up to insert that element back into my blog, rather than cluttering the site up by having them appear at the end of every post. So…
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Currently reading:
The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall.
People who follow me on GoodReads or social networking sites will know that I’ve had this on my “currently reading” list for a month. Like so many other tasks, development of this blog has pushed reading further down the to-do list than I’d intended, but the plan now is to start up again (from the beginning, in this case).
I’d only gotten a few chapters into it, so answers to the “what is it about?” question will be very shallow. The protagonist is a guy with amnesia whose former life is slowly being revealed to him. Why does his brain wipe everything out and start over (it has happened eleven times)? How did his fiancé die? How much is his doctor keeping from him? What is in that locked room in his house? Good stuff so far. A full review should be expected.
I need to read more. It has become apparent over the years that reading good literature makes my own writing that much better.
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Geeky Diversion of the Week:
StumbleUpon. The cure-all for internet boredom. Just click the “stumble” button and the service randomly directs you to a site it thinks you would like – based on your own ratings and the ratings of people who share your indicated interests. I love this and I use it all the time. I have already found enough interesting websites to, if nothing else, keep the “geeky diversion of the week” section full for weeks to come.
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That’s it. The slate is a little cleaner. We go on from here.
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