People robbed of their past seem to make the most fervent picture takers...Everyone who lives in an industrialized society is obliged to gradually give up the past, but in certain countries, such as the United States and Japan, the break with the past has been particularly traumatic.

Photography has become one of the principal devices for experiencing something.

Taking photographs has set up a chronic voyeuristic relation to the world which levels the meaning of all events.

This, in turn, makes it easy to feel that any event, once underway, and whatever its moral character, should be allowed to complete itself.

~ Susan Sontag, On Photography
~ Photo, Me, Dried Mud in Corrales, New Mexico

As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure. Thus, photography develops in tandem with one of the most characteristic of modern activities: tourism.

A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it - by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir. Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.

~ Susan Sontag, On Photography

...Photography has become almost as widely practiced an amusement as sex and dancing - which means that, like every mass art form,photography is not practiced by most people as an art. It is mainly a social rite, a defense against anxiety, and a tool of power.

~ Susan Sontag, On Photography
~ Photo, Arthur Rothstein, Car in a Duststorm, 1930s depression era

Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are. Those occasions when the taking of photographs is relatively undiscriminating, promiscuous, or self-effacing do not lessen the didacticism of the whole enterprise. This very passivity - and ubiquity - of the photographic record is photography's 'message', and its aggression.

Images which idealize...are no less aggressive than work which makes a virtue of plainness...There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera.

~ Susan Sontag, On Photography
~ Photo, Equivalent series, Alfred Stieglitz

Mr. Vonnegut, We Hardly Knew Ye

I first became familiar with Kurt Vonnegut in high school, where I wrote an extensive in depth research paper on his work (as preparation, I read literally every one of his books published up to that point). I have only recently realized how profoundly Mr. Vonnegut and his work have influenced my life. Without any sort of conscious plan, some of his favorite authors have become mine (Mark Twain, Louis-Ferdinand Celine); some of his favorite books have become mine (Journey to the End of the Night - but not Huck Finn). For a long time, his philosophical and religious views became mine - and some still remain. I only discovered any of this recently, while reading one of his autobiographies titled, Palm Sunday. Now I know that this exceptional man has been a mentor and friend to me for over 20 years. And it all started with Slaughterhouse Five. Mr. Vonnegut, we miss you.

Here are some of the points from Palm Sunday I found most intriguing (paraphrased):

Writers are always awkward in the world.

The best solution for our modern society is tribal togetherness.

Cinderella is the Christian Creation Story revised.

In the Words of Buckminster Fuller

Pollution is nothing but the resources we are not harvesting.

If you have started from the bottom then you know by now that I am a complete geek - although I insist there should be a better word. If you are starting here, then, you know right away. Here's more ammo for you: I used to play Buckminster Fuller's world game in college - and I played it more than once. Apparently the houses pictured here were inspired by him. I've read people who think he was a genius and people who make fun of him because of his plucky goofiness and his conceptual 'dreamy' way of thinking. I wish more people had those kind of 'faults' paired with his kind of genius.

An Imaginary Life

In concept this is a very unusual book by David Malouf. The author takes complete liberty with what might have happened to the Roman poet OVID during his period of exile and unto his death. I don't recommend it to anyone who doesn't want to read pages (although it is short) of cerebral ponderings with little to no dialogue but, in a way, a lot of action. Here is some action about Fate:

We barely recognize the annunciation when it comes, declaring: Here is the life you have tried to throw away. Here is your second chance. Here is the destiny you have tried to shake off by inventing a hundred false roles, a hundred false identities for yourself. It will look at first like disaster, but is really good fortune in disguise, since Fate too knows how to follow your evasions through a hundred forms of its own. Now you will become at last the one you intended to be.