I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday week--not too much stressing, and so forth. I had a good one myself. =)
This'll be a bit of a hodge-podge post. Another wintry trail photo for you, in case you're still enjoying the mood of wintry festivities (like me). I did a bit of temperature adjustment with it, to make it a little more warm. I really miss walking in those woods with my college friends (the property and its lodge are owned by my now-old university, so I don't expect I'll really ever see them again).
Anyway. This week I'll be submitting two photos to Lensbaby. If chosen, they could get published in a Lensbaby book, which would be very exciting. I'll be submitting Atone and Give, Take. If there's a public vote, I'll be sure to let my beloved readers know. ;)
Lastly, I thought it would be nice to bring a highlight to some authors I enjoy. They are artists, after all, and as I like to feature my favorite artists, I decided they should be included. (Being a writer myself, this only seems fair.)
To do this, I'm not really going to give a review or synopsis, maybe just a comment or two. Mostly I'll just quote a passage. In writing, like how I view the world, I am drawn to the tiniest details, the images that glitter through the page, the moments and lines so perfect they can be tasted, touched, cupped in the hand like water--beheld for a second, but never captured. In reading, I am undone by these things, put back together again only by that final period. Like a dreamer turning over. When I edit, I try to push for these things, try to peel back the layers of ink so the language can breathe, leaving a wake of marks covering every line and margin. Perpetually desirous. Perpetually optimistic.
This first passage is taken from Anne Michaels' Fugitive Pieces, a novel I never would have picked up had it not been for one of my best friends at college. She'd been reading it herself, left it on the window sill while she left me alone for a moment. I read only the first paragraph, and I was captured. Not just hooked or intrigued--really, it's not generally the kind of story I go for--but Michaels' language was perfect, vivid. When I finally got my own copy, I read it with a pencil in hand and underlined the lines I loved most, the images I wanted to rub from the page and claim for my own. Looking through it now, 75% of the book must be underlined. It is haunting, mesmerizing, lyrical, and groping. Never have I read anything with such a sense of the dead.
I ran and fell, ran and fell. Then the river: so cold it felt sharp.
The river was the same blackness that was inside me; only the thin membrane of my skin kept me floating.
From the other bank, I watched darkness turn to purple-orange light above the town; the colour of flesh transforming to spirit. They flew up. The dead passed above me, weird haloes and arcs smothering the stars. The trees bent under their weight. I'd never been alone in the night forest, the wild bare branches were frozen snakes. The ground tilted and I didn't hold on. I strained to join them, to rise with them, to peel from the ground like paper ungluing at its edges. I know why we bury our dead and mark the place with stone, with the heaviest, most permanent thing we can think of: because the dead are everywhere but the ground. I stayed where I was. Clammy with cold, stuck to the ground. I begged: If I can't rise, then let me sink, sink into the forest floor like a seal into wax. -Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces
One more, just because it took me nearly an hour to select a passage. XP
I fill my pockets and my hands with stones and walk into the river until only my mouth and nose, pink lilies, skim the air. Muck dissolves from my skin and hair, and it's satisfying to see floating like foam on the surface the fat scum of lice from my clothes. I stand on the bottom, my boots sucked down by the mud, the current flowing around me, a cloak in a liquid wind. I don’t stay under long. Not only because of the cold, but because with my ears under the surface, I can’t hear. This is more frightening to me than darkness, and when I can’t stand the silence any longer, I slip out of my wet skin, into sound. -Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces
