Archive for January, 2010

An impulsive campfire at Pencilhaven. Picture this from last night: a close dampness, later turning to a petulant drizzle; trying to keep the enthusiastic dog from wagging through the flames; a headlamp that was dying, dying, dying and; trying to read in this dying light from book of Roald Dahl short stories. I wrapped myself up in a blanket and tried to stay out of the wretched smoke. Oh, and some intriguing white wine from Argentina.

Every two months I am supposed to spend half a day in the St. Vincent Cancer Center with an IV in my (now scarred and elusive) vein while my circulatory system sucks down Remicade, a drug of a class called “biologics,” which, despite having been on the market for 11 years, is still in patent. Remicade costs $4450. Per dose. Add to that a sundry six or seven hundred bucks for the privilege of hanging out in the hospital for four hours, and—this is not a cheap situation.

I find that, though decorative, book jackets get in the way. They fall off. Or they get squashed or bent, which makes me all tense. Sometimes I do like to use a book jacket as an ersatz bookmark, but that’s its only functional purpose. Also, it gives me the clenches when the book I’m reading has a book jacket that is starting to migrate, get out of line, stick up above the edges of my book. So I remove them whilst reading. Am I just weird? How do you deal with book jackets?

Don’t worry: You won’t be bored. Thomas Mullen’s sophomore effort combines gee whiz action scenes with the historical pathos of 1930s Americana and deceptively straightforward characters in a novel that ends up feeling bigger than the sum of its parts. The story opens in 1934, the country at the pinnacle of its economic grief. The criminal brothers, Jason and Whit Fireson, have just died. They have woken up in a rural Indiana morgue, riddled with gunshots, with no memory of how they perished.

The more I start learning about Italy’s wines, the more I feel that regionalism and obscurity often defines the country’s offerings. That is, almost nothing is a single, consistent hallmark. Last week, at a “Wine 202″ class at Red Slate Wine, I tasted an Italian red so peculiar as to be compelling. And its existence makes me feel once again overwhelmed at the task I’ve set myself in 2010: learning about Italian wine.

Hellebore: not really a flower (technically they’re sepals, not petals), maybe the plant that killed Alexander the Great, but definitely in our yard, and decidedly greenish, pinkish and whitish. And it is colorful in January—a big plus.

I have launched a new feature on the site, for those of you who are willing to visit it—it won’t do anything useful for those who follow along using RSS. Individual image posts will now display in a bold, big template putting a much larger version of the photo on black. Enjoy! Here’s a nice photo of the pond in Laurelhurst Park to start things off.

As an at least nominally educated human, I know this much about ocean tides: They happen about twice a day, get real exciting in places like Nova Scotia and Mt. St. Michel France, and that they have to do with the moon. You want a low one when going razor clamming. You want to get out of the way for high ones. In pursuit of my cyclical madness, I decided to learn a bit more about tides.

Nabokov’s second novel, written in the late 1920′s in Germany, traces the torpid and illusory throes of a love triangle pitting young, mawkish Franz against his rich and boisterous uncle Dreyer. Their joint target: Dreyer’s unattainable, beautiful and manipulative wife. The entire book feels like an extreme closeup, showing us the pores and pustules of humans and their delusions.

I’m an awkward adolescent, coming to grips with the real power of digital imagery. It’s an amazing, scary time. I’m thrust into a world of possibilities, but sometimes in my naive enthusiasm I make the photographer’s equivalent of putting on too much makeup or trying to hide a zit with a hat. I’m asking for your patience and forgiveness. It’s like learning to drive, and sometimes I run into the garage door when I’m trying to park. Please don’t ground me. I will grow up, it will get better.