Jenny Spadafora

[Click on the grid to see a larger version, or click on these links to see larger versions of individual photos: 1. snowy (8/365), 2. snow day, again (32/365), 3. starling (62/365), 4. gray day (90/365), 5. prowling (150/365), 6. indigo and orange, 7. evening, maverick square (195/365), 8. stacked (223/365), 9. electric, 10. fall, high line (273/365), 11. windows, 12. eastie lights ]

Though at times I was not sure I would, I did complete a 365 project this year. I’m glad I did; many of these pictures are from that project.

I used my trusty Canon 40D, my android camera phone, and my new crush the Fujifilm X100 to take these pictures. Most of them were taken in my neighborhood and a few were taken on really good vacation trips. (Repeat locations from last year: Rockport and NYC.) Conspicuously absent are photos taken looking out a plane window: I spent way, way too much time traveling earlier in 2011 and those mostly aren’t the parts that made me happiest.

I’m not sure what photo projects I’ll find myself working on this year, but I believe there will be projects. I love spending time looking and photographing, and I’m too much of a geek not to turn that into a project or two.

Inspired by the The Millions Year in Reading series, I decided to post my favorite reads of the year. Narrowing it down to just a few, here are the books I enjoyed most in 2011 year:

Kevin Brockmeier’s The Illumination has such a compelling idea as its central premise that I kept thinking about it, long after I finished reading the book. What would happen if our injuries, our illness, our pain started to glow? How would the world be different (would it?) with that sort of shining?

Catherynne M. Valente’s Palimpsest is about obsession, discovery, longing, dreams, and sex. Valente’s imagination is extraordinary: a lesser writer would never get to you to believe in what she can see.

Kevin Wilson’s The Family Fang is one of the funniest stories about one of the most fucked up families you’ll ever read. Funny as in haha, as in something off, as in weird: the Fangs are all kinds of funny. The Fangs are performance artists who raised two children (as props? as performance?), so what does it mean, now that they are grown?

Wolf Erlbruch’s Duck, Death and the Tulip is an unusual children’s book. It’s about death (not a common topic for picture books) and it isn’t preachy, sugarcoated, or evasive. The quiet illustrations are beautiful, evoking the right balance of sadness and acceptance. This books serves as a reminder that picture books are an art form.

But speaking of art, we are really talking about a cultural shift, and it is art that is so important when you want to change a culture. We doctors can talk pathology and disease forever, but what really causes change is when art — the narrative, the music, and the things that add value and joy to our lives — is directed in a way that is congruent with what’s healthier for us. That’s where we need to be going.

I first read and bookmarked Our Ailing Communities five years ago. Going through some older digital files I rediscovered it. As the spirit seems aligned with the ongoing #Occupy protests, I thought I’d share it.

I’m not working on my really needs to be updated portfolio site. I’m not catching up on book reviews, even though I owe one for LibraryThing Early Reviewers and I read another novel I think was amazing (Kevin Brockmeier’s The Illumination).

I am not taking new photos, even though I don’t have my shot of the day for my 365 project yet. I am also not posting the last few days of shots that I did take with the vignette app on my android phone. Still haven’t gotten around to vacuuming the living room (which I picked up yesterday) or putting away the clean laundry.

For a little while, it looked like I was going to take a nap on the couch, but now I don’t know. There are two new voice mail messages for me to listen to. There’s another room to pick up; there are stacks of reading material. There’s the personal email I haven’t responded to yet, and the work email I am trying not to think about. 

It is a Sunday afternoon, the first in two weeks I haven’t been on a plane during, and instead of doing any of those things that are a supposedly good use of my time, I’m lounging around, pecking this out on my iPad.

Tomorrow will be my last day at home until Friday evening, and I am trying not to think about that. 

I keep coming back to something in Charlotte Joko Beck’s Everyday Zen, where she is talking about what practice is:

Our interest in reality is extremely low. No, we want to think. We want to worry through all of our preoccupations. We want to figure life out. And so before we know it we’ve forgotten all about this moment, and we’ve drifted off not thinking about something…

Sometimes, if I can do it, just sitting is the right thing to do.

I haven’t thrown up or passed out in two years of Bikram yoga classes.

Though there have been fewer than a dozen instances when I really thought I might pass out (so I had to sit down before I fell over) or be sick (so I held still and waited for it to pass), I stubbornly keep thinking it might happen.

Today was the first warm day in a long time, and it was ridiculously humid out. These conditions make it harder for the yoga room to be optimum humidity (I think it is 40%) and temperature (105 degrees). The room is optimized for the practice, not practitioner comfort — which means plenty of opportunities for my sneaky brain to lie to me about it what is going on.

When I find myself wondering if I am going to pass out or throw up, I know I’m probably not, because it would have happened already. What’s more likely is that I’m tired, I’m unfocused, I’m uncomfortable–in other words, I’m dwelling on how I feel.

Today I realized that my rough class was really an indicator of my progress.

Even though I have been practicing for awhile, there are still lots of things I can’t do. I can’t get my forehead to touch all the improbable things the instructors tell me to touch it to, and if you saw my attempt at triangle you’d never in a million years figure out that was the name of the posture. When I started, I could do only two basic things: stay in the room for the whole ninety minutes (harder than it sounds, when your brain is screaming at you to leave because it is so unreasonably fucking hot) and not cry (also harder than it sounds, because not being able to do any of the postures and feeling like crap is pretty demoralizing).

Now I can hold my arms over my head for the opening sequence, and I can hold them out straight for all three parts of awkward. I can touch my forehead to the floor in one posture, and to my knee in a couple of others. My camel is pretty good. Most of the time, I can manage to be still between the postures, like the instructors are always reminding us to be. Most of the time, I can follow the directions and remember that 100% right effort brings 100% benefit, even if my forehead isn’t where it’s supposed to be. When I do something new (like finally getting my forehead to knee) or do something well, it feels really good.

When I don’t do very well, it doesn’t feel so good. Like today: first set of triangle (that’s right, in Bikram class you do everything not once, but twice) I managed to keep my legs in sort of the right position, but the whole elbow in front of knee, other arm shooting up in the air make a triangle thing was just not happening. The instructor asked me if I had something going on with my hips — sometimes people don’t do what they usually do because of an illness or injury — and I said no. I said I wasn’t having my best day.

I forget exactly what he said in response, but it was something to the effect of making our best effort was important, that bringing that energy was needed, and it was good for the whole class.

He was right. I tried harder on the second set (though I still didn’t look like a triangle).

Here’s the evidence of my progress: I didn’t feel any resentment, anger, or shame when he called me out. (That wasn’t his intention, I’m sure it never is, but that doesn’t stop my sneaky brain from taking things that way.) Instead, I took it as I think it was intended: a chance for me to pause, refocus, consider what I was doing, and ask myself honestly if I was doing the best I could be doing at that moment.

I think accepting where I am in the moment — instead of reacting with shame or anger — will lead to even more progress.

If only it wasn’t so damn hot.

I was reading an article on Jonathan Ives (How did a British polytechnic graduate become the design genius behind £200billion Apple?) which mentioned he went to Japan to see one of the leading makers of samurai swords and spent hours in a sweets factory for inspiration.

For some reason, this reminded me of Paul Isakson‘s presentation How to Wander With Purpose:

Viewing the presentation again, the connection wasn’t as immediately clear as it initially felt in my head. So I decided I should write this post, in hopes of finding clarification (and having what I’m learning stick).

I think it has to do with the freedom to make non-obvious connections. The time and space and openness to learn from outside your immediate sphere is not something many employers provide, and it can be hard to find the energy to do completely on your own. That doesn’t make it less vital. I’m lucky in that I have a job where I’m expected/provoked/encouraged to open my mind and see where things may go. That means I can do a lot of this “for work” and that gives me the energy to do it not for work. Another thing I’m realizing yet again is that for work/not work isn’t a distinction that always makes sense for me.

That’s ok. I’m wandering.

People don’t read. Wrong.

That’s what I say to myself every time I hear one of the “but people don’t read” arguments. People do. Sure, there is the tl;dr crowd, but the rest of us? We use Instapaper if we don’t have the time to finish, or pinboard, or some other bookmarking service. And most of the time, we really do go back and read the thing. My Instapaper account has a far shorter list of articles waiting for me than I have unread books in the house.

Lately I’m noticing a resurgence of reading online. I’m not sure what has sparked it. A fascination with a new form factor is no doubt part of the equation — using Flipboard makes a lot of web content more fun to read because it is an iPad app. It’s also more enjoyable because it is focused on the reading experience in a way that far too many websites are not.

One way to make “people don’t read” more accurate is to make it as difficult as possible for someone to read something on your site. First, shrink the font to an impossible to read at arms-length size. Then chop up content into pages, forcing a new page to load every two hundred words or so, so you can increase the number of page views where you serve up ads. Yes, make sure to liberally apply advertising: big obnoxious animated ads, ads that pop a box covering the content people came to see, little text ads sandwiched in between bits of real content, and my new favorite, ads that pop up in boxes when someone hovers over a link. Keep the real content to between two-thirds and one-half of the screen real estate. People won’t read if you make the experience terrible.

So there are all these new methods to make it less terrible, that make it fun, like Flipboard. Like Readability, which not only offers a vastly improved reading experience, but goes so far as to offer a different (and in my mind, more credible than most advertising) model for generating revenue from content published online.

There are so many tools to publish online — clearly we are all writers, of a sort — and yet I’m encouraged every time I see a new tool that makes it easy for people to publish on the web. Things like Posterous, which mainly relies on email to post stuff, meaning it’s accessible to anyone with an email account. Things like Pen, which is designed to let you publish “beautiful text based pages in seconds and share them with the world”.

Because the world that reads.

“This is the power of story, my friends — to ask us questions we can never answer right; to remind us of what we cannot bear to remember, to teach us what we cannot bear to know, and to make us fucking laugh right before we cry. To make us like it. To make us want to go back to the story well and do it all again.”

I am grateful Kelley Eskridge chooses to share so much on her blog.

Krista’s post inspired me to take a look at last year in photos. This is what 2010 looked like:

[Click on the grid to see a larger version, or click through to the individual images: 1. the awesomeness of the shelves, 2. grasp, 3. sunspots, 4. purple tulips, 5. illuminations, epcot, 6. somewhere over the midwest, 7. city lights #1, 8. summer, 9. tenth avenue, 10. the dishes, 11. soapboxes and matchbooks, 12. fireworks]

I didn’t shoot as much as I wanted to, but I still found time to play around with a wide-angle lens, a scanner, a macro, my android phonecam, and a lensbaby as well as my usual nifty fifty. (I tested out some of the impossible project polaroid film too, but didn’t like any of the results well enough pick them to represent a month.)

This year, I’m planning a few photo projects, so I will be spending more time on photography. It makes me happy.

by Douglas Coupland
ISBN: 9781935633167

I wanted to read this book because I thought Coupland (Generation X, Microserfs) would be the perfect person to channel McLuhan. Turns out he probably is, but that isn’t as entertaining or enlightening as I thought it would be.

Not that this is a bad book, it isn’t. Because Coupland is Coupland, this isn’t a straightforward biography. He imagines his way into McLuhan’s life and work, makes conjectures based on psychology, neuroscience, and a shared Canadian sense of space. He sprinkles zippy aphoristic McLuhan quotes throughout, such as:

A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.

Art is anything you can get away with.

Innumerable confusions and a feeling of profound despair invariably emerge in periods of great technological and cultural transitions.

We shape our tools, and afterwards our tools shape us.

It’s a service, really, pulling out these bits from McLuhan’s text, as apparently he is mostly unreadable. In other words, McLuhan’s writing is dense, obtuse, and seemingly unconcerned with clear narrative: it’s the sort of thing that academics and lawyers specialize in. In a footnote, Coupland concedes that “there exists little self-apprehended grasp of the man’s thinking” and compares reading him to visiting Antarctica, as you “have to have time, patience, endurance, means, and stubbornness to do so”.

This caused me to reflect on my time in graduate school theory seminars where discussion was frequently fueled by bullshit: it must be profound because I don’t really understand it, and I can’t admit I don’t understand it so I’ll insist on its profundity. My personal belief that you aren’t being revolutionary if only ten people sitting around a seminar table can understand you was not so popular in the English department. I probably would have been entertained at the first of McLuhan’s lectures, and hated the rest.

Wired lists McLuhan as a patron saint; his ground-breaking media theorizing is often — incorrectly — conflated with support of new technologies. He was intellectually ambitious, quite conservative, and it is possible that brain damage from strokes explains more about some of his later behavior and work than any textual analysis could.

If you think you should read McLuhan and haven’t, you are probably the intended audience for this book. If you’ve read him and wondered what the giant fuss is, perhaps this will provide context that gives meaning to the fuss. That McLuhan was creating a theory of media was new and different and important at one point, even if what he was doing wasn’t always obvious or understandable.

by Daniel Orozco
ISBN: 9780865478534

The title story in this collection is darkly funny and will be recognized as such by anyone who has spent time in cubeville. I liked this story the most.

It isn’t that everything was a let down after reading the first story. I was drawn to the workers in “The Bridge”, disturbed by the narrator in “I Run Every Day” and appreciated the un- and intentional humor in “Officers Weep”. “Somoza’s Dream” is by far the longest story in the book, and in it Orozco shows what he can do with shifting perspective, but it didn’t get to me the way some of the others did. Presidente in Exile’s story wasn’t as compelling to me as the bridge painter’s, or the warehouse worker’s, or the temp’s. Orozco has a knack for identifying grinding foolishness in the modern workplace.

I’ll be curious to see what else Orozco writes.

by Ransom Riggs
ISBN: 9781594744761

The weird vintage photographs on the book cover drew me in. They are compellingly weird: whole-head masks and a coiled tube; a sad, jacketed boy in a bunny costume, and an eerily doubled reflection among others. If you don’t think these photos sound interesting, you can safely skip this book and the rest of this post. If you do think it sounds interesting, you’re probably wondering if it is as good as it seems.

The story is good — there are more strange photographs, and secrets, and special abilities. If this sounds at all familiar, it must be because you’ve read some of the most popular young adult titles ever: not just Harry Potter, but Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, too. And it appears it will be the first in a series, as a bidding war for the movie rights resulted in the announcement of a sequel. (I believe the book is nearly always better, though if Riggs gets his wish and Tilda Swinton plays Miss Peregrine, I will definitely go see it in the theater.)

So it is a good story. I want to say the book is great, but the writing falls a bit short of the magic I’d want to feel to say it was great. (By way of comparison, I thought Catherynne M. Valente’s The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making had that magic.) If you want a good story, are intrigued by monsters, or are curious to see how a writer weaves a story from found artifacts (the photographs are all real vintage images) you’d probably like this.

by Miranda July
ISBN: 9781936365012

This book is what happened as a result of July’s struggling to finish the screenplay for what would become her second movie, The Future. Of the screenplay, she tells us:

Again and again it was respectfully suggested to me that I cut Paw-Paw’s monologue. But I couldn’t kill him twice, and I thought his voice might be the distressing, ridiculous, problematic soul of what I was trying to make. Not that my conviction protected me; it’s always embarrassing to pin a tail onto thin air, nowhere near the donkey It might be wrong, it sure looks like it is — but then again, maybe the donkey’s in the wrong place, or there are two donkeys, and the tail just got there first.

I suspect July is the kind of artist you either really like, or she bugs the shit out of you. Reasons she may bug you: she seems to get away with doing whatever she wants; she does more than one kind of thing (writing, directing, creating art installations); she creates characters who could use a good proverbial smack upside the head at times; she might be considered twee; the Paw-Paw mentioned above is a cat.

I like her. I loved her short story collection No one belongs here more than you. This book, while all about stories, isn’t fiction. July is telling the story of being stuck in one creative pursuit and what emerges are many other stories, often of people being somehow stuck in their lives.

She and her assistant and a photographer go meet people who are selling things in the PennySaver: these are the stories she hears as a result. The PennySaver is the poor internet-less person’s Craigslist. Through her, we meet people selling old blowdryers, photo albums, leather jackets, tadpoles. They are sad, strange, funny, a bit repulsive, heartbreaking. July reveals what she is really looking for, by finding them:

All I ever really want to know is how other people are making it through life — where do they put their body, hour by hour, and how do they cope inside of it.

I think this is the reason I like Miranda July. I want to know the same thing.