“…meditating over an extended period of time on a subject you consider to be important”

17 June 2019

Don’t leave writing to writers. Don’t delegate your area of interest and knowledge to people with stronger rhetorical resources. You’ll find your voice as you make your way. There is, however, one thing to learn from writers that non-writers don’t always understand. Most writers don’t write to express what they think. They write to figure out what they think. Writing is a process of discovery. Blogging is an essential tool toward meditating over an extended period of time on a subject you consider to be important.

Marc Weidenbaum on the value of straight-up blogging, in a place you own yourself. All of this. I’ve been quiet here – less quiet at my work site – but not absent, and knowing that this is mine, and that slowly, what I’m thinking about was always present – even in the Pinboard links – has value.

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  • gilest.org: Black and white and RSS
    "Black and white and RSS is an RSS feed of black and white photographs, updating throughout June 2019. There is no associated website. You can only see the photos if you use an RSS feed reader and subscribe to the feed." Subscribed.
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Boots

20 April 2019

IMG 20190331 105528

I hadn’t properly cleaned my boots last time I put them away.

When I unbagged them and sat on the back of the car in the Lakes, a few weeks ago, they still had mud on them from a previous walk. Mud, from snow melting into earth, and white chalk, from the North Downs.

And now, that mud and chalk was translated a few hundred miles north, to be trodden into ground near Derwent Water.

A smile on the inside: how much mud and soil and who knows what else have I moved around the county, mixing tiny samples from one place into another?

My last pair of boots had taken me up hills in France, Cyprus, California, Australia. I didn’t clean the Australian soil off them for a few weeks after I returned. I couldn’t bring myself to do it; it was a final memento of a huge trip, a little piece of something alien, brought all the way home. I finally replaced those grey synthetic boots with these leather ones around 2016, when the old pair were just no longer waterproof. I was sad to do so; they had so many travels trodden into their soles; the new ones, stiff and clean, didn’t feel like they could match up.

But now, a few years later, these ones have really started to get their miles in, slowly – and highly inefficiently – redistributing soil and dirt around the world.

They’ll get a proper clean and wax in due course. In the meantime, I still like the tingle of all the previous journeys I see in them in moments like this.

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From the ready room to the air in a paragraph break.

26 March 2019

How about this for writing, from James Salter’s The Hunters, his 1956 novel about fighter pilots in the Korean war. Cleve is an Air Force captain; he’s taking off on his first mission from his new posting.

Cleve dressed himself slowly to reduce the time he would have to spend standing around and taking little part in the talk. He was not fully at ease. It was still like being a guest at a family reunion, with all the unfamiliar references. He felt relieved when finally they rode out to their ships.

Then it was intoxicating. The smooth takeoff, and the free feeling of having the world drop away. Soon after leaving the ground, they were crossing patches of stratus that lay in the valleys as heavy and white as glaciers. North for the fifth time. It was still all adventure, as exciting as love, as frightening. Cleve rejoiced in it.

Salter goes from the ready room to flight inside a paragraph break. And how he describes it! His flying descriptions do become slightly more ‘technical’, in the sense of defining what is happening, when combat occurs, but he’s almost completely uninterested in the technical interactions of flying. He wants to show intent – what Cleve is doing, not what his plane is doing. (His plane, incidentally, is an F-86 Sabre, though it will only ever be referred to as a ‘ship’ throughout the novel, and the MiG-15s of the North Koreans will be reduced to nothing but ‘MIGs’.)

Beautiful; not quite ‘spare’, but stripped down to only that which is necessary to tell the story, about how a man feels in the air. The rest of the book is continuing to be as good.

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