Reading: Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

It seems to me that the themes of science fiction have been moving into works that would be considered literary fiction and outside the genre of SciFi. While some SciFi, like the work of Ursula Le Guin, had literary aspiration but was seen as part of the Genre, I think the separation now is mostly one drawn by publishers and bookstores as to where to shelve or categorize certain books.

Certainly, if Klara and the Sun hadn’t been written by the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Kazuo Ishiguro, it would very comfortably find its place on the SciFi shelf. I’ve never read any of his books before, so can’t comment on how it fits stylistically with previous work. My only point of reference in Japanese fiction is Murakami, who’ve I read for many years. There’s certainly some similarity in having a relatively simple narrative line with a single character point of view and a straightforward story that moves directly from inception to conclusion.

I’m reminded once again of the idea that the power of fiction is to relate ideas that can’t be simply put into words. Instead, the story evokes themes where characters and situations provoke questions as we witness the unfolding story. Here, the book is narrated by Klara, an Artificial Friend who is a self aware and independently acting android, manufactured to be a child’s companion. Having been manufactured and gifted with an interior life, Klara has aspirations. Her attempts at fulfillment provide a view into the dreams and disappointments of the family that acquires her. It’s a touching story, made poignant by the nature of the limitations of it’s narrator.

Reading: The Creative Act: A Way of Being

The Creative Act: A Way of Being by music producer Rick Rubin seems to be one of those books that brings out strong reactions in readers, good and bad. I’m on the very positive side of the argument and it was a great read for me. If you have a fear of books that seem on the surface like obvious, trivial recitations of cliche, it either may not be for you or just require some patience to get below the surface into the substance of the book.

I think that it’s fitting that a book providing advice to those who seek to create is itself a creative act. In Novelist as Vocation, the novelist Haruki Murakami asserts that to be a novelist you can’t be too smart. Or at least you can’t have crisp, well defined ideas to express. Because if you knew what you wanted to say, you’d write it in an essay as I’m doing right now. The novelist has to bring the reader on a journey of discovery, a journey the novelist travelled in the creation of the fiction. So too Rubin has an idea of what constitutes the right way of being to foster creation, but doesn’t have it down to just a few rules. So the book comes at the ideas obliquely over and over.

Rubin’s findings align with my own experience. Creation is a process and the audience is just the creator. It’s nice when others can also experience the work and take the journey, but the creative act belongs to the artist. It’s what keeps me creating here- photography, philosophy, book reviews, what have you. It’s the result of my process of discovery.

Rubin rightly starts out by asserting we are all creators in one way or another. Making this a worthwhile read for those who create at work, in their family or dabble in the arts.

The book probably doesn’t lend itself to a second reading and note taking. I think it will be more valuable to dip into it from time to time, seeking relevance in its own time.

Reading: Joe Country by Mick Herron

Trying to keep up with my notes on books as I finish reading them. I’m alternating more literary fiction, generally with a SciFi, AI angle with the Slow Horses series by Mick Herron. Joe Country is the 6th book in the series. As of now, there are 8, the most recent published in 2022. The plan is to finish these and then try another series. The Gray Man series looks interesting and has been recommended by Warren Ellis, so I’ve got the first book in the queue.

The Slow Horses books can be a bit formulaic, where we’re all confused about what’s really going on until the action picks up in the second half of each book. With the Cold War over and terrorism an overused threat, Herron tends to make bad actors out of politicians, old spies and simple criminals, stirring them together in badly conceived plots. The Slow Horses, MI5 outcasts, always manage to solve the crime, but inelegantly in a way that never would permit their real redemption and return to the main game. Their boss, Jackson Lamb, is great literary creation- brought to life in the AppleTV series by Gary Oldman.

Reading: Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr

One of the older posts here that continues to get some hits is a bit of a meditation on the photographer Eliot Porter, who was an influential early color landscape photographer who is now, I fear, largely forgotten, even though he was an important influence on landscape photographers and my own approach to the intimate view.

I had no answer at the time, but after finishing Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr, I felt like maybe I had a bit of insight into why some artists, while influential, are forgotten while others, influential or not, continue to be relevant. Cloud Cuckoo Land is very much a work of contemporary fiction. It is generally somewhat fantastic in its settings, plot and characters- shifting in time and space from ancient Greece to the fall of Constantinople to modern day and a future time, all tied together through the device of the Ancient Greek manuscript, Cloud Cuckoo Land. Most fiction today shifts scene and character point of view. Or makes narrative construction a central part of the experience in one way or another.

For some reason, it brought to mind James Joyce’s Ulysses, which I reread last year, and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, which I reread a few years ago, both influential books of my youth. But it seems to me that while Joyce is still celebrated and read, Pynchon is becoming another forgotten artist who was influential, but now seeming less interesting to read.

Perhaps one reason why artists like Porter and Pynchon fade is that those they influence, surpass them in the very areas in which they innovated. It’s clear that most landscape images taken by YouTube photographer influencers and now much better images than those Porter took. We have better capture methods, better exposure control and better post-processing tools than Porter had. On the other hand, I don’t think anyone has created the kind of majestic monochrome images that Ansel Adams made, keeping his work relevant for us. Sometimes doing it first means doing it so well that those that follow seem to be imitating. Others are surpassed by those that come after and so are forgotten as they were innovative and influential, but ultimately not of a quality that lasts.

Cloud Cuckoo Land seemed to me to take the tools of modern fiction and use them in a fun, somewhat hopeful way. The basic text is an absurd Greek fantasy of no great merit and the stories told that are spun from it similarly are comedies of no particular great merit. Yet the whole is a nice meditation on literature, stories, comedy and, perhaps best of all, is a compelling fun read.

I won’t judge it for the ages. That will depend on those that follow us.

Wabi-Sabi Intention

This photo is one extreme of the casual approach, approaching the almost arbitrary selection of content. I’m showing this just to make a point about what I’m thinking about this year in creating photographs. My instinct is that this is just a bit too far, but with just some structure it would work. It lacks gesture which is enough of a subject for an image.

My contribution to working in public.

Reading: Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy

I’ve tagged this as reading, but was actually an audiobook listen, my first in some time. I found myself looking around for podcasts and being a bit frustrated, I opened the Libby app and borrowed Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy just because it was available and near the top of the list. I otherwise had no intention of reading the book.

It works great as an audio book, being written as a dialog between a psychiatrist and a patient. So to me it’s one of those trick books where the action takes place in a single setting, largely in the minds of the characters via speech. It’s subject is math, the nature of reality with a strong emotional charge. Mostly the math and physics seem to be pretty well represented. Some other subjects not so well, but par for the course really.

An interesting contrast with The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler which I recently read, as both are vehicles to discuss our response to scientific advances, whether math, artificial intelligence or neuroscience. Nayler’s book is a more conventional plot based exposition of the problem, McCarthy takes a more rarified intelectual approach. Yet both show how well fictional tales can be used to explore our world and our reaction to it.

Reading: Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers

I don’t remember where I saw Leonard Koren’s Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers mentioned recently, but I immediately ordered a copy and read it slowly over the last few weeks.

It’s a slim book of about 100 pages with many pages having photographs rather than text. It’s said that Koren’s book of 1994 was responsible for introducing the idea of Wabi-Sabi into the aesthetic conversation in the Western world. I have no idea as I don’t remember when this idea of the veneration of the simple, imperfect and natural entered my own intellectual environment.

I’m reading books about aesthetics and creation these days. This may have been the book that tipped me over into the subject. I’m about two thirds of the way through Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act: A Way of Being, a book I’m savoring on first read and trying to digest a bit, chunk by chunk. As has been my recent practice, I take no notes on the first read, leaving notes for a review session with the book.

My photography has been casual over the last few years, but in a way it’s been a further embrace of a Wabi-Sabi approach to images. My aim has been honest capture, leaving behind some of the cinematic excess of some of my work. Now, evaluating my images of the last year, I see where I’ve pushed forward in just allowing light and exposure settings to create a relatively finished image, an approach that I’ve picked up from photographers like Phillip Penman and Greg Williams. Both work in monochrome with an approach of exposing using the dynamic range and live view that our current mirrorless cameras provide. It’s beyond pre-visulazation, it’s actual visualization at the time of capture.

For, embracing the imperfection of the casual has helped my push on with new work. Wabi-Sabi for Artists . . . has emboldened me to further embrace capturing light and nature as a simple path to creating images.

Intentionality: How Constraints Enable Creativity

23 01 17 Leica Camera AG LEICA M11 L1001053 1

My contraints: The Leica M11 with 50mm APO Summicron ASPH lens. Capture images during breaks outside with the puppy. Images quickly processed in Capture One using the Mastin Tri-X style.

Ever since I took on Sniff and Shoot as a project, I’ve been regularly producing some pretty nice images. It got me thinking about how often we hear that constraints help produce work rather than hinder it. Maybe it is the paradox of choice where when you can do anything you end up doing nothing. Contraints remove choice and guide action.

But I think it’s something deeper than that. It’s that when faced with limitations, we have to become more intentional about our actions. There are hard limits that I have to overcome that force action to act in spite of the constraints. So I pick up the camera as I walk out the door and look around to find ways to use what I hold in my hands and the visual world in front of me. It’s not having a goal, it’s that the limitations provide traction, something to react to with my action.

Whether it’s imposing constraints simply by limiting equipment and technique or it’s setting up a project within which to work, the path forward at the moment and action is engaged.

While “mindfulness” gets a lot of attention, it is simply the passive act of being aware in the present. “Intentionality” builds on mindfulness in providing immediate purpose for action.