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I'm a Believer in the Believer

The people who brought you McSweeny's are now publishing a new magazine called The Believer. In the March 2003 inagural issue, editor Heidi Julavits offers The Believer as an antidote to snark, or the hyper-ironic belittling tone that permeates so much of society.

I fear that book reviews are just an opportunity for a critic to strive for humor, and to appear funny and smart and a little bit bitchy, without attempting to espouse any higher ideals—or even to try to understand, on a very localized level, what a certain book is trying to do, even if it does it badly. This is wit for wit's sake—or, hostility for hostility's sake...I call it Snark, and it has crept with alarming speed into the reviewing community...

This magazine consists mostly of book reviews and interviews. Interspersed are short, one-page, ode-like essays on various semi-banal items; each month features a tool, a mammal, a motel, a light and a child. These are hard to explain, but for instance, last month's tool was the STANLEY TOOLS Magnetic Wall Stud Finder 47-400. The writing is playful, but serious. The authors and editors care about the books and people that are the subjects of their articles. Examples include: a two part tribute to Jerry Lewis, a treatment of Frank Herbert's Dune as a prophecy for our world today, a celebration of detective novels, a conversation between Salman Rushdie and Terry Gilliam and a report from the campaign trail of Howard Dean. Plus, there are interviews with people as diverse as philosopher Richard Rorty, funny man Andy Richter, hip-hop artist ?uestlove, writer Jamaica Kincaid and (in the current issue) Dave Eggers interviews David Foster Wallace.

The Believer's goal is to feature and appeal to people who (as George Orwell puts it, and Julavits quotes) are "neither highbrows nor lowbrows, but elastic-brows." We can all use some eyebrow exercise once in a while.

New images uploaded

I've finally gotten some more photos uploaded, thanks to my new Epson 2400 scanner.

I'm quite happy so far, although it seems slow to me. That may just be impatience on my part, I really have nothing to compare it to. The quality is good, not exceptional, about what you would expect for a mid-range desktop scanner. Maybe I'll have a well-formed opinion after I've used it for a few weeks.

Geek Night

Last night we had some friends over for a lunar eclipse party. I couldn't understand why none of our neighbors were out to watch the moon enter totality (promptly at 8:06 EST!) until Derek mentioned that we must be the only geeks living on our street. Well, yeah.

I claimed that the eclipse was just a good excuse to have some friends over for food, wine and fun (which we had: food and wine and fun), but I early on betrayed my excitment by using the term totality to begin with.

Total Lunar Eclipse

Tomorrow night (Nov. 8) we will be treated to a brief total lunar eclipse. Check out the Astronomy Picture of the Day for a cool animation showing what we might expect.

Those of us living in the Eastern US should see the entire eclipse, from the point when the Moon first begins to enter the Earth's shadow (the penumbra) at around 6:30 PM EST, until it exits at around 10:30 PM. The full eclipse (totality), when the moon is entirely enclosed within darkest part of the Earth's shadow (the umbra), won't begin until around 8:00 PM EST and will only last about 25 minutes. Check out space.com for more details and a graphic that shows what the umbra and penumbra are.

A New Site Addition

I've been taking a class at the community darkroom this fall: Intermediate Black and White Photography (I took intro to B&W last winter), which means as soon as my scanner comes in and I get it installed, I should finally be able to get some of my work posted on this site. I'm pretty excited about some of the results and I'm preparing to possibly make this a more serious hobby of mine.

In this spirit, I thought I'd start a new blog dedicated to black & white photography. I'll be posting uninformed opinions about photography in general as well as the ongoing struggles and lessons learned as I make my own feeble attempts at contributing to the art form.

Not that I expect anyone to actually read it or find it interesting, but I thought it would be a good way for me to stay focused. The best way to learn something is to teach it and so forth.