["Sunday Support Group" is about personal projects, mine or yours, photography-related or otherwise. It appears, at the risk of being obvious, on Sundays. —Ed.]
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Looking for a little help here. Doing a little research for the book.
There are a hundred ways to succeed at photography and a thousand ways to enjoy it. Assuming you've been along for the ride for a while, what would you say are the things about the pursuit that have been the most rewarding for you?
It can be anything, not just the obvious things. For example, my current top three are:
Discovering the work of other photographers through books and museum and gallery shows
"Obsessing" over lenses
Mastering traditional darkroom craftsmanship
Ask me next week; they might change.
But anyway those are just my own "fer instances."
What are the things you've most enjoyed about your pursuit of photography and wish you'd done more of, and what are the things you wish you hadn't wasted your time on? For example, I actually wish I hadn't spent so much time and energy obsessing over lenses, even though I enjoyed it. If you could speak now to your younger self, what would you emphasize? What would you caution yourself against?
Mike
Original contents copyright 2019 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
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["Sunday Support Group" is hopefully meant to provide support and inspiration for peoples' personal projects, photography-related or otherwise. It appears, at the risk of being obvious, on Sundays. —Ed.]
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Humans love games. Toyota used this when it devised its suite of dashboard monitors for its Prius line—Prius owners use the feedback to optimize their mileage in a game they've dubbed "hypermiling."
Lately I've been using a similar strategy with eating: make a game of it.
Backtracking a bit—my eye operation in June derailed my diet. I survived my confinement by eating quick meals of peanut butter sandwiches, which got me back into sugar and bread again, and I have addiction issues with sugar and bread. From there, my healthy eating broke down.
But as I mentioned recently, in my life I've quit cigarettes (1985, age 28) and I've quit alcohol (1990, age 33), and I know how to deal with addictions: you keep struggling until you get it. The struggle with addiction seems endless when you're in the middle of it, but in fact it's not endless—or doesn't have to be—eventually, if you keep trying, try different things, and are willing to go to any lengths to change, you can change. You get it. The new habits "stick." The struggle recedes into history. The trick is to keep trying until you succeed*.
Playing games with the brain Diet isn't just about food ideology—it's also a lot about behaviorism. The best three beginner's starting points for overhauling disastrously bad eating, for instance, are all behavior related:
Don't eat between meals
Don't drink calories
Stop eating two hours before bedtime
So anyway, my latest trick with myself is also behavior related—I've made a game of my goals. I printed up a sheet with my daily goals on it and then at the end of every day I just tick off the ones I achieve. The total is ten, so I can easily count up my score on a ten scale.
The top third of my daily score sheet
Now, obviously, your sheet would have your goals on it, and would look a lot different from mine. I drink two mugs of tea in the morning, have a main meal in the afternoon built around rice, potatoes, sweet potatoes / yams or whole-wheat pasta and one or two vegetables (I eat as much as I want), and then have a dinner of bean, chickpea, split pea, or lentil soups (I eat as much as I want of that, too). The rest of the things are specific to my own bad habits and the details of my own particular daily life. For instance, there's free popcorn at the Moose Lodge where I play pool, and that's a failure point**. I want to try to limit myself to one serving. (I failed yesterday, but I beat my friend 8–6, so you lose some, you win some.) You'll notice that on my sheet I get two checkmarks if I avoid sugar for the day, that being my major weakness—if you have no "sweet tooth," sugar might not even be on your own list at all. "Didn't eat out" is because I'm making much less money now and sort of in a battle to try to make it to Social Security, so I've been trying to comprehensively reduce my expenses, and eating out is a bigger expense than most people think. Not to mention that there are restaurants that have not a single healthy meal on their entire menus. The last one, "soup made," is just because I need to keep up with the chore of making my homemade soups for the evenings—when I don't have any on hand, I have nothing convenient to eat in the evenings, and for me that's a big failure point.
Make your starting point an automatic success Speaking of behaviorism, the first check on my list is a free point—I love my tea and never miss it. It's a "list trick" I learned long ago. Let's say you're making out a list of things to do the next day. Well, what you do is begin the list with three things you've already done! That way you wake up in the morning and you can tick off three items right away. It makes you feel like you're already on the right track, and makes it easier to dive into the rest of the list. Try it; it might sound dumb, but it works.
Everything for the week fits on one page. I eat three salads a week and three berry smoothies a week, and I allow myself one serving of meat a week, mainly so I can either partake when meat is on offer at friends' houses or have an occasional meal of sushi.
That's it. Just wanted to share this trick in case you might like to try it with your own goals. Make a game of it! It's surprising that it works, but it appears to be how we're wired.
Sugar is hiding everywhere Oh, and by the way—you might wonder how peanut butter sandwiches got me back into sugar. Well, the peanut butter I was using has three grams of sugar per two-tablespoon serving (amusingly, the label says "3g sugars including 3g added sugars"), and the bread I bought has six grams of sugar per slice, of which five grams are added sugar. So each peanut butter sandwich I fixed myself during my recovery contained 15 grams of sugar—that's three and a half teaspoons of sugar per sandwich!
There's added sugar in everything these days, including our vegetables, which are being hybridized to be sweeter. I bought a package of celery the other day and look what it says on the bag:
And that "occasional sushi meal" I mentioned? I can't give myself the two points for "no sugar" on days I eat sushi. Sushi rice (and "sushi" is the rice, not the fish) is made with vinegar...and sugar. You have to be careful with this stuff—it's a minefield out there.
Now I gotta go walk. It's not that it's good for me and I need the exercise, it's just that I need the point.
Mike
*This is not advice that I'm a big fan of when it's generalized—I take a dim view of those mindless "persistence" exhortations that are perennially so popular. There are many things you shouldn't persist at—most notably those things at which you consistently fail, or for which you obviously have no aptitude. But addiction recovery is one area where persistence really is the right idea.
**Popcorn is only healthy if it's not cooked in oil and is unsalted. Otherwise it's pretty fattening.
Original contents copyright 2019 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.) Featured Comments from:
Lior: "Here's the merciless version. (SMBC is very funny and very, very intelligent.)"
John Daw: "Hey Mike, Prius owners did not coin the term Hypermiling. It came from a guy name Wayne Gerdes. He was getting upwards of 60 MPG with his stock Honda Accord by driving a certain way to maximize mileage. He dubbed it hypermiling. You can use this strategy with any vehicle. Hope all is well."
David M: "I suggest you also keep a second sheet of paper (or an app) that tracks each day you 'succeed.' The pressure to have a successful day goes up substantially when you've done it, say, 11 straight days. I use a Apple (Watch) app called 'Streaks' to keep track of whether I have done my daily push ups. I'm currently on my longest streak of 294 straight days!"
It's been a beautiful Summer, but difficult. I haven't been doing a very good job with my various resolutions lately, and it's getting me down. That's awkward to admit, but I need to be honest. I haven't touched my book project since my operation, and I stopped being strict about my WFPB aspirations after the last post I wrote on the subject. It's depressing.
People need to eat plants (hear me out. I'm going somewhere with this). We were evolved to eat plants. Our teeth and intestines are formed so we can eat plants. Our nearest animal relatives eat almost nothing but plants. Our bodies function best on plants. Study after study after study closely correlates the health of populations to the percentages of plant food in their diets. All manner of medical outcomes—from the incidence of diabetes, to the health of our veins and arteries, to sleep, to headaches, to joint aches, to longevity—all improve when we eat plants. Plants contain hundreds and hundreds of chemicals that are important or critical to health beyond youth (they're important when we're young too, but, when we're young, the vitality of youth itself often "masks" the health risks and dangers of dietary foolishness). The scientific evidence is growing fast that cancer cells pop up in your body all the time, and that phytochemicals give it the vital ammunition it needs to crush them. If you aren't eating mostly plants, you are not as healthy as you could be. Most humans can survive and thrive indefinitely ingesting nothing but plants and water—a statement that can be made for no other category of food or "foodlike substance."
But it turns out that on a diet adequate in essential plant foods, you can also eat...well, meat.
Make no mistake, meat is poor food. It has low nutritional value. It is high in fat of the worst kind. Of the dietary essential in shortest supply in the appropriately abbreviated SAD—the standard American diet—namely, fiber—meat has none. (Fiber comes from plants.) People like meat because it's savory and it's got all that fat and, as recently as the post-war era, it was still a high-status food enjoyed frequently only by the well-off, and that status lingers in the culture. But it's not healthy. About the only things meat supplies that are good for you are things that the animal itself got from plants and concentrated in its own tissues—such as protein, a nutrient Americans already get way too much of to the detriment of our liver and kidney health. (One cup of broccoli has only 31 calories but 2.6 grams of protein; spinach contains every essential amino acid; etc. You cannot eat a sensible variety of plants and not get enough protein. You'll just get more, faster, from a steak.)
But here's the thing. If you are eating a wide range of plants and vegetables and starches and are getting all of the phytonutrients your body needs, a few servings of meat a week won't kill you. Dr. Pam Popper (she is a Ph.D., not an M.D.) is the founder and President of Wellness Forum Health, "a company that offers educational programs to both consumers and providers that facilitate informed medical decision-making, diet and lifestyle intervention, and improved long-term health outcomes." Dr. Popper, who happens to eat no meat herself, defines "a few servings" as up to four ounces of high-quality, organic, non-processed (i.e., not bologna or sausage or Slim Jims!) meat up to three times a week. People who eat meat in low doses like that, as a group, have about the same health outcomes as vegans and people who eat WFPB (whole-food plant-based) diets.
...Which is a notion that is not very popular among vegans and people who eat WFPB diets.
That's rather an understatement, actually. The idea offends many of them. Well, "horrifies" is a word that also works, shall we just admit. Partly that's because "the V-words," vegetarian and vegan, often define not just a diet but an ethical stance toward animals and/or an environmental position...the production of meat, collectively speaking, being among our poor planet's worst environmental nightmares. There is certainly strong merit in those ideas. Partly, also, it might be because people love being true believer types. Most people who believe in plant diets don't see any sense or sanity in not going cold turkey, excuse the term.
In truth, though, the least worst thing about low-dose meat as part of a plant-based diet is merely that it displaces better foods. That is, the more prime rib you eat, the less spinach you'll have room for. The more pork tenderloin you pig out on, the more likely you are to skip seconds of green beans. The more shrimps you scarf down, the more blackberries you'll be deprived of forever.
But it won't hurt you.
Food by itself is not ideology. If you eat for health rather than ethics or ecology, then you can have good-quality meat in sensible amounts now and then if you enjoy it. It's not ideal food, no, and you could do better for your health just upping your portion of watermelon or watercress or yellow split pea soup. But you'll be fine. Your militant vegetarian friends won't like this at all ("never eat anything with a face!"), but, as long as you get all your plants down, you can be a low-dose meatitarian if you want to, and, at the statistical level at least, your health outcomes will still remain as good as theirs.
Mike
Original contents copyright 2019 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
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John Krumm: "Been doing full vegan Greger ( more or less) for a couple months now. Greger takes pains to emphasize that he’s not really advocating veganism, but of course if you make it through the daily dozen you likely won’t have room for much meat. Sometimes in a world where meat and other bad options surround you almost everywhere, it’s easier stick to full vegan rather than always 'moderating' something I’d like to stuff myself with. Same with cheese especially, my true weakness."
Mike replies: Cheese is the #1 unhealthy food. And it's mildly addictive. Check out Neal Barnard'sThe Cheese Trap. Or watch How to Magnetize a Baby. :-)
Jim Pilcher: "Thank you, thank you, thank you!!! This may be the most sensible post you've made in eons, or at least this week. I'm a 95% vegan by choice since 2012 (no agenda other than health) who enjoys a bit of king salmon once or twice a week. I feel great, much better than when I ate a lot of meats. I don't begrudge others having their meat; I just don't do it any longer. Thank you again, Mike. I did not expect such a sane dietary post mixed in among the gear, billiards, photographic philosophies and sensibilities, and print talk."
If you're a regular reader who happens to pay attention to the comment bylines, you probably know the name Dave Levingston. Dave is a retired photojournalist who lives in Springfield, Ohio. He took the last photograph in this post.
Dave and some members of his family visited last Friday, just in time for an epic rain squall that flattened the area and cut power to hundreds. ("Hundreds" meaning "lots"—we're the third least-populous county in New York State. There are hardly any people here.) He showed me several boxes of his work.
My favorite was a group of "environmental portraits" (portraits of people showing their surroundings). He was attending his 50th high school reunion and started making pictures of his classmates. Then he got a good idea, and decided to try to get as many of them as he could, and at that point he titled the project "The Class of '69." Then he got a really good idea, and thought, hey, why limit this to our class?
Since then, he's been finding people who graduated in 1969 wherever he goes.
Isn't that a great idea? It's a very specific project, yet the potential subject matter is functionally limitless. It's a great entrée by which to make contact with people, even strangers, and oh by the way, make photographs of them. It's comprehensible to everyone instantly and most everyone would be happy to participate (you can tell this because all most all of the people in his portraits look genuinely happy and good-natured) and it's a great way to make new friends.
Perfect. I thought it was a little bit of genius.
Great ideas are actually tough to come up with. They have to be flexible but specific, easy for people to grasp but a rich vein to mine, varied enough to keep everyone (subjects, photographer, viewers) interested....and having that entrée never hurts.
The portraits, by the way, were very nicely printed, I'm going to guess about 9x13" maybe? He did the conversions in DxO and took the pictures with a Micro 4/3 camera. I thought they looked like small enlargements from about a 645 film camera.
The beardy guy in the example portrait above is, as you have probably guessed by now, one Dave Levingston of Springfield, Ohio. Self-portrait using the camera's timer. Class of '69, of course.
Mike (Thanks to Dave)
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this post said Dave was from Canton, Ohio, but that was merely his destination when he passed through here. He lives in Springfield, Ohio. Sorry for the error.
Original contents copyright 2019 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
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William Schneider: "Being from the class of '68, I felt a strange tinge of disappointment that I did not qualify. Upon reflection why, I realized that exclusive projects like this have something working for them. Leveraging human nature, they motivate people to become willing subjects. Clever!"
Gary: "I will be attending my 1969 high school reunion in San Diego in September. It was a momentous year: Moonwalk, Woodstock, and great music. The previous year was momentous also, but tragic. Please provide a link to Dave Levingston's project!"
Dave Levingston adds: I can't thank you enough for your very kind words about my Class of '69 project. I really appreciate it. I've been posting this project on Facebook. If anyone would like to see all the photos they can look at them there. But please remember that Facebook does awful things to photos when they are uploaded to their site. The prints I showed Mike were 8.5x11 work prints. I hope to find a venue to do a little show with some of these before this 50th anniversary year is out. I will likely print them to around 11x14 for framing and display.
For those who care about technical stuff, I'm shooting with a pair of Panasonic GX8s and using a 12–60mm Panasonic lens, mostly around 12mm, for these portraits. I use DxO Photo Lab 2 for RAW conversions and black-and-white conversions. I use ACDSee Photo Studio 2 for most other editing tasks. The prints were made with an Epson 4900 on Epson Ultra Premium Luster paper.
And, if anyone reading this graduated from high school in 1969 and would like to be a part of this project, please get in touch.
Martin D: "Class of '69 is a brilliant project idea. It is simple and effective and amenable to all sorts of artistic variations. And as you rightly say, with such simple ideas it is always easy to see their value once you have them put before you, but coming up with them in the first place is where most of us struggle. I will not copy this idea directly, as such transfers never work, but your friendly visitor Dave Levingston has encouraged me to go back to the little black book in which I take notes for potential photo projects...and then to actually pick one and get it started! Really good photograph by Dave in your 2013 competition by the way, of the turkey farmer. I remember being impressed by it at the time, and now there is additional context."
Mike Potter: "That is a wonderful self-portrait. I like it, a lot."
If you see an obviously obese person walking down the sidewalk clutching a jumbo container of soda, you are almost certainly looking at a food addict. It's possible to get addicted to food, especially sugar. The helpless person you're seeing can't even venture out and be ambulatory for a little while without infusions of sugar-water at the ready.
It's not entirely her fault. An industry with formidable resources has entrapped her. As with the tobacco, alcohol, and now (in some states) the marijuana cartels, 80% of their profit comes from 20% of their customers. They're highly motivated to get you hooked.
I seldom drink soda, and never have it in the house, but I'm a food addict myself...
I never thought I'd be in the demographic for one of these. (Once you get older you start ignoring most trends and fashions, because time has taught you how fleeting and without body and substance most of them are.) But I've ordered an Amazon Echo.
The Echo is the device, the hardware; Alexa is the synthetic humanoid that* listens for your instructions and responds orally. By the way, Echo was originally a mountain nymph in ancient Greek mythology who pines so badly for Narcissus that she withers away until nothing is left of her but her voice.
Really, what could be more perfect during my recovery than, um, a devoted mountain nymph? Hopefully I'll get it set up successfully so that it works entirely by voice command, so I can tell it to start and stop reading audiobooks. Not only that, but I don't even have to buy books—it turns out I joined Audible years ago (I think because my son was an affiliate for a while) and bought a dozen titles that I never listened to. They're still waiting. I'm good.
Mayil in the clutch When the Harry Potter books came out 22 years ago, I (along with approximately one zillion other people) got the bright idea of writing a series of fantasy/sci-fi adventure books for young adults. I plotted a quadrilogy, four books, and outlined two of them. My stories followed a protagonist named Mayil Daka, who lives c. 2280 in an era that followed 80 years of disasters called The Contractions. During the Contractions, world population had plunged to a mere 20 million souls. Survivors had resumed living and behaving in tribal fashion, retreating into small fortified compounds called "enclaves." As world government began to get reorganized, resourceful individuals, called "travelers," were enlisted to locate and approach these armed and isolated settlements to inform them of the re-establishment of civilization and to try to reassure their leaders that it was safe to venture out and reconnect with the broader society. It was dangerous work, requiring bravery, social skill, and good judgement, and the travelers often became heroes to subsequent generations, as well as founders of larger civilized areas, which are also formally called Enclaves. Mayil (pronounced "mile"), lives in the Praetorian Enclave, formerly part of South Africa.
When the story commences, world population is rumored to be approaching 100 million, and renewed fears of overpopulation are reaching almost hysterical levels among the superstitious; terror of the memory of the Contractions is so strong that parents are allowed to exempt their children from studying it in school. World government, based in the Australs (Australia/New Zealand/New Guinea), has an urgent need to carry out an accurate world census. There is only one octant of the globe that is not served by surviving satellites and is hence "dark"—out of contact with the rest of the world. It's a region that was riven by sectarian violence, dark cults, and strange superstitions in the run-up to the Contractions, and it is known as the lands of the Northams—the former North America. Little is known about conditions there.
World government is mounting a small and most likely doomed expedition to the lands of the Northams to see if a government exists there, and, if it does, whether it has census data that can be added to the projections for the remainder of the planet. The expedition will travel by sailboat across the inhospitably hot equatorial region. Mayil, who is the only great-grandson of the great Traveler Emil Ali Daka, the most legendary of the nine founders of the Praetorian Enclave, has been chosen for the honor of being ceremonially asked to participate in the expedition. At age 14, he is not required or expected to accept; it's merely an honor to be asked, a symbolic gesture intended as a compliment to the people of the distant Praetorian Enclave.
He has every reason not to want to go. He has just entered "clutch," a rite of passage for teenagers wherein 12 young women and 12 young men who have been scientifically selected as genetically healthy enough to have children sort themselves into couples. Clutch is not only prestigious—not everyone is allowed to have children, because of the high incidence of birth defects—it is also very social and great fun.
But Mayil has just lost two of his closest friends. One, Davi Ald, a neighbor boy whom Mayil grew up with, had been chronically sickly and always expected to die. But the other was the apparently healthy girl to whom Mayil had been secretly betrothed since age 10, Mali Ohen, who died unexpectedly of a fast-acting cancer after learning, to her devastation, that she would not be allowed to participate in clutch. Her genetic markers for disease had been just above the cutoff.
Mali's exclusion from clutch had subtly driven a wedge between the two former childhood friends despite their better intentions, and since Mali's death Mayil has suffered from guilt as well as grief. To the great shock of his parents, when Mayil stands in the great Council Hall of the Australs to hear his invitation read aloud, he throws caution to the winds and surprises everyone present—and even himself, a little—by accepting a place in the dangerous expedition to the lands of the Northams.
And off we went.
Hominids and humanoids I had fun with it, anyway. The publisher of Harry Potter sent a very nice letter in response to an outline and seventy pages of manuscript: "This almost made it for us! Please keep us apprised of your other projects." Other projects? I didn't have any other projects. I was hard at work on that project. Unfortunately, my next project was to get fired from a job, which threw me into a slow-grinding crisis for several years. Writing was mostly forgotten.
So what's the point of this? I'm sure experts in speculative fiction are well aware of this problem and can limn its dimensions at length, but when the first book opens, in the first scene, Mayil is waking up in his bedroom in his parents' house on the Transvaal plain, and the first thing he does is ask for news from something I called a "conbox," which is voice-activated and can respond to him interactively. The idea seemed at least mildly futuristic to my innocent self in 1999, but my fictional "conbox" was almost identical—in function, but even in size and shape!—to an Amazon Echo. Sheesh.
So anyhow, I got myself a conbox, straight out of the former future.
Mike
*A bit o' grammar: "who" is the proper pointer-word for humans; "that" is the pointer-word for things. Common errors like "the girl that was brushing her hair" or "My friends that have a nice house" are howlers to an ear sensitive to words; should be who both times. But here I think "Alexa" is properly a that, because "she" is not human, but rather humanoid.
Original contents copyright 2019 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
Dennis Ng wrote a comment in the "Oberon" post about how he is finally buying a used medium-format digital back, something he's always wanted. (And congratulations, Dennis. Hope it works out.)
Mani Sitaraman wrote under the same post that he can't afford high-end home audio speakers. [Note: this post is not about speakers. It's about grapes.] Well, who can? The first three entries under "Class A" under the "Loudspeakers" category in Stereophile's once-useful "Recommended Components" list cost $85,000 a pair, $22,000 a pair, and $40,000 a pair, and it goes on from there. But he said he hopes to find a nice pair of Spendor SP100II's in decent used condition one day, and might even be able to afford them.
Have you ever been locked out of something by rising prices? Something you really wanted that seemed again and again to remain just out of reach, like the grapes to the fox in the famous fable*?
Keep-away Sometimes even if your situation improves, the target moves. I have a friend who used to own a house in a certain neighborhood of Denver. She sold it, and now she can't go back—property prices have risen so much that she can no longer afford to buy a house in the neighborhood she once lived in. Locked out! You know what they say: Oh well.
The same thing happened to me with cars when I was young. I started saving for a car when I was 14. At that time, Volkswagen was running an ad for what it called the cheapest car in America—a Beetle for $1,919. (That's going to make me seem very old to young people.) I had to buy a new car because my father said he would put me on his insurance policy, but only if I bought a new car. But by the time I was 16 and had nearly saved $1,919, the cheapest new car in America—I think it was a Datsun (now called Nissan, and yep, yep, sonny, I'm ancient)—was $2,800 or so. Two years later I had saved something like $2,400, and the cheapest car in America was midway through the $3,000 to $4,000 range.
And so on. I gave up, and didn't buy my first car until I was 30. Before that I took the bus a lot. There was one advantage to that at least—you could read on the bus. I carried a tiny "Oxford World Classics" volume of Walden in my pocket so I was never without it. Everyone—especially every young person, and by that I mean you 30-year-olds and 40-year-olds—should read Walden**.
Mark II = price hike Mani reminded me of this by talking about Spendor speakers. For me it's a name that conjures magic. When I was in art school I really, really wanted a pair of Spendor SP1 speakers, and very nearly bought a pair for $850. But they were just a little out of my reach.
Damn grapes.
And just as with that first car, they remained out of reach. Now, you can buy a used pair for $1,200 or even less if you're lucky, but speaker drivers wear out—it's not the smartest move to buy 30-year-old speakers. Fortunately, and rather amazingly, a modern remake is available directly from Spendor, the original maker—the SP1/2 (Mark II, in camera-speak). As you can see from this page, the price had ratcheted up dramatically, to $2,750...in 2002. That is, still beyond my reach at that time.
They're still available, but I don't want to know how much they cost now. I already know they're beyond my reach. They've occupied the same relative position now for more than 30 years, so why would anything ever change?
Aesop's lesson It doesn't matter anyway (see the fox and grapes fable in the footnote again!), because I don't have a place in my house to set up a traditional stereo, with the equipment on a rack in the middle and two speakers on proper stands situated at the proper place out in the room. Besides, I'm happy with my current desktop system, which sounds marvelous and which allows me to enjoy music just fine. (You can see my system in this picture). So I'm able to be grateful for that, and not have any complaints. "Unless I accept life completely on life’s terms, I cannot be happy. I need to concentrate not so much on what needs to be changed in the world as on what needs to be changed in me and my attitudes."
It's just a feature of "life on life's terms," being locked out. And it'll always be something. No matter how good you have it, you can always identify, and focus on, and aspire to the next level, just out of reach. There's always a next level. All we need to do to cure the situation is change our own attitudes, that's all.
Mike
* The Fox and the Grapes
ONE hot summer’s day a Fox was strolling through an orchard till he came to a bunch of Grapes just ripening on a vine which had been trained over a lofty branch. "Just the things to quench my thirst," quoth he. Drawing back a few paces, he took a run and a jump, and just missed the bunch. Turning round again with a One, Two, Three, he jumped up, but with no greater success. Again and again he tried after the tempting morsel, but at last had to give it up, and walked away with his nose in the air, saying: "I am sure they are sour."
"IT IS EASY TO DESPISE WHAT YOU CANNOT GET."
—Aesop, Sixth Century B.C. (text from the Harvard Classics via Bartleby)
**It's very much on topic for this post.
Original contents copyright 2019 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.) Featured Comments from:
Malcolm Myers: "There is also the inverse of this. Things that were unimaginably expensive to me as a teenager became easily affordable as: a.) I grew older and started to earn more money, and b.) things I desired new became available second-hand. I have found this to be especially true when picking up old film and digital cameras from car-boot sales, charity shops. and camera stores."
Joe: "My parents bought a Volkswagen Beetle about the same time you first started wanting one. My father noted that the car cost a dollar a pound."
Benjamin Marks: "I think, responding as a camera guy, 'Leica' comes to mind. Their 35mm cameras were 'unobtainium' for me in college in the '80s. Oh the pain!
"At some point in the mid '90s I bought my first M—a used M3 double-stroke from a camera shop in Oakland, CA, with a really nice 50mm ƒ/1.5 Summarit. I did finally buy a new M8 in the 2000s and then traded it in on a new M9 three years later. But after that, the prices jumped again, and now it's like watching the tail lights of a faster car receding into the distance. I really like the platform (go on, haters...do your worst), but I am just never shelling out $7K for a camera, period.
"Then again, when I was in my 20s, I had a list of camera 'wants' in my head. You know: a Zone IV 4x5 with a matching dual-tube cold light head enlarger, a Hasselblad 500 C/M, a Leica M6, and so on. I could buy all that and be 'done.' I think the magic number was $10,000 in 1988 dollars. Well over the years, I have owned everything on that list, and then some (or: and then, sum). But I still have a mental list, and the magic number hasn't changed much. On the other hand, I can't think of a single picture I haven't taken due to some gear-related shortcoming that existed at the moment of snapping the shutter.
"It brings to mind Spock's (That's 'Mr.' not Dr. Benjamin) quotation about wanting and having."
David Dyer-Bennet: "I've owned a Yashicamat 124G, and a Graflex Norita 6x6 SLR, and the Fujica GS-645, but I think of myself as having been 'locked out' of medium format from the mid '70s until the 2000s (when I went digital) by prices, which kept rising. What that really meant was my perception of benefit didn't ever catch up with my feeling about the price for long enough for me to act; I could have bought used medium-format gear most years in that period with money I instead used for other things. Another part of the problem was that I had 35mm ideas about the range of lenses needed to have a useful system, which ran up the price of medium format as I perceived it. And I did always know that my primary area of photography was recording and documenting things, often rapidly-changing things in dark situations, which is not what medium format is best at."
"The greater the desires the more wealth necessary for happiness. And vice versa."
Dogman: "When I was a kid in high school in the early 1960s, I lusted for the Jaguar XK-E. Of course, to a poor country boy it was an unobtainable dream for its new price of just over $5,000.
"In 1977 I paid just over $5,000 for a new Chevrolet Nova.
"Speaking of that XK-E, just after I graduated from college I made friends with a guy who owned a body shop. Visiting him one day I noticed in the back of his shop something under a heavy, dusty tarpaulin. I asked him about it and he pulled the tarp back to show me a 1960s XK-E. According to him the car and its owner were stranded on the highway when he happened upon them. Being helpful, he offered the man a ride and they later returned to tow the Jag back to his shop. At that point the Jag's owner expressed the frustration he had endured for his entire ownership of the car due to its unreliability and frequent breakdowns. He then made a gift of the car to my friend because of his kindness. Unfortunately, my friend found there were so many things about the car that needed expensive repairs he couldn't justify ever fixing it. But it was a beautiful car and he couldn't force himself to get rid of it."
Dave Levingston: "When I was in high school in the middle of the last century I lusted after two cars, the Shelby AC Cobra (the 289, not the ridiculous 427) and the Porsche 911. Both were completely out of reach at astronomical prices around $7,500. Back when I had a portrait studio I used Mamiya C330s and lusted after a Hasselblad 500 C/M, but could never quite manage to afford one. Today I still feel that lust, and I could afford one, but have to admit to myself that I have absolutely no use for one now. A lovely camera, though, it still is."
Mike Ferron: "Locked out? Sure, on high end photographic gear. I love the good stuff but you won't find me in possession it. I shoot 6x6 with a Yashicamat instead of a Rollei. Thirty-five millimeter rangefinder? Olympus RC instead of a Leica. Digital? A secondhand Oly E-M1 with the Oly 25mm ƒ/1.8 as my premier lens. (not a bad lens at all, by the way)."
Mike replies: I wish I were as smart as you are. I'm being serious.
Moose: "Re 'I really, really wanted a pair of Spendor SP1 speakers.' Change one letter—spender speakers. \;~)> "
Timo: "Locked out? Sure. There's plenty of examples: e.g., Leica's M offerings, which I've not yet tried in any iteration, or maybe that photo safari to the Amazon or Patagonia or Antarctica; of course such were probably always pricey. But the 'locked out' that really stings is Apple's Aperture being discontinued. The amount of time I've spent trying to figure out how to move on (while still taking at least some of my edits with me) is probably a larger 'splurge' than any version of a (have to look up the spelling) Summilux."
Mike replies: Fortunately for me, I had already learned about Apple's nefarious and wicked habit of orphaning its software before Aperture came out, and I lashed myself to the mast to help me resist the siren song of Aperture. I never fell for it. I sympathize with you, though.
Thomas Walsh: "Like so many others, I wanted that special car or camera or stereo system. And then the concept of opportunity cost set in. Marriage and family seems to intensify opportunity cost and then one is often left rationalizing that those grapes were probably sour."
Mike replies: Below is the placemat I use where I sit and eat three times a day, day in, day out. Amazingly, I had never consciously noticed the grapes, nor the theme! Talk about blind.
I was just sitting there this morning eating my oatmeal, when I thought, whoa, those are grapes—that's Aesop's fox.
alex-virt: "This post reminded me a toast from an old Soviet movie: 'I want to buy a house but have no means. I can buy a goat but have no desire. May our desires always match our means!'"
From time to time I suggest little exercises—well, okay, sometimes some big ones too—for people to consider. I love learning, and learners naturally teach.
So...it's January...time for resolutions...which I am notoriously bad at keeping...and I'm thinking...well, that maybe I should take my own advice and do a OC/OL/OY.
I've actually done a OC/OL/OY before, several times. Mainly because there have been a number of more-than-one-year periods when I only owned one camera and one lens. In my first year in photography school I only had a Contax 139Q and a fast Zeiss 50mm lens. In Year Two I made the most momentous equipment change of my life and career and sold the 50mm and replaced it with a 35mm and an 85mm. Whew, big change. Brave new world. :-)
I actually even did a OC/OL/OY with a zoom lens once, too...I purchased my first DSLR, used, in 2006 I think it was, and it came with the Minolta 28–75mm lens made by Tamron that's still available as a Sony lens. (Buy Tamron's own version instead, available for Nikon, Canon, Pentax and Sony DSLR mounts; it's almost half the cost.) I liked the lens so much on the "crop-sensor" camera (in FOV equivalency it was about a 42–110mm) that I never got another lens for that camera. Note that I can only recommend this lens on APS-C—I didn't care for it on FF at the short end.
Mike's camera decision I decided to unwrap the G9. And keep it, that means. So I've got a new camera. It's not perfect for me (mainly because, ironically, it's just more camera than I need and prefer) but it does have what I need right now—fast AF and excellent IBIS. I bought David Thorpe's book. I ordered an extra battery and hunted down one of my UpStraps.
I don't really doubt that I could use just the G9 and the 12–35mm for a whole year, but...a true OC/OL/OY would mean no iPhone photographs other than just record-keeping, note-taking, and social-media-communication-type snaps for that year. And that would mean having the G9 with me much more than I keep a "good" camera with me now. Can I do that? Hmm.
Well, I probably should. I'm pretty addicted to iPhoney snappery, not always to good effect.
Mike's new camera. Uh-oh, this picture is an iPhone snap.
But hey, challenges are supposed to be challenging, right?
Unless I really commit, my OC/OL/OY won't last more than a month. And I'm not really committed yet. Just thinking about it.
But I'll keep thinking about it.
Mike
*...Which I had never seen before I Googled "OCOLOY" just now. Thanks, Michael Z. and PetaPixel!
Original contents copyright 2018 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.) Featured Comments from:
Franklin Berryman: "Given your photographic experience, what do you hope to achieve by such a commitment? I mean there should be a goal other than just saying you did it."
Mike replies: Excellent question. I will ponder that, but I think the goal is re-commitment, renewal, re-engagement—a restoration of your involvement; putting gear, GAS, and technical fussing on the back burner, getting out with the camera more, and concentrating on seeing. Sound about right?
Benjamin Marks: "Why not start with OC/OL/OM (one camera, one lens, one month) and see where it goes?"
Paul McEvoy: "On Instagram for musicians (I believe there are other equivalents for other arts) there is a tag #100daysofpractice (and now #1000daysofpractice). I believe the violinist Hillary Hahn started it. Basically practice your instrument every day for 100 days. Generally post a video of yourself doing such every day (the last requirement is sort of loose).
"I’m on day 312 or thereabouts. About 740 hours of practice which very well might be more practicing than I’ve ever done in my life. I’ve gone from an inconsistent 1-2 hours a few times a week to 16-20 hours weekly. It’s been mostly very enjoyable.
"For me the most important thing has been getting offline. I lock my phone in a thing called a kitchen safe for large periods of the day and don’t have other internet access at home. I have another phone I use to make calls. It’s just the damn internet that screws up my brain.
"The other thing is a large wall calendar (now datebook planner for the new year) where I marked down my practicing hour by hour. This made a huge difference in feeling like I was keeping my streak up.
"It’s been life-changing. I have come to just love practicing in a way that as a lifelong musician I never have before. Just consistently sitting with my instrument and exploring, mostly the same stuff day after day and really digging in. Also totally owning being able to record something that’s pretty awful and put it up there knowing it will be better in six months.
"Lately I’m pondering returning to photography a bit with a similar mindset although it’s hard to serve multiple masters."
Well, I've failed my resolution. I decided early this year that I was either going to write a book in this calendar year—2018—or die trying.
And I didn't. Write a book, I mean.
But you know what? I'm not going to give up.
I don't have any excuse for not giving up. I probably should. I'm just not going to. I like to write, and I've been practicing it all my life, and I'm passably good at it. My problem is mental organization—I'm not very organized in my thinking, not very good at following a thread over the long haul. (You might sometimes detect this even in my blog posts, if you're looking look for it.) I have trouble staying on track over tens of thousands of words.
Human engineering I took a three-day battery of aptitude tests way back when I was a teenager, administered by an organization that is now called the Johnson O'Connor Research Foundation* (JOCRF). It was very interesting, and I learned some things of lasting value about myself.
To give you one example, I scored very high in all the musical aptitudes, but in none of them did I score as high as people who turn out to make their livings as working musicians. JOCRF told me that people who do score high enough in those aptitudes pretty much have to work in music in some way, shape or form, or they tend not to be happy; but that people like me, people with high but not-high-enough musical aptitudes, who attempt to be musicians usually fail.
I took their word for it, and determined to resist the siren song of trying to be any sort of musician. I decided instead to be a music listener—a devoted part of the audience. And that decision has stood me in very good stead over the years. I'm completely happy with that course I chose based on their advice.
They also told me that I was particularly bad at foresight—I have no memory of how they tested for this**, but I do remember sitting across from the clinician's desk while he told me that, to me, "the past will be like a lush, intricate mountainous terrain, constantly worthy of exploration, while the future will look like a flat, featureless, uninteresting desert"—or words to that effect. Raise your hand if you've planned for your retirement...and guess who hasn't.
Salt flats again And guess what my attempts at book manuscripts look like to me? Lots of richness in what I've already finished, and pretty much no freaking clue as to where to go from there forward. Fascinating terrain behind me, bleak nothingness ahead. I have a hard time writing fiction for that reason. I have no more idea than a reader would what the characters are going to do next!
One thing I did do this year, though, was write what I think are very good first chapters of two different books. I had to work very hard at it, but in both cases when I go back and reread them I think they're not just good, but excellent. So maybe planning writing by chapters is the pathway out of my mental organization problem. I think what I'm going to have to do is write chapters as if each one was a little miniature book all by itself—getting one chapter to a pretty high state of finish, then mulling over in my mind as to where the next one needs to go before starting it. In that way I could build a book chapter by chapter, and thereby overcome my problem.
I don't want to quit, though, despite my ultimatum to myself last January. I want to keep after it. I just haven't got the key yet, is all. It's out there. I'm going to find it. I just have to keep working. I'm going to know when it happens for me, because things will start to flow. Until they do, I'll know I'm not there yet.
I feel like I just need to find what I'm meant to do. Do you know the old 18th century definition of "genius"? It meant the particular, peculiar things that make you you—that make you distinctive, individual, and different. What I need to do is find my genius, in that antiquated sense of the word.
Two-thirds right By the way, do you want to know what Johnson O'Conner's three top recommendations for me were, back when I was 16? They suggested that, given my aptitudes, I might want to think about becoming a writer, a photographer, or a forester.
Ha! Forester. Two out of three ain't bad.
If you have a child of any age older than puberty who is floundering about in their life course or career path like a fish flopping on dry land, I recommend you treat them to the JOCRF aptitude tests if you can afford it. It's not very expensive—they're a nonprofit—and there are 11 locations around the U.S.
Helped me, I'll say that. And it's interesting, too.
Onward! Maybe I'll actually die while still trying. But really, there are worse fates.
Mike
*It was originally founded in 1938 as the "Johnson O'Conner Human Engineering Laboratory," which sounds maybe a little Frankensteinish to modern ears.
**It's Chapter 13, page 59, of the Foundation's free ebook about its tests, which you can see here.
Original contents copyright 2018 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.) Featured Comments from:
Paul: "It really hurts me to hear this about your writing. Your blog has become part of my life. Can't you just sit down every day for one hour and just get on with it? Most days your writing will be average, a few will be awful and a couple will be amazing. Those incredible days will refuel you for many days. Stop focusing on finishing it and focus on that bloody hour everyday and things will change for the better."
Mike replies: That doesn't do it though. Works for blogging, not for a book. It's like walking fifty miles in the wrong direction—doesn't matter how brisk your pace is if you're not getting any closer to where you want to go.
Ilkka: "You cannot write a book in a year. Not a good one anyway. That is a too ambitious target. If you didn’t start writing it at all in 2018, then shame on you. You will never write it until you start. But be realistic and give yourself 3-5 years. You need a plan and outline. That can change during the process. Then you need to write. And then you need to edit. But first you need to get started."
Mike replies: Oh, I've started. Have I ever started. It's finishing I have the trouble with. :-)
The Rose of Sharon bush outside my kitchen window on July 18th. Hard to see at this size, but note single flower.
I don't think I hallucinated this—is there a large photo-centric or photo-heavy social media site that has banned "before and after" pictures? I think it's Instagram. Maybe Facebook? I think to prevent before-and-after weight-loss come-ons. But that might be wrong. Sorry...I can't remember. (Told you my brain is shrinking.)
Same bush 12 days later, July 30th
Anyway, I like before-and-after pictures. One of my favorites was taken in the '90s with a then-antique Spotmatic—two B&W pictures of a pan of cookies before and after baking. Simple pictures. But...tasty. :-)
As with many photographic ideas, once you start thinking about it and looking for them, more and more possibilities pop up.
As far as weight-loss before-and-afters are concerned, all I can say is that I am all prepared with the "befores"!
And while we are on the subject of things that grow, may I just say how sorry I am that blueberry season is over* and that green bean season soon will be. We've had a wet Summer and it's been a banner year for green beans. I think I've eaten fresh-picked green beans close to every day for the past month and a half. But broccoli season just got going and will be going strong until the first hard frost, so that's consolation! I'm trying to get the Mennonite farmer up the road to let me go out into his broccoli field (two acres) and cut my own. I suspect he thinks I've got a bit of a screw loose, but broccoli oxidizes fast. It's better for you if it's eaten right after it's picked**.
Enjoy your Sunday. I'm off to work on my book about photography, which is going splendidly if I do say so myself. I'm writing it all off the top of my head and just telling stories. Which, it turns out, I have a lot of. And it even includes quite a bit of sensible practical advice, even. Lots of fun to write. I'll enjoy it even if no one else does. Because when you get right down to it, photography should be fun, right?
Mike
*But don't cry for me. A farmer near me fresh-freezes them and sells them out of his freezer all Winter.
**Source: Eating on the Wild Side by Jo Robinson, a must-have for anyone who eats fruits and veggies. Recommended to me by a TOP reader, and thanks again for that. It's in the form of an encyclopedia, with entries for every major edible fruit and vegetable, telling you about their history, the various cultivars, how to shop for them and how to cook them for maximal health benefit. Big surprise—there's no rule that covers everything, like "always eat raw" or "always eat fresh" or "always eat organic" or any of the other popular ideologies. Everything's different and you have to take each one individually and case by case.
P.S. Someday soon I will do a post about the organic heirloom apple orchard near me. Tomorrow I plan to get some fresh-squeezed 100% pure Concord grape juice from the vineyard across the main road. Life is good in the Finger Lakes.
Original contents copyright 2018 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.) Featured Comments from:
Gordon Lewis: "Please do write a post about the organic heirloom apple orchard. I remember when you and I visited that orchard for the first time and hearing all about the owner's background (not what one might expect) while trying to decide among all of the exotic varieties he had. I can't remember which one we decided on, but I know for sure it was amazingly crisp, delicious, and bargain priced."
Sometimes I think I missed my calling. I've got a dirty little secret: I sometimes believe I know the right ways to sell stuff.
I think I might be a closet marketer.
I had a first-cousin-once-removed and a great uncle who were in advertising. Remember "The Heartbeat of America, It's Today's Chevrolet"? That was my cousin's. Me, I'm not in marketing or advertising, of course. In fact, as I explained the other day, the opposite: I'm on the side of the consumer—the customer—not the manufacturer or seller. And, of course, thinking you might be good at something is a far cry from actually being able to do it, or from putting yourself in a position to try it, much less succeed at it. It's usually a lot more complicated in real life.
Good ideas are good ideas no matter where they come from, though.
My ideas for a few products have led to those products being brought to market over the years, the result of suggestions to, and conversations with, manufacturers. I say ideas because just suggesting ideas isn't the same as being responsible for the decisions to go forward and spend actual money. Of course, with some of the ideas I suggested, the manufacturers were concerned with not giving me any credit. Like I'd dog them for money or something. In one or two cases it was really egregious—I had long, detailed, documented back-and-forth communications with companies, the companies would do exactly what I was pitching, and then they'd disavow ever knowing me or hearing of me. For the record, I've never asked for money. But in a couple of cases, when what I pitched obviously worked, a thank-you would have been nice.
I see this kind of thing so clearly sometimes. So many times I'll see ad or marketing campaigns and roll my eyes—they're so often wrong, or dumb, or—this is the worst—they'll represent a botched opportunity. "No, no, not that, if only you had done this...." Sometimes, just for fun, I find myself inventing marketing campaigns in my head. I don't know if other people do that. I've been doing it for years. It amuses me, I guess.
Anyway, I came up with a perfect marketing plan for the Nikon Z6 and Z7 in my head yesterday, just wandering around the house vacuuming and doing dishes. I could sell those cameras like gangbusters. Six 15-second ads, cheap to produce, quick to make, easily realizable in either print or video format. And they'd not only do good for the full-frame mirrorless cameras, they'd do good for Nikon as a brand. They'd work equally well for deep mavens and casual consumers. I'll bet could write all six in one day. (Or, if I actually had to do it, one week.)
...But sorry, I ain't sharing. I've had enough of big fat companies stealing my ideas then pretending I don't exist. I stopped doing that...well, the last time it happened.
I think this one's the very best imaginary marketing campaign I've ever come up with, though. Of course, amateur imaginings are a far cry from professional reality, and I know that. But I still think my idea would sell Nikons like nobody's business. I know how they should do it. Good ideas are good ideas no matter where they come from.
...Of course, I also still think my idea for the last episode of M*A*S*H was greatly superior to the one the writers actually came up with. Heh. Like I said, daydreaming is not the same as doing. Don't think I've got a big head.
It's not big, it's just in the clouds.
Okay now. Back to the work-week and to real life,
Mike
P.S. The point for the Sunday Support Group: for your longterm project, stick with what you know. Don't spin your wheels.
Original contents copyright 2018 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
All the chickens come on home to roost Plump bodies blotting out the sky You know it breaks my heart in half, in half When I see them trying to see them fly 'Cuz you just can't do Things your body wasn't meant to.
If you read it, you remember that last Sunday's post about long-term projects, "When to Not Persist," was kind of a downer. I had to 'fess up to having drifted away from my book project ambitions (in my fellowship we call it "going back out," i.e., falling off the wagon. Returning to our former state—in this case, my natural state of sloth, inertia and ennui). I had been feeling guilty about this, and it was liberating to man up and come out with it.
So now, good news. I've switched gears and changed projects. I've decided to take John's advice and slam out a book about photography. Starting with a brief autobiography of my life in photography, then switching to an insider history of The Online Photographer. Then I'll recount some of my adventures and misadventures in the various industries and people I've intersected with. Next, a section about the aesthetics of art and practice. Finally, I'll write down my reflections about the changing state of the art over the time I've been involved with the medium. (I just made that all up on the spot. Sounds okay, though.) Along the way I'll sing like a canary and tell tales. I like telling stories, and I got a whole bunch of 'em, and if I leave them sit there on the hard drive, one day the hard drive will just fail and then where will all the stories be? Lost and gone forevs.
No timetable, and of course I'm notorious for not finishing anything, so there's no guarantee this will ever become something.
If it does become a book PDF, however, every loyal booster who contributes via Patreon will get it for free, so you don't have to worry about missing anything. Anything I manage to finish, you'll get, no charge. That's not to say I'll finish anything, but it means those folks won't miss it.
The best-laid schemes o' Mikes an' men Gang aft agley, An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain, For promis'd joy!
I would think this one's going to be a piece of cake, though, because I'm not going to worry about it too much. I'm just going to start writing. It's all in my head already, so I can just write off the top. Like writing a letter. And that goes fast.
Mike
Original contents copyright 2018 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
As you may know, I've been trying to write a thriller, which is specific kind of genre novel with its own forms and rules. Thrillers are much more popular, and sell better, than so-called "literary" novels (or, as they used to be called back when they were novel, "novels"). I've got to be honest: things aren't going well.
I heard a story about Michael Crichton, the late book author who wrote a string of bestsellers including The Andromeda Strain, The Great Train Robbery and Jurassic Park. Supposedly he read a bestseller when he was a young doctor and thought, "that's not so hard. I could do that." So he bought a stack of bestsellers and read them all, absorbing the styles and plots and forms and tropes and modes. Then he started writing his own.
I'm apparently not able to do that. I've tried to study thrillers, and I've read a bunch of them, and I have a good mentor whose advice I've tried to take to heart, but when I try to write my own I'm like a Boy Scout far from home trying to start a campfire in the woods in the rain: it just won't catch*.
I always had this idle thought hanging around in the back of my head that I'd be good at novels. I like telling stories, of the James Herriot variety—part joke and part anecdote, cut to fit, like you'd share at a bar over a pint of ale. (I always suspected Herriot's tales started out as pub stories.) I don't mind "storifying" the truth. And I like yarns. A great example of the yarn form is the movie Little Big Man by director Arthur Penn, little brother of photographer Irving Penn, from the novel by Thomas Berger. To "get" that movie, as Roger Ebert did but many other critics didn't, you have to keep in mind the structure as you watch it: it's an old man spinning a yarn.
But here's the rub: I kinda can't stand false data. I really only like stories if they make some truth more clear or vivid. But with novels, you're supposed to make stuff up. It's not supposed to have to be true.
My mentor is pretty clear on the idea that you have to be deeply familiar with thriller novels to write them. Not only do I not read thrillers, I hardly read novels. Just to keep in touch with fiction I try to read one classic novel every year. One. Last year I finished Heart of Darkness on December 31st...in the evening.
I read nonfiction.
You can't say you're a reader of anything if you read only one (or two, or three) a year. It's not that I'm bigoted in favor of literary novels and a snob concerning genre novel forms; it's that I'm not a novelist. Not knowing thrillers is not the problem. It's that's I don't know novels. I probably read 40 books of nonfiction for every novel I read. At least 20. That's the problem.
You've got to know when to press on, but you've also got to know when to quit. "Persistence" and "perseverance" are beloved myths. But the truth is that persistence is just as often counterproductive as it is positive. You can't make yourself be what you aren't, no matter how hard you try. You've got to figure out what it is you're meant to do. I'm pretty discouraged right now, but I'm not going to give up on that. There's got to be some kind of long-form writing I'd be good at, and somehow I need to figure out what it is.
On that score, I will try to persist. :-)
Mike
*Cf. Jack London's "To Build a Fire"—but note that there are two versions with divergent plots and different lessons learned by the protagonist! I like the little-known 1902 version better.
Original contents copyright 2018 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.) Featured Comments from:
Joe: "I just finished Robert Gottlieb's Avid Reader, a memoir in which he talks about his time as Editor-in-Chief at Simon and Schuster (among many, many other interesting positions including Editor-in-Chief at The New Yorker).
"He has a lot to say about Michael Crichton. Apparently Crichton needed a lot of editing:
'...Michael had a strong background in science. And he had a keen eye, or nose, for cutting-edge areas of science—and, later, sociology—that could be used as material for thrillers while cleverly popularizing the hard stuff for the general public. You got a lesson while you were being scared.
'What Michael wasn’t was a very good writer. The Andromeda Strain was a terrific concept, but it was a mess—sloppily plotted, underwritten, and worst of all, with no characterization whatsoever. His scientists were beyond generic—they lacked all human specificity; the only thing that distinguished some of them from the others was that some died and some didn’t.'"
Joseph Reid: "As a person who makes a living putting words on paper, I can can tell you that writing is easy. Hard is picking a fabric for a sofa. That is an irretrievable act. What you write you can change endlessly before publication, before you have to face the fear that someone else will see your words and retch. So write, dammit! STFU and punch those keys! Also, when did this undertaking change from personal story to thriller? Writing the former would fix that fact-block you have."
David A Edelstein: "My favorite bit of trivia about the 1908 version of 'To Build a Fire' is that apparently Mr. London wrote (revised?) it sitting on the lanai of his friend Princess Kaiulani's house, on O'ahu."
Bill Mitchell: "Thirty years ago a photographer friend and myself decided to write a best seller. It was going to be a 'dirty book' with each chapter fully devoted to a one single perversion. Couldn't lose! It had to have some sort of plot, so we decided to make a murder mystery out of it. Unfortunately, as we progressed, we found the story more interesting than the perversions. I have spent the last 30 years rewriting, revising, and updating the manuscript. Finally, 30 years later, Born to Die will be published this year by a reputable publisher. Occasionally, I run across one of those obscene chapters that we discarded. Even today, I find them incredibly erotic as hell! (Including the ones that I wrote 30 years ago!) Good luck with yours Mike!"
Charlie Ewers: "Points well taken, Mike, but you should still finish your novel. I'm a nonfiction writer, pure and simple, and nonfiction makes up 100% of my published work, but I wanted to write a novel, more or less to see if I could do it. I could, and I used that novel for the thesis in my Master's program. Tried unsuccessfully to get it published (I still think it was pretty good) but then realized its true purpose. I had to write that novel to move past it and back into my nonfiction. Yes, I did learn some stuff regarding narrative form, dialogue writing, and so forth, but the real benefit came from successfully finishing a long (in terms of number of words written) project. That experience served me very well when it came time to write my dissertation, and I would guess it would serve you well, too, if you turn later to writing a long piece of nonfiction."
Tex Andrews: "Oh, boy! Have I got a lot to say about this! Here's a story from grad school, severely cropped: For those who haven't been through it, studio art programs rely an 'the crit'—end of semester, faculty troop into your studio, rip you up, you defend. Lots more to that, but no room here. let's just say the better you are at defending/deflecting, the more success you'll have in the crit. Note I didn't say the better your work was....
"So, in my second semester, I was bound and determined to have a super-strong crit. Tons of work, because I thought other students did far too little, so much it was all over my studio, floor to ceiling. A sculpture I was working on I couldn't finish, so I laid the parts on the floor, and wrote notations in chalk with arrows, like a 3D mechanical drawing. Not enough room for people to come in my studio, fully.
"I was also working full time, two-hour commute one way, and, in the opposite direction of the University of Maryland, one-hour commute one way. By the day of the crit I was exhausted, running on fumes. My normal defenses and intellectual readiness at an all-time low. Could barely, numbly answer questions, coming at me fast and furious. Everyone looking at me really strangely, some peering into the room. They looked oddly alarmed.
"Crit ends, and everyone starts to leave. One prefessor, Jim Sanborn, a sculptor with a rising star in those days, last one to leave, stopped and looked back at me, cocked his head, and said: 'You know, Tex, you should really stop and look at your work sometime.'
"Huh?
"Then I kind of spun around and saw what they saw. I had entered as a painter, started getting other ideas, started furiously developing them, and then basically exploded my brain onto the walls of my studio—and created my first installation. So, then I was an installation artist (plus other things).
"So, Mike, I think you should take a look at your work, all of it. ;-} You know, novels take lots of forms...."
But it is funny too—Michael Jr.'s TED Talk. I enjoyed this and I liked his message, and my son did too.
And it's on topic. Hope your punchlines—er, projects—are going well!
Mike
Original contents copyright 2018 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
I love the phrase "family matters," with its serendipitous ambiguity—it means both "family concerns" and "family is important."
My son and his new girlfriend have been visiting since Wednesday, so I've been on vacation. We went to Watkins Glen, the Curtiss Museum, the Finger Lakes Boating Museum, and the Corning Museum of Glass, and their visit gave me permission to go off my diet for five days—we've had several SAD* meals and went out to dinner four times. They're into board games, so we played several nights. One of the ones we played was an incredibly complex game called Scythe. Fun.
I used to take a sort of "not my thing" attitude to complicated board games, but now I think it's good mental exercise for me to learn them, so I was a more willing participant this visit. Of course I couldn't have managed without Xander as a guide. Scythe was funded on Kickstarter in 2016 with the help of 17,739 backers, who pledged $1,810,294 to help bring the project to life. Xander is deep into board games and very adept at them. He still wants to try his hand at game design, despite working 50+ hours a week.
And it was great to meet Alyssa, who is a centered young woman of integrity with a sharp wit but even temperament, a nice combination.
As for my own LTP**, my writing discipline went AWOL for a few days because—well, you know, family matters. But I'm okay with that. I haven't seen Xander since last October and, as a Dad, albeit semi-retired from active duty, pretty much nothing makes me happier.
Xander at CMoG
If you're a parent I'm pretty sure you can relate!
Mike
*Standard American Diet
**Long-term project
Original contents copyright 2018 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.) Featured Comments from:
Mark Cotter: "There are moments when one just requires a Like button."
kirk tuck: "I agree with what everyone else said. I love this blog!!! And I'm having fun with my kid too. He's perfect. Thanks for all the perspective Mike!"
Jay: "Lovely post! One of those instances where I wish Typepad had a Like button!"
Good news to report this Sunday. I've passed 20,000 words on my novel, which means the first draft is one-fourth finished. So I'm behind schedule but making progress.
I'm shooting for a first draft of 80k words because, knowing myself, I'll inevitably add another 20–40k words in the rewriting process. That'll give me my target word count of 100–120k words.
A few "project" news blips from friends and readers:
Hugh Crawford by Jamie Livingston
• Hugh Crawford sold a number of copies of his massive and epic Jamie Livingston book to TOP readers a few weeks ago. He's very grateful to all purchasers! Here's a link again to the book project page.
• You probably remember John Lehet from his last print sale here. Here's John (above) visiting a few of his own photographs that are hanging in the waiting room of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders' office in the Senate Building in Washington, D.C.
• Tim Smith followed one of my recommendations and bought himself a swell pair of Ohm Walsh Super Sound Cylinder speakers (you can find them on the Beta page of the Ohm Speakers website). He says, "I’m in a sublime state of bless-ed nirvana-tude with my Ohm speakers. And I owe it all to you! They really are wonderful. I find myself listening endlessly and have a hard time walking out of the room, wanting to hear just one more."
John Marshall, Bob Burnett, and Susan Marshall at Nova Fest
• Bob Burnett, who debuted his short film Marshall's House here on TOP, is seen here at a screening of the film at Nova Fest in April, flanked by John and Susan Marshall, the owners of Marshall’s House. If you haven't watched the film yet, it's well worth the seven minutes it takes. Here ya go!
•
Hope you do well with your own long-term project in the coming week. Stick with it!
Mike
UPDATE from Hugh Crawford: "The you-can't-make-it-up coincidences of that photo continue. This weekend I was at the wedding of one of my nieces, the younger sister of the little girl in my lap in the photograph. She, the flower girl at my wedding in the photo, was the maid of honor for her sister. (Oh, and the TOP banana discount for the book is still in effect.)"
Mike explains: When I first published that photograph, in our first mention on TOP of the Jamie Livingston project, in this post in 2008, I chose it from thousands of alternatives—and had no idea the picture was of Hugh, who I still have never met in person.
Original contents copyright 2018 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.) Featured Comments from:
MikeR: "Okay, this is admittedly silly but, in the photo of John Lehet, I noticed how he wears the shoulder strap of his bag. Duh...for years, I've been doing it backwards, and wondered why my Calumet bag was designed that awkward way. So, despite not having an active project, I've learned something new from the Sunday support group. Now I just have to ignore those Ohm Walsh speakers."
Mike replies: Easy enough to do as long as you don't listen to them.
Michael Ferron: "When I retired from full time back in January part of my financial survival plan was to fix up and rent out a studio apartment on the property. That went as planned but I lost my darkroom in doing so. When remodeling I created a walk-in closet size space from the existing apartment with a separate entrance, and for the last few days I have been re-constructing the new darkroom.
"My long term plan is to shoot mostly 35mm B&W film with my Nikon F2 standard and hopefully land a printable decent keeper once a week and then edit it down to the best 12 of the year. No electronics involved. Why? Umm because I can. (Hey it's just a passion and hobby. :-) Now if I can land that above mentioned one keeper a month and continue for, say, three years, hopefully I will have created a respectable 36-photograph portfolio of urban, street and street portraits centered around downtown Austin, Texas. I'll need to do repeated butt kicking on myself to see this through, but as of now I am enthusiastic."
My self-belief crashed this past week (did it seem kind of arid around here? I was depressed). I read the descriptions of several leading thrillers, re-read mine so far, and got morose. I thought, what's the use? How can I compete?
But here's the interesting part: I recovered again. I thought, well, I'm a bit weak-willed, and I don't have a well-armored belief that I can do what I want to do. But I've committed to doing it. So I hauled out the calculator again, figured out the number of words I've written every day on average so far and the number of words I need to write each day to achieve my goal of a first draft within this calendar year (~350), and plunged back in. Because, y'know, I've committed to doing it; so I'm going to do it. And the very next day, the day after my self-belief fell off that cliff, I was back at it, and had a pretty good day.
I'm pretty proud of that. This lack of self-belief often kills my projects. My pattern is that I get excited about the idea, plunge into the work enthusiastically, then suffer creeping doubts as the initial enthusiasm ebbs and my insecurities creep in, and then, rather than face those feelings and deal with them, I throw in the towel and give up. I had a nice conversation with Kirk Tuck, too, about his book. So I figured maybe the best thing to do is to break my pattern, and simply slog onward. I'm not that bad a writer. I'm having fun, generally. Yeah, okay, so it's likely I'm not writing the next Da Vinci Code or Harry Potter and the Slythering Dementers Play Quiddich or [name successful bestselling novel]. But I said that in 2018 I'm going to finish the draft of a book. And it's just not that hard to write 350 words a day; I've been doing that and then some for years.
So then, onward.
It was a good lesson: in any long-term project, feeling discouraged is inevitable. Deal with it. Plan your work and follow your plan.
Mike
Original contents copyright 2018 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.) Featured Comments from:
Kenneth Wajda: "Everybody writes a lousy first draft; that's what first drafts are. The problem is we look at other authors' finished work and we compare our first draft to it and get discouraged, yet they all wrote lousy first drafts, too. The difference is they kept re-writing while we quit. So don't quit, good writing is rewriting, and right now you're just getting ideas out on the page, it's clay that you will shape later. The one thing you have that they don't have is your original voice and they cannot give us what you can so we need your voice, not a variation of their work. Keep going. You're doing it."
Mike replies: That was very encouraging, thanks.
Dennis Mook: "Your feelings about writing mirror how I sometimes feel about my photography. 'What's the point?' often times I ask myself, 'It has all been done before.' Yet I grab my camera and go out as often as I can. I won’t accept failure as an end state. I feel failing is necessary as an intermediate step to learn, grow, regroup, assess, acquire more determination and continue to strive for success. But I also think failure is relative and not absolute. Major League Baseball players are an example of those who fail more than 60–70% of the time but that is considered a success.
"One more thought. If you have done absolutely everything you can, left no stone unturned, tried every avenue available to succeed, did everything possible you could do and you don’t achieve your goal, in my opinion that is not a failure."
Bob Cook: "I'm not sure I can bring myself to check in with you any more. Sheesh, I have problems of my own."
Mike replies: Really? See, I thought today's was a very positive column. You can't help feeling discouraged sometimes. The message is that you can swerve around it and leave it in the rear-view mirror. It's a good thought, or so I thought.
Kirk Tuck: "Mike, you inspired me. I'm working on my second 'Henry White' book today. I'm aiming to be done with it in time for the holidays. Keep writing the Sunday support column; I think it's helpful for all of us!"
I've been posting notices about my book-writing project on Sundays, as a way of encouraging others to keep up with their own large 2018 projects. A day late today.
March was, to put it kindly, a setback for me. The Joni Cole Rule is "touch it every day," meaning, whatever you're working on, at least open it / sit down to it / pick up the instrument or the camera—whatever "touching it" means for your project, do it every day. Not to apply any porcine lip-gloss, I failed at that in March. We had a big snowstorm with a loss of power, I went into the hospital with a heart-attack scare and came out with the rather bizarre (under the circumstances) condition placed on me to not type for a week or two, and I lost willpower and momentum.
Then I found the last piece to the puzzle, which was to work on it first thing in the morning, when I have the most energy. My mentor said, "I think your idea of hitting the writing hard when you’re the sharpest is a good idea, but the best thing about it is that you’re on a schedule. Scheduled writing is critical; otherwise, it’s too easy to let go. It’s like exercise. You gotta do it, but if you don’t have a schedule, you’ll start skipping."
March was a month of skipping; April has been a month of regular work. It's been going great.
Overall, I'm really glad I didn't let the setbacks of March swamp the project. Could have happened. I'm now a little behind my original schedule, still, but catching up fast, and I'm getting work done regularly—six days a week. (Monday, when I play pool with the older guys, is my day off now—from writing, and, usually, or this is the plan, from TOP.)
Moral of the story: don't let setbacks sink the project. Keep working at the method, meaning the mechanics and the nuts-and-bolts of how you work, until you hit on the way of working that allows you to get the job done. Until you're working easily and regularly, without needing too much in the way of self-discipline or willpower, you're not there yet; keep trying. I'm thankful I did.
Lastly, although this isn't pertinent, I have to say I just love working on the book. It's so nice to be able to write without the pressure of immediate publication. I only work for 75 minutes, first thing in the morning after getting up, taking care of the dogs, and fixing coffee, but I look forward to it each and every day. I honestly want to do this for the rest of my life, or at least as long as I've got my marbles. I'm blessed that TOP allows me to work those extra 75 minutes every day.
Hope your own project is going well too!
Mike (Thanks to J.C.)
Original contents copyright 2018 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.) Featured Comments from:
David Maxwell: "Maybe a day late for you, but right on time for me. On Saturday I started a new book project. Time will tell if it is the one to break the 5,000 word barrier (I write very quickly and efficiently to that point, before rapidly losing momentum) or if it will join dozens of other abandoned projects. Previous manuscripts fell into one of two categories—books that I wanted to write or books that I thought other people would want to buy. The latter always fizzled out due to lack of passion while the former would usually die because what little pragmatism I possess would rise up and tell me that I'm wasting my time. Fortunately my newest project combines the two for the first time. I'm referring to it as a 'memoir/how-not-to guide.' It has been a fun few days of brainstorming, outlining, and writing. I have high hopes for this one. Thanks for the inspiration Mike!"
This is about my writing project, but I think it applies, globally, to just about any creative project you're serious about.
It also announces a slight procedural change to TOP.
I think I've finally discovered the last component of my process for writing this book...I had already decided to try to "touch it every day," courtesy of writing teacher Joni B. Cole (a resolution interrupted somewhat by my hand/arm injury, which is now 95% resolved), but I still wasn't working comfortably.
Now I think I've finally put the final piece in place. For years I've been in the habit of getting up, taking care of the dogs, fixing my coffee, and sitting down at the computer right away. Then I work through the morning and into the early afternoon. Later in the afternoons my focus deteriorates and I spend a lot of time doing chores or errands, answering email, web surfing, and mucking about with this and that. So I originally figured it wouldn't be that difficult to carve an extra hour or two out of the afternoons to work on the book.
The problem was that my writing energy is strongest when I sit down in the morning.
So I've made just a little tweak to my routine—I get up on schedule, do my morning routines, then sit down at the upstairs computer and set my iPhone timer for an hour and fifteen minutes. I've been easily writing about 6–700 words in that time. I'm focused, it's quiet, and I've got plenty of energy.
It's going very well and it seems to be the last piece in the puzzle. Plus, it relieves the pressure on the rest of the day—I get the book-writing task out of the way early and then I don't have it hanging over my head, threatening to not get done as my energy ebbs throughout the day. I'm also trying to follow Ernest Hemingway's trick of not stopping until you know what you're going to write next, which means you know where to begin when you sit down tomorrow.
I think with any artistic project you have to be hardheaded and practical about both your method and your process. Until it's a habit, you have to be determined. Everyone's different, and everyone will have different "tweaks" they need to make to their process to solve whatever difficulties they're experiencing. But this stuff is important, and we need to take this kind of problem-solving seriously.
Anyway, expect new posts on TOP to begin appearing in the afternoons from now on.
And if you're good at setting goals and working toward them effectively in an organized, conscious way, consider that to be a skill and a gift. Not everyone can do it. And it's not enough to just make plans for our work—we also have to be willing to modify those plans as needed when we recognize that we're encountering difficulties or impediments.
Mike
Original contents copyright 2018 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.) Featured Comments from:
Ed Hawco: "No surprise here. This works like any priority that we don't take seriously as a priority, such as saving money for retirement. People will complain that at the end of their payroll cycle they just don't have any money left to set aside. It's exactly like your former routine of waiting until the end of your workday to write. By then there's nothing left. But if you do the priority thing first (whether it's writing time or slipping $100 into a retirement plan), then it gets done every time. At the end of the day or the pay cycle, you barely notice the reduced energy/pay because by then you're just phutzing around anyway, whether you had done the high priority thing or not. I wish I could claim credit for this brilliant piece of conventional wisdom, but it's been around for a while. It's one of those things that is, on one hand, so freaking obvious, yet on the other hand so hard to actually initiate."
Eamon Hickey: "Yep, two good lessons. It's been a big key for me in my own book project—to work on it first, in the morning, for an hour or an hour-and-a-half. Then I do the assignment work that pays the bills. And I also make a note for myself, at the end of each session, of what I'm writing (or editing) next. I've started doing this with all my projects, of almost any kind. Helps me a ton. By the way, on the energy waning in the afternoon thing. I largely cured that by mixing mostly decaf beans into my coffee (I drink the equivalent of about 1 or 1.5 caffeinated cups of coffee a day, but spread over multiple cups through the morning and afternoon). What I had discovered was that a strong dose of caffeine in the morning was leading to the classic coming-down-from-a-stimulant crash in the afternoon, just like what happens on the backside of a cocaine binge (so I hear)."
