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For those of you still hanging around

Fetched: September 12th, 2008, 8:57pm PDT

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You may be interested in my new blog, glynnis.nu, which I've created to chronicle my experiences living in Paris. I arrived in the city last night and will be living in the 13eme until June 2009. I'm enrolled in French classes at the Sorbonne, and an art history class at the American University. Though there's not much on the site to explore just yet, I hope to update regularly to keep everyone State-side updated on my life in France.
The metamorphosis

Fetched: June 26th, 2008, 4:17am PDT

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I'm sitting in a computer lab in the basement of the student center (I'm taking classes at the University this summer until early July), freezing beneath air vents and fluorescent lights. I have enough time before I need to report to work that I could go back to my place, but sometimes I feel more thoughtful and more productive when I forget about my car in the parking lot and stay stranded on campus.

It has been a while since I felt driven to write—not just here, but at all. Things are beginning to bubble up again, whether it's the dissatisfaction with daily life, the stress of school and work, a sense of change, or the desire to procrastinate on a daily basis. Sometimes I think we experience sea changes in character without fully realizing it. Can one truly be cognisant of one's own transformation as it is happening? I find that for myself, whether the transformation is physical or unrelated to the body, it is often a single glance, an unremarkable photo, or a tiny moment which makes me aware. For instance, when I look at this photo, taken my freshman year of high school (was that really almost six years ago?), I see someone else entirely.

Mostly I see the physical transformation of my face—that single photo is the main evidence I have of the last of my middle school baby fat, before my jawline sharpened and I began to grow into my adult features. But of course there's an emotional resonance. I still feel a connection and nostalgia for the place it was taken. I remember the fabric of that shirt, the way it fit my torso when I wore it. I remember putting on that bracelet every day. I remember how my life was shaped by the daily routine of high school. I remember what made me happy or excited then. I compare all of this to today. When I visit that place now, I feel differently—it is a place of the past, which, despite all efforts, I can no longer really activate. I don't know where that shirt is, or whether I got rid of it. It probably wouldn't fit, even if I still had it. The bracelet, too, is gone. My daily routine couldn't be more different. What makes me happy or excited now might have seemed alien to me then.

It's not so much that I feel a loss at all this; I could care less about the shirt or the bracelet, the physical transformation of my face, or even the lack of active connection I feel when visiting such an important place from my past. It is true that my memory and my life plagues itself with sentimentality and nostalgia. But, stripping all that away, what remains is merely an awareness—an attempt to draw a line connecting point A and point B. True—I myself made the journey, but while traveling, did I stop to consider the shape of the path? To hesitate now as I draw the line feels only natural. After all, when we board a plane that flies from New York to San Francisco, how can we really comprehend that distance? What cities, what rivers, what houses have we flown over? How many people are below us, and what are they doing? How are they feeling? How many of them look up at the plane to consider its passengers and where they are headed? The most we emerge with at our destination is a pack of peanuts in our belly, a few chapters read, or a short nap—never a genuine astonishment at the great distance we have traveled.

Sometimes I catch myself having acutely adult moments, and I'm not sure what to think of them. Last night in my local grocery store, I stood in line at the checkout. Having already unloaded my items onto the conveyor belt, I considered how much money I would save with my discount card (nearly $17.00, I would discover), and how many buy-one-get-one-free items I had chosen. An extra tub of ice cream, two extra steaks, an additional package of cheese. I felt genuinely excited and satisfied with this. It was some time later before I considered what this meant. How often do adolescents find themselves alone in grocery stores shopping for planned meals to cook at home, genuinely delighted by the idea of a discount? When, if ever, do they feel relieved and content to return home at the end of a long day, read quietly, and turn in early for bed?

The spring semester and the brief extension of school into the summer has left me much altered, though I'm uncertain whether anyone besides myself can observe it. What's interesting about reflecting on the line—the connection between two different characters of my life, both of them me, neither of them me—is that quite suddenly I'm aware of the next point along the way. In acknowledging the distance between myself and point A, it's only natural to consider how far point C will be—incalculably so. The things I admire about myself from point A might not have come along to point B. What else might go missing when I arrive at C?
My year in cities, 2007

Fetched: January 17th, 2008, 1:28pm PST

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This is a bit late, but here 'tis. You can compare it with last year's list.

Tuscaloosa, AL*
Oxford, MS
Holly Springs, MS
Memphis, TN
Birmingham, AL*
Atlanta, GA*
Chicago, IL
New Orleans, LA*
Moundville, AL
Augusta, GA*
Greenville, SC*
Asheville, NC
Charlottesville, VA
Washington, D.C.
Monticello, VA
Natural Bridge, VA
Kaifeng, China
Luoyang, China
Beijing, China
Zhengzhou, China
Song Shan, China

*Multiple visits.

Feel free to throw your own list into the comments.
I created a tumblog

Fetched: October 21st, 2007, 7:49am PDT

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I've been keeping my eye on tumblr for a little while now, and have been an avid reader of my favorite tumblogs. The more I read them, the more I feel the form is appropriate for the way I'd like to express myself online. In fact, many of my recent posts here resemble the kinds of post I'd be able to make more frequently with tumblr. I don't think rocket-fish will be going anywhere. Rather, I hope tumblfish will be yet another way to keep up with me online, with more frequent, less-polished updates that take less time to construct. Consider it an experiment.

Head on over and subscribe to the RSS feed now.
Upcoming photography show

Fetched: October 17th, 2007, 10:03pm PDT

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The LJCC will be hosting a show featuring some photos from my trip to China. If you're interested, stop by! If you're unable to make the reception (there will be food!), the show will be up and the gallery open throughout the month of November. Many of the images in the show haven't yet been published on flickr.

East: Images From Beijing & the Henan Province
November 3 - 30, 2007
Reception: November 11, 3-5PM

LJCC Gallery
3960 Montclair Road
Birmingham, AL 35213

Hope to see you there!
Naomi, earring master

Fetched: October 12th, 2007, 5:25am PDT

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It's always terrible when one of your friends is exceptionally gifted in creating something you compulsively buy. Naomi's begun making earrings to sell on etsy, and I encourage you all to be wowed, inspired, and moved to buy. Her shop is here.
Lately

Fetched: October 9th, 2007, 12:31am PDT

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Joe's been trying to catch up with video editing, and did an especially beautiful job with this one, which was made in late August. In it, I am shooting one of my first photo assignments, the prints for which were not so good (and therefore are not online). Consider it representative of my life for the past few weeks, even if you've yet to see most of the results. Dad called me tonight to ask questions about what kind of scanner I wanted for my birthday; you can live in hope that most of my class work will be online before the semester's over.

Juggle Court from Joe Parmer on Vimeo.

Hats off to Joe's superior video editing.
Changing form

Fetched: October 6th, 2007, 6:52am PDT

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As my interests and modes of expression fluctuate with the passing of time, so too do my forms of input and output. I read this recently on Mareen Fischinger's tumblelog:
There is nothing to hide. I would not put up party pictures that make people or myself look ridiculous, and don't tell the internet who I have a crush on or privilege them in my online life.

In general, people expect my online life to exactly reflect everything there is or has happened, but that is not true. Sure, you guys are allowed to know that I am somewhat crazy and hyperactive, and that is part of understanding how I work (with both meanings). What I do with this online is merely a way of coping with my life. I need the output.

Mareen's talking specifically about online expression, but I'd argue that it applies to all forms. People somehow misconstrue one type of expression as a representation of the creator as a whole. While the expression may be truthful, revealing, and vulnerable, it certainly isn't whole. It is a coping mechanism, an output, and may explore one idea and one question which has eaten away at the creator for some time.

In my photo theory class, we've been talking a lot about Sally Mann, a photographer who has recently infected my life. I think this theory of expression as an exploration and a fraction especially applies to her work, which is controversial. One series (her most famous, and probably my favorite), "Immediate Family," contains many images of her nude children. People misconstrue her as a bad mother who eroticizes her children through photos, but personally I find the work quite moving and hardly pornographic. Another body of work, "What Remains," features images of decomposing cadavers at the Tennessee Body Farm—photos often viewed as a violation of the sacrosanct ceremony of death. Because of these two works, she's often depicted as a woman whose boundaries are ill-defined, who is a terrible mother or an artist selecting controversial subjects for publicity and attention. However, I think it's merely an output—she is exploring her children, their personalities, and childhood in general. I think her work speaks volumes about the violence and wildness of childhood—the part we often brush aside or forget as we reminisce about our formative experiences, or romanticize the rawness and innocence of our early years.

I think I become infected with forms of expression and certain creators of those forms in a way that totally absorbs me and prevents me from doing much else. Late in high school I caught and recovered from several poets, including but not limited to Billy Collins, Jack Gilbert, Mark Strand, and Naomi Shihab Nye. The latter two spilled into nearly all of my serious writing, through epigraphs or borrowed lines, overarching concepts or ideas. Jack Gilbert and Mark Strand got me going on the je ne sais quoi of absence and loss. For an entire year, perhaps longer, all I wrote about was absence, dearth, death, and loss, and it became the subject of my senior thesis. Strand's "Keeping Things Whole" was the be-all, end-all of my late high school existence. Everyone I knew loved it, many could recite it, and perhaps it infected others as it infected me. In a way, the creative writing department was a mechanism for spreading the disease of poetry, as we all passed along little books, poems—vessels—to anyone else ready to come down with something.
Keeping Things Whole

In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.

When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body's been.

We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.

Each infection with a creator and creation—if you really come down with it, and have a long recovery time—leaves a scar. Like a terrible accident, it can change your appearance. The way you look before and the way you look after can be so different that you must explain how the two yous are connected. People see scars and ask for stories. And perhaps it's also like a relationship. You take the poet, the photograph, the painting, the song, to bed each night as you're exploring, and when it's over you're left with scars of another variety. Never will you forget the way a piece has touched you, and when you encounter it again much later—or anything that resembles it—you can't help but linger a moment and remember.

Sally Mann is my latest disease. I can't stop studying her images, collecting information about her work, linking her to seemingly unrelated conversations through some abstract concept I've formed while mulling her over late at night. I want to show her to everyone because of the way she moves me; I feel that everyone, given the right circumstance, will be moved in the same way, but of course that's not the case.

I suppose my ultimate point is that I feel myself changing output. Once my output could be found here, online, at regular intervals. Once it was poetry for critique every other week. Now I feel it shifting, more than ever, to the photograph—the visual—which I can honestly say I haven't felt until this month. It's true that I've been a compulsive flickr user (and abuser) for some time now, but the energy was different. Now that I've learned to swim, I am thrusting myself into the deep end. I cannot find enough time for hiding in the dark room outside of photo class. My time there is a kind of meditation, and there is always much more to be done, not for the sake of deadlines, but simply because I am not finished.

Sally Mann has also sparked a curiosity in the idea of photos as objects, as well as antique photo processes, specifically that of tin types, large format, and wet plate collodion (all processes that I absolutely cannot afford). A local artist, Jenny Fine, got a grant to study with the couple who taught Sally Mann how to create wet plate collodion images. She lived in New York to study and work for a year, and has since returned to Tuscaloosa to teach art to elementary school students. Jenny makes tin types (and uses other alternative ways of producing images). I am supposed to model for her this weekend—an exchange for the opportunity to tag along and observe her process—and hopefully will have much more to report in the near future.
Ben makes CNN

Fetched: September 22nd, 2007, 3:48pm PDT

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Ben, a good friend of mine, has been making national (and international, in some cases) news the last few days for his participation in protests on the University of Florida campus.

Here he is on CNN (in the blue shirt).

And of course, there's lots of other stuff floating around YouTube.
"You look different! Did you get your hair cut or something?"

Fetched: September 21st, 2007, 2:30am PDT

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You may notice ("you" meaning the non-aggregated readers out there) that things look a little sharper around here. The serifs are a little more serify, the sans serifs even sans-y-er, and in general, words are arriving in a new fontastic vehicle. These are the first sentences not dressed in Verdana since rocket-fish's foundation—indeed, since before the rocket took off and I was still addressing the web via frame set and free web space circa 1999. Having survived The Great Capitalization Shift of 2003, I trust you'll all adjust to seeing Verdana pack its valise. Please join me in considering it the most nostalgia-inducing font of our short web-lives.