An article in catapult – On Facebook, social media, and life well-lived

I am very happy to be a part of the most recent edition of catapult with an article titled “And Then He Disappeared,” in which I reflect upon my relationship with electronic life and social media. If you like to reflect on such questions too, you may give it a read here:

https://www.catapultmagazine.com/backward-movement/article/and-then-he-disappeared

The photographs mentioned in the first paragraph of the essay may be viewed here.

Be sure to check out articles from the entire issue which asks questions about the value of progress and its ever forward movement.

of articles and blog breaks – on thrift store shopping and wholeness

Hello, readers/viewers. I don’t know what I ought to call you It has been a little while, but more on that in a little bit.
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First, I have had an article published in catapult magazine about a coat…well, really about other things, too, but finding an amazing coat in a thrift store gets the ball rolling.

In the current issue, which is all about the issues involved in clothing oneself, I also have two haiku, reprinted from here, about some of the wonders of spring.
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Regarding blogging and breaking, well, I am in the process of mulling over a photographic break, both on and off the blog–that is, exiling my cameras elsewhere for a time in order to…well, I am not certain to do what exactly, but perhaps, to riff off the images in the previous post, to let the lake refill. Indeed, the images in that post may serve as an apt image for this time.

I do hope that there will be some activity here, perhaps the posting of an article or two, but, more significantly, I hope to complete an overhaul of The Dassler Effect, with a new look and a section devoted to selling some of my prints.

I am not sure how long the break will last–it has not snowed here and the flowers are as yet to come out to tempt me–but I can be a fickle fellow so there maybe some hope that it will be short.

Thank you so much for coming along for the ride however long you have been on board.

Beautiful Inefficiencies – A Video Produced for Catapult Magazine – On Cooking a Pumpkin

I get a few video segments mixed up, sound almost stoned in others, call a cappuccino a latte, and have other assorted errors, but I am quite pleased with this video essay. Video work is quite the challenge compared to taking and editing stills or even writing essays in print alone, and this project combined them all. Enjoy a final piece of pumpkin on this Thanksgiving night.

James Bond in Skyfall – 10 Second Movie Review

SPOILERS BELOW!
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Hogwarts destroyed. England saved. Dumbledore dead.

Of Giants and Gene Pools, Cardinals and Cardiacs, and Baseball Game Sevens…There Had to be a Game Seven

Tonight just after Angel Pagan hauled in Daniel Descalso’s final fly ball out to hand the Cardinals a second consecutive loss and yet again push them to the brink, my young nephew made a beeline to leave the room, to go sort out sorrow and anger and to lick his wounds alone. It is a response I recognize because it would have been exactly my own response at that age. In truth, it is often my own response today, and sometimes for far more important things than baseball. I did make it a point to haul him in and onto my lap tonight, though, to talk through disgust and hope together, to share the load of disappointment if only a little bit. I miss that sort of lap for me, too, to plop down into myself, but I reckon that lack is one thing that being an adult is about.

As my little doppelganger, it is amazing to see many of his similarities to me in his look, his frame, and mannerisms. It is less pleasurable to see the Das nervousness and bent toward the melancholy be passed on in the young ones, in him and his brother. Sometimes it makes you wonder whether you ought to pass along such things as the love of baseball at all. But even if the Cardinals lose again tomorrow and end their year, eliciting even deeper disappointment, it will have been worth it to have shared the excitement through the late summer and fall, to have received random texts about baseball scores, to be able to remember Andrew and Jack’s laughter as their silly, burly uncle missed the pitching screen in the summer again and again and again.

Speaking of that game tomorrow. It is a game 7, as it almost had to have been if you think about it, even if on Friday night Cardinals fans had fostered hopes of an easy NLCS victory to go on to face the raring-to-go Detroit Tigers. And though I could tell you that the Cardinals are at their best when their backs are against the wall, it would not be with much conviction. It does not look good. And even if we do make it through, that “we” a communal one of city and team, it may be as the poorer side with a weaker set of pitchers and more inconsistent hitters, but it will be nonetheless our team that makes it through, and, yes, a team that never gives up.

The Cardinals and Giants played each other 12 times this year with each team winning 6 games. They have played each other 6 times in the postseason, with each team winning 3. Something has to give. And with some bloops and some blasts from Cardinal bats, with a couple of pitchers making a stand, anything is possible. Tomorrow night about this same time I will make a tiny post with two simple pieces of punctuation, a colon followed by a parenthesis. We will just have so see which way that parenthesis is going to face.

And, finally, somewhere in the great beyond Carmen Miranda is saying, “Hey, wait a minute…”

The Theme of Grief in Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life – An Essay in Catapult Magazine – The Book of Job and the Tree of Life

The still above is from one of my favorite shots from a movie packed with hundreds of stunning shots. In the most recent issue of Catapult Magazine entitled “The Dying of the Light,” I present a piece touching on the theme of grief in Terrence Malick’s movie The Tree of Life. It is more of an essay than a review. If you have not seen the film, this piece could serve as a useful guide to help you navigate its beautiful but challenging waters or else it might serve as a prompt for post-viewing reflection.

Pulling Weeds, a Reflection

Bending down to my task, I see him. The legs bent and wide apart. The left elbow braced against the knee. The belly, covered by the grooved fabric of an a-shirt, centering the gravity of it all. And the right hand gathers, grasps, and pulls-gathers, grasp, and pulls. Bending down to work, I see as him.

I thought of my father immediately as I put on the a-shirt this morning and went out to do a task he both loathed and loved, which he would finish with his shorts grubby, the thin fabric of his shirt soaked with sweat, and the beads rolling down and dripping, dripping off his nose. It is an image which even now I am somewhat hard pressed to reconcile with remembering him as a college president in Pakistan–with suits and ties, salaams and saluting, a company of gardeners at his disposal–when he was never so little clad except in the tall, cool recesses of the president’s house, stretching out on his bed for an afternoon nap, an arm behind his head against the pillow, his toes fidgeting till he fell asleep.

It was not like it was with Willy Loman, that my father was born to be most fulfilled with labor, with whistling while he worked, with getting his hands dirty with building a stoop. Dad was born to lead and learned to lead. In his career at least he did not, like Willy Loman, have “all the wrong dreams.” Before he met and married my mother, he walked away from what would have been an easy life in the Pakistan Air Force to teach at half the pay as a professor at a mission college. Later he would lead that college even though it had been nationalized and also the entire Church of Pakistan for a time as moderator. And yet, still, I have seen him after weeding happy and sweaty as a masdoor,* as he would call it, marveling at the wonder of work. I have also seen him bedraggled, dirty, and dragging home discouraged. I cannot pretend that the difference between these two states of his was not often simply the result of the proximity or lack thereof of me to him, of me being with him in the work or not. And yet in work, perhaps especially in labor with ones hands, it is the long drudgery of the weary days that makes the epiphanies epiphanies, the feasts feasts.

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The weeds have taken over the entire garden, and I imagine Dad grasping my arm and looking in my face and saying in the hushed, excited voice he used to tell a truth, often again and again, “You know the Bible is so true. Look at how quickly the weeds take over.”

Thankfully, the ground is yielding and I am able to grasp out the runners and bunch up the crab grass and pull out its roots. Some of the thick pithy plants break off, leaving the roots in the ground, but I am lucky with most. The morning wears on and I divide the garden in two and try to decide whether I will finish the task of completing half of the garden or finish at a specific time, no matter what my progress. I choose the time–making a choice that I wish my father would have made more often. And, yet, as the finish line nears it becomes evident that I will not be done just on time. I press on and finish just twenty minutes past my target. A manageable task…a time to be done…with only a little extra wiggle room, seldom used, for finishing off some thing close to being done–I will have to remember that combination.

And while I weed, I think of the parables and of Genesis, of satisfaction and futility, of the weedy life I so often seem to inhabit, of the put-off efforts to weed it and the futility so often attendant when I do. And as the sun climbs higher and I weary of my labor under it–gathering, grasping, pulling–I pull out a big plug of grass with a large amount of soil. And even though it has been a very dry summer, from the soil the brown and earthy smell of loam fills my nostrils, and something changes. For a moment I feel the kinship of soil, echoing to our making, to its easy tilling, to feeling its life and substance as part of my own substance–me a cube of soil, with earthworms like mitochondria, shaped and breathed into–me a gardener working without toil.

I stop and think…I hope…that Dad, too, knew the smell of loam.

*common laborer

An Article in Catapult, and Two Haiku

The article is “Do FarmVilleans Dream of Analog Sheep” and is, in a nutshell, about how our lives are increasingly interwoven with technology and how that affects us.

I think both of the haiku have appeared on this blog already, but here in a fancier format are “On Facebook” and “On Twitter.”

If you read these (particularly the article) and the writing provokes any thoughts or questions, I would love to hear from you, either via email or in a comment.

Impeccable Timing…

…on my part to write an article about my love of fruitcake to coincide with the Gateway Men’s Chorus’ holiday production for this year.
By the way, I do not want to herein go into debate about the topic of homosexuality, which is an issue that deserves more measured and thoughtful discussion than that which generally occurs in blog banter. It is interesting, though, to see a gay community apporpriating and subverting a prejorative term, and when I saw it in Starbucks this morning I thought it too funny a coincidence not to pass along.

The Clarity of a Dumpster-Another Article in Catapult Makes a Turkey

For those of you keeping score at home, this is the third article in a row in Catapult, which in bowling terms makes a Turkey (i.e. three strikes in a row). As for whether this one or the last two are actually strikes or gutter balls, I’ll let you decide, if you can spare the time. Get it? “Spare the time.” Roomie Nathan will be proud.
The Clarity of a Dumpster
Other Catapult writings
The Creating Capital issue