Orange leaves are falling on my head; at least the green ones stayed where they belonged.
The hummingbirds have hidden somewhere for the past few weeks; metamorphosed into eagles circling high above.
The deer grow horns and eat the grapes before they’ve turned to wine, and drunken from the harvest turn to rut.
And fox, he smiles and laughs as watching where the subways being built by moles and voles maps menus for his winter meals.
The Kryptonite glowed green beyond the fence. His steed, perhaps in warning, perhaps resentful of the superman that flew above him, stopped short, and Clark Kent flew on alone.
With sad thoughts of the heartache and handicaps a great man fought valiantly to overcome, granted relief from his burdens, but leaving a legacy of hope and faith for those to follow; a true Superman and American Hero, Christopher Reeve has died. Our thoughts and prayers are with his family and the world today, and with him, at last free to fly again.
The technology of new media not only lends itself to exciting ways of telling a story, allowing the reader to manipulate where a story ends, changing its direction, adding flashing lights and color at whim, it offers the ability to determine where a story begins.
A baby is born, and its biography begins at his first cry of freedom and authorship. The paths he will choose are straight ahead, angled, dead ends, cul-de-sacs, uphill and down–whatever he wants and wherever he is led to the final chapter, the final page.
But new media has changed even life story. In this morning’s New York Times, the ability with streaming video, audio, full color, a new place to begin, a prologue perhaps, but a technologically created one.
Because, well, shoot; I have about an hour’s work left on my Stats project to do before I can play with Powerpoint to create a storyboard.
Update: Well, I’ve finished it, although I’m not sure with my cockeyed view of life that I’ve drawn the right conclusions from the graphs and figures I’ve churned out. Hopefully my eloquence in my project statement can serve to dazzle if in fact I’ve come up with a sixth dimension viewpoint that’s contrary to the concrete facts.
You know that itchy scratchy annoying sensation at the back of your neck that you often get from clothing labels?
Well if you ever notice this same occurrence at your throat instead, your sweater’s on backwards.
As I suspected, the various courses taken at a college level are not necessarily for the discipline of the field, or to retain in its entirety all the information. The tool we inadvertently are learning (although the wise professors are aware) is the habit, the process, the method and manner of thinking.
Logic, research, viewpoint, awareness, application, the very concept of questioning; these are what we learn that are invaluable. Often we apply them to the simplest situations and come out with tangled networks of ideas that can complicate the easiest of thoughts. But this is all alright; the paths may just lead back to the most obvious, but we can be assured it is as well the best solution.
I shall never be a scholar, an intellectual, deep thinker or expounder of new ideas. But the way I look at life has been changed forever, and the thought processes have been applied to the most mundane of happenings.
I have been waking with severe and frightening bedhead for the past half year or more, and race for the hairbrush before anything else. I am even breaking and losing hair I’ve noticed. What am I thinking in the night that causes such commotion? What head-grinding-into-pillow-thoughts have been replacing Willie in my dreams?
I have just searched my frameshop for a mouse. A computer mouse, that is. My trusty Microsoft Scroll Mouse was acting strange and it was quite frustrating so I killed it.
I am a thrower, a smasher, a flinger of things. This is what, in fact, finally killed my mouse, and so in remorse and regret I immediately set out to replace it. Computer parts are all over the homestead, but I knew there were spares around and I am now back to my original 1996 Logitech which God knows how it survived my wrath.
Once again wandering away from reality and into the more exciting fantasyland of “And then…,” I wondered how true to life a weblog persona is, or for that matter, how many people we truly are in any given set of circumstances. Would you, loyal reader, have guessed that I have once purposely smashed a framed piece I was working on? Or that my kitchen wall is marred by the dent of a flung pot? These things happen only when I am alone–I am at least better behaved in public. But what secrets lie in the personality of a writer–even the most writerly writer–that hide themselves within the words?
The topology of new media (topology is the new buzz word amongst our captains of new media art and literature, so I’m just kinda throwing it in to let it roll around in my mind and off my tongue) is a layout of narrative structure as assembled and seen in that form by many different personalities. (I think.) The navigation from place to place, time to time is a part of it. The people who make it work and the people within each of them, is a navigable organizational chart as they go off in different directions to meet and meet again when appropriate, and when it progresses the story.
It’s all a giant topo map, with elevations, contours, measurements and paths.
For the more proper definitions of topology, go here or here, and oh yes, wherever else they send you via hyperlink.
Honestly, even I need wonder when my opinion of performance of the presidential candidates directly contradicts the majority of thought.
I was pleased with the president’s performance overall and found much fault in the senator’s at their first debate. I was scornful of the president’s last night, and more impressed with the senator’s delivery and answers. It does in no way change my vote, but it is curious to me if my perceptions are not influenced in fact by my reluctance to join a herd mentality; a rebellion of a sort to ensure my own decision.
Or, if I see things just so differently than what they appear to be.
New Media Moment: Hopefully this is an asset and not a hindrance to the new media way of thinking.
I am short, and tops of highboys, hutches go undusted. Nearsighted, so the spider laughs and builds his home of cobweb and settles in for maybe months. An aching swayback keeps the baseboards safe from running rags, and the lightbulb in the cellar stairwell sometimes is replaced by flashlight in the dark.
Each, we bring ourselves to every project, our foibles and our flaws as well as skill. But overcoming disadvantage for the job at hand leaves on the other, the possibility of success.
A pink morning sky as fake as a Kinkade, or color filters on a Canon. Nature takes creative license with the day. Impossibly black branches cutting through the salmon canvas; a painting I would shake my head at and pass by.
Yet, there it is.
New Media Moment: Evidently nothing is not susceptible to the imagination, when reality itself plays havoc with the norm.
The excitement is there, like reading the first page of a promising book set aside too long.
But what if one couldn’t read? Or the text was in hieroglyphics? Or the pages were all stuck together? Or scrambled in numerical disorder? How do we overcome the little glitches, decide what we need to make something work, to reach our goal in its fullest potential? To put one before two before three, is a learned method, a response to an organizational problem.
But with new media, it may go off in seventeen hundred different directions, double back, die, or reincarnate as a cat. Unless of course, you wanted a duck.
Neat stuff. Discover the tools, open the door to the million page story.
The sun set fire to the trees this morning. The maples bear their torches high into the sky and run along the streets and backyards in their race towards winter and the grueling tests of endurance they will face.
Saw a very nice reference to Spinning on the Great Lettuce Head last night, but it caused a sleepless night nonetheless. This, because while it is a gracious acknowledgement of my enthusiasm, it also brings into focus the problem I am dealing with in the conflict of daily life.
Put bluntly, I don’t want to go into the frameshop this morning. I don’t want to do laundry, vacuum or make dinner. I want instead to spend the day here at the keyboard because I’ve just caught a glimpse of how to create something, where to investigate the possibilities of reaching the next step in a new media project.
I have a picture of a white cup. I have two new weblogs set up to accommodate it. I have Photoshop. I have the opening lines of a story. I have the trails it takes. All I need is the time to put them all together to get a group project headed off in the right direction. The clues shall lead us to the goal, but exploration and investigation call for dedicated time and effort, trial and error, trial and success.
While my upbringing requires me to respond to commitments, I’m getting sneakier in avoiding the issues. So what I’m saying is, is if you are one of my framing customers, honest, your frame is on backorder…really…
Oh and Honey, salad is too a healthy and more than adequate dinner.
I very rarely check out the google hits to my site; they usually show up as “John Cheever’s The Swimmer” or “Fresh Pineapple in Jello,” or something along that line, both of which I’ve blogged about. But this one had me intrigued:
“Susanese women seek men”
Of course I had to track it down, and there was a simple, logical explanation. First, the obvious misspelling of Sudanese, and secondly…well, in one of my long ago posts I explained about my tendency to speak way behind my thought process so that it comes out kind of missing some important elements, or is assbackwards. In other words, it’s Susanese.
The funniest part though, is that after they came to the site and read the post, they still checked out the “About Me” page…
It seems the two are becoming one. New Media is haunting my days and nights, away from classroom influence it seeps into my brain and out again.
Barely had the store unlocked; a neighbor from the past is there. A finder of old and rare books, he has helped me in the past to find the diamonds I sought. Many years have passed, he has passed in space from sea to shining sea and has returned again. It is good to see him.
The talk goes through the politics, the literature, the past, ultimately woven into the future by the web. New media methods come up in conversation, my excitement at its possibilities igniting his and reigniting mine. An hour passes before the old prints are revealed for framing, but not before we’ve traded facts and feelings and the knowledge of how to turn pages in a book.
It is all out there, we decide. It only need be sought.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology