Images and other species of words  

Obviously I haven't been spending much time here lately; some of that time has gone offline, but a lot of it has gone into digital photography (which you can find at flickr). I remember my comp lit advisor (the same one who did the authoritative new translation of Kafka's The Trial a few years ago) telling me that if he had it to all over again, he'd go into art criticism, because with art it only takes a few moments, or at most a few minutes, to take in a whole picture -- whereas with books, you have to actually go and read them. Maybe this is another way of saying that a picture is worth a thousand words (I'm not sure). Anyway, I've been putting all my energy into photography, like a man obsessed. The latest development is that I was the photographer at a family wedding a couple weeks ago -- a brief description of that experience is here.

(As an aside, I should probably take a second to sing the praises of flickr -- it rolls up all of the best things about the interactivity of the blogging experience into an easy to use package that makes it so much easier to use and more immediate than, say, this MT-powered blog. A year ago I probably wouldn't have been very interested in a site that restricts features to members, but with spam as a complete non-problem and the built in feeds for comments posted elsewhere, I'm sold. Sorry, I'm gushing a little bit here, but I can't praise it enough.)

The major ill-effect of this little photography binge is that I've completely stopped writing, whether it's my public non-fictions or my private fictions. And not writing is bad, not just because it has been my major creative (and sometimes even social) outlet for the past three years, but also because the skills begin to deteriorate, and a lot faster than I'd like to admit... I probably shouldn't intimate that I even feel I've been thinking differently. At any rate, the point of all this I'm resolving to write a little more here, even if it's different -- less political, more personal, etc. No, this blog won't be coming to a quiet end, or at least not just yet.