Silver Bullets

Sometimes I wonder, what am I gonna do
Cause there ain’t no cure for the summertime blues
– Eddie Cochrane

July already. The days grow shorter. Not that it’s noticeable, but in a few weeks my morning walks will be in closer alignment to sunrise. The sunset times don’t affect us much because Marion and I aren’t night people. Our routine after dinner is to snuggle on the couch and watch a rented video or one from our collection. We retire early and rise early.

It wasn’t always like this. During my youth and my student days I was a nighthawk. I slept late, unless there were classes, and I confess I slept through a few of those. I usually stayed active until 2-3am. I had friends who kept a similar schedule and we spent many an hour discussing the state of the universe, usually agreeing, by 3am, that it really WAS existential.

What knocked the nighthawk out of me was getting employment and having to be at work and productive in the morning. It never tamed me entirely. Even while working I stayed up until midnight or so. I’d get to bed early enough, but sleep was elusive. I read a lot of novels between 10-12.

But aging has changed my natural circadian rhythms. I’m now keeping farmer’s hours. Funny that. I would have thought my natural rhythms were hard-wired and wouldn’t change during my lifetime. Surprise!

The main aspect of my life this has affected is my reading. I’d developed a pattern of reading fiction late at night. Now when I try to read in bed, I last, at best, a page or two. I often wake with my reading glasses on and a book in my hand. It’s cut down the amount I read. When I try to read during the day I get fidgety and find it hard to keep my focus.

On the plus side, I’m catching up on pop culture movies and TV series. It started by my getting hopelessly addicted to Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Fortunately so did Marion. We then branched out to other Whedon productions: Angel, Firefly, Dollhouse, and Dr. Horrible. Angel was okay, and better than most of the fare on TV, but it never reached the quality of Buffy. Neither of us cares much for David Boreanaz as an actor, so it was hard to very excited about the series. If it weren’t for a great supporting cast, and a few very good episodes, we’d never have watched the entire series. Firefly was good, as was the follow-on movie Serenity. Dr. Horrible was funny, and clever. Dollhouse is disappointing. I was surprised to hear it was renewed for a second season.

In an effort to branch out to see other movies and TV series that we’d missed over the past thirty or so years, I’ve been asking friends to make recommendations. We’ve signed up with Zip.ca to rent titles from our wish list. Zip has most of the TV series I’m interested in.

I particularly like to see how a well-done TV series introduced its story and characters to the audience for the first time. That makes the season one, disc one offerings especially useful. I believe a budding fiction writer can learn a lot from good TV and movie productions.

Starting this month I’m going to start chronicling what we’ve been watching and which shows we really liked, or didn’t, and why. A couple of teasers: we’re loving Battlestar Galactica but couldn’t even get through the very first episode of Star Trek: Next Generation.

As I went down in the river to pray
Studying about that good old way
And who shall wear the starry crown
Good Lord, show me the way !
O sisters let’s go down,
Let’s go down, come on down,
O sisters let’s go down,
Down in the river to pray.

“Down to the River to Pray” as sung by Alison Krauss in O Brother Where Art Thou?

This song, as sung by Alison Krauss, haunts me.  It’s a traditional hymn, and I’ve even seen thoughts that the tune might be Native American, from the Hupa Nation¹. It’s one of those songs that, when it sticks in your head for days, you don’t mind. It’s beautiful.

But the word ‘in’ has bugged me for a long time. “Down in the river to pray.” I keep thinking, shouldn’t it be ‘to’? It doesn’t make logical sense, and even Alison Krauss titles it as “Down to the River to Pray.”

It’s an old southern hymn. Perhaps even an Underground Railroad song. I wonder, is the ‘in’ just a bit of illiteracy that crept in and stuck?

I tried singing it with ‘to’. It’s more logical, but it doesn’t sound as good or scan as well. It puts ‘to’ into the line twice, and it’s too many to’s. Despite the logic, it really sounds better as ‘in’.

So, I thought, needing to tidy this up in my mind, perhaps it’s a prayer offered up during the Christian rite of baptism — the total immersion kind where you go to the river and get dunked in the water and then pray.

There’s a certain logic to that. Baptism is a cleansing. A ritual that emerged from “one of those dusty countries,” to quote Spike in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. When you live in a dusty, dirty place, a dunking in the river undoubtedly takes on added significance, both spiritual and physical.

But, true to my agnostic leanings, I needed a better explanation to settle my word compulsion. And what I came up with is this: that the ‘river’ is the ’stream of unconsciousness’ in the Jungian sense. From whence come our imaginations, mythologies, and symbols. The deep part of our being that we seldom perceive directly.

That river is one I can pray in. Yes. “Good Lord, show me the way.”

¹ Musical Perceptions: Down to the River to Pray. See the comments.

June already. I’ve celebrated my Beatles Birthday (”Will you still need me, will you still feed me…”) and am amazed that I could be 64.

The first couple of weeks of June were almost entirely given over to a magazine piece I’m doing for Here’s How on “Seniors and the Internet.” I submitted it on Monday and am now phasing back into a normal routine: photography, fiction writing, and blogging.

Yesterday two new lens adapters arrived for my Panasonic Lumix G1 m-4/3 camera: Nikon F and Pentax M42. I’ve been trying out different manual-focus lenses to see how the results look. I’ve already tried my M-mount lenses on the G1 with a Leica M to G1 adapter, and the results have been excellent. The Pentax Super-Macro-Takumar 50mm f/4 lens preserves its reknowned bokeh. The pre-AI Micro-Nikkor-P 55mm f/3.5 is incredibly sharp. The Nikon 135mm f/2.8 E-series lens is very sharp and produces a nice colour palette. Bokeh isn’t wonderful, but it never was. Sharpness is its forte. It effectively makes a 270mm f/2.8 lens equivalent.

One drawback to this is that there’s no body stabilization on the G1 and the 135mm shakes like a 270mm when shooting. I have to either rest the camera on a rail or use a very high shutter speed to get sharp images.

On another front, I’m working on my next short story. I lost momentum when I had to turn to the magazine piece, so I’ve spent time revising the opening scene. I’m now ready to proceed with the story.

And summer has arrived. We had an extended, cool spring — my favourite kind. But it’s nice to have real summer weather now.

I wrote my first short story last week, and I’ll never be the same again.

For instance, I can no longer say “I don’t write fiction,” as I have for decades. I can no longer read fiction and wonder, “how do they do that?” I can no longer wonder why my right brain doesn’t seem to work. It evidently does.

This is terrible. I can no longer hide behind my mantra: “I’m not a storyteller.” That gave me permission to avoid fiction writing altogether. “What? Me write a story? Don’t be silly.”

I also had the romantic notion that I could ever write a piece of fiction, from that point on, there’d be a new, creative me. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. Although I knew it in the abstract, I now have a working insight into how difficult fiction is to write. Harder than anything I’ve ever written.

Forget the chapter I wrote for a SAMS book on recovering a failed Linux system. That was a piece of cake compared to looking at a blank page and attempting to coax out a story with a character who’s interesting, conflicted, and flawed, but maybe likeable.

Some part of me told me to at least try. Timid, I started by listening to podcasts of writers talking about their stories. I bought the odd book on fiction writing. I studied episodes of Joss Whedon shows to get a sense of how he and his writers created such zingy plots and dialog.

Then she came to me. A character. One I wanted to write about. The more I thought about her, the more I realized where the setting of the story should be. I thought of a plot that might be interesting. And over the course of a couple of weeks, I finished it.

How’d it turn out? In truth, it sucked less than I thought it would. Although it contained awkward spots and lots of beginner’s mistakes that need fixing, there were some genuinely positive and encouraging comments as well, from my critique group.

And now I’m terrified. What if I can’t learn the craft? Maybe I’m too old for this. Will I ever be able to write another story? Novel? Are you nuts?!

Sadly, I’m hooked. I now know, absolutely, how stories get written. One word at a time. Two words deleted for every three written. Hard work. Bum in chair work. Existential: no excuses.

But you know what? It’s also fun. Hard work, but fun.

Those of you who visit my Flickr photostream know that I have a new Panasonic Lumix G1 camera and Panasonic 14-45mm kit lens. The kit lens has proven to be remarkably sharp, just as I’d heard.

The G1 makes a nice walkabout camera. It’s a little smaller and lighter than most DSLRs and it has some unique features. The most radical design change over a DSLR is that the G1 uses an EVF (Electronic View Finder)  in place of the traditional mirror and prism arrangement. This allows the camera to be smaller and to offer some advantages already known to P&S shooters such as histogram preview in the viewfinder. The G1 also has a fine, large, tilt & swivel LCD that helps for high shots and low shots.

People vary in their reaction to EVF. My older Canon S3 IS uses EVF and I’ve always liked using it. The Canon has nowhere near the resolution and brightness of the G1, however. The G1 may have what is, for now, the best EVF in the industry.

My main reason for getting a G1, though, was not its advanced features, but its ability to be used with retro lenses. There are lens adapters available for lens mounts such as Leica M mount, Nikon F mount, and Pentax screwmount (perhaps bayonet mount as well). That opens the option to using classic, manual lenses, and I love using the classics.

A couple of days ago my Leica M to micro-4/3’s mount adapter arrived from an eBay dealer in Shanghai and I got to take my first shots. It was late in the day with little light left so I used a fast lens: Konica Hexanon 50mm f/2 — a lens highly similar to a Leica Summicron 50/2. With some help from my friend Peter, I learned what setting to put the camera on so the adapter would no longer cause an error warning.

I hadn’t yet figured out how to invoke Manual Focus Assist so I carefully eyeballed the focus as best as I could and got about a 30% yield in well-focused shots. Not very good, but the shots looked outstanding in terms of resolution, clarity, colour, and, especially, bokeh. The OOF (out-of-focus) areas had a creamy transition.

The next day I decided to RTFM (advice I usually give to others but hadn’t taken myself) and found the magic sequence that invokes Manual Focus Assist. And here’s where the G1 offers something unique — something I’ve never experienced before. It magnifies a small part of the image digitally and it’s amazing how accurately you can focus a manual lens this way. And then, when you press the shutter button half way, the view springs back to 100% for composing.

It’s not a fast type of photography, especially when using longer lenses, but for static subjects it works really well. Today I put on the Voigtlander 75mm f/2.5 lens Peter lent me and the 2x crop factor turned it into a 150mm f/2.5 equivalent. It yielded some nice images and showed me what a good combo this made. The only time I had trouble was when I forgot to watch the shutter speed and used a speed too low to be hand held steadily. I’ve become so accustomed to image stabilization, I forgot to think.

Best of all, the G1 meters well when the manual lenses are attached, with plenty of provision for override.

Of course with the 2x factor, you lose when it comes to wide angle lenses. I took a couple of shots with my Voigtlander 15mm Heliar today, and they were very, very sharp, but the nifty 15mm became a garden-variety 30mm prime. Still, it retains the DOF of a 15mm which would make it a pretty decent street lens. You can focus to infinity and forget about the need to manual focus every shot.

There’s one additional element to this that I find deeply satisfying: I get to ‘look through’ my rangefinder M-mount lenses for the first time ever. Rangefinder cameras use a separate viewfinder — they don’t view through the lens like an SLR. It’s a camera-geek thrill, but a thrill nonetheless.

Fun stuff, and I’m already thinking what a nice combination the G1 would make teamed up with my Bessa R3A rangefinder camera. The G1 for longer shots and colour, the Bessa for B&W (film) and true wide angle. Both cameras are compact and rangefinder lenses are much tinier than SLR lenses, on the whole.

Hmmm, but then I think of all those Nikon primes I own. Now that I know the adapter works well, I may just have to consider getting a Nikon F adapter as well.

Photo taken with Voigtlander 75mm lens on Panasonic Lumix G1

I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t get Twitter. But with everyone advising you to use it, in conjunction with Facebook and other social media, to keep an Internet profile, I gave it a try.

I located some friends and ‘followed’ their ‘tweets’. I followed the tweets of some well known personalities. I tried Twitter as an ‘update service’ to let me know about articles, news items, and new web entries.

I understood all this, but I still didn’t get it. Twitter derives from instant messaging and from text messaging, phone to phone. Cell phone that is. It belongs to the culture that apparently wants to be in touch and available almost all hours of the day. I automatically think ‘teenagers’ but what I’m seeing belies that. The world is turning into a cell-phone/texting culture. I don’t get that either.

I own a cell phone. I’ve never texted with it and I only have it on for emergency purposes when I’m out of the house. Perhaps my mild aversion to cell phones comes naturally. For over five years I was in an ‘on-call’ rotation in the IT department of a large insurance company. It was 24/7 and often brutal. When my pager beeped or my corporate cell phone rang, it was usually not happy news.

Even so, I still don’t get why people want to broadcast one-liners along the lines of ‘I’m in Starbucks having a delicious green-tea latte’, ‘Just watched Dollhouse. It’s not going to survive’, ‘Rejection slip. I’m bummed!’, ‘Too sleepy to stay awake. Night, night.’

Sure, it’s life, as lived even. It’s also life at its most trite and banal. It’s characters acting out a part in a play with a bad script, made up as it goes. Engrossing? Perhaps to a sociologist.

Lately there has been a rash of articles in places like the Toronto Star offering advice on what constitutes a good use of Twitter, Twitter for your business needs, and so forth. Kids, when the daily newspapers start explaining how to tweet, you know whatever ‘cool factor’ Twitter might once have had is gone.

Admittedly I’m not the best judge of ‘cool’. I’m somewhat solitary, but when I see friends, I prefer to see them face to face. I don’t automatically count everyone I meet on the Net as a ‘friend.’ I’m fine with email — it works more than adequately to keep me in touch with friends, family, and colleagues. I enjoy discussion forums where something might actually be discussed.

A lot of people keep Twitter open in a window as they work, and tweet back and forth with ‘friends’ throughout the day. Although habitues of Twitter will likely disagree vehemently, I think I can say with some assurance that every tweet read and replied to lessens your concentration and efficiency.

You can multitask fluently, you say? There’s not a neurologist on the planet who agrees with you. ‘Multitasking is a myth’, is their consistent message. But we all cherish our illusions.

Life is short. As I approach my 64th birthday, it seems very short. I’ve tweeted my last tweet. My account has been deleted.

I’d rather be writing.

The Panasonic Lumix G1 has tempted me for some time. I like cameras that are lightweight and compact and after an assignment that involved carrying around a Canon 50D body, I was more than ever convinced that “lighter is better.”

Obviously what works for me doesn’t apply to others but I recently sold my beautiful Nikon D300 solely because of the weight. With some cash lying around, I thought about another prime lens for my lightweight D60 body but decided to experiment with a G1.

Part of the attraction of the G1 is that there are a number of adapters available for other lenses, and one that has been popular among rangefinder users is the Leica M-mount adapter that allows the G1 to use any lens with a Leica bayonet mount.

I have four such lenses — Voigtlander 15mm, 21mm, and 40mm, not to mention a Hexanon 50mm. The idea of a 40mm f/1.4 becoming an 80mm f/1.4 prime on the G1 is delicious. I’ll see how it works out. I have an adapter on its way.

Besides a tilt&swivel large LCD panel, the G1 has the best EVF (electronic view finder) I’ve yet seen. Very bright with high resolution. Ever since owning a Canon S3 IS I’ve like EVF’s. What makes the G1 particularly usable, especially for manual-focus lenses, is an MF Assist feature. The G1 magnifies the centre of the image while manually focusing. I’ve found this an excellent way to get sharp focus, trying the technique with the kit lens.

The optically stabilized kit lens is a sweetheart. Its 14-45mm zoom range delivers the 35mm equivalent of 28-90mm — a good walkabout range. Reviews of the lens have been laudatory. Like my Nikon 18-55mm VR lens, it gets high marks for sharpness. I’ve not yet decided about the 45-200mm kit lens, which with the 2x crop factor gives a 90-400mm equivalent in a compact, lightweight lens. For now I may keep the G1 as a more experimental camera. If I were going on a vacation trip, I’d snap up the 45-200mm in a jiff.

Another useful feature of the kit lens is that it takes 52mm filters, the same as most of my Nikon lenses. Because of this I already have a set of +1, +2, +4 diopters, ND, and polarizing filters. It’s nice to be able to use them directly on the kit lens.

I’ve not had enough time with the G1 to log extensive shooting experience but what I’ve seen of it so far, it’s what I’d hoped it would be: lightweight, compact, sharp, easy to use, and above all, fun.

As part of my “Fresh Start” I thought about the way I use my Acer Aspire One netbook and realized that I didn’t have many Windows-specific programs that were critical. I don’t use it for photo editing, so I don’t need Photoshop and all my plugins. For word processing I normally use Open Office Writer and I’m committed to Firefox for browsing, and there’s nothing Windows-specific about them. I don’t use iTunes on the Acer either. I use it almost exclusively for writing and web access.

So, last night I downloaded the latest Ubuntu Linux 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) Netbook Remix image and tried burning it to a DVD so I could install Linux from my portable DVD reader. After trashing two discs it occurred to me to RTFM¹, at which point I learned that the IMG file was for “burning” to a memory stick (USB flash drive, thumb drive). I’d never installed “Linux onna stick”² before and it was almost spooky to watch the fast, silent install with no optical disc drive whirring.

I’ve installed Ubuntu Linux before so there were no surprises. I opted to blow away Windows XP entirely and reformat the entire 160GB hard disk with the Linux EXT3 file system.

The surprise came after I installed the OS and saw the new netbook-specific interface. Wow! Very iPod Touch-like. I elected to stick with it, despite a usual preference for the spare conventional Gnome interface. It caught my fancy.

This morning I downloaded LyX and the accompanying LaTeX packages. I love the easy LyX interface to the complex LaTeX typesetting markup language. It produces beautifully typeset output.

Connecting to my home Laserjet printer via Samba was simple, and all I needed to do to configure my wireless LAN connection was enter the correct passphrase.

One of my secret pleasures is installing operating systems — even Windows in a pinch. Every time I install a recent Linux distribution I marvel at how far Linux has come as a desktop alternative to Windows and MacOS. And free, natch. It feels like a homecoming.

Notes:

¹ Read the F*ing Manual (or Instructions)

² Thank you to Terry Pratchett for the “onna stick” phrase.

This is a photo of my new writing space. It was previously a sprawling computer workstation area, surrounded by scanners and an inkjet printer, but we consolidated our two desktop PC’s into one unit on the other side of our office, leaving me this space to write. I wanted a place at home where I could sit, shut the door if necessary, and concentrate on writing for as long as I remained productive.

Previously I did most of my writing while sitting in Starbucks, as part of my daily walk. I write well in coffee shops, but the Starbucks is busy and I’m uncomfortable staying for long periods of time, taking a table from the other patrons. So my writing has been done in bursts. And because it’s also a gathering place for many of my photographer friends, I often end up socializing rather than writing.

So this marks a new start, and it’s appropriately symbolic because today (April 22) is the first anniversary of my open-heart surgery. I’ve spent the past year recovering from a double-bypass operation. Only recently have I felt I was returning to normal. It’s been an up-and-down recovery and a little worrisome because the cardiologists and the literature suggest that most people feel back to normal within six months. I didn’t.

This in turn led to depression, which I’m also dealing with. My family doctor reassured me that many of his patients take a year or more to recover from the surgery, but despite understanding that at a rational level, I worried that I might never get well again.

During the past year I’d slipped into the habit of sleeping in late, and casually getting active in the morning, often not dressed and ready for a walk until after noon. In part I had little control over this, and sleep was highly important. Lately, though, I’ve begun some military-like discipline, getting up if I wake early — anywhere between 5 and 6:30 — getting dressed immediately and going for a power walk before breakfast. No stopping at Starbucks, though I carry a camera with me and occasionally stop to take a shot.

The result, combined with the natural healing of my body, is that I’m feeling better and more energetic through the rest of the day. This in turn should help with the writing.

I’ve not been able to shake the depression, but I have many very good days to every bad one, and I’m working with a psychiatrist to help me evaluate my condition and adjust my antidepressant medications when I require changes in dosages. Depression is a terrible disease — one I’ve come to understand first hand and I’m now very empathetic to anyone who is afflicted. Depression is a common condition, I’m told, among cardio patients.

But that aside, I feel I’m having a fresh start in life as I near my 64th birthday. You think a lot on death when you’ve been through major coronary issues, and one of the things that does is help you achieve perspective on what is important in your life.

Family and friends top the list, of course, but I also value creative work more highly than ever. My writing has taken a creative turn. I’m reaching beyond technology writing into creative nonfiction and even some fiction and poetry. I don’t know where this will take me, and I don’t have a particular goal other than to follow the desire to write creatively and to photograph creatively.

Hence the new writing space is symbolic of a fresh start, and a new adventure in life. It’s never too late to start fresh. Somewhere in each of us, I truly believe, are muses willing to work with us, if we learn to listen to them. Call it subconscious or unconscious, or call it tapping into special areas of the brain, or even something new-agey if that’s your schtick — what it’s called matters little, as long as we listen.

I figure a good place to start is right here, at a simple desk, with a southern exposure. Pen and paper ready. Netbook on standby. Dictionaries at the side. The Muses whispering. Everything set to take those important steps into the world of imagination.

Why we itch has remained a mystery to science. And why a scratch will relieve an itch an even greater mystery. Scratching would normally excite pain cells but somehow, when applied to an itch, inhibits them instead. In an article in the NYT Science section, Scratching Relieves Itch by Quieting Nerve Cells , writer Benedict Carey documents the latest research about a study that indicates the answer lies neither in the skin, nor the brain, but in specialized nerve cells located in the spinal cord.

But beyond mosquitoes and poison ivy, there’s another kind of itch that may be harder to study. The itch to write or create.

I honestly don’t know what drives me to keep writing but it’s something akin to a mental itch that needs to be scratched, and the only way to scratch it is by writing more. On days I don’t write, I feel off base, as if something isn’t in balance. I get twitchy, unable to concentrate or appreciate other things. It doesn’t go away until I’ve written something — whether a blog entry, journal entry, or even a one-line poem.

I mean, it’s not the fame, is it? It’s certainly not the fortune. Aside from the odd paying gig, writing for a magazine, I earn nothing from it. Sometimes, okay … often … it’s not even satisfying. I fall so short of my writing goals I’m secretly embarrassed.

But write I must, and write I shall, cause I’ve got this … well … itch.