Walking the Wall

This image was taken during a maternity shoot with a lovely young woman who is due to give birth at the end of the month, it is my favorite shot of the whole shoot.

My sister Joanna and I are in the process of starting a home based portrait photography business. We’re starting small and taking it step by step, but the last week or so has been a whirlwind of getting things to the point that we can start taking some shots to build a portfolio. We’ve built a website: www.visualpoetryphotos.com, almost all of our equipment (starting with the bare basics that we need) is in, and it is exciting to be making these steps together. My sister Emily does makeup and will be doing some makeup for clients who want their makeup done so we got our niece Becca to come over to let us take a “my normal makeup” picture and a “look how gorgeous I am with my makeup done” picture. The only problem is, she is too beautiful to show much difference between the two!

As I cycled through the pictures trying to find the best “before and after” shots (we had a great light come in, however, we forgot to order a light bulb to go with said light and had to make due with not so great light–it was an interesting learning experience though!)…anyway, while cycling through all the pictures I found that out of 67 usable photos there were about 67 different faces–some subtle, but most distinct. Many of the pictures were unguarded as we were just snapping away twiddling with the lights or camera settings getting our bearing with the new setup and new cameras. When the house emptied out and I started going through them in the quiet, I found the experience of seeing so many faces of this beautiful young woman uplifting. There is something amazing about the human face and all the subtle and not so subtle shifts and turns that move a full laugh into a serious contemplation into a clowning around face into a beautiful smile. There is something even more amazing about the human spirit that cannot be contained in a single expression but bursts out in so many ways. I think one could look at facial expressions for a lifetime and always be amazed.

I didn’t know they were coming out with a DVD of the Broadway performance of Rent after the production closed after running for 12 years! It showed up on iTunes movies and I’m downloading and watching it at the same time. I love the movie cast, which has a lot of the original cast, but I just had to see how they do it on stage as I know that as much as I LOVE the movie, and I do love the movie, that it was meant to be seen on stage.

[The rest was random scraps written while watching it.]

Opening sequences are fabulous, I really like Mark a lot and think he is doing a great job (actually, Adam Kantor really is about perfect as Mark.), Roger is good, shows a little more of the grit that Roger’s character probably has that doesn’t show as much in the movie. I think in the movie I see more of a defeated Roger (which works) but this Roger seems more conflicted and warring internally with himself. One of my favorite songs is “Another Day” and I think the movie version is sung better than this stage version, but the stage version does a better job showing the way the two charcters really bounce off each other and how Mimi both attracts and repels Roger. When “Life Support” comes back after that scene, it is very powerful (as was the movie) but in a different, more real, on the street, painfulness of wanting so badly to hold onto dignity when everything is getting stripped away.

Collins is equally lovable, his character is just wonderful, like a big teddy bear (still, love love Jesse Martin). I missed Wilson Heredia’s Angel (movie)–he plays Angel perfectly, in my opinion. Traci Thomas does a great job as Joann again, I think she was able to do even more with the character on the stage version, it was fun to see  a bit more of her dual life and her trying to juggle it all.

I LOVED the “carolers,” and the whole “it’s beginning to snow” sequence, that wasn’t in the movie version.

I have to say that I don’t think anyone can replace Idina Menzel as Maureen–Eden Espinosa sings great, but the whole time I kept thinking she just wasn’t Idina. But then the “Here Goes” scene comes with Roger and Mimi and the emotions are much more intense and you see Roger struggling to let himself go and find love–very beautiful.

I don’t know how anyone can watch the whole funeral scene without crying (in either version)–so sad. The fight scene between Mark & Roger and goodbye with Mimi was really touching–heartbreaking really. That is the power of this whole musical, there is so much joy for life, so much fear of death, so much conflicting emotions and real humans living out real life. It is beautiful and dirty and gritty and heartfelt–”connection in an isolating age.”

Cried through the whole end and loved having past & present actors come on the stage at the end to sing the reprise. Whew, what a rambling bit of nothing post, but I’m glad I watched it!

Between the crazy last few months full of doctor’s appointments and testing and life being turned upside down along with the normal chaos of life and topped with trying to keep up with graduate school last semester, writing has gone on the back burner. Still, it is a new year, a full month with no trip to Cincinnati, a working plan to stay on top of reading for school, life is full of potential. One thing I know for certain is that my reading for this semester is quite intriguing and I look forward to each book (other than possibly being a bit leery of Middlemarch) even though I’ve read many of them. I have a blog set up for my Independent Study class called A World Without Amputations (taken from a quote by Marge Piercy: All women are misfits. We do not fit into this world without amputations).

19th Century Literature:

1. Frankenstein by Mary Shelly
2. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
3. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
4. Middlemarch by George Eliot
5. East Lynne by Ellen Wood
6. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

Speculative Fiction independent study class:

1. Orlando by Virginia Woolf
2. The Female Man by Joanna Russ
3. Kindred by Octavia Butler
4. Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter
5. He, She, or It by Marge Piercy (one of my favorite books)
6. Deerskin by Robin McKinley

So far I’ve finished Orlando and Frankenstein and am in the middle of reading Jane Eyre and The Female Man (VERY different style and an odd juxtaposition of two different styles and different times dealing with some similar issues).

In my Critical Practices class for graduate school in Literature, we discussed the development of English and Literature as an academic subject and the difficulties that the humanities are having present day in universities where people prefer to have a degree that has a job title attached to it and question the relevence of literature. Near the end of the class, my professor asked us to think of her as an administrator faced with making cuts to departments and to convince her as to why we should even keep a literature department functioning. It was interesting and funny to see all our reactions, which tended to incredulation, irritation, laughter, and even anger. Of course, we are all graduate literature students, some of us, like myself, even did their undergraduate in literature, so there was a bit of a bias. Still, we collectively struggled to voice why literature was so important at first. All I could think of was two things, the book 1984, while not about the death of literature, I kept thinking about what kind of world it would be if creative thinking were abandoned and only the logical and “useful” and preciseness was left. The other was what Martin Luther King Jr’s “I had a dream” would have been if it was written by a technical writer! I thought, while driving home, that for me, the true importance in literature lies in its record of history. While history is a litany of dates and facts–literature is a history of humanity. We can know historically that there was place called Auschwitz in a country called Germany being run from this date to this date and that untold numbers of people died. But it is in books, like Shindler’s List and Ellie Wiesel’s Night and Anne Frank’s Diary that we can begin to imagine what it felt like and smelt like and tasted like in a way that facts never can engender. Without imagination, we will forget and there is nothing more dangerous than forgetting the inherent truth in the lives of the people and the society that facts and dates can never encapsulate.

Then while working on a final exam in my Romantic Literature class, I remembered a passage from Shelley’s Defense of Poetry:

But it exceeds all imagination to conceive what would have been the moral condition of the world if neither Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Calderon, Lord Bacon, nor Milton, had ever existed; if Raphael and Michael Angelo had never been born; if the Hebrew poetry had never been translated; if a revival of the study of Greek literature had never taken place; if no monuments of ancient sculpture had been handed down to us; and if the poetry of the religion of the ancient world had been extinguished together with its belief. The human mind could never, except by the intervention of these excitements, have been awakened to the invention of the grosser sciences, and that application of analytical reasoning to the aberrations of society, which it is now attempted to exalt over the direct expression of the inventive and creative faculty itself.

It exceeds all imagination.

I just finished reading To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf last night for school and it is the first book that has really peaked my interest this fall–although, truth be told, I haven’t been able to do much reading outside of school. Luckily I have enjoyed my reading for school–well, again, to be truthful, I really did not enjoy reading Wordsworth’s The Prelude, I had to drag my way through it. While I love Whitman’s Song of Myself, somehow I could not get into Wordsworth’s ponderous epic on himself and his memories.

The Lighthouse, however, was so beautifully done that it felt like a hauntingly sad ghost story. I felt so strongly for the too beautiful, imperfect, trapped Mrs. Ramsey who struggled to accept the role she felt she had chosen (an atypical Victorian marriage) and yet still maintain an identity. There is a poignant scene where she finally gets to sit down in the evening by herself (always so conscious of staying busy and doing her duty that she used knitting as a way to appear productive but give her a space to think and be):

…it was a relief when they went to bed. For now she need not think about anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of–to think; well, not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, of being oneself, a wedge-shaped  core of darkness, something invisible to others. Although she continued to knit, and sat upright, it was thus that she felt herself; and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures. (62)

I felt like a lot of the scholarship missed the inherent sadness in Mrs. Ramsey’s character and viewed her as just the Victorian “past” counterpoint to Lily or Cam’s moving into the modern idea of being a woman. She seemed to be relegated to being a dusty relic of a time when women were bound by the gender issues of the time–and she was, but they seem to neglect the understanding that she was still a human being and did not go gently into that dark night–but struggled with those issues.

Anyway, as I said, the book was beautifully done and really gives a glimpse into how memories change and shift for each person, about the inevitability of time and how people reconcile the past and present and give themselves space to move forward.

Note: Please ignore my husband’s sign! LOL! I told him the other side had to say “Buddhist Hippie who will NOT be voting for McCain or the good looking chick”! We are most definitely a blended family of peace loving wannabe hippies!

I think Sumedh Prasad at Dripping Vanilla is simply brilliant in his poetry. I have mentioned his piece that has become one of mine and my daughter’s favorite poem, Found in a grain of Sand. This weekend he posted another piece that ties in so much with what I have been thinking about in terms of masks and identity and… well, see for yourself, it is called Face of Reality and his works are well worth the time to look (as is his photography) at.

Edited to fix gender assumption! Sumedh is a he, not a she, and either way, brilliant in his poetry and well worth sitting down with a cup of tea and passing a morning reading his works!