Ég tala bara ensku

I began subscribing to the Iceland Review Online daily email a couple of months ago. My disgust at finding myself living in a torture state, and a torture state owned and operated by the wealthy, at that, has me thinking that morally I'm obligated either to smash that state or move out of it.
Iceland is famous for its human-scale, liberal government. Or it was until it went broke a couple of years ago due to investment shenanigans. But the Icelanders, instead of making good the gambling losses of the banking classes (i.e., what we did and are doing in the USA), sued the shit out of them and voted their pets out of office. Decency is still regarded as a civic virtue there - I can't imagine a waterboarding scandal left unpunished once exposed.
The colder climate is way attractive to me. I am a cold-weather, brisk-windy-fall kind of creature, and I can't even feature moving as far south as Pennsylvania, much less farther south. And if global warming is going to hit big in my lifetime, I'd rather suffer it in Iceland than in tropical New York City.
I might just be in time. Eygló Svala Arnarsdóttir has an article in today's IRO about suffering through the current "unbearable" 20+°C (68°+F) heatwave.
It is also possible that a more temperate Iceland, close to the now navigable waters of a thawed Arctic Ocean, under which lie unknown deposits of oil, is going to find itself a very busy unhappy host to a more imperial nation or two. But at least it would be a state I could defend without disgust.
And if not Iceland, there's Nunavut, altho I don't know if I'd be at all welcome there. "Ég tala bara ensku" is Icelandic for "I only speak English." What's Inuit for "honky"?

broken, empty, alive

Another morning at the ICP library. Some interesting work with figurines by Liliana Porter. I chose this one esp because of the emptiness (or, if you wish, "negative space") at the left. It's essential to the pic. Try an improvised cropping - move the window to the left until the deer is conventionally centered in the image - it's dead. Now move it back out. Not only is the empty space alive, but it supplies air for the flaring gold ear.
Egad. More void below:

poof

I make my living as a proofreader and copy editor. Sometimes I think of my profession as being a Professional Nitpicker. This has the virtue of expressing my affection for the work as well as many other people's (account managers, copy writers) resentment of it.
People often ask me if I am always finding typos in newspapers, magazines, books. Yes.
I don't fuss much over typos in newspapers, given their time constraints and that they seem to be doing a better job now (at least in the online editions that are the only ones I see) than they did during the pre-computer and transitional days. Some of my colleagues, including the one who has dubbed herself Conanne the Grammarian, are less forgiving.
The magazines I read dedicate more time and money to the prose they publish, with accordingly better results. When I occasionally see a bit of copy that needs a fix, it will stick in my mind, esp if it's a deluxe pub like the New Yorker (hint - don't assume human skin only comes in pink and white).
What I do find unforgivable is typos and solecisms in books from major or minimally respectable publishers. No excuse. We nitpickers don't cost much compared to salaries on the business side.
An example that sticks in mind: the Booker-shortlisted Breakfast on Pluto, by Patrick McCabe. Harper (owned by the regrettable Rupert Murdoch) published the edition I read, and clearly they felt running spellcheck was proofreading enough. Chalk-fool of typos, it was. I stopped keeping track after the protagonist mentions her "brass earnings," meaning not a mineral investment but adornment for the ears. Shameful. Any author deserves better, but McCabe is esp a novelist of voice - how insulting to broadcast his labor in such a shoddy manner.
The occasion for today's complaint is Michael Bierut's book, Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design, published by Princeton Architectural Press. I enjoy Bierut's straightforward and interesting writing. As you would expect, the book is carefully designed, and well made... except for the proofreading. By essay 7 I had already found three typos, including "and" with a word space in the middle of it and a misspelling of Gutenberg's name, of all things.
As a copy editor, you would note my use of "had already found" rather than "have already found" in the para above, because while confirming how far I have read in the book, I found yet another corrigendum. Bierut expresses admiration of an essay by a certain Susan, but whether she is Susan Sellers or Susan Sellars you could not distinguish by reading page 34. So much for the copy editing.
Proofreading is an aspect of a book as surely as any physical element. Integrity is as compromised by sloppiness as it is by a blot, whether on a page or an escutcheon.

the white stone

One aspect of being a photographer, writer, any kind of creator of new things, that I've never seen discussed, is when you grow sick of a particular work or group of works.

For example, photographs - you have to look at them closely, again and again and again. At the first contact print, or first download (I'll stick with the contemporary process). Skimming through the entire download, seeing what's what, deleting obviously faulty pix but not deleting those that are only possibly faulty. Going through slowly again, discovering which of the ones you thought would turn out well at the moment of capture actually caught something. Puzzling out the possibly faulty - do you remember what you thought you had? did you just get it wrong? does it just need to be cropped? cropped to what you thought you had in the first place, or is there a different way to see it and crop it? what is there now that you've cropped it? is it better if you include the white stone at the bottom right, or crop it out? which of the other variables (exposure, color balance, intensity of color in light or in shadow) would make a picture out of a pic? 

Repeat, repeat, repeat. When you've gotten down to the 10 out of 30, or 2 out of 100, that actually have something to them, print, revise and print (repeat as necessary) - should you print bigger? should you print smaller? should you put it aside as hopeless? not yet? stare at it for a while longer? tack it to the wall until you're almost sure that you love it or hate it?

Repeat, and repeat, and repeat. If you're going to mass reproduce, to print a book or create a web gallery, select, edit, sequence (a whole new opportunity for struggle and doubt), discover what isn't working in the new medium, revise, revise, repeat, repeat. If you're not about to vom, it's a miracle. The phrase is ad nauseam for a reason. 
Ditto with a written work, I know from experience. Entirely apart from the question of how the rest of the world and fate will regard what you're creating, is figuring out your own regard of this word, that phrase, this incident here or before, that adverb, this character (too flat? too round? too unbelievable? too believable?), this whole damn book/story/poem.
You know those clicky things used to count people entering a venue? You could keep one of those by your side, click it whenever you think something's right or something's wrong, even when they're the same something, even when you're looking five seconds, five minutes, or fifteen years later. You'd never stop clicking.