ethan feuer // new work
jody rosen of slate said it too well for me to bother paraphrasing: “jonah, forget rusted root. try baha men. one of the things i love about ‘ambling alp’—and there’s lots i love about this clattery art-pop freakout—is the fact that it’s a stealth jock jam.” put that together with naked people in the desert and you have a song on repeat repeat repeat:
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these days i’m doing a lot of reading and a lot of writing. in the months before i head back to europe, i’ve set it as my goal to get at least one manuscript written and hopefully a second started. by the time i come back, i will have twenty or thirty pages drawn, inked, etc in addition to a complete draft text. armed with these, the idea is to convince a publisher who, in the words of neil gaiman, “publishes the kind of stuff [you] write” to, um, publish the stuff i write. if possible, i’ll have previews for both novels, but i’m going to focus on one (the older one) for now.
when i’m not writing (the other 16ish hours of the day), i’ve been chipping away at several different books. i reread twain’s huckleberry finn and have made various piecemeal inroads on john gardner’s very-nearly-but-not-quite-insufferably-pretentious on becoming a novelist and as well on janet burroway’s guide to narrative craft which is a little bit more to the point than either gardner or dorothea brande. instead of brande, i’m getting my 19th century on with good ol’ leo tolstoy, whose anna karenina has somehow actually managed to live up to its hype. one of my favorite passages is reproduced below. it’s not that i find barbs like this, which appear on virtually every page, representative of the degree of hyperrealism he’s often accused of–it’s more that i think they’re incredibly deft instances of characterization. he’s like the guys in the 1950s who handled uranium isotopes through all these long, spindly tools. only he never dropped it. the passage:
“He saw out of the window how she went up to her brother, put her arm in his, and began telling him something eagerly, obviously something that had nothing to do with him, Vronsky, and at that he felt annoyed.”
next up on the reading list are nabokov’s lolita, david mitchell’s cloud atlas, something by chekhov because they were clearly badasses, and that stupid copy of ghost world that i managed to acquire despite my feelings toward daniel clowes. and goodbye, chunky rice. and also good-bye.
hey all! i’ve been down in the southerlands of maryland for my grandfolks 65th anniversary. wow. that’s a long time to be together. and they’re still gettin’ along grand. anyways, while i was down there, i tested out the olympus e-pl1 (which i had exchanged my e-620 for due to lens adaptation problems). by all accounts, the e-pl1 will do wonders with my old FD lenses and as soon as my adapter shows up, i’ll be posting some images to show the results. but in the meantime, check out some photos from maryland and the fam. it’s also a pretty good test of the e-pl1 in a lowlight situation–most of the indoor shots were taken at ISO 1600; not too noisy, really. the lens is also capable of some exceptional macro, though i feel it is sometimes a bit overenthusiastic with its highlights (a problem which diminishes at around ISO 200). the lens collapses into an incredibly small profile and i have to give olympus credit for creating an all-arounder zoom lens that can be fit inside the footprint of a 50mm FD and is 1/2 the weight. the plastic construction feels frustratingly cheap, but (for plastic) it’s not bad at all. feast!
hey all. as it turns out, i had to return the e-620 because i didn’t read closely enough. basically, i was certain that (because the registry distance was smaller than that of canon’s FD mount, i would be able to find an adapter for FD to four thirds. while i was able to find an adapter, it wasn’t one that allowed me to focus on infinity. but in case you’re curious or thinking about buying one (and the E-620 is an excellent camera!) here are some sample images (click to go to the full-size image…and though it may seem kinda large on the screen, it’s only 25% of the original size. eek!)
use arrow keys to cycle between images and ESC key to get out if yer trapped in an image!
