The big news from April was preparing for our vacation in early May. At the end of March, we decided we needed to get back out to California and started making plans. I wrote a post about preparing for our trip so I won’t go into any details here. Suffice it to say, Holly and I are both exciting about getting a long and relaxing break from work.
Photography
The other big news from April was better weather! Which meant getting out more and taking some pictures.
I already wrote about 2 rolls from April:
I finished another roll in April which I hope to post about soon.
In addition to those film photos, I went out a couple of times with my Nikon Z fc fitted with my NIKKOR Z DX 18-140mm lens.
One time was just a short, neighborhood walk looking for signs of spring.
The other time was when we took a long walk to Lemon Hill. In addition to having my Z fc with me, I also had my Canon EOS Rebel 2000. I brought along the Z fc knowing I was close to the end of the roll in the Rebel 2000 which I wrote about in the aforementioned Canon Rebel 2000 with Lomography Color 800 post. Once I finished that roll, I turned to the Z fc.
I also got a nice shot of Philadelphia’s City Hall looking down Benjamin Franklin Parkway.
On another day, we took a walk to run some pre-vacation errands. I had just finished a roll of film and decided I didn’t want to start another one close to our trip. I also didn’t want to take more digital photos that I would want to edit and post for the same reason. So it was a rare instance of my walking across town without a camera. We were going someplace we had been to often so I didn’t anticipate seeing anything I hadn’t already taken a photo of.
However, we took a slightly different route and came across a small park we hadn’t seen before! I found myself regretting my decision but did take a few decent photos with my Samsung Galaxy S9+.
Reading
Short Stories
I read a couple notable short stories in The New Yorker in April: Just a Little Fever by Sheila Heti and The Repugnant Conclusion by Elif Batuman.
Just a Little Fever was interesting because it was about a young woman who falls for an older man. I don’t often encounter that kind of relationship from a woman’s point of view. And because of that perspective, the relationship between a younger woman and an older man wasn’t as trite as it is often portrayed. She was the one interested in him.
Similarly, The Repugnant Conclusion could have just been another story about a young college student trying to navigate school and relationships, but Batuman crafts a unique and insightful character that keeps the tale from slipping into banality.
Books
I finished 2 books in April. I re-read Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad in anticipation of her new book, The Candy House, which is described as a “sibling” to the earlier book. The New Yorker had a story excerpt from The Candy House, What the Forest Remembers, which includes characters from Goon Squad so there is a definite connection between the 2 works.
This was my 3rd time reading A Visit from the Goon Squad, and I have loved it each time. It’s not quite a novel and not quite a linked collection of short stories. A lot of the connections between the stories are looser than in many such books. I forget where I read it, but someone referred to it as a “concept album,” which seems to be a fitting description since much of it has to do with the music industry. I am definitely looking forward to The Candy House.
The other book I read was After New Formalism, a collection of essays edited by Annie Finch. Back in the later 1990’s, I was really interested by the New Formalism movement in poetry. In recent years, I have generally lost interest in poetry, so reading After New Formalism was a good reminder that I was once more excited about it.
The New Formalists were rather strident in their endorsement of formal poetry and this collection of essays takes a more moderate approach arguing that formal poetry still (at least at the time of its publication in 1999) has a place but so does free verse and it’s up to each individual poet to decide when and how to implement its use.
Books Read in 2022
So far in 2022, I’ve read 12 books:
- The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
- Book, They Might Be Giants, Paul Sahre, Brian Karlsson
- All About Me!: My Remarkable Life in Show Business, Mel Brooks (Kindle book)
- The Photographer’s Eye, John Szarkowski
- Harlem Shuffle, Colson Whitehead (Kindle book)
- Our Country Friends, Gary Shteyngart
- My Name Is Asher Lev, Chaim Potok
- Crossroads, Jonathan Franzen
- South of Somewhere, Robert V. Camuto
- The Promise, Damon Galgut (Kindle book)
- A Visit from the Good Squad, Jennifer Egan
- After New Formalism, Annie Finch, ed. (Library book)
This Creative Midlife Posts in 2022
- December 2021 Update
- Canon AE-1 with Ilford Delta 3200
- Canon Rebel 2000 with Kodak Color Plus
- Christmas Light Box Photos
- January 2022 Update
- Minolta Autopak 450Ex with Lomography Lobster
- New Nikon Z fc!
- Schuylkill River Trail Outing with my Nikon Z fc
- E.M. Cioran on Aging
- February 2022 Update
- Long Birthday Weekend 2022
- Year Two of Pandemic Life
- First Film Photos of 2022
- March 2022 Update
- 2022 Camera Inventory
- Minolta Hi-Matic 11 with Ilford Delta 100
- Canon Rebel 2000 with Lomography Color 800
Khürt L Williams
I love Philly in the spring. I think the wife and I are overdue for tea time at the Dandelion.