ARG! One of my favourite literary blogs is ending its run! I encourage you all to visit Ward Six. I really appreciated their approach: to book reviews, to the art of writing. To art itself.
The reasons they give are sensible, yet I will be selfish and whinge that I am now left with oh so very few relevant, intelligent, knowledgeable literary blogs to follow.
Nonetheless, I wish John and Rhian all the best.
It's the 32nd anniversary of my uncle's murder. Details here: http://www.amw.com/fugitives/brief.cfm?id=44215.
Sad, numb.
I was in a mood when I wrote this - hard not to be, I suppose. However, I don't want it to come across as maudlin, so I thought I'd add some context.
I chose this year to make a statement about it, on social media especially (Facebook, Twitter). Why? Because, outside of the initial blog posts I published around the time of the America's Most Wanted episode, it's been a source of untapped grief. In making it public, I was unabashedly putting it out there - to friends and acquaintances, and strangers alike - instead of it being this twisted little secret which swims around my head.
The fact is, my uncle's death has nothing to do with me. I never had the chance to meet him. I am involved in the sense you would be involved if you were researching a stranger from another age, another country, who just happened to be related. And yet his story is woven into mine, distant though our two lives were. I am older than he was when he was shot. I wasn't even 9 years old back then, and I didn't learn about it until I was 17. The tragedy was delayed for me: time-released.
In any case, this is my sorrow, shared briefly with you. It is, I should add (in all fairness), a necessary exploitation of a crime, in the faint hope someone will happen across an old Guild D40 guitar, or know what happened to a burglar with a Leica fetish. Faint hope, for sure, but it's part of the process of grief.
First off, things are going very well on the Keyhole blog. If you haven't checked it out, please do. Yes, this is me, shilling for myself (and the film).
It is a departure from Guy's previous works, which tended to rely on the aesthetic of film itself as a language; Guy has been very upfront about his love of tropes from the early days of cinema. The difference is that in Keyhole these elements are reordered in priority, toward the background as mise-en-scène and not a character in and of itself. Keyhole is subliminally deeper and more purely emotional than his earlier films; a drawback is that I'm not sure how much people will be able to absorb in one viewing. If there is one challenge that I am experiencing, it is balancing the educational, editorial, and entertainment-oriented components of the diary/blog.
Aside from this, teaching, student-ing, writing are going well. I am working on a submission letter to a literary agent for my novel. The weather is getting warmer. I can't complain
Well, I will complain: we have a federal election coming up May 2nd. I don't mind the election per se, but we have exceeded three weeks of campaigning already and not one word of either Afghanistan or Libya - two wars which require a position, regardless of whether you are the sitting government or one of the contenders. Oh, and health care. It's the weird-assed priorities which bug me - who are they trying to appeal to? Swing voters and pundits, it seems.
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