ThinkingAboutTheThinkable

Narrative and Acting My life and work are at best executive summaries. I cannot tell a long story, or keep one in mind. I do not have a novel in me. Nor have I acted in theater, albeit I am acting a role in life taking advantage of my well-recognized peculiarities, sometimes consciously so, to get on with life and getting along with people and the world.             I am idiosyncratic, sometimes violating conventional rules (without quite appreciating the extent of my violation)—or so I am told. My North Star is internal, albeit I am sure it is much directed by the world’s expectations and norms. I am foolish but not reckless, idiosyncratic but not beyond the pale. In the end, I am quite ordinary, if smart and cute and adorable and handsome, so it is said to me, too much by a half.             As for narrative, there is dialog and a story and an art. I might learn all this in a course. But I rarely recall or attend to dialog. The story becomes schematic and str

Constructing If I am constructing something in my scholarly work, the main task is to figure out a structure that will accommodate what I want to say and describe. That structure is not well denominated by an outline, unless that outline is seen as a structural skeleton, displaying an integrity that allows for attaching my examples and main points so that they have an apparently necessary and preordained place, and they contribute to the structure’s integrity and to the meaning of the other attached pieces. Yes, since the written text is linear, some parts come before others, but their meaning only becomes rich when in subsequent sentences and paragraphs they are seen to be precursors of what is being said then. Definitions or preliminaries only become powerful much later in the text, although they make good enough sense when they do appear.             The aim is to make something whole, although it is presented linearly and in parts. Rereading that constructed

Photographing Literal description, or the illusion of literal description, is what the tools and materials of still photography do better than any other graphic medium. A still photograph is the illusion of a literal description of how a camera saw a piece of time and space.   … photographing [is] a two-way act of respect. Respect for the medium, by letting it do what it does best, describe. And respect for the subject by describing it as it is. (Garry Winogrand [i] ) Get closer, keep moving! The New York Times ’ Bill Cunningham’s philosophy, adapted for MK: I am not a photographer, I am a scholar who writes with pictures (and some words). Cunningham lets the streets talk to him.   He goes out for several days and sees the story emerge. Walker Evans: “you want [your work] to commence from life, and that’s in the street now.” [ii] Here was a whole world finely documented down to the last pocketbook and pocket square. No amount of interviewing could extrac