The Brief Wondrous Life

The title of this year's Williams Reads selection is The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz. It won the Pulitzer. This is a big improvement over last year's pick, which was a kid's book. Tonight was the kickoff party - great live music, Ritmo Latino spurring a small audience to dance. I grabbed my friend Holly Dwyer, who picked up salsa in seconds. We rocked out.

Unfortunately, there aren't any pictures of that, cause you can't be a shutterbug and a jitterbug at the same time.

But today's resolution (in addition to finishing a monster of a spreadsheet for my internship) was taking people photos. I got the chance when we adjourned to Josephine's room for Italian espresso from Italy (and a Sudanese fez?). Think I'm going to have interesting conversations with my professor about these. His preference for spare, clean cut, balanced landscapes is fairly rigid. I like "full" images, subjects pushing out the side of the frame, and, as evidenced above, I like blurring.



Ben sat still(ish) to oblige my fondness for minutia. I photographed his shoes, the edge of his jeans, and I took about 7 shots of his hands cupping this glass.



Eventually, Madeline bribed me to stop with the promise of a bran muffin. I'm a sucker for a bran muffin.



Now I'm meditating on the message of that title: the brief, wondrous life. It helps to maintain joy while databasing, and though they say pictures are for people who can't remember, I disagree. I get irritated at kids who spend the whole party taking pictures of it, but there is something in the act. 3 summers ago, my teaching assistant at Governor's School had 25 students stand in a circle before a show, doing something very New Agey - in turn, we rotated left and, looking into each others' eyes, said, "It is yours. I give it to you," and embraced. The point was claiming ownership of the work we'd done, honoring our trust in one another. Those moments of seeing and being seen are gifts we hand, unwrapped, to one another. I've been feeling the photo expeditions as a kind of embrace, a documentation of what is on offer. It's true that the pictures I'm taking aren't as messy as what is really on offer. For now, they're highlights. And for now, that's contenting.