Sunday, March 21, 2010

How I Stopped Worrying The Book & Learned 2 Love Digital Filmmaking

re: upcoming 2011 panel proposals (working title = Remediation, Convergence, & the Academic Monograph OR How I Stopped Worrying the Book & Learned to Love Digital Filmmaking). i can't see a better way to ask you to consider joining my panel than to channel Slim Pickens. now then, boys,

Saturday, March 13, 2010

the book. an update.



i'd hoped to be in a position to develop the book as part of the conditions of my employment, in a specific "set up" (i like David Lynch's quite a lot). i keep attempting to create a dreamy set up at home, but complicating this possibility is that my husband is an adjunct with a heavy teaching load, and so i end up inevitably sharing my office spaces with him, and this means piles and stacks and mess. it drives me insane, but he loves the gig, and i try to be supportive. it's complicated. and it's a problem we have not resolved. and it's real-life. every day. a conflict. an obstacle. surely to be overcome, but there it is.

yes so but the physical, temporo-spatial conditions of work. i'm writing this as i reflect upon The 3rd Annual Arakawa and Gins Online Conference my friend Martin E. Rosenberg pointed me toward, and i suppose the experience of thinking more critically about life and space has me extra sensitized to my existing awareness of The Situation. i contemplate the purchase of a backyard office pod, but at this time i cannot afford it (plus, it's so beautiful; i'd want to keep it indoors). contemplating it is magical, to say the least, and i see my ideal set up in the same sparkling minimalist light.

oh, and all of this is happening ... all of this excuse-making (i realize it. fully aware.) in the context of my mid-life contemplation about just

what.
i.
am.
doing.

so there's that.

i hope to make more progress in the coming months, in and among other projects (my most recent film, Status Update, for which i will aggregate all my ramblings at my-formerly-designated-film-blog-which-is-badly-in-need-of-resuscitation, maybe). i'm hopeful about this progress and have begun to map some of the book's relations in prezi, a supernatural tool for conceptualizing a conceptual ecology. you are happy to learn that i am also moving the book along via upcoming publication of a webtext that represents the early chapters and central concepts (and let me just say "thank you" to the editors for their patience and encouragement).

and now that i have embraced these truths, i await the emergence of a Joe Simpson-type zone experience that moves me, segment by achingly slow and hope-alive-keeping segment, along.

so but if you've been wondering about the book's progress (mon dieu!), these are among my reasons. i own and embrace them as excuses, and hope to use this recognition as a means of transcending them, of seeing them for what they are so that i may in zencoolnessmode simply move on, whatever this may mean, precisely.