070515-1245

For most adventures, one "leans forward"--you move into them, and where they resist, you push; intellectual life has a different cast: one must ease back, closing channels, doors, and windows until, for a while, only the reading exists, and the world will have to wait for the reader's return.

That day will come and soon.

I had an afternoon of it yesterday with Raphael Patai's The Arab Mind, which in its fourth chapter becomes an exegesis on Arabic and Arab attitude expression, and behavior correspondence, familiar enough stuff from both my now old graduate studies in recreation management and English.

This morning, however was lost to making the old rounds--ModelMayhem.com, Zoetrope.com (where I've revived my virtual office some), and Photosig.com, where I have not yet (and may never) become genuinely active as a critic or forum participant.

Photography, the active art, has gotten pretty good; fiction writing, the lost one, has become an entirely new continent, and I haven't eased back enough to find myself on even its barrier islands. Not yet.

Prior obligations: I am completing photography for a book in press with Johns Hopkins University Press: Maryland Food Traditions, from which project the eight-year-old picture to the right, made one morning at Chick and Ruth's Deli in Annapolis, has come. The momentum on the state culture and history book disappeared years ago--don't even think of pointing the finger at me on that: I was the photographer, not the writer; I had bought into a six-month mission concept, not six years (more) of now and then. I've nonetheless promised to convert a volume of slides to scans and the scans to black and white print files for the project and am half through that work.

This strikes me as the day to work on just that (after lunch).