I braved the humidity and went to a farmers market last weekend. I made sure to go early to beat the worst of the heat, but as it had just rained, the air was full of water. It was fine while the sky was overcast, but once the clouds cleared and the sun came out, it quickly got hot. I wanted to use up the last twelves shots of the roll of Harman Phoenix 200 that was in my Canon AE-1, as well as using the roll of Ilford SFX in my nearly-century-old Kodak Pocket Jr. 1A camera, so dealt with both humidity and sun and finished off both rolls, after which I treated myself to an iced coffee and a piece of cake at the coffee shop. At the farmers market, I bought myself some cookies, a loaf of bread from one of my favorite bakeries, and a bouquet of flowers. The flowers are still mostly good after a week of being in the window. The bread and cookies didn't last as long.
I don't have the film back from the developers yet, so I don't know if either roll turned out. There were some camera shenanigans involved with the Phoenix 200, while the SFX was a test roll to try out the Pocket Jr 1A to see if I'd managed to cover up the pinholes in the bellows. That camera is nearly a century old, but the shutter seems to still work. If I've solved the pinhole problem, then I'll be able to put the camera back to work. I've been using the Agfa Shur-Shot Special, a box camera from the 1930s that I inherited from my grandmother. It's been fun to work with, and has made me want to try out other vintage and antique cameras.
2. A couple of weeks ago, I borrowed a copy of 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die from the library. It was compiled by a group of international critics who wanted to showcase albums that have been important to the development of popular music between 1955 and 2003. I went through all 960 pages and wrote down the albums that caught my eye. By the end of that process, I had a list of around 225 that I either hadn't heard at all, or hadn't heard in full before. I began the listening project yesterday and listened to two albums: Frank Sinatra's In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning and Duke Ellington's Ellington at Newport. I put my headphones on, cued up the music, and sat down on my couch to knit while listening. I definitely preferred Duke Ellington to Frank Sinatra. I see why people love his voice, but overall my response was "That's nice". Meanwhile, Duke Ellington had me wanting to get up and dance, and I am a terrible dancer. As it was, the pace of my knitting greatly increased. The scarf– which I mentioned in the last Three Things– is still very much a work in progress, as I prefer to have abnormally long scarves. I suspect I will be listening to quite a few more albums before the scarf is finished. Listening to jazz while knitting is a lovely experience, though I do wonder if it will be quite the same when I get up to, say, The Rolling Stones or Joy Division. 3. I finally hauled my three boxes of unwanted-by-me books to the used bookstore to sell them. And because the answer to, "Do you want cash or store credit?" is always "store credit, please" I now have a healthy amount of credit for used books. I promptly spent some of it on another photography book, Harmony of Reflected Light: The Photographs of Arthur Wesley Dow by James L. Enyeart. Dow was an American artist and teacher who worked in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He quickly adopted photography as an artistic medium, beginning as a pictorialist before moving into a more modern style. He taught or influenced such artists as Georgia O'Keefe, Charles Scheeler, and a young Frank Lloyd Wright. I have to admit that I don't know much more about Dow than that, but I'm looking forward to reading more about him. When I first flipped through the book, I was intrigued by the soft-focus photographs he made early in his career. Pictorialism in photography is something I've been wanting to experiment with. The soft, often grainy images provide a contrast to the obsession with sharpness that has overtaken much of photography in the past twenty years or so. Assuming the weather ever cools off again, I plan to head out to a few nearby nature reserves and try out a few techniques to experiment with pictorialism in the digital sphere.
What I'm Currently Reading: I finished reading the third book in Shauna Lawless' Gael Song series, The Land of the Living and the Dead. While I enjoyed it almost as much as the previous two, it did feel a little rushed in the last hundred pages or so. Sometimes if felt like Gormflaith got the upper hand a little too easily in situations, and the conclusion and aftermath of the Descendants' council seemed very convenient given everything that's gone before, but I guess I would rather have the story I got than something that would have either added a lot more pages to the book, or else required Lawless to continue the story into another full book. There are too many endless fantasy series that don't know when to stop. I would rather have a bit of plot convenience than be faced with yet another fantasy series that doesn't earn its page count. The next book, Daughter of the Otherworld, is due out at the end of November. I've requested a review copy on NetGalley, and I'm hoping that they will approve my request. I'm looking forward to finding out what happens next. So. If you're tired of all the fantasy novels that claim to be inspired by Irish myth and legend, but are just rehashing the latest sexy fae lord stories with an Irish-ish name, I would definitely recommend the Gael Song series. Shauna Lawless is a solid writer who cares about her history, culture, and language, and that care shines through on every page. The first three books are set during the late 900s into the early 1000s, when Vikings still raided the coasts of the British Isles and Brian Boru was fighting to establish himself as the high king of Ireland. The fourth book will jump ahead about a hundred years, and deals with Ireland in the time of the Norman invasions.  A book I'm in the midst of and need to finish soon is my advance copy of Silvia Moreno-Garcia's The Bewitching. I don't usually go for books with multiple timelines. It always seems like one timeline is boring, and I find myself wanting to get away from it to return to the more interesting one, but there hasn't been a book by Moreno-Garcia that I haven't enjoyed to some degree, so I'm willing to go with her on this. The Bewitching involves three generations of women whose lives are affected by strange disappearances and something that might be witchcraft. In the 1990s, Minerva travels to New England from Mexico to study Beatrice Tremblay, the author of her favorite book. As she develops her thesis, Minerva uncovers the story of how Tremblay became obsessed with her beautiful roommate who later disappeared under mysterious circumstances. The story of the missing roommate seems to echo a disappearance in Minerva's own family a couple of generations earlier, when her great-grandmother Nana Alba was a young woman. The more she investigates these stories, the more strange things start to happen around her, and Minerva begins to wonder if her beloved tales of witchcraft are true. I'm only about 15% of the way through the digital ARC of The Bewitching, but I'm enjoying it so far. Moreno-Garcia has managed to keep me interested in all the timelines thanks to her always-captivating character work. I'm looking forward to finishing this one and reviewing it soon.
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Sunday, 6 July 2025
Three Things #2
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