Better luck this time?
Welcome to the 101st edition of this newsletter!
With each email I'm sharing material that has inspired me recently. I'm hoping it will inspire you, too. If you want to support my work, you can sign up for my Patreon. This will get you access to exclusive material every week.
If Patreon is not your thing but you enjoy what I'm doing, feel free to send me a little something via Paypal. I'll use the funds to pay for the fee the service provider of this Mailing List charges me every month. If there's money left, I'll invest it into the Japanese green tea that fuels much of my creative work.
In the end, I never fully found out the reason for the trouble with my last email. The provider of this mailing list sent me a technical update after I had sent out the repeat email. At this stage, it's not that I'm too old to understand technical stuff any longer (which I might well be). It's that I am not interested in learning so much technical stuff that I feel I shouldn't have to know. Do you know what I mean?
The following obviously is my age showing. But I remember a time when as a computer user you didn't actually have to know much about their ins and outs -- unless you made the conscious decision to get into programming. A computer would work, and if something didn't work, you could get in touch with someone from the company who would fix it for you.
But now neoliberal capitalism has outsourced everything into your court. Your computer doesn't work? Well, why don't you Google the problem yourself? If you're lucky someone else has found a solution for a problem that hundreds of other people are also battling. If you're young enough to know only this situation, I can tell you that there was a time when this was radically different.
My main problem with this is that I feel that my time is limited. I want to control what I can spend it on. Furthermore, I want to spend it in ways that benefit me.
About two weeks ago, I decided to "upgrade" the OS of the MAC I'm writing this email on. I had been mostly reluctant to do so, anticipating that something would break. And of course, it did. The computer stopped recognizing its own wireless keyboard. I had to race to a local "superstore" to buy a keyboard with a chord to get the computer to work again. Ultimately, I never found a solution for the problem. Conceivably, there is one. But I would have to invest more of my time, which I will not do.
The update also erased a couple of documents on my computer. One of them contained the list of publishers and literary agents I had contacted in my attempt to try to find a publisher for a book I was working on over the course of the past four years. There had been a few rejections. But mostly when you try to find someone who will publish your book, you never hear back from anyone. That's considered to be normal.
Last night, it finally dawned on me: If the book will not get published, that's OK. Or rather: The book will not get published because I will not try to contact more people (unless someone gets back to me at some stage in the future -- highly unlikely).
Before I went through a round of extensive re-working of the manuscript earlier this year, I had realized how much the book means to me. Back then, it felt profoundly wrong to give up on it. I think the work I spent on it this year was probably the most fruitful period of the process. I really managed to shape the book into its right form. I was able to work out its logic and its themes.
In the end, though -- and this is something I have been telling photographers for a long time -- a book (or set of photographs) going out into the world is a bonus. The real rewards are had when you work on something, when you invest a lot of energy and passion, when you grapple with things that aren't working, when you break down in tears because you have an unexpected breakthrough... That's where the rewards lie. I had those.
And I have to say that I don't think that the publication of the book and its possible reception would deliver me anything of that order. It would have been nice to have all those words go out into the world. I would have been nice to connect with people for whom the book resonates on some level. But all of that -- that's a bonus. And that bonus is not to be had for this book.
I'm fine with that.
I had assembled a few links to share. Looking at them now, I am not sure whether they fit into this email's mood. So I'm going to conclude by recommending some music. Meitei / 冥丁 is a Japanese musician from Hiroshima. I don't remember where I discovered his music, but I have been somewhat obsessed with it these past few days. I have been listening to Kofū II / 古風 II on my daily walks. There's something very intriguing, something weird, something strange about it. I found an article about the artist in which he says that he wants to evoke an older period of Japanese history. Maybe if you're Japanese, you will pick up on it. If you're not, you will pick up something different.
I hope that you'll enjoy it.
As always thank you for reading!
-- Jörg