Hello to Some of That
Many new things in life as I approach 50 but one of them that continues to elude me is working with cameras. I have my trusty GoPro 7 and GoPro 9, and they are both pretty unreliable cameras when important things are being filmed.
I took the GoPro 9 into the backyard during this heat wave we are experiencing on Long Island. I keep watching the NYC news and weather not thinking that when they say it will be 91F, it really means it will be 87F away from the concrete and against the north shore.
I thought my GoPro 9 would overheat, but it did fine taking video at 4k of the puppy, once again having a great time playing fetch (this is pretty much all she wants to do). The camera worked pretty well, so I think I'll take it into Queens for my birthday celebration (observed) on Saturday. I'm turning 50 at the start of July.
Writing for a bit, reading for a bit, and stepping out into the yard is an inventional strategy I've never used, mostly because I have never been in a situation where I was writing serious stuff while having a backyard. It's a nice re-centering, de-centering compositional tool. The yard is not just a commonplace but perhaps a scribble pad, a commonplace book of sorts, or a storehouse of transitions between things to say.
The weather, the yard, the dog - all things I could write about incessantly but never anything that I thought was part of rhetorical composition in this very direct way, a very mediated way that is disrupting just enough to allow a return to writing that feels nearly as good as the first sentences in the morning - a feeling that I didn't think could be replicated. Well, it still can't be, but this is fairly close.
I'm going to try to use the Go Pro 9 to film a few lectures outside for the online courses I'm doing in the fall. We'll see how that changes the feel of the pedagogy. The post will be more difficult, splicing the slides in and all that, but it might make for a more interesting set of lectures.