The Top Roped

Another Gunks shot, this time of your humble bloggerer.  This is the first time I've appeared here, I believe, except as a five-year old silhouette.  Milestones!  This, obviously, is a guest photographer.  And no offense to any of the people that have commandeered my camera while I'm on the wall, but I really need to bring someone that knows what to do with an SLR one of these times.  Would love to have some solid pictures of myself climbing!

Anyway, the Gunks have no sport climbing; only trad, which I have not the experience to lead.  Thus I mooched mightily off of the skill (and gear) of some of my excellent friends, who rigged top ropes for us less-badassers.  I did, however, learn how to clean routes.  One step further!

Gunkstravaganza!

Took a trip with a pile o friends to the Shawangunks for some climbing and the New Paltz Climbing Film fest.  More pics and details to come!

American Dream

Abandoned homes along Highway 395 in California.  The first one is actually in the ghost town tourist attraction of Bodie, CA (a goldmine boomtown of the 1870s-80s), but the second two are modern-day abandoned homesteads at the foot of the Sierras.  Plus ca change...

Bones

Yak vertebra at the edge of the receding Khumbu glacier, which we saw while crossing it more or less at random (trails are for...pussies?).  There were quite a lot of bones scattered around in the grass, enough for several yaks.  None of the cool ones, though.  Skulls probably get snatched up by tourists before all the flesh is gone.  (Gross)

Cryptid

Abstract statuary, somewhere in Hong Kong.

Uncomplicated

It's just pretty.  Sunset, Half Dome, Yosemite.  About as idiot-proof as photography gets.

Screaming across the sky

In that last post about Gravity's Rainbow, I mentioned little meerkats of brilliance poking their heads out of the subterranean warren of symbolism and digression that make up the bulk of the 900 pages.  One of these shining rodents of authorship is the longest episode in the novel (no chapters, here we have "episodes"), and is almost a stand-alone short story.  It focuses on a character, Franz Pokler, who had been mentioned maybe once before, and the history of his involvement with developing the dreaded 00000 Schwarzgerat as the holocaust occurs in the background.  I know that's just blahblah to those who haven't read this book.  I won't really try to describe the plot, but it's a case where all of the oblique symbolism and allegory and general verbosity of Pynchon come together into a story that is both thought-provoking and poignant without being heavy-handed (how many short stories about the holocaust can say that?).  It's by turns amusing and horrifying and ends in great sadness.  In the simplest terms, its about the manufacture and manipulation of innocence.


The picture is from the holocaust memorial in Berlin- relevant!