The winds of Edouard, the winds of war, the winds of peace... a theme seems to be developing. So, while Edouard passes way east of here and the trees sway gently on the leeward side of the storm, do I contemplate war and peace? Well, I was doing that in the middle of the night when I couldn't sleep, but now I'm restructuring my web page instead. I felt like I had to straighten it out before I put the Russia travel journal online.
I'm way too verbal for the current communications age. I think in words mostly although I have some facility with visual thinking inherited from my Dad who could reproduce any machine he saw once. He was no known relation to Samuel Slater, but If he'd been around in the early days of the industrial revolution I'm sure the Brits would've banned him from the mills. He solved problems entirely by visualizing how all the parts fit together, figuring out patterns visually, and inventing parts to fit the situation. He rarely spoke more than a few short declarative sentences but those sentences were always clear and direct and apropos (I'll never forget his explaining to a congressman friend that food came from farms and not supermarkets and he'd damn well better care about farms even though he represented an urban district.)
So, I've got Dad's ability to see patterns in things that are already out there and to focus my camera on striking visual images, but I definitely do not have the skills to conceive ideas initially as pictures or to invent machinery (or to reproduce it). People tell me I take great photographs (coming to this web page when I get a scanner - real soon now). My Dad took prize winning photos. I never saw him draw a picture though. I can't draw at all. I just don't have that piece of visual language.
I take in enormous amounts of information visually. I even astonish my friends by birding while driving. (Don't try this at home kids.) I love visual art. My poems have been described as "painterly" and "visual". So what is the problem? I can't do graphic design to save my career. The visual vocabulary is more foreign to me than Russian.
That's problem 1. Problem 2 is even weirder. I have devoted my entire career in all its forms to organizing information. Graphically based hypertext expression seems to require me to disorganize it. I've always written in little snippets and then strung them into an overall structure. Now I feel like I'm trying to take the snippets and cut them into smaller snippets, throw them up in the air, and draw a map of where they land. Even though writing is a non-linear process, the end result (for me anyway) has always been a linear product.
How does a verbal and linear person design a visual and non-linear web page? Beats the heck out of me! I thought of doing a map of Galapagos and a map of Iceland for my travel section, but the map idea breaks down for the Vladivostok trip because I wasn't traveling from place to place - the events were more day to day and person to person. This is the kind of thinking I get trapped in. So, I thought I'd write about this in the hopes that it'll lodge it in the upper right hand corner of the brain and hatch into a way to jump out of the box.
Oh, and another thing about visual images. In Russia I saw a lot of music videos - the restaurants had the tv on all the time, usually tuned to the Russian equivalent of MTV. The images confused me. They moved too fast to decode on any intellectual level. They were strongly sexual without being explicit. Many of them were so downright bizarre they made me nauseous and fearful. I'm talking genuinely disturbing images blitzing by too fast to think about accompanied by a pounding beat so heavy it didn't matter if the lyrics were Russian or English - it just made you want to fuck somebody. Yet this is exactly the sort of information 21st century humans will be bombarded with and expected to deconstruct and act on at top speed. Video literacy. This is only tangentially related to my inability to design a web page, but it does raise interesting questions. And no I am not a Luddite.
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