Images of Katrina/Rita

The images have become too familiar.
With Katrina, it was the sight of thousands of our fellow citizens drifting down interstates suddenly become dead ends, or crying out for rescue, or simply gone into the stupor of dehydration and heat.
Now we see Rita, repeating the images of flood and destruction. There is less hopelessness, more property destruction.
Recurrent in these and every other hurricane: images of our commercial culture torn apart, with McDonald's arches overthrown and Exxon gasoline signs in tatters. Also the sailboats. The camera always finds more pathos in a sailboat cast onto land than the equivalent motorcraft. The sailboat has more of life to it - like a racehorse, it once was sensitive and powerful and willful. To see a sailboat, keel bared and masts in the dirt, is to have a sense of something powerful and beautiful brought to a helpless state.
The eye of the photographer seeks such images, ones that encapsulate an entire event in one moment. But because the images are powerful, they are often controversial as well.
Two events at North Carolina A&T next month will look at the power of the new media and the pervasiveness of image.
"Images of Katrine: Media and Politics," will be presented by the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication as part of the College of Arts & Sciences Colloquium Series. The panel discussion and town hall meeting will be 3 p.m. Oct. 4 in the New Classroom Building Auditorium.
Later that week, the ConvergeSouth conference will bring together bloggers from across the nation, academics and local folks, a creative class of all kinds.
The Oct. 7-8 event is the fourth such at least partially academic approach to the new media, blogging and citizen journalism, and the first in the South.

Revisiting

Sometimes the stories seem better when viewed at a distance. Sometimes worse.
I had a short-short story that had been languishing in the files for a couple of years. It grew out of personal experience, walking the boundaries of my West Virginia farm with the man who was to buy it.
Of couse, the characters and the incidents are changed or remodeled to fit the needs of the story. But the descriptions came from real life, and the emotions. At the time, I wasn't sure I liked the story much, probably because it was too close for comfort.
But when I read it again, I found that distance had made it better. With some rewrites, it was ready to go.
I sent it to the News & Observer in Raleigh, which has a nice weekly feature called the Sunday Reader with poetry, essays and stories by writers across the state and the region.
They liked it, too. And printed it this past Sunday.
If you want to visit, it's at
Boundaries

Identification

Just finished "Cat's Eye" by Margaret Atwood.
Funny how a book will draw me, I'll buy it and put it on the shelf for months or even years before the right time comes.
I bought this copy at a gigantic used book site in Maine - a former chicken barn, with antiques on the first floor and books on the second. So large that a map was provided - Judaica this way, juvenile fiction that way.
That was 10 years ago, following a divorce. I took my parents back to Maine, where they took me when I was a child. We went back to Greenville and Moosehead Lake, the edge of the bush. It was early June and I swam in the black waters of Lily Bay, with pine pollen on the surface, the water cold as the recent ice-out promised.
And this book....
I'm a fan of Atwood and of Alice Munro and other Canadians. Growing up close to the border, I guess, in the deep snows of western New York, with the same oppressive skies and cold. Joyce Carol Oates grew up not that far away, in Lockport.
So this book had much that was new and much chillingly familiar. Without spoiling the intricate memoir-style plot, I'll say that it recalled the northern trips, and it recalled the terrors of growing up a girl when you don't understand how to do that.
Unlike Atwood's narrator, I had no brother, but I did grow up free and wild in the northern woods. It was easier to understand botany and the ways of boys, my father and my cousins, a world of fishing and football and dares. Girls have a different, more subtle, more horrifying cruelty that I learned in school.
We survived. That's the point. I had lunch with a female friend the other day and she brought up this same book. Loved it, too. "A Lord of the Flies for girls," she said.
Indeed.