july 26th, 2009, 12:02 am

i have finalized my master’s thesis committee. i now have a schedule that will result in my m.s. being awarded, a paper being submitted to a journal for publication, and applications being sent out—all in december. then i’ll get about seven months of time off from school. i hope to travel away from north america, but i’ll probably have to get some kind of job during that time as well.

my darkroom is complete! i have purchased an archival print washer. this was the one thing that my darkroom was truly lacking. now i can properly produce archival-quality fiber-based gelatin-silver prints. i have recently upgraded from a beseler 35 enlarger to a beseler 67 dichro enlarger. this is a welcome change—in the future, i’ll be able to work with medium-format film. also, i no longer have to deal with multi-grade filters.

just as i am getting the last tools for my darkroom, i am realizing that this art may not be for me. i think i’m too much of a perfectionist for photography. the slightest imperfection with an exposure drives me crazy. perhaps my darkroom will simply become my torture-chamber.

also, all of this photography business is very far from cheap. cameras, lenses, film, paper, chemicals, darkroom equipment, water, water, water—and what about dry-mounting and matting? my silly little binder of photos certainly isn’t very presentable. maybe i should have stuck with a point-and-shoot digital camera and a web page to display my photos.

my progress with anna karenina has slowed. i’m about half-way through the book. but i’m still enjoying it very much, and i do plan on finishing it.

[...] the joyful terror of the nearness of his happiness communicated itself to him.
tolstoy, anna karenina, 404

i think tolstoy is generally over-optimistic. at the same time, i could just be premature in my judgement. it may not end like this.

He saw only her clear, truthful eyes, frightened by the same joy of love that filled his heart. Those eyes shone nearer and nearer, blinding him by their light of love. She stopped up close to him, touching him.
ibid.

tolstoy sets up little challenges for his characters, but they all prevail each time. the story is just a cluttering of propped-up straw men. while he spends time on his kitty and dolly and anna, helping them fight their weak foes, he does as least acknowledge something greater.

She could not understand how lofty and inaccessible to her it all was, and she should not have dared to mention it.
ibid., 399

i’m glad that tolstoy recognizes something grand that can only be fouled by spoken language. he also mentions other things that are very important to me personally, including a peculiar urgency.

When Kitty had gone and Levin was left alone, he felt such anxiety without her and such an impatient desire to live quickly, the more quickly, till tomorrow morning [...]
ibid, 398

but i’ll stop here. if i were to work my way backwards to the very beginning of his novel, this entry would certainly be four-hundred pages itself. all i intended to say originally is that, yes, the loftiness exists and is beautiful, but the real world doesn’t work in such a way.