karamozov

"It's the great mystery of human life that old grief passes gradually into quiet, tender joy. The mild serenity of age takes the place of the riotous blood of youth. I bless the rising sun each day, and, as before, my hearts sings to meet it, but now I love even more its setting, its long slanting rays and the soft, tender, gentle memories that come with them, the dear images from the whole of my long, happy life - and over all the Divine Truth, softening, reconciling, forgiving!

My life is ending, I know that well, but every day that is left me I feel how my earthly life is in touch with a new infinite, unknown, that approaching life, the nearness of which sets my soul quivering with rapture, my mind glowing and my heart weeping with joy."

- Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamozov

for those who wander

Highly recommend Through Painted Deserts for anyone who has ever felt numb or lost in the molasses of everydayness.  It will make you feel alive and appreciate the eccentricities of life.  It will make you want to go outside and do something new.

Donald Miller is the only author I have read who has made me laugh aloud while nose deep in a book.  He just posted an excerpt on his blog.

book project

I have been meeting a friend for lunch every Thursday for the last three and a half years. He worked down the street from me in El Segundo so it was a short drive and a long lunch once a week. It was a great time, something consistent that I needed through the ups and downs of the last few years. Now that I work fifty some miles from El Segundo, those lunches are no longer possible. They will be missed.

I have offered to help him with a stalled book project that he has been working on for a handful of years. Its working title is "When God is Not Enough" and it is written for Christians who have experienced God in a visceral way, but have for whatever reason lost a part of that intimate connection. For those who have trouble reconciling what they see in the church with what they experience in the world. For those who are disillusioned, dissapointed, and frustrated with God, but not enough to forget Him. In other words, right up my alley.

Hopefully, this will keep the friendship alive and help me work through some of my lingering issues. I enjoy writing, but I have trouble writing more than a blog entry at a time, so this will be a challenge.  Also trying to figure out how dual authorship works, specifically when the authors are approaching the subject from different angles. A dialog perhaps, or is that off-putting? I hope our styles compliment each other.

Suggestions and stories welcome, readers.

festival of books

They moved the LA Festival of Books to USC this year. It had been at UCLA for as long as I've been in West LA. I haven't been on campus for quite a long time. Interesting memories. Also got to do a little casual portrait shooting. Fun!



Winnie Cooper!

Madeline is kinda creepy in 3D 

Hanged for stealing cookies

Dinner at Papa Cristo's 



Exposition Park




















Full set on Flickr as usual.

regret and potential

Waste forces within him, and a desert all around, this man stood still on his way across a silent terrace, and saw for a moment, lying in the wilderness before him, a mirage of honourable ambition, self-denial, and perseverance. In the fair city of this vision, there were airy galleries from which the loves and graces looked upon him, gardens in which the fruits of life hung ripening, waters of Hope that sparkled in his sight. A moment, and it was gone. Climbing to a high chamber in a well of houses, he threw himself down in his clothes on a neglected bed, and its pillow was wet with wasted tears.

Sadly, sadly, the sun rose; it rose upon no sadder sight than the man of good abilities and good emotions, incapable of their directed exercise, incapable of his own help and his own happiness, sensible of the blight on him, and resigning himself to let it eat him away.

-Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

what's in a voice

The faintness of the voice was pitiable and dreadful. It was not the faintness of physical weakness, though confinement and hard fare no doubt had their part in it. Its deplorable peculiarity was, that it was the faintness of solitude and disuse. It was like the last feeble echo of a sound made long and long ago. So entirely had it lost the life and resonance of the human voice, that it affected the senses like a once beautiful colour faded away into a poor weak stain. So sunken and suppressed it was, that it was like a voice underground. So expressive it was, of a hopeless and lost creature, that a famished traveller, wearied out by lonely wandering in a wilderness, would have remembered home and friends in such a tone before lying down to die.

"If you hear in my voice - I don't know that it is so, but I hope it is - if you hear in my voice any resemblance to a voice that once was sweet music in your ears, weep for it, weep for it! If you touch, in touching my hair, anything that recalls a beloved head that lay on your breast when you were young and free, weep for it, weep for it! If, when I hint to you of a Home that is before us, where I will be true to you with all my duty and with all my faithful service, I bring back the remembrance of a Home long desolate, while your poor heart pined away, weep for it, weep for it!"

-Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

sherlock holmes, pre hollywood

It was a September evening and not yet seven o'clock, but the day had been a dreary one, and a dense drizzly fog lay low upon the great city. Mud-coloured clouds drooped sadly over the muddy streets. Down the Strand the lamps were but misty splotches of diffused light which threw a feeble circular glimmer upon the slimy pavement. The yellow glare from the shop-windows steamed out into the steamy, vaporous air and threw a murky, shifting radiance across the crowded thoroughfare. There was, to my mind, something eerie and ghostlike in the endless procession of faces which flitted across these narrow bars of light - sad faces and glad, haggard and merry. Like all humankind, they flitted from the gloom into the light and so back into the gloom once more. I am not subject to impressions, but the dull, heavy evening, with the strange business upon which we were engaged, combined to make me nervous and depressed. I could see from Miss Morstan's manner that she was suffering from the same feeling.

-Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, "The Sign of Four"

currently reading

• The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli
• The Art of War, Sun Tzu
• Inside Out, Larry Crabb
• Holding Hands, Holding Hearts, Richard D. Phillips
• Book of Acts, TNIV New Testament
• A Midsummer Night's Dream, William Shakespeare

In the queue:

• The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins
• The Ragamuffin Gospel, Brennan Manning (anyone know where to find the non-visual edition?)