Fathers and Daughters and Other Foibles

Originally Posted Wednesday, July 3, 2013

The horror show of not being able to post a blog began again today, but Nadja sent me an email with the solution.  Blogger has changed and you MUST enter a title for the post.  I always do, but I do so when I have finished writing my impressionistic/associational blather.  But therein lay the complication. All better now. 

How do I get away from Google and Blogger?  For me, the answer is simple.  I can't.  I am their slave boy now.  They own this and my other blog, too, years and years of faux-creativity.  I can't just leave my legacy behind. 

I'm glad I never started on Facebook.  And for all those of you who keep trying to add me to Linked In or whatever it is called, I have a profile there but I don't remember the password.  I haven't been there for years. 

O.K.  What wat that about?  BORING.  I want to comment on the Snowden--what do you call it?--thing, but I can't find the fellow's name who falsely testified to Congress that the NSA did not collect information on millions of Americans.  I can't find the story on either CNN or the N.Y. Times. 

???

Whose crime is worse?  Which criminals do we prosecute?  Is it a crime to give people the information that their government officials are lying to their elected representatives under oath? 

I guess it depends on what the meaning of "lying" is.  This fellow just got confused.  He will continue to sleep in his bed and attend cocktail parties.  The other crime is so heinous that the democratically elected President of a sovereign nation was denied permission to land his Presidential airplane in western nations because of a rumor.  Just imagine, if you will, that happening to Obama.  Wait.  I can. 

While I'm opining, I had a discussion with a college professor yesterday, the chair of a humanities department.  He teaches history.  We were talking about what is going on in Egypt.  I don't think many people understand that most of the people who want the president out are not "good guys" in western terms.  That is, they are not what we recognize as liberals here.  It is like the Tea Party taking to the streets for the ouster of Obama.  Maybe not.  I may be the one who is confused.  But it could be true.  I don't think the other guy knew what he was talking about, either.

I've been corresponding with Colin Pantall about photographs he makes of his daughter.  I am intrigued by them in the same way I am intrigued by the photographs of Slava Pirsky.  It has occurred to me that their are few artistic projects by fathers whose subject is their daughter.  The father/daughter relationship, I realize, has more restrictions than any other association.   It has more boundaries than relationships between a mother and son.  Behavior is far more constricted.  There are no male equivalents of Sally Mann while there are many mothers who photograph their daughters.  I've written all of this to Pantall who is a good essayist about art and social issues hoping that he will put on his thinking cap and pursue the idea further.  It is probably too late for him to pursue it artistically, though.  That would take a sea change that I doubt he would want to undergo. 

Perhaps this is a project I can pursue.  I don't have a daughter.  What I mean is that I can pursue the structures, relationships, and taboos that rule/constrict the father/daughter thing.  I already know much about women who have had issues with their fathers.  That might be helpful. 

There it is.  That's what I have today for better or for worse.  I know which.  Still, the picture is pretty in a slightly disturbing way.  There is always something.