BECKENHAM LIBRARY INDEPENDENCE DAY

Plus: I now know who I am
Plus: I have a new camera

Beckenham Library in Kent will mark the 4th of July tomorrow with a self-publish and be blessed day and I am one of the people invited by Michael J. Weller to come and talk about my own experiences. I'll give a short PowerPoint presentation and then perhaps have a chance to dialogue with Mike about that alternative universe known as self-publishing. 

The mikonoclastic maker of HomeBaked Books is a friend and fellow self-publisher who has described me as an itinerant rhizomath . Forgive my ignorance but I had to look it up. Here's what botany and philosophy have to say about rhizome and rhizomatic:

...a characteristically horizontal stem of a plant that is usually found underground, often sending out roots and shoots from its nodes.....If a rhizome is separated into pieces, each piece may be able to give rise to a new plant.

Rhizomatic thought is non-linear, anarchic and nomadic ....Rhizomatic thought is multiplicitous, moving in many directions and connected to many other lines of thinking, acting, and being.

...rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo.

Here, at last, is the answer to my lifelong question: WHO AM I?

Thanks to Mike Weller's brilliant insight, I can now carry on in my itinerant rhizomathic way with complete confidence that I am fulfilling my destiny.

I HAVE A NEW CAMERA

My old Fuji Finepix bought in January 2004 has died. Is a digital camera too old at seven? Not by my reckoning but I'm old school and believe things should last and last and last. Unfortunately I've had to accept the unfairness of its demise and start searching for a replacement. This is a process that awakens my inner anorak and there's no snippet of information, however boring, which escapes my detail-hungry eye. After weighing up the evidence concerning those cameras I could afford, I settled on the Canon PowerShot A3300 . All the options will take some getting used to and it feels more fragile than my old camera but it's too soon to say what I think of it. Here are some of the first shots I've taken with it.

MORE