Note to self: know when to put the camera down!

January 1, 2008
· Martin Kelley

We went to fam­i­ly fav-place Long­wood Gar­dens last night for New Year’s eve. It was cold but the lights on all the trees were beau­ti­ful and the fire­works were loud and fun. Going around I kept think­ing about how many cam­eras were around. I took a few pho­tos of course, but I real­ized I’m start­ing to devel­op a reac­tion to Obses­sive Pho­tog­ra­phy Dis­or­der. How many fuzzy pic­tures of long-ago fire­works do peo­ple need to store on their hard drives? 

A few weeks ago I took an eye-opening pic­ture at a wed­ding. It was a quick pho­to of the bride and father walk­ing down the “aisle” (it was more a space between tables in a small ban­quet room). I must have had squirm­ing Fran­cis in one arm, the cam­era in the oth­er, because it’s all blur­ry. The light’s bad, there’s red eye, it’s total­ly not some­thing to send up to Flickr. But what’s haunt­ing about the pic­ture is the back­ground: behind the bride you can see four peo­ple. From left to right, they are: tak­ing a pic­ture, hold­ing cam­era at neck lev­el ready to take a pic­ture, lean­ing back from the cam­era screen set­ting up a shot, and look­ing down at a dis­play review­ing the just-taken pic­ture. This is a wed­ding and it’s the dra­mat­ic part: the bride’s just entered the room and is about to be giv­en away by her father (it’s a sec­ond wed­ding so I can’t take the sym­bol­ism too far, but still this should be a holy moment).

Many Friends Meet­ings ban cam­eras in wed­ding cer­e­monies and I should­n’t have relaxed my stan­dards to take my own pho­to­graph of the wedding-in-progress. There are times where our pres­ence is much more impor­tant than any doc­u­men­ta­tion. I dare say that none of the two-dozen or so walking-down-the-aisle pho­tos tak­en that day are worth devel­op­ing or print­ing. I use my picture-taking for mem­o­ry’s sake and love look­ing at old shots of the fam­i­ly, and a few of the pic­tures I took that day are def­i­nite keep­ers. But us com­pul­sive shut­ter bugs need to know when to put the cam­era down.

Snipers shoot democracy yet again: the assasination of Benazir Bhutto

December 27, 2007
· Martin Kelley

The bul­lets and bombs have final­ly found their mark. It is no sur­prise to learn of yet anoth­er assas­i­na­tion attempt against Pak­istani oppo­si­tion leader Benazir Bhut­to. Details are still sketchy and con­flict­ing but the only thing we real­ly need to know is that this attempt was suc­cess­ful and that Bhut­to is dead less than two weeks before Par­lia­men­tary elec­tions that might well have brought her into pow­er for the third time.

Pak­istan is a coun­try who’s top gov­ern­ment sci­en­tist export­ed atom­ic bomb-making across the world for decades. It still hosts Osama bin Laden. Afghanistan’s Tal­iban are still more-or-less head­quar­tered in its West­ern provinces. The stand­off with India has spawned war after war over the decade, now nuclear-enabled should either coun­try get so embold­ened. Bil­lions of dol­lars of Unit­ed States mon­ey has left Wash­ing­ton for Islam­abad since 9/11 and a pop­u­lar politi­cian can’t even cam­paign there with­out dead­ly assas­si­na­tion attempts. Pak­istan is one of the world’s hot spots, a nexus of ter­ror­ism, nuclear pro­lif­er­a­tion, reli­gious extrem­ism. It is a very sad day today indeed.

The spiritual discipline of sailing in circles

December 10, 2007
· Martin Kelley

An inter­est­ing image in meet­ing yes­ter­day. “CS” rose after the break of wor­ship to share a sto­ry from a old Quak­er jour­nal he’s been read­ing. The min­is­ter in ques­tion was in Eng­land at the time and felt a strong lead­ing to vis­it Friends in Ire­land. Being duti­ful he arranged pas­sage in a ship head­ing west and board­ed it think­ing he would soon reach his des­ti­na­tion. But the winds did­n’t coop­er­ate. The cur­rents did­n’t coop­er­ate. In an era before diesel engines and jet fuel the ful­fill­ment of trav­el­ing inten­tions were depen­dent upon out­side forces: wind, cur­rent, trails, weath­er. The poor Quak­er’s ship went around in cir­cles for a week and final­ly end­ed up in the port it had departed.

We expect today that when we set out to accom­plish some­thing it will get done. But there are always unex­pect­ed cur­rents to con­tend with, unco­op­er­a­tive winds, sand­bars and shoals and God may well be involved in these blocks. Our duty as peo­ple of faith is to get on the boat. We might not get to our Ire­land and that may not be the real pur­pose of our lead­ing. Maybe our job is to learn to catch fish from the boat. Per­haps our faith­ful­ness in appar­ent fail­ure is a les­son for the dis­be­liev­ing sailors on board. And maybe the les­son is for us, to remain faith­ful in the mys­tery and con­fu­sion of God’s roadblocks.

The mod­ern impulse is to win, to accom­plish, to neu­tral­ize dis­sent, problem-solve and suc­ceed. As Friends, we’ve inher­it­ed some of this atti­tudes and often want to take our spir­i­tu­al lead­ings and run with them as if
God’s part is over. We set up com­mit­tees, write mis­sion statements,
hire staff: we lock our ship’s course in a par­tic­u­lar direc­tion, crank
up the engines and plow ahead. These can be use­ful tools, cer­tain­ly, but some­how there’s a les­son for us in that lit­tle boat going around in circles.

No pictures please

November 28, 2007
· Martin Kelley

Since I use this blog as a bit of a per­son­al jour­nal, to remem­ber dates and hap­pen­ings, I should duti­ful­ly note that last night was the time four year old Theo pushed two year old Fran­cis off the foot­stool while brush­ing teeth, caus­ing said Fran­cis to fall pre­cip­i­tous­ly against the bath­tub and open a nasty gash in his chin. Three hours and a Martin/Francis emer­gency room vis­it lat­er there were four stitch­es in the poor guy’s chin. I’ll spare you all a descrip­tion of the ini­tial mess or the dif­fi­cul­ty of hold­ing down a scream­ing child while the doc­tor tries to put the stitch­es in. Every­thing is fine now. And no, no pho­tos or Youtube videos of the pro­ceed­ings. Maybe I’ll snap a pic­ture of the stitch­es so Fran­cis can see just where that scar came from!

Another Quaker bookstore bites the dust

November 28, 2007
· Martin Kelley

Not real­ly news, but Friends Unit­ed Meet­ing recent­ly ded­i­cat­ed their new Wel­come Cen­ter in what was once the FUM bookstore:

On Sep­tem­ber 15, 2007, FUM ded­i­cat­ed the space once used as the Quak­er Hill Book­store as the new FUM Wel­come Cen­ter. The Wel­come Cen­ter con­tains Quak­er books and resources for F/friends to stop by and make use of dur­ing busi­ness hours. Tables and chairs to com­fort­ably accom­mo­date 50 peo­ple make this a great space to rent for reunions, church groups, meet­ings, anniversary/birthday par­ties, etc. Reduced prices are avail­able for churches.

Most Quak­er pub­lish­ers and book­sellers have closed or been great­ly reduced over the last ten years. Great changes have occurred in the Philadelphia-area Pen­dle Hill book­store and pub­lish­ing oper­a­tion, the AFSC Book­store in South­ern Cal­i­for­nia, Bar­clay Press in Ore­gon. The ver­i­ta­ble Friends Book­shop in Lon­don farmed out its mail order busi­ness a few years ago and has seen part of its space tak­en over by a cof­fee­bar: pop­u­lar and cool I’m sure, but does Lon­don real­ly needs anoth­er place to buy cof­fee? Rumor has it that Britain’s pub­li­ca­tions com­mit­tee has been laid down. The offi­cial spin is usu­al­ly that the work con­tin­ues in a dif­fer­ent form but only Bar­clay Press has been reborn as some­thing real­ly cool. One of the few remain­ing book­sellers is my old pals at FGC’s Quaker­Books: still sell­ing good books but I’m wor­ried that so much of Quak­er pub­lish­ing is now in one bas­ket and I’d be more con­fi­dent if their web­site showed more signs of activity.

The boards mak­ing these deci­sions to scale back or close are prob­a­bly unaware that they’re part of a larg­er trend. They prob­a­bly think they’re respond­ing to unique sit­u­a­tions (the peer group Quak­ers Unit­ing in Pub­li­ca­tions sends inter­nal emails around but has­n’t done much to pub­li­cize this sto­ry out­side of its mem­ber­ship). It’s sad to see that so many Quak­er decision-making bod­ies have inde­pen­dent­ly decid­ed that pub­lish­ing is not an essen­tial part of their mission.

Focused blogs and side trips

November 23, 2007
· Martin Kelley

Over on Eileen Flana­gan’s Imper­fect Seren­i­ty, there’s an inter­est­ing post on blog pub­lic­i­ty, “Blog­ging dilem­mas,” inspired in part by Robin M“ ‘s recent “How did you get here?” post. Both bring up inter­est­ing ques­tions about the role of blogs in com­mu­ni­ty build­ing and the loca­tion of that line that sep­a­rates good blog­ging from mere self-promotion and pandering.

Read­ers will prob­a­bly be unsur­prised to learn that I use Tech­no­rati, Google Blog Search, etc., every day to keep track of the Quak­er blo­gos­phere. I act as a kind of com­mu­ni­ty orga­niz­er and my search­es are for inter­est­ing posts talk­ing about Quak­ers (until read­ing Eileen’s post I had­n’t check my Tech­no­rati “rank” in months). Many peo­ple’s first intro­duc­tion to Quak​erQuak​er​.org is get­ting linked from it, and I sus­pect I’ve acci­den­tal­ly out­ed a few begin­ning blog­gers who had­n’t told any­one of their new blog!

I have a pro­fes­sion­al blog on web design and ana­lyt­ics (with a some­what off-topic but sat­is­fy­ing post on top at the moment) and sep­a­rat­ing that out has allowed me to use this per­son­al blog, Quak­er­Ran­ter, for what­ev­er I like. Most reg­u­lar­ly read­ers would say it focus­es on Quak­erism and cute kid pic­tures and while those are the most com­mon posts, the most read posts are the minor fas­ci­na­tions I indulge myself with occa­sion­al­ly. Quak­er plain dress is some­thing I prac­tice but don’t think about most of the time (806 read­ers in past month). My wife and I love to bust on bad baby names and unfair­ly unpop­u­lar baby names (627 vis­its). I’ve also detailed some out­ings to semi-legendary South Jer­sey haunts (317) and score high on search­es to them.

The con­ven­tion­al wis­dom of the blog-as-publicity tool crowd would prob­a­bly say these off-topic posts are dis­tract­ing my core audi­ence. Per­haps, but they’re infre­quent on the blog and long-lived on Google. Besides, I think it helps peo­ple to know I’m not just obsessed with one top­ic. Being a part of a real com­mu­ni­ty means know­ing each oth­er in all of our quirks. I’m more ten­der and for­giv­ing of oth­er Quak­er blog­gers when I know more of their sto­ry: it puts what they say into a con­text that makes it sound more lived, less ide­o­log­i­cal. There’s cer­tain­ly good rea­sons for tightly-focused pro­fes­sion­al blogs (I’d drop Techcrunch from my blogroll if they start­ed post­ing kids pic­tures!), but as more peo­ple read posts through feeds and aggre­ga­tors I won­der if there’s going to be as much pres­sure for per­son­al, community-oriented blogs to be as single-minded in their focus. 

We all have diverse, quirky inter­ests so why not indulge them? I have seen blogs that try too hard to pan­der to par­tic­u­lar audi­ences and boy, are they bor­ing! A cer­tain degree of idio­syn­crasy and sub­jec­tive orner­i­ness is prob­a­bly essen­tial. Per­son­al­i­ty is at least as impor­tant as focus.

PS: I’m also inter­est­ed in mak­ing sure I don’t loose the core audi­ence with all my side trips, hence the “lat­est Quak­er posts” at the top of the page. I have at least one request for a Quaker-only RSS feed and will even­tu­al­ly get that going.
PPS: As if on queue, the next post in Google Read­er after Eileen’s is Avin­ish Kaushik’s Blog Met­rics: Six rec­om­men­da­tions for mea­sur­ing your suc­cess. Parts of it are prob­a­bly a bit tech­ni­cal for most QR read­ers but it’s use­ful for think­ing about blogs as outreach.