GR and Grrrrr

In early May I dropped my backpack with my pocket camera, a Ricoh GR, and I feared that was the end. WhiskyFoxtrot and SaraEvans both suggested I take it back where I bought it and ask for help. It needed a new screen, and for $210 (ouch! but less than a new camera) I was able to get it repaired, and today it came home from the hospital with a 90-day warranty. At the magic hour I took a stroll to try it out, and I’m pleased to have it back. What it does that the Fuji (with 35mm lens) can’t do is wide-angle contextual shots like this one--people having beers at the end of an August day under the fuchsias. It's small enough to be inconspicuous, so it's helpful for stealth street photography. 

However I find the focusing of the GR tricky. I had to delete nine out of ten shots, as I’d aim at a person and it would focus on a wall or a door or a car behind her. If I stand stock still and shoot with a steady hand, I can occasionally get a shot as clear as I’m accustomed to getting with the Fuji (see Extra of girl juggling ice cream cone and camera phone). 

I spent a hunk of the day with another damn migraine, and when I could see, I read Campbell McGrath’s XX: Poems for the Twentieth Century.  It put me in a foul mood. It’s a great idea: a hundred poems, one for each year of the 20th century, each written in the voice of a prominent person from that century. But McGrath has a pointedly masculine imagination. When he writes as Picasso, Mao, Apollinaire, Matisse, or Jacques Derrida, he is forthright, powerful, demanding, and sexy. When he writes as Frida Kahlo, Virginia Woolf, or Georgia O’Keeffe, he is apologetic, self-absorbed, neurotic, and whiny. I think McGrath just doesn’t get women. Or he gets them only as ornaments, diversions, or receptacles for men. Grrrrr.