De Laatste Glimlach, Literatuur algemeen – Romans & Literatuur | TenPages.com.
16 Nov
NaNoWriMO halfway
So, it’s now the 16th of November which means that there are only 14 more days left till the deadline of NaNoWriMo (on the 30th of November at 00.00). I am too ashamed to post my word count, which is nothing close to the 50.000 goal, so I will just talk about the reasons of my failure (although I haven’t given up entirely!).
The first day I actually wrote the mandatory, roughly, 1700 words. It was a great start and motivated me to continue writing. However, although I did write on the following second, third, fourth and sixth day, I never reached those 1700 words again. I tried to write, not knowing where my story would go but I’m not happy working that way. I know it’s great practice and a way of actually getting words on paper but just blabbing on to fill my page just isn’t my piece of cake. I like to have an idea in my head of what the story is supposed to become and to work with a certain plan.
So, what happened in between day 6 and day 16? Exams. It wasn’t so much the not being able to find time to write but more the using of the ‘exam excuse’. I certainly can’t be writing for NaNoWriMo during my exam period, that would be so irresponsible! Convincing isn’t it? Of course I had to take free time to relax, but writing isn’t relaxation! Right? For me it wasn’t when having a word target each day. It felt more like homework no teacher would ever grade. I think NaNoWriMo is not really something for me. It is supposed to be “30 days and nights of literary abandonment” but I am too busy with school and friends to make this happen. I’m not quitting yet, I’m just quite sure I won’t meet the 50.000 word count. But I know what I can change next year to increase my chances:
1. Have an idea before the 1st of November. Having a general storyline will make it easier to write but also more fun as I would already be content with my story and the way it’s going to turn out.
2. Tell people I am participating with NaNoWriMo. I have told, I think, two people and none of them have asked me in the past week how I was doing. So, social pressure would definitely be a motivating factor.
3. Read the pep talks NaNoWriMo send. Now I don’t even dare opening them as I feel so guilty.
4. Join the activities NaNoWriMo organises. Last week there was one 5 minutes away from where I had my last exam. As I had very little words and no acquaintances to go with I didn’t go. Which brings me to the next point.
5. Tell my friends about NaNoWriMo and make them participate as well. In that way I will not feel so lonely and I will be more motivated to continue writing. As well, sharing of ideas and experiences can be useful.
I think that’s about everything I can do to change the way I am working. Today I will reach the 1700 words (without plan of what to write) and I promise I will post my final word count on the 30th of November.
[1st of December: it has been a complete failture, I don't want to talk about it!]
30 Oct
NaNoWriMO Start
NaNoWriMo: a strange term most of you probably haven’t heard about yet. I came across it today but I remember someone mentioning it to me last year. NaNoWriMo stands for ‘National Novel Writing Month’. During this month, writers, or anyone who wishes to participate, aim to write a short novel of 50.000 words. NaNoWriMo is a competition without prices. The price is your own satisfaction about your accomplishment.
How many people have an idea for a narrative of some sort. They ponder on it for ages, sometimes never using it. Starting a novel is often the most difficult part. That’s where NaNoWriMo comes in. The aim of NaNoWriMo is to get people to write their ideas down, taking quantity over quality. Their slogan is ‘Thirty days and nights of literary abandon!’.
I’ve signed myself up today. The ‘month’ starts in 2 days (November 1st), I have no idea what I’m going to write about. And I don’t really have spare free time to lock myself up into my room and write. But, I like the idea… and I have unfinished ideas in my head… so up to the 1666.67 words per day!
3 Sep
List of books and movies I have read/watched.
This post is more for myself than for you. I want to keep track of the books and movies I read and watch. By posting them on my blog I oblige myself to complement the list (and maybe even read more books) in order not to be looked upon as a non-intellectual;)
(counting from 1 September 2010)
List of books:
- Leo Tolstoy – Anna Karenina
- Dante – The Divine Comedy – Volume I: Inferno
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky – Notes from the Underground
- Bret Easton Ellis – American Psycho
- Virginia Woolf – Mrs. Dalloway
- Michael Cunningham – The Hours
- Jane Austen – Pride & Prejudice
- Jean-Paul Sartre – Les mains sales (Dirty hands)
- Charlotte Brontë – Jane Eyre
- Michel Houellebecq – De wereld als markt en strijd (Extension du domaine de la lutte)
- Yann Martel – Life of Pi
- Tommy Wieringa – Dormantique’s manco
- Arnon Grunberg – Huid en Haar
- F. Scott Fitzgerald – Tender is the night
- Jonathan Franzen – The Corrections
- Paul Auster – Invisible
List of movies:
- La tête en friche (2010)
- Walk the Line (2005)
- Brothers (2009)
- From Paris with Love (2010)
- Step Up 2 – The Streets (2008)
- The Butterfly Effect 3 – Revelations (2009)
- The Accidental Husband (2008)
- Leaves of Grass (2009)
- Body of Lies (2008)
- Crime d’amour (2010)
- The Ghost Writer (2010)
- Chapter 27 (2007)
- Grave of the Fireflies (1988)
- Surrogates (2009)
- American Psycho (2000)
- Carne trémula (Live Flesh) (1997)
- The Hours (2002)
- Mr. Nobody (2009)
- Big Fish (2003)
- Elle s’appelait Sarah (2010)
- The Social Network (2010)
- Good Luck Chuck (2007)
- Burn after Reading (2008)
- Des Hommes et de Dieux (2010)
- Komt een vrouw bij de dokter (2009)
- Ensemble, c’est tout (2007)
- Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (1977)
- Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
- Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi (1983)
- Red (2010)
- Star Wards Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999)
- Tenderness (2009)
- You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010)
- The Fourth Kind (2009)
- The Informant (2009)
- The Bucket List (2007)
- An Education (2008)
- Mr. Nobody (2009)
- The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Casper (2008)
This will be my first poll, so quite experimental. I hope you all vote!
3 Sep
What is dust?
Dust: tiny particles of matter that can only be seen when the sun lights them up. Flakes that tickle your nose and make your eyes water. But WHAT is dust made of? Dust partly consists of skin and hair particles we, humans, shed. Dust also contains plant pollen, textile and paper fibres, minerals and other materials found in the environment we live in. (I know Wikipedia is not very trustworthy, but it does come in handy!). I also learned that there are different types of dust: domestic dust (the just mentioned skinny and hairy dust), atmospheric dust (can be radioactive!), road dust (vehicle exhaust waste etc.) and cosmic dust (gasses etc.).
I don’t know which disturbs me more; the radioactive and polluting dust or the human dust. My aversion to domestic dust is probably caused by the visibility of it. You know what I’m talking about? When the sun shines into a room you are able to see a lot of floating dust particles. When I walk through this sunny dust I always try to keep my mouth shut and stop breathing. It’s a habit I can’t stop although I know there’s no point as we breath in dust all the time. Luckily our nose is equipped with hairs and mucus which stops (most of the) dust from entering our bodies. However, I wonder if we eat dust when we speak or if it gets blown away because we exhale while we talk? I hope for the last. Just remember not to put your finger into your mouth after picking your nose!
4 Aug
Canonet 28 – #4
Today I will be returning to the Canonet 28 problems I described in my second Canonet 28 post. I believe I know what went wrong with the unsuccessful pictures I posted the other day. I’ve taken some more pictures but it will take at least two more weeks before I can take a look at them, and probably more than three weeks before you can see them. However, I will try to explain the problems here and the (read: my imagined) solutions to the problems.
I first want to start off with the ASA settings. As I wrote in my first post, the shopkeeper changed the settings on my camera to take a picture and, trusting his experienced fingers, I didn’t change them. However, he changed my ASA settings to 400 while the film I had was 200 (this means he assumed I was using the worst and cheapest film!). This means that the camera thought the film speed was faster and that less light was needed to saturate it. So, the film got less light exposure than it was supposed to get which means that the pictures should have come out darker than wanted. Looking back at them, yes they are quite dark. But I’m not sure how much of an issue wrong ASA settings are. Let’s look at the other problems:
1. Overexposure
This one is easy. I used the flash unit with this picture. I left the exposure ring on ‘automatic’ while when using the flash unit the f-stops should be controlled automatically (with a flash unit other than the Canolite D). I should have looked at the small table on the back of the flash unit which shows the relationship between the distance from the object, the ASA settings and the f-stop needed. I probably should have made the f-stop larger such that less light would have entered the lens and the face wouldn’t have been so overexposed (or maybe we should just blame pale Dutch complexions).
2. Sharp in the front, blurry in the back.
Well, I’m not yet sure about this one. However, I’m gonna go with ‘I should have focussed on the person and then he would have come out sharp’. I have no idea how the objects in the foreground will look like then, if they will come out blurry or sharp, but as you can also see in the next picture I didn’t use the focusing ring too often. I didn’t take the time to focus correctly on the object to be photographed and I still find it quite difficult to focus correctly with the Canonet 28.
3. Blurry in the front, sharp in the back.
The problem lies with the focusing problem I described above. However, I have taken the picture below again (unfortunately not with the same cups because I didn’t feel like taking cappuccino that time) and I am positive that that one will come out correctly.
I will be going on vacation on saturday and I will only return two weeks later. I have bought myself a black and white film which I will try out. I’m curious to see what that will produce and I will keep you posted!
27 Jul
Inception – a world full of possibilities
Yesterday I watched Christopher Nolan’s movie ‘Inception’. Great cast, great filming, great idea. In the world of Inception it is possible to enter someones dream, finding out his or hers most inner secrets and planting ideas into his or her head. With the help of sleeping potions you can control the times that you are dreaming, prolong this process and enter dreams together with others. It is also possible to create your own dream and build your own unique and possibility-rich dream world. The last option is the one that appeals to me most. Yes, finding out people’s secrets can be handy. However, being able to do this would make you conscious of secrets you actually don’t want to know about. Would you want to know that your lover cheated on you? Would you want to see it happen right in front of your eyes? The movie already showed the disastrous results the planting of ideas in someone’s head can have. If they are not planted correctly they can backfire and can lead to devastating consequences. Therefore, creating your own world, something which people do all the time, is the best option. It is not a dream world where things just happen and where you are hurdled from place to place. This is a place that you may call home. A place which you may begin to see as the only reality. At least the only reality worth living.
I have thought about what kind of world I would create if I had the possibility to do so. I don’t know if it is because I like the world I live in now or because I am loosing my imaginative mind to adulthood, but the world I would like to live in resembles the present one a lot (keeping in mind that you can create anything you want). If I could build my own world, I would want a world like Dom and Mal’s: a world in which you and the one you love are the only ones on the face of the earth. All the people who annoy you, acquaintances as well as strangers, are gone. I would create a paradise-like world with lots of trees and everlasting flowers (no insects though). I would live in an old but modern furnished castle, ride my horse everyday and fill my nights with reading the books in my enormous library as well as taking an occasional swim in the little lake beside the castle. I would like to fly an airplane (or travel on the back of a gigantic and friendly eagle), make friends with tigers and kill myself in several ways (dying merely makes you wake).
Although the human time-consuming necessity of sleeping is not needed I would keep the revolving of the sun by which day and night are created. I enjoy the moments of darkness. I would keep the necessity to eat because food is one of the most wonderful things in life. I would free myself from all responsibilities and obligations and simply do what all of us should be doing: enjoying being alive.
However, is the price to be paid for this world worth it? The price of having to return to the real and inferior world and to be confronted with the problems you left behind. The price of being unable to remember what is reality and what is your dream. The price of the possibility of being robbed from your darkest secrets and most treasured memories. I think the answer is yes, it is worth it. The most important factor to consider is that dream-time and real-time do not coincide. A minute in real-time is twenty minutes in dream-time (or something along those lines). By creating dreams within dreams the dream-time can be stretched even further. Therefore, life could be extended to last infinitely or as long as you want it to last. You could grow old in a dream layer, die and live a full life again in the next layer. And so on and so on. This would be the answer to the immortality humans have sought since a long time ago. Immortality that does not involve increased population rates, unethical procedures and unfairness: it is available for all. All different worlds, occurring at the same time, in the heads of ordinary people. It’s a nice idea to dream about.
