Dear mediums who commune with the spirits of place, As I sit at my desk and revisit my notebooks and photos from the Hill of the Skull, the memories of that strange place rush back to me. They bewitch me into a kind of impassioned trance, a rapture. Florida’s lower altitude ensures a lower resting heart rate, and yet my heart fluters as my notes and photographs transport me back to that dusty mound in the foothills of the Andes....
Fellow travelers, We have successfully orbited our sun again, at least according to this artificial thing we impose on ourselves called calendars. And as I look at mine, I see something on the calendar that I haven’t seen since July 2022: meetings and class prep. Yes, dear friends, my sabbatical has come to an end. My sabbatical was nice. I had a lot of time to think, reflect, and write. Its energy has been so good, I’m trying not to let it go....
November came and went and it seems like the place that captured too much of our attention was a virtual one. The news of Elon Musk’s mishandling of Twitter is but another reminder that we shouldn’t spend too much time building our social networks 1) on other people’s platforms or 2) online. I’m not deleting my Twitter account just yet, but I have joined Mastodon. If you’ve joined Mastodon, let’s connect: mastodon....
When I went to Bolivia last August, one of my missions was to do research during the Festival of the Virgin of Urkupiña in a town called Quillacollo. The most popular events of the festival are its parades, which feature dancers and musicians wearing brightly colored “folkloric” and “indigenous” costumes. I originally planned to take photographs of dancers and the musicians in what I imagined being an ethnographic study, but those plans fell through....
Hello, autumn. But here in Florida it still feels like summer. Oh, and Hurricane Ian is poised to strike the peninsula tomorrow. I’m writing and scheduling this a few days early in the likely event that power outages persist through the end of the week. The last month has been productive. As you may know, I’m working on a book-shaped thing, replete with photos and a narrative, based on my travels to Bolivia....