Back to Solitude
Playing with your sense of time and logic.
Soon I may have internet access in my halls again and at that point the writing will begin again. it’s hard to be inspired in a library. On the positive side I’ve watched up to three new documentaries since last night so I’m wondering whether to look at the origins of french and English cinema.
I had some inspiration whilst attempting to watch Nightmail by Grierson.
Tonight I shall be watching Philibert’s L’empire des Sourd, documentary I recently read about.
I went to see Borat and it’s really amusing, a good excuse to laugh for more than an hour.
The first time I went to St Hilaire du Touvet was for the Coupe D’Icare event which is held every September. It is a mountain film festival and parapente competition. The second time I went was with Glocals friends to climb up the via ferrata. There are two routes up. One is an easier one. The second is a hard one. What makes the second one so hard is that it’s vertical, up a chimney of sorts. What made me uncomfortable was the friable nature of the rock. I thought that if I fell the spikes would not hold. A few weeks later I found out that this is one of the hardest via ferrata, supposedly the hardest via ferrata in France.
The video above is nothing like that. They’re climbing up the beautiful waterfall that the via ferrata goes along. I was attracted by the width of the water fall.
I hate slow connections, they force you to wait patiently whilst the content you desire shows itself. It forces you to select more carefully the content you are about to read. When the connection is fast you skim through the pages reading the first paragraph before jumping onto the next page until several hours have passed.
In contrast with slow connections you look through articles of interest and start downloading them. As one arrives you read it without rushing. There’s no point. You’ve got time.
Whilst I was in the southwest of England every Sunday I would go to a pub where I’d order a coke and find all the newspapers. I would have four or five papers and I would skim through each paper looking for articles of interest. On occasion I would read the entire article, learning new things as I went along. It allowed me to keep up to date with what was happening.
It was a method of escape, of relaxation. There was no rush, nowhere to be. It was directed daydreaming rather than free. It was directed by the article. The eyes read the text and the mind translated it into pictures and thoughts, spreading and converging. Occasionally those daydreams meant that the eyes were reading the text but the mind was thinking of something else. That demonstrates that the article was not written as well as it should have.
The Co working space in Lausanne (ECLAU/FB) is an interesting idea for freelancers and those who have some work to do but do not want to work from home or a cafe. There are desks and couches, a meeting space and more from which individual work and team work can be done. I was there for an Apero last night and got to meet a few of the people.
At the moment there are four people there using the space full time and another who go there occasionally. For those like me who go there very occasionaly we can drop by and work there if we so desire. It’s easy to get to from the motorway and apparently not too hard from the center of Lausanne.
One of the members is a cat, apparently he loves to come in through one window, sleep on the couches and distract certain people before walking out through a window at the other side of the space. What’s interesting is that the participants of L’Eclau think of him as a sort of alarm clock. He’s there to remind them that they should take a little break from the work they were doing.
I know quite a few people in Lausanne now so it might be an interesting place to meet some people when there are some collaborative efforts to be done.
My shoes are wet and my socks are wet because today I tried river walking. If a child was to do the same it would be called immature and irrational but when an adult does it then it’s adventure, and trying something new.
My motivation to river walk came from the pandemic, or more precisely from how people behave during a pandemic. When I walked yesterday I had a runner pass right by me and then spit on the ground a few meters ahead of where I would have been going. When I walked through the woods yesterday I could hear groups of people so I avoided walking along the same routes.
That’s why I placed both feet, and the shoes they were in, into the river and walked. I didn’t get that far. In fact I was only able to walk a few dozen meters before finding that the river would have required wading. I wasn’t prepared to do that. We’re not in a heatwave yet.
Although you can’t really see it in the image above grooves have been worn into the rock strata. As a result you shouldn’t spend all of your time looking forward because you’ll be caught out. River walking requires you to look at where you’re placing your feet. In the image below you can see these erosion patterns more clearly.
I’ve walked along the routes so much that now I’m starting to get to know the details. Now I know that the river is beautiful and that if you’re willing to get wet you can see some nice features. There are a few places I need to return to, and document through photography.
This morning I was looking through to see if Thru-hiking had started and to see whether people would still try to thru hike any of the main trails in the US and from what I see most people have not started and those that did have postponed their hikes for now.
As a follow up to this I listened to this episode of the Hiking Thru podcast. It’s about Chris Smead going for a lesser known Thru hike with eleven lenses, seventy five batteries and a monopod to document a hike with a group of people. The hike sounds like an interesting experience. It also makes a nice change from listening to so many news and current affairs programs. A moment to dream.
I will keep exploring. To a large degree I treated today as if there was no pandemic and that was refreshing. I still washed my hands as soon as I got home. I just didn’t stay cooped up indoors without treating myself. Exploration is a treat.
There was a time when you would wake up and it’s only half an hour later that the world around you would be clearly visible. In today’s web 2.0 world you wake up and twenty other people are wishing each other good morning. Many are celebrating that it’ Friday and others have pathetic status messages about 40 days of celibacy, about being overworked and all those other messages.
Of course everyone has the right to their feelings and to their own experiences but as certain individuals spend more and more time online they notice these status messages and trends and get really tired. Look at the level of media saturation about the McCann story. I muted a podcast for mentioning the story. Careless parents lost their daughter, end of story. It’s not worth as much airtime as it’s been given.
Then there’s the “back from the dead media coverage” that gets just as tiring. If a royal driving a car doesn’t wear her seat belt and dies as a result of a crash then she should not be idolised in the way people have done. It should have been an opportunity to promote the use of seatbelts to avoid repeat deaths in such a manner.
Then there’s the enthusiast’s oversaturation of the media. In particular I’m thinking of the Iphone. Of course it’s a beautiful new interface, of course it’s ushered in the fully screen tactile device but for anyone outside the US the media saturation has become too much. If you’re an active consumer of new media news then there’s a good chance you would have read several thousand articles boasting about how great it was. As a result a lot of people got media burn out from the story. It’s only as a result of getting an ipod touch that I can tolerate those stories once more.
The 30 minute news round up in the evening preceeded by the daily newspaper has been followed by an era of instant access to news stories once they have been written. What this means is that for ardent consumers of new media it is easy to reach a burn out/saturation point. we, as new media consumers must be careful not to read about single topics so much that we are unable to hear about specific topics anymore.