Several things of note in recent days as I process the AWP conference and absorb Iditarod madness over at Alaska Dispatch. A few things that have caught my eye recently:

1. Rebecca Hall is starring in the play Machinal which is loosely based on the life and death of murderess Ruth Snyder. I find it very interesting how journalist/playwright Sophie Treadwell wrote about Snyder in 1928: not in a biographical or chronological way but by breaking up her life into segments and looking into what would drive any woman of her times to murder her husband. Also crazy is that the newspapers ran pictures of Snyder as she died in the electric chair. I'm just not getting a warm fuzzy "good old days" feeling from that bit of information.

2. Quote from Hall: "It's primal," she says. "It was sort of a guttural scream (that) just tumbled out of the writer in response to anger and emotion to seeing that photo and following how this woman's mythology was built around this case."

3. The National Portrait Gallery has a new show: "American Cool" which includes portraits of Americans like Debbie Harry, Steve McQueen, Jimi Hendrix, Billie Holliday, John Wayne, Barbara Stanwyck and I could go on and on. (Joan Didion! Jackson Pollock! Duke Ellington!) You can see some of the portraits here. I want a coffee table book of this exhibition in the most absurd way.

3. What it's like to take the train for 47 hours - you certainly meet a ton of interesting Americans. (via longreads)

4. And via Jenny D., Gary Panter on the NY Public Library: "But much more exciting to me is knowing that really deep scholarship is going on there, the real thing, human computers desiring to know, souls burning with curiosity in a place that they can't exhaust, that there is a deep life of the pursuit of knowledge happening on and on in that hive."

5. Finally, a movie report. I loved The Lego Movie ("Everything is Awesome!!!!") and Monuments Men (Bill Murray = amazing) and after watching Thor: The Dark World (on blu-ray) I am having a lot of feelings for Loki. I am still trying to process if I am under a spell or something....

[Post pic - I'm also addicted to a rewatch of WONDERFALLS. You should be too.]

That is National Geographic photo archivist Bill Bronner in a lovely super short film from the magazine about his job. In an accompanying article, Kathryn Carlson writes about meeting him and the impact one of his photos had on her:

The first time I went downstairs to film Bill for this video, he was busy searching for old photos about South Africa, at the request of a magazine editor. One of the unpublished images he pulled has stuck with me. It was taken during the apartheid era at Christmas time, and it showed dozens of white men standing along a pool's edge, tossing money into the water where black mine workers were fighting for their Christmas bonuses. It was a simple photograph, but it thrust me into the small, yet appalling moments of racism. There were no broken bones, no starving children, no corrupt cops. But there was degradation. There was merciless humor. There was struggle, strength, pride, hope, pain, entitlement, hate. That photo showed me apartheid. And Bill remembers that image, and those people, and the photographer every single day. He pays homage to their lives by keeping these moments safe in his memory, and sharing them with anyone who wants to learn.

In another life, I'm sure I was an archivist. So much of what I love is connected to the past and the truths I pursue, both in what I write and in how I live, are connected to the past. Right now I have hundreds of photographs spread out in my office tracing my Irish American family back over 100 years, my French Canadian one back to my father's childhood.

Last week, I was working (finally) on my own photo albums.

For my next book (still horribly untitled - nothing fits!), I have been looking both at the reports of a long dead scientist/mountain climber and the work of a pilot who filled the map through a critical mountain pass and then later disappeared on a final flight. (The irony that he filled in the map for everyone else only to lose himself less than a year later boggles my mind if I dwell on it.)

In his "cartographic" memoir, In the Memory of the Map, Christopher Norment writes of his lifelong love of maps. It was here that I found the wonderful quote from George Eliot about "the unmapped country within us." (I have not read much Eliot at all and must rectify that.)

Norment also quotes Michael Ondaatje: "All that I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps." Norment himself is fascinated with unmapped terrain, "a vanished world". He writes, "Mapping the last of the lost and lonely places would be more than a simple act of filling in a blank space; it would be a potent symbol, an admission that there are personal and collective limits on our options."

It's a very interesting book and I enjoyed reading it. But at the end of the day, with a life that has been so dominated by road maps and aircraft sectionals (aviation maps), I have come to treasure a solid, accurate map. I don't see romance in unmapped places but rather a world to get lost in - a place to disappear without a trace.

I don't like disappearing.

On my office wall is a family tree, the country of where I come from going back to 1860. I have names, places, photographs. I have a record of loves and lives and hopes and dreams that crossed an ocean.

So many things make a map, so many people. I never made it as a professional archivist but in my own world, it is what I am on every level. It is, my truest self.

Outside ran an amazing piece last week by Grayson Schaffer on the life and tragic early death (from a hiking accident) of the amazing artist/creator Zina Lahr. I don't know how you can watch this and not fall in love with this girl--she was really something special and the world is a sadder place without her in it.

I've been thinking about the struggle to embrace a creative life for the past few days. I made hotel reservations for the Association of Writers & Writing Programs conference in Seattle and it's been hard not to feel selfish about that. This is a total indulgence; it's meeting up with friends, attending panels on subjects that interest me and talking about writing for hours and hours. I'm not getting paid for this and it has been hammered into my life forever that writing is a hobby unless you are paid for it.

I started hearing that when I was 12 and it hasn't left my brain since. (My husband does not feel this way at all and totally supports my trip.)

The funny thing is, I likely will make contacts at AWP, it's the nature of these conferences after all. And I am attending specific panels that I think will help me with my writing. So technically, this actually is work-related. But still, I can't silence those powerfully critical that echo in my head; the ones from so long ago and the ones that still occasionally are uttered around me. I just need to watch this video enough times I think, chant "Zina Lahr" over and over again, reflect on all that she accomplished and attempted, and perhaps finally the guilt will evaporate.

She was really someone special, wasn't she?