Beth Kephart's Blog, page 367

The Feast that Follows Famine

I called Anna Lefler as the sun was setting, and we talked as the sun fell down—my eye on the purpled sky and the silhouetted tree (all its buds still in a clench). Purpled to dark, dark to the only lit thing being the moon, which is full and gorgeous this night. Have you gone outside? Have you seen it?

I'd been telling Anna about my day—an up and down day, intense from its four a.m. start. I'd been saying, Once upon a time I wrote a book that I believed in, a very different kind of book. I'd

Gogol, The Overcoat, and the Connective Book Life

While waiting yesterday for a client call, I took The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol from its corner on my glass desk and read the final story, "The Overcoat." If it feels like "Bartleby the Scrivener" at first (with its particulate descriptions of the seemingly mundane), "The Overcoat" soon evolves into a smash-up of the horrifying and fantastic, as poor Akaky Akakievich, "a short, somewhat pockmarked, somewhat red-haired, even with a somewhat nearsighted look, slightly bald in front, with w

Dr. Constantine Papadakis: A Tribute

I spoke in a recent post of my privileged life—living literature, living community and ideas at the same time. I spoke of how sometimes luck walked me straight through the door of extraordinary people and let me stay awhile.

Dr. Constantine Papadakis, who served for 13 years as the president of Drexel University until his passing yesterday, was one of those big-thinking, renaissance-quality people. He was just 63, and today my city mourns his loss.

I spent time in the company of Dr. Papadakis du

Morning Breaks

7:07 a.m. The view through my office window, right now. It is post storm, and pink, still a yellow moon in the sky.[image error]

The Nothing but Ghosts Trailer

Nothing but Ghosts is a work of fiction, but its landscape was inspired by the glorious pleasure gardens of Chanticleer—an international treasure that happens to breathe and bloom ten minutes from my home. I shot the trailer footage yesterday, in sixty-degree weather, under blue skies.

This morning, while finishing my work on the piece, I did something I tend to do most mornings, which is to check in on Chasing Ray, a most extraordinary book blog. There, in a piece about books Colleen Mondor ha

The Season's First Sunday at Chanticleer

Yesterday I hunkered down with client work until I could no longer and set off (this time in a car) for my favorite garden anywhere—Chanticleer. I'd received a season's pass as a birthday present from the gardeners themselves, and when I arrived I was floated at once up and out of myself. I had my Sony and two lenses and a borrowed video camera. I had my wild hair tangled up with the breeze. There were bursts of families and lovers on every hill, bright as balloons let free of their strings.

Gone Walking

I have lived here a long time now, and I have taken near-daily walks—cleared my head, eased my limbs out of the posture of desk work and heavy lifting. You'd have thought I'd have traversed every road within an hour's walking, therefore, but yesterday I left the house in such a haranguing hurry that I wasn't much paying attention to the direction I was traveling, until all of a sudden I was somewhere new.

It was one of the prettiest bits of country I'd ever seen—a meandering margin of green, sto

Borderlands (a first Final Cut Express Experiment)

I'm not the prettiest sight when trying to learn new software (think of my hair springing madly about the sweaty planes of my head). When the prospect of new software is complicated by a downed Comcast email system (if you are trying to reach me, it's the worm that's got me thwarted) and a broken connection between my camera and the computer, well the only thing you have to add to the chase is housework and bills. Both happen to be on the day's agenda.

Nevertheless, I have made this first rec

And Now a Few Words on What I Also Really Do, and Why

I started my own business at the age of twenty-five—hung out my shingle and began to consult with a dozen or so design and engineering firms. I worked on branding and positioning, wrote brochures and proposals, conducted research, trained internal staff. I continued along in my tried-and-true Undercover fashion, ghosting articles and writing talks for the city's architects.

Within a few years (following a brief full-time stint for a major consultancy), I had expanded my range—put my History and

Sea Stroked

In a Woody Allen moment, I imagined walking out into the sea—down the spine of the pipe, over its buttresses, into the splash and foam. I'd mermaid for awhile, perhaps, and dream, and all that I'd been expected to do would be done (what would be the choice?) by someone conveniently not me (another one of the multitudes of Beth Kepharts?).

I'd reemerge eventually—salt in my skin, green in my hair, fewer responsibilities.[image error]