Dreamers Rise
An Open Notebook
And for those who choose the twisty road, prefer it to the straight
Let joy beat out old misery, as love will conquer hate.
 Illustration by Henry L. Stephens from The Goblin Snob (ca. 1855) | |||||
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The following assortment of notes,
musings, proposals for future consideration, lists, and quotations is by
design doubly open: exposed to the reader, but also subject to revision,
expansion, excision in a way that a traditional written journal (or even
a blog) is not.
Aloft Anne Arden McDonald's name is new to me, but I've been familiar with her work — or rather with one striking example of it — for some time. The image first caught my eye when Albert French's Holly was published, with this cover:  French's novel, which I was impressed by when I read it, concerns a romance between a white girl and a young black man in North Carolina in 1944; needless to say it doesn't end happily. I once heard French give a reading from the book. He told the audience that he chose the name of his title character in honor of an old friend, the actress Holly Hunter, whose spirit he felt had animated the story as he wrote it. I think the McDonald photo, showing a female figure who is exuberantly aloft in apparent defiance of gravity, manages to evoke a similar presence. (The front cover image is actually a little less than half of the original panoramic photo, which the book designer has stretched around the spine and the back cover and even a little onto the front inside flap of the dust jacket.) Sometime later I bought a cassette of Freedy Johnston's Can You Fly, which uses the same image, cropped a little more — and possibly lightened. (Can You Fly actually came out before Holly, but I didn't pick it up until after Johnston's next record, This Perfect World, was released in 1996) This is the CD version of the same design: 
The photo is perfect for the title, of course, but I think it also fits a couple of the songs on the record that might be called heartland Gothic, especially “The Mortician's Daughter,” the title cut, and maybe one or two more. McDonald must herself be fond of the photo (which, by the way, she calls “Untitled Self Portrait #3, Connecticut, 1987”). It decorates the index page of her website, and you can see it in full there. This is what she has to say on that page, not just about this image, but about her work in general: I have many fantasies that I can not achieve in life as I have known it — being able to fly is the main one — and am frustrated by the limitations of an earthbound body. This is a dilemma we share — being both flesh and spirit — living in a body with a mind that dreams. My images serve as visual metaphors for struggles we face every day: tensions and balances, keeping hope alive against the obstacles, and living in a vulnerable way without being crushed. December 5, 2005
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