Haunted

I should be editing again tonight, making up from several days last week spent under a blanket, socked with a cold, drinking Sprite, and eating Breyer’s mint chocolate chip ice cream while watching TV. But today was cold and dreary, a typical May day along the coast in Southern California, and all I want to do is read more of Jhumpa Lahiri. I still haven’t found a passage that describes what my neighborhood project is about, but if it’s possible to learn about photography by reading fiction, I’m doing it. Not so much with the title story in Unaccustomed Earth (which I could take or leave), but with the second and third stories, “Hell–Heaven” and “A Choice of Accommodations,” both of which I read today. I haven’t yet figured out how to evoke the kind of feelings in my photographs that she does in her writing, but just reading Lahiri makes me feel it’s possible. Her stories haunt me.