Monday, September 10, 2007
The View from Room 636
Lucky you! I'm going to subject you to photos from our trip to Atlanta. We stayed at the Omni Hotel at CNN Center in Room 636. I'm going to see how Blogger sticks these photos in. They look a bit wonky while I'm in the screen to write this post.
The first photo is a shot of the back side of the Omni Hotel looking straight up. I love taking photos from this sharp angle. It makes the building loom. The second is a distance shot of the hotel and CNN Center taken from the Centennial Olympic Park (more about the park in a later post). The CNN Center and Omni Hotel are connected, which may not be readily apparent from the photos. The third shot is of the view out of our room, which was on the sixth floor of the hotel. Quite a bustling intersection down below. Very touristy area.
You're not going to see this in any of my pictures, but there were cops everywhere. Cops on motorcycles. Cops on bicycles. Cops in cars. Probably because there were so many tourists and this is CNN's headquarters.
Labels: atlanta, blogger, cnn, cops, hotel, olympic park, photos, tourists
Monday, August 20, 2007
Saving Fish from Drowning
If you're looking for a great book, I've got a suggestion. Try Amy Tan's "Saving Fish from Drowning." Her book, which is fiction, starts with a note to the reader that explains the genesis for the story. Seems Amy was caught in a rain storm in Manhattan one day and ducked into the American Society for Psychical Research for protection. While there she did some research on automatic writing, finding that a woman named Karen from California had channeled a woman named Bibi Chen, someone Amy was actually familiar with. Amy interviewed Karen and read the writings Bibi had sent through her. Bibi mentioned within her writings the disappearance of eleven tourists in Burma. Just after the note to readers, Amy had placed an article from the newspaper into her book that concerns these tourists. From this ingenious premise, Amy constructed her story. She has written it so well (having done her research beyond that of talking to Karen and reading the channeled writings of Bibi) that it reads like nonfiction. I kept asking myself whether this or that part of the story was true. Where did Amy take artistic license? When you can't tell, that's the mark of an excellent writer.
P.S. The title of the book is from a small parable that appears after the copyright page.
P.S. The title of the book is from a small parable that appears after the copyright page.
Labels: amy tan, automatic writing, bibi chen, book, burma, fiction, fish, saving fish from drowning, tourists, writing
