Today in the NYTimes (online) there was a blog post by Ross Douthat on “The Influential Books Game”. Apparently it’s been making the circles on various blogs and I thought, let’s give it a try, shall we? The only rule is, “go with your gut”. Don’t spend 2 hours on this.

I shouldn’t be surprised, but pretty much every book is a direct reflection of where I was, developmentally.

These are in very rough chronological order.

1. The View from the Cherry Tree (4^th Grade). My oldest memory of losing myself completely in a book. Written by Willo Davis Roberts, I remember being engrossed by the kid-friendly murder mystery plot in 4^th grade (Lincoln Elementary!), absorbed, looking up and seeing that the rest of the class had already left for phys-ed. I’m sure I was quite upset at the teacher for not alerting me to this with more vigor, but forgive and forget I say.
2. The Catcher in the Rye (9^th Grade? 10^th?) How cliché can you get? But in our standardized English classrooms around the country, this is one of those few books that is still anti-establishment, yet still accepted within the established order of English education classes. Considering that rebelling against the standardized, anesthetized rooms that we call classrooms was my greatest preoccupation in high school, this book was a perfect “right place, right time”. Damn phonies.
3. The Dharma Bums (Freshman Year). This is what started the downward spiral into my love for writing. Wha? Paragraphs with one period? Sentences that start with But and And and Because? Most importantly: wine out of a jug!?! A great Freshman year book. Smarter people read it in High School. I read it Freshman year.
4. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Freshman Year). I still try to read this book once a year. I don’t read it as a novel anymore; I’ve stripped it down to a series of passages and chapters that I rereade and have at times used in curriculum with both high school students and graduate students, when I was doing basic writing workshops. If you’re willing to put in the time, there’s a lot of wisdom in here that, personally, has stayed with me over the years.
5. The Monkey Wrench Gang (Freshman Year). Set off a lifetime appreciation for Edward Abbey. I did a lot of hiking Freshman year. Abbey owes some credit for this. Freshman year I was in Eugene, Oregon, and these books are pretty evident of that.
6. Atlas Shrugged (Freshman Year). A wild departure from my normal fair of Beats and Environmentalists. I believe I was reading this book as I was moving back to the East coast from Eugene. Read into that as you will. I didn’t agree with Rand’s dehumanizing view of people, but I loved her intensity, and share her scorn for those who prevent me from getting things done due to their stupidity. Rand’s does take it a bit too far for my taste, however, but this isn’t a top 10 favorite list, it’s a top 10 influential list, and thus is qualifies.
7. The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying (Forced sabbatical between Freshman and Sophomore years). I still remember highlighting passages of this on the train from New Delhi to Shimla, to the amusement of my fellow white passengers. We were going to a small town to do “cross-cultural” activities. 10 years later I still don’t know what that means. This would be my bible/torah/koran for 6 months. I don’t think I ever read it again, but it felt like I didn’t need to. It had been imprinted.
8. The Sheltering Sky (Sophomore Year). Bowles (and Burroughs, to a certain extent) took the beatniks and put them in their rightful place: playful writers, often lacking much substance or real insight. Bowles, on the other hand, wrote in the 50s of the West’s continuing obsession with “understanding” the rest of the world, and the profoundly disastrous results typically ensued. This was before all that technology crap, when people took a ship, A SHIP, to travel! And they were dressed up, and they drank champagne, and their vices and affairs were oh so much more romantic. I was born in the wrong era. But I didn’t have to worry about getting drafted to kill people. It all evens out.
9. Ulysses (Junior Year Abroad). Junior year I studied in Dublin, Ireland. I got an internship at the James Joyce Centre, having only read The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man. Hadn’t read Dubliners, certainly hadn’t read Ulysses. I lied to get the job. But I had 2 months before the internship started, took trains around the countryside of Ireland, read Dubliners and started reading Ulysses. I was able to finish reading it under the watchful eye of one of Joyce’s last living relatives, by a fireplace, in a study. It couldn’t have been more romantic. I’ve reread the book half a dozen times, and it’s never felt repetitive or predictable. It changed the way I thought about novels, about what they were capable of, and of what happens when you push the format to its limit.
10. The Paris Review (Senior Year). This shouldn’t count, but I’m including the literary journal here because it exposed me to too many great writers to list here. I interned there, and while in retrospect I don’t think I was Paris Review material (not picky enough—I liked rooting for those unsolicited submissions that weren’t perfect, but they showed promise dammit!), it was an incredibly influential journal in terms of widening the scope of my reading and pushing myself to be more critical about what I liked and didn’t like when I sat down to read a story. It wasn’t just about reading stories—it was about learning what a good story was, what made a good story—something I still work on today, when I take a picture, or write an evaluation of an education program in the south of Haiti, or write a blog post.

One thing stands out. I’m 29, and these books fall between the age range of 10 and 22. What happened the last 7 years? I read some great books. Books that changed the way I thought about the world (if it were the top 11, not 10, White Man’s Burden would be here). But those books you read growing up, when you’re molding your perspective of the world (not to say that mold ever really hardens–it should remain pliable with the constant application of fresh material), are the ones that stick.

Put some of your most influential ones in the comment section.

I did a bit of traveling the past week, seeing more of the country, taking pictures for an NGO that needed pictures on the ground in Haiti. There’s more coming, but here are some early favorites.

I shouldn’t still be amazed, but I am. I live in a foreign country for several months, a year maybe, and still discover words and “systems” that are completely new to me. Why? Because I didn’t think to ask about it.

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Photograph from “Rodrigo Abd/Associated Press” found HERE.

On Wednesday I start a five day contract with an NGO to follow them around and take photographs of what they’re doing. I’ve been working in Haiti for 6 months, and take a lot of pictures, and I think I know some of the basic rules of photography in this context. Mainly, ask permission. If the person is unsure of why you want to take their photograph, explain why as clearly and honestly as possible. Don’t get in the way. Try and focus on new stories, not old ones. There are plenty of photographs of amputees. My goal is not to add to that reservoir; my goal is tell new stories with my camera. However, I’m also getting paid to take photographs, and need to take in to account my employers interests.

So, I ask you, what advice, tips, dos and don’ts, can you share? I’ve never been paid to take photographs before, it’s always just been a hobby, or an extra “bonus” I bring with me to the other “real” job I’m doing. For five days, taking photographs is my real job. My instinct is to be invisible. To have the people I’m following not really “think” about me: to document both the obvious stuff as well as the moments that escape them because they’re focused on the things right in front of them, rightfully so. Don’t objectify. Don’t sensationalize.

What else? What are the nuances, you photographers out there? Please comment here on other things to think about.

Gabion was transformed, early on after the earthquake, from a soccer stadium to an IDP (internally-displaced peoples) camp. When I think of “camps”, images of miles and miles of refugees, dirt, makeshift housing, and generally unsanitary conditions come to mind. I’ve been conditioned to associate camps with terrible living conditions. Gabion is definitely not terrible. It’s not ideal—none of the people there want to live there—but it’s clean and relatively well managed. There is an organized food program, that we’ve been contributing to, and there’s a water supply on the premises. Really, it’s the heat more than anything else that makes life in Gabion hard. That, and the pain brought to the camp from Port au Prince. The IDPs living in Gabion are the minority of people who have traveled to the south who don’t have any family or friends to help support them. They’ve got nowhere else to go. And while there’s “only” around 150 people living there, they’re perhaps the 150 loneliest people in Les Cayes. No family. No friends. No familiar surroundings to find comfort in. During the day, the heat makes staying in the tents unbearable, and people shrink next to the tiny slivers of shade. I’ve been trying to record as many stories from Gabion as I can, trying to preserve them, so that we don’t forget what they went through, what they’re still going through.

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I was inspired after reading an article Foto8 about how all the pictures coming out of Haiti looked the same. And I remembered Binyavanga Wainaina’s article, “How to Write About Africa“, in which he writes:

Describe, in detail, naked breasts (young, old, conservative, recently raped, big, small) or mutilated genitals, or enhanced genitals. Or any kind of genitals. And dead bodies. Or, better, naked dead bodies. And especially rotting naked dead bodies. Remember, any work you submit in which people look filthy and miserable will be referred to as the ‘real Africa’, and you want that on your dust jacket. Do not feel queasy about this: you are trying to help them to get aid from the West. The biggest taboo in writing about Africa is to describe or show dead or suffering white people.

So, I thought I’d upload some pictures I took on Wednesday to a trip to the countryside, where a colleague and I were seeing how the waves of IDPs leaving Port au Prince were affecting rural communities. What we found was, in a sense, typical: we found problems, people who were frustrated, people who seemed to still be in shock. We also found families back together for the first time in a long time. We found parents taking in children, and children taking back their parents.

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I’ve been inundated with requests by people wanting to be volunteers in Haiti. While they’re intentions are great, unfortunetely there are too many conversations like this:

Me: Hope for Haiti

Caller: Hi! I want to get on the next flight to Haiti and help!

Me: Oh, hi, thank you! Do you have a background in medicine or disaster relief?

Caller: Not at all! I just want to help!

I get it, and I don’t begrudge them one bit. But the truth is, right now the only volunteers needed are experts. Haiti will need plenty of non-expert volunteers in the coming weeks and months, but for now resources there are so tight, and security is so haphazard, that it’s not practical, safe, or helpful to go down there.

So what can I do? Give money to these big orgs that already have raised a ton?

Well, yeah, that would be a good start. Give $5. Give $10. I’m working with Hope for Haiti, and we’re having our first plane full of doctors and nurses land in Port au Prince in about 10 minutes. Another plane is landing in the DR with supplies. So the money being donated to Hope for Haiti IS REACHING HAITIAN PEOPLE.

But let’s say you already donated, or want to help in a more tangible way. If you’ve got tech skills, we need your help with Crises Mapping.

1. Read up on it.
2. See it in action
3. Sign up to be a volunteer programmer/designer/data entry person

From the co-founder of Ushahidi (quotes are from Beth’s Blog)

We have received tremendous support from the crisis mapping community through the Crisis Mapping Network, the developer community, collaborating organizations like UN OCHA Columbia, INSTEDD, Haitianquake, Digital Democracy, FrontlineSMS, Google and others, and dozens of volunteers who’ve helped with everything from data entry, to translations, to data filtering.

Since the site went live, the team has been working round the clock to make improvements to the instance, fix problems (our server has crashed several times already and our alert system went beserk!), coordinate efforts with volunteers, share information with partners, and collaborate with other tech-based efforts e.g. the people finder at Haitianquake (since merged with Google’s). The fact that we have a global team means that we have been able to offer round the clock support, with the Africa-based team taking over when the US-based team goes to sleep and vice versa.

Ory describes their current challenges, including:

Close the feedback loop: that is, ensure that agencies trying to figure out where help is needed are tracking our reports and following up on requests for help that are coming in. We are currently doing this via the Crisis Mappers network, Sahana, and Internews and INSTEDD teams who have just landed in Haiti, but a lot more needs to be done.

Boys Dancing at Port Salud, Haiti from Lee on Vimeo.