(HI! Welcome to Caterpillar Steps, a newsletter by the writer and photographer Corbin Smith. I doubt I will employ subscriptions here, but if you like the newsletter and want to help me buy a new camera lens, you can feel free to deposit some cheddar in my Venmo account, @BigCorbs. Also please share with anyone you think might enjoy it.)
My friend John doesn’t like Subsacks. He doesn’t like reading stuff that isn’t subjected to an editor’s touch, and finds himself editing whatever someone wrote on the fly every time he opens one up. It’s safe to say that even though we are friends and collaborators, he doesn’t even read this Substack.
I don’t totally disagree with John. I especially wonder why the people who do solo paid Substacks aren’t, like binding together en masse, to net subscriptions and make something where they can depend on collaborators and editors to make their writing better. Writer ownership is clearly the future of this terrible industry, but Substack is just… so much easier, I guess. Log on, set up a thing, get cracking. The format encourages atomization, like all other social media forms, alienating people from each other and making their bargaining position worse. This newsletter itself will never be paid, because I simply don’t believe that just Corbin alone can make a writing product that he wouldn’t feel bad charging people for: half of this shit is revision, and revision is better when someone else is there to do it.
But some people, even established writers, just can’t make work for themselves at a rate commensurate with having a full writing life. Some people are standing on the outside of the writing economy for no good reason whatsoever, and these things are the only format available to do anything useful at all with words. Editing shouldn’t be a luxury for a decent writer, but, nowadays, it sort of is and I don’t think that fact should stop people from releasing writing, even if people’s work would be better if there were more avenues for collaboration.
The reason I do this newsletter is simply because I think making myself write and edit something every week is a good way to stay in shape, so to speak, and to write about stuff editors don’t care about, like, the ducks I took pictures of this morning.
A handsome portrait of a beautiful lady, and you can see the sky in her eyes!
But really, no one who pays gives a shit about my ducks, or me, and I can’t be expected to find a taker for all my stray thoughts, even the ones that are still interesting to me. So, whatever, I blog I guess. Part of me wonders if I should release a lot of this stuff at all, if there was some receptacle I could collect it all in that will someday overflow and create some great work about ducks. Seems unlikely.
The baby wood ducks in the local pond are growing up, like everything and everyone. Not two months ago, they were fuzzballs, hanging out with their weird adopted merganser brother.
(I haven’t seen the Merganser for a while. I try not to think about it.) And now they’re just small ducks, exhibiting duck behavior in a little miniature form. Here is one stretching and spreading its wings, still not quite big enough to take flight.
Soon, they will leave, off somewhere south for the winter, replaced by a troupe of Wigeons who came here from somewhere in Canada, sporting less interesting feathers but a weirder, bluer beak. When you write and think about nature, the coming and going, rain and growth and death and burning and ash and new birth, but this cycle is, after all, the heartbeat of life itself, the monotonous ongoing song that demarcates the passing of time. For years I was fairly disengaged but now that I spend all this time collecting pictures, I can feel it moving along, feel myself getting slowly swept along by time as well.
When he was younger, my father did film photography with a little camera he still owns, somewhere. Whenever we are out somewhere, and I am blast shooting a bird or a car or whatever with my digital camera sporting a 256 Gig SD card, he feels inclined to utter a little comment: “Film is so cheap, now.” Once, he implies, you would think forever about if it was worth blowing an exposure on whatever. But now, you just blast away and sort it out in Lightroom.
In the spirit of my dad’s comments on this matter, here is a picture I took today of a purple bag of dog shit someone threw on a solar panel that sits on the local elementary school. I took like ten pictures of this bag of dog shit.
Maybe it’s too easy to stuff nowadays.