Strangely enough, two of my all-time favorite televison shows are Married With Children, because it broke all the rules and showed a totally dysfunctional family that somehow managed to love each other whenever it came right down to it, and Wonder Years, which reminded me an awful lot of To Kill a Mockingbird.

As you correctly point out, both were sentimental in their own way, but both also managed to convey a "truth" that hadn't yet been stereotyped and robbed of its originality and power to make the viewer see a "truth," whether the truth was that not all families are "ideal" families or that our childhood, as ordinary as it may have been, still has a sense of "wonder" about it.

I wonder if any of Jonathon's students have ever chafed against his code of photographic conduct, and went ahead to shoot these off-limit subjects anyway. The better artists are ones that tend to find a way of chucking the rules, or at the very least a loophole in them.

"What I want from my pictures, and my writing, is to somehow pull in my audience while simultaneously pushing them away."

That's it in a nutshell, Bb: the tension that is, for me, the essence of so much great art.

Kafkaesqui, we only had the "rule" in place for a semester. And students did go back to photographing the "banned" subjects. But I don't recall any truly memorable photographs. In my experience, the best artists are the ones who manage to find freedom within the most severe constraints. As the Japanese say: "The further you travel along a narrow path, the wider it becomes."

Loren, I'm finding much of this out. I started writing about my childhood experiences, and either the work ended up being 'sweet', or in one's face. I pulled a posting yesterday that contained one of my stories, primarily because it was 'flat' -- there was more to this than the event implied.

I have to learn how to combine the views into something multi-dimensional. This is not going to be easy.

Jonathon, I feel as if I've now returned to ground zero, in writing and photography. I hope everyone will be patient as I bump about in confusion for a time (perhaps longish time) with both.

I read that original post that was pulled and tried to write a comment three different times, but couldn't put any adequate response into words.

It was a telling experience, but one that was obviously difficult to put into words.

The F- word came to mind, though.

I debated two days about publishing that little essay, Loren. I think there is a limitation to the type of material you can put into a weblog. The problem, lately, is that everything I want to write about seems to fall out of weblogging scope.

My weblog doesn't fit me lately. Maybe I should go back to writing about technology. Or cats.

I was beginning to feel that my site, too, lacked focus. One of the reasons I'm moving sites is so I can set up three different areas, one for lit., one for politics and environment, and one for personal reminisces. That way people can choose what they want to read.

Personally, I think it's important for people to read that kind of thing so that they understand what some people have gone through and managed to transcend, though I understand why you might not want to include it here.

"Both 2 and beyond Binary" does a good job of combining these elements.

I would be interested in hearing what you think the limitation is, Bb. Not because I don't believe you; just because I'm (in my ex-comp-lit way) curious about the boundaries between media.

Shelly, it seems as though the term "sentimental" here is being used synonymously with "cliched," and this is something of a reduction of the rich and resonant ride the term has had, especially as it developed in the German idealists. For Schiller and that ilk, "sentimental" contained the sense of, essentially, self-consciousness, reflexiveness - i.e., something well beyond mere cliche. This may be what Ward has been trying to get to in some of his ruminations on the word - the sense that it is getting bashed around a bit by being treated as if it can only equate to a sort of stupified poster of a feeling.

I think it's more me than the media, Dorothea. Odd woman out.

"Odd woman out" - against which particular groupthink sense of normal Shelley? I love the way blogs mix different aspects of people's character - it's what makes them so interesting. The main reason I don't use aggregators is that they deconstruct this tapestry and reduce blogs to their parts (the whole being greater than the sum of)

Similarly (as Loren knows from a previous "conversation") I believe that attempts to categorise posts are usually flawed and add minimal value to the reader.

Do keep going with the "Odd" mix - I love it!