{"id":4410,"date":"2026-03-23T09:56:00","date_gmt":"2026-03-23T13:56:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/?p=4410"},"modified":"2026-03-24T13:46:06","modified_gmt":"2026-03-24T17:46:06","slug":"hotel-vertebrae","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/2026\/03\/hotel-vertebrae\/","title":{"rendered":"Hotel Vertebrae (updated)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Context<\/strong>: Last week I attended ICFA<\/a>\u2014who are nice enough to invite me every year to read a story, comp me a couple meals, and otherwise leave me alone to mooch appetizers and wine from various receptions and schmooze with academic folks I’ve never met before and editors I know. On Saturday I attended a panel that featured Nancy Hightower<\/a>, whose photography work largely focuses on capturing NYC cityscapes in puddles. Her work is absolutely stunning. Earlier that morning I’d gone to see a panel where Ann Leckie<\/a> was being interviewed about her upcoming novel Radiant Star.<\/em> Leckie mentioned, in passing, that she’d gotten some inadvertent writing advice while attending a beading class years ago, to the effect of “if you are looking for a structure and don’t have one, repetition always works.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So that was what was in my head Saturday morning, when I looked at Hightower’s uncanny, liminal photographs of the exceptionally mundane airport conference hotel we’d all been living in for four days: <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mirrors are repetition machines; repetition is the fundamental rudiment of structure; structure is the lone difference between “art” and “a neat thing I saw”<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2026 and then I was alone in my room with this shiny post-modern coffee table, and I had my phone in my hand, because I always have my phone in my hand, because we all always have our phones in our hands, and taking a picture is a helluva lot better for my mind than looking at the news one more time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is that picture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Expect more of them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Context: Last week I attended ICFA\u2014who are nice enough to invite me every year to read a story, comp me a couple meals, and otherwise leave me alone to mooch appetizers and wine from various receptions and schmooze with academic folks I’ve never met before and editors I know. On Saturday I attended a panel … Continue reading “Hotel Vertebrae (updated)”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_share_on_mastodon":"1"},"categories":[1021],"tags":[113,1144],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/a2mi.social\/@dave0\/116278831595515058","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4410"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4410"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4410\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4417,"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4410\/revisions\/4417"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4410"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4410"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4410"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}