Chris Wells

Why "serial dilettante"? 

 

Serial:    repeatedly committing the same offense and typically following a characteristic, predictable behavior pattern.

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Dilettante:    a person who cultivates an area of interest, such as the arts, without real commitment or knowledge.

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I'd like to return "dilettante" to a less pejorative meaning.  Yes, I am guilty of the occasional vacuous dabble.  But my dabbles often get serious and last decades, with breaks.   

 

I bore easily.   I love novelty, variety, and steep learning curves.  So when the curve flattens a bit, I wander.  But I return to it in a few weeks, months or years.  And I usually repeat the cycle -- thus "serial." 

 

I have done that for guitar, mountain biking and road cycling, fly fishing, tea, wine, French, Spanish, bourbons and vodkas, asian rugs,  hand and power tools, fountain pens, hiking and backpacking, watches, travel, and photography for over 50 years.  I once enyoyed but probably left forever behind, model trains, cribbage boards, pipes, VW repair, cooking, bonsai, billiards, coffee, beer, cars, wood carving, competitive handgun shooting, mountaineering, and hog farming.  

 

I appreciate specialists.  They address the toughest problems and often break new ground. But over time that single focus is boring monomania.  Having specialized as a professional, I enjoy my frequent returns to amateur status.  

 

Website building is new for me.  Even thought the site focuses largely on one interest -- photography -- even the photographs reveal a reluctance to focus, as it were.  They range from family snaps to wildlife on safari and monochrome art shots to color landscapes. A couple shots are by others.   The photos present a range of other interests as well, and then I add a little writing. After all, I don't want the site to specialize . . . .  

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Chris 

 

PS: For the photography gear heads out there who want to know about equipment, settings, etc., I have not usually provided any information with the photographs themselves. I can say that I used about a dozen cameras over time, including Nikon, Canon, Rollei, and Olympus film and digital P&S, Nikon D100 and D700 digital, Leica M3 film, Leica Digilux 2 and M9 digital, and Panasonic GF1, Olympus OMD-EM5 Mark II micro 4/3 digital, and Panasonic Lumix Superzoom. All did the job needed.  I also scan old family film photos, sometimes with imperfections intact.  

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PPS: I genuinely believed  when I started this project that I had coined the phrase "serial dilettante." But Google tells me that it appears in a biography of an Irish revolutionary from my own family's County Waterford, Thomas Meagher, who became an American lawyer and Civil War general  ("doomed to be a serial dilettante").  I'll take it.            

(https://books.google.com/books?id=EWQpCgAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false)