Isolina

Near Okefenokee Swamp, July 2011

2011-12-11T19:34:00.001-05:00

January 23

2011-01-23T23:06:00.010-05:00

or your hair's backlit
(same as the rain's)
slender metals ---
anything might flash out ...

from Metallurgy for Dummies, James Richardson

Say that I showed him heavily
how I saw him
from above: no wanderer but a map, unmoving
though a man thinks he can hide in changes.

-James Richardson, _By the Numbers_

Angie Estes' poem Dark Spots

2010-06-01T23:18:00.002-04:00

Dark Spots

In the late nineteenth century, some photographers
claimed not only to capture images
of loved ones from beyond
the grave, but to be able to photograph memories
of the deceased, their auras still glowing
around the bereaved,
as if to capture light reflected off a body could preserve
that body over time as Beatrice explains
the presence of the dark
spots on the moon to Dante in Paradiso, how
the brightness of a celestial body
reveals the angelic
gladness that quickens the body, letizia that shines as joy
shines through an eye. Visit Fort
Courage—Take Pictures
of the Past, the billboards across Arizona advised,
and at the base of the mountain in
New Mexico, a note taped
to the gasoline pump read, Hold tight to your money—the wind
will carry it away. In the snapshot of
my grandmother in her
casket, wearing the Elizabethan collar and perm'd
curls she never wore, my mother
gazes through her
to a planet she always knew existed but which, without
the darkness, she could never see
before. They call
some bruises shiners like the violet stars of the Rose of Sharon
that come out in the morning and shine
all day in their leaf-black
shade, shade carved into the yard like fish scales covering
the sarcophagus in Sant'Apollinare in
Classe near Ravenna
or the stiff, veined hands of the sycamore stretched wide
in applause, the Italian gesture
of mourning.

Poetry Daily poem of the day June 1, 2010

Excerpt from The Summer Book, Tove Jansson.

2010-03-24T00:47:00.001-04:00

The family had long realized, without ever discussing it, that Eriksson didn't especially like fishing and hunting and motorboats. What he did like was harder to put your finger on, but perfectly understandable. His attention and his sudden wishes raced here and there across the water like ocean breezes, and he lived in a perpetual state of quiet excitement. The sea is always subject to unusual events; things drift in or run aground or shift in the night when the wind changes, and keeping track of all this takes experience, imagination, and unflagging watchfulness. It takes a good nose, to put it simply. The big events always take place far out in the skerries, and time is often of the essence. Only small things happen in among the islands, but these, too---the odd jobs that arise from the summer people---have to be dealt with. One of them wants a ship's mast mounted on his roof, and another one needs a rock weighing half a ton, and it has to be round. A person can find anything if he takes the time, that is, if he can afford to look. And while he's looking, he's free, and he finds things he never expected. Sometimes people are very predictable: they want a kitten in June, for example, and come the first of September they want someone to drown their cat. So someone does. But other times, people have dreams and want things they can keep.

Erikkson was the man who fulfilled these dreams. No one knew exactly what he found for himself along the way---probably a lot less than people thought. But he went on doing it anyway, perhaps for the sake of the search.

from The Summer Book, Tove Jansson,

Translated from the Swedish by Thomas Teal.

The future enters into us

2010-01-10T21:38:00.004-05:00

Ruth, Danville, Virginia, 1968
photographer: Emmet Gowin

The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens.
-Rainer Maria Rilke in Letters to a Young Poet

excerpt from "Finding Her" by Brenda Hillman

2009-12-20T19:42:00.002-05:00

Listen. You don't have to do anything.
The raccoon is in the garbage can, selecting an eggshell;
there's a patch of moonlight
on the rug. Get up, stand in it, be seen through---

And out in the night
where the ragged patches converge:

everything that lets go
still has its memory of attachment
and that which refused to let go
still has its uses---

excerpt from "Finding Her" by Brenda Hillman, from _Death Tractates_.
Wesleyan University Press. 1992.

Susie and Bill/ 1968

2009-12-19T18:11:00.003-05:00

From Jimmy's collection of found photographs.

The parted water reunites behind our hand.

2009-11-27T23:19:00.001-05:00

The parted water reunites behind our hand. Pleasure is taken out of pleasant things, profit out of profitable things, power out of strong things, the moment we seek to separate them from the whole. We can no more halve things and get the sensual good, by itself, than we can get an inside that shall have no outside, or a light without a shadow. "Drive out nature with a fork, she comes running back."

Ralph Waldo Emerson, from "Compensation"

Globus Hystericus by Timothy Donnelly

2009-10-26T22:55:00.002-04:00

(above image: Fog Plumes Over the Great Lakes)

Excerpts from Globus Hystericus by Timothy Donnelly

Sensing my hand
in what I push away. Watching it dissolve into plumes

rising like aerosols, or like ghosts of indigenous peoples,
or the lump in the throat to keep me from saying that
surviving almost everything has felt like having killed it.

When the last of the human voices
told me what I had to do, they rattled off a shopping
list of artifacts they wanted thrown down open throats.

That left me feeling in on it, chosen, a real fun-time guy
albeit somewhat sleep-deprived; detail-oriented, modern,
yes, but also dubious, maudlin, bedridden, speechless.

7.
After the panic grew more or less customary, the pity
dissolved into a mobile fogbank, dense, reducing visibility
from the rooftop observation deck. Mobile in the sense

that it possessed mobility, not in the sense that it actually
moved. Because it didn’t. It just stayed there, reducing
visibility but not in the sense that it simply diminished it

or diminished it partly. Because it didn’t. It pretty much
managed to do away with it altogether, as my photography
will come to show: field after field of untouched white.

After the possibility of change grew funny, threadbare,
too embarrassing to be with, I eased into the knowledge
that you’d never appear at the foot of the bed, the vale

turned into a lifetime’s heap of laundry, and not the gentle
tuffets and streambanks of an afterlife it seems we only
imagined remembering, that watercolor done in greens

and about which I predicted its monotony of fair weather
over time might deaden one all over again, unless being
changed with death means not only changing past change

but past even the wish for it. I worried to aspire towards
that condition might actually dull one’s aptitude for change.
That I would grow to protect what I wished to keep from

change at the cost of perpetuating much that required it.
In this sense I had come to resemble the fogbank, at once
given to motion but no less motionless than its photograph.

The last time I saw myself alive, I drew the curtain back
from the bed, stood by my sleeping body. I felt tenderness
towards it. I knew how long it had waited, and how little

time remained for it to prepare its bundle of grave goods.
When I tried to speak, rather than my voice, my mouth
released the tight, distinctive shriek of an aerophone of clay.

I wanted to stop the shock of that from taking away from
what I felt. I couldn’t quite manage it. Even at this late hour,
even here, the purity of a feeling is ruined by the world.

Carl Martin Photography

2009-08-26T21:53:00.002-04:00

Carl Martin's Photographs

Eula Biss, Notes from No Man's Land

2009-07-16T21:53:00.002-04:00

I'm midway through this book and am really liking it.

You can hear Biss read the book's first essay here.

Sitting With Paintings

2009-06-29T20:20:00.003-04:00

Photographs by Andy Freeberg

Judy Linn Photographs

2009-06-14T21:04:00.007-04:00

More images by Linn here.

National Pigeon Day

2009-06-12T20:06:00.003-04:00

Tomorrow is.

nationalpigeonday.blogspot.com

Portable Gardens for Vacant Lots

2009-06-12T19:56:00.003-04:00

Salt Lake City Wasatch Gardens project

"....The relatively new concept takes a vacant lot, in this case a 0.2-acre site owned by the Redevelopment Agency of Salt Lake City, and transforms it into a temporary community garden through the use of 36 4-foot by 16-foot boxes of soil. Neighborhood gardeners rent the plots for $25 a year, which includes water."

Article By Tom Wharton for The Salt Lake Tribune

Mars Hill Beauty Shop

2009-06-12T02:57:00.001-04:00

May 2009, Mars Hill, NC

Twins on a Boat

2009-05-05T21:51:00.001-04:00

1402

2009-05-01T20:17:00.004-04:00

Architect David Adjaye in March 2008 issue of Dwell: "As cities grow, and as the experience of urbanism becomes overwhelming or intoxicating, I think the notion of the domestic retreat becomes more and more important."

farmhouse near Byromville, GA

2009-03-20T21:45:00.002-04:00

near Blvd Dr and Ralph McGill Blvd

2009-03-08T16:52:00.004-04:00

I wonder if this type of memorial is particular to Atlanta. I've seen this two or three times, along Boulevard between Ponce and Highland: stuffed animals arranged on a light pole. Did all of these belong to the young person who died, or does each mourner bring an object?

2009-03-01T15:18:00.004-05:00

My eye goes to the short woman in the foreground. First perhaps for her height, and the juxtaposition of her and the woman to her right, our left. Her red socks, how the left one has fallen a little. The angle of her face...what are her eyes trained on? I wonder, or what thought was hers then, in August or September of 1960, though the camera's date was set 4 or 3 months ahead, or maybe that tells us when they were printed: when this small likeness of this small yet not small woman materialized somewhere else.

old names

2009-02-01T22:20:00.010-05:00

I've been spending a lot of time lately squinting at PDFs of old US census data, especially from 1920 and 1930. I'm doing research for an essay, but I get sidetracked by jumping from name to name...so many of them rarities now. Exie, Euna, the surname Necessary, Izola, Versie, Dolphus, Argant, Octavia, Pleamon, Rodie, Otulkie, Nomy, Leety, Mancy, Cassian, Eleazor, Viga, Willaby, Lilla, Neddie.

Also interesting are the community names---many of them seem to have fallen out of use. I've learned that in the early to mid 1900s many people in Clinch County, GA had my maternal grandfather's surname, especially in a place called Mud Creek. I don't know what scale this name matched up to: neighborhood, unincorporated town, or a sort of landmark.

It makes me wish more places still had names that described the surroundings---that we still made a point of really looking around and identify a place by its features: like meeting a new person, learning a new face. Towns named after creeks or rocks and springs, for instance. There are so many places named Fairview and Midway, but how to know what that fair view looked like, and midway to where, now. Mixed in with the call-it-as-you-see-it community and town names are ones that seem tied to stories or incidents: I'm looking at Bandana, Faust and Day Book, NC right now on a Google map.

I'm also wondering what's the latest on Georgia's decision to pull many unincorporated towns off of the DOT maps, for the sake of legibility.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1220/p03s03-ussc.html

A later headline said that uninc. towns with zipcodes would be restored, but I don't know what's happened since or how many of the almost-500 would be reinstated by zip.

It seems that now, so often places (prime example: subdivisions and housing developments) are named to elicit some kind of impression without having anything physical that actually makes an impression. "Impression"---the material sense: there is a depth that presses into something and leaves a dent. That brings Eliz. Bishop's ending of The Imaginary Iceberg to mind:

Icebergs behoove the soul
(both being self-made from elements least visible)
to see them so: fleshed, fair, erected indivisible.

Foxtown image found here: fcit.usf.edu/florida/maps/local/polk/Foxtown.htm

Notice Tree

2009-01-24T13:05:00.002-05:00

Taken a while ago on or just off of Huff Road in Atlanta.

Century Plant Bloom

2009-01-10T18:05:00.006-05:00

This was taken in Mystic, Georgia in late December, 2008.

Photograph 1

2009-01-03T20:30:00.002-05:00

A pigeon, yes? No date or note on reverse.