excerpt from "Finding Her" by Brenda Hillman

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

From Jimmy's collection of found photographs.

The parted water reunites behind our hand.

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"

Carl Martin Photography

Carl Martin's Photographs

Eula Biss, Notes from No Man's Land

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

Photographs by Andy Freeberg

Judy Linn Photographs

More images by Linn here.

Portable Gardens for Vacant Lots

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

May 2009, Mars Hill, NC

Twins on a Boat

1402

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

near Blvd Dr and Ralph McGill Blvd

Dec 60

old names

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 identifying 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

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

Century Plant Bloom

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

Photograph 1

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