Philip Cohen on Naming Trends

Philip Cohen Article on Name Trends



Excerpt:

"In the tradition of treating statistical trends as horse races, I imagine that there is one person named Mary, who is constantly falling behind: first behind Linda, then Lisa, Jennifer, Ashley, Jessica, and so on, all the way to Isabella and now Sophia.
But that's not how it happens—it just looks that way because of the amazing regularity in human behavior, which produces an orderly succession of names. Incredibly, out of 1.7 million girls' names recorded by the SSA in 2011, I was able to predict to within 87 how many would be named Mary. By simply taking the number born in 2010 and subtracting the 5-year average decline, I predicted 2,584 would be born; the actual number was 2,671 (an error of 3.3 percent).
Somehow, out of the millions of individual decisions parents make, they produce steady trends like this."

Near Okefenokee Swamp, July 2011

By the Numbers excerpt

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

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.

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

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

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