many a hand has scaled the grand old face of the plateau

Joe, Sylvatus, VA

--a photo from one of the first rolls of film I shot for a class in the fall of 2006, which is when I decided photography might be an interesting thing to do with some of my time.

Poem For Malcom Lowry
-- by Jon Cone

Señor, another mescal.
My thirst is cruel,
This coffin endless.

Joe, enjoy Ecuador

Someday I will transcend, just like Jane's Addiction, but today I simply I'm in a rut, I'm in a rut

Untitled (Marlboro Men), Stuart, VA

While taking breaks between grading student papers this week, I've been reading Rick Bass's The Watch. It's an engaging, if uneven, collection of stories. Here's a couple paragraphs from "The Government Bears," one of my favorites in the bunch:

When I was twenty-seven I was hit in the head by a man wielding a fourteen-inch pipe wrench. He was about a hundred pounds heavier than I was. Sometimes when I throw two fifty-pound sacks of feed out of the truck and listen to them hit I think about that. He was much larger than I was but I killed him.

It wasn't even over some woman, or a horse or a dog, or our mothers' names: it was just plain bad blood, that odd thing, right from the very start. I had worked with him about a week, and one day he said he didn't like me because my clothes were always too clean and because he said he had seen me looking down the creek like a crazy man, just watching it, when there was nothing there, in the middle of the summer. We were working up on the Big Black, drilling Tinsley Field: cotton everywhere, and the magic flat sky. Honeysuckle crept and smelled good right on down and into the creek: the water was muddy, and alligators lived in there. If you watched, you could see one every now and then.

I suppose these paragraphs remind me of some of the jobs I've had, like one last summer working for a commercial mowing crew. We mowed/trimmed the 481 bypass, which is 14 miles or so of four-lane connecting Christiansburg and Blacksburg, Virginia. I was fascinated by the change of view afforded by walking vs. speeding along at 65 mph--the angles of some of the bridges, the colors of the weeds and flowers growing in the median, things like that. I mentioned it to some of the guys I worked with, and they gave me odd looks. I don't think any of them wanted to cleave me in two, but perhaps I'm wrong.

Sometimes a notion swells like the ocean, and I can't think where I should be

Untitled, Princeton, WV

Postcard from Searsburg
--Wyn Cooper


What was it you wanted he calls out the door
as I walk toward his house, which tilts uphill.
I just wanted to ask, I start to say — but he
cuts me off, tells me he doesn’t talk to strangers,
says that I should go away. I tell him I like
his old car, I name the year and model,
and soon he is shaking my hand,
inviting me in for home-brewed beer.

After my second and his who-knows-
how-many-pints, he tells me he’s ready
for the government when they come.
He takes me down to the cellar, filled
With enough food for years, calendars
for the coming one, enough water for
about a month. He shows me the vegetables
he’s growing under lights, but I can’t see them.

I swirl out the door like the windmills
we watched from his den, ten spinning,
one broken. I stand in his driveway
and feel them, their slow whipping roar.
The town’s elevation is unmatched,
except by a few of its people, higher
than kites from the slogans they write
on the outside of their dwellings,
which no wind has managed to blow down.

I've been looking for my shadow, but this place is so bright and so clean

Redbud? and Powerlines, Pulaski, VA

Tree
--Jane Hirshfield

It is foolish
to let a young redwood
grow next to a house.

Even in this
one lifetime,
you will have to choose.

That great calm being,
this clutter of soup pots and books--

already the first branch-tips brush at the window.
Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life.

I ended up in search of ordinary things, like how can a wave possibly be

Untitled (Wal-Mart Parking Lot), Radford, VA

I've been really enjoying Bill Callahan's newest album, Sometimes I Wish I Were An Eagle. The opening track, "Jim Cain," is ostensibly about James Cain, author of The Postman Always Rings Twice, but it certainly reflects Callahan's own artistic trajectory. The song also makes me think of "Binx" Bolling, the protagonist of Percy's The Moviegoer, a novel I've been re-reading recently with my American Lit. class. Binx's "search" is for ordinary things, concrete reality, not the abstract truth of science or, often, religion; and the pleasure he takes in the mystery of ordinary things seems similar to photographers like Eggleston or Friedlander.

To me, Callahan's album seems to be dealing with similar issues--a skepticism toward the schemes and concepts we use to prop our lives up, and an acknowledgement that that light and dark (and self/world) is a continuum, not a series of either/or moments. The final song on the album, "Faith/Void," recalls "Permanent Smile" from Callahan's 2000 album Dongs of Sevotion, but whereas "Permanent Smile" dealt with death ("Oh God, by being quiet, I hope to alleviate my death. Oh God, by being still, I hope to lighten your load"), "Faith/Void" seems like an enjoinder to move beyond preoccupations with God and death and dwell attentively in mystery.

Jim Cain

I started out in search of ordinary things
how much of a tree bends in the wind
I started telling the story without knowing the end.

I used to be darker, then I got lighter, then I got dark again.
Something too big to be seen was passing over and over me.
Well it seemed like a routine case at first,
with the death of the shadow came a lightness of verse,
but the darkest of nights, in truth, still dazzles
and I work myself until I'm frazzled.

I ended up in search of ordinary things
like how can a wave possibly be?
I started running, when the concrete turned to sand.
I started running, when things didn't pan out as planned.

In case things go poorly and I not return,
remember the good things I done.
In case things go poorly and I not return,
remember the good things I done.

Or done me in.