Author: cbcrenshaw

C.B. Crenshaw is a musician, artist, writer, coder, gardener, and maker in Alabama.

Camera Roll: Lake Talquin, Quincy, Tallahassee

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Today’s perambulations took me from the shores of Lake Talquin, where the wind bringing in the next layer of December cloud cover whipped the water to a hard chop–which is the only way I’ve ever seen Lake Talquin, to be honest–to the crisp winter understory of the Lake Talquin State Forest, where the pines are awaiting the distant spring in silent resignation. State Road 267 then carried me north to Quincy, where the clouds ruined my original plan (I’ll be back another day) but cleared enough for me to grab a few shots of a beautifully-restored Gulf Station on the Old Spanish Trail, US 90. A couple shots in Tallahassee caught my eye in the late afternoon and evening.

Gulf Station on US 90, Quincy, Florida
Lake Talquin State Forest
Lake Talquin. Cell Phone Camera.
Creation 1 Inn, Quincy, Florida. A full service establishment.
Florida Christmas
Lake Talquin State Forest.
Gulf Station on US 90, Quincy, Florida
Accidental artwork, Tallahassee, Florida
Gulf Station on US 90, Quincy, Florida

Sketch Book: Abandoned House in Cape Sable

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Today’s notebook entry is based on this photo of an abandoned house in Cape Sable hosted at Florida Memory. If you’ve never visited Florida Memory, it’s a wonderful resource full of photographs, documents, audio, video, maps, and other gems from the Florida Archive. It’s a bottomless source of inspiration for me as a historian, artist, and information geek.

Based on a 1925 photo in Florida Archives.

How Much Research is Enough?

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I always do this: “Oh, I’ll never have enough to say to make it to the page limit. I need to do more research!” So I gather more and more. And then I write well past the page limit with even more to say. In the end, it feels like I trained for a marathon and ended up running a 5K.

How many years of graduate school does it take to understand the “right” amount of research one needs to make an argument?

I’m reminded of an anecdote from a historian–and, sorry, I won’t find the citation right now because I’m in the middle of writing a literature review on web indexing–which basically goes like this:

Interlocutor: Hey, famous historian, how do you know when you’ve done enough research?

Famous Historian: Well, I read and read until I feel like I know what to say.

Which is to say that there isn’t a “right” amount of research to do to answer a question. Read until you know what to say.

I’m going to go and finish saying it now, page limits be damned. That’s what editing is for.

Untitled, Thursday Night

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I smell my dad’s house sometimes
While sweeping, maybe,
Like some particle of the psychic past stirred by our labor in common. He swept, too.

A man who didn’t believe in vacuum cleaners,
he believed in me; and somewhere I register that in an olfactory way. The same way you hear voices when you drift off to sleep. Voices from other rooms and other times. He told me he heard his mother that way, her voice clear as a navy bell in the night.

How will I hear my own?
Her house had a smell that was mine too,
My Monday to Friday smell from the metes and bounds.
Hoover in the closet an oblique sort of foreboding.

Sweep first, then mop the floor. Drive across town, then vacuum some more.