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.
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.
Here’s another shot from a few weeks ago that never made it here. Dusk settling over Okeeheepkee Prairie Park in Tallahassee, Florida.
Took these a few weeks ago and never got around to posting them here. Autumn sunset on Lake Jackson in Tallahassee, Florida.
Today’s entries in the sketchbook.
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.
What an exceptionally good band. I’m so excited to have found them tonight.
Is to create something everyday. As evidence that I was here, if nothing else.
I am here. I was here.
So, full disclosure: I’ve deleted my Facebook account twice in the past 6 years. Last month I came back again after about six months away with a shamefaced grin. It made me sad to think about all of the people I know sharing their lives with one another, without me. If I’m unwilling to let those connections go, then I can’t opt out of Facebook.
But today I was reading this fantastic reporting in the New York Times about the company’s response to its many crises, and what troubled me is not necessarily that it knows everything about me–which it does–but that the best way to monetize that information is to zero in on the weaknesses: the points of ignorance, credulity, impulse, and reaction. It’s a vast database of personal pressure points the platform presses all day long.
Google has the same information, Apple has a lot of it, Samsung now owns a lot of my pressure points, and all of the apps, trackers, and aggregators on my phone, iPad, computers, and web browsers that don’t come from those companies know a lot about me. There’s no way to opt out and no clear way forward for any of us. Is there some combination of open source and paid platforms, along with encryption and data security practices that will save us?
C.B. Crenshaw 