D-E-F-G

uring the afternoon, after I get home from school, it's been my habit to sit down with the newspaper, browse for the very few minutes it takes me to get drowsy, and then take a nap for anywhere from ten minutes to half an hour to let my batteries recharge. Over the last two weeks, I've broken that pattern and begun establishing another, which is to grab my camera and either jump in the car and go somewhere, or just go for a walk in the neighborhood and get some air. Yesterday I did both. I went out to get a sandwich around 4:00, and then, when I came back, decided that I wasn't quite ready to settle in with my schoolwork yet, so after I put the car in the garage I took my camera and started walking.

ach time I go out with my camera I have a couple of things in mind. On the one hand having the camera with me is mostly an excuse for being outside with something like a purpose. On the other hand, I like the way that having the camera focuses my alertness and keeps me looking. Sometimes I have no clear sense of what I'm looking for; I'm just there with the camera in case something turns up. (I'm reminded of what Flannery O'Connor side with regard to writing: "Every morning between 9:00 and 12:00 I go to my room and sit before a piece of paper. Many times, I just sit for three hours with no ideas coming to me. But I know one thing. If an idea does come between 9 and 12 I am there ready for it.") Other times, I am on a hunt, I am actively looking for something. That's what I was doing yesterday. I had been reading a book on photography which had a brief passage about Edward Weston and how in the early days of Polaroid photography he had gone out put together a book of photographs based on letters of the alphabet. It was rainy off and on yesterday afternoon, so I wanted to walk close to home. I decided as a kind of experiment to see how many letters of the alphabet I could find as I walked. Photographs of actual letters were ruled out; I was going to try to find the shapes in the physical objects around me.


inding the letters was easy at first. Some of them more or less jumped out at me, and since I had the whole alphabet to work with, there were a lot of possibilities. Then as I went along and started eliminating letters, it got harder to find plausible renditions of the remaining letters. But I was interested in the way the particular mission I had set for myself was changing the kind of experience I was having when I was walking. Instead of seeing the buildings or the trees or the people whole as I normally would, I was looking at intersections and junctures and shapes and shadows. There were a number of times when I more or less lost track of where I was and looked up in surprise some minutes later. A number of people smiled somewhat warily at me as they walked by me while I was bent over a bit of chain-link fence or the top of a cactus; it occurred to me that I might be cementing my reputation as the neighborhood oddball.


etting the whole alphabet put together is going to take a while, but it should be an entertaining pursuit. It's not a project that has any real purpose or payoff, just a kind of noodling around with an idea. I hadn't actually thought of doing anything with the letters until I started writing tonight's post, and had the idea of using the pictures I was going to share anyway as drop caps. So the whole enterprise this evening is a kind of novelty. I didn't know what I was going to wind up doing until I did it, and now it sort of looks like it's done, or at least this part of it is done, for now. This is the kind of thing I might often have done in my original physical commonplace book, freehand of course, but it's a little trickier to pull it off given the formal constraints of the blog. But this has been an entertainment, a confection, a concoction. It'll do for now.