If You Like Atget...

I'm an admirer of the "empty" aesthetic of Atget, that Buddhist mutei he found embodied in the pre-dawn, peopleless streets and parks of Paris and environs.

Just before the golden hours are the Atget hours.

I get from those photographs what I get from the best haiku: the inexpressible which cleanses the mind and (more importantly) the spirit. This can lead to continual rebirth. For me, those aren't photographs to be looked at once or twice and "done." For me, those are photographs which can renew vision itself, when one revisits them in the right mindset. I'm not sure that's why the French surrealists championed Atget, but it's my reason for championing him.

De Chirico's early paintings have the same effect on me. After all these years, they still energize my seeing and tweak my perspective (with their confected sense of perspective).

Only recently has the photography of Pennsylvania native Horace Engle come to wider attention. MoMA has inducted his body of work into their pantheon of photography and rightly so.

I've just received the book Other Summers: The Photographs of Horace Engle and am enjoying and absorbing it now.

Many of the photographs are sui generis for their period. As the book copy below points out, candid photography had not yet come into its own in the nineteenth century. Photographs were, generally, calculated things. So many of these moments captured with Engle's hidden camera feel so fragile and ephemeral, so vividly real. You instantly feel how qualitatively different these photographs are from what we see produced in that period.

I highly recommend this book if you are interested in photography or the visual arts in general.

From the publisher:

This rare cache of early photographs, salvaged and printed by the author, reveals an authentic view of life in the late 19th century America with a photographic vision that was fifty years ahead of its time. An unposed, candid record of people and activities in rural areas and towns of Pennsylvania and Virginia in the 1880's, these images have a quality of unstrained honesty and freshness that is in marked contrast to the stilted, formal portraits of the period. Professor Leo's text reveals the unconscious artistry of the photographer Horace Engle (1861–1949), a native of Marietta, PA, who was a chemist, promoter, inventor, and researcher at the Edison labs, as well as a lifelong amateur photographer. Engle's pioneering candid photographs—taken with a Gray/Stirn concealed vest camera—display photography's special ability to capture a truly significant moment. This is the basis of much of today's reportorial and documentary photography. Engel's camera, however, had no viewfinder, and offered only one shutter speed and lens opening. His 1888 images, therefore, are remarkable examples of a photographic style which did not come into its own until the era of the picture magazines. Since very few prints made by early detective cameras such as the Gray/Stirn exist, this collection is an impressive example of a very rare photographic type and provides a valuable and authentic view of a vanished past.

Stirn concealed vest camera (19th century)

Summer Reading: Do You Know Gastro Obscura?

Heat wave's dominating the East Coast, so it's a good time to stay inside and read (after you remember to put out food and water for the wildlife contending with this hot mess). I created a water station in the backyard, although the birds probably have been frolicking in the air conditioner waterfalls. I noticed they were still active and not out on siesta.

I've been reading much more this year.

While I started un-building my nest right about the time the birds started building their spring digs, making regular donations to a new thrift store right down the street that I love, I have also bought more books this year than I have since I was in my twenties, I believe. I am still committed to making weekly donations to the thrift store, which directly benefits the local community. Of course, I find treasures there every week, but my ratio of donation to purchases is at least ten to one. A bas hoarding! I can feel my house getting lighter. Maybe it will rise?

I'm usually reading about five or six books at once, going back and forth.

Some of the books I have been enjoying very recently are Capote's first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms and Joseph Heller's cult classic Something Happened.  I try not to read reviews of books which I am still reading, but I had a great time reading the Goodreads reviews on that latter title. People seem to have caught on to what a dark treasure the novel is.

I'm really fascinated by John Bodnar's Steelton: Immigration and Industrialization, 1870-1940. Bodnar's unromantic take on the lives of working class Americans is bracing; his gaze is unflinching and his analysis is trenchant and credible. He charts the larger patterns of socialization and ostracization which make a culture. This book makes me want to read all of his other historical writing, particularly the book he did on Pittsburgh's ethnic minorities. I believe he contributed to a larger book series on the working class whose titles I want to suss out.

I'm always reading many anthologies and collections of haiku. I will review some of those shortly on Goodreads. I've only received one disappointing haiku title lately and my complaint was that the translations from the Japanese were bad. The poetry was lost. This is a shame, because I'm fairly certain the original poems were scintillant with life in Japanese.

I'm reading some serendipitous thrift store book finds in delicious bites. These include a Gaiman title, Roxane Gay's Bad Feminist and a college-level textbook on entomology which is really blowing my mind. Certain things you learn about insects just won't leave your consciousness for very long. Insects are the Other World. You will never think about design in the same way again.

I'm smitten with Joy Harjo's How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems and by her other books.

Do you know about the Gastro Obscura site?  I believe this is the culinary section of a larger site dedicated to finding outre and interesting stories from around the globe. In any case, I wanted to draw your attention to two really great reads on that site, which I just enjoyed today. There's this article, "The Canadian Towns that Icelanders Visit for a Taste of their Past," by Karen Burshtein, that I found absolutely fascinating. While I am committed to cruelty-free dining, I thought the feature was delicious. Be sure to take her up on her links, as there's much readworthy history there, including that essay authored by an (at that time) 11th grader! I had no idea there was a miniature Iceland in Canada's Manitoba province.

The other article which you really shouldn't miss is "How Pink Slime Saved Sushi" by Sabrina Imler. I don't want to give you any spoilers as to what this article is about, but let's just say there's a certain someone who is the Patron Saint of Nori and you'd never guess who it is. Don't worry, if you need tragedy, there's some of that. I'm sort of hoping Morrissey will write a song about the female scientist at the heart of the article. I don't think I've seen "nori" in the Morrissey Concordance yet, and that's a glaring omission.

These two articles just appeared in the past few days on the site. I can see it's very likely I am going to become a habitue of the Atlas Obscura site. I think the article I want to read next is "Almost Every Bob Ross Painting in Existence Lives in a Virginia Office Park." Oh God, Yes.  Some clicks cannot just be unbaited. One must swoon into the acquiescence of pleasure.

Pruning Haiku

I posted versions of these haiku before. But it is summer now, so they need pruned. So here are pruned versions of the same haiku.


vacant lot
wildflowers
holding someone’s



red balloon
in a cemetery
holds its breath


evening
shadows
night picks up


in the woods
a snake passes 
I pass myself


snake skin
deep woods
time sheds 



deep woods
your time 
holds my hand


everything 
borrowed light
speaking



long after
the reflection
the 



Kato Shuson
the wildflowers
grenades


garden 
then let go–
shapes entwine


raging sea
one soft spot
in a boulder



empty coffee cup
one continent
pushes another




her desk’s peeled orange–
a skyscraper
sways in wind



manhole steam
in the night things 
not words



bird’s snow trill
wasted flutes
my bones



a dragonfly
energy
on a hot tombstone


morning diner
the waitress pours coffee
from another lifetime



iced window
my reflection
is away


diner parking lot
sparrows kill time
until McDonald’s



mark on glass
from a dog’s nose
not sure which side



the wind–
a child’s
half-finished drawing



winter diner
a waitress forgets
Proust’s name 



starfish–
a blind hand
shows you its teeth



the morning
pretends to be 
again again



orphaned train car
spring nestlings
with new hair


a stone
your starkness
fuzzy in my mind



one room schoolhouse
a wasp trapped
in local history


peach fuzz
some get turned on
by armor


distant train
from a bathtub you say
you won’t say



winter diner
nothing young 
but the sparrows




birds then trains
morning sounds
meet in silence



a houseplant grows
largely ignoring
nonessential input



funeral hands
people touch people
as autumn does



airplane overhead
sound waves 
want out

Serendipity

Antiques malls are my Gothic cathedrals, my Metropolitan Museum.

I go there to stare in awe at the relics of lost lives of those who might not have been saints or great sinners, but who, nonetheless, lived gorgeously.

I really need several hours (if not all day) when I get in a larger Church of Lost Whispers like that.

Yesterday, I visited one I hadn't revisited for some six months or more.

There was a new booth dedicated to old photographs. I fell into a swoon, then a trance. I had to look at all of the thousands of photographs, which were only a dollar apiece, even the larger ones.

After a while, I started doing vertical yoga, because I had been standing there so long that my skeleton started to suggest he and I might have different agendas for the day.

I found numerous unusual photographs for my own personal collection. I was so happy to find these lost moments.

Then I noticed some larger portraits of posh personages, children posing alone and with their families. It was instantly apparent that the photographer had exceptional skill. As I removed this set of photos from their display box, I saw the pencil signature at the bottom of the lovely portraits: Marcus Adams.

Adams photographed the Windsors and many other notables. His photograph of the young Elizabeth later appeared on a Canadian banknote.

I haven't yet identified the people in the photographs, but that's for another day, I suppose.

There were a number of interesting paintings by probably unknown artists, many of them in the naive style, and I usually make a purchase along those lines, but nothing quite made me jump yesterday. There was a pair of paintings on boards by an artist working in the seventies that I almost snagged, but there was some slight damage to each painting which turned me off the purchase. It's a shame, because they were both Matisse-inspired and colorful to the psychedelic max. But I didn't feel confident enough to color match and do the restorations myself.

When I go through more than a thousand photographs, I like to do "themes," where I create groupings of photos which seem to go together. Yesterday, I was able to assemble a nice set of early to mid-century photos of kittens and cats alongside a grouping of photos of soldiers (mostly WW II) with the rough theme "Disport Yourself."

I don't just look at the old photos. I invariably get fiction ideas as I drift through each vanished world. I found myself coming up with quite grim stories for some of the odder photos.

One small cabinet photo I bought simply because the woman looked more like an Edward Gorey drawing of a questionable governess than any other living human ever did to my eyes.

The Aurorean

I was very happy to learn I will have a poem included in the autumn issue of The Aurorean. 

Many thanks to editor Cynthia Brackett-Vincent.

I Had a Poem Published in The Mainichi

I was really happy to learn I had a poem published in The Mainichi, "Japan's National Daily Since 1922."

I usually read the journal's haiku selections in spurts, and was between spurts, and so missed this until now.

Many thanks to editor Dhugal Lindsay, whose celebrated work I first encountered in a really great haiku anthology edited by George Swede.