Self-Reflection (In Geronimo's Eye)

June 6, 2014, 8:57 am

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Geronimo -- detail showing photographer reflected in his eye. Photo shows the famous Apache warrior Geronimo, photographed during the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1904. The close-up view of his left eye reveals a reflection of the photographer. ["Reminds me of the old myth that was prevalent back in the old days, that you could somehow see the last thing a person saw reflected in their dead eyes." -- JW FHB]: photo by the Gerhard Sisters, St. Louis, Missouri, c. 1904 (Library of Congress)


The world is a looking-glass, and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face. Frown at it, and it in turn will look sourly upon you.

-- Thackeray, Vanity Fair(1847-48)

 

Portrait of Billie Holiday, Club Downbeat(?), New York, New York. Caption from Down Beat: [from article] The gal singers, Billie Holiday and Mildred Bailey, have been singing about a quarter of a mile from each other: Billie at the Club Downbeat on 52nd St. and Mildred at the Blue Angel on the East 50's [William P. Gottlieb's reflection seen in mirror]: photo by William P. Gottlieb, c. June 1946 (William P. Gottlieb Collection, Library of Congress)

 

Self (Holga wet plate).Wet plate glass negative in a Holga. Me, sleeping on the floor of the New England School of Photography. It was a long exposure. I took a nap: photo by Jim Rohan, 9 February 2014

Strange Land (Cambridge, Massachusetts): photo by Jim Rohan, 29 December 2010

Self-Reflection (seahorse, Monterey Bay Aquarium): photo by Pargon, 15 August 2009
 

Male Siamese Fighting Fish (Betta splendens) flaring at his own reflection in a mirror: photo by Malzees, 28 October 2007

Me, myself and Jesus: photo by frau kpunkt, 6 March 2013
 

Untitled (shopwindow, Stockholm): photo by Hans Söderström, 9 September 2013

Reflection and Projection (shopwindow, Stockholm). A huge camera was taking my picture as I walked by. I couldn't just take it, so I shot back: photo by Hans Söderström, 11 May 2011

Untitled (shopwindow, Stockholm): photo by Hans Söderström, 9 September 2013

 

self reflection: photo by Desideria, 6 August 2006

 

Looking-Glass Aberration. Bluhm Family Terrace, The Art Institute, Chicago: photo by Rana Pipiens, 28 April 2010

 
Our cameras record the world-out-there as clearly as possible. So we don't want dust or smudges on our lenses. Differently from Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, we prefer real turtles over the Mock-Turtle and real bread-and-butter or flies over the Bread-And-Butter-Fly... But we often forget that even clean and clear lenses can cause inherent distortions of what we think we see. Chromatic aberration is one of these, and you can see it in this photo: the horizontal, thinnish black lines or line segments are not 'out-there' but in the camera's 'brain', as it were. To make things even more a part of my mind-game, I shot this picture through the plate glass window of the Terzo Piano restaurant of The Art Institute at Chicago. (I wonder incidentally whether that name is a pun on Renzo Piano, the architect of this new wing...) Thus there are at least three all but invisible -- except for that Chromatic Aberration -- barriers to seeing this world as it 'really' is; and I haven't even mentioned the various computer screens and electronic waves and so on by which this picture is further transmitted (nor my eyeglasses).

The Bluhm Family Terrace and its bright surroundings are as real or unreal as the deconstructivism of Frank Owen Gehry's (1929-) Jay Pritzker open-air Music Pavilion (just to be seen in the lower right of the photo) or the Rising Architecture in the backdrop, or the Boeing Engine Installation.

The two engines were 'installed' here by the British artist Roger Hiorns (1975-). They were originally attached to a jet of the Strategic Air Command (USA), a Boeing EC135. These jets were part of the mission called Operation Looking Glass, put into place in 1961. It mirrors ground command in the sky, if after a cataclysmic event ground control were no longer able to function. Hiorns calls his installation "Untitled (Alliance)". To make things even more complicated, the artist has 'hidden' containers of medicine and drugs in these engines. What this all means is not very clear to me: I think I read words like 'trauma', 'depression', 'symbols', 'security', 'personal well-being', 'ties', 'alliances', 'freedom'. I suppose this all falls under 'deconstructivism'. I feel like Alice in Wonderland in a rather scary story; and it's uncanny and 'unreal' at the same time. But on a fine clear, crisp and blue-skied day like this it's exhilarating as well, even if my lenses suffer from chromatic aberration.

And those people in the photo? They're a group of journalists, I think, recording and talking and creating 'lenses' through which to understand... What they're saying I know not... Meanwhile, I think I'll stick with St Augustine's "uti et frui".-- R.P.

In another moment Alice was through the glass, and had jumped lightly down into the Looking-glass room...

-- Lewis Carroll: Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871)

Boeing EC-135. From 3 February 1961 to 24 July 1990 one of these aircraft was airborne flying the Looking Glass operation to monitor Soviet missile activity. Twenty four hours a day. Every day. For 29 years: photo by Chris, 14 June 2011



A U.S. Navy Boeing E-6A Mercury aircraft, painted anti-flash white, in flight, as part of the US military TACAMO (Take Charge and Move Out) system of survivable communications links designed to be used in nuclear war to maintain communications between the decision makers (the National Command Authority) and the triad of strategic nuclear weapon delivery.  Its primary mission is to receive, verify and retransmit Emergency Action Messages (EAMs) to US strategic forces. It does this by maintaining the ability to communicate on virtually every radio frequency band from very low frequency (VLF) up through super high frequency (SHF) using a variety of modulations, encryptions and networks. This airborne communications capability largely replaced the land based extremely low frequency (ELF) broadcast sites that became vulnerable to nuclear strike: photo by US Navy, n.d., from Naval History and Heritage Command; image by alexandru.rosu, 17 April 2010

Bluhm Family Terrace, The Art Institute, Chicago: photo by Jim Watkins, 8 May 2010

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Vertiginous

June 7, 2014, 9:33 am

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A (Los Angeles, California): photo bymichaelj1998, 7 April 2014

A university physics student was confronted with the following challenge:
"Describe how to determine the height of a skyscraper using a barometer."

The student replied:

"Tie a long piece of string to the barometer, lower it from the roof of the skyscraper to the ground. The length of the string plus the length of the barometer will equal the height of the building."

This answer so infuriated the examiner that the student was failed immediately. 

However, the student appealed on the grounds that the answer was indisputably correct, and the university appointed an independent arbiter to decide.

The arbiter judged that the answer was indeed correct, but that it did not display any noticeable knowledge of physics.

To resolve the problem, it was decided to call the student and allow six minutes for him to provide an oral answer.

For five minutes the student sat in silence, his brow furrowed in thought. When the arbiter pointed out that time was running out, the student replied that he had several extremely relevant answers but could not decide which to use.

"First, you could take a barometer up to the roof of the skyscraper, drop it over the edge and measure the time it takes to reach the ground, but too bad for the barometer.

"If the sun is shining you could measure the height of the barometer, then set it on end and measure the length of its shadow. Then you measure the length of the skyscraper's shadow, and thereafter it is a simple matter of proportional arithmetic.

"If you wanted to be highly scientific, you could tie a short piece of string to the barometer and swing it as a pendulum, first at ground level, then on the roof of the skyscraper. The height of the building can be calculated from the difference in the pendulum's period.

"If the skyscraper has an outside emergency staircase, it would be easy to walk up it and mark off the height in barometer lengths.

"If you wanted to be boring and orthodox, of course, you could use the barometer to measure the air pressure on the roof of the skyscraper and on the ground, and convert the difference into a height of air. "But since we are continually being urged to seek new ways of doing things, probably the best way would be to knock on the janitor's door and say: 'If you would like a nice new barometer, I will give you this one if you tell me the height of this building.''

So the examiner permitted the student to descend into the basement of the building, where the janitor had a small office. The student did so, and when he returned, reported what had happened.

"I went downstairs and knocked on the janitor's door. He opened it right away, but before I could get in a word, he began telling me a tall story about having met some top models over dinner in a nightclub.

"'After dinner, the tallest one told me a tall story about her barometer,' he said. 'It was a strange and confusing story; I had some trouble following it.'"

 
Corners (Los Angeles, California): photo bymichaelj1998, 7 April 2014
 

NK Mall (Stockholm): photo by Mikael Jeney, 1 September 2012
 

In Line (Stockholm): photo by Mikael Jeney, 29 August 2012
 

New Subway Station (Stockholm): photo by Mikael Jeney, 1 September 2012
 

Lamp (Long Beach, California): photo by michaelj1998, 13 April 2014

Liberty, Unincorporated

June 8, 2014, 9:26 am

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Scott's Run, West Virginia: Ben Shahn, 1937, tempera on cardboard, 56.5 x 70.8 cm (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York)

Monongah Mine Explosion


I want to go up to Monongah where they had that big explosion up there. You know, Monongah Mine on Route 19. See, that’s where three hundred and seven men got killed. They don’t even know how many boys, because they wasn’t on the payroll.


Bumping Coal off the Stone


This here is what they call bumping coal off the stone [refers to photo]. You had to undermine this about four feet deep -- you know, get it in there about four feet deep. You see when they get that undermine, then someone would drill a hole there for the coal.


You lived in a coal camp. If you had a boy that was big enough where he could carry a dinner bucket and it wouldn’t drag the ground, then he was big enough to go in the mines. This is a boy here.


Hand Auger


After they get this cut around here, this boy would drill a hole with this hand auger here for when they get ready to tap it. A hand auger like this, see, you had to have. You use to get up on the bench and drill down. If you go in deeper, you can move your bench up see. But then they’d each tap that up, then they’d shoot it, they'd shoot the coal.


Tamping the Hole


[Now for the tamping, what would they actually put in the hole?]
 
One was dynamite and clay. They use to put clay at the mouth of your place where you would work. You got clay and wrapped it up in paper and you stuck it in a hole and you would tap it in there, see. See I don’t have none of that. Paulette Shine from that museum, the Coal Museum, we’ve got all that down there.


Shooting the Coal


[Shooting the coal means what?]


They’d hook a cable to it and years back they use to call what they have a fuse. They’d light the fuse, then run. Run away, and it would go off. Nowadays they have a cap, what they call a cap. They stick in a stick of dynamite with about a seven foot cord on it, and you’d put it in there and then you’d get your cable and you’d tie it on to this cord. Then you’d stretch it out for about a hundred feet until you’d get around a corner. Then you'd have a little battery. You’d put it on there, and just, you know, pull the wire, and it would go off. Just charge it up and set it off. See here, now they shot the coal down and here’s where they’re loading it in the car -- putting it in there and hand loading it with a shovel.


Shovels


You see they’d have a shovel. They had what they called a number three shovel. Number three shovel is the size down here. And number four shovel was a little bit bigger, number five shovel was bigger yet. You had guys working in mines called steam shovels. We’d call them steam shovel because they could load like a steam shovel. See, they’d load this car up after this coal was shot down; they’d load the car.


Dog Holes


I don’t know if you know where Scott’s Run is or not? Granville right down here? Go past and there was sixty nine mines, sixty-nine mines from here to Granville to up at Cassville. Nineteen of them these mines and the rest of them were called dog holes. Go in there with [? ]and shoot the coal out and sell it.


Nobody had to pay for them. Like you wanted to start a place like that? Well you started with crops out along the river. You’d go up and clean the dirt away and you could start undermining the coal, shoot it and load it up. Yeah, they use to be a lot of dog holes.


Cutting Machine


Then they got a machine -- what they call a cutting machine. Cut coal on the bottom you know. Cut about seven feet deep. They had anywhere from twelve to fourteen feet wide. 

Then you didn’t have to undermine it or nothing. You would just clean it, you’d clean that dust from underneath that coal out, where the cut coal was underneath. Clean all that dust out, then you’d shoot it.


Each cut of coal sold about eight cars. That’s about twenty to twenty-two tons of coal. Then you’d clean that some places. You had a cleanup, a cleanup system. You have to clean that whole cut of coal up, regardless of what kind of condition and whether they had a wreck or something and something leaked.


Relay Motor


They had what they called a relay motor. They’d bring end pieces in and put it in the side track and then the horse would get it and bring it to your work place.


Steel Hoppers


Cassvile Mine use to load a hundred steel hoppers a day. That's hand loading. That’s how big it was.
 
Steel hoppers were what you loaded the coal into, what you see on the road now. They had fifty ton cars and seventy-five ton cars. Cassville was a big coal company. It was owned by some company in Pittsburgh. But we had a coal mine here had a tipple on the other side of the river.


[What’s a tipple?]


Well, see on this hill side? In here they had a mine and a real tipple and they’d load the coal in a bucket and transfer across the river occasionally. That’s where Star City comes in. But then when a cable broke, that would change the mine.


Mine Timbers


See, timbers like that [in a picture] was your warning. If the place was getting bad, going to fall in, them timbers would crack. They would crack and that’s how you got your warning. Then as more weight come down, them posts would just bend and break and fall.

Timbering


Well, [to timber something] you had a saw and an ax. You’d measure, you’d have a little piece of stick, two pieces of stick and slide you know and you made the lintel, then you’d cut that post there and let it leave enough space for that cap piece up there you see. You made it sometimes on what from was left over from the posts. Split the post to make the cap pieces. See here’s where they are doing more timbering, that’s where the place probably got real bad.


Once them posts took weight, you knew it. You could feel the difference. You could tell the difference when you’d come into work the next morning you could tell the difference by looking at the posts.


Now some company’s had what they called timber men. They work separate. You had a real bad place, they’d come in and timber it out.


Coal Loader


See these guys, you see a coal loader. He didn’t make no money unless he loaded coal. What coal you load, that’s what you got paid for.


The coal loader all he would do is load coal and stuff like that. That’s what it looks like here.


Carbide Lights


I started in the mines in the thirties, but this photo was way before the thirties [refers to photo]. See, the miner has a carbide light on. You bought carbide to put in the bottom of the lamp. And the top of the lamp had a little place where you would put water. Then when you want a bigger flame, you’d just flip that water on it and it give you more steam and that flame would come out, see. If was down at the museum, I could show you a carbide light.


Testing for Bad Conditions


See here’s this guy is testing for bad coal. You know you could tell if you heard somebody talking or by the sound of it. If it sounded solid it was all right, but if it boom or something to it, we knew it was bad. We had a regular tapping signal.


A lot of times, your carbide light would tell you if you had air in a mine or not.
 
It would go dim. It wouldn’t go out. If you didn’t have enough ventilation up in your work place that flame wouldn’t get big at all, then you’d go out there in the fresh air and pop up.


I mean this picture was taken back in the twenties when they tested for gas with canaries.


Horses in the Mines


See I can remember the horses working in the mines. A lot of the times, they’d break a new horse in, I had to go up there and coax the horse. They’d pull a car up and when they was coming back down they didn’t know where to turn off at and I had hell of a time trying to get it to turn off. After all they learned, they were smarter than what the men was driving.


Children in the Mines


A lot of them kids wasn’t over twelve years old. They had them on the tipple picking slate. That was bindering the coal, separating the coal.


You see this little boy that what I was telling you about a while ago wasn’t big enough to carry a bucket. There he is right there. There’s his horse. See, probably that’s a family. 

They went in there and loaded the coal and pulled it out and dumped it and car [?] back in there. There was a lot of them in the mines around here.


Factory Train


See I can remember when they had a factory train coming through Osage any time of the day. It came from Pennsylvania to Jimtown, then from Jimtown they could catch a train anywhere. East or West, North or South anywhere they wanted to go. They could catch a train.


The only transportation you had was you had to walk from here to Jimtown, hit the train, go to Morgantown, catch the train coming back. They run about every hour or so. Then there was a lot of car hopping too because that freight train ran all the time up in the hollow and Jimtown. I would jump on it and take a ride to Jimtown and wait and ride it back.


Coal Camp


[You grew up in Coal Camp. What was that like? ]


Well, a lot different than what it is today because everybody knew everybody and if something went wrong in the camp, everybody was there to help you. I can remember when somebody had a baby or something, everybody come up there with chicken. People were more friendly, you know what I mean? They were closer together.


Coal camp is like a big city. It’s got everything coal.


A Burnside stove is a favorite. You’d put that in one room and it would heat the whole house. About four room houses about all they had. Coal stove, yeah. You lived in the coal camp they had a team of washers and a wagon and a guy with all that. If we needed coal, he would go get it and bring it up to your house. Wouldn’t charge a penny for it. I can remember them days real good. You ever see that picture in that museum down there about Liberty? If you ever go down, look at that picture. Liberty’s a little town down there.


Busting and Yellow Dogs


When they started breaking the union, see they throwed the people they call scabs -- we call them scabs -- they took their furniture and throwed it out. And them people, their streets was all full of furniture. [The companies] owned everything.


Now I can remember up here at Osage in Chaplin. Osage had a coal mine there, and Chaplin did on the side of the road. That’s all the water there was. You couldn’t even tell when it was dark here because they had so damn many floodlights shining back and forth, you couldn’t even tell when it was dark. And nobody, let’s see they had a lot of guards. But the trouble didn’t start till they started fooling around with [company guards]. 

And then that’s when the trouble started, that’s when the trouble started. It was knowed all over the place. It was knowed all over the country.


We use to call [the company guards] yellow dogs. They carried guns and they thought they owned everything. They found out different.


Them old union men that we had are now gone. Yeah they’re all dead. I’m the only one around here. I’m the only one around here knows this stuff. And I try to tell them.


Shifts


[They ran] three shifts. One day shift, afternoon and night. See here, this is Uncle Lloyd right there [refers to photo]. That’s me when I was a kid. All these people are dead here. All of them. Let’s see. This guy lives up in Granville. All these guys here I was raised with in Granville. They’re all gone Second shift. 1940 picture was taken. It shows up good don’t it? Most of them was from around here, not too far. Around Granville, well Granville that’s where the tipple was at. Star City, Evansdale, Brier Hill, just right around here.
 
This here’s beginning of a shift there everybody’s waiting to go in. You know in them days you had to walk every place. There’s no trips, no nothing. Then in 1945 or something they started bringing loading machines. 

 
There use to be a mine here called Hell Creek brought them in earlier than that. That’s when we were working seven hours a day then, too.


After a shift when we got ready to come home, they’d side-track us or something to bring a load of coal out. That’s when we struck. We got paid for the time we went in till the time we went out. No trouble getting you in there, but getting you out.


River Ferry from Star City and Brier Hill


I can remember a lot of people here worked there from Star City and Brier Hill. They went together and bought themselves a room so they wouldn’t have to pay a nickel to ride the ferry. That ferry, they had a ferry down there you know. High water, low water or not, they’d do it. They’d load that boat on high water up the river a long ways then they’d start across by the time they’d got across they’d be close to the tipple.


Just think. There was everything floating in that river when it was high. Logs, trees and everything. And the river wasn’t very deep then because they didn’t have the locks. The only locks they had was up here. Cause in 1932 I can remember whenever it went dry.


Seasonal Work

We’d set down there on the company store on the porch down there, and then that girl would call us up whether or not we worked tomorrow. If she said there was no work, we’d take off and go off somewheres. Sat around all damn day just to hear whether we worked or not.

Interview with former Scott's Run miner Lewis Loretta by Kirk Hazen, in Scott's Run Voices, from Scott's Run Writing Heritage Project,West Virginia History, Volume 53, 1994  

 Striking miners, Scott's Run, West Virginia: photo by Ben Shahn, October 1935 (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)



Pursglove Mine, Scott's Run, West Virginia: photo by Ben Shahn, October 1935 (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)



Sunday in Scott's Run, West Virginia: photo by Ben Shahn, October 1935 (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)



Sunday in Scott's Run, West Virginia: photo by Ben Shahn, October 1935 (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)
 

Sunday in Scott's Run, West Virginia: photo by Ben Shahn, October 1935 (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)

Scott's Run, West Virginia. Negro family living in Moose Hall: photo by Ben Shahn, October 1935 (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)
 



Scott's Run, West Virginia. Negro family living in Moose Hall: photo by Ben Shahn, October 1935 (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)
 



Liberty, unincorporated, Scott's Run, West Virginia: photo by Ben Shahn, October 1935 (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)



 
"Black Fury" poster, a movie about a strike. Scott's Run, West Virginia: photo by Ben Shahn, October 1935 (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)
 


 
"Black Fury"  a movie about a strike. Scott's Run, West Virginia: photo by Ben Shahn, October 1935 (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)
 



Payoff at Pursglove Mine, Scott's Run, West Virginia: photo by Ben Shahn, October 1935 (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)



Walking into town for food relief, Scott's Run, West Virginia: photo by Ben Shahn, October 1935 (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)



Relief check, Scott's Run, West Virginia: photo by Ben Shahn, October 1935 (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)



Relief check, Scott's Run, West Virginia: photo by Ben Shahn, October 1935 (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)



Waiting for relief check, Scott's Run, West Virginia: photo by Ben Shahn, October 1935 (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)



Inhabitant of Scott's Run, West Virginiawho has just received a relief check: photo by Ben Shahn, October 1935 (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)




Houses stained by coal dust, Pursglove Mine, Scott's Run, West Virginia: photo by Ben Shahn, October 1935 (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)
  

Men in Sunday clothes with miners’ clubhouse in the background. Omar, Scott's Run, West Virginia: photo by Ben Shahn. October 1935 (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)
 




Doped singer, "Love oh, love, oh keerless love": Scott's Run, West Virginia. Relief investigator noted a number of dope cases: photo by Ben Shahn, October 1935 (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)



Scott's Run, West Virginia: photo by Ben Shahn, October 1935 (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)



Scott's Run, West Virginia: photo by Ben Shahn, October 1935 (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)

Scott's Run, West Virginia: photo by Ben Shahn, October 1935 (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)



Miner's sons, Scott's Run, West Virginia: photo by Ben Shahn, October 1935 (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)
 


Miner's sons, Scott's Run, West Virginia: photo by Ben Shahn, October 1935 (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)


 
Miners' houses, Scott's Run, West Virginia. Note sewerage system: photo by Elmer Johnson, 1935 (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)
 

Scott's Run mining camps, near Morgantown, West Virginia: photo by Walker Evans, July 1935 (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)



Scott's Run mining camps, near Morgantown, West Virginia. Company houses: photo by Walker Evans, July 1935 (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)



Women selling ice cream and cake, Scott's Run, West Virginia: photo by Walker Evans, July 1935 (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)



Scott's Run, West Virginia: photo by Walker Evans, July 1935 (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)

Mexican miner and child, Bertha Hill, Scott's Run, West Virginia: photo by Marion Post Wolcott, September 1938 (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)
 

Mexican miner and child, Bertha Hill, Scott's Run, West Virginia: photo by Marion Post Wolcott, September 1938 (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)
 

Mexican miner and child, Bertha Hill, Scott's Run, West Virginia. Many Mexicans and Negroes were brought into Scott's Run around 1926 to break the strike. Now about one-fourth of all mines employ any at all of these, only very small percent and "only the cream". They are generally accepted by other folks and there is a good deal of mixing and intermarrying: photo by Marion Post Wolcott, September 1938 (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)




 miner's children, Omar, Scott's Run, West Virginia: photo by Marion Post Wolcott, September 1938 (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)



Coal miner's son, Omar, Scott's Run, West Virginia: photo by Marion Post Wolcott, September 1938 (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)



Old fences around farm in coal mining section near Scott's Run, West Virginia: photo by Marion Post Wolcott, September 1938 (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)



Old bridge, Scott's Run, West Virginia: photo by Marion Post Wolcott, September 1938 (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)



Coal barge on river, Scott's Run, West Virginia: photo by Marion Post Wolcott, September 1938 (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)

Coal on riverboat, Scott's Run, West Virginia: photo by Marion Post Wolcott, September 1938 (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)

Wood pile for use in mine and coal cars, Scott's Run, West Virginia: photo by Marion Post Wolcott, September 1938 (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)

Burning slag near coal mine, Scott's Run, West Virginia: photo by Marion Post Wolcott, September 1938 (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)

Coal miner waiting for the next shift, Bertha Hill, Scott's Run, West Virginia: photo by Marion Post Wolcott, September 1938 (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)

Coal miner, Chaplin Collieries, Scott's Run, West Virginia: photo by Marion Post Wolcott, September 1938 (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)



Miner (Russian). Capels, West Virginia. Marion Post Wolcott. September 1938 (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)

Company houses, coal mining section, Pursglove, Scott's Run, West Virginia: photo by Marion Post Wolcott, September 1938 (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)

Company houses, coal mining section, Pursglove, Scott's Run, West Virginia: photo by Marion Post Wolcott, September 1938 (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)

Main store front in coal mining town, Scott's Run, West Virginia: photo by Marion Post Wolcott, September 1938 (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)

  

Osage, on Scott's Run, West Virginia. Drugstore window display in mining town: photo by Marion Post Wolcott, September 1938 (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)

Storefront, coal mining camp, Scott's Run, West Virginia: photo by Marion Post Wolcott, September 1938 (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)
 

Union barber shop in mining town, Scott's Run, West Virginia: photo by Marion Post Wolcott, September 1938 (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)

Mine workers' club, beer and dance hall, Scott's Run, West Virginia: photo by Marion Post Wolcott, September 1938 (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)

Coal miners on steps of company store, Scott's Run, West Virginia: photo by Marion Post Wolcott, September 1938 (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)
 

Coal miners buying supplies in company store, Scott's Run, West Virginia: photo by Marion Post Wolcott, September 1938 (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)

Former coal miner, worked twelve years for Chaplin Coal Company as hand coal loader. He and several others complained to company about conditions not being up to NRA (National Recovery Administration) standards. All lost jobs. He's now on WPA (Works Progress Administration) at thirty-eight dollars and twenty-five cents per month. Scott's Run, West Virginia: photo by Marion Post Wolcott, September 1938 (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)



Unemployed miner's home he built. "It'll be purtier when I paint it." Osage, Scott's Run, West Virginia: photo by Marion Post Wolcott, September 1938 (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)

Carrying water, coal miners' shacks, Scott's Run, West Virginia: photo by Marion Post Wolcott, September 1938 (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)

Shanties by the river. Coal miners' shacks, Scott's Run, West Virginia: photo by Marion Post Wolcott, September 1938 (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)

Former miners (note crutches). Scott's Run, West Virginia: photo by Marion Post Wolcott, September 1938 (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)

Bohemian coal miners, now unemployed, since mechanization of the mines, Jere, Scott's Run, West Virginia: photo by Marion Post Wolcott, September 1938 (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)

Woman (probably Hungarian) coming home along railroad tracks in coal mining town, company houses at right, Pursglove, Scott's Run, West Virginia: photo by Marion Post Wolcott, September 1938 (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)

Old man, Hungarian, with cane, going home after work along tracks, Pursglove, Scott's Run, West Virginia: photo by Marion Post Wolcott, September 1938 (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)

Even the cow goes home along the tracks, the main thoroughfare. Scott's Run, West Virginia: photo by Marion Post Wolcott, September 1938 (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)

Even the cow goes home along the tracks, the main thoroughfare. Scott's Run, West Virginia: photo by Marion Post Wolcott, September 1938 (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)

Old rotting coal tipple, Scott's Run, West Virginia: photo by Marion Post Wolcott, September 1938 (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)

Children playing around old coal tipple, Scott's Run, West Virginia: photo by Marion Post Wolcott, September 1938 (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)

Abandoned coal tipple, Scott's Run, West Virginia: photo by Marion Post Wolcott, September 1938 (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)

"White" school house, Scott's Run, West Virginia: photo by Marion Post Wolcott, September 1938 (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)

Negro school, Scott's Run, West Virginia: photo by Marion Post Wolcott, September 1938 (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)

Coal miner's wife getting water from pump, company houses, Pursglove, Scott's Run, West Virginia: photo by Marion Post Wolcott, September 1938 (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)

Clothes line on fence in front yard of miner's home, Scott's Run, West Virginia: photo by Marion Post Wolcott, September 1938 ( (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)

Wives of coal miners talking over the fence. Capels, West Virginia. Marion Post Wolcott. September 1938
 

Coming home from school. Mining town. Osage, Scotts Run, West Virginia. Marion Post Wolcott. September 1938

Coal miner’s child taking home kerosene for lamps. Company houses and a coal tipple are in the background in Scott's Run, near Morgantown: photo by Marion Post Wolcott, September 1938 (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)

Watching a football game, Star City, West Virginia: photo by Ben Shahn, 1935 (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)
 

Omar, mining town, West Virginia: photo by Ben Shahn, October 1935 (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)

Pay day. Coal mining town, Omar, West Virginia: photo by Marion Post Wolcott, September 1938 (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)

Coal miners going home from work, Omar, West Virginia: photo by Marion Post Wolcott, September 1938 (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)

 Negro school children, Omar, West Virginia: photo by Marion Post Wolcott, September 1938 (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)

Coal miner's family. Pursglove, West Virginia: photo by Marion Post Wolcott, September 1938 (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)
 


Coal miners' card game on the porch, Chaplin, West Virginia: photo by Marion Post Wolcott, September 1938 (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)
 


Coal miner's wife carrying home water from the hill, Bertha Hill, West Virginia: photo by Marion Post Wolcott, September 1938 (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)
 


Mexican miner's wife, Scotts Run, Bertha Hill, West Virginia: photo by Marion Post Wolcott, September 1938 (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)



Child of coal miner, Jere, Scott's Run, West Virginia: photo by Marion Post Wolcott, September 1938 (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)
 



Miner's wife on porch of their home, an abandoned company store. Pursglove, West Virginia: photo by Marion Post Wolcott, September 1938 (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)

Water

But during those times it was you know and we had to carry water. I first remember that we had to go to the well and carry water. Because we didn’t always have water in our houses, you know. Then when the coal mining, the coal company [came], they put up an old fashioned pump.


The hand pumps. Yeah . . . about every six houses, they put a pump. So we still had to carry water. I remember buckets of water we had to carry especially on wash days.


Monday: Wash Day and Bread Day


Monday was wash day and bread day. My Momma made bread. She’d make bread that would last the whole week. We’d wash clothes and bake. And I remember we’d come home from school and had to finish the washing cause we didn’t always have washing machines. We had the oppression [?] -- the rub board.


I thank God for my raising. It has made me appreciate life so much. I can really appreciate things you know now because I knew the hard time. But everybody did their washing like that, you’d see a line clothes line because everybody had to put your clothes outside because you didn’t have a dryer.


So you’d walk down the community and this row of houses and almost everybody washed Monday and you’d see just lines and lines of clothes and things were pretty and white. I remember the clothes were so white the sun would sparkle on them, you know, cause you’d wash twice and rinsed twice.


All day, you was washing all day, and we came from school. Because what my mom didn’t do, we got a chance to do. I remember when my dad bought our washing machine he said, “My God she’d about wash herself to death.” Because we finally got a washer. Everyday the washing machine was up until we got use to it.


Pursglove #2


Pursglove number two that’s where we lived. Pursglove two and over on the other hill was Pursglove number eight. They was all owned by the same man, but the little community like a little nest of houses maybe about fifty families. Maybe a little bit more than that, maybe a little less. But that was called Pursglove number two and then over on the other hill there was one called Pursglove number eight. And they had their own little school building and their own little church and that’s how it was.


Soup Lines and the WPA

I remember vaguely the soup lines right here in Osage. I remember when the WPA was first started and I must’ve been about eight years old maybe when all that started WPA then they had just a soup line. A place in Osage made big meals and you just stand in line and went and got the food. You had a hot lunch.


Quakers


 I remember, and this was when I was in grade school, maybe second, third, fourth grade. But I remember the Quakers came here. There’s a building up the road about two miles called the Shack, have you heard anything about the Shack?


There was a shack and they came together and sponsored a hot lunch program for the kids from all the schools. Okay all the schools in these communities like Pursglove, over Pursglove number eight whatever. The Quakers did that -- they sponsored a hot lunch program and the moms would come and cook everyday and so the kids everyday at lunch time we had a good hot meal, a good hot lunch.


They had certain days each mom cooked, certain days have three or four moms cook Monday, three or four moms cooked Tuesday. I remember those meals were good. We always had fruit and sometimes you didn’t get fruit at home you know, but they always had fruit. Always gave you a real nourishing meal, a hot bowl of soup and some crackers or peanut butter on nice brown thick bread and jelly.


Everyday Life


My brother-in-law had a car and we just thought it was just great if we could just ride from Pursglove to Osage. That was just the greatest cause we walked everywhere. Bus fare was just about a nickel, I think. I remember candy bars were two cents. We use to sell pop bottles to get money to buy some pop, you know, candy, something sweet that we craved.


But relations were real good. Everybody knew everybody. And if anybody got sick, people call midwives. I didn’t call them that -- just mothers that knew anything if anybody got sick, like pneumonia or something, they knew what to conjure up. All kinds of saps and oils.


Home Remedies


Yeah, I wish I remember that stuff that my mom knew because you didn’t go to doctor all the time. First off you couldn’t afford it, and then they had one company doctor. One thing, the coal mines would provide a doctor for all, and so you needed the doctor when he was somewhere else. Mrs. Williams needed him, or the boys needed a doctor? Well he was over at Pursglove number eight so you couldn’t always get a doctor and so, but they knew what to use. You had whooping cough with pneumonia or whatever and it worked. And all kinds of teas and roots and herbs.


We kept stuff all the time. My mother kept sassafras tea and she kept all kind of roots. I can’t remember all the stuff that she did have. And when you got something, she just knew what to make. And I remember she made homemade cough syrup. This was good, now. She would take a whole lemon and cut it up the peel and all, and she would take onions and cut that up in there, and then she would take honey if she could -- or even sugar, and put that in the oven and let that bake, and it came a real thick syrup. And that’s what she gave you for cough. That lemon did it and that onion. It didn’t taste very good, but it did the job.


Osage and the Company Store


 Osage, my goodness, it was a business town -- had two department stores, I think. I forget how many. We had an A and P here and I don’t know how many grocery stores and a company store. Let me tell you what a company store is.


Okay. A company store, it’s owned by the man who owned the coal mines. Okay. They would have a great big store and they had almost everything in the store and what they didn’t have in the store you could get. Then what they did, like you go to the company store, okay, just like you go to a market and shop, that’s what they had, but you had credit from the company. So my dad never had any money and I’ll tell you why: because our store bill was always bigger than the money that he made, so he was always in the hole as they use to call it. There was a lot of families like that, you know. Your store bill was more than you worked cause there was a big family of us. Everybody wasn’t like that. Some people just didn’t use the company store at all. They just went to stores in Osage. Oh yes, you could, but not till we got old and began to get after-school jobs and things, and we could, you know, help out.


Family


There was nine of us in the house, seven kids and dad and mom made nine of us and we lived in a four-room house. All the houses were four rooms. And you made and you just lived good. I don’t know how you did it. Now we couldn’t do it. I’m telling you I look back now and wonder, but we had two bedrooms upstairs and one for the boys and one for the girls cause you had two big beds in every room. And everybody had the same thing. You had two big beds and girls slept over here some at the top, some at the bottom -- you put two up to the top and two down to the bottom. Think about that, but it was fun. It was fun, it really was, and we had a little heater in our room. You had little coal stoves everywhere and you kept the room warm.


After we got bigger where we could get real jobs and my brothers carried the newspapers, we was able to help out at home and you really didn’t mind doing that because you saw the sacrifice that mom and dad made for you. We bought linoleums and I bought my mom a rocking chair and my sister bought my mother a rocking chair. She always wanted one. Like I said, we got linoleums on the floors and curtains and pretty bedspreads. After we got bigger and then my dad began to have some money, you know, we went to school. I had one sister that went to college. We went away. I went to Washington to work and so the family dribbled down to just two, my baby brother and baby sister, so then there was money.


Swimming


And oh my goodness. . . . I remember the swimming pool, when you first got the swimming pool in the area. The coal miners got together and had a swimming pool made, built up at the Shack. Oh it was fun. We didn’t have a swimming pool cause you could go to the river, you know. When the kids wanted to swim, they’d go to the river to swim because we didn’t have anywhere to swim, but when the coal miners got together and had a swimming pool built (it’s up at the Shack and it’s still there the swimming pool is) that’s when we got a chance to go to the swimming pool.


Or you could find a little creek and dam it up and swim in that, but that was muddy water and you didn’t know what was in it, you know. Oh God, I remember my brother-in-law threw me in one time, one of these muddy rivers, muddy ponds, just stopped it up, and it scared me to death, I tell you what, cause you don’t know what’s in mud. You don’t know whether you ‘re going to run into snakes or whatever. But you know, I didn’t get in there no more. I said. "I’ll never do that again!"

Interview with anonymous former Scott's Run mining community resident by Kirk Hazen, in Scott's Run Voices, from Scott's Run Writing Heritage Project. West Virginia History, Volume 53, 1994

Scott's Run, West Virginia. Outdoor privy. Scene taken from the main highway. The stream is Scott's Run. This privy is typical of many improvised outdoor toilets on Scott's Run. It is made from an old automobile; the house at left is also improvised by the family who occupy it. A stream of water flows past the privy into Scott's Run: photo by Lewis Wickes Hine, March 1937 (US National Archives)
 

Scott's Run, West Virginia. The Shack Community Center. Scene is typical of crowded space. In center of valley the stream is Scott's Run Creek. The Shack is a community center sponsored by a religious organization: photo by Lewis Wickes Hine, March 1937 (US National Archives)
  

 
Scott's Run, West Virginia. Woman gathering coal from mine refuse: photo by Lewis Wickes Hine, March 1937 (US National Archives)
 

Scott's Run, West Virginia. Pursglove No. 5. Scene taken from main highway shows typical hillside camp. The houses are multiple dwellings: photo by Lewis Wickes Hine, March 1937 (US National Archives)
 

Scott's Run, West Virginia. The Patch. One of the worst camps in Scott's Run. The stream is an auxiliary branch that flows into Scott's Run. The main valley of Scott's Run can be seen towards the right of this picture. These houses were originally built as single bachelor apartments; there are from six to eight separate housekeeping units in the buildings. Many of them are now occupied by families living in one room: photo by Lewis Wickes Hine, March 1937 (US National Archives)

x Scott's Run, West Virginia. The Patch. One of the worst camps in Scott's Run. The stream is an auxiliary branch that flows into Scott's Run can be seen towards the right of this picture. These houses were originally built as single bachelor apartments; there are from six to eight separate housekeeping units in the buildings. Many of them are now occupied by families living in one room: photo by Lewis Wickes Hine, March 1937 (US National Archives)

Scott's Run, West Virginia. Jere, mine tipple. Mine bankrupt and closed since December 1936. The camp of this mine is considered a stranded community: photo by Lewis Wickes Hine, March 1937 (US National Archives)

Scott's Run, West Virginia. Troop Hill -- an abandoned coal camp on Scott's Run, West Virginia, December 22, 1936. Mine closed early in 1936. Scene taken from main highway entering Scott's Run, March 1937: photo by Lewis Wickes Hine, March 1937 (US National Archives)

 

 Scott's Run, West Virginia. Chaplin Hill. This scene is typical of many camps built near the mine. In the background can be seen several of the government sanitary privies. These houses are multiple dwellings which accommodate several families. It is one of the few camps on Scott's Run which affords space for hogs and garden: photo by Lewis Wickes Hine, 1936 (US National Archives)
 

 Scott's Run, West Virginia. Chaplin Hill Mine Tipple. This mine as bankrupt and closed during the summer of 1936. The company was reorganized and began to operate under new management in November 1936: photo by Lewis Wickes Hine, 1936 (US National Archives)
 

Scott's Run, West Virginia. Cassville, mine tipple. This mine is operating and supplies work for three separate camps (Cassville, New Hill, and the Patch). To the left of picture is shown one of the government privies built by WPA workers in a sanitation campaign organized to eliminate the old typical filthy mine camp toilets: photo by Lewis Wickes Hine, March 1937 (US National Archives)

Scott's Run, West Virginia. Pursglove No. 2. Scene taken from main highway shows company store and typical hillside camp: photo by Lewis Wickes Hine, March 1937 (US National Archives
 

Scott's Run, West Virginia. Pursglove Mines Nos. 4 and 5. Scene taken from main highway shows typical hillside settlements. Houses shown are for supervisory staff. Camp one of the best on Scott's Run: photo by Lewis Wickes Hine, March 1937 (US National Archives)

Scott's Run, West Virginia. Pursglove Mines Nos. 3 and 4. This is the largest company of Scott's Run. Scene shows main Scott's Run Highway and atmosphere loaded with coal dust and typical of Scott's Run on any working day: photo by Lewis Wickes Hine, March 1937 (US National Archives)
  

Scott's Run, West Virginia. Another view of Pursglove Mines Nos. 3 and 4: photo by Lewis Wickes Hine, March 1937 (US National Archives)
  

Scott's Run, West Virginia. This building is a part of the abandoned mine buildings of the stranded camp of Jere. It is the exterior of the old fan house. The children are a part of a WPA nursery now functioning in the camp: photo by Lewis Wickes Hine, March 1937 (US National Archives)

Charlie Walsh: The Health Story

June 9, 2014, 9:50 am

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Calendar for Abietine Medical Company: artist unknown, 1893 (California Business Ephemera Collection, California Historical Society)

If you eat vitamins A, B, C, D, E, K and X
....................for the rest of your life
you will die.
......this is the value of poetry.

 

 Charlie Walsh: The Health Story (Alternative Press bookmark, 1971)

Vitamin Packaging: photo by Colin Dunn, 1 March 2010

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Dictionary pigeonholes. Alphabetised quotation slips for the Oxford English Dictionary: photo by Owen Massey McKnight, 11 February 2000
 

To help him in arranging the words and the quotation slips -- the crucially important pieces of paper that would be the project's building blocks -- [Herbert] Coleridge had a carpenter build for him, in oak, a small suite of pigeon-holes, to hold and permit the alphabetical arrangement of the various quotation slips that his volunteers sent in. The arrangement which he designed was six square holes high, nine across -- giving him a total of 54 pigeon-holes, with some 260 inches of linear space that were thought sufficient to hold comfortably between 60,000 and 100,000 of the slips. No greater number could Coleridge ever imagine his having to deal with. When they were all filled with quotation slips, he was heard to tell his fellow philologists, then and only then would it be time to start proper editorial work on the big dictionary.
.

'There are two beginnings in every year,' says an old Irish proverb. The Oxford English Dictionary had the first of its beginnings in 1851. And now, with James Murray's formal appointment in 1879, it was having its second almost twenty years later. But it was not quite so simple, getting matters under way again after so long a period of quietude.

First, there was the small matter of what everyone called quite simply 'the slips'. These were the quotation slips, the morsels of paper on which the brief -- but to a dictionary editor absolutely essential -- pieces of information that had been gleaned from all those years of volunteer reading of the core books of English literature, of the newspapers and learned journals and railway timetables and technical manuals and navigational almanacs and collections of belles lettres besides. Within the sentences that had been written on these slips, and which were waiting to be sifted and sorted and discovered by dictionary editors, lay all the subtle and not-so-subtle shades of meaning and sense of the various words that the quotations illustrated.

There were said to be something like two million of these slips already collected, tied together in rough order, no doubt covered in dust and lint, curled and yellow, and perhaps even crumbling themselves with age and decrepitude. It was already twenty years since Herbert Coleridge had begun to amass them at his house on Chester Terrace, and fifteen or so since Frederick Furnivall had entreated his scores of readers to 'copy and burrow' in the literature, to write out the slips, and to send them in to him to St George's Square. Some were therefore very old indeed, and by now a good number of those gentle readers who had collected them had perhaps not survived to see them put to use.

Many of those worthies whom Furnivall had appointed as sub-editors for individual letters had taken away their bundles of slips for sorting, and when Furnivall's attention settled on one of his other enthusiasms -- Amazonian scullers from Hammersmith teashops, for example, or practising with early English balladeers, or setting up Working Men's Clubs -- many had stopped working on them, had squirreled them away somewhere, and everyone involved had forgotten about them.

Most of the slips were simply half-sheets of white writing paper, each of them (if properly filled in by the volunteers who submitted them, though not all complied) with the headword -- or the catchword, or the lemma, as it is now commonly known -- at the top left, the date and author and precise source of the quotation that contained it written below, and then the quotation itself, either in full or in what the rules were pleased to call 'an adequate form'. Two million of such slips, weighing the better part of two tons, were in existence.

But where on earth were they? To begin work properly on his dictionary, Murray needed to find them, and given that the contract clock was running, he had to find them fast. Frederick Furnivall, it will be recalled, had entirely lost the will and concentration that was necessary to run the project, and quite frankly had lost track of all the scores of volunteers, the hundreds of thousands of slips, the pages of schedules and proofs and specimen pages and type designs and other details of dictionary assembly, such that the entire enterprise under his care had been reduced to a sorry shambles of decay and desuetude.

Simon Winchester: from The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary, 2003

Specimen quotation slips, from June 1879 Philological Society Appeal by editor James A.H. Murray for the assistance of readers in compiling the New English Dictionary (via Oxford University Press)

Such was the position of English lexicography in the middle of the nineteenth century, when the late Dr. Trench, then Dean of Westminster, who had already written several esteemed works on the English language and the history of words, read two papers before the Philological Society in London 'On some Deficiencies in existing English Dictionaries,' in which, while speaking with much appreciation of the labours of Dr. Johnson and his successors, he declared that these labours yet fell far short of giving us the ideal English Dictionary. Especially, he pointed out that for the history of words and families of words, and for the changes of form and sense which words had historically passed through, they gave hardly any help whatever. No one could find out from all the dictionaries extant how long any particular word had been in the language, which of the many senses in which many words were used was the original, or how or when these many senses had been developed; nor, in the case of words described as obsolete, were we told when they became obsolete or by whom they were last used. He pointed out also that the obsolete and the rarer words of the language had never been completely collected; that thousands of words current in the literature of the past three centuries had escaped the diligence of Johnson and all his supplemented; that, indeed, the collection of the requisite material for a complete dictionary could not be compassed by any one man, however long-lived and however diligent, but must be the work of many collaborators who would undertake systematically to read and to extract English literature. He called upon the Philological Society, therefore, as the only body in England then interesting itself in the language, to undertake the collection of materials to complete the work already done by Bailey, Johnson, Todd, Webster, Richardson, and others, and to prepare a supplement to all the dictionaries, which should register all omitted words and senses, and supply all the historical information in which these works were lacking, and, above all, should give quotations illustrating the first and last appearance, and every notable point in the life-history of every word.

From this impulse arose the movement which, widened and directed by much practical experience, has culminated in the preparation of the Oxford English Dictionary, 'A new English Dictionary on Historical Principles, founded mainly on the materials collected by the Philological Society.' This dictionary super-adds to all the features that have been successively evolved by the long chain of workers, the historical information which Dr. Trench desiderated. It seeks not merely to record every word that has been used in the language for the last 800 years, with its written form and signification, and the pronunciation of the current words, but to furnish a biography of each word, giving as nearly as possible the date of its birth or first known appearance, and, in the case of an obsolete word or sense, of its last appearance, the source from which it was actually derived, the form and sense with which it entered the language or is first found in it, and the successive changes of form and developments of sense which it has since undergone. All these particulars are derived from historical research; they are an induction of facts gathered by the widest investigation of the written monuments of the language. For the purposes of this historical illustration more than five millions of extracts have been made, by two thousand volunteer Readers, from innumerable books, representing the English literature of all ages, and from numerous documentary records. From these, and the further researches for which they provide a starting-point, the history of each word is deduced and exhibited.

James Augustus Henry Murray (1837–1915): from The Evolution of English Lexicography, a lecture delivered in the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford, 22 June 1900

Handwritten slips submitted by readers for the Oxford English Dictionary. These slips show illustrative quotations for 'cash' and 'emperorship', among other words: photo by Owen Massey McKnight, 11 February 2009

Emperorship: examples of usage, via Oxford Dictionaries:

• The only check on that power is the spasmodic eruption of pseudo-scandal, a brief orgy of blood-letting as used to occur between emperorships in ancient Rome.
• Helping him is Wu Yip, who has designs on the emperorship of China.
• In this way, the astronomical clock and the water mill became two different embodiments of the same emperorship in science.
  

James Murray (1837-1915), editor and philologist: photographer unknown, before 1910 (Oxford English Dictionary)

In March 1879, after a series of prolonged discussions, the Philological Society came to an agreement with the Oxford University Press concerning the editing and publication of what was now to be known as The Oxford English Dictionary (OED). After consulting several scholars, among them Frederick Furnivall, Henry Sweet, and the comparative philologist Max Müller, the delegates of the press offered the task of editing the dictionary to James Murray. He was invited to edit the material for publication in parts. It was proposed that he would be able to compile the successive fascicles with help from a small editorial staff while he was still teaching at Mill Hill School. Murray, estimating that the dictionary could be finished in ten years in an estimated 7000 pages, accepted. In fact the first fascicle, consisting of words in the range A–Ant, was not published until 1884, and the last one in 1928, forty-four years later. (Volume publication, collating the fascicles, also took place over this span of time.) In its final form the dictionary consisted of more than 16,000 pages.

Murray arranged for a workroom to be built in the small front garden of his house in which to store all the accumulated piles of illustrative quotations that had arrived over the years; it was also to serve as a suitable place for editing the dictionary itself. He jokingly called this building his scriptorium. Elisabeth Murray describes the initial chaos in graphic terms:

Many of the sub-editors had clearly found difficulty in packing up hundredweights of [dictionary] slips. Some were sent in sacks in which they had long been stored, and when opened a dead rat was found in one and a live mouse and her family in another … Many of the bundles had stood for so many years in unsuitable places that the slips were crumbling with damp and the writing had faded.

.

Throughout the preparation of the dictionary he had to endure what his biographer called ‘The Triple Nightmare: Space, Time, and Money’. The project was plagued by a lack of adequate office space in which to accommodate the editorial staff and their essential books, as well as the pigeon-holes for the quotation slips. There was also mounting pressure from the delegates of the University Press, who feared that the return on their investment was increasingly at risk because the dictionary was taking much longer to prepare than had seemed likely when the contract was signed in 1879. Murray felt persecuted by what he saw as harassment to accelerate the rate of completion of the fascicles.

Murray gave occasional lectures on the project, the best-known of which was the Romanes lecture, ‘The evolution of English lexicography’, which he delivered on 22 June 1900 in the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford. It gave an outline account of the emergence of interlinear glosses (some Latin/Latin, others Latin/English) in England in the pre-Conquest period, and the later transformation of individual glosses into classified and alphabetized lists of ‘hard words’, then into dictionaries of ‘hard words’, and finally into dictionaries of ‘the whole’ language, including ordinary words such as the definite and indefinite articles, adverbs, prepositions, phrasal verbs, and so on -- arguably the most difficult entries to compile in any modern dictionary. The scale of the OED was astonishing by comparison with that of any English dictionary published before the end of the nineteenth century. Murray had revolutionized the whole process by which the English language was mapped.

R. W. Burchfield (1923-2004): from ‘Murray, Sir James Augustus Henry (1837–1915)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004

Box of quotation slips submitted by readers for the Oxford English Dictionary: photo by Owen Massey McKnight, 11 February 2009

For no product whatsoever of reason... can last forever.

Dante Alighieri, Paradiso XXVI

Kennicott Collapsed Hospital. Every flood season, the river overflows and fills it with rocks. No really, the whole hospital is full of rocks: photo by Phil Ackley (Mr Lunatic Fringe), 29 September 2012

What is uttered at any time differs from language, as the body of its products; and before leaving the present section, we must take time to examine this difference more closely. A language, in its whole compass, contains everything that it has transformed into sounds. But just as the matter of thinking, and the infinity of its combinations, can never be exhausted, so it is equally impossible to do this with the mass of what calls for designation and connection in language. In addition to its already formed elements, language also consists, before all else, of methods for carrying forward the work of the mind, to which it prescribes the path and the form. The elements, once firmly fashioned, constitute, indeed, a relatively dead mass, but one which bears within itself the living seed of a never-ending determinability. At every single point and period, therefore, language, like nature itself, appears to man -- in contrast to all else that he has already known and thought of -- as an inexhaustible storehouse, in which the mind can always discover something new to it, and feeling perceive what it has not yet felt in this way. In every treatment of language by a genuinely new and great talent, this phenomenon is evinced in reality; and in order to encourage him in the constant labour of his intellectual struggle, and progressive unfolding of his mental life, man does in fact require that, beyond the field of past achievements, a vista should remain open to him into an infinite mass that still waits to be gradually unravelled. But language contains at the same time, in two directions, a dark unrevealed depth. For rearwards, even, it flows out from an unknown wealth that is still to a certain extent discernible, but then closes off, leaving only a sense of its unfathomability. For us, who receive light from a brief past only, language shares this infinitude, without beginning or end, with the whole existence of mankind. But in it we gain a clearer and more vivid sense of how even the distant past is still linked with the feeling of today; for language has traversed through the experience of earlier generations and preserved a breath of this; and these generations have a national and family kinship to us in these same sounds of the mother-tongue, which serve to express our own feelings as well.

This partly fixed and partly fluid content of language engenders a special relationship between it and the speaking generation. There is generated within it a stock of words and a system of rules whereby it grows, in the course of millennia, into an independent force. As we noted above, the thought once embodied in language becomes an object for the soul, and to that extent exerts thereon an effect that is alien to it. But we have primarily considered the object as having arisen from the subject, the effect as having proceeded from that upon which it reacts. We now encounter the opposite view, whereby language is truly an alien object, and its effect has in fact proceeded from something other than what it works on. For language must necessarily be a joint possession, and is in truth the property of the whole human species. Now since, in writing, it also keeps slumbering thoughts ready for arousal to the mind, it comes to enjoy a peculiar existence, which in every case, admittedly, can only hold good in the current act of thinking, but in its totality is independent of this. The two opposing views here stated, that language belongs to or is foreign to the soul, depends or does not depend upon it, are in actuality combined there and constitute the peculiarity of its nature. Nor must this conflict be resolved by making language in part something alien and independent, and in part neither one nor the other. Language is objectively active and independent, precisely in so far as it is subjectively passive and dependent. For nowhere, not even in writing, does it have a permanent abode; its ‘dead’ part must always be regenerated in thinking, come to life in speech and understanding, and hence must pass over entirely into the subject. But this act of regeneration consists, precisely, in likewise making an object of it; it thereby undergoes on each occasion the full impact of the individual, but this impact is already in itself governed by what language is doing and has done. The true solution of this opposition lies in the unity of human nature. In what stems from that, in what is truly one with myself, the concepts of subject and object, of dependence and independence, are each merged into the other. Language belongs to me, because I bring it forth as I do; and since the ground of this lies at once in the speaking and having-spoken of every generation of men, so far as speech-communication may have prevailed unbroken among them, it is language itself which restrains me when I speak. But that in it which limits and determines me has arrived there from a human nature intimately allied to my own, and its alien element is therefore alien only for my transitory individual nature, not for my original and true one.

When we think how the current generation of a people is governed by all that their language has undergone, through all the preceding centuries, and how only the power ofthe single generation impinges thereon -- and this not even purely, since those coming up and those departing live mingled side by side -- it then becomes evident how small, in fact, is the power of the individual compared to the might of language. Only through the latter’s uncommon plasticity, the possibility of assimilating its forms in very different ways without damage to general understanding, and through the dominion exercised by every living mind over its dead heritage, is the balance somewhat restored. Yet it is always language in which every individual feels most vividly that he is nothing but an outflow of the whole of mankind. For while each reacts individually and incessantly upon it, every generation nevertheless produces a change in it, which only too often escapes notice. For the change does not always reside in the words and forms themselves, but at times only in their differently modified usage; and where writing and literature are lacking, the latter is harder to perceive. The reaction of the individual upon language becomes more apparent if we consider, as we must not omit to do if our concepts are to be sharply defined, that the individuality of a language (as the term is commonly understood) is only comparatively such, whereas true individuality resides only in the speaker at any given time. Only in the individual does language receive its ultimate determinacy. Nobody means by a word precisely and exactly what his neighbour does, and the difference, be it ever so small, vibrates, like a ripple in water, throughout the entire language. Thus all understanding is always at the same time a not-understanding, all concurrence in thought and feeling at the same time a divergence. The manner in which language is modified in every individual discloses, in contrast to its previously expounded power, a dominion of man over it. Its power may be regarded (if we wish to apply the term to mental forces) as a physiological efficacy; the dominion emanating from man is a purely dynamical one. In the influence exerted on him lies the regularity of language and its forms; in his own reaction, a principle of freedom. Fora thing may spring up in man, for which no understanding can discover the reason in previous circumstances; and we should misconceive the nature of language, and violate, indeed, the historical truth of its emergence and change, if we sought to exclude from it the possibility of such inexplicable phenomena. But though freedom in itself may be indeterminable and inexplicable, its bounds can perhaps be discovered, within a certain sphere reserved to it alone; and linguistic research must recognize and respect the phenomenon of freedom, but also be equally careful in tracing its limits.

Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835): from On Language: On the Diversity of Human Language Construction and its Influence on the Mental Development of the Human Species, 1836; English translation by Peter Heath, 1999

Jönköping. Östra centrum och Kålgården: photo by Johan Larsson (sonicinfusion), 12 March 2014

As a living, socio-ideological concrete thing, as heteroglot opinion, language, for the individual consciousness, lies on the borderline between oneself and the other. And not all words for just anyone submit equally easily to this appropriation, to this seizure and transformation into private property: many words stubbornly resist, others remain alien, sound foreign in the mouth of the one who appropriated them and who now speaks them; they cannot be assimilated into his context and fall out of it, it is as if they put themselves in quotation marks within the will of the speaker. Language is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private property of the speaker's intentions; it is populated -- overpopulated -- with the intentions of others. Expropriating it, forcing it to submit to one's own intentions and accents, is a difficult and complicated process.The word in language is half someone else's. It becomes "one’s own" only when the speaker populates it with his own intentions, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention. Prior to this moment of appropriation, the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language (it is not, after all, out of a dictionary that the speaker gets his words!), but rather it exists in other people's mouths, in other people's contexts, serving other people's intentions; it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one's own.

Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975), from Discourse in the Novel, in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, 1975; English translation by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist

De mortuis (Dollville, Illinois): photo by efo, 29 September 2013

The Construction of the Tower of Babel (The "little" Tower of Babel): Pieter Bruegel the Elder, c. 1563; image by Quistnix! 2009 (Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam)
 

The Tower of Babel: Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1563 (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna)

The Second Temple

June 11, 2014, 10:19 am

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Page from Codex Borgia, pre-Columbian: author unknown, facsimile (British Museum)

At a dark portal between cosmic realms
A wizard found himself stood up by the Morning Star --
Evening his element as the Rain God's is water.

She who has the power of giving flowers
Promises everything is alive
As long as the night sky stays fresh and new.

"Only a moment here on earth.
It is untrue that we have come
To live here on earth."

On a golden dais laid over the broken stones
In the declining shadow
Between the rising of the Morning Star

And the setting of the Evening Star
The palace of the Smoking Mirror is built.
The second temple is not like the first.

 

Page from Codex Borgia, pre-Columbian: author unknown, facsimile (British Museum)

Page from Codex Borgia, pre-Columbian: author unknown, facsimile (British Museum)
   

Page from Codex Borgia, pre-Columbian: author unknown, facsimile (British Museum)
 

Page from Codex Borgia, pre-Columbian: author unknown, facsimile (British Museum)
 

Page from Codex Borgia, pre-Columbian: author unknown, facsimile (British Museum)
 

Page from Codex Borgia, pre-Columbian: author unknown, facsimile (British Museum)

Page from Codex Borgia, pre-Columbian: author unknown, facsimile (British Museum)

Page from Codex Borgia, pre-Columbian: author unknown, facsimile (British Museum)

Page from Codex Borgia, pre-Columbian: author unknown, facsimile (British Museum)

Page from Codex Borgia, pre-Columbian: author unknown, facsimile (British Museum)
 

Page from Codex Borgia, pre-Columbian: author unknown, facsimile (British Museum)

  

 Page from Codex Borgia, pre-Columbian: author unknown, facsimile (British Museum)

Page from Codex Borgia, pre-Columbian: author unknown, facsimile (British Museum)

Codex Borgia (facsimile): British Museum. Drawn by Agostino Aglio. Representation of Aztec culture; pre-Columbian; date of original c. 1500, made in Mexico; facsimile painted in Vatican City, 1825-1831; drawn on paper, height 25.8 metres (screenfold); width 990 centimetres.

The tracings of the codex are on two screenfolds. The tracing was commissioned by Lord Kingsborough and made by Aglio in the years 1825-31. It is published in vol. 3 of Kingsborough's nine volume work “Antiquities of Mexico ...”

 

Codex Borgia is preserved in the Apostolic library at the Vatican in Rome, Italy. It was constructed of animal hide and covered with a white plaster-like foundation upon which the figures were painted. It was folded so that it could either be stored compactly or opened to reveal all of the pages of one side. Codex Borgia features a page by page portrayal of the various divisions of the sacred 260 day calendar or tonalpohualli (toe-nall-po-wha-lee).Diviners used the calendar to foretell the future of children born under each of the 260 day signs. Codex Borgia was used by palace diviners, mid-wives, and curers as a means of invoking the prophecies of the gods.

Screenfold pages from Codex Borgia: image by Princeton University Art Museum

Mictlantecuhtli and Quetzalcoatl Ehecatl -- Codex Borgia. Aztec gods of death and wind. (Work in progress -- 1): image by Gwendal Uguen, 28 May 2012

 

Mictlantecuhtli and Quetzalcoatl Ehecatl -- Codex Borgia. Aztec gods of death and wind. (Work in progress -- 2): image by Gwendal Uguen, 28 May 2012

My Sort-of Vacation

June 12, 2014, 10:27 am

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 National Forest, Panguitch, Utah (Crown Graphic, Type 79, expired 03-2009): photo by moominsean, 11 October 2010

Distant mountains.  Near mountains.  More mountains; bluish beauties never attainable, or ever turning into inhabited hill after hill; south-eastern ranges, altitudinal failures as alps go; heart and sky-piercing snow-veined gray colossi of stone, relentless peaks appearing from nowhere at a turn of the highway; timbered enormities, with a system of neatly overlapping dark firs, interrupted in places by pale puffs of aspen; pink and lilac formations, Pharaonic, phallic, "too prehistoric for words" (blasé Lo); buttes of black lava; early spring mountains with young-elephant lanugo along their spines; end-of-the-summer mountains, all hunched up, their heavy egyptian limbs folded under folds of tawny moth-eaten plush; oatmeal hills, flecked with green round oaks; a last rufous mountain with a rich rug of lucerne at its foot...

 

A collection of a local lady's homemade sculptures, closed on a  miserable miserable Monday morning, dust, wind, witherland. ... Our twentieth Hell's Canyon. Our fiftieth Gateway to something or other fide that tour book, the cover of which had been lost by that time.  Always the same three old men, in hats and suspenders, idling away the summer afternoon under the trees near the public fountain. A hazy blue view beyond railings on a mountain pass, and the backs of a family enjoying it (with Lo, in a hot, happy, wild, intense, hopeful, hopeless whisper -- "Look, the McCrystals, please, let's talk to them, please" -- let's talk to them, reader! -- please! I'll do anything you want, oh, please ...").

Vladimir Nabokov: from Lolita (1955)

Rimforest, California (Crown Graphic, Fuji FP-100C45): photo by moominsean, 3 November 2011

Abandoned convenience store, Picacho Peak, Arizona (Crown Graphic, Type 53, expired 03-1995): photo by moominsean, 29 August 2010
 

 

Rain, Panguitch, Utah (Crown Graphic, Type 79, expired 03-2009): photo by moominsean, 11 October 2010

Grand Canyon (North Rim), Arizona (Crown Graphic, Type 53, expired 03-2009): photo by moominsean, 7 October 2010

 

Storm, Panguitch, Utah (Crown Graphic, Type 89, expired 02-2006): photo by moominsean, 11 October 2010
 

Rain, Panguitch, Utah (Crown Graphic, Type 58, expired 04-1993): photo by moominsean, 11 October 2010

Storm, House Rock Valley, Arizona (Crown Graphic, Type 79,  expired 03-2009): photo by moominsean, 11 October 2010
 

Abandoned tanks, Bisbee, Arizona (Crown Graphic, Type 59, expired 02-2006): photo by moominsean, 29 August 2010

Monsoon, Phoenix, Arizona (Crown Graphic, Type 64, expired 06-2004): photo by moominsean, 31 July 2010

Monsoon, Phoenix, Arizona (Crown Graphic, Type 64, expired 06-2004): photo by moominsean, 31 July 2010

Monsoon, Phoenix, Arizona (Crown Graphic, Type 58, expired 04-1993): photo by moominsean, 31 July 2010
 

Chiriaco Summit, Arizona (Crown Graphic, Type 79, expired 02-2004): photo by moominsean, i August 2011
 

Yarnell, Arizona (Crown Graphic, Type 79, expired 03-2009): photo by moominsean, 1 August 2011

A Little Mystery

June 13, 2014, 9:18 am

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Warren Woods path, trees and scenery. A man, Professor Frank Johnson (FCM or other institution?) standing near a tree. Part of the Wildflower Preservation Society trip series: photographer unknown, 1914; posted 17 January 2007 (Illinois Urban Landscapes Project /The Field Museum Library)

A nagging little mystery persists concerning what happened to the professor in Warren Woods. Were his eyes burned out by what he had seen? Or had he merely later become the victim of an insane, possibly vindictive photo-developer? And if so, when? And why?

Professor Frank Johnson in Warren Woods. Part of the Wildflower Preservation Society trip series: photographer unknown, 1914; posted 17 January 2007 (Illinois Urban Landscapes Project /The Field Museum Library)

"I have to ask, why are the eyes like that?" -- Kid Gibson."He ate the magic mushrooms." -- Hart Ryan Noecker. "The eyes were scratched out on the original glass plate. We're not sure why." -- The Field Museum Library

 

Was the professor -- and Is this really him, in any case? -- the only person left alive who had seen the woodsman dragging Snow White under the big trees?  Was he then the sole witness, or perhaps even, perish the thought, a suspect? Just what's going on here? And why? And is there any way out of these woods, when the mystery is over?

While we were musing idly over these several questions, some months passed. Seasons changed. Snow fell. Time reversed on its axis. Two years mysteriously went by in the wrong direction. More snow fell.

Footprints in the snow and trees in Jackson Park, Chicago: photographer unknown, 1912; posted 3 January 2007 (Illinois Urban Landscapes Project /The Field Museum Library)

"Who was walking alone in the cold snow? Did they have far to go? We'll never know." -- Retired at last

We all have our secrets. Not every life lies open before us like one of those old books, the kind that had spines and pages.

Could those be the professor's solitary footsteps, a man pursued, his desolate tracks in the snow?

Unidentified bird on a branch, possibly Northern Shrike. Jackson Park, Chicagos: photographer unknown, 1912; posted 3 January 2007 (Illinois Urban Landscapes Project /The Field Museum Library)

Plowing on heedlessly through the silent white medium, the blank unwelcoming snow, did the professor notice this little bird, exposed to the elements much as he himself now was, naked unto the world as he presumably was not, and all the same bearing up stoically? Would it have provided him a stirring example of courage amid adversity? Could those have been the professor's solitary footsteps, his desolate tracks in the snow, and we, so busy with our own pathetic affairs, not even having noticed?

Benches in snow and unidentified house. Jackson Park, Chicago: photographer unknown, 1912; posted 3 January 2007 (Illinois Urban Landscapes Project /The Field Museum Library)

Proceeding doggedly ahead through the pathless drifts, forgetting all traces of the backstory, would he have come upon these empty benches, this large unoccupied house, frozen in mute repose in the snow?

Herring Gull in snow. Jackson Park, Chicago: photographer unknown, 1912; posted 3 January 2007 (Illinois Urban Landscapes Project /The Field Museum Library)

Spying the tracks of that first-winter Herring Gull, probably just blown in off the Lake and at least as lost as he was, would he have felt he was not as alone in all this as he had supposed?

Herring Gull in snow. Field Columbian Museum building south exterior in distance. Jackson Park, Chicago: photographer unknown, 1912; posted 3 January 2007 (Illinois Urban Landscapes Project /The Field Museum Library)

Here a bit of orienteering experience would have come in handy. Taking his bearings on that hardy if somewhat confused bird, he would have glimpsed the cleared road, and beyond, the gleaming apparition of a citadel of knowledge.

Herring Gull in snow. Jackson Park, Chicago: photographer unknown, 1912; posted 3 January 2007 (Illinois Urban Landscapes Project /The Field Museum Library)

Displaying little respect for the things of the Mind, however, the gull hopped on gamely, and crossed the road. This would have posed a certain dilemma for the hero of the present tale. Keep following that bird, trusting it knows where it's going, and take the chance a search party, despatched some time earlier, might come marching along, armed and warranted to take in the fleeing suspect, by any means necessary, dead or alive? It would be understandable had the professor grown a bit desperate, at this point, upon these dire considerations. Wasn't there a Plan B to be found, hidden somewhere in one of those otherwise blameless drifts?

 

Chicago houses and backyard with an unidentified bird. (Verify if bluejay?) Possibly the Hyde Park neighborhood: photographer unknown, 1912; posted 3 January 2007 (Illinois Urban Landscapes Project /The Field Museum Library)

Can the professor then have stumbled on out of the Park into a nearby residential neighborhood, where he would perhaps have glimpsed a bird in a birdbath, perched atop a pile of snow?  What kind of bird would do such a thing? Was the professor in fact not a murderer but a birdwatcher after all?  And if so, what would have made us think such an unkind thing about him in the first place? Have we got the whole thing wrong, failed to read the signs all along? Are not all historical persons innocent until proven guilty, and after as well for that matter?

Warren Woods path, trees and scenery. Part of the Wildflower Preservation Society trip series: photographer unknown, 1914; posted 17 January 2007 (Illinois Urban Landscapes Project /The Field Museum Library)

---

Go West, In That Case

June 13, 2014, 9:02 pm

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Notice on Mount Bundy Station prohibiting shooting beyond sign, Northern Territory: photographer unknown, 1945, in Survey into possibilities of pursuing buffaloes in North Australia for export to liberated Far Eastern countries by Major Granger and Captain Peisley, Northern Australia, May-June 1945 (National Library of Australia)

Panoramic view of the main street in Katoomba, New South Wales: photo by EB Studios (Sydney, N.S.W.), 1920 (Enemark collection of panoramic photographs, National Library of Australia)

Panorama of Rose Bay bakery, Rose Bay,, New South Wales: photo by EB Studios (Sydney, N.S.W.), 1920 (Enemark collection of panoramic photographs, National Library of Australia)

Francis Birtles' bicycle and a thirst victim's grave in central Australia: photo by Francis Birtles, c. 1899(Francis Birtles motor car tour collection, c. 1899-1927, National Library of Australia)

Two dolls with a potted cactus, Cuppacumbalong, Australian Capital Territory: photographer unknown, c. 1893  (De Salis, Farrer and Champion families photograph collection, Australian Capital Territory and New South Wales, National Library of Australia)

Mascot on radiator cap: photo by Francis Birtles, c. 1899 (Francis Birtles motor car tour collection, c. 1899-1927, National Library of Australia)

 Wrecked engine from an R.E.8 aeroplane, France (likely to be an RAF-4, built by the Royal Aircraft Factory): photo by John Michael Joshua) (1893-1974), 1918 (John Joshua collection of World War 1 aviation photographs, 1915-1918, National Library of Australia)

 

Overturned train engine of the Brisbane Limited that crashed at Aberdeen, New South Wales: photographer unknown, 10 June 1926 (National Library of Australia)

 

Rescue crew clear wreckage surrounding the crashed Brisbane Limited, Aberdeen, New South Wales: photographer unknown, 10 June 1926 (National Library of Australia)

 

The Melbourne-Sydney passenger train derailed at The Gap, Salt Clay Creek, near Cootamundra, New South Wales: photo by William A. Nicholas or George H. Nicholas, photographers at Cootamundra, Cowra, Bundanoon, 25 January 1885 (National Library of Australia)
 

 

Group of Aboriginals at Chowilla Station on the lower Murray River, South Australias: photo by Charles Bayliss (1850-1897), 1886, in Views of scenery on the Darling and Lower Murray during the flood of 1886 (National Library of Australia)

  

The water tower and waterworks at Wilcannia on the Darling River, New South Wales: photo by Charles Bayliss (1850-1897), 1886, in Views of scenery on the Darling and Lower Murray during the flood of 1886 (National Library of Australia)

 

The dust storm is coming, early Broken Hill: photo by Ion Llewellyn Idriess (1890-1979), n.d. (Ion Idriess glass plate negative collection, National Library of Australia)
 

Sheet iron building at homestead, Flora Valley, Western Australia, during search by Les Holden in de Havilland DH61 Giant Moth biplane for Charles Kingsford-Smith and crew after the Southern Cross was forced to land in North-West Australia: photo by Norman Ellison, 19 April 1929 (Norman Ellison Collection of Australian 1920's aviation search and rescue activities, aerial views and people, 1914-1970, National Library of Australia)

Aerial view of small outback settlement [almost certainly Alice Springs, with Heavitree Gap and the Todd River visible in the background], Western Australia, during search by Les Holden in de Havilland DH61 Giant Moth biplane for Charles Kingsford-Smith and crew after the Southern Cross was forced to land in North-West Australia: photo by Norman Ellison, April 1929 (Norman Ellison Collection of Australian 1920's aviation search and rescue activities, aerial views and people, 1914-1970, National Library of Australia)

Aerial view of outback, Western Australia, during search by Les Holden in de Havilland DH61 Giant Moth biplane for Charles Kingsford-Smith and crew after the Southern Cross was forced to land in North-West Australia: photo by Norman Ellison, April 1929 (Norman Ellison Collection of Australian 1920's aviation search and rescue activities, aerial views and people, 1914-1970, National Library of Australia)
 

 

Small crowd with truck examining Les Holden's de Havilland DH61 Giant Moth biplane airliner G-AUHW 'Canberra' on a field, Alice Springs, Northern Territory, during search by Les Holden for Charles Kingsford-Smith and crew after the Southern Cross was forced to land in North-West Australia: photo by Norman Ellison, 7 April 1929 (Norman Ellison Collection of Australian 1920's aviation search and rescue activities, aerial views and people, 1914-1970, National Library of Australia)
 

Three camels walking across plain, Wyndham, Western Australia, during search by Les Holden in de Havilland DH61 Giant Moth biplane for Charles Kingsford-Smith and crew after the Southern Cross was forced to land in North-West Australia: photo by Norman Ellison, 19 April 1929 (Norman Ellison Collection of Australian 1920's aviation search and rescue activities, aerial views and people, 1914-1970, National Library of Australia)
 

Panorama of the site for Canberra taken from Mt. Ainslie. Landmarks and sites for future buildings handwritten in ink on image: "Queanbeyan Rd., Red Hill, Stromlo, Parliament House, St. John's Church, Molongolo River, Hotel Canberra, Acton House, Civic Centre, Black Mountain": photo by Frank H. Boland (d. 1955), c. 1910 (National Library of Australia)

Panorama of Canberra before the construction of buildings in the Northbourne Avenue, Ainslie Avenue area. Taken from Civic Centre showing Terrace Avenue on the left, Northbourne Avenue centre, Ainslie Avenue to right: photo by Frank H. Boland (d. 1955), c. 1920 (National Library of Australia)
 

Canberra Power House (1926 tour): photo by Charles Henry Taylor (1900-1984), 13 March 1926 (collection of photographs of Canberra before the official opening of Parliament House by Henry Taylor, National Library of Australia)
 

Sheep near Parliament House [Canberra]: photo by Albert R. Peters (d. 1969). c. 1940 (National Library of Australia)

Unidentified woman seated outdoors on a rug with tea set and books: photo by Sir Lionel Lindsay (1874-1961), c. 1906 (Sir Lionel Lindsay collection of photographs of family and friends, c. 1880-c. 1960, National Library of Australia)

Portrait of Norman and Daryl Lindsay: photo by Sir Lionel Lindsay (1874-1961), c. 1920 (Sir Lionel Lindsay collection of photographs of family and friends, c. 1880-c. 1960, National Library of Australia)

Josephine Smith digging a grave at the Drouin Cemetery, Victoria (1). Label: "Meet Mrs. Josephine Smith, aged 84, whose hobby is digging graves. She lives in Drouin, a typical little farming town (1100 people), in southern Australia, 60 miles out of the Victorian capital, Melbourne. ...": photo by Jim Fitzpatrick (1916-), 1944 (collection of photographs of Drouin town and rural life during World War II, National Library of Australia)

Josephine Smith digging a grave at the Drouin Cemetery, Victoria (2). Label: "Meet Mrs. Josephine Smith, aged 84, whose hobby is digging graves. She lives in Drouin, a typical little farming town (1100 people), in southern Australia, 60 miles out of the Victorian capital, Melbourne. ...": photo by Jim Fitzpatrick (1916-), 1944 (collection of photographs of Drouin town and rural life during World War II, National Library of Australia)

Portrait of Leah Notman, Drouin, Victoria. Label: "Leah Notman is a Drouin farmers's daughter. She plays the piano at the local dances and helps her mother with the housework. She has three brothers; no sisters. Her boyfriend drives a big milk truck; she usually goes with him for a drive in the truck on his Saturday afternoon circuit.": photo by Jim Fitzpatrick (1916-), 1944 (collection of photographs of Drouin town and rural life during World War II, National Library of Australia)
 

 
William Russell putting the four gallon monthly ration of petrol into a customer's car, Drouin, Victoria. Label: "Home town Australia. Drouin's biggest service station (there are two) is owned by a company consisting of 80 year old William D. Russell and his family. Mr Russell is putting the four gallon monthly ration of gas onto a customers car. Normally he employs 16 ... Sign is for the benefit of United States servicemen using the Princes Highway ...": photo by Jim Fitzpatrick (1916-), 1944 (collection of photographs of Drouin town and rural life during World War II, National Library of Australia)

Mrs Searle standing beside a road sign, London Circuit, Canberra: photo by Edward William Searle (1887-1955), c. 1949 (E.W. Searle collection of photographs, National Library of Australia)

A.J.M. Smith: The Archer

June 15, 2014, 11:45 am

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Twin Arrows, Arizona: photo by Philippe Reichert, 26 June 2010

 

Bend back thy bow, O Archer, till the string
Is level with thine ear, thy body taut,
Its nature art, thyself thy statue wrought
Of marble blood, thy weapon the poised wing
Of coiled and aquiline Fate.  Then, loosening, fling
The hissing arrow like a burning thought
Into the empty sky that smokes as the hot
Shaft plunges to the bullseye's quenching ring.

So for a moment, motionless, serene,
Fixed between time and time, I aim and wait;
Nothing remains for breath now but to waive
His prior claim and let the barb fly clean
Into the heart of what I know and hate --
That central black, the ringed and targeted grave.

Arthur James Marshall Smith (1902-1980): The Archer, in Canadian Forum, January 1937

route 66, twin arrows, arizona. nikon D80 + nikkor 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6G VR. NEF processed in lightroom LR4 + photoshop CS6 + nik color efex + alienskin exposure 4: photo by eyetwist, 28 March 2007

 

route 66, twin arrows, arizona.approaching spring storm at sunset. abandoned twin arrows trading post and truck stop, northern arizona.nikon N90s 28-105mm. cross-processed fujichrome RDP 100. lab: photoimpact west, santa monica, ca. scan: noritsu koki: photo by eyetwist, 29 March 2007

Twin Arrows. Twin arrows in the aptly named Twin Arrows, Arizona: photo by Randy Heinitz, 1 September 2013

Strindberg's Celestographs: A Nonmechanical Cosmophotography

June 16, 2014, 8:44 am

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Celestograph I (The Full Moon): photo by August Strindberg, 1893-94 (Manuscript collections, National Library of Sweden)

“I have worked like a devil and have traced the movements of the moon and the real appearance of the firmament on a laid-out photographic plate, independent from our misleading eye. I have done this without a camera and without a lens. [...] The photographic plate showed an area full of moons. Certainly, every spot on the photographic plate reflects a moon. The camera misleads as the eye does and the tube hoaxes the astronomers!”

-- August Strindberg: from a letter to physiologist Bengt Lidforss, 26 December 1893

"The celestographs or coelestographs are photos of the sky taken without camera or lens. The plates were directly exposed to the night sky for some time and then developed. The plates are now lost and only prints remain. August Strindberg thought he had captured the stars, so he called the photos celestographs.

"The series was taken during the winter of 1893-1894 in Dornach in Austria where Strindberg was staying with his wife Frida Uhl.

"Strindberg distrusted lenses and thought they gave a distorted rendering of reality. The celestographs were therefore an attempt to produce a more objective view of stars and planets. He sent the prints to the French Astronomical Society, where they were discussed."

 -- National Library of Sweden

Celestograph I (The Full Moon), verso: Strindberg inscription: "La pleine lune. Sans appareil. Exposées: 1 minute et 1 1/2 minute. Non-fixées! (The Full moon. Without camera. Exposed 1 minute and 1 1/2 minute. Unfixed!)": photo by August Strindberg, 1893-94 (Manuscript collections, National Library of Sweden)

 Celestograph IV: The Sun: photo by August Strindberg, 1893-94 (Manuscript collections, National Library of Sweden)
 

Celestograph IV (The Sun), verso: Strindberg caption:"Solen / Le Soleil": photo by August Strindberg, 1893-94 (Manuscript collections, National Library of Sweden)



Celestograph VI: Starry Sky: photo by August Strindberg, 1893-94 (Manuscript collections, National Library of Sweden)
 

Celestograph VI (Starry Sky), verso: Strindberg caption:"Stjernhimmeln / Etoiles": photo by August Strindberg, 1893-94 (Manuscript collections, National Library of Sweden)

Celestograph VII: Stars: photo by August Strindberg, 1893-94 (Manuscript collections, National Library of Sweden)
 



Celestograph VII (Stars), verso: Strindberg caption:"Stjernor/ Étoiles": photo by August Strindberg, 1893-94 (Manuscript collections, National Library of Sweden)
 

Celestograph VIII: Stars. Region of  Orion: photo by August Strindberg, 1893-94 (Manuscript collections, National Library of Sweden)
 

Celestograph VIII (Stars), verso: Strindberg caption:"Stjernor/ Étoiles / La région d'Orion (Stars / Area around Orion)": photo by August Strindberg, 1893-94 (Manuscript collections, National Library of Sweden)




Celestograph XII: untitled: photo by August Strindberg, 1893-94 (Manuscript collections, National Library of Sweden)
 

Celestograph XIII: untitled: photo by August Strindberg, 1893-94 (Manuscript collections, National Library of Sweden)
 

Celestograph XIV: untitled: photo by August Strindberg, 1893-94 (Manuscript collections, National Library of Sweden)
 

Celestograph XV: untitled: photo by August Strindberg, 1893-94 (Manuscript collections, National Library of Sweden)
 

August Strindberg with children. Swedish author August Strindberg with his children Karin, Hans and Greta in Gersau, Switzerland: photo by August Strindberg, 1886 (National Library of Sweden)




August Strindberg. Self-portrait of Swedish author August Strindberg in Berlin: photo by August Strindberg, 1892 or 1893 (National Library of Sweden)

Thomas Neumann: Springtime in Berlin with Agfacolor Neu, 1937

June 17, 2014, 9:28 am

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In the streets of Berlin (camera: Leica / film: Agfa Color Neu): photo by Thomas Neumann, 1937 (National Archives of Norway)

Tyskland (Berlin) (camera: Leica / film: Agfa Color Neu): photo by Thomas Neumann, 1937 (National Archives of Norway)

 

Decorated streets in Berlin, Labour Day (May 1st)/Berlin's 700th anniversary. Flags and banners with swastika, cars with banners. Driver leaning towards a car.streets of Berlin (camera: Leica / film: Agfa Color Neu): photo by Thomas Neumann, 1937 (National Archives of Norway)

 

Decorated streets in Berlin, Labour Day (May 1st)/Berlin's 700th anniversary. Large crowd, flags with swastika, maypole (camera: Leica / film: Agfa Color Neu): photo by Thomas Neumann, 1937 (National Archives of Norway)

Berlin Cathedral (Berliner Dom). Decorated streets in Berlin, Labour Day (May 1st)/Berlin's 700th anniversary. Large crowd, flags with swastika, maypole (camera: Leica / film: Agfa Color Neu): photo by Thomas Neumann, 1937 (National Archives of Norway)

 

Berlin Cathedral (Berliner Dom). Decorated streets in Berlin, Labour Day (May 1st)/Berlin's 700th anniversary. Large crowd, flags with swastika, maypole (camera: Leica / film: Agfa Color Neu): photo by Thomas Neumann, 1937 (National Archives of Norway)
 

   Decorated streets in Berlin, Labour Day (May 1st). Flags with swastika (camera: Leica / film: Agfa Color Neu): photo by Thomas Neumann, 1937 (National Archives of Norway)

 

Large crowds and decorated streets with Nazi banners, Labour Day (May 1st) in Berlin (camera: Leica / film: Agfa Color Neu): photo by Thomas Neumann, 1937 (National Archives of Norway)

Viewer comment (Mohammed H.), 2012: Woooaaah

Large crowds and decorated streets with Nazi banners, Labour Day (May 1st) in Berlin (camera: Leica / film: Agfa Color Neu): photo by Thomas Neumann, 1937 (National Archives of Norway)

Viewer comment (Tibor Kodal), 2012: What a great capture. And a very intimidating sight as well...

Agfacolor Neu: photo by Thomas Neumann, 1937 (National Archives of Norway)

Colour photography was made accessible to a greater audience in the last half of the 1930s. The companies Kodak (USA) and Agfa (Germany) competed in becoming the first to launch a method that would make colour photography with slides easy and cheap to use.
Kodak was first with their Kodachrome in 1935, and Agfa also patented their version in the same year, but the processing was very complicated. Agfa continued to work on their method, and in 1936 patented a colour film that was so easy to process that it could be made accessible to a large audience.

This new film was marketed as Agfacolor Neu and was accessible in the German stores from late 1936. Agfacolor Neu was thereby the first commercially successful colour film, and when the patent was released after World War II, the method was used by other producers. Kodak, on the other hand, had developed their own technical solution in 1937.

These photos are the first colour slides taken by an amateur photographer that we are aware of. In the spring and summer of 1937 the Norwegian engineer Thomas Neumann was an eager photographer of different motifs in Germany and Norway. The film he used was the first of its kind.


(National Archives of Norway)

Robert Walser: Sentiment

June 18, 2014, 9:13 am

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we used to have summers: photo by josefeggshunting, 17 April 2014

Whatever it was in plain sight

gave me fresh heart, if, nonetheless

it could not, being nature, give me rest,

soon it will be far away, outside.

I'll go without it then, this glow,
this ringing of the sounds and of the colors.

and with a passion sing of it. Somehow, as if

what's missing left me with a mystery,

its absence makes me love it twice over.

Once you have seen it with your inward eye,

a beautiful thing spreads beauty all around.

To dote on it, or want it back again, is wrong.

It walks along with you, kept well in mind.

RobertWalser (1878-1956): Sentiment(October 1927) from Thirty Poems, selected and translated by Christopher Middleton, 2012

murder of seagulls: photo by josefeggshunting, 17 April 2014

The First Hour

June 19, 2014, 8:45 am

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Pronghorn doe with fawns about 1/2 hour old at Up & Down Ranch, 10 miles northwest of Ft. Davis, Texas: photo by Helmut Karl Buechner, 28 May 1947 (Smithsonian Institution Archives)

Life, such a delicate thing. They will struggle just to stand, nor will things get easier later. Soon enough they will have to be able to run -- for it, for life, for their lives. Still, here they are, now. And they have just noticed us for the first time. But probably not the last.

 

Such a peculiar thing, to each its own, none more nor less important than any other one.

 

Life, such a harsh thing. Yet so companionable, from the first. It wouldn't harm a fly.

Pronghorn doe with fawns about 45 minutes old at Up & Down Ranch, 10 miles northwest of Ft. Davis, Texas: photo by Helmut Karl Buechner, 28 May 1947 (Smithsonian Institution Archives)
 

 
Pronghorn doe with fawns about 1 hour old at Up & Down Ranch, 10 miles northwest of Ft. Davis, Texas: photo by Helmut Karl Buechner, 28 May 1947 (Smithsonian Institution Archives)

Pronghorn doe with fawns about 1 hour old at Up & Down Ranch, 10 miles northwest of Ft. Davis, Texas (2): photo by Helmut Karl Buechner, 28 May 1947 (Smithsonian Institution Archives)

 

Pronghorn doe with fawns about 1 hour old at Up & Down Ranch, 10 miles northwest of Ft. Davis, Texas (3): photo by Helmut Karl Buechner, 28 May 1947 (Smithsonian Institution Archives)



Pronghorn doe with fawns about 1 hour old at Up & Down Ranch, 10 miles northwest of Ft. Davis, Texas (4): photo by Helmut Karl Buechner, 28 May 1947 (Smithsonian Institution Archives)

 

Pronghorn doe with fawns about 1 hour old at Up & Down Ranch, 10 miles northwest of Ft. Davis, Texas (5): photo by Helmut Karl Buechner, 28 May 1947 (Smithsonian Institution Archives)

Pronghorn doe with fawns about 1 hour old at Up & Down Ranch, 10 miles northwest of Ft. Davis, Texas (6): photo by Helmut Karl Buechner, 28 May 1947 (Smithsonian Institution Archives)



Pronghorn doe with fawns about 1 hour old at Up & Down Ranch, 10 miles northwest of Ft. Davis, Texas (7): photo by Helmut Karl Buechner, 28 May 1947 (Smithsonian Institution Archives)

Pronghorn doe with fawns about 1 hour old at Up & Down Ranch, 10 miles northwest of Ft. Davis, Texas (8): photo by Helmut Karl Buechner, 28 May 1947 (Smithsonian Institution Archives)

 

Hunter with Pronghorn antelope, New Mexico: photographer unknown, 1940s: posted by windryder, 11 August 2012

 

Pronghorn hunt: photo by Matt (mattphillips18), 18 August 2008

 

Pronghorn hunt: photo by Matt (mattphillips18), 19 August 2008

 

Pronghorn hunt: photo by Matt (mattphillips18), 19 August 2008

 

West Texas Pronghorn Hunting: photo by will_mccullough, 1 October 2010

Pronghorn evolved as creatures of vast spaces. Their white rumps, ochre fur and harlequin-striped faces camouflage them in tawny grasslands. They bound across plains at speeds unmatched by any other North American land animal. They can spot a predator four miles away. But these adaptations have not protected them from a mysterious population crash in Trans-Pecos Texas. What’s happening to them here?

Millions of pronghorn once roamed Texas’ western half, but overhunting and habitat loss sent their numbers plummeting in the late 19th century. The Trans-Pecos’ grasslands remained home to most of the state’s pronghorn, with the Marfa area having one of the highest densities in the southwestern United States. Trans-Pecos pronghorn numbers have been falling though since the 1980s, when they peaked at 17,000. Last year, they hit an all-time low of just over 4,700 animals.

-- Megan Wilde: Pronghorn in Decline: Chihuahuan Desert Research Institute, Fort Davis, Texas (2014)

 

 

Pronghorn, West Texas: photo by Circle Ranch, 3 September 2011

Desert Pronghorn, Sierra Diablo Desert, West Texas. These are pronghorn does in the desert. They have at least one fawn which we observed but could not photograph. The Eagle Mountains are in the background: photo by Circle Ranch, 25 May 2011

Pronghorn, Sierra Diablo Desert, West Texas: photo by Circle Ranch, 25 May 2011

Pronghorn in Sierra Diablo Desert, Texas, looking south to Eagle Mountains: photo by Circle Ranch, 7 July 2013

The Terrible Embarrassment of the Goalkeeper on the Crown Princess's Birthday

June 19, 2014, 11:01 pm

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TheBelgian goalkeeperVan deWeijerisbeatenagain,Netherlands-Belgium(9-3), Olympic Stadium, Amsterdam: photographer unknown, 11 March 1934 (Nationaal Archief)

 

 

Man cheering after the first goal, Netherlands-Belgium, Amsterdam: photographer unknown, 1931 (Nationaal Archief / Spaarnestad Photo)
 

 

A shot byWimLagendaal(right) runs wide of the goalof the BelgiankeeperVandenbergh,Netherlands-Belgium(2-1), Amsterdam: photographer unknown, 17 April 1932 (Nationaal Archief / Spaarnestad Photo)

The players ofthe Dutch national teamenter the field at San Siro Stadium, Milan for the World Cup match against Switzerland (2-3).Leading:Puckvan Heel,followed byFrankWelshandSjef vanRun: photographer unknown, 27 May 1934 (Nationaal Archief)

International match, Belgium- Netherlands (3-3), Beerschot Stadium, Antwerp. People shinnied up trees so that they could get at least a glimpse of the match: photographer unknown, 9 March 1913 (Nationaal Archief / Sparnesstaad Photo))

The Czechoslovak keeper parries aDutchattack.Czechoslovakia-Netherlands(0-3,aet),World Cup, StadeMunicipal, LeHavre: photographer unknown, 5 June 1938 (Nationaal Archief)

The Dutch team scores again against Belgium (9-3). Olympic Stadium, Amsterdam: photographer unknown, 11 March 1934 (Nationaal Archief / Spaarnestad Photo)

 
Dutch  player Bep Bakhuys bearing down on goal during Netherlands-Belgium match: photographer unknown, 1935 (Nationaal Archief / Spaarnestad Photo)

 
Soccer for the disabled. One legged-player plays the ball, Berlin: photographer unknown, 1935 (Nationaal Archief / Spaarnestad Photo)

Swiss goalkeeper Sechehaye in action between Beb Bakhuys (middle) and Kick Smit during World Cup match between Netherlands and Switzerland (2-3) in San Siro Stadium, Milan: photographer unknown, 27 May 1934 (Nationaal Archief / Spaarnestad Photo)

Keeper Gejus van der Meul ashamed after letting an easy ball pass through, during a special match in Heemstede, Netherlands on Crown Princess Juliana’s birthday: photographer unknown, 28 May 1969 (Nationaal Archief / Spaarnestad Photo) 

 

Ajax players' wives watching the European Cup Final (Ajax - AC Milan 1-4), Madrid.Right to left: Yvonne van Duivenbode, Maya Suurbier, Danny Cruyff, Andrea Swart and Carla Suurendonk: photographer unknown, 28 May 1969 (Nationaal Archief / Spaarnestad Photo)

Women's football, England - France (2-0), Preston, England. Team captains greet each other with a kiss: photographer unknown, 28 May 1920 (Nationaal Archief / Spaarnestad Photo)

  

Supporter "riots": the public floods the field, just before the match starts. 300.000 tickets have been sold for the 125.000 seats in the new Wembley Stadium. London, FA Cup Final (Bolton Wanderers - West Ham United 2-0): photographer unknown, 28 April 1923 (Nationaal Archief / Spaarnestad Photo)

Players celebrate Netherlands' 5-2 victory over Ireland with coach Karel Lotsy, Olympic Stadium, Amsterdam: photographer unknown, 8 April 1934 (Nationaal Archief)

Billboard advertising Netherlands-Czechoslovakia World Cup match, StadeMunicipal, LeHavre: photographer unknown, 5 June 1938 (Nationaal Archief)



Dutch football supporters in Milan for the World Cup match against Switzerland (2-3): photographer unknown, 27 May 1934 (Nationaal Archief)

---

Secrets of the Keeper

June 22, 2014, 12:03 am

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Adrian Mutu rounds the keeper (Brad Friedel): Tom Clark, 2006

I Vladimir Nabokov: The Flapping of the Rooks

 
Of the games I played at Cambridge, soccer has remained a wind-swept clearing in the middle of a rather muddled period. I was crazy about goal keeping. In Russia and the Latin countries, that gallant art had been always surrounded with a halo of singular glamour. Aloof, solitary, impassive, the crack goalie is followed by entranced small boys. He vies with the matador and the flying ace as an object of thrilled adulation. His sweater, his peaked cap, his kneeguards, the gloves protruding from the hip pocket of his shorts, set him apart from the rest of the team. He is the lone eagle, the man of mystery, the last defender. Photographers, reverently bending one knee, snap him in the act of making a spectacular dive across the goal mouth to deflect with his fingertips a low, lightning-like shot, and the stadium roars in approval as he remains for a moment or two where he fell, his goal still intact.

Rook (Corvus frugilegus), Siauliai, Lithuania: photo by Mindaugas Urbonas, 2007

But in England, at least in the England of my youth, the national dread of showing off and a too grim preoccupation with solid teamwork were not conducive to the development of the goalie's eccentric art. This at least was the explanation I dug up for not being oversuccessful on the playing fields of Cambridge. Oh, to be sure, I had my bright, bracing days -- the good smell of turf, that famous inter-Varsity forward, dribbling closer and closer to me with the new tawny ball at his twinkling toe, then the stinging shot, the lucky save, its protracted tingle... But there were other, more memorable, more esoteric days, under dismal skies, with the goal area a mass of black mud, the ball as greasy as a plum pudding, and my head racked with neuralgia after a sleepless night of verse-making. I would fumble badly -- and retrieve the ball from the net. Mercifully the game would swing to the opposite end of the sodden field. A weak, weary drizzle would start, hesitate, and go on again. With an almost cooing tenderness in their subdued croaking, dilapidated rooks would be flapping about a leafless elm. Now the game would be a vague bobbing of heads near the remote goal of St. John's or Christ, whatever college we were playing. The far, blurred sounds, a cry, a whistle, the thud of a kick, all that was perfectly unimportant and had no connection with me. I was less the keeper of a soccer goal than the keeper of a secret. As with folded arms I leant my back against the left goalpost, I enjoyed the luxury of closing my eyes, and thus I would listen to my heart knocking and feel the blind drizzle on my face and hear, in the distance, the broken sounds of the game, and think of myself as a fabulous exotic being in an English disguise, composing verse in a tongue nobody understood about a remote country nobody knew. Small wonder I was not very popular with my teammates.
 

Vladimir Nabokov: from Speak, Memory, 1950

Hilario/Andrade/Owen: Tom Clark, 2006

II Peter Handke: Looking at the Doorknob (The Angst of the Keeper)

"In the stadium I once saw a player break his leg," the salesman said. "You could hear the cracking sound all the way up in the top rows."

Bloch saw the other spectators around him talking to each other. He did not watch the one who happened to be speaking but always watched the one who was listening. He asked the salesman whether he had ever tried to look away from the forward at the beginning of a rush, and, instead, to look at the goalie the forwards were rushing toward.

"It's very difficult to take your eyes off the forwards and the ball and watch the goalie," Bloch said. "You have to tear yourself away from the ball. It's a completely unnatural thing to do." Instead of seeing the ball, you saw how the goalkeeper ran back and forth with his hands on his thighs, how he bent to the left and right and screamed at his defense. "Usually you don't notice him until the ball has been shot at the goal."

Denmark 0-Germany 1: photographer unknown, November 1940 (National Museum of Denmark)

They walked along the sideline together. Bloch heard panting as though a linesman were running past them. "It's a strange sight to watch the goalie running back and forth like that, without the ball but expecting it," he said.

He couldn't watch that way for very long, answered the salesman; you couldn't help but look back at the forwards. If you looked at the goalkeeper, it seemed as if you had to look cross-eyed. It was like seeing somebody walk toward the door and instead of looking at the man you looked at the doorknob. It made your head hurt, and you couldn't breathe properly any more.

"You get used to it," said Bloch. "But it's ridiculous."

Door handle with knob, Hotel Russia, Moscow: photo by Dsmack, 2005

A penalty kick was called. All the spectators rushed behind the goal.

"The goalkeeper is trying to figure out which corner the kicker will send the ball into," Bloch said. "If he knows the kicker, he knows which corner he usually goes for. But maybe the kicker is also counting on the goalie's figuring this out. So the goalie goes on figuring that just today the ball might go into the other corner. But what if the kicker follows the goalkeeper's thinking and plans to shoot into the usual corner after all? And so on, and so on."

Saboteurs with guns. Guarding at Lyshøjgårdsvej in Copenhagen, where the saboteurs' cars are placed: photographer unknown, March 1945 (National Museum of Denmark)

Bloch saw how all the players gradually cleared the penalty area. The penalty kicker adjusted the ball. Then he too backed out of the penalty area.

"When the kicker starts his run, the goalkeeper unconsciously shows with his body which way he'll throw himself even before the ball is kicked, and the kicker can simply kick in the other direction," Bloch said. "The goalie might just as well try to pry open a door with a piece of straw."

The kicker suddenly started his run. The goalkeeper, who was wearing a bright yellow jersey, stood absolutely still, and the penalty kicker shot the ball into his hands.

 Handke: from Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter (The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick), 1970: translated by Michael Roloff 

Mido/Ferdinand/Hislop:Tom Clark, 2005

III Albert Camus: Direct Access to the Cemetery
 

Yes, I played for several years at the University of Algiers. It seems to me like yesterday. But when, in 1940, I put on my boots again, I realized that it was not yesterday. Before the end of the first half, my tongue was hanging out like those kabyles dogs one comes across at two o'clock in the afternoon at Tizi-Ouzou. It was a long while ago then, from 1928 onwards, I believe. I made my début with Montpensier sport club. God knows why, since I lived at Belcourt, and the Belcourt-Mustapha team is Gallia-Sports. But I had a friend, a shaggy fellow, who swam in the port with me and played water polo for Montpensier. That's how one's life is determined. Montpensier often played at the Manoeuvre Grounds, for no apparent reason. The ground was bumpier than the shin of a visiting centre-forward at the Alenda Stadium, Oran. Quickly I learned that the ball never came to you where you expected it. This helped me in life, above all in the metropolis, where people are not always wholly straightforward. But after a year of bumps and Montpensier, they made me ashamed of myself at the lycée: a "university man" ought to play for Algiers University, R.U.A.

  

Tizi-Ouzou, panoramic view from Amjudh: photo by Said026, 2009

Yes, R.U.A. I was very pleased, the important thing for me being to play. I fretted with impatience from Sunday to Thursday, for training day, and from Thursday to Sunday, match day. So I joined the university men. And there I was, goalkeeper of the junior team. Yes, it all seemed quite easy. But I didn't know that I had just established a bond that would endure for years, embracing every stadium in the Department, and which would never come to an end. I did not know then that twenty years after, in the streets of Paris or even Buenos Aires (yes, it happened to me) the words R.U.A. spoken by a friend I met would make my heart beat again as foolishly as could be.

At full-back I had the Big Fellow -- I mean Raymond Couard. He had a tough time of it, if I remember correctly. We used to play hard. Students, their fathers' sons, don't spare themselves. Poor us, in every sense, a good half of us mown down like corn! We had to face up to it. And we had to play "sportingly", because that was the Golden Rule of the R.U.A., and "strongly", because, when all is said and done, a man is a man. Difficult compromise! This cannot have changed, I am sure.

The hardest team was Olympic Hussein Dey. The stadium is beside the cemetery. They made us realize, without mercy, that there was direct access. As for me, poor goalkeeper, they went for my body.


Albert Camus: What I Owe to Football, in France-Football, 1957

Zidane and Cannavaro: Tom Clark, 2006

Look Out Any Window: Alfred Henry Rushbrook, the South Side of Edinburgh, 1929

June 22, 2014, 9:12 pm

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Buccleuch Street no.125. Photograph of a four storey tenement in Buccleuch St. Ground floor with sign 'Wee Beer Shop' and 'D. Cuthbert' over door, woman and two children at door, two men at window. Little boy looking out of first floor window. Woman looking out of third floor window. Washing hanging out of third floor window. Advertisements on gable wall.

Oakfield Court. Photograph of a four storey Tenement in Oakfield Court, at the back of the building. The top storey window in the centre of the building is smashed. Below a child is looking out of second storey window at a group of three girls. In the foreground a line of washing is blowing about with a pram visible in the background.
 

25-29 North Richmond Street. Photograph of a three storey tenement building with shops on the ground floor. The shop signs are M Bullon Kosher Fish Restaurant and Cabinetmaker Joiner A.G. Heddle. On the left a bicycle has been propped against the wall and above a person looks out of a third floor window. To the right above the cabinetmaker a woman leans out of a second floor window.

9 Buccleuch Street. Photograph of a two storey building with shutters and bars on the ground floor windows. A lamp is on the left side of the building and there is a window box above. Two women are leaning out of different first storey windows and another is above in a second storey window visible over a line of washing. All of them are looking at the camera. On the far right a gate is visible at the end of the building.

12-14 West Richmond Street. Photograph of a three storey building with two shops on the ground floor. The two shops are J. Anderson and J.E.Trayner Wallpaper Paint. There are two men in the doorway of J. Anderson one wearing an apron. In a doorway in the centre of the picture there is a group of children, some seated. On the extreme right there is a small child leaning against the building looking away from the camera. There is also a dog outside J.E. Trayner. In the windows there are several window boxes and two people looking out.

Richmond Road to 21 Richmond Place. Photograph of a three storey buildings with people looking out of some of the windows. The shops on the ground floor are a fish and chips shop, a cold meat seller, and a boot polish merchant. A woman and child are talking in the doorway of the meat shop. Two women on the first and second floors are hanging a washing out.

 

3-9 Pleasance. Photograph of a two storey house with shops on the ground floor: a tobacconist's on the left, a newsagent's in the middle and a shop selling cooked meats. The latter, however, has a display of small bottles in the shop window. In front of the newsagents a number of headlines are shown on billboards, and Woodbine cigarettes are advertised on a sign above the shop. A woman is standing in the doorway of the tobacconist's, and a boy with a bucket is cleaning the shopwindow of the newsagent's.

 

14-18 East Richmond Street. Photograph of a three storey building. There is a shop with an awning on the ground floor, a sign in the window reads 'Famous Pies'. Outside on the pavement in the centre there is a group of adults and children and a dog. Some of the women have baskets that they may be selling. There are also three people looking out of the windows above the street.

23-29 Richmond Place. Photograph of a four storey tenement. Shops on the ground floor are General Dealer J.A.Masterson and Charles Greiner Wine and Spirit Merchant. Mother and child just visible in the fourth window of the top storey above the wine and spirit merchant. Below there are five men and two women standing around. There are also some people retreating under the archway on the left side of the picture.

76-78 St. Leonards Street. Photograph of a two storey cottage style house in the centre with flowers on the window sills of the top floor and curtains in all four windows. Somebody is looking out of the top left window. The left door is open. An iron ladder leads from the roof to the chimney stack.

 

2-12 North Richmond Street. Photograph of a three storey building with some shops on the ground floor. A man is looking out of a second floor window.

 

86-90 St. Leonards Street. Photograph of a two storey building with two women standing in the doorway and three boys in front. To the right, a women with children and a pram can be seen. Two people are looking out of a window on the third floor.

 

21-27 Gifford Park. Photograph of a three storey building with a whitewashed gateway in the left leading to a joiner's workshop. Two young people are looking out of a second floor window, and somebody is also at a third floor window.

17-21 Pleasance. There is a three storey building on the left with 3 children standing in a close. A child is looking out of one of the top floor windows. Most windows have curtains. The two storey building on the right has a cash store for fruit, vegetables and sweets on the ground floor. Two boys are looking into the shop window.

14-20 Gifford Park. Photograph of a three storey building with people looking out of various windows. Two boys are inspecting the window display of a confectioner's shop on the right. A woman is standing next to a whitewashed gateway. There are flowers on some of the windowsills.

 
83-91 Pleasance. Photograph of a three storey building with a fish restaurant and a grocer's on the ground floor. People are looking out of a second and a third floor window, and a girl is standing in front of the grocer's holding a toddler. Fruit is displayed in baskets in the shop entrance.

92-96 Pleasance. Photograph of a row of three storey buildings with shops on the ground floor. On the left, a hardware store has a display of crockery in the shop window and some baskets hanging in the doorway. A woman and three children are standing in front of the shop. On the wall of the left house are advertisment signs for milk and soap. Two children are looking out of a second floor window.

Photos by Alfred Henry Rushbrook (1867-1937) commissioned by the City of Edinburgh Improvement Trust to record the appearance of streets and houses in the south side of Edinburgh before slum-clearance demolition, 1929 (National Library of Scotland)

Desolate

June 23, 2014, 10:25 pm

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American Black Bear, Lincoln Park Zoo, Chicago: photographer unknown, 1900 (The Field Museum Library)

 

Unidentified monkey in cage, Lincoln Park Zoo, Chicago: photographer unknown, 1900 (The Field Museum Library)

 

Unidentified monkeys, Lincoln Park Zoo, Chicago: photographer unknown, 1900 (The Field Museum Library)

 

Male and female unidentified monkeys sitting in wood enclosure, Lincoln Park Zoo, Chicago: photographer unknown, 1900 (The Field Museum Library)

 

Polar Bear (Ursus maritimus) in cage, Lincoln Park Zoo, Chicago: photographer unknown, 1900 (The Field Museum Library)

 

Polar Bear (Ursus maritimus) in cage, Lincoln Park Zoo, Chicago: photographer unknown, 1900 (The Field Museum Library)

 

Visitors looking at Polar Bear (Ursus maritimus) walking along the floor of his cage, Lincoln Park Zoo, Chicago: photographer unknown, 1900 (The Field Museum Library)

 

Zookeeper smoking his pipe while feeding two bears who are standing upright, Lincoln Park Zoo, Chicago: photographer unknown, 1900 (The Field Museum Library)

 

Zookeeper smokes his pipe while feeding bears, Lincoln Park Zoo, Chicago: photographer unknown, 1900 (The Field Museum Library)

 

Cougar sitting on a ledge in a cage, Lincoln Park Zoo, Chicago: photographer unknown, 1900 (The Field Museum Library)

 

Cougar in a cage, two men looking in from outside, Lincoln Park Zoo, Chicago: photographer unknown, 1900 (The Field Museum Library)

 

Cougar in a cage with bars, Lincoln Park Zoo, Chicago: photographer unknown, 1900 (The Field Museum Library)

Cougar in a cage with several men and women looking at it through the bars, Lincoln Park Zoo, Chicago: photographer unknown, 1900 (The Field Museum Library)

Male lion, in a cage, Lincoln Park Zoo, Chicago: photographer unknown, 1900 (The Field Museum Library)

 

Lions, Lincoln Park Zoo, Chicago: photographer unknown, 1900 (The Field Museum Library)

 

Leopard in cage, Lincoln Park Zoo, Chicago: photographer unknown, 1900 (The Field Museum Library)

 

Tiger in cage, Lincoln Park Zoo, Chicago: photographer unknown, 1900 (The Field Museum Library)

 

Tiger in cage, Lincoln Park Zoo, Chicago: photographer unknown, 1900 (The Field Museum Library)

 

Tiger, Lincoln Park Zoo, Chicago: photographer unknown, 1900 (The Field Museum Library)

 

Zebra (probably Grant's), in outdoor fenced enclosure, Lincoln Park Zoo, Chicago: photographer unknown, 1900 (The Field Museum Library)

 

Emu, Lincoln Park Zoo, Chicago: photographer unknown, 1900 (The Field Museum Library)

 

Zebra and emu in adjoining cages, Lincoln Park Zoo, Chicago: photographer unknown, 1900 (The Field Museum Library)

 

Zebra [Grant's?], Lincoln Park Zoo, Chicago: photographer unknown, 1900 (The Field Museum Library)

 

Zebra [Grant's?]. A gentleman visits a zebra, which is in a caged area, Lincoln Park Zoo, Chicago: photographer unknown, 1900 (The Field Museum Library)

 

Zebra. A gentleman visits a zebra, which is ina caged area, Lincoln Park Zoo, Chicago: photographer unknown, 1900 (The Field Museum Library)

 

Camel. Hand of unidentified man pointing at camel emerging from a parted curtain, Lincoln Park Zoo, Chicago: photographer unknown, 1900 (The Field Museum Library)

 

Nilgai in outdoor fenced enclosure, Lincoln Park Zoo, Chicago: photographer unknown, 1900 (The Field Museum Library)

 

Kangaroo, Lincoln Park Zoo, Chicago: photographer unknown, 1900 (The Field Museum Library)

 

 

Wolf in cage, Lincoln Park Zoo, Chicago: photographer unknown, 1900 (The Field Museum Library)

Wolf in a cage with bars, Lincoln Park Zoo, Chicago: photographer unknown, 1900 (The Field Museum Library)

Wolf in stone walled enclosure, Lincoln Park Zoo, Chicago: photographer unknown, 1900 (The Field Museum Library)

Llama in outdoor fenced enclosure, Lincoln Park Zoo, Chicago: photographer unknown, 1900 (The Field Museum Library)

Deer in pool of water in their enclosure, Lincoln Park Zoo, Chicago: photographer unknown, 1900 (The Field Museum Library)

Yak, Lincoln Park Zoo, Chicago: photographer unknown, 1900 (The Field Museum Library)

American Bison, Lincoln Park Zoo, Chicago: photographer unknown, 1900 (The Field Museum Library)

Elephant in enclosure with roof and chain on its leg. Garden, benches, conservatory building and smoke stack in background, Lincoln Park Zoo, Chicago: photographer unknown, 1900 (The Field Museum Library)

Seals or sea lions, Lincoln Park Zoo, Chicago: photographer unknown, 1900 (The Field Museum Library)

Egyptian Goose, Lincoln Park Zoo, Chicago: photographer unknown, 1900 (The Field Museum Library)

Parrot, Lincoln Park Zoo, Chicago: photographer unknown, 1900 (The Field Museum Library)

White Pelican, Lincoln Park Zoo, Chicago: photographer unknown, 1900 (The Field Museum Library)

Black Swan, Lincoln Park Zoo, Chicago: photographer unknown, 1900 (The Field Museum Library)

Cranes, Lincoln Park Zoo, Chicago: photographer unknown, 1900 (The Field Museum Library)

Ostrich, Lincoln Park Zoo, Chicago: photographer unknown, 1900 (The Field Museum Library)

Pheasant, Lincoln Park Zoo, Chicago: photographer unknown, 1900 (The Field Museum Library)

Collared Peccaries, Lincoln Park Zoo, Chicago: photographer unknown, 1900 (The Field Museum Library)

Rabbits, Lincoln Park Zoo, Chicago: photographer unknown, 1900 (The Field Museum Library)

Ramshackle

June 24, 2014, 10:37 pm

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Untitled (Newark): photo by J Perez, 12 May 2013

William Carlos Williams: Between Walls

the back wings
of the

hospital where
nothing

will grow lie
cinders

in which shine
the broken

 

pieces of a green

bottle

 

William Carlos Williams: Between Walls (1938) from The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, Volume I, 1909-1939(1988)

 

Untitled (Newark): photo by J Perez, 17 September 2013

 

Untitled (Newark): photo by J Perez, 25 May 2014

 

Untitled (Newark): photo by J Perez, 25 May 2013

 

Untitled (Newark): photo by J Perez, 25 May 2013

Untitled (Newark): photo by J Perez, 25 May 2013

Common Goals

June 25, 2014, 11:08 pm

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Street football, Havana: photo by AL/EX, 7 April 2007

"The penalty kick I blocked is going down in the history of Leticia," a young Argentine wrote in a letter from Colombia. His name was Ernesto Guevara and he was not yet "Che". In 1958 he was bumming around Latin America. On the banks of the Amazon, in Leticia, he coached a soccer team. Guevara called his travelling buddy "Pedernerita". He had no better way of praising him.

Adolfo Pedernera had been the fulcrum of River's "Machine". This one-man orchestra played every position, from one end of the front line to the other. From the back he would create plays, thread the ball through the eye of a needle, change the pace, launch surprise breakaways; in front he would blow goal keepers away.

The urge to play tickled him all over. He never wanted matches to end. When night fell, stadium employees would try in vain to stop him from practicing. They wanted to pull him away from football but they couldn't, because the game wouldn't let him go.

Eduardo Galeano: from El fútbol a sol y sombra (Football in Sun and Shadow), 1995, English translation by Mark Fried, 1998

Havana I: photo by AL/EX, 2 March 2007

Shop, Santiago de Cuba: photo by AL/EX, 16 April 2007

 

Havana 2: photo by AL/EX, 2 March 2007

Havana: photo by AL/EX, 24 August 2007

Logistica, Santa Clara: photo by AL/EX, 2 March 2007

Agenda 21 (Havana): photo by AL/EX, 21 April 2007

Plantage (Havana): photo by AL/EX, 21 April 2007

Che monument, Santa Clara: photo by AL/EX, 2 March 2007

Che (Havana): photo by AL/EX, 2 March 2007

Che (Cuban postcard): photo by AL/EX, 15 February 2007

Oldtimer (Havana): photo by AL/EX, 21 April 2007

Oldtimer (Havana): photo by AL/EX, 21 April 2007

Havana: photo by AL/EX, 16 April 2007

Cementerios (Havana): photo by AL/EX, 21 April 2007

Cuba: photo by AL/EX, 14 December 2006

Cuba: photo by AL/EX, 4 December 2006



Sierra Maestra: photo by AL/EX, 13 December 2006



Cuba: photo by AL/EX, 14 December 2006