Eastman Kodak Company, “How to make good movies…” (1938)
The many faces of defeat
Invite you home:
They offer you such silence
As has no truck with time.
The face of horrid purpose,
The train of circumstance
There, the door is closed upon;
They shall no more advance.
Yet see in the uncertain sky
Above your uncertain station–
The sign she left you, passing,
Persists in affirmation.
— Ray Smith, “The Sign”
Charles O’Rear, “Train passengers bound for St. Louis, Missouri, board a chartered bus…” (1974)
To the couple that were kissing at the Greyhound Bus Station, July, 1981
You probably don’t remember me.
I was standing next to you waiting.
I was the guy with the guitar and the paperback copy of “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”.
You’re in your sixties now.
You’ve been married for 40 years.
It doesn’t seem possible
Because the sun is still reflecting off the luggage compartment door
And the driver is still getting impatient
And her blonde hair is still glistening in the late afternoon haze
And I knew I was going to be late.
— J.S.
cf. Australian Women’s Weekly Magazine (1948)
MY mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun…
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.
Photograph by Les Anderson via Unsplash
I WHISPERED, ‘I am too young,’
And then, ‘I am old enough’;
Wherefore I threw a penny
To find out if I might love.
‘Go and love, go and love, young man,
If the lady be young and fair,’
Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny,
I am looped in the loops of her hair.Oh, love is the crooked thing,
There is nobody wise enough
To find out all that is in it,
For he would be thinking of love
Till the stars had run away,
And the shadows eaten the moon.
Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny,
One cannot begin it too soon.
— Yeats, The Young Man’s Song
“You and Your Friends”, Blake (B.K.) Inc.
Thomas J. O’Halloran, “Medlars – new computer to keep medical information” (1964)
Now I’ve found my heaven
From the neck on up
You’re a perfect eleven
From the neck on up…
cf. Elmer Underwood, “Gossip at a wayside inn at Botten…” (ca. 1905)
And Benedick, love on; I will requite thee…
— Much Ado About Nothing
cf. National Geographic Magazine (1948)
EXERT thy voice, sweet harbinger of Spring!
This moment is thy time to sing,
This moment I attend to praise,
And set my numbers to thy lays.
Free as thine shall be my song;
As thy music, short or long.Poets wild as thee were born,
Pleasing best when unconfined,
When to please is least designed,
Soothing but their cares to rest:
Cares do still their thoughts molest,
And still th’ unhappy poet’s breast,Like thine, when best he sings, is placed against a thorn.
She begins, let all be still!
Muse, thy promise now fulfil!
Sweet, oh sweet! still sweeter yet!
— Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, “To the Nightingale” (excerpt)
National Geographic Magazine (1948)
I waited all night, I remember that
smoked a cigarette
watched TV
went out and saw some friends
drove by your house
went to a bar and had a beer
got back home and tried to sleep…
— J.S.
I knocked the phone off the nightstand
And the operator said, “May I help you please?”
and I said “No thanks, baby tonight there ain’t no help for me —
see I just had a bad dream, that’s all that’s wrong with me
see I just had a bad dream.”
Bob’s Love Affair (1915)
O my Luve is like a red, red rose
That’s newly sprung in June —
cf. Warren K. Leffler, “George Mason College, Va.” (detail) (1964)
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
— Hamlet
Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic
cf. Gold Bell Catalog (1963)
cf. Richard Avedon, “Carmen, Homage To Munkacsi, Coat By Cardin, Place François-Premier, Paris” (ca. 1957) and Horst Ehricht, “All the rage in Paris” (Maclean’s Magazine, 1977)
cf. Screen Magazine (2003)
BENEDICK:
Come, come, we are friends. Let’s have a
dance ere we are married, that we may lighten our
own hearts and our wives’ heels.LEONATO:
We’ll have dancing afterward.BENEDICK:
First, of my word! Therefore play, music.—
Prince, thou art sad. Get thee a wife, get thee a wife…
— Much Ado About Nothing
Library of Congress, “Reflection” (ca. 1910)
COME to me in the silence of the night;
Come in the speaking silence of a dream;
Come with soft rounded cheeks and eyes as bright
As sunlight on a stream;
Come back in tears,
O memory, hope, love of finished years.
— Christina Rossetti, “Echo”
W.E. Daugherty, “Solitary” (ca. 1904)
BEHOLD her, single in the field,
Yon solitary Highland Lass!
Reaping and singing by herself;
Stop here, or gently pass!
Alone she cuts and binds the grain,
And sings a melancholy strain;
O listen! for the Vale profound
Is overflowing with the sound.
— Wordsworth, The Solitary Reaper
I’m thinking of you Mary Anne…
cf. photographs of Frances Benjamin Johnston by Frances Benjamin Johnston (ca. 1888)
Until You Come Back To Me (That’s What I’m Gonna Do)
Esther Bubley, “Girl sitting alone in the Sea Grill…” (1943)
I’ve been made blue
I’ve been lied to
When will I be loved?
cf. Unknown, “Amateur Snapshot Album” (1890–92)
Many and many a verse I hope to write,
Before the daisies, vermeil rimm’d and white,
Hide in deep herbage; and ere yet the bees
Hum about globes of clover and sweet peas,
I must be near the middle of my story.
O may no wintry season, bare and hoary,
See it half finish’d: but let Autumn bold,
With universal tinge of sober gold,
Be all about me when I make an end.
And now, at once adventuresome, I send
My herald thought into a wilderness:
There let its trumpet blow, and quickly dress
My uncertain path with green, that I may speed
Easily onward, thorough flowers and weed.
— Keats, Endymion
George A. Alsop, “Sweet Memories” (ca. 1917)
NOT from the stars do I my judgment pluck
And yet methinks I have astronomy,
But not to tell of good or evil luck,
Of plagues, of dearths, or seasons’ quality;
Nor can I fortune to brief minutes tell,
Pointing to each his thunder, rain, and wind,
Or say with princes if it shall go well,
By oft predict that I in heaven find:
But from thine eyes my knowledge I derive,
And, constant stars, in them I read such art…
— Sonnet XIV
cf. Schlesinger Library, “Midnight pranks of college girls” (1903)
But you can’t see you’re still running wild
Oh Madalaine!
Now don’t run away from me…
National Geographic, 1969
Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more.
Men were deceivers ever,
One foot in sea, and one on shore,
To one thing constant never.
Then sigh not so, but let them go,
And be you blithe and bonny,
Converting all your sounds of woe
Into hey nonny, nonny.
— Much Ado About Nothing
J.M. Bridges, “Left Ashore” (ca. 1935)
Mrs. W. M. Gatch, “Waiting for the train” (ca. 1893)
Midnight Train To Georgia by Gladys Knight & The Pips
Educational Screen And AudioVisual Guide, 1959
I SING the body electric,
The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,
They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,
And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the
soul.
— Leaves of Grass
Lynn Pelham, “A public machine vends customers’ blood pressure for 25¢” (LIFE, 1960)
Educational Screen Magazine, 1954
Sometimes she tries to hide it from me
But when she starts talking over my head
It makes me dizzy…
cf. Underwood & Underwood, “Bluff Island…” (ca. 1900)
I almost wish we were butterflies and liv’d but three summer days — three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain.
— letter from John Keats to Fanny Brawne, July 1, 1819
The U.S. National Archives, “A youngster, clutching his soldier father, gazes upward while the latter lifts his wife from the ground to wish her a ‘Merry Christmas.’ The serviceman is one of those fortunate enough to be able to get home for the holidays.” (December, 1944)
Anna Curtis Chandler & Irene F. Cypher, “Audio-Visual Techniques For Enrichment Of The Curriculum” (1948)
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Mendelevium.
cf. photograph by evalynn via Pixabay (edited)
Tuesday, September 25, 2018
Betimes I found myself alive again and in downtown London.
And so to the office but I greatly found large crowds about and lost my way and strange moving carriages betimes almost hit me and large houses and great noises all about me so that I could not even collect my thoughts and so lost my wits and many strangers who were moving greatly fast and past me in the streets.
And so to bed. I miss my wife.
— J.S.
(cf. Diary of Samuel Pepys)
The Saint and the Singer (1914)
“What are you going to do?” Hans Castorp asked, flabbergasted.
“I am leaving,” she repeated, smiling in apparent amazement at the frozen look on his face.
“It’s not possible,” he said. “You’re joking.”
“Most certainly not. I am perfectly serious. I am leaving…”
A whole world was collapsing inside him.
— The Magic Mountain
If Ever You’re In My Arms Again
Just Mother (1914)
How say you? Let us, O my dove,
Let us be unashamed of soul,
As earth lies bare to heaven above!
How is it under our control
To love or not to love?
— Robert Browning, Two in the Campagna (excerpt)
Ladies’ Home Journal, 1948
And what is love? It is a doll dress’d up
For idleness to cosset, nurse, and dandle;
A thing of soft misnomers, so divine
That silly youth doth think to make itself
Divine by loving, and so goes on
Yawning and doting a whole summer long…
— Keats, Modern Love (excerpt)
cf. G. W. Thorne/London Stereoscopic Company, “The Bashful Lover” (hand-colored) (ca. 1860-1870)
cf. photograph by freestocks-photos via Pixabay (edit)
cf. Home Movie
He was standing with her in the cold, looking in through a grated window at a man making bottles in a roaring furnace. It was very cold. Her face, fragrant in the cold air, was quite close to his; and suddenly he called out to the man at the furnace:
“Is the fire hot, sir?”
But the man could not hear with the noise of the furnace. It was just as well. He might have answered rudely.
— Joyce, The Dead
“I Want To Know What Love Is” by Foreigner
LIFE, 1970
Who will in fairest book of nature know
How virtue may best lodg’d in beauty be,
Let him but learn of love to read in thee,
Stella, those fair lines which true goodness show.
There shall he find all vices’ overthrow,
Not by rude force, but sweetest sovereignty
Of reason, from whose light those night-birds fly;
That inward sun in thine eyes shineth so.
And, not content to be perfection’s heir
Thyself, dost strive all minds that way to move,
Who mark in thee what is in thee most fair.
So while thy beauty draws thy heart to love,
As fast thy virtue bends that love to good:
But “Ah,” Desire still cries, “Give me some food!”
— Sir Philip Sidney, Astrophil and Stella 71: “Who will in fairest book of nature know”
cf. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, “Man sitting with dog on front porch as woman looks through door…” (between 1860 and 1930)
“Move It On Over” — George Thorogood and the Destroyers
cf. Thomas A. Morgan, “After The Dip” (edit) (ca. 1904)
And all those acts which Deity supreme
Doth ease its heart of love in.—I am gone
Away from my own bosom: I have left
My strong identity, my real self,
Somewhere between the throne, and where I sit
Here on this spot of earth. Search, Thea, search!
Open thine eyes eterne, and sphere them round
Upon all space: space starr’d, and lorn of light;
Space region’d with life-air; and barren void;
Spaces of fire, and all the yawn of hell.—
Search, Thea, search! and tell me, if thou seest
A certain shape or shadow, making way
With wings or chariot fierce to repossess
A heaven he lost erewhile…
—John Keats, Hyperion
“Missing” by Everything But The Girl
Billy Rose Theatre Division, “Harvest” (1913)
Newman uttered one of the least attenuated imprecations that had ever passed his lips…
—Henry James, The American
cf. Finnish Museum of Photography, “Osuusliike Mäki-Matin uuden liikekeskuksen ravintolasali.” (1958)
fluorescence
a long time ago
someone told me
reflected light waves travel out into space
eternally
if you turn around
from someplace far away
you will see
the past
again
eternally
now
I understand
—J.S.
“Sweet Baby” – George Duke / Stanley Clarke
Missouri Historical Society, “Capturing the City: Photographs from the Streets of St. Louis, 1900–1930 — Strand Motion Picture Theater entrance at 419 North Sixth Street featuring advertisement for the movie “Bootles’ Baby,” 1915. The large colorful poster catches the attention of the woman passing at far right.” (detail)
Darling, I’ve nearly sat it off in the Strand to-day and all because W.E. Lawrence of the Movies is your physical counter-part. So I was informed by half a dozen girls before I could slam on a hat and see for myself—He made me so homesick…
—letter from Zelda Fitzgerald to F. Scott Fitzgerald, March, 1919
Doug Cronk, “Supervalu Supermarket…” (1952)
What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon.
In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
Allen Ginsberg, A Supermarket in California (excerpt)
The Clash – “Lost in the Supermarket“
The Finnish Museum of Photography, “A customer ascending to the fabrics department of Kyminlaakso cooperative’s new department store.” (1961)
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang…
—Sonnet LXXIII
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, “Youth at a restaurant night club…” (ca. 1941)
accompagnato
Scarlatti went to dinner with
Scriabin and Rameau
and at the table next to them were
Schoenberg and MilhaudScarlatti sang 440 “A”
to catch the waiter’s ear
Arnold sang eleven more
and Webern drank his beer
—J.S.
Finnish Museum of Photography, “Autoja ylittämässä salmea lossilla…” (1959)
I on my horse, and Love on me, doth try
Our horsemanships…
—Sir Philip Sidney, “Astrophil and Stella 49”
cf. The Finnish Museum of Photography, “Osuustukkukaupan osasto Elintarvikemessuilla Messuhallissa.” (1950) (edited detail)
cf. LIFE, 1964
Esther Bubley, “Jitterbugs…” (detail) (1943)
John Sapiro 