Outside a freak show at the Vermont state fair, Rutland: photo by Jack Delano, September 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
The barker had laughed, the pitch of it rolled out, on us, and I wondered if he was as drunk as he looked. He was calling the midget, cute, saying, a cute little fellow. He made a joke of it, looking at the women and laughing. Saying, who would like to take him home. There was laughing, they liked the joke, and he carried it further, sensing their tolerance, and played it up. It was the joke he seemed intent on making us remember, the cuteness, the idea of the women.
-- Robert Creeley: Mr. Blue (excerpt), 1951, from The Gold Diggers, 1954
-- Robert Creeley: Mr. Blue (excerpt), 1951, from The Gold Diggers, 1954
Poster advertising a side show at the Vermont state fair, Rutland: photo by Jack Delano, September 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
Poster advertising a side show at the Vermont state fair, Rutland: photo by Jack Delano, September 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
Poster advertising a side show at the Vermont state fair, Rutland: photo by Jack Delano, September 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
Poster advertising a side show at the Vermont state fair, Rutland: photo by Jack Delano, September 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
Poster advertising a side show at the Vermont state fair, Rutland: photo by Jack Delano, September 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
Poster advertising a side show at the Vermont state fair, Rutland: photo by Jack Delano, September 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
Poster advertising a side show at the Vermont state fair, Rutland: photo by Jack Delano, September 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
Poster advertising a side show at the Vermont state fair, Rutland: photo by Jack Delano, September 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
A side show at the Vermont state fair, Rutland: photo by Jack Delano, September 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
A side show at the Vermont state fair, Rutland: photo by Jack Delano, September 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
Barker at a side show at the Vermont state fair, Rutland: photo by Jack Delano, September 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
At a side show at the Vermont state fair, Rutland: photo by Jack Delano, September 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
At a "girlie" side show at the Vermont state fair, Rutland: photo by Jack Delano, September 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
Visitors at the Vermont state fair, Rutland: photo by Jack Delano, September 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
Visitors at the Vermont state fair, Rutland: photo by Jack Delano, September 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
Fortune teller at the Vermont state fair, Rutland: photo by Jack Delano, September 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
Trapeze artists at the Vermont state fair, Rutland: photo by Jack Delano, September 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
Tired visitors at the Vermont state fair, Rutland: photo by Jack Delano, September 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
Grandstand and parked cars at the Vermont state fair, Rutland: photo by Jack Delano, September 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
Tom,
ReplyDelete"WORLDS MOST FAMOUS TWINS"
"DAMES"
"CONSULT MADAM LILLIAN for a True life Reading"
-- something to look forward to in September, once upon a time. . . .
1.18
light coming into sky above still black
ridge, white curve of moon below branch
in foreground, wave sounding in channel
think of that, “figures and
more” record on paper
moment only this much, that
is, reference “itself”
silver line of sun reflected in channel,
waning white moon in cloudless blue sky
Thanks Steve,
ReplyDeleteMoon gone now in the frigid dawn, here come those ominous clouds... and they're tearing up the freeway feeder again this morning ("disabled access" walkway right smack in the middle of the Kill Zone!).
The photo series interested me for several reasons and from several points of view.
I saw the colour shots as capturing a rich golden warm light of the imaginal past (thank you Kodachrome), infiltrated by pathos (the "girlies"); and the black and whites as undermining all that by showing us the lurid details, the cruelty, the sensationalism...
At least the (wretched) humans on display in the spectacle had, ostensibly, some choice about being exhibited, whereas the animals, obviously, not so much.
Some fun, as used to be said.
The early Creeley story quoted in brief epigraph is a painful tale of public grotesquerie mingling with psychological torment (that of the narrator, of course).
RC writing a decade later, one state over, but pretty much the same deal as what we see here.
Coney Island Malebolge skulking toward Rut-Land to be born.
In propria persona -- horrific early memories of seeing Forties freak shows in Chicago came slinking back as I wandered through Delano's extensive files.
A New Yorker, musician/artist, son of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants, he seems to be viewing all this Yankee state-fair cultural data with a pretty hard eye, as from another planet.
(That's my last planet, up there on the wall...)
“figures and
more” record on paper
moment only this much, that
is, reference “itself”
Brings back memories -- I used to have show my heifers at the Richmond fair every fall. It was nuts, the whole thing--from the lead training of calves to to washing and shaving my heifer only to have it do a major dump and walk through it and then . . . to the wearing white and having my girl lick me and leave huge smears on my new white getup --obligatory for the show ring to the show itself where the judge would announce the defects of each cow and the assets --from head to tail with ample discussion of udders and legs . . .
ReplyDeleteWorse--after and between the show times, my one sister loved to go to the freak shows and being obsessed with the fat lady, would line up to see her again and again and make me see her, too, in exchange for a ferris wheel ride (being the youngest, I had to take bad deals) . . . And then there was the ride home when we would be so sick from the long day of cotton candy and sun and hotdogs--we all would be unable . . . We kept a bucket in the car.
Nin,
ReplyDeleteEerie, almost uncanny about those "amusement park"/fairground/"carny"-world cultural memories we still feel, acutely, when images like these trigger them, and the doubleness comes back again -- that tension between what is familiar as it was felt then, and extremely strange, or even awful, as we think our way back into it now.
That special kind of vulnerability or defenseless of a younger sibling, as you hint of it -- the being dragged along to witness/experience, and having to put up with, and then keep one's dumb/smart little mouth obediently shut about, spectacles of public humiliation and abjection, disguised as "entertainment -- probably amplifies the sensitivity in a real way.
There is that stage at which one is "taken along"; and then that later stage at which, out of ignorance, or curiosity, or in the grip of peer compulsion -- one goes voluntarily.
When I drift back in memory now, I shudder to consider some of the spectacles to which I was exposed at the "freak shows" attended in childhood -- the most vivid at Riverview Park in Chicago, which I remember as a kind of hell, with the summer pall of the stink of blood from the stockyards always hanging on the air, pervading one's nostrils, as one was admitted into the darkened tents, in which, on makeshift stages, one would see, for example, a woman, naked to the waist, with a foreshortened, flipper-like "third arm" protruding from the middle of her torso... one gaped in wonder, not quite taking it in... but having to pretend to.
And as for cotton candy, ugh, the worst. The cotton candy memories are all from the circus. Terrible sensation of being sick in the pit of one's stomach, in the car, on the way home, from eating too much of that disgusting pink spun-sugar floss on a stick, yech. Once in my grandfather's car, on the way back from the circus, this would be about 1945 or 1946 -- oh the horror, the big car speeding in traffic along Jackson Boulevard, necessity suddenly giving birth to invention, wrenching the passenger door open, being explosively sick, cotton candy and stomach contents pouring forth upon the pavement, all at about sixty miles per hour.
And then oh the inner chagrin, the embarrassment.
(And the total freedom from nostalgia regarding any of this wonderful compulsory American childhood stuff, now...)