tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post5728486924125515034..comments2024-01-28T03:56:39.351-08:00Comments on TOM CLARK: "We've Been Blown Out": Dorothea LangeUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger17125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-9060266126074020252012-11-19T17:24:25.336-08:002012-11-19T17:24:25.336-08:00This is really interesting. I am doing a project o...This is really interesting. I am doing a project on Dorothea Lange and this info has been so helpful :)Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-57554197474004044812010-08-18T09:56:11.036-07:002010-08-18T09:56:11.036-07:00Marylinn, I guess I am pretty naive, but the respo...Marylinn, I guess I am pretty naive, but the responsibility question WAS on my mind, what there was left of it, in that unfortunate incident. But I'm afraid the question that was on the mind of the dog owners was not that of responsibility but that of liability, marked by their quick exit, as I lay in the sidewalk.<br /><br />I am at any rate left with the consequences to mull over helplessly, having paid the price for the crime of being an innocuous elderly city pedestrian.<br /><br />The personal of course seems very small in comparison with the scale of the drama Dorothea Lange could feel occurring as she met those blown-out people on the roads that day. One day can change the lifetimes of millions. To be in the middle of that sort of thing, sense it happening, feel shaken by it, and yet be able to record it -- I think that is what "momentous" means.TChttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05915822857461178942noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-27568923828103691772010-08-18T08:18:19.864-07:002010-08-18T08:18:19.864-07:00Dorothea Lange was the center of my thoughts until...Dorothea Lange was the center of my thoughts until I read of the senseless and terrifying dog attack you survived. Is a sense of responsibility being bred out of us or is that simply not taught anymore? I am glad that you are healing, but indeed, who needs more trouble?<br /><br />"The beginning of the first day of the landslide that cut this continent..." gave me chills and the remarkable combination of timing and awareness that led Lange to follow the story to its roots.<br /><br />One doesn't need to know a mule from a tractor to intuit the heart of the story. (Leaving you an updated comment to your reply on an earlier post.)Marylinn Kellyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02759437467691163658noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-23772524646395094452010-08-17T12:48:58.965-07:002010-08-17T12:48:58.965-07:00Thanks Ed. New wounds on old guys who should have ...Thanks Ed. New wounds on old guys who should have been carrying their canes (if only for defensive purposes) take doubly long to heal, you're always kicking yourself, over the bandages.TChttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05915822857461178942noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-91115985849502955192010-08-16T12:09:34.127-07:002010-08-16T12:09:34.127-07:00WOW!
several pit bulls around here.
they are ALL...WOW!<br /><br />several pit bulls around here.<br /><br />they are ALL MOUTH.. vice-like jaws and razor-sharp teeth..<br /><br />big chests chest and mouth take up 3/5 ths of their body..<br /><br />several pit-bull attacks an children being mauled/killed yearly..<br /><br />two pit-bulls attacked a little girl playing in her front yard awhile back... the 911 came by the time the police came another neighbor went over to the pit-bull house with a shot-gun and "blew them away"!<br /><br />these dogs that attacked you.... will do it again.<br /><br />they should be "put down"<br /><br />... no two ways about it!<br /><br />all dogs scare me... dogs are stupid animals<br /><br />almost as stupid as the owners who train them to shit in their neighbors' yards!<br /><br />scary stuff... I've been bitten twice... now whenever I walk the neighborhood I carry my cane... the heavy-handled <br />one<br /><br />as we get older well healing fresh wounds <br />takes longer...<br /><br />healing old wounds takes even longer..<br /><br />be wellEd Bakerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11285310130024785775noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-57271599569242995842010-08-16T07:47:20.064-07:002010-08-16T07:47:20.064-07:00Tom,
Sorry to hear of your brush w/ that mad beas...Tom,<br /><br />Sorry to hear of your brush w/ that mad beast (and its stonefaced masters), "mind-blowing" as Curtis says -- "we've been blown out". . . . Lange's "hostile situation" takes on some unintended meaning here. Meanwhile, this "attention to a picture" ----<br /><br />8.16<br /><br />grey whiteness of fog against invisible<br />top of ridge, green of leaves on branch<br />in foreground, wave sounding in channel<br /><br /> background under figure seen,<br /> when presence of object<br /><br /> to one in that, may withdraw <br /> from, place of material<br /><br />grey-white of fog reflected in channel,<br />whiteness of gull gliding toward pointSTEPHEN RATCLIFFEhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12339481653546188412noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-11689799392819631792010-08-16T06:04:21.035-07:002010-08-16T06:04:21.035-07:00"As if we did not have problems enough alread..."As if we did not have problems enough already", indeed. On Friday, I drove to Philadelphia to meet with some people at what turned out to be a nice sidewalk cafe on Christian Street, a sort of eclectic area I don't know well. While walking from my car to the restaurant (and then walking back), I passed at least four of these human-plus-attack dog groupings. The owners' weird anti-social intentions were unmistakable and the whole thing is mind-blowing, really. I was happy to drive away unscathed and wish to extend my belated sympathies. <br /><br />That being said, years ago we owned a lovely, petite Russian Blue cat named U. (We named her after U Thant, the Burmese Secretary-General of the UN, when we thought we were going to acquire a Burmese and later discovered -- to the amusement of some waiters in a Burmese restaurant -- that "U" was an honorific meaning "Mister"; "we are all "U", they told us). Once our neighbor’s son, Gregory, visited us to pick up something for his father. He brought the family dog, a Norwich terrier, and came into the foyer. U, who didn’t know any dogs, suddenly leapt out from under the dining room table displaying a sort of scare/warning cat behavior that I once saw illustrated in a book. The justifiably frightened dog and his owner recoiled and Caroline, who was just as shocked, yelled out “U-sie, U-sie, stop”. Greg looked at her and said: “You named your cat Uzi?”.<br /><br />By the way, should you ever have any legal questions, please just ask. I may know something useful.<br /><br />Back to Lange, briefly: she speaks so beautifully and eloquently.Curtis Robertsnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-28617525353837673692010-08-16T05:50:55.766-07:002010-08-16T05:50:55.766-07:00Damn, to train an animal to do something like that...Damn, to train an animal to do something like that. Very ugly. Devastating. How often these animals turn on their owners - people are stupid as well as vicious. Are you having the wound treated? Do take care of yourself.<br /><br />You're in my thoughts today.Issa's Untidy Huthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07352841590717991698noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-83916925181944067812010-08-16T05:23:07.730-07:002010-08-16T05:23:07.730-07:00Thanks for that, Don. You've got it exactly ri...Thanks for that, Don. You've got it exactly right. The dog was somebody's private weapon, without the safety catch. My mistake was breathing. My punishment is a knee that looks like minced meat. <br /><br />The two dames were pretty tough. Gazes of hard steel. I couldn't even get their names. They were gone, into thin air. This is what "community" means around here, now. <br /><br />As if we did not have problems enough already, like they say.TChttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05915822857461178942noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-55467677127007596982010-08-16T04:13:33.354-07:002010-08-16T04:13:33.354-07:00Tom:
How awful, what a horrific experience. Here...Tom:<br /><br />How awful, what a horrific experience. Here in the smallish city of Pittsburgh, more and more 'people' have these attack bred dogs and the owners eyeball you as you walk by, as if to just dare you to do anything (i.e. breath, which usually doesn't occur until a few steps beyond).<br /><br />I do hope you are resting comfortably and that you recover quickly.<br /><br />DonIssa's Untidy Huthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07352841590717991698noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-83313885814469569122010-08-16T01:13:43.640-07:002010-08-16T01:13:43.640-07:00Curtis,
The Lange interview I too found deeply mo...Curtis,<br /><br />The Lange interview I too found deeply moving. <br /><br />The original transcript is very long and the openness and candour on Lange's part disarming in the context of such formal public reminiscences. Extremely, surprisingly honest. She was in the last year of her life and struggling bravely with a condition we know from experience here to be very, very difficult. So there is a courage and directness in the interview that suggests a "last statement" disposition. Toward the end she talks in hard terms about the frustrations she had felt over the years regarding the resistance the FSA project met internally in government, the failure of the project to gain proper circulation, and, above all, the fact there had been in later years no continuity following upon what had been done. <br /><br />Coincidentally, in researching the life of the poet Olson some years ago, I had occasion to look into the workings of the various New Deal propaganda agencies, of which the Office of War Information (where Olson worked), which succeeded and effectively swallowed up the Farm Security Administration, was the most notable.<br /><br />It's apparent that the rough and ready spirit and relatively disinterested reporting methods of the photographers and other artists working in these agencies in the early war years was replaced, sometime around 1943, by a more tightly administered, generalized bureaucratic structure and a much more simply and baldly "patriotic" approach to image and word. <br /><br />Already by the last year of Lange's life her elegiac tone about the work that had been done is laced with some bitterness, in the implicit disappointment that less had been made of the files than might have been, and beyond that, that the project of recording America disinterestedly in images had died around the end of 1942 and never been resurrected. <br /><br /><br />(By the way, Curtis, sorry to hear about your lousy week. In fact I'd been thinking about you only a few moments before seeing your comment. Not that commiseration is ever of much use but ... a not so great week here either, in fact -- rather dramatically punctuated, in the now receding evening hours, in midst of one's attempt at slow innocuous perambulation of what passes for the "neighborhood", by the less than happy experience of being leapt upon, bitten and thrown to the ground by a sizeable and quite fierce canine of some evidently malign breed, while its owners, two adult females of the species homo sapiens, sat stonefaced in a cafe, clutching their other two canines, looking on. As the melancholy codger lay on the pavement bleeding, a passerby, pausing to assess the scene -- firetrucks, paramedics, police on hand by this point -- bent and said faintly, barely audible, "Hope you know a good lawyer, buddy". Curtis, it must be confessed that at that moment the name that popped into mind was... but then the next earth-to-self lightning bolt that immediately hit was, "wake up, it's not the New Deal any more, Toto".)TChttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05915822857461178942noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-6019477597272719872010-08-15T16:02:05.653-07:002010-08-15T16:02:05.653-07:00Lange's photographs and her remarkable exchang...Lange's photographs and her remarkable exchanges with Doud are brilliant and moving, beyond words and images. "We've been blown out". I don't know what to say, really. To hear that expression used literally...<br /><br />So much of today's and the week's news makes me feel blasted, atomized and disconnected from humanity. The Lange material and being here reconnects me.Curtis Robertsnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-91646785948176204722010-08-15T12:41:09.953-07:002010-08-15T12:41:09.953-07:00Thanks everyone. I too was moved by Dorothea Lange...Thanks everyone. I too was moved by Dorothea Lange's words (as well as, of course, by her photos).<br /><br />For those who didn't know, Lange was born in New York and came West to San Francisco in the 1930s. She worked initially for the Federal Relief Agency, then for the Resettlement Administration which in turn became the Farm Security Administration. <br /><br />She was first married to the painter Maynard Dixon, then to the UC economics professor Paul Taylor, who informed her views on the sociology and economics of what was happening in America at that time, and with whom she made that first trip down the California migratory work route as described in the interview. <br /><br />The Smithsonian interviewer, Richard Doud, who had himself grown up in the Midwest in the 1930s, at one point asked this: <br /><br />RICHARD K. DOUD: I'm not sure I can quite understand how someone who was born and raised in a city could do as sensitive and powerful a job of photographing these people as you did. I'm very sensitive to what you did, but I can't understand how you could have been as sensitive to the situation as you obviously were.<br /><br />DOROTHEA LANGE: Well, I declare, I didn't know a mule from a tractor when I started.TChttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05915822857461178942noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-45812412974423875202010-08-15T11:28:33.377-07:002010-08-15T11:28:33.377-07:00just driving home
listening to Jerry Garcia's
...just driving home<br />listening to Jerry Garcia's<br />rendition of Dylan's<br />"She's an artist, she don't<br /> look back"<br />a phrase which may explain<br />mainstream America's infatuation<br />with material success in later<br />decades following the Great<br />Depression...Certainly agriculture<br />has come along way with soil<br />conservation techniques<br /><br />it would also explain to the<br />poets of TC's generation who<br />rebelled against materialistic<br />ambitions, why their parents<br />were so hunkered down on<br />material success<br /><br />Simonize the car,<br />a light blue DeSoto<br /><br />DeSoto in real life<br />made it all the way<br />to where I live now<br />a concern of the<br />geography poets<br /><br />Dorn Irby<br />Geography<br />poets not<br />caught<br />in the draught<br />from the plains<br />as well<br />did tell<br />in occasional<br />starkness<br />the way looking<br />back and forwardElmo St. Rosenoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-71245099570590983762010-08-15T10:13:50.551-07:002010-08-15T10:13:50.551-07:00"this shaking off of people from their own ro..."this shaking off of people from their own roots started with those big storms and it was like a movement of the earth, you see ..."<br /><br />If one looks at this from a wholistic perspective, and Lange seems to have known it as quickly as that first family at the filling station knew their land was finished, seeing it in the mere space of her lifetime, one can only think not "what next" but "is there a next?" <br /><br />Immediately I think of Stephen Hawkings recent statement about how <a href="http://theweek.com/article/index/205943/stephen-hawking-humans-will-go-extinct-without-space-travel" rel="nofollow"> humans will go extinct without space travel</a>. Perhaps this is too much of a leap and yet ... what she is saying here about her art and the world is powerfully disturbing because it is so true.Issa's Untidy Huthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07352841590717991698noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-45790203930879413602010-08-15T07:36:54.565-07:002010-08-15T07:36:54.565-07:00Tom,
Great to see this, the words behind the pict...Tom,<br /><br />Great to see this, the words behind the pictures -- "the work you eventually did in the field . . . when you were out in the field". . . .<br /><br /><br />8.15<br /><br />grey whiteness of fog against invisible<br />top of ridge, crows calling from branch<br />in foreground, sound of wave in channel<br /><br /><br /> pictures of inspired picture,<br /> last week “in the field”<br /><br /> “time in which” this or that,<br /> i.e., the “punctual now”<br /><br />grey-white of fog against top of ridge,<br />line of pelicans flapping toward pointSTEPHEN RATCLIFFEhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12339481653546188412noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-30552883123125691382010-08-15T07:06:34.806-07:002010-08-15T07:06:34.806-07:00from "here":
"But you find your wa...from "here":<br /><br />"But you find your way. Sometimes in a hostile situation you stick around, because hostility itself is important."<br /><br />to this farther "here:<br /><br /><br />"One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you'd be stricken blind. To live a visual life is an enormous undertaking, practically unattainable. I have only touched it, just touched it. -- "<br /><br />I got tears TEARS in my eyes!<br /><br />not so much here photo-images but her attitude which to my mind's 'eye' sees ALL of our ... present arts and attitudes lacking...<br /><br />especially our written "arts" like poetry...<br /><br />which to me are ALL-SO "snapshots"<br /><br />after I blow my nose<br />and pee<br /><br />will track this book down <br /><br />ek cetera<br /><br /><br />"we was blown away"<br /><br />you know there are photographs of that actual cloud... when it first approached someone who had a camera! what was it called "Black Sunday"<br /><br />I wasn't gonna comment<br />however I was<br /><br />"blown away" by her words/answers/INSTANTANEOUS reactionsEd Bakerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11285310130024785775noreply@blogger.com