George Santayana comments on a soldier

In 1944 George Santayana was 81.  He had been living in Europe since 1912, chiefly in France and Italy.  He had retired into the care of the Blue Nuns of the Little Company of Mary in Rome in 1941.  The Irish sisters took him in and he stayed with them until his death in 1952.  By 1944 the Allies, chiefly American, Canadian, and British forces, had fought their way 'up the boot' and liberated half the country from Mussolini.

He was able to weather the strains of fascism by keeping his Spanish passport and, although being raised in the United States, never taking citizenship.  He was surprisingly accepting of the Blackshirts.  By the war years he enjoyed literary fame and was comfortably well off due to his novel The Last Puritan.  He never married, but kept company with many gay and bisexual friends. In one allusion to his nature, after a discussion about A.E. Housman and his poetry, he said that "I must have been that way in my Harvard days - although I was unconscious of it at the time .."

Santayana at Harvard, 1886

With the triumphant ride into Rome by General Mark Clark and his Fifth Army, Benito Mussolini and his mistress Claretta Petacci fled north to Milan. Four weeks after the liberation of the city, Santayana was corresponding with George Sturgis and commented on a young Allied soldier who had found his way to the convent - and to the old philosopher.  It was still a time when people could seek out writers and sages and visit with them.  Sadly, it is the kind of pilgrimage that is no longer tenable.  Writers, some as celebrated as the Kardashians are these days, are protected by their publishing houses like sacred cows.

I suspect Bob was adorable (shy, as he notes) and George smitten in his old age with a younger man paying him a visit.  I do hope that Bob returned to Rome and took a walk with George among the stone pines and polished rubble of the Eternal City.

The TTC

Stumbling through the internet, I came upon this picture and realised that he was travelling on my city system.  The Toronto Transit Corporation was inaugurated in 1954 with a singular line running vertically, up and down Yonge Street.  These days it remains not a very large system if one considers New York, London, or Tokyo.  If it is a recent photo, he is definitely travelling on the east-west line (now called Line 2).  Line 1 (travelling north and south along Yonge Street) has articulated cars, like a long snake, not separate cars as above.  The difference in seating colour denotes accessibility.  The blue seats are for the elderly, pregnant, or incapacitated.  From the look of what is hanging so nonchalantly out of his shorts, he seems in quite good health. 

 For a few other recognitions, see here: PF and CH

Mobilis in Mobili

To fill the gaps these days, with what Williams said was 'to find in motion what was lost in space', I have started running.  I can't say that I am very good at it yet, but I do have the proper gear, a good pair of running shoes, and a wrist wallet to hold my keys (emblazoned with the Austrian Airlines logo, from a flying friend).  I know that I should run on the balls of my feet and not my heels, I know that the grass is better than the sidewalk - but that I prefer the sidewalk.  The funny thing is that everyone seems to be doing it now that the gyms are all closed.  Or maybe it's just me, maybe I am seeing things more closely that I never noticed before.  I have started to see the same people.  I have been bitten by a dog.  I have run in the rain and the snow.

I was warned by a friend that running is not like lifting weights, that cardio is a whole different kind of physical exertion, and he was right.  Regardless, I have made it my own.  I am not one of those plodders that tax themselves slowly with long distance.  I run around the park closest to our house.  It is a giant rectangle and one of the few parks left in the city with a pair of diagonal allées, mapped out when the park itself dominated a much more comfortably smaller Toronto.  I have chopped up my run into sections, three times the four panels that make up the rectangle, with short rests at each corner.  All in all, about two and half kilometres. I am not overly speedy, but as my old high school geography teacher once said when I saw him walking briskly, "It's better if you push it".  So I push it, I keep a steady pace.

I am noticing a lot more police cruisers circling the block and turning into those allées I mentioned, moving slowly like metal grey koi in a mirrored pond.  I see groups of yellow-jacketed constables.  They match the forsythia that, with the blue bells, are the first blooms to appear up here in the spring.

Last week as I approached the south east corner and my second break in the rectangle, I found myself in the middle of a medical drama.  There was an ambulance and paramedics attending to a homeless man who was flat on his back on the interlocking stones.  He had a large bump on the left side of his forehead.  When I was a kid I wondered if the drunks that I would see with black eyes got them in fights, but then later I understood the meaning of the term 'falling down drunk'.  Less romantic than fisticuffs in my 8-year-old head.

A few days ago I was again at the south east corner of my run, standing around and catching my breath.  Across the street I saw a tall dishevelled blond walking somewhat unsteadily on her clear and towering lucite heels.  She clomped across the street like an old mare, heading straight for me.  Eyebrows shaved clean, but not drawn in.  This then, is 'Dollar Bill' as I had been told.  She has been around for years and is lately a bit worse-for-wear.  "Excuse me, sir", she said plaintively and with absolute utter sweetness, "Would you like a blow job?  There is a spot I know around the corner."  Still slightly winded, I laughed as I bent over with my legs spread, arms akimbo.  The woman has absolutely no guile.  It was as if she were inviting me for tea.  "No thank you", I said with as much gentlemanly zest as I could muster, then I turned .. and ran.

Sean Zevran, care of Randy Blue, Mark Henderson, Raging Stallion, Falcon, et al

 

 

Blue boy magazine

Bob Mizer was cute

Here he is, probably around the early 1940s.  With his photographic work he launched AMG after World War II - and re-invented the 'Blue Boy' magazine.

Wilfred Edward Salter Owen

Owen was one of the most haunting literary figures of the First World War.  A voice of sensitivity and reason, stymied by his attraction to men, he suffered and died an unfulfilled man in a war that cut short so many young men's lives.  Where Rupert Brooke was the voice of the valiant Empire, all glory and sunset calm, Owen was a realist - he saw the horror, experienced it, and wrote about it plainly, beautifully, and tragically.  Unlike Brooke, he lived long enough to see the waste and futility of the conflict.  He was certainly the leading voice of his generation of war poets.

Owen entered the war with much the same gallant spirit that drove Brooke to write the enshrined and nationalistic poetry that secured his own war-time reputation, but the comparison ends there.  After being blown into the air by a mortar and landing in the remains of one of the officers in his company, his view of the war understandably changed.  He suffered 'shell-shock', better known today as post-traumatic stress disorder, and his real writing began after that.  He recovered at an army hospital, and there met Siegfried Sassoon, who was to be the major influence on his style and future impact of his work.  After Sassoon, his work became critical and experiential.  Sassoon's influence was very strong.  Owen once said the he was "not worthy to light his pipe."  Male beauty, shining imagery, gore and resignation are all hallmarks of Owen's work.  His fatalism is palpable.  Almost every poem reverberates with the foreshadowing of inevitable death.

Owen is gay by inference, rather than fact.  His poems, letters, social associations, and his remarks about Sassoon all lean toward a conclusion that he was a man who loved other men.  It was war, it was a different time, and certainly any presupposition of privacy or intimacy was impossible in the filth and watchfulness of the front - or in the pressure to conform at home.

Owen was a brave and resourceful soldier.  He was awarded the Military Cross in 1916 for taking an enemy dugout single-handedly.  But luck was not his.  While crossing a canal on November 4th, 1918, at the battle of the Sambre just a week before the end of the war, he was shot in the head and died on the spot.  He was 25 years old.

In a famous preface to a posthumous edition of his work, he wrote:

This book is not about heroes.  English poetry is not yet fit to speak of them.  Nor is it about deeds, or lands, nor anything about glory, might, majesty, dominion, or power, except War.  Above all I am not concerned with poetry.  My subject is War and the pity of War.  The Poetry is in the pity.

His was the complete antithesis of Brooke's literary legacy.  Where Brooke saw bloodless glory, Owen rightly smelled the stench of death - and told the world.

Virgil's Aeneid begins with the line "Arma virumque cano" or "Arms and the man I sing".  Here Owen succinctly changes it to reflect his own experience.

Arms and the Boy

Let the boy try along this bayonet-blade

How cold steel is, and keen with hunger of blood;

Blue with all malice, like a madman's flash;

And thinly drawn with famishing for flesh.

Lend him to stroke these blind, blunt bullet-heads

Which long to nuzzle in the hearts of lads.

Or give him cartridges of fine zinc teeth,

Sharp with the sharpness of grief and death.

For his teeth seem for laughing round an apple.

There lurk no claws behind his fingers supple;

And God will grow no talons at his heels,

Nor antlers through the thickness of his curls.

More Dugdale

The post highlighting the poetry of Lydia M. Child (here: Marius) included a photo by John Dugdale. The picture of the man in the water is the photographer himself.  In this series the second, third, fifth, sixth and seventh images are of Dugdale.

John Dugdale works in what could best be described as an antique style. He has done Tintype, Daguerreotype, Bromide and Albumen prints. He works with a large format camera from 1912 (8x10 format) and another from 1935 (11x14 format). The blue toned images above are Cyanotypes - a printing process that lends a photo a distinctive blue tint (called Prussian blue) due to the reaction of ferric ammonium citrate and potassium ferricyanide used in the process. It is the same process that is used for blueprints, the typical colour of architectural drawings and schematics. The third and last images are most likely albumen prints.

Dugdale contracted HIV and is now almost completely blind as a result of his condition. When doing nudes, which he does almost exclusively when photographing the human figure, he also strips down when he is shooting his subject. Assistants focus the camera for him and his subjects read his light meter for him. He, though, is the one with his hand on the shutter.