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.

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.

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.

Blue boy magazine

City of Men by Donald Rawley

I am in love in a city of men.

Men who grab
my backward glance
with the threatened beat
of their breath,
men whose nights
are convenient and sly.
Men with mirrored glasses and rifles
laughing on the freeway,
men who punch the air with
their angry sex
men with the squint of a hyena.

This is my city
And I smoke cigarettes like convicts.

My men are as peerless as dukes
with the static strength of statues,
with their cocks in hand
tempting fate
and the hair on their bellies a warning.
My men are prudent with joy,
men who discard love and memory
when their sight
has big muscle and hair
Men who allow me crime and melancholy.
Men who allow me nothing.
I take it all like barbiturates
and I am in a sleep of men.
Men who disorient me.
They take my eyes like dice.
I study their buttocks
with the greed of a child.

Men. I can be a vanishing act.

Men who know how to smoke a cigarette
without women's fingers,
men who understand their role.
Men with caked hair
under their arms,
men with pink skin and a lisp,
beautiful men with histories and gifts
as constant as a fine bell.

Men who die for no reason.
Men who have a white light
like Valentino or Clara Bow,
the light moths
kill themselves for,
the white light that makes me
sit up and blink like a child,
a pupil
a student of men's eyes
lit with candles and starch,
a congregation of men
who are fireflies and saints.

Men are as kind as
any animal who can steal.
As kind as your sexual history of Mexico
with your men reeling with tequila.
Men who smell as fine as dirt
and the salty perfume of paid sex,
men who allow their semen
to run through every channel.

Men. I can touch their palms when I dream.

Young men with still perfect limbs,
ex-husbands in loud sweaters
groomed men with clenched teeth
who hover in packs
beyond the shotgun eyes
of deserted women,
fat men with a comic's sweat and ripe hands,
tired men sitting on safe settees
full of bibles and loss
beyond the dull swipe
of rolled lawns,
men who make with piety
canonized in a frenzy of flesh,
men who masturbate their lives
so that every daylight
becomes their own private keyhole.

Men with cars for girlfriends,
men who live in air-conditioned ruins
choking with ghosts and fearing rain,
men who slam doors and telephones
men who have secrets and money
and clean nails,
black men with skin
like wet grapes
and teeth like winter clouds,
drunk men who walk like dancing bears
old men with wrinkled, ruined cocks
that peek out like rummy sailors,
men whose skin accumulates layers
like a granite shelf,
men with twisted veins like
Monterey pines running down
their clenched arms and spread legs.

Men whose lust is hurried and benign,
men whose lips are a crime,
men who are boys that play
with black leather and vaseline,
boys who shadow box their
fancy passions in alleys
and steam rooms until dawn.
Men who ride horses naked in the desert.
Men who surrender nothing.

Men with the pinched faces of thin air,
staring out of buildings
so high they can only see mountains
they do not understand.
Men in average blue suits
with wives in another state,
men with the laughter of poets
running elevators and pumping gas
with delicious, cracked large dry lips,
smoking unfiltered Pall Malls
and scratching their asses.

These are the men with the rhythm of
my city's white light,
men whose eyes are lit by gin and possibilities,
men who work in airports
and have never flown,
men who are not safe in numbers,
men who drive beat up old cars
and live with scarred women,
men who watch the stars
with drugs and candles
from the roofs of shabby buildings,
men who come like a car wreck,
men who are mindless
with prodigy,
men who eat rocks,
men with Cyprus green eyes
and hairy shoulders,
men who devour
a callous embrace,
all the men I find
beyond my barricades,
all the men who tell me
of hymns of earth
and the strength of my loins,
of tasting the white light,
of being in love in a city of men.

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.

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

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