Thanks to Louis Agre, Tom Geoghegan, Ernesta Ballard, Loann Scarpato, Maddy Ballard, Josh Mitteldorf, Kim Swayze, Martha Schlieffer, Hentzi Elek, Michael Miller, and Jody MacDonald for their contributions in 2019 and the first quarter of 2020.
As always, contributions are greatly appreciated.
by Chrissie Richards
Chrissie Richards – Mixed media on canvas.
“Perfection is overrated”
by Daphne Kalotay, 2010
[Nina, a once famous Bolshoi ballerina who defected from Soviet Russia, now in her eighties, in pain, and in a wheelchair, remembers her start as a dancer.]
“when she has worked her muscles too hard, her entire body feels as if it is trembling inside. knots in her legs, hips, feet. stockings bloody at the toes. some days everything comes together beautifully, her body obeys and even surprises her with its achievements. other days it disappoints her. she is forever cleaning her toe shoes and ironing her costumes, stitching elastics and ribbons onto her slippers. listening to notes after rehearsal, shedding occasional tears. the frustration of unattainable perfection… she kisses her mother’s cheeks and steps out into the twilight, past children playing hockey in the alley, their bright voices like chimes in the cut-glass air. in the street overstuffed trams roll slowly by, passengers clinging to the sides, as Nina heads to her world of tights and tutus, of makeup rubbed on and then off, of the Bolshoi curtains drawn apart and then together again, their gold tassels swinging.”
By Joseph Conrad
[A Chief Inspector of the London police, in a philosophical mood, is thinking back on the early years of his career, when his work “had been concerned with the more energetic forms of thieving”… ]
Thieving…was a form of human industry, perverse indeed, but still an industry exercised in an industrious world; it was work undertaken for the same reason as the work in potteries, in coal mines, in fields, in tool-grinding shops. It was labour, whose practical difference from the other forms of labour consisted in the nature of its risk, which did not lie in ankylosis, or lead poisoning, or fire-damp, or gritty dust, but in what may be briefly defined in its own special phraseology as ‘Seven years hard.’ Chief Inspector Heat was, of course, not insensible to the gravity of moral differences. But neither were the thieves he had been looking after. They submitted to the severe sanctions of a morality familiar to Chief Inspector Heat with a certain resignation. They were his fellow-citizens gone wrong because of imperfect education, Chief Inspector Heat believed; but allowing for that difference, he could understand the mind of a burglar, because, as a matter of fact, the mind and the instincts of a burglar are of the same kind as the mind and the instincts of a police officer. Both recognize the same conventions, and have a working knowledge of each other’s methods and of the routine of their respective trades.
copyright© 1907/1992 Knopf Everyman’s Library edition
Earle Richardson
48″ x 32″, oil on canvas, 1934. Commissioned and financed under the New Deal.
Folk/blues/Traditional
Popularized by Leadbelly, learned by school children throughout the country, and denounced in modern times as racist, this song has been covered by many artists including Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Harry Belafonte, and Johnny Cash, and sampled by Ludacris in “Potion”, all singing the same telling song of hard slave labor in the cotton fields of our American South.
Here is one of my favorite versions. Behind his upbeat rendition, Donegan gives us visual reminders of what must never be forgotten.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ILbUduwBkg (Lonnie Donegan)
I’m gonna jump down turn around, pick a bale of cotton
Jump down turn around, pick a bale a day
Jump down turn around, pick a bale of cotton
Jump down turn around, pick a bale a day
Oh Lordy, pick a bale of cotton
Well, oh Lordy, pick a bale a day
Well, oh Lordy, pick a bale of cotton
Well, oh Lordy, pick a bale of hay
You got to jump down, turn around, pick a bale of cotton
You got to jump down, turn around, pick a bale of hay
You got to jump down, turn around, pick a bale of cotton
You got to jump down, turn around, pick a bale of hay
Well, oh Lordy, pick a bale of cotton
…
Me and my [wife, gal, buddy. partner] can pick a bale of cotton
…
Well, oh Lordy, pick a bale of cotton
[A poem to read while “working at home” during a pandemic]
By Joyce Carol Oates
She’s naked yet wearing shoes.
Wants to think nude. And happy in her body.
Though it’s a fleshy aging body. And her posture
in the chair—leaning forward, arms on knees,
staring out the window—makes her belly bulge,
but what the hell.
What the hell, he isn’t here.
Lived in this damn drab apartment at Third Avenue,
Twenty-third Street, Manhattan, how many
damn years, has to be at least fifteen. Moved to the city
from Hackensack, needing to breathe.
She’d never looked back. Sure they called her selfish,
cruel. What the hell, the use they’d have made of her,
she’d be sucked dry like bone marrow.
First job was file clerk at Trinity Trust. Wasted
three years of her young life waiting
for R.B. to leave his wife and wouldn’t you think
a smart girl like her would know better?
Second job also file clerk but then she’d been promoted
to Mr. Castle’s secretarial staff at Lyman Typewriters. The
least the old bastard could do for her and she’d
have done a lot better except for fat-face Stella Czechi.
Third job, Tvek Realtors & Insurance and she’s
Mr. Tvek’s private secretary: What would I do
without you, my dear one?__
As long as Tvek pays her decent. And he doesn’t
let her down like last Christmas, she’d wanted to die.
This damn room she hates. Dim-lit like a region of the soul
into which light doesn’t penetrate. Soft-shabby old furniture
and sagging mattress like those bodies in dreams we feel
but don’t see. But she keeps her bed made
every God-damned day, visitors or not.
He doesn’t like disorder. He’d told her how he’d learned
to make a proper bed in the U.S. Army in 1917.
The trick is, he says, you make the bed as soon as you get up.
Detaches himself from her as soon as it’s over. Sticky skin,
hairy legs, patches of scratchy hair on his shoulders, chest,
belly. She’d like him to hold her and they could drift into
sleep together but rarely this happens. Crazy wanting her, then abruptly it’s over—he’s inside his head,
and she’s inside hers.
Now this morning she’s thinking God-damned bastard, this has
got to be the last time. Waiting for him to call to explain
why he hadn’t come last night. And there’s the chance
he might come here before calling, which he has done more than once.
Couldn’t keep away. God, I’m crazy for you.
She’s thinking she will give the bastard ten more minutes.
She’s Jo Hopper with her plain redhead’s face stretched
on this fleshy female’s face and he’s the artist but also
the lover and last week he came to take her
out to Delmonico’s but in this dim-lit room they’d made love
in her bed and never got out until too late and she’d overheard
him on the phone explaining—there’s the sound of a man’s voice
explaining to a wife that is so callow, so craven, she’s sick
with contempt recalling. Yet he says he has left his family, he
loves her.
Runs his hands over her body like a blind man trying to see. And
the radiance in his face that’s pitted and scarred, he needs her in
the way a starving man needs food. Die without you. Don’t
leave me.
He’d told her it wasn’t what she thought. Wasn’t his family
that kept him from loving her all he could but his life
he’d never told anyone about in the war, in the infantry,
in France. What crept like paralysis through him.
Things that had happened to him, and things
that he’d witnessed, and things that he’d perpetrated himself
with his own hands. And she’d taken his hands and kissed them,
and brought them against her breasts that were aching like the
breasts of a young mother ravenous to give suck,
and sustenance. And she said No. That is your old life.
I am your new life.
She will give her new life five more minutes.
by Edward Hopper
workandworkingblog.wordpress.com 
You must be logged in to post a comment.