My Desk and I

K. B. Dixon

Excerpts

Excerpts from The Photo Album

Introduction

This collection of photos is in a sense a memoir. It is the story of a photographer—a very amateur one: me—yours truly, the chronically conflicted Michael Quick. As you will soon discover when you turn the page, I am new to the medium—or, more accurately, I should say I am new to it again. I have flirted with photography both regularly and inconsequentially in the past, but as I suspect my expensive new camera will suggest, I seem to have gotten more serious about it lately.

One of the problems with getting serious (or semi-serious) about photography is that at some point in the process after you have mastered the various manuals and looked into the basics of making competent images, you will find yourself thinking more than you would like to about the subject of photography in general—about the recalcitrant mystery of it: what it is, what it should be, how it should best be done. It is grueling and ultimately profitless, this noetic gum-chewing. The only thing I feel I can say with certainty right now about the camera is that there doesn't seem to be anything it cannot make interesting—a verity that is in equal parts both worrying and wonderful.

If you would like to jump over to Plate 4 and take a quick look, you will find a photo that is pretty typical of the sort of thing you can expect from me. I have for the most part eschewed the "art" shot as well as the emphatically vernacular one. I have taken a sort of middle way, a way in which there is no glory, but with which I am (at the moment anyway) comfortable.

Plate 1

This is a photograph of my mother with her mother taken I don't know how many years back. It might not glow with the allegorical meaning of some, but still it fixes us. The women, elegantly dressed, sit primly side by side holding each other's hand. Just minutes before there was, I think, a violent argument from which my mother's mother has not backed down—an argument about the man who would one day soon become my father.

My mother and my mother's mother share the same mouth and the same slight build, but they do not look alike. The emphatic bulbousness of the older woman's head alludes phrenologically to the size of her impressive brain while the dourness of her expression suggests it has not been much of a comfort to her.

My mother, who wears her rings on nontraditional fingers, is clearly still very much interested in looking pretty. Her hairdo is complex—a small braid rings the center of the creation like a halo separating the severity of the center-parted bangs from the relative voluptuousness of the pompadoured crown. The dress—which is quite obviously silk—leaves her shoulders bare. And in her eye there is a girlish glint I do not recognize; a glint that disconcerts me; a glint in which one can see an intimation of the wildness that will one day overwhelm her.

Plate 4

I bought a new lens—a wide-angle zoom. This is the second shot I took with it. I have included it here as a sort of salute to my equipment. I think I have for the most part avoided the obsession with gear that afflicts and addles so many of we dabblers. That does not mean, however, that I am entirely without envy or that I am above the occasional flaunting of whatever technical resources I may have at my disposal.

The man in this picture with the golf clubs is my neighbor, Thomas Lockhart. He is a lawyer. He specializes in getting drunk drivers back on the road—on getting them out of jail, getting their records expunged, getting their licenses back in their hands. This lens—a 12-24mm—is not considered a good one for portraiture because it tends to distort. I didn't care in this instance. I wasn't trying to flatter the man. What I wanted was a broad, environmental shot— a shot that recorded not just Tom but the conventional ostentatiousness of Tom's defining upper-middle-classness. (Note the convex profile of the status symbol parked on the periphery.)

Excertps from My Desk and I

“I’m having trouble exercising. I’ve been doing sit-ups, push-ups, and deep knee bends for some time now, but lately I find myself being lured away from my regimen by the pleasures of the bottle. Is this a sign that I’ve started to concede something? As I have fewer and fewer days left to me the idea of seizing them has gotten more attractive. If no one comes to the end wishing they’d spent more time at the office, neither do they come to it wishing they’d done one more set of jumping jacks.” Excerpt from TWENTY-EIGHT DAYS

“First find a painter. It’s not as easy as you might think. Ask your artist friends if they know anyone. They won’t be offended that you haven’t asked them—they are abstractionists and performance whatnots and clearly dozens of isms beyond this sort of thing. Be persistent. Eventually someone will admit to knowing someone who will admit to knowing someone who will admit to knowing a figurative painter. Get this painter’s name. Talk to him. His political opinions will be appalling—the neanderthalic excrescencies of talk-radio—but his artistic judgments astute. Visit his new show.” Excerpt from HOW TO HAVE YOUR PORTRAIT PAINTED

“I call and leave a message because I just don’t want to see her tonight. There are nights like that, when I don’t want to see her—partly because I am who I am and partly because she is who she is. Lately it’s been more because she is who she is than because I am who I am, but I can’t tell her that. . . .” Excerpt from I LEAVE A MESSAGE

Miscellany

From IT'S ALL ABOUT YOU JEFFREY (Personal Essay)

“I had dinner the other night with some people I think I will leave nameless because there is a chance I will be eating with them again sometime in the future and if I was unable to deny that the following paragraphs were about them it could be—well, you know, awkward. It was pretty much the sort of dinner you would expect from the sort of people these were—that is, it was gourmetish but not formal. I don’t remember exactly what we had—which worries me a little, given the amount of time we spent discussing the arcanum of its preparation—but I do remember its’ being very good. It was a nice evening, as these sort of evenings go, but for one small thing. His name was Jeffrey.
Jeffrey was our host and hostess’s four-year-old son, a generic sort of kid with a big head of curly blonde hair. As we guests met and mingled and had a drink in the living room before dinner, Jeffrey was allowed—in fact, encouraged—to run around among us like some sort of free-range chicken.”

From STRANGE BUT TRUE (Art Review)

   “Blue. Purple. Red. Red (again). White. In Sean Cain’s dreams everyone wears a bandanna. Well, not everyone—but almost everyone. It’s a compositional device that is also, in part, an iconographic tease.
   A painter of perplexing allegorical images, Cain focuses primarily on the solitary figure in enigmatic isolation. A subdued surrealist—a descendent of Rene Magritte—he relies on the clarity and order of a neo-classical style to accentuate the mystery inherent in his pictures. Like Magritte, he is a philosophical painter who restrains the fantasy element in his work. But unlike Magritte—where it can be argued the intellectual reward precedes the visual—Cain serves up, first and foremost, a generous helping of good old-fashioned pictorial pleasure.
   In his third solo show at the Laura Russo Gallery, Cain gives us yet another impressive collection of beautifully drawn figures. Oddly posed, and dressed with a casualness that stands in marked contrast to the formality of their stylistic presentation, Cain’s characters seem captured in the middle of some obscure private drama. Both the poignancy and primacy of their solitude is emphasized by a looming relationship to a vast, long-shot landscape.”

             WHITWORD
                      by
                K. B. Dixon

Whitword is, of course, a poet.
It shows in his carefully crafted snarl,
The quality of the Scotch he drinks,
And the shameful way he treats his wife.
His hair is a poet’s hair;
It is long and lank,
And when he wakes in the morning
It hangs in front of his face like a cheap curtain.

A bony boulevardier,
He is a digger for truffles.
He sniffs at the base of a moldy conscience
Looking for a significant moment
To shellac with sentiment
And set in the window to dry--
A succulent moment that will carry his name
On a silver serving tray
To poetry’s prestigious table of contents.

How much room is there in the little magazines
For another piece of the Frosty northeast
With its snowy woods and mapleleafs?
The quarterly silos are full of nature poems
And there is talk of a deal with the Russians:
Surplus Staffords for Yevteshenkos.

Whitword is a poet.
He ruts at the root of his family tree.
How much room is there in the little magazines
For another piece about a darling daughter,
Her creamy innocence and her deadly dimples?
The quarterly day-care centers are full
With the creamily innocent and deadly dimpled
Of a middle-aged Ivy League.

How much room is there
For another pie-shaped piece of public agony?
A well-combed depression,
All its gray fur in place,
So nice to rub up against.
His heroic intransigence—
The cabbage smell of his most prized and sour thoughts
Turned into stony stanzas on the hollowness of CPA’s.

Whitword is a poet.
He sips his thick black coffee
And greets the dumpy destiny that is his subject
As if it were an aunt from Iowa.
It is hugged and kissed on a powdery cheek:
The fickleness of inspiration.

Whitword is a poet.
He teases this nothingness for meaning,
And when it laughs (chuckles, really)
He snaps its picture
And sends it over to Dr. So & So,
Chairman this year of the English Department,
Who with his ballpoint wand
Signs off on it;
And fickleness becomes—
For better, not for worse—
What it always was:
A stipend,
A thing of beauty and a joy for nine months.