Comments on: Ithaca: archival kisses, drunken birds, firebrand

By: m'aider

m'aider — Thu, 01 May 2008 23:15:25 +0000

Vicarious life is better than none. Fiendishly envious of your Lab visit. Cheery Scilla in pictures can’t be tossed about in storm like ours is now. Well. Unless the storm gets really bad.

By: jean bb

jean bb — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 12:01:34 +0000

birdwatching? i knew i had crossed into middle age when i started that myself. here in china missing home thought of your site. thanks.

By: April

April — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 00:46:56 +0000

see above^
Maggie, your story amazed and delighted me. Thankyou.
I’m so glad your family kept those photos, even if they do ‘sanitise’ the stories behind them.

By: M

Wed, 16 Apr 2008 16:42:45 +0000

Alison, I find these photographs so fascinating as well. You should look into the book Mary Diana Dods: A Gentlemen and a Scholar. She was a writer who was friends with Mary Shelley, and she was apparently very androgynous in appearance and probably had relationships with a lot of women in their literary circle. She actually ended up posing as the husband of one of Shelley’s friends who had gotten pregnant out of wedlock, and Betty T. Bennet, the author of the book, suggests that Shelley and this friend might have had affairs with Dods. Amazing!

By: jude

jude — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 15:35:30 +0000

I run a home for abandoned photographs of women and girls & one summer based a series of 200 handlettered cards on the collection: The Lost Girls. During the 2 years of avid collecting i would occasionally run into an album that documented many years in the life of one woman.
I am possessive about photos i really like, and so i would use photocopies of ones i was attached to, and only use real photos if i thought i could live without them, had lots of similar shots, etc.
What i discovered – and this should have been no news to a word girl but into every life some huge DUHs like bolts from lackogod must fall -is that giving a text to an anonymous woman brings her to life. A woman in an apron standing in her yard in 1952 is transformed into a prophet, a poet, a ghost sent to only you to make sense of smallness and place you in the continuum of revelatory experience. sorry :>

anyway. metaphor is the risk of finding meaning anywhere and everywhere – so even tho it’s not accurate, metaphoric is the only word i can find for all of this. Sometimes the photos feel like a huge tarot deck or something. I have never been able to describe why I love them or how personal my connection can become to almost any of them. hmmm. Maybe it’s more like glimpses of the moon or myself or Everywoman from other times – always the same moon, always a woman looking up, never the same moon because never the same woman and then in some way always the same woman.

By: s.

s. — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 13:43:41 +0000

I took two semesters of screenwriting with Elisabeth at Ithaca College. I had a great time, and it’s nice to see her again, if only in a picture!

By: ready2agitate

ready2agitate — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 02:09:17 +0000

omg there’s 2 other entried up, including a new ep! Anyway, my friend was in that documentary by Laurel Chiten on Tourettes, and I had no idea that she was the person who also did “Two in Twenty”!

By: Wax Lion

Wax Lion — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 23:51:29 +0000

I was in Ithaca for a few days in the fall, and that Farmer’s Market was enough to make me seriously consider moving there on the spot. Holy crap it was awesome. (Not quite as awesome as 1930′s lesbian nookie photos, mind ya’s. But close.)

By: June

June — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 15:40:56 +0000

Here's an interesting video about Talibs posing for photos. (Sorry to be such a shill for Slate, but I do like the stuff we publish!)

By: liza Cowan

liza Cowan — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 15:21:34 +0000

Two In Twenty was produced by Laurel Chiten and Cheryl Quamar. It is indeed on eBay right now, starting price $14, which I think is pretty cheap, but you never know how the bidding will go. Somewhere in my house I have a set of the videos.

Laurel Chiten went on to produce a documentary about Tourettes Syndrome, and then a film called “The Jew In The Lotus.” (I just found this out on a google search.) This ties in with my family research, in which I am discovering things about my cousin, Zina Rachevsky, who, in 1967, was the first westerner/barbarian to study Dharma with Tibetan Lamas. Her hidden history is not that she was a Lesbian (she wasn’t) but that she was Jewish.

It’s on my blog.

I also have old photo albums of women dressing like men and larking about. I don’t think it necessarily means that they were Lesbians. Sometimes it does. Alice Austen (b. 1866) for example, was a very early photo enthusiast who relentlessly documented herself and her friends dressing up, carrying on and having fun. She was a Lesbian, or, since the category was barely invented then, let’s say she loved women. Her work is available online http://www.aliceausten.org