Tag Archives: Kentucky

Mark Twain’s “The Gilded Age, A Tale of To-Day” – New memories from an old book

30 Saturday Dec 2017

Posted by in Inspiration, Writing

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1895 edition of The Gilded Age, A Tale of To-Day

AT YEAR’S END, I can’t help but feel some sense of introspection. This year, I opened an 1895 edition of The Gilded Age, A Tale of To-Day, by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner. It was Twain’s novel about the turn of the century. The book was a gift to me from my father, who passed away in 1996.

When the book was published, the term “Gilded Age” became synonymous with graft, materialism, and corruption in public life. The plot opens as a poor Tennessee family, the Hawkins family, dreams of affluence by selling 75,000 acres of worthless Appalachian land acquired by their patriarch, Silas Hawkins. Truth, lies, and exaggeration color aspirations shaped by want, greed, and deceit. Mark Twain’s wonderfully sarcastic wit and his gift for description present an era of uncanny resemblance to the politics of today. The subtitle, containing the words “To-Day,” remains as current as human behavior’s lack of change.

In the 1950’s, my father bought some of the Cumberland mountain land once owned by Mark Twain, and I remember our family visits to that region. I remember the Obed River, where the “gold” glistening along the stream in the afternoon sun was actually iron-stained rock from abandoned coal mines.

Having recently read two wonderful memoirs, Hillbilly Elegy (by J.D. Vance) and The Glass Castle (by Jeannette Walls), along with a fine historic book, Night Comes to the Cumberlands (by Harry Caudill), Twain’s description of the rugged East Tennessee hills comes alive with relevance.

More important to me, I can now see how reading The Gilded Age directly affected my father’s views of public service as well as providing for his family. I’ll be writing more about this. But, for now, I’ll enjoy turning the brittle pages, carefully, of this 1895 edition by Mark Twain…savoring his descriptions of the age…with relevance today.

First page, Chapter I, The Gilded Age, original illustrated edition – click on image to enlarge

 

 

“Chesapeake Views” – Blink of an eye

24 Monday Feb 2014

Posted by in Chesapeake Bay, CHESAPEAKE VIEWS - CATCHING THE LIGHT, Maryland, Photography, Writing

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Another book review of Chesapeake Views – Catching the Light. Thank you to Dara McBride, Feature Editor at The Cecil Whig, for the current article.

Chesapeake Sunrise, at Thomas Point Light

Chesapeake at Dawn, Thomas Point Light –  One of the images before the cover shot for the book.   Click on the image for a full view

This is the third consecutive book review and interview by an editor recently, all unsolicited. As a photographer and writer, I’m delighted.  In fairness, I must give most of the credit to the beauty of the Chesapeake Bay region. My contribution is a click of the shutter, a blink of the eye.

The published interview follows:

Photographer Wilson Wyatt catches Chesapeake moments                               By Dara McBride, dmcbride@cecilwhig.com | Wednesday, February 19, 2014

ST. MICHAELS — At just the right moment, with just the right light, photographer Wilson Wyatt can get the shot no one else can.

Out of 27 photographers taking photos of the Thomas Point Shoal Light, the historical Chesapeake Bay lighthouse, at dawn one morning, Wyatt walked away with the award-winning shot. After waiting for the sun to hit the roofline of the lighthouse, Wyatt captured the meeting of a cruise ship and tanker as they sky turned tangerine.

“Photography, for me, is purely a pursuit of beauty,” said Wyatt, 70, of St. Michaels. “A pursuit of passion and beauty, those are the things that make life worthwhile.”

The Chesapeake region has its own unique beauty, one that Wyatt has tried to capture as a photographer in his latest book, “Chesapeake Views — Catching the Light.” The scene of the Thomas Point Shoal Light, which won the Nikon Mentor Series “Best of Maryland” photo, is the cover of the book.

For area residents, the book is filled with familiar sights of the Eastern Shore, of lighthouses, sailboats and sunsets over water. The tabletop book includes 82 color images taken of the Chesapeake and Eastern Shore region. Also included in the book is information on where and how many of the images were taken.

Enchanted by the bay area, Wyatt and his wife decided to move to the Chesapeake region about 15 years ago.

Although now a skilled photographer, Wyatt started on the other side of communications: writing.

He started his career as a reporter and feature writer at The Courier-Journal in Kentucky and, intrigued by the skill of the newspaper’s photographers, took up photography as a hobby. He said he learned photography by studying the works of others and critique from mentors.

Over the years he has balanced both photography and writing. Right now, he is executive editor of literary journal The Delmarva Review and is active on the board of The Writer’s Center, in the Washington, D.C. area.

Today, he’s the one teaching the photography skills. As president of the Academy for Lifelong Learning at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum, he leads spring classes in beginner and intermediate digital photography. He reminds himself and students that photography can be a demanding art.

Wyatt focuses on light in his series of Chesapeake photos. Photography is more than pointing a camera and pushing a button, he said. Photography is about catching light, the colors that make up a scene, how light bounces off clouds and waiting for the moment for it all to come together.

“I am definitely a morning person,” Wyatt said, commenting on his favorite time of the day to shoot. There are three stages of light to shoot in the morning, he explained: predawn light, the reflection on clouds before sunrise and the sunrise itself.

Photography is “a constant discovery,” Wyatt said.

“It’s always a challenge, and I wish I could go back and take many of the photos I took years ago again because I’ve gotten better,” said Wyatt.

In addition to “Chesapeake Views,” Wyatt has published another hardback book of his color photography in 2011, “Yosemite – Catching the Light.” He also publishes a blog on his experiences, Writing & Photography – the Art of Words and Images, at www.wilsonwyattjr.com.

For the full article in The Cecil Whig, go to:

http://www.cecildaily.com/features/arts_and_culture/article_c308bfd6-a792-59d1-8f7f-3c7334e2ed9f.html

Book Availability:

‘Chesapeake Views—Catching the Light,’ is available at Talbot County Public Libraries, the News Center, in Easton, MD and Mystery Loves Company, in Oxford, MD. For more information about signed copies of the book, contact the author directly by email at: wwwyatt2@gmail.com.

November Reflection, from "Chesapeake Views - Catching the Light" - click on image for a larger view

November Reflection, from “Chesapeake Views – Catching the Light”    click on image for a larger view

Memories come on little cat feet…remembering Carl Sandburg

29 Thursday Sep 2011

Posted by in Uncategorized, Writing

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September Fog - "It sits on silent haunches...and then moves on." (Click on image for full size)

Louisville, Kentucky 1954 – Carl Sandburg sat in the white Adirondack chair on our wrap-around front porch.  I was too young to know more about him than he was a famous writer, and he wrote “Fog,” which I could recite as a ten-year-old.  My older sisters were more aware of his work. We sat at his feet as he read to us.

His thinning white hair stood from his pale scalp like slender feathers, playing in the summer sun.  He wore a white shirt that hung loose from his skeletal frame.  When he smiled, his whole mouth opened and spread across his face, hinged from ear to ear.  He reminded me, as a boy, of the comedian, Joey Brown, who could fit a baseball inside his mouth.

He was a gentle man, but when he spoke, it was with a certain authority.  Words came from his mouth as long, slow syllables.  His rich, mellow voice trembled slightly, hanging onto certain words, accenting them with importance.  There was a musical cadence to his speech.  He punctuated sentences with silence, waiting for the words to take hold in space.  His open collar exposed a pronounced Adam’s apple, which moved up and down his stalk-like neck…syllable by syllable.

When he finished reading to us, he removed several pages of white note paper from a folder.  They contained handwritten words, scratched out in liquid black ink.  I couldn’t make them out.  There were lines and arrows and underlines, with other words scribbled along the sides.  He signed the pages and handed them to my oldest sister.  “I am dedicating this to you,” he said.

I later learned that those pen-scratched words composed the “Prologue” to the book The Family of Man.  It was a collection of an era of photography, inscribed “The greatest photographic exhibition of all time,” edited by Edward Steichen for the Museum of Modern Art.  The museum published it the following year, in 1955. My sister treasured those handwritten pages, and we all treasure the memory.

In the years since my childhood, when I see a fog bank covering the water and landscape, I often think of Carl Sandburg’s Fog, coming “on little cat feet…looking over harbor and city, on silent haunches.”  When I visit Chicago, I think of his Chicago, “Hog Butcher for the world…Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat…City of the Big Shoulders.”  I can hear his voice uttering the words, slowly, syllable by syllable.  And, when I read the Prologue to The Family of Man, I see him, sitting there, with a boy at his feet, as he speaks with a measured cadence:

“The first cry of a newborn baby in Chicago or Zamboango, in Amsterdam or Rangoon, has the same pitch and key, each saying, “I am! I have come through! I belong! I am a member of the family.”   

It comes to me now, looking back. It all makes sense.

A writer’s voice and words have an inherent telepathy, replaying a memory, only with permanence.  The uttered words once scribbled down with liquid black ink on paper later become a gift, in the future, for all to read.  They live on, in time, from one place to another, one person to the next, indefinitely.