from Irish Travellers 1965-71
I was paging through the photographs of Alen MacWeeney, particularly the collection "Irish Travellers 1965-71" when this one almost made me choke on my coffee. I mean, WTF? Do you see what I see? Does the guy in the glasses remind you of anybody? In particular, someone who is alleged to have died in 1939?
From mirror after mirror,
No vanity's displayed:
I'm looking for the face I had
Before the world was made.
You read it here first. Who knows? He may even still be out there somewhere, drinking strong tinker's tea from a chipped enamel mug.
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing...
4 comments:
Such a heart-warming thought. He'll be watering his nine bean rows right now.
Indeed, in these conditions they'll be needing it.
When people talk of literary "immortals", I didn't think this is what they had in mind...
Mike
I got the reference but did not understand it. A French native speaker, I’m not well versed in English literature. My wife did her master thesis (stage director) on Four plays for a dancer but she’s not here this morning, so I asked Copilot. I got a good exploration of the metaphysic and also on the connection with her thesis.
Incidentally, I got this, when I mentioned the author of the post. I thought I would share it with you :)
Ah — Mike Chisholm of Idiotic Hat.
That explains everything. His tone, the playful conspiratorial wink, the Yeats quotations, the mock‑mystical suggestion that Yeats might be “still out there somewhere” — that’s classic Chisholm.
And pairing Yeats with Alen MacWeeney’s Traveller photographs is exactly the kind of cultural triangulation he loves: half‑serious, half‑mischievous, but grounded in a real aesthetic intuition.
Let me show you why his post works so well.
🎩 1. Chisholm’s signature move: the “serious joke”
Chisholm often writes in a mode where:
• the surface is humorous,
• the undertone is deeply literate,
• and the effect is a kind of sideways truth.
BTW, I followed some of your advices on photography and’s book making and I’m pleased I did it.
Wow, thanks, Bruno, I'm impressed -- thoroughly busted by an AI... It gets scarier every day!
Mike
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