Found this on the Library of Congress website.
I can’t stop looking at this photograph.
It reminds me of Luvvy and the girls
Girl’s Basketball Team
Milton High School
North Dakota
1909
(John McCarthy is presumed to be the photographer)
I am especially struck by the background (obviously a backdrop), but my eyes are drawn to its curlicued ornate-ness, and its rampant velvet-tasseled domesticity.
I never ever want to see you using the phrase “rampant velvet-tasseled domesticity” again. Almost as bad as sepia-toned hammock.
Ha ha ha.
No, actually, it’s a lovely phrase, as keen a sign of your linguistic prowess as any.
And if you’re arrested by a photograph like that (that woman standing on the far right seems like she’d pull no punches, either on the court or in the locker room), you must get your hands on Alice Munro’s latest, “The View From Castle Rock.” It’s this kind of marvelous hybrid of her family history and fiction, often prompted by photographs like this one. Just finished it–literally, like two minutes ago.
sepia-toned (hammock)
hee hee
Actually – my phrasing there was QUITE deliberate as I’m sure you can imagine. i tried to make my writing LIKE the background in the picture! See??
Talent is HOT, I tell you. HOT!
Think about the team photos in yearbooks now and how ODD it would look if they were posed against some background of a velvety drawing room!
Dammit, and you keep telling me to read Alice Munro – she is on my list. I’ve read none of her stuff! Must remedy that!
Have you read Scoop, by Evelyn Waugh?
I read it in public and find that I end up making a fool of myself, literally guffawing LOUDLY. I can think of only 1 or 2 books that have made me laugh this loud and this consistently. It is so so so funny.
And I think my favorite girl is the one way over on the left hand side. There’s something in her face that looks vaguely Anne Frank-ish. Lively eyes and stuff like that. And I like the scowling pretty girl next to her.
I also ADORE the coach.
My dad has this great picture of my great-grandmother posing with her high school basketball team some time in the early 1900s. Their skirts almost touched the ground. How did they play basketball in those?
I like the one on the lower left. She’s all “They ALWAYS make me sit down on the floor like this. Why do they always make me sit down on the floor like this?”
Also – I have a studio portrait of my great-grandmother and great-grandfather (my maternal grandmother’s parents) either on their wedding day or very shortly after, and there is a similar backdrop in the photo (This would have been in northern Michigan or Wisconsin, but about 15 years earlier than the basketball girls’ photo)
my great-grandmother-to be looks TERRIFIED. Like -she just found out what all this “marriage” thing entails…
I would love to have a video of those old-fashioned games. I know – I wonder that, too, about the tripping. Look at those bloomers!!
I have a recent photograph in a book at home of a bunch of girls in Iran playing basketball – with their veils and burqas flowing to the ground – but underneath they have these big thumping Converse sneakers. It’s hysterical.
ricki – hahahaha Oh, no! She got the birds and bees talk right before the walk down the aisle??
I love those old photos. I find them so … I don’t know. My mind just goes, off into imagining what those people are thinking, what’s really going on –
Like it seems to me in the photograph below that the two girls on the right are very good friends. Something about the way their arms are around each other. It looks like the poses my friends and I did in high school. Natural, you know? But I could be making that up. I like making stuff up about these old photographs.
What do you mean “vaugely Anne Frank-ish”? That IS Anne Frank! Making the diary, of course, as our good friends in Teheran have been telling us, a complete hoax.
(and, of course, I will rot in hell for even making such a joke).
She really does look like Ms. Frank. And the coach. Oh dear, what’s to imagine about whatever was going on through his mind, repressed channels or otherwise, watching those ladies dribble . . . in 1909!”
I bet you he ended up marrying the girl directly to his right, the one with the big bonnet of hair looking like it’s about to slide off her head. (she probably had an awesome hook shot–and took none of his lip, yanked the whistle right out of his mouth, just as he was about to blow). “Reginald,” she said, “I’ll tell you when it’s a foul. You just mind your ledger and let me take care of this.”
Have yet to read “Scoop” or, sad to say, anything by Waugh. And the list grows longer and longer still. Whose doesn’t?
But I’m all for a book that’ll make one cackle aloud. A lot of Francine Prose’s stuff has that effect on me–esp. “Blue Angel.” Hilarious. And kind of scary, too. All about an undergraduate creative writing seminar and the jaded, frustrated guy teaching it, eventually fucking up his life big-time as a result. Perhaps you’ve already read it?
oops – I meant to say the two girls over on the LEFT, the ones who are standing.
Jon – “Reginald,” she said, “I’ll tell you when it’s a foul. You just mind your ledger and let me take care of this.”
hahahaha
Jon –
Is that the one that the movie is based on? With Marlene Dietrich? I’ve never read it – but I’m haunted by that freakin’ film. It’s brutal.
And I always thought of Evelyn Waugh (for some reason) as a vaguely consumptive melancholy homosexual who mooned about in a sort of repressed fin de siecle kind of way. Probably I based my image of him from the Brideshead Revisited miniseries that I was addicted to, lo so many years ago.
But this book is a spoof about journalism – and all of these crazy British journalists flocking to a fictional country in Africa to cover a war. It is laugh out loud funny.
I’m telling everyone to read it. I just told Emily to read it. Thank God my dad has already read it so I can talk about it with SOMEbody!
I have “Scoop” on my bookshelf. I suppose I should read it too.
Not that I’m old or anything, but the girl in the front right is my old squeeze Helen Rossick. Her parents came over from Poland. She could dribble with both hands, and had a terrific two-handed set shot. She married a coalminer from Pennsylvania, and had nine children. The girl to her right, Louise Wychykowski used to hide her chillum in her hair. She wasn’t particularly bright, but she didn’t need a weathervane to tell you which way the wind blew.
Sheila,
I just ordered it from Amazon.
“Mind your ledger”
BWAHAHAHAHA!
Is it my imagination, or is that basketball about three sizes too big?
It does look big. But not as big as the bow in the girl’s hair standing to the far right.
The girl on the far left standing looks a little too happy for an early-1900s photo. I like her. I bet she was spunky.
[off-topic, i know, but…] happy archie leach day, sheila!
Lisa – yeah, I agree. My eye keeps being drawn over to her. Something about her face. Her expression.
Oh dear. Dropped off for the rest of yesterday. Didn’t see your subsequent comments until now. And, yes, Prose’s “Blue Angel” takes its cue, explicitly and implicitly, from the Dietrich film–which I hear is incredible. And “Scoop” is a must for the near future; it sounds hilarious–and would seem to be the template for so many subsequent satires on the same theme (i.e., self-absorption vs. humility/awe). Come to think of it, Prose herself has written a couple of novellas under the title “Guided Tours Through Hell” about this very subject, one of which is this insanely funny story (in the truest sense of the phrase) about academics jockeying for position and fame while touring a concentration camp. Well worth checking out.
Jon – Blue Angel is incredible. For many reasons – Marlene Dietrich’s entire persona, first of all – but the last scene with the German actor Emil Jannings is one of the most excruciating ever put on film, in my opinion. The first time I saw the movie (at the Music Box!!) – I had to put my hand over my eyes during the last scene. His humiliation and degradation were too painful to witness.
Francine Prose sounds wonderful – I’ll have to check her out.