Other Interests
For me, more reading makes the best change from reading. In my down time, I concentrate on novels and poetry, classic and contemporary, trying not to learn too much that would illuminate work. But in fact I fall into reading almost anything in front of me. It would be useful to be able to walk and read at the same time – like the doctor in Hitchcock’s The Trouble with Harry.I have been fascinated by cartoonists for as long as I can remember, both political and social, they are the last outposts of satire with teeth. For pure graphic achievement and narrative triumph, my big loves are predictable, if very different from one another; Walt Kelly and Hergé.
My father’s union activism and sense of (in)justice got me interested in politics. It was he who started me on Walt Kelly’s syndicated Pogo strip, then I found the books. There is some of Animal Farm in the swamp, the cow birds spouting garbled Marxism while appropriating for the masses (themselves) anything edible or usable. Okefenokee dwellers are by no means possessive individuals, but the cow birds push the envelope. Kelly is not an ideological satirist. He joyfully targets capitalism’s hucksters and salesmen. Among these is the circus manager, who literally speaks in signs, no sign being in the least arbitrary as regards the signified. There are excellent websites devoted to Pogo.
Hergé’s Tintin series, some pages of the books being pure miracles, gave me my start on the French language when I was already mid-career. The volumes, read and re-read in no particular order, bypassing at whim, provided the least painful education a person could get in French verb tenses. Time is before your eyes.
I had earlier been a follower of the Marvel Universe, probably more specifically of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. For a time I had a serious idea that the political messages in comics were important enough for systematic examination, but got mocked out of it and sheepishly gave my near-complete collection to a little kid.
Photography is an interest for the second time in my life. My first full-time job was out of high school. I was miraculously hired as a reporter on a newspaper. Although the position was almost free of wages, it financed my first degree, showed me day by day how the world worked, and taught me to pile on the questions one by one and to prod assumptions.
The newspaper staff photographers sometimes let me try my hand. They were wildly generous with their older equipment. Among other items I was given a fine 35 mm camera, and an almost-new double-lens camera. They were both stolen about 1973. I bought a cheap and awful replacement for the double-lens camera but didn’t start taking photos again until about 2001 when given a first digital camera.
The photos in this site were taken on holiday in Victoria, New York, Toronto and, to be sure, in France. The building that houses the Oriental Taste Restaurant, shown here on the very last page of this section, is currently my all-time favourite photograph (of my own).
(Miscellany of Photographs © 2007, S. L. Sutherland)
