photocopy

Motley Canyon Ridgeue Photocopies Screen Tee
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Photocopies: Encounters
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It's tempting to put quotes around the word "stories" when talking about John Berger's stories in Photocopies since they aren't really stories at all: they're sketches, quick studies, notes for stories, tributes, obituaries, or fey bulletins from a playful (and sometimes even too strategically playful) man. Berger has a great weakness for exclamation marks, for example, and too great a fondness (especially when writing about lithe and humorless women) for a sort of coy whimsy.

The titles of his pieces, on the other hand, are workmanlike and plain and as static as the captions for photographs or paintings (A Bunch of Flowers in a Glass, Two Cats in a Basket, Two Dogs Under a Rock, Sheets of Paper Laid on the Grass). Or they suggest the titles of Japanese prints (A Woman and Man Standing beside a Plum Tree).

There's a portrait of a house in Italy too (A House in the Sabine Mountains) which is both a portrait of a village and a brief history of time (Italian time). And there's also an elegy to an Alpine meadow that Berger visits after a friend's death. "The laws of probability change up there," he tells us in a brilliant and dislocating description of how and why this is so. "Sometimes the pine trees seem as if they've just stopped walking. There are nights when the Milky Way looks as close as a mosquito net."

In A House Designed by Le Corbusier, the house, built in Paris in 1923, resembles an abandoned garage, with a studio wall of "murky glass", but it's the site of the most emotionally affecting tribute in the book--the house that Andr���, a fourteen-year-old schoolboy, leaves behind him early in the winter of 1927 when he bids his mother (Berthe) and his stepfather (the sculptor Jacques Lipchitz) goodbye and travels by train to Moscow to meet--for the first time in his life--his father, a general in the Russian Army.

He travels with the People's Minister of Education and with the Minister's mistress, who decides, as the train is pulling out of Berlin, that she hasn't bought all the underthings she intended to buy. She pulls down the chain for an emergency stop. The train comes to a halt. She disembarks. The other passengers play cards until she returns with her lingerie.

On his arrival in Moscow on the morning of the tenth anniversary of the Russian revolution, Andr��� hurries straight to Red Square. His father is up on the podium in his general's uniform, taking the salute. Andr��� stares up at him but the temperature is -28 and he can think of nothing except how cold he is, dressed in a light summer suit and "a fashionable white raincoat with dark amber buttons". The officers behind the podium take pity on him and one of them approaches the General to ask what should be done. The father's response--and this must be one of the most bizarre introductions of father to son in all of history and literature--is decisive: Wrap him up in a tarpaulin and deliver him to my house!

But then the introduction to the stepmother is not exactly run of the mill, either, as Andr��� now tells us:

And this is what happened....My stepmother thought I was a new carpet! Eventually she thought she heard the carpet murmuring! Soon afterwards I moved out of their house. For two years I was a vagabond and by the winter of '30 I was already an enemy of the people. My father the General was executed in '37.

But tragedy occurs not only for the General, it also for Andr���, who is sent to the Gulag. In the meantime, Berthe and Lipchitz have sailed to America, but after the war, Berthe leaves New York to return to Paris, convinced that somewhere her son is alive and that when he's released he'll go to their house to find her and that if she's not there when he arrives, "we'll never meet again on this earth."

She has to wait for him for fourteen years. By the time he appears on the doorstep of the house designed by Le Corbusier, he's forty-five years old and has spent twenty-seven years in the Gulag.

And in Men and Women Sitting at a Table and Eating, the first scene is set in a legendary Paris restaurant (Maxim's) where Berger and some of his Russian friends eat in elegant near darkness at a long refectory table. Berger orders sole four���e with prawns and mushrooms. The sauce over the fish is "the colour of a milky opal"; the marigold carrots are "sliced thin as wafers."

Berger is served a much sunnier lunch in a town on the northwest coast of Spain; it's mid-August, and an old woman in black settles a cooked octopus on a wooden worktable. "It glistens there, no longer reddish but phosphorescent--with the colours of gas jets, green, white, violet. She cuts it with a pair of secateurs into round slices. The slices are about the size of signet rings. Sprinkled with salt, vinegar, oil, cayenne, and served on round wooden plates, these rings are the feast."

Which is such a terrific evocation of a cooked octopus.

But Berger can also occasionally be disingenuous, as he seems to be in A Painting of an Electric Light Bulb when he rationalizes his not being able to give any help to a friend whose paintings he considers extraordinary: "Sometimes I read in a newspaper that I am (or was) one of the most influential writers about art in the English language. Yet I know nobody in the art trade in Paris or anywhere else. Nobody."

But then there are so many John Bergers: the sightseer, the raconteur, the romantic, the reporter. There's also the art critic who wrote Ways of Seeing and the novelist who wrote G. and To the Wedding. There's the author of a polemic on writing too (Lost off Cape Wrath) and there's also the writer who recently read from his work on the CBC's Writers and Company. A brief memoir in which he described a childhood ritual, the one in which the child sings out to the parents, "See you in the morning!" and the parents come to the child's doorway to sing back to the child, "See you in the morning!"--this chant being a guarantee, at least in the child's mind, that the only three people in the world who really matter will all survive the night.

Photocopy Machine (Acoustic Version)
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Historic Print S Photocopy of Wrights 1903 Machine as Defendants Exhibit No. 32

This is a museum quality, reproduction print on premium paper with archival/UV resistant inks. The framed work is single matted (ivory), under acrylic glass, with a hanging wire.Date: 1903Subject: Notes: Photo of photo superimposed on another photo. Aviation--1903; BI; Airplanes--1903; Shelf.Format: SOURCE: Library of Congress