No, not a metaphorical desert, a real one. I continue to work through my pictures from winter 2013 in Tucson. I shot many of my wife in the desert. We spent a lot of time there, walking, exploring. Karen was just saying the other day that it was mostly the desert she liked about Tucson. I felt the same.
So here's a little series: Karen in the desert.
It wasn't only Karen that I photographed in desert. I found lots of other oddities and points of interest. I was always trying to make pictures out of desiccated deadwood we saw strewn along the paths. And saguaro cacti were a favourite subject - though we didn't see any others like this one growing out of the middle of a tree.
I say we both liked the desert best about Tucson, but it's not as if we disliked the city itself. We continued to be charmed by the residential architecture and landscaping we strolled past on our city walks and bike rides. And I kept photographing it when there was nothing else to shoot.
We often walked through the slightly more upscale Sam Hughes district near the University of Arizona, a neighbourhood where lots of faculty members live apparently. The houses are still not huge, but tend to be bigger and better kept than in the area where we were staying. Here's another selection.
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Another grey day today. I did get out for an exercise walk. Today's passage in my Frederick Douglass bio started with Douglass and his black and abolitionist allies railing against the horrendous 1883 Supreme Court decision in the so-called Civil Rights Cases.
In an 8-1 decision, the court said the Civil Rights Act, which prohibited discrimination based on race, only applied to governments, not to individuals. So racist hoteliers, unions stewards, school administrators, train conductors, etc. could discriminate with impunity in the ways they always had. The decision, which was based in part on States Rights doctrine, paved the way for the Jim Crow laws that would come in a few years.
Most of the rest of the passage dealt with Douglass's personal life, mainly his "secret" - soon revealed - marriage to a white woman, Helen Pitts. She was 20 years younger than him, and worked in his Recorder of Deeds office. He didn't even tell his children he was getting married, just went to a city clerk with a couple of trusted friends.
The marriage caused yet another media firestorm. The black activist community in particular was very critical. It was widely reported in the press as a blunder, or worse. Douglass maintained with some dignity that he had a perfect right to marry who he chose and that it wasn't of "public moment." Helen's family - staunch abolitionists - initially disowned her, although later some, not all, took her back.
As ever, the negative press coverage often tipped into the scurrilous, grossly exaggerating the difference in their ages, or representing Helen, an educated middle-class woman with a strong record as an abolitionist and women's rights advocate, as not much better than poor white trash. One editorialist said the decision to marry Pitts suggested Douglass had entered a second childhood.
Next, Rosetta's estranged husband, Nathan Sprague, who has apparently grown resentful of Douglass, brings a law suit against him, claiming that his sister, Louisa, had worked in the Douglass's home for years and never been paid. Another media circus ensues. Douglass fights back in the newspapers, as usual, but eventually settles out of court.
Finally, Ottilie Assing, travelling in Europe, discovers she has breast cancer and shortly after, commits suicide. In her will, she leaves Douglass a substantial sum of money, her books and other keepsakes.
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I've just started reading a translation of the Spanish writer Arturo Perez-Reverte's 2010 novel, El Asedio (The Siege). It's a murder mystery set in the south coast town of Cádiz during the siege of 1811 by Napoleonic forces.
This is the same conflict, The Peninsular War (1807–1814), commemorated in Goya's famous painting El tres de mayo de 1808 en Madrid or Los fusilamientos de la montaña del Príncipe Pío, a picture of Spanish prisoners of war being shot by a French firing squad.
It interested me because we spent a few days in Cádiz in 2016. And we've seen the Goya paintings from the Peninsular War at the Prado in Madrid.
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