TRANS ATLANTIC FAN FUND


The March 1993, late again and it's all my fault Newsletter of North America's Queen of TAFF, Jeanne Bowman P.O. Box 982 Glen Ellen Ca. 95442-0982. Brought to you with the last of DUFFer Art Widner's Corroborees. A Reminder to Get Out and Vote for TAFF. Thank you Robert Lichtman and Paul Williams for mailing suppport. And Sue Thomason, for inspiration with limpets and St. Hilda's snakes.


Auction, baby

Kim Huett bought Hyphen #8 for $35. Tony Berry has sent me copies of his fanzine, Eyeballs In the Sky. Including #5 "about obsessions... two women, from different sides of the Atlantic, wrote about the same thing: shoes... Both Pam and Lucy find it necessary to go out and buy vast amounts of footwear, and then go out and buy some more." But it will cost you. No more of this whining about "I don't know these people", or "I haven't voted for so long I'm gafia now" or "is this stuff on the ballot really true?" Worse yet, give up on the notion of "Common Wisdom" and it's pointing to any "obvious" winner, unless you've voted with it. Even then, I divulge nothing by saying your vote counts. In fact, I'd like to add it up, and before the deadline on May 1, 1993. So, two bucks in a ballot and then I'll accept your bids. (Questions? Call me at (707) 996-9009.)

Mail Order

The Lindsay Report Ethel Lindsay's 1962 TAFF trip report, reprinted by Joyce Scrivner. Edition limited to 150 copies. $6.50
Platen Stories by Dave Langford $4
TransAtlantic Hearing Aid D.Langford $5
Fanthology 87 edited by R. Brandt $5
A Fans' Christmas In Ireland with Walt Willis and fannish neighbors. Art by Stu Shiffman. Limited & numbered edition. $6

Money

Start up March 1992
Total March 1993
$4609.98
$3082.82

After the voting I'll give you the breakdown for the figures on it, a real financial statement.

Whole zloty shaking doing on ...

The (old) news is that certain of our European fans cannot export currency. One Zagreb voter worked out an exchange with a British fan, so that Pam did get money with the ballot. Looks as though we may need to think more about this for the future. Ideas?

® TAFFTM ©

That's right. Ah, nuts, seriously I'm not going to go the route of the Worldcon. The thought occured though when reading the collectible fanzine sale catalog to benefit the Arkadian Bookshop and TAFF. That was 10% to TAFF, which came to a tidy $60. No complaint there, but the issue was raised on the use of TAFF for commercial endeavors. It's a grey area, but mixing auctions for Fan Funds is one thing and sales for bills and new stock in a business is another. Certainly, many publications have put a percentage towards TAFF and merrily paid for themselves on the way. But I worry about TAFF showing up in other weird combinations. I'll have to be more careful with how agreeable I am to Andy Hooper's next proposition. To be honest, I am missing quite a few *interesting* photos, and here in Slubberdegullion 5 among other intriguing titles and right next to "Conventional Proustian Housewife" is "TAFF Nudes".

Frank Meadow Sutcliffe

Whitby's Limpet Photographer

The small port town of Whitby, located on a remote stretch of the northern Yorkshire coast in England, had enough character and variety to provide Frank Meadow Sutcliffe with almost infinite photographic subject matter. Any other photographer might have been attracted to Whitby's collection of masted ships and the ruins of Whitby Abbey on the heights above the harbor, and then moved on after a day. Sutcliffe, however, stayed for a lifetime and recorded the town's inhabitants and changing aspects from 1876, when he was twenty-three, until his death in 1941. No one less rooted in Whitby's everyday life could have captured the character of its fishermen, housewives, factory hands, and "wharf rats" as well as Sutcliffe did over the decades, or patiently waited for changing seasons and weather conditions to provide dramatic lighting conditions. Sutciffe once wrote of meeting a visiting photographer who waited under an archway during a summer storm, when the sun suddenly broke through the black clouds.

The effect of sunlight was so impressive and grand that I broke through all formality and asked the stranger if he was not going to take it. "Take what?" He asked. "I am waiting to take the bridge as soon as the rain stops." The bridge is there always. The grand effect of sunlight on the wet houses, with the black sky behind and the wet pavement below, reflecting both, lasted for a few minutes, and then disappeared forever. I mention this simply to show how some people wickedly throw the most splendid chances away.

Sutcliffe made a modest living as a portrait photographer, and recorded the town itself in his spare time. He passed up opportunities to develop a lucrative practice elsewhere in order to concentrate on Whitby, and thought that other photographers would also do well to tightly focus their subject matter. His suggested training exercise was to choose a subject and to fix a camera on it by fastening the camera to a stake in the ground. Then,

Photograph your subject at every hour of the day, on fine days, and at intervals on dull days, photograph it after it has been rained on for weeks, and after it has been sun-dried for months.

Sutcliffe thought of himself as a limpet, that shellfish which attaches itself to a rocky seacoast and never moves away.

His aesthetic development, however, was perhaps the equal of anyone who had travelled widely and exchanged ideas with prominent colleagues. He had a superb sense of composition, both with people and inanimate objects. His landscapes and harbor scenes can be realistic or romantic, or somehow, both simultaneously. His portraits, though posed, are remarkably natural and evocative of character.

Despite Whitby's location far from the commercial and cultural centers of England, Sutcliffe became well known in his own time, attracting praise from John Ruskin and P.H. Emerson, and winning numerous awards. He exhibited widely and quickly mastered new technical advances. (One can only regret that he did not manage to photograph Count Dracula when the vampire landed at Whitby, as related by Bram Stoker.) He retired from portrait work in 1922 and spent his remaining years as curator of the Whitby Museum.

Today, Whitby is little changed, and Sutcliffe's photographs sell to visitors from around the world from a little shop managed by his granddaughter. William Kostura

Voting Deadline May 1