1A: Nancy Mairs (b. July 23, 1943)

To learn more about Mairs go to her official website: http://nancymairs.com/  Her biography can be found here.  Follow this link to see a good video with Mairs. To learn more about Multiple Sclerosis, go to the National Multiple Sclerosis Society and Mayo Clinic pages.

& Thou Shalt Honor: Nancy Mairs Interview with PBS Tucson

Nancy Mairs and her husband George Mairs were interviewed by Dale Bell of PBS Tucson. Original Airdate: August 2, 1995. Nancy Mairs' s response follows. Nothing is straightforward. Confinement is a curse; confinement is a blessing. Oh I hate the limitations. There are specific parts of limitations that I especially hate. I was always a walker, and I just miss being able to get up and take off and walk somewhere. Probably the greatest source of pain has been that I can't be with my grandchildren the way I want to be. You know, I can sit and look at them, but I can't pick them up, I can't cuddle them, I can't run around after them, I can't take care of them. If I want to make things easy and comfortable for everybody, the only thing I should do is die. Interestingly I've started doing it in dreams. I've started dreaming about them a lot as though, perhaps that was a way of acting on my desires, since I no longer had a way of doing so in my conscious life so I could do it in my dream life. But it's a blessing also, because that very sitting -- I say I sit and look at my grandchildren, that way I see them in a way that perhaps nobody else does. You know, if things are flashing by you, you don't have time to contemplate them and cherish them, you don't know that you're not doing it. And that's part of the reason why I refer to people that other people may refer to as able-bodied, as non-disabled. Because they lack disability. They have a whole element in their lives that they lack. And I have that element in my life. Because I wasn't born disabled, I also have grounds for comparison. I started my life as a non-disabled person, and I know my losses very sharply -- very painfully -- but I also know my gains. I don't know whether my relationship with George is unique, because I have no grounds for comparison. In other words, every relationship is by definition unique. But I think there are some unusual aspects judging from my observation of other people's relationships. And I've often tried to characterize it without making it sound ideal in some way. It's ordinary. It's just the way we are. Other people however, tend to respond, well, very warmly to it; as if they took reassurance from it; as if they took strength from it. Although my wedding day is sort of a blur, we must have pledged to love and honor each other, because that's in the traditional marriage ceremony. I'm sure that I at least, I can't speak for George, that I had no idea what I was pledging to do. I wonder if anybody ever does. When you wind up requiring personal care, then I think it's easy to fall into a pattern of thinking, well, George is an extension of me, and should know what I want, what I need, when I want it, when I need it, and I do fall into that trap regularly, and I have to stop and remind myself George hasn't that obligation. So I suppose that for me honoring him, is backing up and looking at him as a person. As not me, or a part of me but as a wonderful, separate being. I mean, to be as helpless as I am, means that it would be easier to die. It would be easier for everybody, if I just died. If we're talking ease, and in our society ease is a very great value, for it to be easy. If they get hard, tough, then we think something's wrong. There's something sick about it, there's something the matter and we have to do something to make them easy and comfortable again. Well, if I want to make things easy and comfortable for everybody, the only thing I should do is die. And having George participate in my care and having other people do the same, calls me into life. It says, despite your losses, despite your limitations, you belong here with us and we want you to stay. We want you to stay enough that we're willing to participate in the labor that it takes. That's perhaps the fundamental of caregiving -- to enable another to want to be in the world. Not just enable them to be, but to enable them to want to be in the world when it would be easier not to. Historically, I'm depressive, but I'm a suicidal depressive. And there have been times when I've wanted to be dead, and several times when I've tried to be dead. And I'm pretty glad that it didn't work, most days. Most days I'm pretty glad to be here. To be open and accommodating to disability you have to accept the potential in your own life. I think all the time about rights for the disabled. Often not in a political sense. I've been an activist on issues of peace and justice in general, but never have focused in upon disability rights exclusively. I do however, serve on the Board of the Arizona Center for Disability Law. And that does a great deal of work towards furthering employment rights and housing rights for people with disabilities. But I think what I'm good for more than anything else is being in the world in a disabled form and therefore confronting the world with its inability to deal with me. For instance I go in to see my doctor, let's say. There's a sign-in sheet. I can't sign in on the sign-in sheet, because the counter is about this high, and the sign-in sheet is on top of the counter, and I can't reach that high. I can't see the person behind the counter to tell that person that I'm here and need to be signed in. But what I can do is shout up, "there's a person down here" and then a little head peers over and I think I have, I hope, made my point, that there are persons this high and at least one of the counters should be cut down to the height of my waist and nobody else's waist. That's become built in to who I am -- to be open about my disability and willing to remind others even at the risk of embarrassing them -- and they do tend to get very embarrassed if they do something heedless. But why should they be embarrassed? Why should somebody expect to know something without experience? It's not like they're dreadful people that it never occurred to them that the counter was too high. They should hear me when I tell them that the counter is too high, and respond by lowering the counter. So one of the functions I can serve is help people to see that there are angles that they may not have considered. An extra vision. An extra perspective that they haven't had occasion to know yet, but that they might have occasion to know. That of course is the source of the resistance, I think, is in order to be open and accommodating to disability you have to accept the potential in your own life, and most people are too terrified to do that. They resist it; it will never happen to me. Mairs talked about Voice Lessons with PBS Tucson on August 2, 1995.  Click here for the program. The New York Times HERS By Nancy Mairs;  Published: July 9, 1987 FOR months now I've been consciously searching for representations of myself in the media, especially television. I know I'd recognize this self because of certain distinctive, though not unique, features: I am a 43-year-old woman crippled by multiple sclerosis; although I can still totter a short distance with the aid of a brace and a cane, more and more of the time I ride in a wheelchair. Because of these devices and my peculiar gait, I'm easy to spot even in a crowd. So when I tell you I haven't noticed any woman like me on television, you can believe me. Actually, last summer I did see a woman with multiple sclerosis portrayed on one of those medical dramas that offer an illness-of-the-week like the daily special at your local diner. In fact, that was the whole point of of the show: that this poor young woman had M.S. She was terribly upset (understandably, I assure you) by the diagnosis, and her response was to plan a trip to Kenya while she was still physically capable of making it, against the advice of the young, fit, handsome doctor who had fallen in love with her. And she almost did make it. At least, she got as far as a taxi to the airport, hotly pursued by the doctor. But at the last moment she succumbed to his blandishments and fled the taxi into his manly protective embrace. No escape to Kenya for this cripple. For the rest of Mairs's column click on this. Los Angeles Times Book Review ORDINARY TIME: Cycles in Marriage, Faith, and Renewal, By Nancy Mairs (Beacon Press: $20; 238 pp.) July 11, 1993|Review by Michelle Huneven | Huneven is a fiction writer, a restaurant critic and a graduate student at the Claremont School of Theology Essayist Nancy Mairs is clearly astonished and delighted by at least one plot twist in the story of her own life. "I did not set out to be either a Catholic or a feminist, let alone both at once," she writes in her new book, "Ordinary Time: Cycles in Marriage, Faith and Renewal." A Congregationalist in childhood, an Episcopalian in young adulthood, she still can't fully embrace the full paradox of her present condition. "A Catholic feminist? Dear God," she exclaims, "couldn't I please be something else?" Known for her extreme, even controversial candor, Mairs has written in "Plaintext" and "Remembering the Bone House" about her own suicide attempts, her crippling depressions, extramarital affairs and ongoing battle with multiple sclerosis. "Ordinary Time," a parallel narrative to these works, is another pass through her life, this time as seen through the twin lenses of Catholicism and feminism. For the rest of Huneven's review click on this.

DOROTHEA LANGE: AMERICAN MASTERS (STREAMING AT PBS)

Lange at work during the Great Depression.
Photograph by her husband, economist Paul S. Taylor, 1934

The photograph of the dog stand, above, was taken by Dorothea Lange in October 1939 while she was under contract with the Farm Security Administration, a federal agency that hired photographers to document American rural life during the Great Depression. This stand was on U.S. highway 99 in Lane County, Williamette Valley, Oregon. Lange is considered one of the great American photographers, best known for her documentary photographs of rural Americans in the 1930s. A good place to start to learn more about Lange is this video, "Dorothea Lange's Documentary Photographs," from the Getty Museum. 

Her best known photograph, shown below, is "Migrant Mother," whose subject is Florence Thompson, a 32-year-old widow and farm worker during the Great Depression. It was taken in Nipomo, California in 1936. Four videos at YouTube--Lange's "Migrant Mother" (2:11), CSPAN's Story of "Migrant Mother" (4:09), Lange: An American Odyssey (37:46), and Lange: "Migrant Mother" (23:07)--present reports on Lange and the photograph, an important visual document of 20th Century America. You can find more photographs by Lange at this Library of Congress website. Check this site, too, for more photographs by Lange.

PBS broadcast Dorothea Lange: Grab a Hunk of Lightning (preview) on Friday, August 29th, 2014, at 9 PM. A trailer for the program appears above. If you missed the broadcast, you can now stream it.  Click here to stream the whole program. 

Her life is reported by bio. Read some of Dorothea Lange's words on photography at Dodho. a magazine of photography. 

Brainpickings presents the story of how Lange's "Migrant Mother" came to be. Read "The Story Behind the Iconic 'Migrant Mother' Photograph and How Dorothea Lange Almost Didn’t Take It" The U.S. Library of Congress Farm Security Administration archive is home to many photos that Lange took when visiting with Florence Thompson, the "Migrant Mother." You may be interested in reading an excerpt from No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy by Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites. The photograph also inspired Marissa Silver to write her novel, Mary Coin. NPR gave it a good review,  as did the Los Angeles Times. 

The photograph, "Migrant Mother," is of Florence Thompson, 32, and is part of the
Library of Congress collection. Lange took the photograph of Thompson
and three of her seven children in 1936, in a pea picking field in Nipomo, California.

The Layers by Stanley Kunitz

I have walked through many lives, some of them my own, and I am not who I was, though some principle of being abides, from which I struggle not to stray. When I look behind, as I am compelled to look before I can gather strength to proceed on my journey, I see the milestones dwindling toward the horizon and the slow fires trailing from the abandoned camp-sites, over which scavenger angels wheel on heavy wings. Oh, I have made myself a tribe out of my true affections, and my tribe is scattered! How shall the heart be reconciled to its feast of losses? In a rising wind the manic dust of my friends, those who fell along the way, bitterly stings my face. Yet I turn, I turn, exulting somewhat, with my will intact to go wherever I need to go, and every stone on the road precious to me. In my darkest night, when the moon was covered and I roamed through wreckage, a nimbus-clouded voice directed me: “Live in the layers, not on the litter.” Though I lack the art to decipher it, no doubt the next chapter in my book of transformations is already written. I am not done with my changes.    Copyright © 1978 by Stanley Kunitz. Used by permission of W. W. Norton. About This Poem About “The Layers” Stanley Kunitz has said, “I wrote ‘The Layers’ in my late seventies to conclude a collection of sixty years of my poetry. Through the years I had endured the loss of several of my dearest friends, including Theodore Roethke, Mark Rothko, and—most recently—Robert Lowell. I felt I was near the end of a phase in my life and in my work. The poem began with two lines that came to me in a dream, spoken out of a dark cloud: ‘Live in the layers, / not on the litter.’” Stanley Kunitz was born on July 29, 1905, in Worcester, Massachusetts. His many honors include the Pulitzer Prize and serving as the Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. Kunitz was a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and died at the age of 100 on May 14, 2006. Poetry by Kunitz The Collected Poems (W. W. Norton and Company, 2002) Poem-a-Day Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org. © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038

1B: William Carlos Williams & Pieter Brueghel

A man examines Pieter Brueghel the Elder's The Wedding Dance at the Detroit Institute of Arts

The Wedding Dance in the Open Air by William Carlos Williams Disciplined by the artist to go round & round in holiday gear a riotously gay rabble of peasants and their ample-bottomed doxies fills the market square featured by the women in their starched white headgear they prance or go openly toward the wood's edges round and around in rough shoes and farm breeches mouths agape Oya ! kicking up their heels *the poet: William Carlos Williams (American physician of New Jersey; 1883-1963) *artist: in this case,     Pieter Bruegel the Elder (Flemish; 1525-1569) *doxie: mistress; prostitute Will the  Detroit Institute of Arts sell Brueghel's The Wedding Dance  or other masterpieces in its collection today?  How much are they worth to Detroit today?   How much would they be worth to Detroit in 10, or even 100 years from now? The Detroit Institute of Arts and the city of Detroit are having a hard time paying their bills.  Should the museum sell masterpieces from its collection in order to balance the museum's and city's finances? For more of the story, see  "Masterpiece theater: Will Detroit have to sell its art to pay its bills? Art's true value frames debate as Detroit ponders selling museum masterpieces" by Mark Caro, Chicago Tribune, October 18, 2013.

Barack Obama, Editor

from

THE ATLANTIC      FEB 19 2013, 1:16 PM ET

inShare4by James Fallows

The hoary joke in the literary world, based on Dreams From My Father, was that if things had worked out differently for Barack Obama, he could have made it as a writer. Not as a pro basketball player, which might have been his original fantasy (or pro golfer, despite recent tips from Tiger Woods); or as a game-show host or famous disc jockey, where you can imagine Bill Clinton being a big success; or as commissioner of baseball, the path-not-taken for G.W. Bush; or as a backstage legislative master, like Lyndon Johnson or even Teddy Kennedy. But in nonfiction writing, he coulda been a contender.

He might also be vying for the ever-dwindling number of editor jobs that are available. Three years ago I posted the picture of his hand-edited version of his address to a Joint Session of Congress on health-care reform. Now we get this White House photo of his reworking of last month' inaugural address. Click for a zoomable detailed view.



There are lots of fascinating details and insights from the edits Obama has made here, and from comparison with the final version he delivered six days after this draft. I'll leave most of them for you to find and will mention only one.

As I noted at the time, early in the speech Obama made a very powerful allusion to Lincoln's second inaugural address:

Through blood drawn by lash and blood drawn by sword, we learned that no union founded on the principles of liberty and equality could survive half-slave and half-free.

That line isn't in this draft shown in the picture --  at least not the part we can see. But Obama is working toward it with this handwritten insert at the top of the page:

 Through blood and toil ____ we learned that no nation founded on these principles could survive half-slave and half-free.

He recognizes that "toil" is not right -- "blood and toil" would be an allusion to Churchill, not Lincoln -- but he also knows that for cadence he needs another word after "blood," where he's crossed out "toil" and left a  ___  mark.

At some point between this draft and delivery time he or his assistants figured out that the most elegant approach would be simply to use Lincoln's phrase -- and, part of the elegance, just to use it as an allusion, an element of the national heritage Americans either should know or could know, rather than lumbering it with a heavy "in the words of our Sixteenth President" attribution. Much as our Sixteenth President himself had once used the phrase "a house divided" without having to tell his audience that he was quoting the Bible. There's much to observe in this one image. Thanks to reader KP.

__

Update: I mentioned earlier that I "remembered" a line from Obama's 2004 Democratic convention speech that he hadn't actually uttered. Reader TZ, in California, gives another explanation for why I "heard" something different from what Obama said:

As others may have pointed out, in the movie Man of the Year, Robin Williams character Tom Dobbs speaks this line:

But the last few years we've been divided. Red states, blue states.
There are no red and blue states, there's only the United States of America. That's what we're about.

You can find this article at this site for the The Atlantic.

Things You Can't Unsee
(and What That Says About Your Brain)

Are you ready to find more? Go.
from The Atlantic, May 5, 2014
by Alexis C. Mardigal

1B: Six-Word Story Guidelines

Six-Word Story Guidelines

WILLIAM FAULKNER FAMOUSLY SAID that a novelist is a failed short story writer, and a short story writer is a failed poet. Hemingway, with his creation of the six-word story, combined poetry and drama into a short form that has grown in popularity while remaining difficult to achieve. Narrative is looking for six-word stories that can stand alongside the best that have been written. Here are a few:

For sale: Baby shoes. Never worn. —Ernest Hemingway

Longed for him. Got him. Shit. —Margaret Atwood

          All those pages in the fire. —Janet Burroway

           First sex. I came. She didn’t. —Sherman Alexie

WAR. Nineteen. I was older then. --Stanton S. Coerr

You can find more at Narrative Magazine.  Go to http://www.narrativemagazine.com/sixwords for more information.

To see more examples of six word stories read the Atlantic Monthly, August 27, 2013, "Describing My Experiences in Afghanistan in 6 Words" by Thomas Gibbons-Neff. His article includes a link to "A Glimpse of War Hemingway-style" in Stars and Stripes, August 8, 2013. It is also devoted to six word stories. More six-word stories by veterans can be found here.

                                                               photo by Finbarr O'Reilly/Reuters

Came home. Moved on. Couldn't forget. --Thomas Gibbons-Neff

1B: Larry Levis (1946 – 1996)

The Poem You Asked for 

by Larry Levis

My poem would eat nothing.
I tried giving it water
but it said no,

worrying me.
Day after day,
I held it up to the light,

turning it over,
but it only pressed its lips
more tightly together.

It grew sullen, like a toad
through with being teased.
I offered it money,

my clothes, my car with a full tank.
But the poem stared at the floor.
Finally I cupped it in

my hands, and carried it gently
out into the soft air, into the
evening traffic, wondering how

to end things between us.
For now it had begun breathing,
putting on more and

more hard rings of flesh.
And the poem demanded the food,
it drank up all the water,

beat me and took my money,
tore the faded clothes
off my back,

said Shit,
and walked slowly away,
slicking its hair down.

Said it was going
over to your place.


The Poetry Foundation

1B: Quincy Troupe

A Poem for Magic

by Quincy Troupe

take it to the hoop, “magic” johnson,

take the ball dazzling down the open lane

herk & jerk & raise your six-feet, nine-inch frame

into the air sweating screams of your neon name
“magic” johnson, nicknamed “windex” way back

in high school

cause you wiped glass backboards
so clean, where you first juked and shook

wiled your way to glory

a new-style fusion of shake-&-bake

energy, using everything possible, you created your own

space to fly through–any moment now

we expect your wings to spread feathers for that spooky takeoff

of yours–then, shake & glide & ride up in space

till you hammer home a clothes-lining deuce off glass

now, come back down with a reverse hoodoo gem

off the spin & stick in sweet, popping nets clean

from twenty feet, right side

put the ball on the floor again, “magic”

slide the dribble behind your back, ease it deftly

between your bony stork legs, head bobbing everwhichaway

up & down, you see everything on the court

off the high yoyo patter

stop & go dribble

you thread a needle-rope pass sweet home

to kareem cutting through the lane

his skyhook pops the cords

now, lead the fast break, hit worthy on the fly

now, blindside a pinpoint behind-the-back pass for two more

off the fake, looking the other way, you raise off-balance

into electric space

sweating chants of your name

turn, 180 degrees off the move, your legs scissoring space

like a swimmer’s yoyoing motion in deep water

stretching out now toward free flight

you double-pump through human trees
hang in place

slip the ball into your left hand

then deal it like a las vegas card dealer off squared glass

into nets, living up to your singular nickname

so “bad” you cartwheel the crowd toward frenzy

wearing now your electric smile, neon as your name

in victory, we suddenly sense your glorious uplift

your urgent need to be champion

& so we cheer with you, rejoice with you

for this quicksilver, quicksilver,

quicksilver moment of fame

so put the ball on the floor again, “magic”

juke & dazzle, shake & bake down the lane

take the sucker to the hoop, “magic” johnson,

recreate reverse hoodoo gems off the spin

deal alley-oop dunkathon magician passes

now, double-pump, scissor, vamp through space

hang in place

& put it all up in the sucker’s face, “magic” johnson,

& deal the roundball like the juju man that you am

like the sho-nuff shaman that you am
like the sho-nuff spaceman you am

Following his poetry reading at St. Mary’s, Troupe was asked whether he planned to write poems for other basketball greats (Michael Jordan then the reigning monarch).  I don’t remember his exact reply, but the gist of it was that he was not so much portraying individuals as capturing the spirit of basketball at its best. My sense is that, having written the perfect basketball poem once, any further poems about particular players would seem superfluous.

http://www.betterlivingthroughbeowulf.com/?p=3022d

1B: Alice Walker (b. Feb. 9, 1944)

The official website of Alice Waker is a good place to start to learn about the writer, best known for her novel The Color Purple, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1983.  Find more information about Walker at the New Georgia Encyclopedia and make a visit to her pages at the Poetry Foundation and at Biography.com. Watch the video documentary Alice Walker: Beauty in Truth that was broadcast on PBS: American Masters.

In an interview (The Guardian, March 9, 2013) Walker discussed the film and her life as a writer:

Interviewer: Pratibha Parmar's film Beauty in Truth, about your life and work, makes for fascinating viewing: you've done so many different things in so many different places with so many different people. Is that how it feels to you?

Walker: I'm still living at least five parallel lives, honestly! I wonder about it. I have no idea how that happens. But, yes, I live in Mexico, I live in Hawaii and I live in northern California and all my life has been like that. It's as if I got all of this energy from ancestors who were not permitted to leave the plantations for 400 years and I got all of their desire to be part of the world.

Interviewer: The film begins with your upbringing in Jim Crow Georgia, one of eight children, the daughter of sharecroppers. Your family had very little money, but you did have an extremely determined mother.

Walker: I think many people in my community had very different kinds of mothers: they had mothers who acquiesced in the system of male and white-supremacist domination and my mother never did. She just could not do it. It just wasn't in her.

Interviewer: Would you that your first motivation as a writer was to bring hidden lives to light?

Walker: When I was 13, my sister was a cosmetologist – she made up the bodies in the funeral home. One day, she showed me the body of a woman who had been murdered. Her husband had shot her in the face. Now, many people would hear this tale, and they would categorise it; they would try to box it into some little corner, but actually that kind of brutality against women is endemic and it's now coming more and more out into the open.

Interviewer: That's something to see at the age of 13.

Walker: It had a big impact on me. And her daughter was in my class, and had the same name as my own grandmother, who had been shot to death. I think that, when you start out writing, it's often like following the thread of Ariadne: you never know which minotaur you're going to find. But you often find one – or two or three!

Interviewer: You were involved with the civil rights movement and with feminism, the latter especially when you moved to New York and worked with Gloria Steinem on Ms Magazine in the 1970s.

Walker: I love the women's movement and I never thought of it as belonging to any particular segment of the population. I loved working at Ms Magazine, especially because of Gloria, because she understood that I really needed a room of my own, even there.

Interviewer: What are your feelings about contemporary feminism?

Walker: The conundrum, in a way, is why, after all the struggle, and all the teaching – teaching was so important: we taught each other, and we taught other women and girls – women, at this point, are comfortable referring to themselves as guys, and basically erasing their femininity at every opportunity. I don't get it.

Interviewer: You're very open about what it's cost you in terms of personal relationships, for example with partners and with your daughter [Walker and her daughter, Rebecca, are estranged].

Walker: I accept it. What can I do? I am this being who, for whatever reason, feels completely dedicated to the whole of humanity. I do. I deeply regret any harm, or any perceived harm, that I may have done to anyone by any behaviour of mine. I absolutely always tried to do the very best that I could with the spirit that I have.

Essay by Alice Walker

Oppressed Hair Puts a Ceiling on the Brain

from Living By The Word: Selected Writings 1973-1987 

by Alice Walker

I am going to talk about an issue even closer to home. I am going to talk to you about hair. Don't give a thought to the state of yours at the moment. Don't be at all alarmed. This is not an appraisal. I simply want to share with you some of my own experiences with our friend hair, and at the most hope to entertain and amuse you.

Read the entire essay here.

The photograph that accompanied her interview with The Guardian, March 9, 2013.

Andre Kertesz: Photographs of Readers

photograph by Andre Kertesz: Man Reading (with cow), Paris, 1928 

Who is that guy, above, reading with that cow looking over his shoulder?  I have no idea.  But if you wish to learn more about Andre Kertesz (1894-1985), the photographer (of the picture, above, and those below), see the page for the PBS Americian Masters. and go to a great page blogger of photographer Erick Kim has devoted to Kertesz. The Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College in Chicago has an extensive Kertesz biography and archive.

New York City Skyline, Chimneys, 1963

Reading in New York City, 1963

Esztergom, Hungary, 1915

Second Avenue, New York City, Man reading in antique store, 1969

New York (boy on pile of newspapers eating ice cream), October 12, 1944

Paris, 1923

Nara. Commuters on a train. 1968

Circus Performer in Dressing Room, 1969

Long Island University, New York, 1963 

Café du Dôme, Paris, 1923

Man Reading with Magnifying Glass, New York, 1959

And there's more photos of readers by Kertesz here and here. There is also a Kertesz series produced by the BBC on YouTube. This is the first part of the Master Photographers program on him.

Chief Reading Chekhov, Los Angeles. 2010