David K. Leff, Essayist, Poet, Lecturer

On the Corner of Art, Time, Place & Memory: The Wadsworth Atheneum Meets Coney Island

My late father never took me to a museum.  He had little patience for velvet-roped quiet, gilt-framed paintings, static sculpture and dioramas.  So I was shocked when I felt his almost palpable presence on a

Wooden Horses, Reginald Marsh

recent visit to Hartford, Connecticut’s Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, in his view one of those “high class joints that could use a little shaking up.”  He was so clearly beside me that I could smell his skin, hear his indelible Brooklyn accent.  I was so sure he had spoken, that I looked around me astonished that no one else had heard him.  But I shouldn’t have been surprised.  I was in the middle of “Coney Island: Visions of an American Dreamland, 1861—2008.”   Indeed, the exhibition seemed to be shaking up America’s oldest public art museum with images and reminiscences of Brooklyn, New York’s exuberant and grotesque ongoing mardi gras, just a short walk from my dad’s childhood home.

The River's Pulse: Fifty-Two Haiku Weeks Along the Farmington (part 1: March)

March

beneath the ice
a restless flow holds its breath
liquid skin awaits

ice cakes at the dam
are suicides soon to leap
slowly melt away

soils ooze and gurgle
as sun loosens earth’s bowels
rush to the river

broken factory
windows watch the cold flow pass
wheels once spun machines

rain and melting snow
peak a steady whoosh and roar
the wind’s voice stolen


A couple blocks from my home, the Farmington River is the largest tributary of the Connecticut.

From Tinker's Damn, Homebound Publications, 2013, http://homeboundpublications.com/tinkers-damn-bookstore/

Seeking Local Color: Connecticut's Infamous Blue Laws Revisited

Until the 1980s, if you tried buying a pair of blue jeans, a place setting of flow blue china, or a blue racer snake in my home state of Connecticut on a Sunday, you would likely have found yourself singing the blues.  State law kept most stores shuttered.  Though many businesses are now open daily, some places lightly echo the old statutes and still maintain a weekly sabbatical out of long held custom or belief.  More than a historical curiosity, it’s tribute to their unique sense of community in an age of homogenous business formulas.

Known today as a blue state for the political dominance of democrats, the color once signified the harsh colonial moral code embedded in our statutes by 1650 when playing shuffleboard, blasphemy, idleness, and failure to attend church were crimes.   Denoted “blue laws,” the term’s origin has never been adequately explained, though the quaint notion that they were originally printed on blue paper is apocryphal.  The longest lived and most notable of theses statutes were ones forbidding work and commerce on Sunday.