The Adventures of the Overzealous Historian

Joining the Discussion...

2012-01-25T13:14:00.000-08:00

So the MBTA is having a "Discussion" tonight at Salem Town Hall Annex to discuss the proposed fare hikes and service cuts to the T. And I'm bringing this little missive with me. If it never gets read, or, alternatively, I am never heard from again, I thought I'd share it here.
.......

I’m not sure how many of you actually use the T to get to work of a day, but I thought I’d share with you my experiences, taking a random day last week as an example. I pay $163 a month for my monthly pass, which, on an average month works out to about $8.15 a day.

I start out my commute when I arrive at the Salem Commuter Rail Station Parking Lot. In case you aren’t aware, for a long time, there was a pot hole just at the entrance to the station, beneath the underpass, that was deep enough to show a glimpse of the earth’s core. It has been filled in partially since then with, I can only assume, other cars who were not aware of its presence. I then manage to find a parking spot…or what I can only assume is a parking spot. The lot hasn’t been shoveled since last night’s flurries, and the snow has been tramped down to a kind of glassine sheen that obscures the numbers. It does, however, make it much easier to get to the train platform, as I need only set a foot down and apply a bit of pressure, and I can simply slide toward the train. Incidentally, according to the T’s website, the halfway mark of the Salem Parking Garage is this June. I’m assuming this assumption is much like the one that said the Apocalypse was going to occur last May. It seems at this point that they both have the same likelihood of occurring.

Once on the platform, a discomforting quiet descends. Because the 8:06 is not yet here. And since the ambient temperature has now dropped to about 14 degrees, and I’m starting to sympathize with Leonardo DiCaprio after the boat went down. Or, perhaps Anna Karenina would be more appropriate. Because despite the $374,702,363 you have received from the Federal Government in the past four years alone, I still don’t have my heated waiting area, and though the trains can and do run delayed whenever the temperature falls below about 30 degrees, my boss says I don’t have that same luxury. When the train finally does arrive, it is 8:12, and the good people who plan to travel on the 8:14 are on the platform as well, and only one set of doors will open, for reasons that no one seems to understand, so boarding will take at least 5 minutes. Which is a step up from last year, when the train arrived at 8:12, and only one set of doors would open, and it took five minutes to board, during which the grease on the open door caught fire. I think it says something about the state of affairs when someone calls out “Hey, I think the train is on fire”, and meets with nothing more than a few resigned chuckles.

I now get to stand for half an hour because the train is overcrowded, in the aisle, simmering gently in a puddle of condensed snow and salt grit. We grind to a prolonged crawl and eventually stop to let another train cross over the Saugus bridge, but generally arrived in a somewhat timely method. Once again, only one set of doors will open, but we eventually make it through North Station and down to the subway platform. Judging by the amount of people already gathered there, one can only assume the Green Line is experiencing signal problems. Or traffic problems. Or a mechanical failure. Or a medical emergency. The possibilities are so varied and many that it makes every morning a thrilling adventure. It should take 8 minutes to get from North Station to Arlington Station. I think I can count on one hand the number of times this has actually happened. Fortunately for me, and for many others, most employers in Boston need only hear that you commute on the T, and you have a permanent excuse for your perpetual tardiness. In my office, so many people use the T that no meetings are scheduled until at least 10am. I turn on my computer to find that I have an email from my boss, one from my mother, and 15 from the T, alerting me to the delays and problems on the Commuter Rail and Green Line thus far today. Which means it’s been a pretty good day so far, as far as the T is concerned.

For my commute home, I head back to Arlington Station, once again to face a crowd of people waiting for a train back to North Station.

Now this is my big question. More than why you are raising fares. More than why you based your entire financial plan on the foundation of an exponentially increasing sales tax that had no basis in reality. And more than why you would refuse to allow alcohol advertising on the T, which will mean another $1.5 million in revenue that I am going to have to pay eventually. Why are all the Green Line trains so eager to go to Government Center? Because, believe me, I’ve had time to count, and for every one train that is going to North Station or beyond, there are five trains that insist on stopping at Government Center. And of those precious few that do manage to move on to Haymarket and North Station, it’s probably about once a week that I’m on a train that simply arrives at Government Center and refuses to budge. Is there a mythical Valhalla of trains in that tunnel? Are you hiding the Fountain of Youth in there? The secret treasure of the Knights Templar? I doubt it’s Government Center station itself. I’ve spent far too much time there, and it’s uncomfortably warm and smells like cheese and exhaust fumes.

If and when I am fortunate enough to make it to North Station, my worries are largely at an end. Except that lately, since apparently it was decided to remove a car from the 5:40pm train, forcing me once again to stand all the way home. Luckily, today, the train doesn’t stop, as it did earlier in the week, outside Lynn station. We sat for ten minutes until a conductor decided to go to the driver and find out what was the matter. He emerged a few minutes later looking pale, and told us that we were going to roll into Lynn and figure out what was going to happen from there. We were never told what on our train broke, or what MacGuyver-like contraptions were used to cobble together our train, but from what we were meant to believe, it was a pretty heroic effort.

As you can imagine, I’ve met some extraordinary people on my commutes. The conductors who try their best to make our trip and peaceful, efficient or non-combustible one. The gentleman who helped me with my homework while we were stuck near Wonderland station for two hours (we got to leap off the train and wander to Wonderland, in case you were wondering). The woman who I helped with her knitting one night as we waited to find out if we would have heat on our train home last winter (we got heat, but lost our lights). I clearly have a wealth of memories from my commutes, and plenty of good stories to tell at parties. And I realize that you might very well be sheltered by your $100,000 salaries and the endless cycle of nepotism and financial mismanagement that seems to define the MBTA and MBCR, so I am glad truly grateful for the opportunity to speak to you today. But, to be quite frank, if you think that I am willing to pay a penny more for such service, you have much bigger problems than a budget discrepancy.

Taken for a Ride....

2011-09-22T14:59:00.000-07:00

Ok, ok, so it's been a while. I'm sorry.

This is not the letter I sent to the MBTA this week, but it's the one I'd like to have sent. Enjoy.

Dear Mr. Davis,

I realize that you’ve only been the actual General Manager of the MBTA for a few weeks now, and I hope that’s going well for you. I’m sorry that I didn’t get a chance to write and welcome you and introduce myself, but I was stuck on a Green Line train. For three weeks.

The MBTA means a great deal to me. I celebrated a birthday waiting for a train a few years back and another one on the Commuter Rail just a few weeks ago. By the time we reached North Station it had started snowing, so I missed out on my party, but such is the way of things. I figure that next year, I’ll invite my friends and family to join me in my commute so that we can celebrate together. To this, I would ask that you inform me if there are any ‘planned upgrades’ to the T that might actually go into effect in this decade, so that I could make my plans accordingly. I should hate to arrange for a Keown family reunion on the 110 out of Rockport in the morning, only to find that we actually arrive at North Station in a timely manner.

Also, the T brings people closer together. In this world where people are increasingly isolated in their jobs and daily life, it is remarkable that the T is such an effective instrument for uniting people of all classes, social strata and life experience. For example, last week on my way home from work, I, like many others, waited four and a half hours for a Green Line train to North Station. This may be a slight exaggeration, Mr. Davis, but the joy that thrilled through the hearts of all my fellow commuters as we awaited a train that was not terminating at that great sinkhole of youth and hope known as Government Center was a palpable thing. The train perhaps was a little over-filled, but all that means for us Green Line veterans is the chance to make new friends and memories aboard the subway. My colleague made her way aboard the train and I followed, wedging myself between surly college student and a very well-dressed man in a lovely charcoal-gray suit.

Suddenly, behind me, I hear a feminine voice say “Excuse Me”. Now, in my experience, one says “Excuse me” when one has inadvertently and non-aggressively touched another human being. Perhaps they bumped them with their bag, stepped on their foot, or at a pinch, encroached upon the other’s personal space in order to pass by to a more convenient place. It is an apology for a transient physical transgression. But not on the T. Oh no, the T even elevates language itself to new levels. For the woman who excused herself to me did not do any of the things I have mentioned above. No, she stepped aboard the train, clipping the back of my sandaled feet with her pointy-toed shoes, and proceeded to use her not inconsiderable bodily mass to propel me forward into the train. Heedless of the laws of physics and dignity she surged on, so eager was she to become one with the rest of the Green Line passengers. Or, at least, with the back of my head.

When she had shoved herself so close that we were practically conjoined, her over-sized purse repeatedly jamming me in the kidneys, the doors swung, shut encasing me like a mummy in an aluminum sarcophagus, surrounded by the riches—well, not of a kingdom, but I was pressed up against a lot of bags and hips, and I’m assuming there were some wallets in there, so riches, nonetheless. The train lurched forward and I, compacted and yet stranded in the middle of the car with no way to raise my arms and reach for a far-off pole or strap with which to anchor myself, was in great peril of colliding with a fellow passenger. Or the floor.

Fortunately, the Great and Good Gods of the T were smiling upon me, and the lovely-suited man came to my aid by reaching out his hand, and wrapping it around my neck, just where it meets the shoulder. And while my current position—and his hand’s current position on my spine—prevented me from turning and demonstrating my thanks, I couldn’t help but think how fortunate I was that the MBTA permitted vampires to ride the subways. What an interesting cultural exchange and what a display of tolerance and diversity! Now, when interested neighbors ask me if I have ever been groped on the Green Line, as seems to be the experience of every other person I have ever met. No, I can say, I have never been groped. Mauled? Yes. Gripped in the tenacious claws of a charcoal-suited vampire? Indeed. But groped? Such paltry, base behavior is not for the riders of the Green Line!

And while we are on the subject, Mr. Davis, what on earth is so fantastic about Government Center? I've spent a great deal of time there lately. I spent forty-seven minutes there a few weeks back waiting for a train to North Station (I could have walked, I know. I could have walked back and forth between Government Center and North Station three times, I think). It's a little hot, like all T Stations, it smells like feet and cheese and despair. And there is that man who lives there who talks to the escalator all day. Not that much different from most other T Stations that I've visited. Yet every single Green Line train seems hell bent on getting to Government Center, and never leaving. Do the Orange Line cars make fun of them? Is that why they don't want to go on to Haymarket and, more importantly to my story, North Station? Is there a kind of Subway Car Happy Hour going on in that tunnel into which they all scurry? Are you hiding the Fountain of Youth in there? The lost library of Alexandria? Unicorns? If so, could I meet one? Because with the amount of time I've spent at Government Center with other homicidally annoyed commuters, dazed and bewildered tourists with their fanny packs and visors askew, and teenagers on field trips to nowhere that I am thinking of changing my mailing address. I sometimes wonder if the security camera footage of all of us wailing and gnashing our teeth and sweating while waiting for the Mythical Train that is "right behind this one" (which is rather like when I was four and my mother told me if I watched Disney's Sleeping Beauty one more time, the ending would change), entertains you and your fellow employees. If so, I can dance for you. Or stage an engaging display of mime. Whatever you feel would be worth sending a train to North Station that isn't so clogged with people that it looks like an escape from an active war zone.

Perhaps it is because of problems like these that there seems to be some discrepancy in service on the Green Lines. Generally between the hours of 7:30am and 11:00am, though I suppose this isn’t too much of a problem, since for only about 2 of those hours are any large groups of people trying to utilize the subway. Sadly, though, by the time a train arrives, they have regressed a bit and resemble a well-dressed stock of neanderthals, reading to use their briefcases as cudgels in order to access the doors of the train. I am generally in that crowd, arriving at the North Station T Stop around 8:35am. Yesterday, I was fortunate enough to arrive at 8:32am, just as a Green Line Train bound for Cleveland Circle groaned its way out of the station, its taillights blinking like luminescent warts. I shrugged, thinking that, as it only takes about 12 minutes to get to Arlington, which is where I work, I had plenty of time to wait.

It’s just that I had no idea how truth that thought would eventually become. In the time it took for another train to arrive and shunt me off into the bilious darkness, I had time to read the entire Metro—you know that little mini-paper full of Interesting and Insightful Articles that is produced for commuters to read in the time it takes to do their commuting? Except I read the entire thing. Cover to cover. Including the Help Wanted and the Personal Ads. And then I read 37 pages of my book. Then I think I must have blacked out for a time, as the next thing I remember, I was making paper airplanes out of the now-completed Metro and was trying to convince a few harried looking lawyer-types to join me in a chorus from The Gondoliers. And in that time, at least three Green Line trains passed through the station, with “No Service” signs decorating their destination signs.

Where are these trains going, Mr. Davis? Are they lost? Did they get bad directions coming out of Lechmere Station? Or is it true, as some have whispered in the darkness of Copley Station, that the Green Line is indeed a conduit to Hades itself, where the souls of the damned are transported to eke out an eternity in anguish?

…If the latter is the case, then I really think these trains should stop. After all, we, the T Riders, could offer these condemned some words of comfort and encouragement. After all, if you’re on the Green Lien of a morning, it’s a pretty safe bet that wherever you’re going can’t be all that much worse, right?

Trick or Treat?

2010-10-29T13:31:00.000-07:00

Wish I had something more fascinating, but I wrote this a while ago, and it seems like a fitting time to inflict it on you. Enjoy!

That is not dead which can eternal lie.

And with strange aeons even death may die.

(H.P. Lovecraft)

Halfway between Park Street and Boylston, the train ground to a shuddering halt. Following a death-rattle of exhaust fumes, the conductor’s radio clicked to life.

“Ladies and Gentlemen…grinkle gaaaaaaahhh....standing…..few minnnnnoooooo. Please be…murfle furfle..thank you…battangs anders….BTA.”

There was a chorus of sighs around me as of souls in purgatory. One girl in a hot pink sweater with black-tipped blonde hair sipped her coffee and began tapping with her free thumb at her phone. A business man in a pin-striped suit turned the page of his newspaper and almost elbowed a woman with a toddler on her lap in the head. The mother closed her eyes and tilted her head against the window of the car while the child slept in her arms. No one looked particularly concerned or annoyed. In Boston during the morning rush hour, it was a minor miracle that it had taken this far for the train to come up with some reason to stall.

I readjusted my grip on the bar running the length of the car and shrugged my bag higher up on my shoulder. In the window, I could see my reflection in the dim tunnel light. Short, ruddy-brown hair that curled mercilessly despite my every effort to keep it straight. Green eyes that had sleepy-shadows lurking beneath them, leftovers from a week of increasingly long nights. Pale skin. Freckles. Button-down shirt, a-line skirt and green patent-leather Mary Janes. At least I could look snappy, even if I felt like I could sleep for a month and still need a chemical infusion to keep me upright.

The train sighed again, a slight pulse of electricity ran from the third rail and made the wheels of the car tremble a little. The man in the suit turned his page again, and the girl in the pink sweater took another gulp of coffee while the screen of her phone flashed green and blue in the reflection of her butterfly-shaped glasses.

Because I was standing close to the driver’s compartment, I heard his walkie-talkie blip to life.

“E Train 4370, E Train 4370, be advised there is an electrical problem on the tracks ahead of you. Please stand by until an Employee can be located to remove the…problem. Over.”

I let out the slightest of moans and checked my watch. 8:35am. And no coffee. Today of all days.

Turning carefully so as not to whack into the man in the red shirt beside me, I shuffle-bumped my way to the conductor’s booth.

“Excuse me,” I said, fumbling for my id in the side of my bag. “But did I just hear a request for an Employee?”

He waited a few breaths before turning his head. His skin was shiny and pale, and reminded me of the inside of an uncooked potato. Greasy dark hair. On his head and shooting in ill-advised tufts from his chin. But at least his eyes weren’t glowing. Yet.

He looked me over, starting at my shoes and moving unhurriedly over my clothes to the key dangling from a chain around my neck, then quickly up to my face. I held my badge up beside my eyes and glowered like a professional.

“I—um. Oh. I didn’t think—“

“I noticed.” I snapped. “Can you please open the doors?”

“Umm…right away Mith.” I raised my eyebrows. He was missing a fang. Looked like a newer injury. The hand that shot out to pull the handle controlling the door had an ugly scar running from his index finger to his bony wrist. It looked like a burn in the sticky orange glare of the maintenance lights.

“Did you get that looked at?” I bent down so the girl in the nearest seat wearing a Red Sox hat and eating a banana wouldn’t overhear.

“Yeah. Thaid it’s jutht a matter of time.” He mumbled, trying to hide the one-fanged lisp.

“How’d that happen, anyways?”

He shrugged and his injured hand curled back in his lap. Like a well-trained T employee, his face assumed that blank, nearly catatonic state that made it difficult to tell if he were stupendously bored or a reanimated corpse.

I nodded slowly and stood. “Ok.” The doors open with an agonized huff and squeal. “Thanks.” He gave an uninspired sigh and continued staring at the back of the lead subway like it was his job. But, then again, when you thought about it, it kind of was.

The MBTA started hiring vampires to run the subway about five years ago, right about the time that Thomas Bourke got elected to his first term as governor. As a former Employee himself, he was in a prime position to negotiate with the head of the T and a few union stewards. It was explained that here was a group of willing workers who had no need of health benefits, life insurance, or summer vacations. The depths at which the trains usually ran meant that they would be nearly immune from the need for a morning nap (though there was no discussion about the mind-numbing boredom of the job beating them all into a stupor within a few weeks). And all those problems with conductors using cell phones and derailing their trains? Telepathy is a beautiful thing sometimes.

So the subway became a haven for younger vampires, those in need of cash or those who had opted not to start the regiment of Aurora—magic little pink pills that allowed vampires to stay awake in daylight, thus enabling them to hold jobs and interact with humanity. The pills were still causing a huge amount of controversy, both within the Agency and in the mainstream press, though hardcore-opponents were becoming more and more marginalized.

And in case you were wondering, no, there are no vampires on the MBTA busses, though they are registered with the Authority, as well. Daylight doesn’t pose any particular threat, but they are just as indestructible. And if you’ve ever seen a bus try to get down Boylston Street at rush hour, you’ll understand why this is an important job requirement.

The tunnel smelled of dust and sweat and diesel. And something else. Something salty and slightly stale and something a little…slimier. I hopped off the last step and my Mary-Janes thonked against a metal grate set on the floor beside the tracks. I drew a small flashlight from my bag and flicked it on. The orange work lights made as many shadows as they dispelled, and I really didn’t want to bump into anything that might be on the tracks before I caught sight of them.

Tentatively, I whistled into the darkness. A fair number of the inhabitants of these tunnels haven’t quite mastered complete sentences as yet, but nearly all of them can whistle. In response, I heard the fat, liquid spliff of puffy lips and dripping tentacles, then the shuffling of something wet and enormous shifting in the murky heat ahead of me.

I blinked and stopped with one foot resting on the rails. “Reuben?”

There was a gargling hiss from the mass on the tracks. Inching closer, I could make out the nervous twitching of two huge, leathery wings. The air got more and more fetid as I came closer, and the wings fanned the heat of the tunnel around me until it felt like a belch from Hell itself.

“Reuben,” I said, a little more authoritatively. “Calm down. It’s just me.”

“Strrrrrrrrrrrrssssssssssssttttttttttttttttttt.” Is about as near an approximation of the sound the thing made as I can accurately type.

“Reuben!” I had only had a crash course in basic Cthulu, but I was fairly sure this was not on the list of “nice things to say upon meeting a familiar face in the tunnels under Boston Common”. Reuben hissed again, and it sounded vaguely apologetic. When I took another step closer, he didn’t try and cave in the tunnel with his taloned elbows.

“That’s better,” I said, and the flashlight finally picked up his face. I hadn’t been aiming it nearly high enough.

I keep forgetting you probably don’t know these things, but yes, H.P. Lovecraft was an Authority Employee, too. He was originally hired as a Dream Walker, one of the toughest jobs in the whole system. Having grown up with night terrors, it was assumed he’d be a prime candidate to identify the wandering nightmares of others. He had started a compendium for the Authority on the various entities that could enter the human mind in a dormant state, when three workmen who were excavating parts of the city for the brand-spanking new ‘underground tram cars’ came upon a creature that was described by one as “A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque scaly body with rudimentary wings”, and by another as “a monster … with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers…prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind." The third worker was supposed to have yelled something to the effect of “the green, sticky spawn of the stars” before dropping dead of sheer confusion.

Enter Howard Phillips Lovecraft, by now insomniac and suffering from malnutrition. The Authority decided to prolong his lifespan a bit and took him off the Dreamers detail and assigned him the task of investigating the Monster in the North End. He discovers that when the great and wise engineers who filled in the marshlands to make the Back Bay and Haymarket were doing their thing in the 19th century, they had inadvertently destroyed a large area of R’lyeh, which, in Cthulu means, quite simply, “home”. Or “dinner plate”, depending on whom you ask. As far as I can tell, the word, when pronounced correctly, sounds like someone trying to giggle and cough up a wad of phlegm at the same time, so I’ve just tried my hardest to avoid actually having to use it in conversation. And considering that by now, R’lyeh is known as Nixes Mates and disappears twice a day with the rising tide, it’s pretty easy to avoid having to actually say it. Anyways, Lovecraft decides that the best way to hide the origins and continued existence of the Cthulus is to do it in the most blatant way possible, and he makes them the nightmare creatures of some of his best stories.

In reality, the Cthulus—and yes, there are plenty more than one—are pretty sweet. Massive, yes, and rather smelly (but who wouldn’t be when you live in sewers and vacation in the Charles River?), and an absolute pain when they get mad, but, by and large, more friendly than most. They have a sort of hive-mind thing going on, and the main hub, such as it is, is thought to live somewhere in the Marianas Trench. Hence the whole “sleeping at the bottom of the sea” myth. It can make it a real pain when one of them has a bad dream, let me tell you. And they had this really annoying habit of wandering out onto the tracks in the hopes of making friends, or having a snack, wreaking absolute hell on the T’s efficiency—and life expectancy, that is, until Bourke’s little “hire a vampire” campaign.

If you’re ever in Boston and want to know why the T doesn’t run twenty-four hours a day, now you have the answer. In an attempt to regulate the schedule and still provide the displaced Cthulus with something resembling a home, the T officials agreed to a halt in service between 1-5am and leave the tunnels to the use of those who live in them. Usually, it’s a system that works extremely well. Then, every once in a while, there is an ‘electrical problem’—the generic euphemism of the MBTA to explain the presence of a conscious blockage on the tracks.

“Reuben, sweetie,” I tried, squinting the murk to find his hooded eye and stare into it. “It’s almost 9am. Way past time for you to be in bed…or whatever.”

Reuben gurgled.

“Easy there, Big Fella,” he let me take another step closer, curling a tentacle to make room for me on a switch plate. “What seems to be the trouble?”

Reuben hissed, sounding like the shrill of a thousand tea pots all erupting to life together. Or, like the sound of the brakes on an everyday MBTA subway car, which is what I’m sure most commuters assumed that noise to be.

“I know, Sweetie, I know,” I tried really hard not to screech over him. “I’m hungry, too.” He slumped back just a little bit and shut up, tilting his head like a bird in order to see me better through his maggot-white eye. Then he gurgled.

“No, Reuben. The conductor is—“

“Grraarrrrrrgh.”

“No. He isn’t ‘yummy’! He’s…” I could see the bobbing lights of T maintenance workers’ flashlights about 200 yards ahead in the tunnel. Time was short, as most T worker s thought the most awful thing to encounter in a tunnel was a rat. Or another maintenance worker.

I stuck my own flashlight under my arm and put my hands up to my face, dangling fingers from my mouth to look like fangs. Reuben huffed and shook his head, his dangling tentacles making sparks jump off the rails.

“Exactly.” Reaching into my bag, I found the one cereal bar that had been left in my house that was supposed to keep me until lunch. “Here, Big Guy,” I held it out and Reuben hunkered down to my hand. “Take this, and I’ll see what I can do about getting some num-nums to you soon, ok?”

“Mmmmmmmmuuuuuuuuuuurrrrf.” He moved and I repressed a shudder as something cold and porous and oozing brushed over my hand. When I opened my eyes, the cereal bar was gone and my hand was sickeningly damp.

“You’re welcome,” I managed to keep my voice steady. “Now,” I swallowed and yanked one of the sanitary wipes from a compartment in my bag, “do you think you can head back to…home…and all these nice people can get on their way?”

Reuben wiggled his tentacles.

“Good guy,” I smiled. The sound of work-booted feet clumped closer, and I made out a Revere accent coming through a walkie-talkie and whining about he was “always getting called out hee-yah.”

“Ok, you.” I said, backing up a little to keep out of the encroaching lights. “Scoot!”

“Mmmmmmmmmrrrrtthhhhhh.” He gargled irritably.

“Reuben, I am in no mood for—“ he started forward, presumably for more munchies. The size difference—not to mention the difference in our dietary preferences—suddenly became rather alarmingly obvious and I drew in a quick breath of stinking tunnel air and monster breath. Rule number one in my book: never, ever, let anyone see you scared. That included the kind of things that most people only saw in their nightmares or between the covers of various genres of pulp fiction; things with eyes that absorbed light and gave nothing back. Things that lived in and off the shadows and spoke only in the wind or the rain. Things that I was responsible for keeping in the darkness. Away from you.

The key around my neck was getting warmer. I could feel it prickling my skin and tried to take a long breath. Tried to calm down before—it was too late. One of the light bulbs above Reuben’s left wing exploded in a shower of sparks and tinkling glass. He flinched and let out a small, curious noise. I stayed still and kept glaring. Another bulb erupted behind him. In its final flash, I could just see the outline of a man in a fedora and a long gray overcoat. His face was grim and his feet were planted steadily about three inches from the concrete floor.

One of the maintenance men let out a startled expletive and all three jogged backwards, their lights bobbing around frantically, snagging on a few more figures in the shadows that only I could see.

Reuben mewed.

“That’s what I thought.” I said, surprised at how light my voice sounded. “Now, Scoot.”

No amount of training can prepare you for how blinking fast a Cthulu can dissolve into the darkness of a subway tunnel. One minute, they’re staring at you with their moony eyes and slobbering you with some kind of primeval cosmic horror-slime, and the next, you’re standing alone against some piping and wondering if you’d been hallucinating. Totally silent and completely unsettling.

As quickly as I could manage in my shoes, I hopped over the rails and scooted back to the train. I had to knock on the door five times before my one-fanged friend woke up and opened the doors for me.

“Should be all set.” I said, brushing stone dust off my skirt. “But I’d radio ahead to make sure the guys are off the line first.”

He looked at his watch and raised a single eyebrow. “Thixth minuteth.” He said with a measure of appreciation. “You’re good.”

“Damn right I am.” I answered with a wink.

A Sight to Behold...

2010-08-25T20:12:00.001-07:00

Just in case you're one of the few sentient beings left on the planet to whom I haven't ranted and raved yet today, here is the face of one of the most amazing men of the 20th century:

"But who is this?" you ask in bewilderment. "He is no revolutionary, no politician. He is no criminal, no warrior, and no statesman." No to all of these. Sergey Mikhaylovich Prokudin-Gorsky was a chemist and a photographer.

Prokudin-Gorsky was born in Murom, Russia (about 190km east of Moscow), in 1863. He grew up studying chemistry under Mendeleev and photography and music both in St. Petersburg and Berlin. When he returned from Europe to Russia, he began applying for patents for his development of a system to take--and get this--color photographs.

Essentially, his system of his photography involved taking three monochromatic photos through three differently colored filters. By then layering these photos under what the correct lighting conditions, Prokudin-Gorsky developed the first genuine color photograph, rather than the hand-colored prints that had existed previously. Now, instead of smearing color over a black and white photo, mangling details and creating a hazy kind of image that looked more like an oil painting than a photo like so:

Prokudin-Gorsky could create portraits like these:

You know who that is? Leo Tolstoy. It's the only color photograph of Tolstoy in existence. And, despite the fact that this photograph is 102 years old, you can see the lines in the Great Man's forehead; you can trace the weave of the linen in his shirt; you can follow the shadows across his birch chair. He is a living, breathing human being, no longer a black-and-white memory or a greeting card image. Granted, the camera required a few minutes of exposure in order to create a picture, and any movement within the frame resulted in some truly unsettling 'ghosts' in the picture, but, with a little work, the world suddenly took on a whole new perspective.

And, like the all-around incredibly awesome gentleman he was, Prokudin-Gorsky decided to use his new-fangled technology not to make money, and not to make a name. He decided he wanted to teach the school children of the Russian Empire about their homeland. Because the Russian Empire was so bewilderingly large (now broken into over 20 countries and comprising the largest contiguously governed land mass on earth), and because industrialization was threatening to alter the landscape of the country, Prokudin-Gorsky petitioned the Czar to preserve the Empire on film. And in color.

In 1909, he was given a specially-equipped railroad darkroom and permits that would allow him entrance to government-restricted areas. He would spend the next six years traveling from the Urals to Lake Baikal, from St. Petersburg to Irkutsk, from the edge of Europe to the shores of the Bering Sea, photographing landscapes, buildings, settlements and, most awe-inspiring to me, people. Older farmers with faces so parched and lined as to be nearly expressionless. Children, who squinted curiously at this strange apparatus that was capturing their expressions, their movements, the colors in their clothes and in the fields around them.

He photographed religious leaders and cultural icons, like the Emir of Bukhara, Mohammad Elim Khan--supposedly a direct descendant of Genghis Khan, who invaded Russia in the 14th century, and one of the last and most violent opponents of Bolshevik rule in post-revolutionary Russia:

I mean, seriously. Look at this photograph. The brain almost fails to recognize it as a relic of a dead empire. Mohammad Elim Khan died in 1944 in exile after violently opposing the Bolshevik invasion of Bukhara. This photograph was taken before the development of digital photography, before the Internet, before The Wizard of Oz, before the wristwatch. Before modern zipper. And yet, he could be sitting by that doorway today.

Black and white photography preserved some spectacular memories for future generations, and I would not begrudge a single image. But because of them, I think our perception of history tends to be similarly monochromatic. 'The Olden Days' were dull. They were bland and they were dull. Prokudin-Gorskii smashed that theory to dust. The past was blazing with color. People were as varied and as creative and as passionate then as now. Perhaps even more so, without the homogeneity engendered by things like the Internet and the television and the omni-present mobile phone.

In fact, looking again at these pictures, it makes me wonder if we aren't the ones who have grown a wee bit monotone. If we've become so inured to the garishness of the present that it all doesn't just blend together and become forgotten. To see the costumes of these Caucasian children, or the robes of Mohammad Khan makes a lot of today's frills and furbelow seem just a little anemic.

History is always shown as black and white. Or, at best, as hazy colors. Dreamscapes that are somehow inaccessible, that require interpretation and explanation. Then I see things like this:

And, to me, this is magic. Because it is still alive. And it is beautiful.

Prokudin-Gorsky was forced to flee the fledgling Soviet Union after the 1917 Revolution. He moved around Europe, eventually settling, like so many former Russian aristocrats, in Paris, where he set up a studio and gave lectures on the world of pre-revolutionary Russia until his death in 1944. Four years later, the Library of Congress purchased his photographs and negatives from his family for about $5,000. They have been regularly displayed since then, and about eight years ago were fully restored and digitally preserved, thus ensuring that another century of scholars can get a view at these spectacular memories.

I wonder if Prokudin-Gorsky knew how vitally and immediately important his pictures would be. I do know that when I first saw them during my junior year of college, I forgot the point of the lecture I was attending. I stopped listening to everything and just stared. And may, as you can see, have become just a little obsessed. But I was completely thrilled to see that today's Boston Globe took the time to remember Prokudin-Gorsky and the world he preserved. And I thought you might like to see it, too.

"This Is My Letter To The World..."

2010-06-25T20:07:00.000-07:00

After reading about the absolute insanity that is currently swirling around the Boston Public Library, I finally decided to write a letter to someone. This plan spiraled out of control a bit and it is now a letter headed off to Mayor Menino, Deval Patrick, Jeffrey Rudman (head of the Trustees of the BPL, or as I like to refer to him, the head clown of this little circus), the Boston Globe and the Salem Evening News. And Barack Obama. Just so he doesn't feel left out. I've held off a few days, hoping that, if I re-read it, I won't come across sounding like a quasi-literate hysterical revolutionary. I think it's ok.

Essentially, the issue is this: The State cut funding to the City. The City told the Library to find $2.4 million to meet their fiscal needs. The Library then threw up their hands and decided to close four branches in the most economically strapped area of the City. The State responded, telling the City that if a single library closed its doors, the State would revoke all its funding (meaning the library would only be open to citizens of Boston, rather than the whole Commonwealth, as well as threatening the future of even more branches). The City responded to the Trustees in a meeting on Monday, looking to find another way to solve the problem. The Trustees stated that they don't lobby for money, but at last agreed that if the remaining $1.6 million could be "located" (by the State), the libraries would remain open. However, the meeting then descended into a maelstrom of finger-pointing and accusations. The State accused the Trustees (appointed by the Mayor) of having terrible lobbyists, while the Trustees seemed merely focused on planning what to do with the Libraries once they had pulled out.

What I'd like to have said was that I think the lot of them are the most useless group of individuals I've ever encountered. That their behavior, toward the patrons of the BPL, its employees and the legacy of one of the most respected library systems in the country is reprehensible. And that their headline-snatching, sound-bite oriented finger pointing is only proving an old maxim: That all books are better than most people.

TO:

Deval Patrick, Therese Murray, Robert A DeLeo, Thomas Menino, Jeffrey Rudman, Barack Obama, The Boston Globe and the Salem Evening News:

I am writing to express my grave concerns over the current battle being fought over the fate of the Boston Public Library and more specifically, the closing of four of its branches. I have been a card-carrying patron of the Boston Public Library for more than ten years. In that time, I have seen first hand the vital need for libraries within the Commonwealth, and the incredible level of service the Boston Public Library network provides to its patrons. In times of economic hardship, this need only becomes greater, as people look for ways to cut their own costs, to improve their education, or to simply have a safe place to go from the turmoil that economic depressions foster. Because of this, I have continued to donate money to the Boston Public Library to ensure that all its branches could remain open and functioning. In reading the continuing wrangling going on in government and within the library over funding, I am saddened to see that no one in power appears willing to make the commitment or the sacrifice that I, and so many patrons like me, are continuously willing to make to preserve the Library in our city and our Commonwealth.

What message does it send to the children and students of the state to allow these library branches to close? Or to sit in meetings and make grandstanding speeches regarding their future use to the community? That the City of Boston and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts care about the education and future success of its citizens, but only when the economy is good and prospects are bright? Or that playing the political game matters more than serving the community? In a recession, libraries matter more than ever. There are few more important services our government can provide than a safe space in which to learn and develop. While I understand that there are other parts of the city and, indeed, the state, are in need of maintenance and repair, the astronomical amounts of money afforded to projects such as the recently announced renovations of the Longfellow Bridge (at a cost of $260 million dollars) shows that there is money to be put to use. I urge you to use that money in a way that will benefit the people of Boston and the state—by funding the Boston Public Library system. It is not a project that will improve the aesthetics of the city, nor will it garner the headlines that many other projects will. But the importance of libraries to the city and the Commonwealth are equally as, if not more important.

The freedom of access the Boston Public Library system gives, not only to current books or periodicals, but also to microfilm, historic documents and research materials is an invaluable resource. That the State Legislature would imply its willingness to deny citizens of Massachusetts that access by threatening to cut funding is intolerable. There has to be a point where the game of politics and the finger-pointing has to come to an end and the real needs of the constituents considered. The harm to the Boston Public Library system by a removal of state funding would be grave in an economical sense. The harm to the people of the Commonwealth living outside of Boston would be tragic. That the legislature would even make such a threat shows support of library services in name only, and not a commitment to actual needs of the Commonwealth they purport to represent.

Further more, that the Trustees of the Boston Public Library would not fight to save the jobs of their employees and to raise the necessary funds to save these four branches is astounding. Throughout this process, the Trustees have been extraordinarily reticent about what it would take to keep these branches open, and seem to care only about what to do with the properties when the Library is no longer their occupant. After Monday’s announcement that the libraries would indeed stay open if $1.6 million in further funding were to be made available, I, along with a great deal of other library patrons are left asking: what took so long to make this decision? Why were the Trustees of the Library, those who are supposed to be committed to promoting and preserving the library for the people of the Commonwealth, not out in the community doing whatever they could to find this money, instead of willingly allowing them to close?

The excuse that, alternately, the Trustees refuse to condescend to working with politicians to gain attention and funding, or that their lobbyists are not doing their job are further examples of political bickering in the face of a major problem. The Trustees have no excuse but to work with the community and the government to ensure the well-being of their institution. The government, further, should not need a reminder to provide resources for the use of the library. As one of the busiest library systems in the nation, it should be a source of pride to support such an enterprise, rather than a duty one needs reminding to fulfill. That the failure of both entities to perform these simple job requirements is about to cost a significant number of jobs and the loss of four library branches is reprehensible.

I am sadly aware that none of the parties involved will suffer much politically from this situation. We live in a world that is about appearances and dollar signs, rather than one where public responsibility and accountability are taken seriously. It is time for that to change. It is time for the city government, the state legislature and the Trustees of the Boston Public Library to stop attempting to grab headlines and make sound-bites and actually do their job to ensure that the Boston Public Library remains open—in its existing form—for the coming fiscal year and into the future. The inscription on the outside of the Library’s Central Branch in Copley Square states, “The Commonwealth Requires the Education of the People as the Safeguard of Order and Liberty”. It’s about time someone in power showed that this sentiment was more than a decoration.

Very Truly Yours....

This Wasn't the Post I Wanted to Write

2010-06-17T21:31:00.000-07:00

It's so hard to tear myself away

Even when you know it's over

It's too much to say,...

(The Juliet Letters)

Despite being utterly exhausted, the adrenaline hasn't yet worn off, and thus, I write:

I really wanted to write another happy little piece on the Celtics championship. And how great it was to watch a Finals Playoff with my father in the same room as opposed to on the other side of the planet.

Then, I admit, I really wanted to write a post about watching LA topple and fall in a smoldering heap of ashes and broken glass and the remains of Lakers fans who, in their fetish-like joy over Kobe Bryant's success, literally exploded.

But there are a few things that are keeping me from actually losing my admittedly tenuous grasp on reality at the moment.

First is the memory of the commuters who I travel with every morning; the nameless, typically faceless people who see me at my least presentable every morning and evening. If you walk with them to the T Station outside North Station, you'll notice a healthy amount listing right as they walk. And as they pass the Red Auerbach plaque on the wall, they all reach out and touch the shamrock beside him. "For Luck", the wording beneath it reads.

Second, to go along with that, is the train conductor this afternoon who announced, at each stop "Now approaching Salem--GO CELTICS!" And the business men in their work-weary suits, who grumble at every turn and sigh with martyred exhaustion every time they have to shift their briefcases in the aisle, broke out laughing. And cheering.

Because to live in Boston, especially during Championships, is to be the player on the sidelines, or the tenth man on the field. It means wearing the same clothes for every game and sitting in the same place in the room. As if lives and worlds hung in the space between every heartbeat. And it means believe in the luck of bronze shamrocks, or the magic of a collective wish. It's staring into the bleary, red-rimmed eyes of everyone who stayed up with you and with the team to see it through, regardless of the outcome, and knowing that collective misery is a much easier burden to bear. And it's believing that even if you didn't score more points than the other team, that goodness and right and the angels of hopeless causes were on your side this time. Just like they always have been.

So I wanted to write about how great it was to share a Championship win with my father. And how happy he was and is and how great the Celtics are as a team and what unselfish players they are and how I can go to bed happy. But you know what?

I did get to enjoy the Championship with my father. And I got to wear his BEAT LA shirt. And watching him watch the Celtics win beats the actual win hands down.

I would rather lose with the Celtics than win with any other team. I would rather put my faith in a shamrock-prayer than in any superstar on any day.

And I would take these nights of stress and anguish with my father even if I knew a loss was guaranteed. And I'd have my BEAT LA shirt on the whole time. Just in case the angels decided to be kind.

And that's what it means to be a fan in Boston.

...And that having been said, by God, the Red Sox had better win it this year. My heart can't take this any more.

Postcards from the Garden Gnome: Sodom and Gomorra

2010-04-24T20:14:00.000-07:00

One of the perks of being unemployed is the ability to travel at a moment's notice. Provided, of course, that one has generous friends in Helpful Places, and one is very good at batting one's eyelashes and looking impoverished. Luckily, for Bridget, looking impoverished is about as difficult as putting on a hat. And I, naturally, can bat my eyelashes with the best of them. Thus it was that we were able to finagle train travel and accommodations to enable us to travel to the New York Antiquarian Book Fair in the beginning of April.

Now, leave us to get one thing straight from the beginning. I like New York only slightly more than Bridget. And since nothing times anything is still nothing, you can perhaps figure out for yourself our mutual feelings for this modern-day Sodom and Gomorra. Upon alighting from the train (in Penn Station, which is like some kind of mid-eighties rabbit warren of grimy horror), we began wandering down (up?) Broadway, and were immediately nearly assaulted by a man who smelled like a septic system and another decked out in full Yankees regalia. We are still having tiffs as to which of the two was the more objectionable...

We had some time to kill before being rescued, so Bridget decided to go to a bookstore. Having lived, and walked, in London, it seemed as nothing to walk from 1500-something Broadway to 800-something Broadway. Child's play, says my Little Friend. What no one told us was that the 'city that doesn't sleep' takes a nap right along this route, and we ended up wandering down streets that had been shut up for hours already and that hadn't seen a decent street light since the Reagan area. Thankfully, a few blocks further, and we were in an hysterically-bright park with cars winging around every corner intent on ushering us into the great hereafter. Welcome to New York.

The Strand bookstore is lovely; with creaky wooden floors and floor-to-18-foot-ceiling bookshelves, and a staff that doesn't mind if you a) use the step-stools, chairs and/or ladders for your own book-hunting pleasure, or b) curl up on the floor and read everything within grabbing distance. Which is precisely what we proceeded to do. I settled Bridget (who was beginning to suffer some kind of New-York induced fever) on the floor, and, harnessing my inner Tensing Norgay, climbed to the shelf of her choosing and shoved books into her lap.

Luckily for our wallet, our Getaway Car arrived to carry all the books to New Jersey, where we were to rest for the evening (any references of pan into cooking fires will be given a proper welcome here).

Like any true Bostonian, Bridget had become deathly ill immediately upon her arrival into Gotham. She spent most of the night shivering, cursing the infernal heat, moaning, shivering and generally making a thorough nuisance of herself. Sometime in the wee small hours of the morning, her mysterious, six-hour fever broke, and we were both permitted a bit of rest, after agreeing that, if it weren't for the books, this would have been a colossally foolish enterprise.

The Good Lord, however, decided to take mercy on our impoverished, unemployed souls, and the next day dawned warm, breezy and bright and generally renewed our collective will to live. We caffeinated and made our way, via a needlessly comfy bus, to the Heart of Darkness itself. Manhattan. As the Book Fair didn't open until noon, we stopped first at Mood, having watched Project Runway since its inception.

The buttons, my God, the buttons! Not to mention the stacks of pleather, mohair and angora. This is the alpaca section, where, I swear to you, I could have lived and died in perfect, cozy contentment.

However, such things were not to be (think of Tim Gunn's face upon discovering a Garden Gnome in his lapel!), and we spent thirty minutes debating which cab to select of the billions living the streets. Having selected our cabman, we were soon ferried through a parade route, a protest rally, and the wilds of Park Avenue to the Armory, wherein lived The Books.

And this is where Things Got Interesting.

Not only were we (and by we, I mean Bridget, in whose pocket I cowered) the youngest person in the building by about twenty-eight years, we were also in such a low tax bracket that we may actually not have existed. But it didn't matter. Because there were Books.

I could tell you how we wandered the aisles of the showroom for four hours, scouring the titles and the bindings, cursed the glass doors on the display cabinets that denied us the visceral pleasure of petting the pretties and insisted on fogging up every time we pressed our noses too close to them. Why these silly people felt the need to keep the poor little books locked up surpasses our understanding. Unless they knew of my Friend's need to liberate them all...in which case, they are wiser than I preliminarily gave them credit for being.

I shall, however, keep my descriptions to the (somewhat) basics. There was the first edition of Dracula that Bridget nearly tackled a finely-tailored man to touch (a steal at only $13,500, since it couldn't be guaranteed that it was a second or third printing). There was the Wicked Bible ($90,000. Yes, I know). I thwapped Bridget good and hard with my valise until she returned to his counter to ask, at the risk of sounding Hopelessly Uneducated, why this priceless tome was entitled "The Wicked Bible".

And it was a good thing I did, as it turns out this good man had been waiting hours upon hours for one such as we to come forward and ask this self-same question. Essentially, the answer is this: In 1631, some printer got it into his head to print a Bible and, inadvertantly? perhaps?, left out a rather significant word. From the Fourth Commandment. The word is "not". Hence, in 1631, the Good Lord spake to the people and declared "Thou Shalt Commit Adultery". The Church, faced with a rather embarrassing paradox, declared all copies to be seized and burned. According to the Nice Man, only about 12 copies survived, this being one of them. Thus, our entire day having been made, we moved on.

Next we found ourselves in front of a seller whose shelves were full of Rider Haggard, Andrew Lang, Rudyard Kipling, and a veritable Rogue's Gallery of Great Imperialists. The books not in the display cases were really rather cheap. Not a one of them was more than $600.

"If you see any in the cases that you'd like to look at," said a charming British voice, "feel free to reach in and take them."

I cautioned Bridget that this was not meant literally. That this poor, young bookseller clearly did not know her and that she should not take his consideration as an enticement to grab whatever she could and run. So we stayed, pretended to be invisible, and oogled books like mad.

Suddenly, there was a presence beside us.

"I have a first edition of Jane Eyre," said a now-familiar voice. "You wanna see it?"

Talk about a bloody match made in Heaven.

Some time later, after a near-priceless Sherlock Holmes, three editions of Polidori's The Vampyre and a prolonged discussion about Yeat's The Order of the Golden Dawn, we turned to a first edition of Emma.

"I don't know why the other sellers lock these cases," Our New Best Friend observed. "I mean, the books were meant to be read, after all. They need some company."

Tragically, a man with money and a checkbook came forward to take a stack of books away. I offered Bridget up for adoption, or sale, but he was far more interested in Hemingway. Appalling.

We dragged ourselves away from the nice man and his rich client with difficulty, and made our way to a corner seller with more than his fair share of cases. Locked cases. The seller himself was in conversation with a paunchy, balding man in a dark suit.

"I use to collect early modern first editions." He drawled. "But the upkeep." A shake of the head. "The maintenance. Not to mention the difficulty of..." a hushed, nearly horrified voice, "other collectors."

Bridget might have been horrified, had it not been for the sight...of...(brace yourself)...a copy of Oscar Wilde's Poems from his own library.

For a few minutes, we could only stare. Only marvel. Then, we gathered our courage, and stepped around Chubby to the charcoal suit beyond.

"Would it be possible to see the Wilde book?" Bridget, I am proud to say, managed to keep her voice level and steady.

"Of course," said the seller, whose haircut probably cost more than both our lives were worth.

He lifted the book from the shelf, carefully sliding the case closed with his free hand. Bridget reached out, and I counted my blessings that she didn't attempt to tackle him and escape.

Then, suddenly, he grabbed her hand and braced her wrist.

"No, no!" He said firmly, as if we had suddenly been returned to grade school. "You need to cradle it. Books are fragile, you must cradle it. Cradle it. Here."

I then began counting my blessings that Bridget didn't yell "Oscar likes me better, Loser!" and run away. Instead, she simply muttered, so low that only I could hear it.

"They were meant to be read. And you are an ass."

"Pardon?" Charcoal Suit queried.

"I said, it's beautiful." She said with regal grace, returning the book to his worrisomely smooth, never-to-be-careworn hands. Then, we managed to walk out and into the waning light of the day before bursting out laughing.

So all in all, we emerged from our adventure no less impoverished than we began, and considerably more enlightened. About the nature of books and the nature of bookmakers; the nature of readers and of collectors. And that it is an unspeakably good thing that the next book fair on our list...is in Boston.

"Hot dogs, peanuts, and go get 'em."

2010-04-04T17:30:00.000-07:00

Opening Day (Night...whatever), 2010

I remember in October of 2004, when the Yankees were up 3-0 in the ALCS. It was my sophomore year in college, I was taking the maximum amount of credits, involved in every organization humanly possible and working 2 jobs. I'd had acid reflux for three days, not merely because I hadn't slept--because I had to do my homework after the games--but because the Yankees were making us look foolish. Again.

I spent an hour at the gym listening to "Who's Your Daddy" until I was so angry I started swearing at the tv on the elliptical. And, in the process, scared an emeritus professor so badly he had to leave. I had to endure the taunts and jibes of the morning janitor at the campus coffee shop who wore his Yankee hat to work every morning. Student employees weren't allowed to wear hats, but they made an exception for me when Joe and I became the Tuesday morning favorites for our good-natured heckling. I sat through class with a die-hard Yankees fan who made of point of sitting next to me each morning.

The morning of Game Four, I called my house to check in, and to check in on my Grandfather, who was staying in my room while I was at school.

"How are you doing today, Grampie?" I asked, trying to sound chipper. Trying to sound conscious.

"I went out and bought a Yankees hat this morning." He grumbled. I knew he was kidding, as it was 7:00am, but my heart still sunk a little. "I've been watching these bums for eighty-seven years, and they're breaking my heart all over again. I'm done with this."

"Ok, Grampie." I answered. "I'll tell them for you, ok?"

That night I had a class that went until 9:30pm. I went because I had to, but I made sure to sit in the back and to the side so that my professor wouldn't notice I had earbuds in and the game on a walkman. And between the lecture and the game, I still managed to nod off in class.

I woke up to the sound of wild cheering. Hysterical yelling. That didn't stop. Blinking furiously, I sat up and pressed the earbud as inconspicuously as I could manage. And started kicking my friend sitting ahead of me.

"They tied it up." I whispered, and watched her start bouncing up spastically. "Bottom of the ninth and they flipping tied it up!"

I ran home and didn't move from in front of the tv for the rest of the night. When it was all over, and I was still going to have baseball on TV the next night, I called home. Grampie answered.

"I returned the Yankees hat," he declared with a chuckle.

Fast forward--to October 27, 2004. Right around 11:40pm. One of my closest friends (who had never watched a full baseball game in her life) was sitting next to me. "I thought it was important to watch this. With you."

"No," I remember whispering. I was convinced it wasn't 3 outs. That there was some rule that stated that if the pitcher underhanded the ball to the first baseman, the out didn't count. That this was really a ten-inning game.

"Yes," my friend whispered. "I think you can be happy now."

It took about an hour before cell phone service was restored and I was able to call anyone. My father was in Japan and sniffly. My mother was crying, so my Grandfather got on the phone.

"I can't believe it," he said, talking faster than I could remember hearing before, "I...I just can't believe it. I can't sleep. I'm too happy to sleep. I'm happy! You told 'em, Bridie!"

"What was that about a Yankees hat, Grampie?"

"I have no idea what you're talking about."

He called me back. At two in the morning. Too happy to sleep.

The only other time I talked to him that late was in 2007. The Red Sox won and the phone rang.

"Hello there, Johnny!" My mother answered the phone. I grabbed the extension.

"I knew you'd be up!" I cried, at the same time as Susan said "I thought you'd be in bed by now!"

"Are you kidding? I've been dancing with Papelbon all night!"

.......................

It's been 175 days since I last watched an official Red Sox game. And believe me, when you're in Boston without baseball, the winters are colder, the nights are darker and those 4,200 hours end up feeling like about eight years. You shovel and you plow and you have plenty of evenings free to think.

Plenty of time to remember watching grown men in suits skip work and climb trees to cheer on their team in a post-season rally. To remember the sound of church bells ringing in the middle of the night in October of 2004, because the one prayer on everyone's mind had finally been answered. Plenty of time to remember going into work on the train with people who had been up all night watching a west-coast, extra-inning game the night before, or going home during a post-season game with some guy yelling out the scores down the length of the car and the conductor threatening to throw any Yankees fans out at the next station.

Because the sight of baseball on the screen means infinitely more than some guys in cleats and helmets. It means that the sun will once again shine and the fans will once again sing "Sweet Caroline" so loudly that the batter won't be able to step into the box. It means that homeless guy in Harvard Square will sit next to the man in the three-piece suit and $800 shoes to listen to the game, and people will block traffic when they sit outside Cardullo's to watch the TV in the display window. It means that, after 7:05 at night, very little matters in the outside world. Because it's the Red Sox. And it means that, even if only for one night, everyone believes that there is just enough hope, just enough potential, just enough luck, to see us all through another year.

It's remembering where you are and why you belong here and that, in the midst of all the nonsense, it is all worth it.

It's baseball season and once again, all's right with the world.

EDIT: Just after posting this, the Red Sox tied up the season opener against the Yankees. It's now 5-5 in the bottom of the 6th inning.

Somewhere out there, Grampie's smiling.

Doomed to Repeat It...

2010-03-25T21:25:00.000-07:00

Dear Texas State Board of Education,

My name is Bridget. I am 25 years old. I have a Master's degree in Imperial and Commonwealth History. I have no job, I am unable to collect unemployment and I have a truly abysmal health insurance plan. I am also, most likely in your eyes, a raging left wing radical revolutionary lunatic.

Why, you ask? Because I believe that human beings--and I include children as humans, which seems to be another point against me--have the ability to think for themselves.

You see, I've been reading a great deal about this new curriculum you approved a few days back, and I just wanted to share my thoughts. Which, I realize, you probably couldn't care less to hear. But more on that later.

See this man up there? That's Thomas Jefferson. He was a pretty cool guy. He played the violin. He wrote a pretty important document, called the Declaration of Independence; you may have read it--most likely in a history book. He invented a music stand and the dumbwaiter. He was the ambassador to France and made the American government pay to ship home his 37 trunks of books that he collected during his time in Europe. For that reason alone I think he was pretty fantastic. But you decided to strike him from your history books because he also came up with the theory of "separation of Church and State".

And this is kind of the root of the problem that I have with you. It's not so much that you have an opinion. If no one had an opinion about history, or allowed history to have an opinion of us, then the world would be made of nothing more than a few dates and some big buildings. But instead, we have stories. Stories about the pyramids and about amphitheaters and mosques; stories about monsters in the sea and demons in the air and stories about the people who dreamed them up and who made them real; stories about heroes and villains and cowards and people who did nothing more remarkable than to survive. And every single one of those stories is precious.

And in this country, we have some pretty great stories. About people who were willing to pack up their lives, packed up their families, and their pasts and brought it to the middle of an impossible wilderness; people who believed in cities on hills and in angels who wrote on sheets of gold. They did some pretty remarkable things: they mined canyons, they built railroads, they invented the banjo, and they invented silly putty. They also enslaved and killed and destroyed and defiled. They lied and they cheated and did a great deal of terrible things, believing that what they did was Right.

You, my dear Board of Education, are some of those people. Because in denying your children part of that story, you are not simply mis-educating them. You are denying them a piece of themselves. I don't care very much at all whether you like Thomas Jefferson. But you have a duty to tell your children who he was and what he did with his life. Just as you have a duty to tell your children who Ronald Reagan and Joe McCarthy were and what they did for the brief amount of time they breathed on this earth. It is part of an educator's job to tell children what they need to know.

But how dare you presume that you have the right to tell your children how to think?

I am physically unable at this point to care less about your thoughts on the separation of Church and State. However, it exists. It is a point of fact, not debate and not contention, that the United States of America was founded in the hopes that all its citizens would be free to worship where they pleased and vote for whom they pleased, without the two actions affecting each other. It is not your job to tell children whether that idea was "right" or "wrong". It is your job to explain why the Founding Fathers felt that to be such an important part of the government. I would start with the example of a group of radical right-wing Christians attempting to write a history book might be a very good one. But regardless of my opinions here, this is part of the story of American history. On a purely objective level, it leaves a black hole throughout your curriculum: without Church and State, you have no reason to explain the role of missionaries in the founding of the American West, though without Native Americans, there really is no story to tell there...or the Women's Rights Movement, oh wait, that would involve mentioning women, which doesn't seem to be part of your plan either...or the writing of the American Constitution and the Bill of Rights--or does that no longer exist at all?

From a subjective point of view, how is it advantageous to you to raise a generation of automatons? What good does it do you to raise a state full of children who cannot think for themselves what their country was, is, and could be? Why is it so terrifying to you to teach children what the separation of Church and State means? If your truth is so universal, so potent and so right, why can't they figure it out for themselves? Frankly, there is a hell of a lot of evidence throughout history that you might have a point--from the Mayflower Compact to that Moral Majority you are so fond of referencing, America has never been able to get God out of the Courts or government out of the pulpit. So let's talk about it, for pity's sake. I don't want to take Ronald Reagan or the NRA out of your text books. I don't want to write a manifesto of left-wing doctrine, either. I just want to present a curriculum that allows children to see the many sides of the issues that exist in American History and to make their decisions based on all the available evidence, no matter how unpleasant, ugly or contrary to my personal beliefs they may be. There is no harm in discussing anything--unless you are afraid that a frank discussion might show you up as the fools you really are.

There are no morals to history. Things happened. People thought things and people did things. And whether they turned out to be right or turned out to be mistaken, there is no excuse for removing them because they don't fit in with your world view. What if I decide that I don't agree with the politics of Henry Ford (which I don't, but that is beside the point)? Am I allowed to deny one of the most revolutionary inventions in modern history, turn my back on the man who invented the assembly line and who made ambulances and fire trucks and jet engines possible because he was a Nazi sympathizer? Can I forget the automobile because of a P-Ship? Of course not. But what I can do, is to show someone both sides of the individual and let them decide for themselves what kind of man he was, and what kind of inventor and where the good outweighs the bad.

I can show Thomas Jefferson as a politician who was willing to postpone abolition in favor of a revolution, as a man who might have slept with his slaves; as an inventor and a musician who wrote his own epitaph and neglected to mention that he was the President of the United States. I can do this because I don't believe history is something to be feared. I think it is something to be revered as the basis for who we are as individuals, as a country and as a species. You can mold it and shape it and pare it all you want, but I promise you, there will come a day when all those children you are attempting to hoodwink will wake up.

And they will realize that yes, there were Communists working in America, but there will be some who will want to know why, and they will learn about the oppression of American thinkers and artists, of the lockouts and shakedowns and riots and murders that made those people believe in Communism. They will realize that they believed in their cause just as much as McCarthy did his, and a great number of people suffered because of it.

They will wonder why it is that "men gave women the vote" in 1919, and they will find out about all those women who starved and were force-fed until they drowned, and were raped and burned and trampled in order to say who their president would be. They will learn about the women who worked in munitions factories until their hair fell out and their skin turned yellow and they glowed in the dark of night, believing that their sacrifice would allow their daughters some autonomy in their own country.

They will see in your books that slavery was nothing more than a relic of British Colonialism that America desired to cast off from day one. And then they will see white hoods and burning crosses on TV. They will see photos of children being pummeled by water hoses and women weeping over the bodies of their lynched husbands. They will read about slave ships and internment camps and they will read about wars and they will see the memorials in their towns and cities to the brave men who fought to preserve the union.

And you will lose, my dear State Board of Education. You will fail. Because no matter how hard you try--and many, many other fools have tried before you--you cannot hide the truth. And the truth is that American history is far more dirty, far more embarrassing, far more astounding and awe-inspiring and painful and memorable than you could ever really conceive it from within your blinders. And to force those blinders on your children is simply an act of cowardice. You are not "restoring" anything to anyone, alive or dead. You are cheating your future by removing its past. Just as so many have done before you. And you know what? They, too, failed. If history has shown anything, it is that humans are unpredictable and adaptive and that they have the ability to use their great and powerful minds, no matter how hard others try to cripple them. If you cared enough, you could find that out for yourself.

I just pray that when those historians gather around a conference table to write your story, when the time comes to remember the Texas State Board of Education who decided that their children didn't deserve to know about Thomas Jefferson and who were too weak to bear the truth about Civil Rights and who were too stupid to think for themselves, I hope they judge you more kindly than I do. I hope they can find something redemptive in your crusade to purge American History and to reshape the country so it fits into your cozy little concepts of reality. I hope they forgive you. Because I can't.

Love,

~Bridget~

PS: Neither can Thomas Jefferson.

Snowpocalype: Just When You Thought It Couldn’t Get Any Better Than This

2010-02-24T23:20:00.001-08:00

Day 6: Awaken and lean over to the window. In the official parlance of Massachusetts, there is a f@%& load of snow outside. I’m impressed, but it’s not a sight I haven’t seen before. Arise and flip on the TV. The well-dressed young thing behind the desk offers to “take you live to Ryan Whatisname, who is in downtown Bethesda. Ryan, what’s it like out there?”

Ryan, who resembles the Abominable Snowman in his enormously puffy-parka and ski hat pulled down to his eyebrows, raised a mittened hand in which is obscured a microphone, and bellows, “Well, Cathy, it’s snowing pretty hard here!!” Overwhelmed by this journalistic revelation, I turn the television off and began fixing a very large pot of coffee.

The kids get up, and proceed to educate me as to just how old I really am. It turns out that Full House is now a Nickelodeon re-run, just like Leave It To Beaver was when I was a child. Rather than spend a snow-day reading or melting braincells in front of the TV, one now “chats” with one’s friends, either through instant message, or by yelling very loudly at one’s computer and waiting for a voice to issue forth from it. This voice purports to be that of the eight-year-old down the street, but I am unconvinced. After realizing that Melissa Joan Hart of Sabrina the Teenaged Witch is now in her mid-thirties and being informed that no one remembers what Oregon Trail is (was?), I decide to take my decrepit bones outside and get some shoveling done.

I am informed by my godbrother-in-law that there are big men who have been hired to shovel, especially as he is leaving as soon as possible for Hawaii (on business. No seriously). Harnessing all my Massachusetts-born pride and the legendary Keown stubbornness, I vow that no man will do what I can damn well do myself, and begin to apply myself with vigor to the snow that is now drifting up around my knees.

A word about snow shovels in Maryland. They are designed along the lines of an ice-cream scoop; think of a very wide “C”. In the usual circumstances where one needs to push an inch or two of snow around, these work very well. However, in the face of 28 inches of God’s wrath, they are about as effective as a Zippo lighter for cooking a turkey. Speaking of which, can someone get me a Zippo lighter for Christmas, or something? I don’t smoke, but all good spies need them; I’m told their good for intimidating witnesses.

The other alternative in the roller coaster of thrills that is shoveling is the industrial-strength thing that was fresh-purchased for this storm. The thing is gray and made of the same plastic as Barbie doll legs, and has to weigh two pounds. As a potentially lethal weapon, it’s ideal. For moving several hundred thousand tons of snow, I’m not so sure.

This is all on top of the fact that, this being Maryland, there is nowhere to throw the damn stuff. In Massachusetts, there is space on either side of the driveway—even a few inches—to chuck snow. Here, there is the yard on one side. And the neighbor’s driveway is on the other, with absolutely no dividing line. Which means half the shoveling is easy, and the other half takes on the air of a javelin-throw. The other alternative appears to be the street. Which hasn’t been plowed. At all.

“Umm…” says silly little me, “When do you think the plow will be coming?”

The neighbor across the street eyes me with gentle humor. “Oh, sometime on Sunday maybe. Definitely by Monday night, I bet.”

“Wait…what?”

He continues to look at me rather pityingly.

“But—how is the plow going to clear 30-something inches of snow? Why not plow 10 inches three times or something?”

“Yeah. But, man, the budget for snow plows is so high this year already, you know?”

I just keep staring, my mind meanwhile screaming Of course it’s over-budget. You can’t budget for snow Just pay it.

“So…if the house catches fire, should we just start throw snowballs at it?”

The Neighbor scoffs gently.

“I’m sure the fire department will get down this.” As he says this, a pick-up truck fishtails by in reverse. According to the decal on its side, it is the vanguard of the self-same Fire Department, clearing a path should combustion occur.

“Great.” I smile, looking down at the now-frozen pile of exhaust-stained crap that has adhered to the pavement. “I feel much better now.”

There are two kids trolling the neighborhood offering to shovel for money. Godsister hires them to help with the house across the street. Decide that no thirteen-year-old boy is going to be me (who has the metabolism of a thirteen year old boy, anyway), and lend some biceps to the effort. By the time I go in, am unable to lift my arms past my shoulders, which makes removing my coat a feat of near-epic proportions.

Day 7: It has stopped snowing sometime during the night. The driveways are comparatively clear from our work yesterday, and now it simply remains for us to clean off the car. Especially the Mini Cooper, as it has a cloth roof, and the forty-seven tons of snow piled on top is becoming somewhat worrying. In an effort to engage the kids, I suggest that they come out with me and help. We finally manage to shove the door open and stumble out into the winter wasteland.

“It’s cold!” Shouts one child.

“It’s heavy!” Shouts the other, wielding her shovel at a small drift. They decide to go see the neighbors, and wade into the street, which is hidden beneath two feet of snow.

My Godsister comes out and realizes that the downspout is out of commission, full of ice and causing the gutters to begin leaking. I advise her to go and get some hot water and pour it on the downspout in order to melt the water inside, and go back to shoving snow off the roof of the car.

“What seems to be going on here?” The voice sounds male, but I have my hat jammed so far down on my head that everyone is sounding somewhat like a Muppet.

Godsister explains the downspout issue.

“Ah, that’s easy. Go fill up the teapot and pour the hot water down it." Returns the voice in confident tones.

Ooh, I think, how marvelous that we have a big, strong man to help us with our dilemmas.

Godsister goes inside for the teapot. Manly Neighbor stares at the drainpipe, sparing occasional glances in my direction. I continue heaving anvil-heavy clumps of snow from the roof of the minivan to the driveway, where it falls with a contented sounding whump.

“Looks to me like you’re doing that backwards.” Chuckles Manly Neighbor.

“Oh?” I ask, between gasps.

“Yeah,” he chortles again. “You’re pushing snow on the driveway. You’re just going to have to shovel it again, you know.”

I look at him. He has returned to staring at the drainpipe. I consider suggesting to him that unless he possesses laser vision, he might very well want to pick up a shovel and get to work. But by the time I look up, he has wandered off, and my dignity remains intact.

That night, we host a Super Bowl party for all the neighbors who are unable to attend parties of their own. It actually was great—everyone brought a little something that they had made, including a box of frozen pigs-in-a-blanket, which I won’t eat, but do enjoy flinging in a pan and roasting senseless.

My mother starts calling to make sure I’m still alive and sentient.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m dealing with wieners.”

“You’re what?”

“Pigs in a blanket.”

“You’re touching hot dogs?”

“Of course not! I found some tongs somewhere.”

The neighbors are lovely people, and thoroughly welcoming to a poor, snowbound Bostonian. However, I notice they all have the exact same reaction to me when introduced.

“Oh! From Massachusetts!” They smile. “So, this must be, you know, nothing to you.”

The appropriate response would be to laugh and make some kind of polite and self-deprecatory remark. I am not known for my appropriate responses.

“You’re right.” I say, entirely seriously. “I’m still waiting for this to be a practical joke.”

It is clear by their response, it isn’t.

Later that night, Maryland’s Public Television Station shows a documentary on the Great Flu Epidemic on TV. Godbrother-In-Law comes down to say good night and finds me gaping at the screen. He watches for a few moments, then looks at me.

“You have a thing with high death-tolls, don’t you?”

I just nod and keep watching.

Day 8…Day 9…Pass in a blur of unplowed streets and re-runs of the Office. I have knit a scarf that is nearly 9 feet long.

We make it out for a few hours to get lunch, to look in the bookstore, and to generally revel in the scent of fresh, exhaust-tinted air and to engage in human interaction.

While at lunch, however, everyone’s phone starts beeping at the same time. Everyone. It’s like a scene out of a Verizon commercial. It turns out that everyone in Bethesda subscribes to some kind of magic message service that alerts you to impending nuclear disaster, Mongol invasion, or, in this case, more snow.

That’s right, folks. Another 20 inches are on their way.

Attempt to contact Moonfleet, my British Spymaster, but am at a loss as to how precisely to explain that I can’t get to the Archives because I somehow have wound up in 1907, and, at this rate, the Archives might never open again.

Kim Philby never had to put up with this nonsense.

Day 10: Reserve a copy of Alfred Crosby’s book on the Great Flu Epidemic in America and make it to Barnes and Noble before the snow erupts once again to pick it up. The lady behind the counter retrieves it for me, and regards the cover for a long moment. Then, she looks up at me; then back to the book cover.

“So…why are you reading this?” She asks, slightly hesitantly.

“Oh, no reason, really,” I respond. “I just thought the kids could use some light reading before bed. We ran out of fairy tales. Have a nice day now!” And I beat a hasty retreat.

Not hasty enough, it would seem. The streets are once again dire need of an angioplasty, and pedestrians are fleeing the unsheltered sidewalks, screaming in fear and begging for mercy from the offended heavens. I roll my eyes and begin singing again as loudly as I can. Apparently the man waiting for his bus does not appreciate Dracula the Musical. Everyone’s a critic.

A word, briefly (I hope) about Maryland Plow Jobs. And yes, I know how dirty that sounds.

(Note: I took this picture at a red light. I don't remember the two cars crashing into each other, but it does certainly look like the visual version of "Famous Last Words")

Because the county didn’t see fit to plow until after there were thirty inches of snow on the ground, and after several cars had forged paths through the snow (see above), the best the plows can now hope to do it to flatten the icy mess of blackish snow and ice along the surface of the roads, meaning most streets have a 2-inch coating of crust on top of them that are passable only because the ice crystals stuck in them provide traction. Except for the places where the ice isn’t. Then, there are gaping holes in the frozen sludge that, when one inevitably hits it with one’s car, one’s liver is driven by the force of the impact against one’s lungs.

I finally manage to trundle the poor, abused car down the street to Home, and think, since the car has front wheel drive, to back it into the driveway for easier movement if it is possible to ever leave the house again. I turn, ready to back the car up the driveway, and the air is suddenly filled with the sounds of screeching tires and the whine of an engine pounding in furious futility. I have become stranded on the ice-bump that had formed between the two tire-tracks on the street. My front wheels are stuck in the snow, leaving the back wheels to spin useless a few millimeters over the cement.

One of the neighbors shows up and valiantly begins to dig away at the ice, hoping to give me enough traction to wiggle the car free. It doesn’t work. At all.

A few moments later, my humiliation is further augmented by the approach of another car. Since I am stuck perpendicular to the street, this new arrival has absolutely nowhere to go, and nothing to do but sit and stare at me and my now useless car. This driver leaps from his BMW and rushes to my side, conferring with the neighbor before turning to me and squinting through the window.

“There’s no reason to worry,” he assures me, in an unnecessarily loud voice. “Your car is stuck on the ice. What we are going to do is to dig away some of the ice from your front tires in order to give you traction. You are driving a Lexus, which typically have front wheel drive, which will allow you to rock the car free. That means you need to put the car in reverse, then in drive, then…”

I lose the train of his explanation, distracted by the almighty urge to prove that I am from Massachusetts and used to ice. I am then distracted by the urge to prove to him that though I am wearing mascara and eyeliner, that I could probably bench-press him, and he probably should stop talking to me like I don’t have to brain cells to rub together for warmth. Wonder briefly if he himself can be used as traction, but by then he is already on his knees, digging at the snow with the lid of a Tupperware container.

Godsister comes out to lend assistance, though whether it is to the nice men trying to free the car, or to keep me from flailing wildly every time the Man with the Beamer opens his mouth, I’m not sure. As if this scene couldn’t get any more fun, an older gentleman comes walking slowly down the street and surveys the four of us and the car.

“Can I help?” He asks. Fairly sure we can use all the aid we can get, we agree. What we should have ascertained prior to agreement was this man’s definition of ‘help’. Because, to the best of my ability, ‘help’ involves walking in slow circles around the stranded automobile, and making sure that he is always on the wrong side, thus subjecting himself to the threat of death or maiming with every attempt we make to wiggle the car free. To make a long, and incredibly painful story somewhat shorter, I get the car into the driveway. The Men returns to his Beamer and departs, no doubt to look for more helpless, less cranky damsels to rescue. The neighbor goes in, hopefully for a stiff drink and a nap, and the older man wanders away. I slink into the house and hide.

The Godfamily leaves to get groceries. Decide to take this opportunity to calm my frayed and clanking nerves by playing the piano. I sit down, turn on the electric keyboard, and am just settling into a favorite piece when, from behind me, comes a cry, as of a twisted soul in torment, or as of tone-deaf sirens trapped on the far-off shores. It turns out that the dog has a musical turn and enjoys yowling along. Wincing slightly, I decide that I am beyond argument, and change tunes. The dog changes pitch and howl-length in order to keep up with me. I remember another piece and begin to play it. And the dog follows me into the new key and the new tempo.

No lie. The 45-minute concert that Macy and I put on might very well be the highlight of the trip. I bet the neighbors have a different opinion on this, but such is the way of the wintry world.

Turns out that there is no more produce to be purchased for love or money in Bethesda. Just as there is no more meat, butter or eggs. Apparently, the survivors of the last Biblical catastrophe have alerted their friends and everyone is now in a buying frenzy. Because when I’m trapped at home, I want to know that I’ll never need to worry about running out of grapes and bacon.

We go to the neighbors to watch American Idol and I sit in the rocking chair with my tea and my knitting, surrounded by teenage girls and suddenly evolve into my own grandmother. During a commercial, Neighbor Mom explains that she went out and stocked up on candles and batteries, since “we didn’t lose power in the last storm, so we’re definitely going to lose it this time.” I look at her over my needles, hoping my project will hide my grimace of confusion.

“You…what?”

“Well,” she says calmly, “We didn’t lose our power or…”

“No, I got that, just…never mind. Makes total sense. Do you let the unicorns graze outside, or will they be allowed to come in for the storm?”

Day 11: Guess what? It’s still snowing. Spend 2½ hours on the treadmill doing two 5k’s (whatever they are), and imagine myself in a place with balmy sunshine, soft, salty breezes and unicorns--or, maybe just a place with snowplows and adequate shovels—and read about the Spanish Flu Epidemic. Have decided that Heliotrope Cyanosis is rather fantastic, especially if you don’t have it. Around 6pm, decide that if I stay in this house any longer, something terrible might occur, and head outside to reacquaint myself with the shovel.

This time around, the snow is rather fluffy, and due to the freakishly high winds, it has drifted, meaning that the snow in the backyard is now almost 4 feet deep in places, but along the driveway and the walk, there is maybe 6-8 inches. And after the first storm, lifting 8 inches of snow with the Barbie Shovel is as simple as breathing. I think about Kim Philby, and wonder if, following his defection to the USSR, any of the Mrs. Philbys (Philbies?) made him shovel. In which case, maybe he did have to put up with this nonsense. Maybe they just made Maclean shovel for them.

Return to the warmth of the indoors and opt to finish Sherlock Holmes vs. Dracula instead of plowing on through the flu epidemic. Am a little bit perturbed by how much I love trashy literature.

Day 12: There’s more snow in my driveway. Make a note that I have, at least, mentally, taken possession of the driveway. Decide to forestall being concerned over this fact until after I’ve finished my coffee and Frosted Mini-Wheats.

For the record, Frosted Mini-Wheats may indeed be God’s perfect food. If you can’t manage a Zippo lighter, I will totally accept gifts of Frosted Mini-Wheats.

Retrieve some dry and manly clothes and head out to once again tackle the drifts. As it is blessedly warm out, I decide to show these charming Southerners how real Massachusetts ladies shovel, and remove my coat and scarf and take to shoveling in my t-shirt and jeans.

As I am working my way up the driveway, a pick-up truck makes its way down the quasi-semi-sorta-plowed streets. Five men leap from the cab and the back, armed with big puffy jackets, thermal hats and massive, industrial-strength shovels (no doubt made of Ken legs for extra manliness) and all set to work shoveling the driveway of the neighbor across the street. These, I think, must be the landscapers who were hired to clear the driveway. One of them looks at me and says something to his companions, which I am unable to hear over the sound of my iPod. I decide, however, that there is no way in hell five dudes in a pickup truck will ever beat me in a shoveling match, and get back to work. Twenty minutes later, I am proven right. The dudes look at me with newfound respect and I swagger back onto the porch to get the brush to clean off the cars…yet again...

Snowmaggedon--the Musical!

2010-02-13T19:48:00.000-08:00

There are times in this life when you just happen to be in the right place, on the right train platform, on the right day, and good things happen. Such was the case with yours truly, which is how I fulfilled my ultimate destiny and became a Spy. Or, to be more specific, a History Spy. The uninspired might simply call it a research job in Washington, D.C., but that would never cover the full scope of my new occupation. I have a fedora, for Heaven’s sake. And I have an overcoat from a vintage shop in Greenwich that was obviously owned by a spook before it was passed over to me. And since the good old days of button-cameras and lipsticks guns have cruelly abandoned us, spies like me must practice our craft where we can.

I was sent on a mission to the National Archives, armed with my rapier-like intellect and a truly killer pair of boots. After spending a lovely weekend with Kelsey (code name: Guy Burgess), I arrived at my godparent’s daughter’s house, which was serving as my operations base for the week. I had a car, I had a room to myself, and I even got siblings for the week. Or godnieces, for us only children who will never have the real thing.

Day 1: Arrived at the National Archives after a fun-filled trip down The Beltway. Drivers in Maryland are disarmingly polite. Coming from a state that treats lane-changes as a test of Darwinian proportions, to not only be allowed to merge into another lane, but to all but be welcomed with a banner and some light refreshment was more than a little unnerving. Also, they travel the speed limit. I haven’t driven 55 miles per hour on a highway since the week I got my license. But these people seem to have a lock on their car that keeps them from even considering pushing the envelope to 56.

The Archives might very well be the most secure entity outside of the Vatican. It took me over an hour to pass the gauntlet of identity checks, interrogations and figuring out how in the hell the keys to the lockers worked. Then, as a further test of your endurance, adaptability and skills in subversion, no one tells you how to request materials. You must, by yourself, distill a crumb of reason from the giant, molten vat of record groups, incomplete finding aids, illegible forms in triplicate, and, finally, pass beneath the scrutiny of the cranky archivist who spends his spare time discussing alien abductions in the American mid-west. These trials were as nothing to a seasoned spy like me. Which is my story, and I’m sticking to it.

Day 2: Having confirmed my identity with the litany of security staff, I am able, at last, to get some real work done. Am slightly distracted by the two visitors at the table beside me who are discussing Aunt May’s swollen ankles, but manage to forge bravely ahead. I grow increasingly annoyed with the policy of timed pulls, which limits me to three or four record-groups a day. Essentially, if you get stuck with a batch of stuff that is utterly useless (I’m looking at you, Record Group 331), you’re stuck with it for an hour until the next one shows up. However, into each Spy’s cup a few tears must tumble, so we press on.

My return to base is foiled by a snow squall—charming wintertime event that coats the ground and lends a little sparkle to the hair and coats of passers-by. As well as reinventing my 20 minute commute home into a 95 minute crawl up a highway full of people clinging to their steering wheels and screaming for mercy from the vengeful gods that have seen fit to punish them with this white fluff from the heavens. I am still ushered into other lanes with a southern charm and if only there was something on the radio, things might have been very nearly passable.

Day 3: An otherwise uneventfully productive day is interrupted by a weather bulletin: there is a storm of near-Biblical proportions bearing down on the D.C. –Maryland area. Being a hardly daughter of Massachusetts winters, I scoff at the radio and call out the reports as mendacity and hyperbole. And in doing so, miss my exit and nearly enter Delaware.

Day 4: The reports have grown increasingly hysterical as the day progresses. Essentially, it is going to be a foot of snow. The more frenzied reports are suggesting it could be as much as a yard of snow and that, truly, the end is nigh. I stay at the Archives until they close at nine and return home with secrets to share, trepidation in my gut and a case of eye-strain that is, oddly, making everything look blue.

Day 5: The Archives should be open until nine tonight. However, due to the imminent fury that is about to be unleashed upon the innocents of Maryland, they have announced that they will close at five. Which means I still get my three pulls of material and there is a chance that I might actually accomplish something useful before inevitably being trapped in the house for two days.

That morning, I simultaneously run out of shampoo, conditioner and gum (all critical spy-tools, in the right hands), and thus have to make a stop at the nearest store before Archive Espionage can start. And it is in the market that I notice strange things. People are wandering the aisles with glazed and shattered gazes, their carts full to overflowing with cans of soup, boxes of pasta and hot dogs. One woman is buying six gallons of water and four jumbo-packages of Bounty paper towels. Another has three cases of bottled water, enough toilet paper to make mummy Halloween costumes for my entire neighborhood, and has an entirely separate carriage for her non-perishables, including Fire-Starter logs, candles and powdered milk.

“I’m sorry,” I ask the man ahead of me in line, who appears to have been spared by the zombie-disease that has stricken his fellow Marylanders. “Are we expecting a snowstorm or a comet?” He turns and looks at me with mounting confusion. “Seriously,” I continue calmly, “It’s going to snow, and then you’re going to shovel, and then it’s going to be over.”

“Shovel?” He grew visibly pale and his eyes widened and dilated. “A shovel! I need a shovel!!”

I wanted to ask him what happened to the one that he carried in the trunk at all times, then decided not to tax his clearly-distraught mind.

Arrived at the Archives, at long last. As I am entering, I can hear a voice making an announcement, but choose to pay it little heed. Get through the metal detector, the inspection of my computer and camera, get my papers stamped, hide my Spy-Coat and Spy-Bag in my Spy-Locker and head up to the next round of security guards.

“Good Morning,” I offer the sullen man behind the counter.

He looks at me, turns and looks pointedly at the clock, then returns his gaze to me.

“You do know we’re closing at twelve.” It’s not a question.

“You’re—but it’s 10:30 now.”

“Yeah.”

“But…” His gaze remains as sympathetic and feeling as a boot and I decide to cut my losses and get upstairs. I had requested some materials before I left the night before and figure that at least I could get through that before I am bodily removed from my seat at Table #29, Seat #4. I am given my cart o’ fun, which I wheel to my seat and open the first box.

It contains absolutely nothing that I need, or indeed want, to see.

I look at the box label and look at my notes. One says “Box 21”. One says “Box 27”. I spend several minutes trying to figure out how my European ‘7’ (with the line through it to keep it from looking like a ‘1’) could look like a ‘1’, and decide that this way leads to nothing but madness and get through the other box before the announcement is made, in a voice struggling to be calm in the face of mounting panic, “Ladies and Gentlemen, the Archives will be closing in fifteen minutes”.

I look up. It’s not snowing yet. At all.

I hand in some requests for Monday and trudge back to the car. As I turn the key in the ignition, a solitary flake swoops down and comes to rest on my windshield. Several older ladies scream in terror and run for cover. I pull out and head for the road.

I think I forgot to mention the fact that the state has already declared a state of emergency and that all schools are getting out at 12:35pm? And that, therefore, everyone and their kids and their Uncle Samuel are now trying to get home along with me. And for some perverse reason, they all have their windshield wipers on I fight the urge to roll down my window and explain in a very loud, but extremely patient voice, that it is barely snowing and that there is nothing to clean from their windshields. But a quick look at the faces of my fellow commuters and I decide the smell of burning rubber might actually be some kind of stimulant for their sanity. And as the radio is playing nothing but increasingly distressed reports about snowfall totals (“There’s already an inch in Silver Spring!!”), I content myself with putting my iPod in one ear and singing along very loudly, to the obvious delight of my fellow commuters.

It would appear that the veneer of southern gentility is falling away. As I get off the highway and enter downtown Bethesda, it looks as if the world has been put on pause. The lights are changing at the intersections, but the cars do not appear to be making any forward progress. Concerned, I edge my way closer. Indeed, it would appear that during a state of emergency, the rules of the road, and especially the rules of common courtesy, fly off to less arctic climes.

Because normally, when you are at an intersection and the light turns green, you progress forward in an orderly manner, until the street ahead of you is full. The people who are behind you and similarly desirous of progressing in a forward direction wait until there is room for their car to fit on the other side of the intersection, Because the lights are slightly staggered, this might take a few moments, but it is things like this that are commonly considered the price to pay for existing in a civilized society. Maryland is no longer a civilized society. Because when the light turns green, it’s as if the last flight out of Casablanca has just been announced. There is a furious stomping of gas pedals, and cars shoot forward with an alacrity for which I had not previously given any cars with Maryland plates. And when the street beyond the intersection is full, they just keep coming. Because it’s snowing, apparently, though I missed the chapter where that was an excuse, but it seems to work for everyone here. Especially the people who are looking to enter the intersection from the perpendicular. They champion the advance progress of these cars with loud, jubilant honking of their horns, and gestures of camaraderie through their windshields and…oh. Wait a second….

It takes me nigh on two hours to get back home. The snow is indeed accumulating, no lie, and I wouldn’t want to be outside doing tai chi, or something, but I still fail to see what everyone is so panicked about. Everyone on our street seems to have stood their windshield wipers up in the air and coated their windshields with trash bags. I am told later that this is so that one can simply lift the trash bag and render the windshield clean. I look at the speaker of this wisdom with blank faced incredulity. Then I realize he’s not joking.

I do notice, however, that the snow is starting to accumulate in the streets. And it occurs to me that I haven’t seen a snow plow since I entered this state…

Rewind: Another Chapter for the Memoirs...

2010-01-04T21:54:00.000-08:00

In which our heroine finally tells another tale...

Bearing in mind that my time of being footloose and financially fancy-free was rapidly drawing to an end, I decided that the time had come to being tackling the list of things that I would kick myself for not accomplishing. The most expensive and most adventurous of which being a Grand European Tour. Or, under my careful planning, the Great Vampire Hunt of 2009. That's right, you heard me.

I explained to my mother my plans and my travel arrangements. Her advice?

"Call me every night. And wear a scarf."

"Why?"

"To hide the scars when a vampire gets you."

And that's why my mother is awesome.

I was able to con a friend into coming with me (lest my family appoint me an Interpol liason), and we arrived in Vienna late enough that the one Starbucks in the area was closed, but not so late that the sweetly-pungent smell of simmering onions and sauerkraut was still wafting from the little sausage stalls outside the hotel. Vienna is the only city in which I was sad that I didn't eat meat, as I wanted desperately to sit at one of those stands and act like a spy. However, I found one that sold pickles and Coke, and my life was rendered full and complete.

Day One was supposed to be devoted to the Royal Apartments, which my erstwhile traveling companion had wanted to see the first time around. Which was fine with me. Because I got to have lunch at the Cafe Mozart.

Now, it is entirely possible that my admiration for Orson Welles borders on the slightly obsessive, but the idea of standing on the same cobbles and sipping a lemon squash was far too much to pass up. I kept asking people if they knew where Harry Lime might be, but was not able to get much of a response. I did, however, get grilled pumpkin, which was strange and delicious and went perfectly with my lemon squash.

After lunch, we tramped up to the Imperial Palace, which, as I think I might have explained, is a compound of buildings that house the modern Austrian government, the National Library, several national museums, former palaces of the various Hapsburgs, and apartments for regular Viennese citizens...who can pay upwards of $3,000 a month for the privilege.

Because of this, it is entirely possible to walk right through the mass of buildings and miss the vast majority of them, because they shoot off at not-entirely-sensible-yet-impossibly-elegant angles from each other and are linked by a network of stony alleys and shadowy courtyards where the first Viennese Church choir was formed in the 13th century.

Not being one to pass up an alternative route, I found a way around the back of the first two sets of buildings (the site of the first performance of The Magic Flute and The Marriage of Figaro, it must be noted) and through a dim passageway. On the right were the stables of the 430 year old Spanish Riding School, from which a parade of enormous white horses were being led. Just beyond that was a sign for the Prunksaal, or 'Splendor Room' of the Austrian National Library. And there are some things in this world that you don't just walk by without investigating.

The Prunksaal was begun in 1723 by Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach and completed three years later by his son, Joseph Emanuel. The frescoes where the work of Daniel Grans, and were completed in 1730. Rather than showing religious figures, the art is secular, and shows the ascension of Charles VI, and the triumph of knowledge. The hall is divided, both in terms of the artwork and in terms of its collections, into "war" and "peace". From one end, you can trace knowledge, from Cadmus, inventor of the Greek alphabet, sowing the teeth of a slain dragon, to the central dome, where Minerva, surrounded by The Geniuses, is handed a olive branch by the goddess of peace, watched by the enemies of erudition.

On the other side of the hall, one can trace the history of Charles VI, beginning with the arrival of Aurora in a burst of sunlight and continuing up to an allegorical founding of the library over a mammoth statue of Charles VI himself.

I learned this all later. I'm sure there were guide books and leaflets and whatnot available at the time. But I spent my visit wondering when I had died, and remarking to anyone who would listen, that I was quite favorably impressed to find out that Heaven was indeed lined with bookshelves.

In addition to the utter perfection of it all was a display in the hall of cartography and travel accounts from the 15th-19th centuries, starting with early star charts and continuing up through the age of empires. I love maps. Especially maps with dragons on them. I love the idea that there were people whose imaginations could exceed their navigational realities, and who could invent shorelines and rivers and native peoples and great sea beasts who reared out of unknown seas. And they were all there, in stunning, living color.

I didn't cry. You weren't there. Go with it.

Anyway, after that, there wasn't too much time left in the day. After all, that night, I had a date with my first vampire.

Across the Danube from the hotel (God, I love saying that) was the 10-anniversary production of Tanz Der Vampire, a musical based on Roman Polanski's 1960's bizarrely-fascinating "Fearless Vampire Slayers". The production is an absolute cult sensation in Europe (think High School Musical for people with too much eyeliner and a thing for black lace), but relatively unknown in the US, thanks to an absolutely-laughable English-production that was mercifully closed before it could do any further damage to anyone's eardrums or reputation.

The show itself totters on the fine line between stage drama and Gothic absurdity, but in the right hands can be massively entertaining. I knew the score fairly well, thanks to too many sleepless nights with a German-English dictionary, and had seen articles about the amount of bells and whistles in the show, and thus simply had to go.

The entire lobby was flooded with red lights, and hundreds of little black rubber bats were suspended from the ceiling. The ushers were all wearing black capes, and all the seats were upholstered in black velvet. Just so you knew from the outset that we all meant business.

Cedric is dying to tell you about the show itself--he made me get a seat in the front row of the balcony so he could see everything. So I'll let him take over from here. But I do want to mention that in the lobby, they were selling scarves. Perfection.

"It is the summer of the soul in December"...

2009-11-29T14:22:00.001-08:00

More "Tales of Foreign Places" Coming soon, but I wanted to put this out there first:

Overheard in parking lot of Target a few nights back:

Girl (probably around 10 or 12) to Mom: I can’t understand how people just don’t believe in Santa Claus.

Mom (Slightly hesitantly): Oh? Like who?

Girl: Like—my friends. Some girls at school (who she proceeds to name). They were saying that they just…didn’t…I guess.

Mom: Wow.

Girl: Yeah. I just don’t get it.

Mom (very hesitantly): So…you believe in Santa, then?

Girl (with utter confidence): Well, yeah! Of course I do! He is…just….everything that’s good at Christmas, you know?

I walked out of earshot around this point, but that little snippet of conversation has been in my head ever since. And it got me thinking.

Now, don’t get me wrong—I find the Christmas decorations in late-October as annoying as the rest of the western world. There is nothing that says “We are in a recession, for the love of God, BUY SOMETHING” or, more simply “Buy stuff or it isn’t Christmas”. And there are only so many times I can see faux-antlers or hear “Dominic the Italian Donkey” on the radio (seriously…what?) before I want to run screaming into the night. But it is also totally missing the point. Which this little girl at Target got, better than any card or any overly-emotive holiday commercial.

I think there’s something wrong with my brain’s hardwiring, but come Christmas, I turn into an utter milksop. No lie, I cry at everything. I see the lights spinning up the lightposts on Church Street, or the trees that like Commonwealth Ave, and I’m gone. There is a defiance of the darkness, a refusal to give into to the gloom of winter, as if those trees could hold the very stars closer, that makes me so happy I can’t really do much else.

Christmas carols do me in every time (don’t get me started on the Muppets and John Denver). Because I’ve seen those same people who roll their eyes at the piped muzak in Macy’s stop still in the middle of a gusting snow squall to listen to a group of carolers who are entrenched against the elements near a snowbank outside Starbucks. No surprise, I was one of those carolers, but you have no idea how many people genuinely light up at the sound of the music, how many bring their kids, how many have treated others (and us) to tea, have found rock salt so we don’t have to stand on ice…it’s really hard to sing and sniffle at the same time, but I’ve managed.

I cry at decorations. Trees, menorahs, what have you. Because for all they have been commercialized, there is a force about their presence. They, too, serve to banish the cold and the dark. They are light, and they are love. I cry at the words, too. My first memory of any kind of religion was hearing about the “multitude of Heavenly Host” and thinking that was the most beautiful phrase I had ever heard. That phrase was beaten only by the line in “Noel Christmas Eve 1913”, no surprise, on the John Denver and the Muppets album, “And they sat there and they marveled / And they knew they could not tell / Whether it were angels or the bright stars a singing”. I annually flip out my mother by bursting into tears at that song because I am so jealous of those shepherds and because I like angels and because, even if it’s only for a few days, I like that other people believe in them, too.

Like the girl at Target, my Santa isn’t necessarily a man who can wriggle down a chimney, or circumnavigate the world in a single night. He is the good in people that make the miracles of Christmas occur: He is the guy who gives you his parking space at the mall, or the MBTA conductor who holds the train an extra few moments so you don’t have to wait 20 minutes in the cold for the next one. He is the guy at John Lewis who needed help picking out yarn so he could learn how to knit his wife a scarf; and he is the ladies at Dunkin Donuts who remember you even when you’ve been gone for six months. He is in the little mouse ornament my mother bought me when I was three with the last of her paycheck because he was sitting on an hour-glass and I thought those were the greatest things ever; he is my father’s voice reading A Child’s Christmas in Wales on Christmas Eve before sending us to bed. Because he has tea with Santa on Christmas Eve and helps him put all the presents out just so.

If you want to write me off as rather damp, naïve, or assume that “I’ll learn soon enough”, that’s fine. Hell, I’m working at UPS this Christmas. If I had a nickel for every person who has informed me that this is the quickest way to kill the Christmas spirit, I still wouldn’t have enough to pay back my student loans, but it’d be an excellent start. But, fortunately, my Christmas isn’t about packages, or who gets what or what dress I need to wear. It’s about the power of love to make things beautiful and to make people good. It’s about that magic period where people remember what it feels like to hope.

The more I read this over, the less is makes sense. Basically, I like Christmas. And I believe in Santa, and angels and magical things and good people. And I thought I’d try and tell you about it. Merry Christmas.

The Great Ireland Adventure, Part 3: Postcards from the Garden Gnome(s)

2009-10-20T15:36:00.000-07:00

Cedric: Hello, Stranger. Who might you be?

Larger Gnome with Lantern: I am looking for an honest man.

Cedric: A what? Oh,…well, I think I could perhaps help you out there.

Larger Gnome with Lantern: Oh? Indeed?

Cedric: Indeed, indeed. Pleased to meet you. The name’s Cedric. Professional travelling gnome.

Larger Gnome with Lantern: A pleasure. Mine’s Diogenes.

Cedric: I should have known. Well then, lad, tell us a bit about yourself.

Diogenes: Well, after some extensive, if unsuccessful travels, I decided to take a bit of a rest cure here in County Antrim and found myself at the St. George’s Market at the same time as your overgrown friend with the backpack full of books. And someone with that many books must indeed have a passion for the truth, or at least a desire to seek it in all its forms—

Cedric: Or just a bit of a maniac.

Diogenes: I beg your pardon?

Cedric: Nothing, my man, nothing. Now—how’s about I show you around Dublin?

Diogenes: I can truthfully say that sounds lovely.

Train travel ensues.

Diogenes: My good friend, I hope you will not take it amiss if I ask where on God’s green earth we are?

Cedric: Clontarf.

Diogenes: Truthfully?

Cedric: Our bookish friend, you will soon learn, is hardly one to stay to the proverbially beaten track.

Diogenes: And why, pray tell, did we walk in a five mile circle only to return to this rather ill-kempt crescent?

Cedric: Because, so far as we can tell, this is the house where Bram Stoker was born. However, at the time, the street was known as Merino Crescent. And no doubt had some kind of groundskeeper.

Diogenes: Shouldn’t there be a little green circle outside the door?

Cedric: One would assume, seeing as there is a throng standing in line to check out a stranger’s dustbins.

Diogenes: I don’t see anyone around. Except that man in the taxi giving us odd looks.

Cedric: Wanders off in direction of:

Sometime later…

Cedric: Oooh! Look! A gnome-friendly street!

Diogenes: This is true.

Cedric: I know it’s….oh never mind.

Diogenes: So, did the erudite one say why we have come here?

Cedric: This is the street where Dorothy Macardle [Kenneth’s sister] lived.

Diogenes: Is that why she’s taking pictures of that art gallery?

Cedric: Yuppers. Dorothy lived at number 16 back in the late 20's.

Diogenes: I must learn more about this person.

Cedric: I promise, I swear, you will know more than you ever cared to in a very short while.

Diogenes: Are you truthful?

Cedric: Would you stop asking me that?!

Later:

Diogenes: Where are we now?

Cedric: No! No! Stay in the bag! It’s a mob scene!

Diogenes: Are you—

Cedric: Ok, ok, it’s not a mob scene. But there is a gathering crowd and I have a fear of shoe soles. And you, my porcelain friend…

Diogenes: Say no more. I was quite comfortable, actually. But where are we?

Cedric: Oscar Wilde’s birthplace.

Diogenes: My, my. And would I be correct in stating that the crowd is due in large part to our friend’s feat of leaping over a parked car in order to get across the street to see said house?

Cedric: That…yeah. That would be accurate in the extreme.

Much later, on the train to Stoke Newington:

Cedric: I really can’t stand flying. If the good Lord meant gnomes to fly….

Diogenes: We would have been crafted with large feathery wings.

Cedric: I couldn’t have put it better myself.

Diogenes: She's taking our picture again, isn't she?
Cedric: Get used to it, Buddy Boy....

The Great Irish Adventure, Part 2 (Dundalk)

2009-10-05T10:17:00.000-07:00

"So, where is your next stop?" Asked my long-suffering mother on the phone Sunday evening.

"Dundalk."

"And what is there?"

"Precious little, apparently. They just opened a mall, apparently."

"And you are going....why?"

"Because I want to see where Kenneth Macardle lived."

"Ah. Do you have an address?"

"I have a street, but the 1915 directory didn't give house numbers. I'll figure it out."

"I'm sure you will."

"Basically, I look at it like I'm on a blind date with a ghost, or something."

I bid Belfast farewell without many great pangs of regret, especially once the man at the bus station gave me the wrong information on how to get to Dundalk. Luckily the people at the train station (which is in the same building--one of the few awesome things about the city) were kindlier and I was soon tucked inside a train car and winding my way south. The view wasn't too much to write home about, save for the part when the train went through a junk yard and ran between piles of crushed cars stacked twenty feet high on both sides, which I found fascinating. I wander aimlessly through Dundalk for a bit to get a feel for things before getting a taxi to my hotel, which was about 2 miles from town.

The morning into town the next day was marred only by the windmill at the Dundalk Institute of Technology. I can't begin to tell you how utterly terrified I am of the new windmills thathave the ominous presence of a Poe specter and the unutterable malevolence of a Lovecraftian Creature (Cue my mother: it's a windmill Bridget, for the love of God calm down). I thus walked very quick past and tried not to look at it took closely for fear of drawing its evil attention.

Dundalk's name is derived from the Irish Dún Dealgan meaning "Dalgan's Fort", and is considered to be the home of the mythical warrior Cúchulainn. It is, according to its legal boundaries, the largest town in Ireland, but the vast majority of it is farmland and open fields. In 1863, it became the home of Macardle and Moore Brewing Company, founded by E.H. Macardle and Andrew T. Moore, who together bought out the town's former brewery and moved the building to the area of Dundalk known as Cambricville. The brewery grew in popularity through the century and, in 1915, Thomas Callan Macardle, the grandson of E.H., was knighted for his work in supplying grain and alcohol to the British Army. His son was one Kenneth Callan Macardle, who you may have heard me mention one or two times before (It would appear that Kenneth was working toward taking over the operation of the brewery, as he was apprenticed to a granary in England for a while and was ostensibly in San Francisco to learn brewery and farming techniques). During the Irish Civil Wars, Dundalk enjoyed quite a bit of notoriety as a border town and customs center (as well as numerous less-palatable incidences), and continued as a market town until the 1950's, when the rail lines to the town closed one by one. The brewery went strong for over a century until it was bought by Guinness in 1988, and in April of 2001, it closed for good.

As I only had a day, I didn't plan to do much more than walk around and get a sense of the place. I don't blame Kenneth in the least for leaving fairly quickly, as it isn't exactly a happening place, it is beautiful.

As foolish as this sounds, there is poetry everywhere. If the forms of memorial and public art is any indication of the mentality of the population, I can see where Kenneth got his linguistic talents.

This is the plaque on the statue commemorating the town gates that were originally erected in the 14th century. Despite having a more recent history of severe economic hardship and unemployment (County Louth, as well as being Ireland's smallest county, had it's highest levels of unemployment in the 1980's), it was really nice to see a town that was proud of its history. Dorothy Macardle (Kenneth's sister) wrote in her first book of a "sense one has everywhere in Ireland...of the companionship of the dead.” It's one of the things that struck me most strongly about Dundalk. Nearly every street had a plaque or a monument on it, not necessarily to significant events, but to individual people who were involved in history:

I'm still looking for information on the Watters family, but these are just examples.

And I too was there in the companionship of the dead, so to speak. It's hard for me to picture KCM as anything but as a tall, somewhat gangly, mustachioed 26-year-old, but I did find the street on which he grew up (according to the Registries of the early 20th century).

Like I said earlier, I couldn't track down a house number, so I had to go up and down the street and say Hello to all the buildings that weren't obviously too new--which got me more than a few questioning glances, believe you me. Also on Jocelyn Street is the building that was the main office for the Brewery

Which is now an office building and the small offices of the Dundalk Tourist Bureau.

I didn't have time to visit the archives (a perfectly good excuse to return, I think), nor was I able to find the cemetery where Sir Thomas is buried. It would have been nice to say hello and introduce myself, but according to the map, it was somewhere outside of town on a road that had no identifying features for miles and miles, according to the map. And as much fun as it would have been to haul my backpack down a non-desrcript rural road for hours and hours, I think enlisting some sort of transportation might be advisable for the next time around.

This time, however, it was nice to simply walk around, and say hello to the buildings. I do genuinely believe in Guardian Angels. Maybe he's mine, maybe I'm his. But we got to have another strange, fleeting visit, and it was worth every dusty mile it took to get there.

The Great Irish Adventure, Part 1

2009-09-29T14:20:00.001-07:00

(Excellent taste in sweepstakes!!!)

I was in a bookstore today (not unlike every other day of my life) and saw rhyme that described Thursday's child (who traditionally "has far to go") as a natural-born wanderer, and that, to me, seemed highly appropriate. So when my student loans provided me with a few more weeks of wandering, I took them happily and rapidly booked a flight to Belfast. The plan is 3 days in Belfast, 2.5 days in Dundalk and 3.75 days in Dublin, and with my indestructible back-pack and Cedric, my erstwhile gnomey companion, I was off!

Belfast was....interesting. The good stuff first:

I was there mainly to go to the St. George's Market, where my favorite t-shirts are sold on Saturdays from Tee and Toast. Cedric has much to say about this, so I'll leave off for now, but I fell in love with the market as soon as I saw it. Fresh fish sat glaring up from beds of crushed ice, next to wheels of cheese bigger than my armspan, across from some of the most delicious-looking bread I ever saw, and around the corner were cupcakes. A whole table of cupcakes with whipped, marshmallow frosting.

As if this wasn't enough, I had tea and toast, of the edible variety, at the Linen Hall Library--the oldest library in Belfast and the last subscription library in Ireland. It's gorgeous on the inside, with dark wood shelves and old leather couches and standing-writing tables scattered around. And the toast is marvelous.

Speaking of books (again, not all that surprising here), I also found a mystery bookstore near the pub above, that was run by the greatest guy in Belfast. He was a bibliophile, he offered me tea, and he also spoke arguably the greatest greeting I have ever heard. A Queen's College professor came in to check on his reading list, and I, who was crouched on the floor behind a bookcase, my arms laden, heard:

"Stephen! How in hell are you? Sit your weary soul in that chair and tell me your tale."

I am ruthlessly stealing this line for a story one day. And thus Mr. Bookman has found immortality.

The Botanic Gardens are lovely, as well. Coming from a land where the sight of roses in late September are few and exceptionally far between, to be assailed by the smell of a whole rose garden in bloom was a rare treat.

It is also next to the oldest graveyard in Belfast that has ties to Druidical practices and ancient Celtic carvings...and is only open by appointment. Unspeakably unfair.

Also, the First World War happened.

Basically, there aren't a great number of First World War memorials in Ireland because of the awkward overlap of Ireland fighting with the British Empire while at the same time fighting the Empire for Home Rule. Which in itself is an incredibly interesting conflict, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

HOWEVER.

Belfast is weird.

Seriously. I've never been in a city that was so intensely defined by its geography. I was staying on Great Victoria Street, one of the major streets in the city. However,two streets west (while trying to find Belfast City Cemetery, a perfectly high-minded endeavor), I hit this:

Needless to say, I never made it to the cemetery. I was busy running very quickly in the other direction.

There is a persistent anger that lives just below the surface in so many parts of the city--not just an historical resentment, or a resentment of memory, but a truly ugly feeling that is as alive and as real as those murals. Maybe it's because the history is so recent and, in a sense, ongoing. But it still made me feel a guest at the Borden Family dinner table.

Also, everything closes at 6:00pm. Everything.

Except the pubs and bars.

I'm not exactly an Anthropophobic, but I don't have any need whatsoever to make friends. Especially friends who smell as if they have just drunk their own weight in cheap whiskey.

And on Sundays, nothing opens 'til one. There is no one out or about, save for the hooligans loitering near the City Hall. It's a ghost town.

It's not, though. I don't think ghosts like Belfast much, either:

And, being a devout admirer of memorials of all kinds, I was... perturbed, let's say, to see this:

It's the Belfast Titanic Memorial. Inside a Ferris Wheel. You can't see the bottom, because it's covered by a giant motor. You can barely make out the figures because of the constant swoop of cars. I was trying to get this picture when I heard a conversation over my shoulder:

"What is that girl takin' a picture of, Larry?"

"Don't know...is it the wheel then?"

"No...it's the statue inside. What is it, then?"

"Don't know. Looks old, though. Not really one for old things, me."

Like I say...Belfast and I...didn't quite see eye to eye.

Fragments...

2009-09-29T00:53:00.000-07:00

This was a story I started to write for a competition by the English Heritage People--basically, you had to write a story that involved Whitby Abbey. However, since the story was due a week before my dissertation and could only be 2,500 words, it was never completed. Enjoy!

I saw him the first time was I was eight. My father was a religious historian and was writing a paper on the collection of myth and memory at significant sites throughout Britain. He did his best to schedule the trips in the summer so that I could join him—he said it was because he enjoyed the company. I knew that it was because, even then, I was the one who would type up his notes and keep our itineraries in order. He said it was because I always found points of interests that he missed. I knew it was because, even then, his eyes were failing him and I was the only person he would allow to guide his feet up the steps and over the hidden folds in the ground without being ashamed.

We arrived, perhaps appropriately, in the middle of a fog so heavy that I knew the sea only from its sound. We slept in an inn overlooking the Bay where my father made us tea with too much milk. Otherwise, he said, I’d be up all night and wouldn’t be able to see all the spirits that still lived in the Abbey. The tea had no effect on me one way or the other, but I was still up most of the night, my face pressed to the window, willing away the mist and the chill with childish savagery. My mood did not improve when, awaking (having been mysteriously transported to my bed in the night), I saw that the mist had congealed into fat, fuming rain clouds that spit and hissed against the windows and the walls of our tiny room.

I don’t remember much else about that morning, beside my Father’s weary chuckle at my impatience.

“It’s stood there for seven hundred years, Cait. I promise you, it won’t have changed much by the time the sun comes out.”

By noon, the clouds apparently grew tired of their games and began lagging behind each other, leaving patches of sunlight that stretched across the grass of the nave and made the steps shimmer. We went up, hand in hand, my little mary-janes sliding into the ancient footprints worn into the weary stone.

“You go on ahead,” my Father whispered, moving his hand to the railing so he could hold something still and steady. Thrilled to at last to be moving, I dashed up the rest of the stairs, losing count before 199, but in far too much of a hurry to mind. There was wind making my hair thrash around like a living thing and surf twinkling at my feet and for a few breathless moments, I felt like I could fly.

He saw me before I was even aware of his presence. He stood amongst the graves, as still and ageless as the stones that surrounded him. I had an image of black clothes and black hair and a face that was turned with intense, silent vigilance to the sea. Then my Father was behind me, his hand on the base of my neck, guiding me into the standing shadows of the Abbey.

As we walked up the path, the man turned his head, following our movements with something almost wary in his gaze. I met his eyes for a moment, and to this day, despite everything, I still see those eyes in my dreams. They were wide and nearly white, as if he had been staring to the sea so long that his eyes were now nothing more than a reflection of the sea foam and the sky.

“Who was that?” I asked, trying to turn my head back, but I was too slow for grown-up strides and merely ended up stumbling.

“Who do you mean, Darling?”

“That man there in the graveyard.”

“I’ve no idea, Cait. Come on—it looks as if it might rain again.”

It did. But not before we’d walked every path, studied the nave from every angle, and watched the starlings dance with the sunbeams through the holes in the masonry. My father would have been content simply to stare, to absorb the history and the atmosphere and distill from it some kind of truth, but I made him tell me again about the sacking by the Vikings, the German bombs that wrecked the nave, and the warriors who lay beneath the stones. At last, he sat on a broken wall and took his little notebook from his breast pocket, and I knew he would be writing his impressions for sometime and that I was free to wander. Eager to see the sea, I slipped through the walls of St. Mary’s once again—and found myself not three feet from the man with the moon-bright eyes.

“Are you waiting for someone?” He was leaning toward the wall around the Abbey, far less for support than if he were keeping it company. He turned lazily to me, as if we had already been introduced.

“You could say that.” His voice was calm and solemn and I suddenly felt very grown-up.

“Who is she?”

“How did you know it was a she?”

“You look too lonely. It must be a she.”

He smiled at that, and I saw that the skin around his eyes folded oddly, as if unused to the movement.

“Have you visited the Abbey before?”

“Nope. But my Dad told me all about it. He writes books.”

“I see.” We stood together in silence, while I watched him watch a gull ride a gust of wind over the cliff, before swooping down toward the shore.

“Can you hear it?” He asked presently.

“Hear what?” In answer, he nodded to the hulking skeleton of stone and shadow before us. The sky was rapidly darkening, and a few heavy raindrops splattered into the ground around us.

“Of course not.”

“Then you’re not listening hard enough.”

“Fine then. What do you hear?” I pouted. If he noticed, he gave no indication, far too busy staring into the dimness of the Abbey.

“It’s waiting,” he murmured, more to himself than to me. “Just like all of us.”

It was more than twelve years before I returned to Whitby. But that time, the sun shone for the entirety of my visit, as if trying to apologize for being too cowardly all those years ago. I was engaged. I was published. And I was alone...

To be continued...

Perhaps....

Postcard from the Garden Gnome: Enter Freely and of Your Own Free Will...(Part 2)

2009-09-28T14:07:00.000-07:00

Day 2 of this little excursion dawned much brighter and Bridget decided we were going to follow Mina's walk to Robin Hood Bay (yes, he was supposed to have hung out there). Fortunately for Mina and Lucy, there were no highways in 1892. There are now, and lest we re-enacted our little St. Brigid's expedition and get hit by a truck, I decided to curtail this expedition. I did, however, let her stop in the East Whitby Cemetery (I can hear her mother snickering right now--"It's always a graveyard with her").

There were a bunch of Commonwealth War Graves there, mostly for naval men, and as it was Sunday, it was mercifully quiet and free of tourists (But Herb, there are 199 steps! I counted them! Who the hell put those there? It's exhausting! Oh, I need to rest for a minute here...). I also met a lovely older lady who was "visiting her husband" and we spent five minutes looking for a water spigot so she could water her flowers.

I tried really hard to convince her to be well-rounded. I really did. Whitby has some great history. Captain Cook served his apprenticeship there before zipping off to the Antipodes to antagonize Aborigines, and there a long history of sea-stories and whaling off Whitby.

Oddly, its sister city is Anchorage, Alaska, and there is a giant bronze whalebone near the shore that was sent as a token of... camaraderie, I guess...

But, try as I might, she was deaf to the calls of culture. And, in the suddenly pouring raid (you have no idea how nice it was to be in a place that was at the climactic mercies of the sea again!), we found The House Where Bram Stoker Wrote Dracula:

(He also worked on it at the Royal Hotel around the corner when his landlady kicked him out so she could sweep and dust, but there's no plaque there). As the skies cleared, Bridget went down and strolled the beach, scanning for any sailorless ships, giant dogs or tall men in incongruous tuxedoes. Sadly, none were present, but I had a lovely paddle in a tidal eddie. A note: the North Sea is really cold:

And we saw another brilliant sunset at St. Mary's. We sat on a bench by Caedmon's Cross and hummed for him. Caedmon was a cow-herder who had a dream that God wanted him to spread The Word through song. So he presented himself to (St.) Hilda, the Abbess of Whitby. She agreed to give Caedmon a chance and had the monks read him a psalm to memorize (since Caedmon couldn't read), and in the morning he delivered the first hymn in the history of Christianity. He wrote over 600 of them, and never learned to read a word. He had the monks read him the passages every night so that he could teach people the beauty of the words.

So all in all, I really liked Whitby. It's a phenomenal city for walking, it has a fantastic bookstore--I rate bookstores on the comfiness of their chairs and the length of time I get to sit and read all the books in the store, and this one topped an hour-- and a superb literary reputation.

...Did I leave her there? On a bench, perhaps, in St. Mary's Cemetery? Hmmm.....

Rewind: Enter Freely and of Your Own Free Will...

2009-09-25T20:11:00.000-07:00

So after some adventurous train travel that involved sitting in York, arguably the coldest train station in Great Britain, I arrived at Whitby in a fog so dense that I could only tell the sea by its sound. Perhaps not an auspicious beginning for a summer holiday, unless you're like me, in which case you get really excited, because it's all just so damn literarily accurate.

My hotel was The Leeway, run by arguably the two nicest people in Whitby, and possibly in Yorkshire. As it was cold and drizzly, I made some tea and hit the proverbial hay in order to be ready for morning.....

Which dawned just as cold and damp as the day before. But, if Mina could take it, so could I.

My first walk was from the B&B, a stone's throw to the East Crescent, where Stoker set Lucy and Mina's living quarters in Whitby, to the 199 steps leading up to St. Mary's Graveyard (where Lucy got nom-nomed)--the same walk my Mina made to save her friend. And let me tell you, Mina was no shrinking violet.

Just around the wall from the graveyard is Whitby Abbey, which has been there in some form since about the 12th century. I had to dodge around the school groups who were visiting, but just as I was entering the visitor's center, the sun began poking through the clouds.

There has been continual excavations going on around the site of the Abbey since the 1920's (when farmers were paid 6 pence for digging up ancient Roman artifacts by the local historic committee), and have uncovered a line of Roman graves that are estimated to be about 1200 years old:

And inside the visitor's center, there is are smaller pieces that have been uncovered. My personal favorite was the shoe leather that was discovered at a gravesite closer to the Abbey. They knew it was a religious because of the site, but apparently, there was some doubt as to whether it was a priest or a monk--before it was discovered that monks were traditionally buried facing east, while priests were buried facing west: that when, when judgement day came, they would rise and be able to face their flock. As this man was facing the east, he was a monk. Best of all, the imprint of his feet could still be seen in the leather. A fact which made me so happy I might have started doing a little dance in the exhibit hall.

The Abbey also has an audio tour that not only gives you the history of ruins, but also lets you hear some of the voices of the people who lived there. It's more of a children's thing (or appropriate for the less imaginative visitors), but there was a line in one of the sections that talked about the stained glass windows that were once in the main hall for visitors. They not only taught the stories of the Bible, but the near-miraculous colors that shimmered in the sun taught people how to wonder. As you can probably tell, I was really happy.

Down below the Abbey is the area known as Tate Hill sands. Or, to those of us in the know: the place where Dracula landed on the Demeter. I had to bide my time all day waiting for low tide and when there water finally rolled back to reveal the rocky shoreline, I scrambled down the sea walk as fast as my dignity would allow.

It's the perfect place for a vampire-arrival. The sand is black and the rocks are covered in gaping barnacles that curl around in the tide pools like spines of sea-monsters.

And above all, it stinks.

Literally, it's that low-tide stench that hits all seaports, but never gets old or familiar.

You can, however, find jet there, which is, essentially coal that is formed in seabeds. It is made into jewelry all over Whitby and is this gorgeous glossy black color and, oddest of all, is warm to the touch. While I was there, I saw two guys trying to get jet out of the rocks. Which, I'm sure is a noble enterprise, but I watching to grown men beating a rock with an ice pick was a bit of a mood-killer.

That night, I took a Dracula walking tour of Whitby. There were fourteen of us on the tour. Want to take a guess how many people on the tour had actually read the book?.....

Five. Including the tour guide.

The world is unjust. But the tour was great. Afterwards, the tourguide's publicist took two very friendly goth-tourists to do some photo-ops and I headed back up to the cemetery, since Whitby has some of the most heart-stoppingly beautiful sunsets I've ever seen and I wanted the best view.

What I didn't know was that the photo-op was in the same cemetery. All I knew, was that when I stood up from my bench, in St. Mary's Cemetery in the deepening twilight, I turned and saw a tall man dressed all in black standing beside one of the weathered graves and I nearly jumped out of my own skin.

Feeling rather sheepish, I took myself home and to bed, where a black moth slept on the head of my bed all night. Coincidence? I think not.

But First...

2009-09-20T04:54:00.000-07:00

As it is the first anniversary of my acquisition of an N16 postcode, I thought it would be nice to look back on the things we've learned this year:

1) Just because people drive on the left side of the road doesn't mean they walk on the left side of the street. Or the right. Or walk at all, if stopping and staring at a brick wall will cause the maximum amount of confusion behind them.

2) Busses live. And they will determine where they take you and when. Or whether they take you at all. Sometimes they will decide it is time for a nap three stops before yours on a day when you really need to get somewhere quickly. Or they will shy in fright at traffic and dump you on the pavement in front of a shop that can straighten your hair, put rhinestones on your teeth and help you wire money to Nigeria at eleven o'clock at night beside a woman with an infant in a stroller and a man who hasn't taken a proper shower since the Reagan administration.

3) Do not go into the Church Street Bookshop unless you have enough time to go back home and drop off the pile of books you found before proceeding on your way.

4) It doesn't matter whether you carry an umbrella. You're going to get soaked. The rain is passive-aggressive and blows sideways if it thinks you are trying to avoid it.

5) There is no way to understand the weather by looking at the sky. All those inherent New England traits that tell you that it will rain on a perfectly sunny day, or that fall will start tomorrow, are useless. The sky doesn't change shades of blue when it gets colder (or at least not as noticeably) and you can't smell the ocean before it snows. Odd.

6) Speaking of which, a snow storm will bring the entire world to a grinding halt. There are no snow shovels. There is no rock salt. And there are no sleds. But my God, are there snowmen. Everywhere. And outside the Jewish Community Center, they have yarmulkes.

7) Tina We Salute You has the best coffee in the city, and the people who work there actually like their jobs. And they commandeered the corner across the street by the Church, so you can drink your coffee in a church pew. The Tinderbox is an exceptionally close second. Their almond croissants might have the power to affect global peace.

8) The British Library closes at 8pm on weekdays and 5pm on weekends. And if you don't look like you are ready to head out by 4:15 on Friday or Saturday, the cranky librarian will yell at you. And the obscenely handsome librarian is there on Wednesdays and Thursdays. And that guy in the back on the left? Is totally a vampire.

9) Greenwich Park is the greatest place in the whole city. It's best in February when you can get it all to yourself and watch the sunset over the hill. Best day I can remember over here. Oh, and that oak tree behind the Pavilion is mine. Clissold Park is a close second, but you are far more likely to be eaten by a dog or nasally-assaulted by hippies. The North Reservoir is one of the most remarkably beautiful things you'll see around here--and the men fishing in it are the most remarkably odd.

10) Learn to adopt a British accent when carrying on short-term transactions. Otherwise, you will be treated like you are mentally inadequate. Or have to explain that, while you are from America, you live neither in New York nor Florida. And no, there are no palm tress where I live, and yes, it snows a great deal.

11) Stoke Newington is full of mad people. Absolutely bonkers. Put them all in a room (or a bookshop, during a book signing, no less) and it's like feeding time at the asylum. On that note, don't talk to the people petitioning outside the farmer's market on Saturdays. They have no pause or mute buttons. Do, however, ask the mushroom man about his mushrooms. And the cupcake lady is amazing.

The Irishman who sells gems at Greenwich Market told me that everyone picks out the particular stone that they need at that time--whatever property it contains is what they need. I think the same is true about most things. Area of residence included. If it was good enough for Edgar, I think it's good enough for me....

A Defense

2009-09-18T18:16:00.000-07:00

I would argue that one of the more under-appreciated books of the late 19th-century is Dracula. Not overlooked, mind you--the book was published in 1897 and hasn't been out of print since. And not unknown. Anyone who's seen Sesame Street knows about Count Von Count--did you ever notice his fangs? Ever had Count Chocula cereal? Worn those awful wax teeth at Halloween? My point exactly. But how many people know about the man behind all those fangs and capes? Or the man who dreamt him up in the first place.

(Oh merciful Lord, no, she's going to do it again)

Bram Stoker was born in Dublin on November 8, 1847, and spent a good deal of his early childhood confined to his bed with a "mysterious disorder of the blood" (cue menacing laughter). During this time, his mother read him folktales of Ireland, as well as the more popular Gothic authors of the time, most notable among these being Sheridan LeFanu (author of Carmilla, about a vampire from the darkest corner of Eastern Europe) and Charles Maturin (author of Melmoth the Wanderer. Read it. Now.)

While at Trinity College in Dublin (studying mathematics, bless him), he fell head over heels in love with the work of John Greenleaf Whittier, and was among a group of students who defended Whittier once the revelation of his homosexuality hit the world's headlines. Not surprisingly, he had few friends in college, and tended to hang out at home of Sir William and his wife, Lady Jane Wilde. He knew their son Oscar, who was at Trinity at the same time, and he sponsored Wilde's membership for school's Philosophical Society. He also married Wilde's (former) fiance. Though the break seemed to have been rather hard on poor Oscar, he and Florence remained friends once she and Bram and Oscar and Constance were in London (another story for another day...)

Stoker became assistant to Henry Irving, a man he had come to idolize nearly as much as he did Whittier. Irving, along with being one of the greatest actors of his age, was also, apparently, a bit of a slave driver. He sucked the blood from all those who worked for him...you might say. He was also known for walking around London wearing a long black cloak. He was also tall, with high cheekbones, a large, broad forehead and a hooked nose, and wore his hair swept back off his head. Noticing a similarity here?

The book was supposed to be a play. A five act play that Stoker wrote one summer while staying at Whitby. He had done research on Transylvania at the British Library and spent months collecting local stories, superstitions and sea tales from residents of Whitby and from the Captains of the hundreds of ships that sailed into the harbor. When Irving rejected the play, Stoker turned it into a book and...the rest, as they say....

I love Dracula. Unabashedly adore it. From an historian's point of view, it is one of those books that absolutely defines its era: Dracula was published during the Queen's Jubilee Year, but one that was far from triumphant. Fears were rampant in England the the global influence of the British Empire was declining and that the 'race' was being polluted with foreign immigrants, most significant among these being Jews. There was continual violence in Ireland. And continuous trouble in the Balkans and the gradual collapse of the Ottoman Empire posed a serious threat to European security. This part is important. The British Empire was feeling well and truly menaced by an Empire that had existed for almost 400 years. It was the symbol of all that was old and corrupted and decayed in European imperialism, and yet it still managed to drag Britain into his maws.

The best thing, that I don't think anyone plays up nearly enough, is that idea that Vampires are created at the end of empires. Dracula himself declares: "Is it a wonder that we were a conquering race; that we were proud; that when the Magyar, the Lombard, the Avar, the Bulgar, or the Turk poured his thousands on our frontiers, we drove them back?...Ah, young sir, the Szekelys [Dracula's Wallachian tribe, essentially]...can boast a record that mushroom growths like the Hapsburgs and the Romanoffs can never reach." Later, Van Helsing himself notes (in his charmingly obnoxious Dutch-English: ", "Let me tell you, he is known everywhere that men have been...He have follow the wake of the berserker Icelander, the devil-begotten Hun, the Slav, the Saxon, the Magyar.” What could be more terrifying for a British public already aware of the impending end of their Dynasty?

Technology abounds. Dr. Seward records his diary on phonograph cylinders. Mina used shorthand and later a typewriter. They utilize the telegraph and railroads constantly. This is no mythical reality into which these characters are plunked. They are living in the here and now. And yet, a mere few hundred pages later, they are donning garlic and brandishing crosses and taking on all the powers of superstition and heathenism that their century has unequivocally rejected. The book is not so much about the triumph technology (in my mind) as it is about the fragility of all that modernity to protect its characters from the force of a world that is not yet dead. Witness if you will the death of Quincy Morris, an American, from the self-professed most progressive nation on earth, who is killed at the book's end by a gypsy paid to defend the sleeping Count. In his hand is a bowery knife, a primitive tool usually found among South American native. He abandoned his gun some time earlier.

And then there is the Count. Seriously, in all the Bela Lugosi nonsense, no one ever gives Stoker enough credit for creating a truly appealing villain. He's repulsive (the dude has hairy palms. Come on, that's gross) and at the same time is one of the most compelling characters in the whole book. Harker grumbles about his train schedule (greatest line ever: "It seems to me that the further East you go the more unpunctual are the trains. What ought they to be in China?") and Lucy whines about her fiances. But the Count is possibly one of the only characters in the book who has a real sense of vitality. All the other characters travel on compulsion: Harker goes to Transylvania for work, Mina goes because Jonathan is ill, Van Helsing is 'compelled' by his work to go back and forth from Amsterdam (and apparently to get a hold of his unlimited supply of Communion Wafers), but the Count travels because he wants to. The only thing holding him in check is the tide, and even that doesn't seem so bad when you can bring a fog around you that blots out the sun itself...

There are theories in eastern Europe that vampires are not created through a pact with the devil, but out of a vital soul's overpowering the body's desire to die. And I think that theory suits our Count far better than any reference to Satanic bargains.

His conversation, likewise, is alluring and imperative and authoritative and all those good things that make you want to listen and to follow. Standing in the doorway of his castle, Dracula, unable to force himself upon the unwilling, urges Harker into a kind of Faustian pact, “Enter freely and of your own free will!” I think Stephen King got the by-invitation-only aspect of the vampire thing more accurately than Stoker, but you have to admit, the way he forces his victims to take an active role in their own demise is fantastic.

And is he ever out for revenge. It's never specifically mentioned in the book, but it has been postulated that the reason Dracula goes for everyone's female companion is because his wife [the real Dracula's wife, mind] committed suicide thinking that the Turks had taken the Castle and her husband. And after a lifetime of fighting for Christianity, (the real) Dracula was held up as the paradigm of tyranny and sadism. 18th and early 19th-century stories in Germany talked about all his awfulness, and there are a few references of mothers telling their children that if they didn't behave, Count Dracula would come and get them. So maybe he's lonely. Maybe he's just living up to his reputation, but it should be noted that all the vampires before Dracula, from Carmilla, to Polidori's Lord Ruthven, are all out to find companionship and a real friend. Not our Count.

And Mina. Oh, my poor Mina. No one ever gives you any credit, do they? There are piles of papers that discuss Stoker's use of women in the book and how the concept of 'The New Woman' of the late-19th-century is punished. And certainly, in some senses this is true. Lucy, she of three suitors and of disposable income and generally lax morals, is not only drained by the vampire, but is staked in her grave when she keeps trying to seduce the living. And Mina, despite her run-in with the Count, survives to marry and have a child. But is it really that simple? Stoker's mother was a feminist, and I tend to think some of that wore off in this book. Lucy is a pain in the bustled backside from beginning to end and I wasn't too upset to see her go. But Mina, if you actually look at her, is one feisty little lady. She goes running around in bare feet across town to save her friend, she up and goes to Hungary, sight unseen, to help her fiance, and it is the one who insists on being a full-fledged member of the Fearless Vampire Hunting Party. If anything, Mina is threatened most by the hidebound men around her who insist on maintaining her innocence and refuse to let her in. Without adequate knowledge to protect herself, she becomes Dracula's next meal and nearly his next victim. At the end of the book, while the boys are running around with machetes, she's the one with the gun.

And it is to Mina that the Count reveals his true intentions:

"And so you, like the others, would play your brains against mine...They should have kept their energie for use closer to home [oh, who's the one who supposed to stay at home now, eh?] Whilst they played wits against me--against me who commanded nations, and intruiged for them, and fought for them, hundreds of years before they were born [the real Dracula was responsible for keeping Christian Transylvania free of the rule of the Muslim Ottomans for most of his life]--I was countermining them...You shall be avenged in turn."

And here we come to the big question. All the adaptations (that aren't overtly pornographic, mind) of Dracula have the Count in love with Mina and, often, she returns his affections. What do we make of this? Is there any hint in the actual book that this might be the case?

Certainly, the Count refers to Mina as "flesh of my flesh; blood of my blood; kin of my kin...my helper." But this is also a reference to the pollution of her sanguinary purity (and, in turn, the pollution of the 'British race'), and far from a real declaration. A good friend of mine has a theory that there might be something to the "D&M 4-Ever" theory.

Just before he attacks her, the Count says to Mina. "...now you shall come to my call. When my brain says "Come!" to you, you shall cross land or sea to do my bidding". And yet, he never calls her. Lord knows he made Lucy his little puppet while he had her in his power. But Mina is always under her own control. Similarly, it is discovered that, during sunrise and sunset, Mina can hear the Count's thoughts, and this connection is exploited as much as possible in order to learn his whereabouts. And while the connection grows dim and there is a fear that he might be able to hear them through it, there is never any retaliation by the Count on Mina or her menfolk. And she is the only one who expressed any kind of pity for the soul of a man who can never know true rest. And while this may not be evidence enough for the "stake me for I can't live without you" kind of logic that Francis Ford Coppola would have us believe, there is some basis for the belief that the Count held Mina in pretty high regard, at the very least. And so should we.

So there you are. I really like this book.

So in July, I decided to go to Whitby to see the sights. And that will be the topic of our next discussion. Class dismissed.

"I thought how tragic it would be if you were wasted..."

2009-09-17T22:29:00.000-07:00

I went to see "Dorian Gray" tonight.

Cue the ominous music. I'll give you time to prepare yourself....

Before we get started, a little history (no surprise). The Picture of Dorian Gray was first published in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine on June 20, 1890. Interestingly enough, it was inspired by a meeting between Oscar Wilde and Arthur Conan Doyle. The two met at a dinner party that was supposed to introduce the young Mr. Wilde to society. He apparently spent the whole night with Doyle, and the two discussed the nature of art and beauty, and the eternal question of whether goodness and beauty can ever be the same thing. The two made a bargain to write a story based on their diologue. Conan Doyle wrote The Sign of Four (and word on the street is that Sherlock Holmes' methods of deduction and conversation was in many ways modeled on Oscar's own), while Wilde created Dorian Gray.

The book was an immediate scandal-magnet, dealing, as it did, with homosexuality, debauchery (which is a word that really needs to be used more often) and, Wilde's favorite topic, hypocrisy. During his trial, sections of the book--most notably the preface--was read to the jury as proof of its author's utter lack of morals. Perhaps the most famous passage was:

"There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all."

For Wilde, the duty of the artist was to create beauty. Pure and simple. And through creating beauty and through looking at beautiful things, one could become beautiful. When asked, during his speaking tour of America why he thought the country was so violent, he answered, "Because you have ugly wallpaper." It seems flippant, but if you think about it, what he was saying was that beauty begets beauty. And by recognizing and surrounding oneself with beauty, the beautiful can come out in you (I think it is also amazing that this dialogue took place in a mining town in Colorado. The miners, dirty, most likely illiterate men who would never see a Wilde play or read one of his poems, were absolutely enthralled by Oscar. He really was one of those remarkable people who could get along with everyone).

Then came Dorian Gray.

"Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art". So says the introduction to The Picture of Dorian Gray. The whole book focuses around beauty and youth--to Wilde, the highest form of human beauty. Poor Dorian makes his Faustian bargain to keep his looks in exchange for his soul, which ends up residing in his portrait painted by Basil Hallward (Wilde's portrait of himself as he saw himself). He inspired to do this by a brilliant speech by Lord Henry Wotton (Wilde's portrait of himself as he believed the world saw him) As he goes off on his wild (Wilde?) escapades, the portrait becomes all that is hideous about him. He drives one woman to suicide after she confesses to him that stage romance means nothing to her now that she loves Dorian. "How little you can know of love, if you say it mars your art! What are you without your art? Nothing." Her brother chases him for 18 years, seeking revenge on his sister's honor, only to be tricked by Dorian's youth into letting him escape. And in the end, Dorian tries to destroy his own soul and free himself of his conscience by stabbing his painting--thereby killing himself.

There are ambiguities left and right about where Wilde's real message lies. He was an enormous fan of watching people trying to find 'meaning' in everything he created. So I won't presume to tell you the 'point' of the book. I think he's had enough chuckles over my expense over the past ten years or so. But I think that Dorian is a villain because he allows his life to mar Basil's art. He uses beauty to hide his own ugliness, when he should have used the painting as a model for all he could be. But that's just me...

I first read Dorian Gray in the summer of 1999 for my first year of high school summer reading. I liked it. I was already hooked on Wilde's biography, so I made myself like his books. I gave Lord Henry's speech (which my mother still likes to yell randomly to this day) for our high school declamation contest and carried off the first prize. Thank you, Oscar. I read it again in the winter of 2006 and had nightmares for a week. The kind of nightmares that stay with you the next morning and follow you around all day. I can still tell you in vivid detail what they were about. And I think it's because, despite the Victorian gothic melodrama of the book, there is something far more human about Dorian Gray than there is in, say, Dr. Jekyll's Mr. Hyde. We can't all grow to be seven feet tall and go stomping little children in the night. We all can, however, lose our higher natures by indulging our baser instincts. And I think it is a story that is more and more easy to see as the years go on. The Picture of Dorian Gray is in many ways a Victorian novel, but I don't think Dorian Gray himself would be too uncomfortable in this little world of ours today.

So, all that being said: the movie didn't send me stomping down dark alleys seeking the blood of the innocent, which in itself was pretty surprising. I was predisposed from the first to hate it unconditionally, which I didn't. That being said...

I think someone, somewhere, somewhat missed the point. I was not impressed with the casting from an aesthetic point of view. I always saw Dorian as that kind of face that is alluring in its innocence as well as in its beauty, which wasn't really going on here. The celluloid Lord Henry was--decently, but not the silver-tongued devil that he is in the book. Which might very well be due to the fact that someone thought they could write dialogue better than the good Mr. Wilde. There is a very great distance between ""Realize your youth while you have it. Don't squander the gold of your days, listening to the tedious, trying to improve the hopeless failure, or giving away your life to the ignorant, the common, and the vulgar, which are the aims, the false ideals, of our age. Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing" and "Live life like a hard flame." One is the kind of hopeful temptation that could carry a saint away. The other is just an obvious false promise that a fool follows at his own peril. And debauchery does not (and did not) equal sex, people. Seriously. Oscar had very few scruples about describing exactly what Dorian got up to, and not all of it, and certainly not the worst of it was sex. It is perhaps easier to show on film than the kind of necromancy and out and out diabolically selfishness described in the book, but it also makes him seem awfully superficial in his villainy.

Next off, the ending was really, really unnecessary. Not to spoil the fun for you, but the film has Lord Henry chucking an oil lamp at the painting (which has been spouting maggots the whole time, for what purpose I missed) in order to save his daughter from Dorian's ever-youthful clutches. While the whole house is going up in smoke, Dorian stabs the painting--for what purpose, I'm not really sure, since the sucker was burning anyways--and Lord Henry is severely scarred as he wrestles his daughter away from Dorian, who professes his real and true love for her before he dies (oh, and here we get that irony of the physical scarring of Lord Henry and the lack thereof on Dorian. Oh, how clever! Oh, how blatantly obvious!). So not only is he merely a sex-addict, he is repentant. Where is the horror in that? The real terror factor (for me, anyways) in Dorian Gray is that he never actually repents. He is terrified throughout the book of being found out, and wishes to change his ways, but never puts any effort toward it. The only good deeds he does are out of a desire to feel something new, to play at being good for the effect. And when his painting grows no less hideous, he stabs it in an attempt to free himself from his filthy soul, not out of a desire to be better, but to be worse. That he does it for a girl just makes him a little bit more of a wimp. And that Lord Henry (who, by the way is freakishly old and hideous at this point) had to be the one to start it just makes him even lamer. And seriously--why the maggots?

But what bothered me most of all (oh thank God--get on with it!) was that no one involved with the film could add. According to the book, Dorian makes his little bargain when he is 18 or 19 years old. If the book is contemporary, that means he was born roughly 1872. And the book ends around his 37th birthday (ish). So, even if we round up to 40, that means the book ends no later than 1912. Thus, and this is important, Dorian Gray never saw the First World War. Why then, oh why, is the entire second half of the movie infested with Tommies and recruitment posters?

It's jarring enough to see Dorian bounding around in his frock coat and cravat in front of all the Sam Browne belts and being solicited to buy War Bonds, but more to the point, this presupposes a world that I don't think Oscar could even have contemplated.

There were plenty of Victorian authors who survived the war instead of their children: Arthur Conan Doyle (who never actually forgot about Oscar after his downfall), Rudyard Kipling, J.M. Barrie, Francis Hodgson Burnett. Oscar's older son, Cyril, was himself shot by a German sniper at Neuve Chapelle on May 9, 1915. More than perhaps any other event, the First World War proves Oscar's idea that ugliness begets ugliness, in landscapes and in the people forced to live in them. It is, perhaps, in a way, merciful that he died before the war. I don't think he could have endured it, any more than he could have endured the loss of his boy. So to see Dorian Gray wandering through this alien world that Oscar never conceived, was so incongruous that the whole movie was kind of spoiled for me.

What point is there in the ugliness of one soul when the world is busy consuming itself in mud and filth and hatred? Where is the horror in the death of one old man when so many--young and old and innocent and otherwise--are being lost by the hour? The horror of Dorian Gray is real in a world that is innocent--or complacent--enough to be able to see the darkness and the lightness in their own soul's portrait. When the world is darkness, who can tell the difference?

The BAB Adventures

2009-09-13T13:50:00.001-07:00

In her diary, Louisa May Alcott wrote that, while on a walk with Thoreau, he pointed out a spider's web and told her "a cobweb was a handkerchief dropped by a fairy". I never really dug Thoreau as much as I did any of the other Concordians at the time, but I kind of knew, deep down, that I was more like him than any of them. And not just because I bring my dirty laundry home to my mother and expect her to cook me dinner (which he did into his thirties).
Anyway, so The Rental Family and I went to Roald Dahl's house today, since the gardens were open in memory of his birthday. It was a really sweet little place with gorgeous flowers and blackberries that Amy and I snuck and ate when no one was looking. Beautiful, charming and idyllically English. Made even more so by the fact that every child under the age of ten was there with their parents, or on the roadways trying to get there or home at generally the same time we were. So a drive that rationally should have taken maybe 40 minutes took upwards of 2 hours each way.
I never had siblings. When my family went on car rides, my parents listened to old radio shows and I either read, knit or made up stories about the people in the cars who passed ours. I rarely needed entertaining, and was never in the position to have to entertain anyone else. But today was different. So I thought of Mr. Thoreau.
"We're going to tell a story," I said, "each of us is going to take a little part of it and build it up."
It took a little while to get going, mostly because Ben insisted on immediately sending all the characters to the nearest Starbucks and/or bringing them incongruously face to face with Lady Gaga, and Amy and I had to spend the first part of our turn either blowing up said Starbucks or sending Lady Gaga to her ultimate rest. However, by the time we were at last home, we were sitting around the dinner table discussing what each character looked like. I went to work on Smithie (see below, version 2), and Tony (Rental Dad) looked at he with that look that is typically reserved for idiots or the magically.
"Well, how about this Lucian? I think he has heavy wrap-around shades. You know, the really cool kind. And one of those tattoos that goes around his fantastically massive biceps and a really large gold watch and..."
And so now Ben is convinced that our fortunes are to be made in the televised series of these adventures (through time and space, over the land and through the sea), and wants me to write up the characters to go with his pencil sketches. I bet you can tell who came up with what:

To start with, we have the characters. The principles, not surprisingly are Ben, Amy and Bridget who look very much like you would expect them to look, and are gallant, intrepid and utterly fearless in the face of prison, danger, lasers, fat penguins and Starbucks.

Behind these courageous heroes are "Rvrus", an enormous, overweight penguin with a massive attitude problem, poor taste in bow ties and the ability to deflect said lasers with his massive beer belly.
Then comes Algernon, Apple and Pineapple, children of Ignatius and Octavia (who were killed in an explosion at Starbucks before our story takes place). These three grew up on the moon following the Starbucks in which they were hiding being beamed into space. They somehow returned to earth and are jolly good company. Apple and Pineapple (brother and sister respectively) dress similarly in clothes resembling the colors of their names, while Algernon sports a very classy argyle sweater, corduroys, Converse sneakers and a backwards baseball hat that no one can seem to convince him to remove.
Next up we have Lucian, a former security guard for West Life, and also former circus strong-man, who only reveals his true vampire nature when our gallant team is faced with certain death in Scotland. His undying love for Bridget means he is occasionally relegated to the truck (or boot, depending on who you ask) but he always seems to escape right before the car is crushed by a Momma Tyrannosaurus. He is also addicted to caffeine, which, again not surprisingly, is typically found in a local Starbucks.
And Smithie. I always forget Smithie. The crew met Smithie in jail where he was serving time for safe-cracking, and, handily enough, was able to rescue them from their cell. He is either tall, thin and innocent looking, with a face that makes you want to ask questions, or he is short, fat, pock-marked, greasy and wears green braces.
Finally, we have Constantine, the Blue Wizard, who helped Ben, Amy and Bridget defeat the Red Lady with a petal from the flower at the world's end. He is assisted (or more usually handicapped) by his young and eager apprentice, Bob. Constantine has harnessed the power of time travel and is usually found in his blue bathrobe, crumpled wizard's hat and torn blue jeans with flip-flops, while Bob is incredibly tall and gangly with freckles and a lisp.
Ben wants me to remind you that, when you least expect it, Lady Gaga will arrive to foil the best laid plans of our fearless brand of misfits, but she is usually deterred with lasers, explosions or time-warps.

...Erika just came up to put Ben to bed. He said goodnight, took his sketch book and looked up at his mom.
"Bridget's clever, Mum. Did you know that? She's really clever..."

Where Credit Is Due

2009-09-11T09:39:00.001-07:00

I just woke up from the first decent bout of sleep I've had in longer than I care to remember.

Why? Because at 10:30am this morning, I turned in my Master's Dissertation.

I'm still too blitzed (get it, military history reference?) to be able to think clearly about it, but I'm happy with it. More to the point, the fact that I got the damn thing printed, bound and turned in two and a half early is proof positive that man can walk on Mars, that somewhere in this world there are unicorns frolicking, that there will be a North-South Station connection on the MBTA and that, most improbable of all, I might have learned how to act like a grown-up. Of course, I tried to get into the library to print it half an hour before it opened and walked into a door trying to get back out, had to dance between three printers to get the whole thing in solid form and, just before I turned it in, I snuck into the bathroom in order to have my panic attack in private, only to have the zipper on my skirt break. So I turned it in and anti-climactically went home, finding new muscles on my torso that I could flex in order to maintain my dignity while I walked up the street. So not quite that grown-up...

Smith lets you put a dedication in your Senior Thesis, which I really like. Since King's doesn't go in for the fluffy, cuddly form of academia, I wanted to write my dedication somewhere, since there should be some record of all the nifty people who kept my stuffing intact and my seams together this past year. So, if you would, imagine opening a copy (one of the two of them) of"Treacherous Blood and Unbalanced, Useless Minds": The Construction of Irish Race, Psychology and Shell Shock in the First World War and seeing on the first page (or...three):

DEDICATION

First, and always, to my parents, who gave me my roots and my wings and my wake-up calls, and who never let me forget that I am braver than I believe, stronger than I seem, and smarter than I think. To Emma and Sabrina, for the laughter, the conspiracies, and for always listening to the kettlebox sagas. To the gang at Surviving Grady, my virtual home away from home, who believed in me even when I forgot how and who never let a day pass without laughter and a touch of mayhem. To EB, who taught me everything I know. To Amy, for the lucky earrings, for telling me I looked pretty even on the days I couldn't bear to put on mascara, and to Ben, for letting me be a sister for a little while, for the Red Sox Pajama Dance and for reminding me on the bad days that he wouldn't let the world end until I handed this in.

To Dennis, my computer, who hasn't complained yet about the impossible hours, the miles of travel, or my appalling taste in music and to Vlad, for checking in on me. To DS and to Lucian, for the Voice of Reason. To those who emailed or called me (Abby, Kelsey, Crystal, Jet), and who didn't complain when my response time rivaled that of the Pony Express. To the Kids. To my Grandfather, who got this all started, and, as ever, to KCM, for sticking around through all it. I know you two are getting along famously.

Edit: And to the Cab Driver who brought me home last week. Thanks for realizing you had a genius in the back that morning, and thanks for letting me know.

Crimes Against Humanity

2009-09-04T03:48:00.000-07:00

Let me warn you here and now, I'm incredibly overtired and frazzled and have five days left to finish my dissertation (no, my dear, let me tell you about shell-shock). So I am hardly in a mood to be writing anything coherent or level-headed.

Which is clearly why the first thing I read upon arriving at the British Library is this fun-filled article about how Cushing Academy is getting rid of all the books in their libraries.

“When I look at books, I see an outdated technology, like scrolls before books,’’ said headmaster James Tracy, who explained to the Boston Globe today that the "library" will instead now be filled with three large flat-screen TVs ($42,000) that will project data from the Internet, laptop-friendly study carrels ($20,000), and will be placing a coffee shop in place of the reference desk ($50,000, not to mention the $12,000 cappuccino machine).

And in the place of the 20,000 books in the library's former collection (amassed over 144 years), the school has forked over another $10,000 for 18 electronic readers. That's right, count 'em. 18. Those students who aren't able to get a reader will be expected to read selected texts from the internet.

Now, before I begin the tirade that I'm sure you can sense building, let me state that I think that there are some definite perks to technology in libraries. The ability to digitally scan material makes precious and often desperately fragile pieces available to a public that could never hope to travel to see the original, as well as preserving something precious for the next round of humanity to see. I think things like Project Gutenberg are great, because they give immediate access to an enormous amount of information and literature to a wider public, and offer the hope that, just maybe, some more obscure works won't be entirely forgotten in a world a mass-market paperbacks. Google books and I get along only to the extent that they are working to preserve books in rare book libraries, which can alert people to the existence of such works. But that is about the point where my ability to suffer the dot-com world expires.

None of these advancements are replacements for books. They make the experience more fun, more immediate and more comfortable, but they are based in the world of the printed word. They were created with the understanding that there is something enduring and (dare I say it) immortal about books that the Internet can only hope to imitate. Indeed, the Internet is in itself an imitation of the printing press, a magical tool that allows the dissemination of information to an incalculably large audience, and to each in their own language.

But it wasn't the first instrument to produce such miracles.

I've touched a Gutenberg Bible. We had a facsimile in the library where I last worked, as well, so I can also say I've perused a Gutenberg Bible. They are breath-takingly beautiful. There are imps and devil hiding in the curls of along the margins and images of paradise in the illuminated letters. I know I get really hyperbolic really easily, but for me, there are few things (other than Mozart's Requiem or perhaps something like St. Stephen's Cathedral) that show more clearly the little spark of divinity that is supposed to still linger in mankind. These books changed the world, politically, economically and religiously. No longer did God speak only to those who could speak Latin; He now spoke German and Italian and English, and He was now willing to speak to everyone. And, just as importantly, people could now communicate with each other, regardless of distance, language or time. We take eternity very casually nowadays. But the act of setting type, of mixing inks, of laboring to create something that still exists today, is one of the greatest acts of faith, be it in God or humanity, the choice is yours, that I can imagine. To simply write that off as "outdated technology" is to throw out that part of humanity that seems to be slipping so easily away and to dispose of 600 years of human ingenuity and endurance.

On top of that, books don't break down; they aren't affected by power outages or network connection errors; they don't need to be recharged and they don't get viruses (they get silverfish though, but let's not go there). They live and they last, which is far more than I can say for most large-screen tvs I've met. And, let's be honest, there is hope for a book, even if you spill your cappuccino on it (from the nearby $12,000 espresso maker, ahem). I can't say the same for a Kindle.

And let's do away right now with the idea that internet access is going to ensure these kids stay well-rounded. By pre-loading the readers with texts and offering "selected texts", this concept is as potentially damaging to free-thought as public bonfires and stakes were to an earlier age. The vast majority of downloadable texts aren't free, so it's not like kids can scoot around looking for information on a subject. Similarly, there is a horrendous lack of fact-checking on the internet that is, at least in someway, mitigated by the act of publishing a book (it costs a hell of a lot more to reprint or retract than it does to edit and delete). Both these problems can be solved by teaching a kid how to read an LC catalogue entry (or Dewey. Poor Dewey) and let them skim a shelf of books, at no cost and with considerably less threat to their eyesight.

Most books that you can buy in Borders have a lifespan of about 40 years, assuming a minimum of maltreatment. This in itself is worrisome enough without making the written word as transient and insignificant as a blip on a monitor. The idea that there might soon be a generation of kids who haven't had the visceral experience of holding a book, of smelling moldy binding or even had the bizarre experience of reading marginalia by a long-vanished former student is, for me at least, terrifying. I'm not saying that there is no place in libraries for technology, but I truly don't believe there is any spark of divinity in a Kindle.

Not to mention the fact that my career prospects are dismal enough without this nonsense.

Who knows? Maybe I'll just have to learn how to make proper cappuccinos...

What Scruples?

2009-08-31T07:03:00.000-07:00

I have an enormous backlog of things I want to write here, but this was too exciting to let pass.

My father showed me a newspaper article last night of "Books to Read" that are soon to be published. Among them was E.L. Doctorow's new book (surprise, surprise), Dacre Stoker's sequel to his great-uncle's Dracula, which I think will either be the most awesome thing ever or something truly nightmarish, but seems destined to be memorable...and this little tidbit:

Vladimir Nabokov's Laura.

You heard me.

Apparently, Nabokov, who wrote all his books on index cards before transcribing them, left 138 cards for a new novel at the time of his death with the instructions that they were to be burned. His wife, Vera, and son, Dmetri, kept them instead. Now, thirty years later and thanks to Penguin, the book will see the light of day.

I am experiencing mixed emotions. On the one hand, I always have believed that if an author specifically said "this text should not see the light of day", then their wishes should be granted. I was around and working at Orchard House when Louisa May Alcott's The Inheritance was published. There was a reason it wasn't. It really wasn't that impressive. Similarly to Lucy Maud Montgomery's stories that were stuffed behind her desk and published by her biographer a little while back. They are either reworkings of her published stories, or generally pretty bad. Which is why neither of these fine ladies wanted these works to reach the general public. By writing books, you have the power to create your own legacy, and to the power of the creator lies the ability to say what that legacy shall be.

However.

I read my first Nabokov my senior year in high school. The book was The Defense and one of my clearest memories of high school is the day I ducked out before an evening program I was holding and sat in Bradley Palmer State park with all the peeper-frogs to finish the book. That summer, when I had to commute to Concord every day, I got Lolita on tape (yes, yes, I'm old), read by Jeremy Irons. And nearly drove off the road because the writing was so perfectly beautiful that I forgot where I was and what I was supposed to be doing. I've read it probably six times since then, and the book hasn't lost any of its perfection over that time.

When he was writing it, Nabokov said that Lolita was the story of his love affair with the English language. It's perfectly true. In the most charming of all ironies, the book could only be published by a French pornography printer and, despite the fact that it does not contain a single four-letter word, or any overt reference to any of the actions to which it might allude, it was banned in France, England, Australia, Belgium, South Africa, Burma and Austria, and in numerous individual American states and towns. I would personally argue that this was far more a result of the sympathy Nabokov stirs in the reader for Humbert Humbert than for any individual act that he might commit, but that's just me.

I love Nabokov's writing, clearly, but on a personal level, I really really like him, too. He despaired of ever learning English following his arrival in the United States, and was afraid he would never be able to write again (all but three of his novels were written in English, he oversaw the translation of his Russian works into English and helped translate all his own work into Russian, as well as writing poetry and letters of his own in English and translating major works of Russian literature for an English-speaking readership). I read his biography of these years while I was learning Russian and crying every day because I was so hopeless at it. Then one day I was at the Boston Public Library and found a copy of his poetry in Russian and sat down to pick out words I knew.

The last sentence on the first page was the first full sentence I read by myself in Russian (to the best of m knowledge and memory): "и я буду с Вами всегда / And I will be with you always."

I have no idea what the poem was, or in what context the sentence was meant, but I thought it quite fitting.

So, what to make of poor, forgotten little Laura? Nabokov's wife saved Lolita from the fire when she was first being created. And considering the close partnership between Nabokov and his son, I think he is in the best position to know what his father would want. And with the publication of this book, Penguin is bringing out all his books with fancy new cover art, his poetry (both the previously-published and some new stuff) and a book of his letters (to be released in 2010). My scruples would say that what was left unfinished should be kept unfinished and what an author wanted destroyed should be. Similarly, that which is private should probably be kept private. But then again, I already pre-ordered my copy (release date: November 17, 2009!!!). So who am I to talk?

Another Shirt, Another Story

2009-08-12T16:55:00.000-07:00

He sometimes thought he was going crazy. Other times he wished it could be that simple. Because crazy people heard voices. He could remember his cousin Mitchell who had been able to hear the voice of John Lennon on nights when there was a full moon. John would tell him about his music and sometimes play the songs he hadn’t had time to write. Mitchell made a killing with those songs, as long as he remembered to keep his mouth shut about their real origin.

But this was different. Because the voices never spoke to him. They spoke to each other. They argued and they whispered and they laughed and they loved, but they were entirely unto themselves, and merely used his head as a way of escaping into visibility. And it wasn’t all the time—the stupidest, most mundane things would set them off: the sight of a bookshelf full of tattered paperbacks he had seen on the second floor window of a flat in Islington while on the bus home one winter’s night; the smell of fish frying for brunch one cloudy Sunday morning; the color blue on the walls of the bookstore by his house; a builder sitting on the sill of a house under repair, blowing smoke rings into the empty shell of a room. They would grab at these images, trapping them with their voices and creating out of them a tiny world, using these people, these colors, these sights and smells as anchors.

Sometimes they brought their own images. He had stopped taking the bus ages ago—the sight of so many people clogged together, all their little voices, their smells, their weary, seedy, shimmering stories made him so claustrophobic that it was worth the extra hours of walking to avoid the panic that he would never have the time to tell them all. And so they came to him. There was one night he had had to sit on the sticky plastic bench of a bus shelter for almost three quarters of an hour because the image in front of his eyes was so marvelously detailed that he couldn’t see the street beneath his feet properly. He had tried to write it all down in the little notebook he carried with him, but his hand was too slow, and before he could string the words together that would fix the image on paper as clearly as he could see it in his head, it had dissolved into the drizzly twilight.

He loved his notebooks. They were like safety-valves for his brain when the weight of the voices became too much to carry. He would go back and read them on the quiet days and the echoes of the voices would come back to him. They would forgive him for neglecting their call, and they would whisper the next episode in his ear. And, ever the eager servant, he would write them down. His writing would change, sometimes, depending on who was telling the next story: his ‘Y’s’ and ‘G’s’ would grow feminine tails when a lady was speaking; there were great ugly inkblots on the pages where the murderer had labored over his ransom letter and tears that crinkled the pages where the child had been homesick in the dead of night. The one man who insisted on his writing in block capitals, for what reason he couldn’t even now explain, had been sheer torture from beginning to end. He could never print fast enough to keep up with the brute, and he would insist on speaking so quickly that there were days he had seriously considered declaring himself insane in order to make it stop. It had taken four notebooks to satisfy that particular voice, and he had slept for three days after the proofs were sent to the printer.

Those notebooks were the bane of his sister’s existence. They lived in the house their parents had left him years earlier, despairing of their youngest boy being able to keep himself in food and funds, and he had invited Kathy to share the rooms with him when the echoes and the images became so insistent that he barely slept for a week. She seemed delighted with the idea, and, in truth, the only complaint she ever had was about the notebooks. They grew under the furniture like mold. They nested on the top of books and leapt down onto the heads of unsuspecting guests at parties and onto Kathy when she took it into her head to dust. They napped in his bed, beneath his pillow, in the folds of spare quilts and once she had found a stack of them in the linen cupboard when the smell of summer grass on a pillowcase that had just come off the line became the stanchion for a story that bought the groceries for two months and was able to fund Kathy’s son’s trip to Cannes that summer.

Because that was the truly crazy part. The stories sold. Enormously. He could only assume that the voices needed him to listen and to see and to hear for them, so they had to watch out for him. He was their charming little minstrel, and if he was going to dance to their tune, he would need to see that his shoes were sturdy and his stomach wasn’t aching too often. There were days, sometimes a week’s worth of them, when they would back off long enough for him to actually transcribe everything they had said and all that they had shown him, before they started up again, waylaying him in a shop at the sight of a girl in a green shirt biting her thumbnail, or snaring him in with a song on the radio that became the composition of his next hero.

He had an editor—a caretaker, really—who took him out to dinner once a month and tried to get him drunk and ‘loosen him up a bit’.

“You need to get out more,” he would say, shaking his pudgy, bald head with the air of a disappointed parent. “You’ll never be able to keep up this pace, and besides how will you keep writing if you don’t get out and see new things?”

And he would laugh. Because the Editor assumed that he was inventing all these stories by himself. Or that it took the sight of a mountain range, or a sunrise in a foreign land was what provided “inspiration”. It was flattering, in a way, that the Editor assumed he was really that clever. He had tried to explain the voices to him once. Tried to tell him that there were stories that hid in the seams of old clothing, in the grit on the side of a bus, caked on the shoelaces of the homeless man who shouted on the corner. All he did was write them down. Because if he didn’t, they just kept talking, shrieking at him, until they drowned out any thought he did manage to have of his own. The Editor had told him he was finally drunk and called him a cab to take him home.

He had to get a pen name. The Editor had declared that no one would believe a man who could come out with that many books in a year and the only way to keep from flooding the market was to create another version of him, with a different last name and a first initial that, like himself, stood for nothing very much at all. He had chosen ‘Q’, because he liked the way it looked by itself, free of the parasitic ‘U’ that insisted on being a shadow to its feeble little successes. And then he realized that he had just created a tale for a meaningless letter and decided it was time for another cup of tea. He had owned the kettle for three years, but had never thrown the box away. There was an epic in that little kettle box, he knew. And maybe today was the day he would finally have the courage to set the first bit of it to paper…

"As the stars are known to the Night"...

2009-07-28T14:31:00.000-07:00

[Note: I tried to post this from the British Library yesterday. Guess it didn't work out. Could have edited it, but that doesn't seem fair somehow.]

Just found out that Harry Patch, the last surviving man to have seen service in the trenches of the First World War, died on Saturday. Am feeling terribly and inexplicably lonely all of a sudden.

Finding it very hard to wrap my head around the concept that the First World War is now something that lives only in memory, only as a construction of historians and analysts. Wish I had something profound to say. Maybe silence is all you can do.

As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust,
Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain;
As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness,
To the end, to the end, they remain.

--Laurence Binyon--

[Further edit: Funeral Details.]

Rewind: Postcards from the Garden Gnome: The Rest of the Story

2009-07-23T10:47:00.000-07:00

Charming little writer, isn't she?

She'd had you believing that her little jaunt to Vienna was a spiritual and historical Odyssey full of weeping angels and tolling bells and nibbling chocolate cakes while leaning over a balcony and looking oh-so-picturesque and cultured, didn't she?

I'll let you in on a little secret: She didn't go for any of those reasons.

Life has been a little harsh to My Most Favorite Traveling Companion recently. She's doing fine, if a bit snippy at times, but that's nothing new. But to know her is to know that she has a playlist on her iPod for all occasions. Seriously. There is the "British Library" playlist, the loud classical music playlist for novel-reading, the mellow classical music for academic reading, the playlist for when she's nervous, the playlist for when she's angry, the playlist for when it's raining, and the playlist for when she's lonely. And it is that one that most concerns us right now. Because most often occurring on that list is the music of one Drew Sarich. You can see his picture above, with Yours Truly. Which one of us blinked first I leave to your imagination.

...She's going to be livid for me mentioning this. Lovely.

Anyway, a major point in this gentleman's favor is that he studied in Boston and promptly moved to Europe, in open defiance of everyone's advice and sound reasoning. On top of that, even I will admit he can sing (if you listen to Bridget, there is no one else who can sing). And he was in Dracula the musical. What more could our young lady possibly need? Except, perhaps, the knowledge that Mr. Sarich is currently appearing in 'Rudolf' at the Raimund Theatre in Vienna.

And there you have the origins of her little 'Faustian Bargain' to get to Vienna.

July 4th was the last night of performances before the summer break, and you can be damned sure that she had tickets for that night, as of early May, I believe. So after all her little atmospheric adventures, we dash back to the hotel for a much needed shower and rocket off again to the Theatre. I advised her to wait outside while the tickets were retrieved; the better to make those very high-pitched squeaking noises out in the open where they could be blamed on birds or crickets or aliens. The program was mercifully bi-lingual, so we read the plot quickly before the curtain rose.

Essentially, it is the story of Crown Prince Rudolf, one-time heir to the Habsburg Throne, who died along with his mistress, Mary Vetsera, in 1889 in what remains rather--interesting--circumstances. That play exists is something I find fascinating. For as long as I can remember (and Gnomes have quite a memory, you know), Rudolf was always shown as a bit of a simpleton, an idealist who was in no way fit to rule an increasingly hostile Empire or contend with an evermore aggressive Germany. Lately, especially with the establishment and comparative success of the European Union, there are those who would point out that Rudolf was among the first to demand a European governing body that would unite the continent's economic and cultural interests (and thus prevent a war). He has become a doomed visionary in a turn-around I never saw coming.

Either way, he was carrying on an affair with 18-year-old Baroness Mary Vetsera when the then 30-year-old left a note for his wife saying (in part): "Dear Stephanie, you are now rid of my presence and annoyance; be happy in your own way...I go quietly to my death, which alone can save my good name. I embrace you affectionately. Your loving Rudolph."

The body of Rudolf and Mary were found at Rudolf's summer hunting house, Mayerling on January 30, 1889.

It was originally publicized that Rudolf had died of heart failure and Mary was secretly buried elsewhere with no publicity. When that story couldn't fly, it was admitted that Rudolfand Mary had made a murder-suicide pact after Franz Josef demanded that they separate. The Pope granted a special dispensation saying that poor Rudolf was mentally unbalanced at the time, thus allowing him to be buried in the Imperial Crypt.

And therein endeth the facts of the case. At the time, it was thought that Rudolf was assassinated for his involvement in his attempt to overthrow his pro-German Father in order to align Austria with France (thus leaving Germany essentially friendless and ending the threat of war). Of those who argue this, there are those who say it was done by French agents when Rudolf opposed the deposition of his Father, others that it was done by Austrian officials who rejected his anti-German politics. The murder was then disguised as a double suicide.

At the funeral, his body wore gloves, and his mother was not allowed to see his hands. It is rumored there were defensive marks on the body. There is a story about Mary's remains being stolen in 1992 and studied--with the result that there were no bullet or shrapnel wounds to her skull; instead the body appears to have been beaten. ::Cue ominous music::

Believe what you will. The play certainly makes it clear that the suicide pact is the only possible explanation, though it does have Rudolf willing to chuck Daddy off his Imperial seat in order to save Austria from the insufferable Germans. The music is decent, if overly dramatic, and the staging was done by someone with an obscenely large budget. I hardly think our Miss Keown saw any of it after Sarich took the stage. If so, she didn't mention much of it to me.

But then again, she was grinning like an idiot until late the next afternoon, and by then, I forgot

to ask.

"Come quiet, there's war in my head"

2009-07-22T17:26:00.000-07:00

You don't need to read this.
But you know that song from Babe that the Farmer sings to Babe to get him to go out and be a Sheep Pig? So that song is based on a theme in Saint-Saëns' 3rd Symphony. It's fantastic--loud and triumphant and the trumpets get some serious attention, which is always nice.
Anyway, I told people that when I finally got my hands on my Master's degree, I wanted that piece played instead of 'Pomp and Circumstance' or something.

At Christmas last year, my Grandfather and I were talking about graduations and he said that this would be the first one he wouldn't be able to attend (having been at everyone since I graduated pre-school) since he wouldn't be able to make the flight to England. He told me to remember that, no matter what happened, he would be in the front row for any graduation I had in the future.

Today was my graduation from King's. It's kind of a hollow ceremony since my diploma won't come through 'til January. I an way too superstitious to cotton to any kind of celebration before the paper is in my hand, so I wasn't too keen on going. Add to that the fact that my natural cold-blooded rationality and hard-won stoicism can only hold out so long, and I never RSVP'ed for the ceremony.

Instead, I decided to take myself to the BBC Proms concert tonight. Just for fun.
And what piece do you think they played?
Screw stoicism. Screw cold-blooded rationality.
I sobbed like a lonely six-year-old.