Lord, I Am Not Worthy

First happened when I was 45.

May have happened when I was 26, but I was too young to realize it. Still in grad school, I joined a ten-day field trip with five other students and a professor of sociology from South Dakota State University to the Pine Ridge Reservation, just four years after the 71-day occupation of Wounded Knee by the American Indian Movement that dominated national news in the spring of 1973. On our last night there, I stepped out of a van in the parking lot of a high school football field and walked toward a pow-wow already in progress.

Felt it before I saw it, mostly in my collar bones. Gave me momentary pause, but I gave little thought to why the drummers’ beat would penetrate me, much less to what it meant. Of course I knew that the Lakota Sioux attached spiritual beliefs and obligations to all their gatherings, all native tribes do, but all I wanted was to get closer to the dancers circling the drummers in their ceremonial native garb.

My heart may have skipped a beat, but my knees did not wobble, and I charged ahead.

Today, I’m reminded of it as hints of summer finally break through the overcast of May, and I begin to consider the books I’ll be bringing to the beach just a ten-minute walk away. Former English teacher that I am, I long ago made it a rule to include classics that somehow slipped past me or that, more likely, I artfully dodged on my way to the degrees that allowed me to stand in front of classes and make occasional references to the very works I had skipped.

Most have been works long out of print, lost to public memory, and weeded out of American public libraries to make ever more room for Danielle Steele and Barbara Cartland, but others are still well-known of if not much read, such as Gulliver’s Travels, Don Quixote, and Heart of Darkness.

This year’s choice put me back in the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, back in 2012, the last time it happened as I looked at the opened pages of a book hand-printed and colorfully illustrated some fifty years before Gutenberg’s Bible came off the press. But first things first.

The 90s were my most musical years. Yes, I spent a lot of time busking through the 80s, and the mostly-free summer schedule of an adjunct college teacher allowed for it. But I was writing at least as much until 1994 when I let my twice-a-month output for the local paper’s opinion pages drop to a handful-a-year.

By 1996 I was full of jigs and reels, laments and aires, and started to add Baroque prestos, allegros, and andantes. Did fairly well until I went for the biggest prize of all, the opening melody of J.S. Bach’s Double Violin Concerto.

https://violinsheetmusic.org/classical/work/bach-double-concerto/

If you know the piece, please don’t think I ever thought I could duplicate it. As with a few movements from the Brandenburgs, I was hoping for no more than an opening melody that I could use as a launching pad for improvisational riffs. But I wanted to get all of it, which took me through measures with sudden octave jumps that can turn playing a wind instrument into an athletic event.

First dozen measures contained a few incidental notes. That took some time and effort, which is to say I played through about a dozen times, non-stop, until I started hitting those notes without having to think of them. Then came the octave-jumps. Luckily, I live alone, so there was no one else to suffer through at least fifty attempts.

Nevertheless, I persisted, and, admittedly to my own surprise, nailed them. However, on that first successful pass, as I continued playing the relatively easy measures that followed, it happened. Not the first time my fingers shook out of control. But the first time that I felt the literal truth of a prayer: “Lord, I am not worthy…”

Unless you are or were Catholic, you likely will not get the reference, but it opens the line in the Catholic Mass that leads to the sacrament of Communion:

Lord, I am not worthy that you should come under my roof. Say but the word, and my soul shall be healed.

Yes, I’m a long-lapsed Catholic who hadn’t said those words since the Beach Boys sang “Two Girls for Every Boy.” And it is far more likely that the last several times I said them were not during Mass, but in the playground or with friends after school to suggest that one of us was “not worthy” of any girl no matter how much they outnumbered us. Our elementary school class was 34 girls and 17 boys, so the Beach Boys were on to us, and their song was our anthem.

Because those opening five words could be applied to anything, we got more mileage out of that line than any other. In card games, if we could surprise an opponent with a winning card, we might say, “Sorry, Bill, but you are not worthy to make your bid.” In a Little League Baseball game, I took a throw from an outfielder and put a tag on a runner, a good Catholic friend of mine, trying to stretch a double into a triple, telling him while leaning down: “Nice hit, Marty, but you are not worthy to be on third base!”

Ten years passed after my grueling session with Bach before it happened again.

I’m no student of architecture, but I appreciate the best of it and will go out of my way to see it. That includes taking my out-of-town visitors a half-an-hour inland to see the library designed by Louis Kahn at Phillips Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire. The elegant, subtle curves of the brick exterior would be missed by anyone going in or out in a hurry, but once you step in…

https://exeter.edu/about/our-campus/facilities/class-of-1945-library/

On my first visit, I must have taken at least a second step inside before looking up and seeing what loomed over the lobby, the gaping concrete openings, perfect circles where you expect right angles–even though I had seen it in My Architect, his son’s 2003 documentary film, and on the USPS’ commemorative 37-cent first-class stamp issued in 2001.

My knees wobbled for the first time since my high school principal busted me for smoking cigarettes during recess. I had to grab a nearby railing as all four walls filled my ears: “You are not worthy…” Fortunately, as loud as it was in my head, I did not say it aloud, but as I recall, it took awhile to explain my temporary paralysis to my non-Catholic friend.

He laughed at the joke. After all those times I treated the line as a joke, I started thinking the joke was on me.

Two years later, I was in Chicago’s Institute of Art, awe-struck before a doorway in between two of America’s most iconic paintings: American Gothic on one wall, Nighthawks on the other.

Spent a while standing back from both as one field trip of excited elementary schoolers after another would flock to Gothic, pointing and chattering, as well as posing and mugging in attempts to imitate what they saw on the canvas. All the while, Nighthawks drew no attention from anybody.

Finally started through the door into the room of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings, braced to see anything by Van Gogh or Gaugin–or “Van Go and Go-Again” as we liked to say back at Salem State. A few by each, as well as by Manet, Monet, Muney, Minuet, and Menopause, did not disappoint, but before I saw any, I was face-to-face with Georges Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on La Grande Jatte.

https://www.artic.edu/artworks/27992/a-sunday-on-la-grande-jatte-1884

Reproduced on the pages of every high school and college textbook used to teach art, and often making cameos in pop culture, it is better known as Sunday in the Park, the title of a 1984 musical based on it. I’ve see the painting as often as I’ve seen reproductions of Starry Night, but that doesn’t prepare you for the experience of seeing the genuine article, walking toward it, and then stopping as your knees begin to wobble. Easy to say that this is due to the size of the canvas, at least 20 times the size of any page in the largest formatted coffee-table books.

Might have more to do with the effect of pointillism, Seurat’s method of rendering subjects with small dots rather than with strokes. As I entered the room, it came more into focus, but halfway there, it started going back out. Could say I was stopped by the painting itself, but I distinctly recall thinking that I could walk right into it and mingle with the people out for a stroll or having a picnic on La Grande Jatte.

Then the voice: “Lord, I am not worthy…”

Many people have told me and many writers have written of this or a very similar experience upon first viewing nature’s treasures, though never in the terms of the Catholic Mass. I, too, have been awe-struck at my first sight of the Grand Canyon, Alaska’s Mendenhall Glacier, the Badlands, bluffs of the Mississippi, and the summit of Maine’s Mt. Katahdin which so intimidated Henry Thoreau that he did not complete his climb. Neither did I.

But as natural places, I’m already under their roof, worthy or not. My hesitancy is in the presumption that I might partake of artistic treasures, that I might play and improvise on a Bach melody, walk into a Seurat painting, peruse books in Louis Kahn’s library, examine a Gutenberg Bible, an original Shakespeare Folio, and a six-century-old first edition of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.

Also known as the Ellesmere Chaucer, the memory of it recalls my long-running if intermittent history of unworthiness. Like many teachers who admit to having “Imposter Syndrome,” perhaps I can be pegged with “Unworthy Syndrome.” Today it is triggered by a suggestion made in a book about Herman Melville that I reviewed in my last blog: That Melville modeled the novel Confidence Man after the Canterbury Tales.

At the Huntington, it is open to a middle page, under glass to one side of the Gutenberg Bible, with the Shakespeare Folio on the other side. May have been the effect of all three, but the artwork in the margins of the Ellesmere Chaucer was especially dazzling. For me, the glass was unnecessary, as I stood there thinking, “Lord, I am not worthy to turn those pages.”*

And so the Canterbury Tales, of which I read just one while in high school only after being told it was R-rated, is the book atop my summer reading list. Until then, I wonder if Melville also wrote Confidence Man in the same farmhouse room where he wrote Moby-Dick. His window offers a majestic view of Mt. Greylock that stops visitors to Arrowhead Farm in Massachusetts’ Berkshires as soon as they see it from behind Melville’s chair facing his desk.

If Melville created the white whale to tell us that megalomania and vengeance, both personified by Ahab, are “not worthy” to control or decide anything, perhaps he was interpreting his view out the window.

Yes, the echo rings loudly across America in 2026. But while a structure for cage fights is being erected on the White House lawn, who could possibly be unworthy of anything?

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*Nighthawks* (or most of it) by Edward Hopper. Photo by Michael Boer.

For more interior shots of the Louis Kahn Library at Exeter Academy: https://www.flickr.com/photos/onewe/albums/72157629278698261/

*For a look at all three, go to the Huntington website, and in the search engine, enter, one at a time, Ellesmere Chaucer, Gutenberg Bible, and Shakespeare First Folio:

https://www.huntington.org/search?cms-content-main%5Bquery%5D=canterbury%20tales

Preferences To and Not To

Call it derivative. I prefer the term “speculative,” but you can speculate about anyone without relying on a source. Not only is Melvill true to a source, it offers its speculation as a source for novels and short stories that have been read, analyzed, taught, studied, and referenced for a century and a half and counting.

From Argentinian novelist Roderigo Fresan in 2022, Melvill was not translated into English until 2024 and is just now making the rounds of Herman Melville and Moby-Dick fan pages on social media.

The title character is not the writer we know, but his father Allan who went mad, was kept tied to bed, and died when Herman was just 12–and who spelled the family name without the final e, soon added by his widow either to improve the flourish of her signature (her reason) or to confuse her husband’s and now her creditors (circumstantial evidence).

That much we know. Speculation begins when Fresan puts an attentive young Herman bedside, listening to his father’s wild tales of his “Grand Tour” of European courts and markets dealing in silk and textiles with a mystical partner named Nico C. All this to establish the likely impressions left upon the imaginative boy.

And this is where Fresan ups the ante. Other derivative novels are narrated by other characters to tell: a parallel story, Ahab’s Wife (1999); a backstory, Finn (2008); the same story, James (2024); or an adapted story, this year’s Call Me Ishmaelle. Fresan’s Melvill suggests where the characters and plots of most of Herman Melville’s fiction and poetry originated.

Quite a trip to see how seamlessly and plausibly Moby-Dick, Confidence Man, Pierre, Israel Potter, and Billy Budd fit the narrative. Even Nico C. anticipates Herman’s friendship with Nat H. (“Nathaniel Hawthorne to all of you”), and the connection of the wary, cerebral older man’s “Wakefield” to the admiring, dynamic young man’s “Bartleby” is worth the effort.

Effort it is in the first of Melvill‘s three sections. The narrator is Herman at the end of his own life, posing as a 12-year-old son, recounting his father’s “Great White Delirium” with a constant barrage of parenthetical clarifications. If that’s not enough, the footnotes outnumber the pages with a parallel account of how his father’s raving echoed throughout his own life, his relationships with his suicidal sons, his writings, his reactions to critics.

Anyone who has read Moby-Dick with any honest attention will realize by page five or footnote four that the format parodies the book that intersperses a novel about a whaling voyage with a manual on the whaling industry while adding barrels of philosophical and historical seasoning. As the older narrator says in a footnote:

A new style for beginning to write things, yes. A style that I want to be mine for the things I end up writing. A style that no longer runs through what is written but through how it is written. The present of a style that might be the style of the future, knowing that all style is but the result of new language being added to an old expression. Or vice-versa.

Footnotes disappear in the second of the three sections, “Glaciology, or the Transparency of Ice.” In it we hear Allan Melvill in an uninterrupted rhapsody. May take some effort to keep reminding yourself that you are not listening to any of the narrators of Herman’s novels, especially Ishmael in his “Cetology” and “The Whiteness of the Whale.” And on the subject of human fascination with ghosts and vampires who:

…are not supernatural or impossible beings but, actually the most natural constructs of human fear… Oh, it’s touching: the invocations of all those instruction manuals for ways to destroy us that you all have invented in order to tolerate just sensing our presence and to convince yourselves that you can expel us at will from your parties… But I fear it’s not and won’t be like that, O fearful humans. Ours is the real party and you haven’t been invited.

That’s one of several passages that classify Melvill as a “Gothic novel,” and Fresan includes as many references to Melville’s Gothic parody, Pierre, that the critics took all to literally, as to Moby-Dick. The most references, however, are made to Bartleby’s mantra, “I would prefer not to,” which Fresan suggests is an answer to Hamlet’s existential question. If so, Bartleby was Melville’s response to those who condemned Pierre as vile, and called him mad.

For all that, I favor the claim–again having to remind myself that this is not the voice of Herman Melville, but of an actor so skilled that he is nailing the literary voice–that the form, if not the content, of Confidence Man was inspired by Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales:

…a stranger coming aboard, in Mississippi, on April Fool’s Day, to make everyone feel guilty for their capacity and need to be deceived, changing masks, again and again, but leaving the mystery of the true face beneath all of them unresolved and offering the warning that “after pouring over the best novels professing to portray human nature, the studious youth will still run the risk of being too often at fault upon actually entering the world.”

That’s from the third section after the father has died, and the son, nearing the end of his own life, assumes the narrative, connecting all kinds of dots between what he had heard and what he would write. At which point, I remind myself that some of what I’m reading really is Herman Melville.

Even the acknowledgements do not escape Melvillean treatment, as Fresan names every influence major and minor, from Coen Brothers’ films to Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, from a critical essay by John Updike to a song by Bob Dylan, “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)”–along with reappearing, lengthy footnotes such as the one quoting Dylan’s praise of Moby-Dick in his Nobel Prize lecture.*

A quote from Dylan’s “Key West” is among the extracts placed on the front pages of Melvill, a la the many placed before Moby-Dick:

That’s my story, but not where it ends.

Derivative? Yes, but Melvill creates much more than it derives from the lives of Allan Melvill and Herman Melville. And suggested possibilities seem endless: Did you ever consider, for instance, that Melville used the word “extract” rather than “epigraph” because it suggested the scents of spices and perfumes still be offloaded at all American ports in his time?

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*https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2016/dylan/lecture/

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/rodrigo-fresan/melvill/

Music to Make You Gag

A friend posts a meme with the photos of Kristi Noem, Pete Hegseth, RFK Jr., and the Mob Boss now posing as president of the United States.

Text tells of a drunk, a drug addict, and a puppy killer (before she flew her luxury jet out of favor) reporting to a 34-count convicted felon named in the Epstein files more often than all twelve apostles combined are mentioned in all four gospels combined in a book that he has never read but nonetheless sells for $59.99 a pop–or up to $1,000 if you want his signature on it–all of them printed in Hangzhou, China.

While taking this all in, I happen to be listening to Jefferson Airplane’s Volunteers, among the most galvanizing–and frequently played–counter-culture albums of the Sixties. Between the force of Grace Slick’s voice and the sight of the four assholes in the meme, something clicks. In my typically sardonic mood, I comment that, if the four assholes were a rock-and-roll band, their name would be Crimes-R-Us.

Unfortunately, the idea sticks in my head like a worm in the brain of America’s number one health official, and I’m compelled to report what such a group would look and sound like.

Mob Boss, of course, will insist on being frontman and lead singer. Since his speech often tends toward singsong, and since he can’t focus on a coherent thought such as a song requires, he would simply bloviate as he always does while the others make noise with various instruments for accompaniment.

Take, for instance, the tangential rhapsody when he went behind the mic to address the bombing of Iran and comment on the first casualties: Within seconds he wandered into a few minutes of praising the beautiful drapes which he himself choose, golden drapes, I love gold, so beautiful, like the ballroom soon to be built, the likes of which the world has never seen, picked them myself, more beautiful than in any palace in Europe, everybody says so, make your head spin…

RFK Jr. would be hidden away behind the drums using bones from some roadkill in lieu of sticks and ordered to remain silent because he has the voice of a frog that just swallowed another frog. Hegseth would be off to the side with a tuba because the bell holds enough bourbon to fill a toilet bowl.

With the advantage of always being in costume, Noem would be prominent near Mob Boss at center stage, preferably behind a keyboard so she can face the audience and display what she obviously likes to display.

However, now that she has been banished from the national stage, who knows where she’ll take her cosplay and display? Perhaps a solo act alluringly called “Kristi and The Girls.” Or she could team up with fellow reject Pam Bondi as a duet called the “Screeching Sisters of Damnation” with hits like “Sex Jet” and “What about the Dow?”

We could do this with the rest of the berserkers still in the crime syndicate now posing as the Executive Branch of America’s federal government. Dr. Oz, Cash Patel, Laura Loomer, and Tulsi Gabbard could form a band called “Strangers on the Right” and sing “Hang on Loopy,” “We Do It His Way,” and “ICE Coming to Take You Away Ha-Haaaa.”

Put J.D. Vance, Karoline Leavitt, and Steve Miller in a trio, and they would be called “The Draculas.” Their album would be “Hate Thy Neighbor” with a cover picture of all three holding crosses in hands outstretched toward the camera. Instead of songs, there would be twenty minutes of hissing on both sides, one titled “Biden Did It,” the other “You Are A Stupid Person.”

If Elon Musk is willing to return, he and Steve Bannon could tour as the “Far-Righteous Brothers.” Their album would be “You’ve Lost that Fascist Feeling,” and they would have huge hits with “Chain, Chain, Chainsaw” and “Apartheid the Beautiful.”

Apparently friendless in Mob Boss’s fruitcake cabinet, Marco Rubio would be a solo artist with hits such as “Great Hillbilly Pretender” and “Where Have You Gone, Neville Chamberlain?”

Congressional Republicans who have allowed Mob Boss and both his crime families to wreak havoc with America’s government and Americans’ lives could easily get in on the fun. They would sport names such as “The Yesmen,” “Cowards-R-Us,” and “The Grateful Headnodders.”

Albums such as “Thoughts and Prayers,” “More Thoughts and Prayers,” “Yet More Thoughts and Prayers,” etc. would feature songs such as, “Don’t Worry, Be Quiet,” “Goosestep through the Tulips,” and “Spine Free.”

Soloists would include Susan Collins singing “Both Sides of My Mouth Now,” Ted Cruz on “Fly, Fly Away,” Lindsey Graham on “Karma Chameleon,” Jim Jordan on “YMCA,” and Mike Johnson on “It’s My Party and I’ll Lie if I Want to.” As a duet, senators Katie Britt and Tommy Tuberville could sing “We Left Our Brains in Alabama.”

Not to be left out, Republican governors could form the “States’ Rights Choral.” Soloists would be Florida’s DeSantis and Texas’ Abbott taking turns on songs such as “Invade Minnesota,” “Threaten California,” and “Don’t Tread on Us, Tread on Them.”

And all rise for the Supreme Court Sextet sure to top the charts with sentimental favorites such as “Uncle Thomas’ RV,” “Give Me Money,” “Stand By Your Convicted Felon,” and “What’s It All About, Jim Crow?”

For an idea of how all of this might sound, all you need to do is eat a lot of beans, drink some beer, and then sit down and listen to the blasts of your own posterior trumpet.

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Jefferson Airplane: https://www.veryimportantpotheads.com/jeffersonairplane.html

Baby, You Can’t Drive Any Car

Far more than anything else, Americans bemoan bad drivers.

Granted, phone menus have been gaining ground in these AI “assisted” (i.e. debased) times. Still, those who call customer service or technical support are way outnumbered by motorists.

After all, those calls often work quite well, and we give glowing reviews on the surveys that follow, as annoying as they can be. Meanwhile, heated complaints against bad drivers come from people who are themselves bad drivers.

Such as a friend who griped on and on about the blaring horn of a car behind her when a red light changed to green: “I was pouring coffee from my thermos into my cup, and the thermos cap was on the cupholder.”

“So the light was green for a few seconds?”

When she didn’t answer, I told her I’d have also hit the horn, as I do for drivers who, stopped for a light, are looking down. Whatever the distraction, it makes you oblivious to where you actually are.

“Well, people need to be patient!”

“And drivers need to understand that their first obligation is to other drivers, and not serving themselves breakfast when waiting for a light to change.”

I’m now reminded of this after publicly criticizing the placement of the new sign on the road to Plum Island, the memorial for the late and lamented Pink House.

Please note the words, “placement of.” The sign itself is worthy of the former scenic treasure and the breathtaking landscape on which it sits. Both elegant and forceful.

And quite legible from a distance, as it was clearly intended–except that, rather than facing traffic as most signs do, it is parallel and very close to the road. Drivers do not see it. On social media, one wag called it, “the rubberneck installation technique.”

Leaders of the years-long effort to save the Pink House, however, found my complaint “sad.” I had “turned a positive into a negative.” There I was talking about a specific object (the sign) and a specific act (its placement), and they turn it into the vague simplicity of “positive” (both) and “negative” (anything critical about either) that could apply to anything. This is Orwell’s Newspeak: Debased language leads to debased thought.

Truth is, I was always a supporter of the Pink House. From 2016 to 2018, I devoted three columns in this paper to the cause. The decal was on the back of my old Nissan. Would they rather I put their sticker on the car’s side?

Relevant to rules-of-the-road, one reaction to my critique was unwittingly revealing: “Anyone can slow down to look at anything on any road and do it safely.”

The triple use of “any” will make any libertarian smile, but the one describing “road” should be a red flag to the Registry of Motor Vehicles.

Anyone out there want to be behind a driver liable to apply the brakes at any time? On a two-lane, 40-mph road often crowded on warm days?

Doesn’t have to be for a sudden stop. What if curiosity gets the better of the driver who turns more and more to not just see, but read the sign while keeping the car in motion? Anyone want to be in an on-coming car? Or pedaling a bicycle?

Such is the risk unless someone comes to their senses and turns the sign sideways or at an angle. Could be on a single stand. Raising it eight feet would allow it to face traffic while hanging safely over the bike lane.

Meanwhile, there’s something else here worth consideration: What if driver’s exams included written responses to questions about obligations a driver has to other drivers?

When do you turn on directionals? What factors do you consider at the moment a light turns yellow? What do you do to slow down on a road where drivers do not expect it? Or to pull over?

Such a test could be educational in itself, as the act of writing leads the applicant to think through sequences and conditions–such as the distance of a car following you. That would produce better drivers.

Moreover, if it didn’t prevent some from thinking that anything goes, it would at least discourage them from advocating such things in public forums. And if they went ahead and wrote it on a test, the license would be denied.

Nothing to lose here–nothing except bad drivers.

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The Pink House Memorial sign as seen from the passenger seat of a car going 40 mph going toward and within two car-lengths of it.
Photo by Angela Anderson.

Witness to the Spirit of ’76

Last Friday I awoke to the fully unexpected news that a friend, Jim McCauley, just 62, had died.

A former Newburyport city councillor, his passing was top of the front page for the next issue of the Daily News, filled with tributes from other city officials, including his political opponents. Among those is the mayor who narrowly survived McCauley’s attempt to unseat him last fall.

Over a year earlier, as readers of the Daily News or of Mouth of the River may recall, I announced my own write-in candidacy for the city’s highest office. Write-in because I’m not a resident of the Port but of a sandbar belonging to a neighboring town.

Yes, it was an April Fools’ prank. Who else promises to make his parole officer his chief of staff? But it was also an effort to coax a viable challenger into what was starting to look like an uncontested race. Soon after that, I met McCauley for the first time at a mutual friend’s and started pestering him to run. It didn’t matter that I didn’t know him, only that I had seen and heard him in action in City Council meetings, including the first when I didn’t even know his name.

This weekend, I described that first impression as my own tribute. It appeared in today’s issue of the Daily News:

McCauley threw open the windows

If I could pick a single moment when I felt witness to “the Spirit of ‘76” in action, it was two years ago at a council meeting in Newburyport City Hall.

The subject was whether the council should investigate an on-going library controversy, and the council president cautioned that it was not “within the council’s purview” and emphasized the need to “stay in our lane.”

The mood of the room was somewhere between in agreement and a willingness to go along this path of least resistance. The room itself felt sleepy, the air barely enough to breathe.

Then came the voice. Not loud, but firm. Not angry, but well-measured. “I take exception to the idea of lanes,” then-councillor Jim McCauley began. He then made a case that could have been distilled from any of America’s founding documents:

All councilors represent people who live in Newburyport. The library is of, by, and for the people of Newburyport. We are not just able, but obliged to consider this.

That’s paraphrase only because the sensation of windows being thrown open was too much to keep taking notes. In seconds the room’s vibe went from the suffocation of policy and procedure to the inspiration of truth spoken to power–in the very halls of power.

Two years later, I re-live that moment now that Jim McCauley has passed away. Because he was an inspirational force in a time when inspiration is not often welcome, if even recognized, it’s easy to say he will be missed.

Much better would it be to say that he’ll serve as a model for others who we elect to public office.

Several months passed after I first met McCauley and urged him to run for mayor before he announced his candidacy. That took me off the hook, and I was able to turn my withdrawal from the race (as if I was actually in it) into an endorsement of him. We still didn’t know each other well, although that gradually changed as we both showed up at a Friday afternoon salon at a not-so-undisclosed location on State Street.

Subjects of conversation and debate included everything, but Newburyport issues topped the list, and MCauley knew them all in detail. He usually offered possibilities for solving or avoiding problems, and he didn’t hesitate to admit when something just would not be solved or avoided due to the, let’s say, inclinations and limitations of personnel involved. His refrain for that was: “Sometimes you just gotta laugh.”

Last saw him at my own birthday party upstairs at The Grog two months ago. We laughed a lot. About a lot of things.

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At the head of the table, chatting it up with Walt Thompson as his wife, Liz, assist in the distribution of the “Whale Cake.” Carol Thompson, Walt’s wife, is in the foreground. Photo by Sharon Spieldenner.

Jim McCauley. Photo: Kevin Sullivan, Newburyport Daily News

To Remember Everything

At the end of this week, you’ll have four chances to catch Translations, one of the legendary Irish playwright Brian Friel’s most cherished works, in a setting so intimate that even those in the back rows will consider themselves in the room with the folks of Balle Baeg in 1833.

Such is the Chelsea Theater Works on the triangle in the heart of that suburb at the foot of the Tobin Bridge and within sight of it. And where The Longwood Players bring the play to life by “explor[ing] it anew in its many layers of eloquence and despair,” to quote Director Rose Carlson.

To that, I’ll add laughter, which came often–as it always does in anything Irish–no matter how deep the despair of a people about to be forced from their homes. As Maire (Via Gould) fumes, “These people are not happy unless they are miserable!”

The mix of comedy and tragedy makes Translations a play that actors and directors crave. So said the actor playing Bridget (Melinda Kalanzis) when she told me it was about to open. Sources I have since found tell me that this has been true since its 1980 American premier in NYC with Liam Neeson and Stephen Rea in the cast.

Best known for Dancing at Lughnasa due to a 1998 film adaptation starring Meryl Streep, Friel (1929-2015) is often called “Ireland’s Anton Chekhov” and credited as “the universally accented voice of Ireland.” All of which is true but can be misleading. Translations has a lot to say about what happens when any people, anywhere, at any time are forced into cutural conformity, including the loss of their language.

Turns out the room is a “hedge school,” one of an underground network throughout Ireland, a place where Hugh (Anthony Mullin) still teaches Gaelic despite the British overlords’ edicts that all subjects speak English. To dramatize this, the audience is quickly made aware that the local characters are actually speaking Gaelic. It’s the same suspension of belief that playgoers hear in 2007’s Once, a play set in Dublin with a family of Czech immigrants speaking in their own tongue.

The only link between the two is Owen, Hugh’s son now employed by the Brits as a translator to serve the military occupation. Played by an energetic Raj Mukesh Bhuva, this is the torn character we find in all narratives about people being uprooted and as Hugh puts it, “imprisoned in a landscape of fact.” Owen is of the people, but he is with a force bent on changing them. He’s of the land, but he’s employed to service the bulldozer to put it asunder.

He’s the farmer’s son who accepts the job of driving the corporate tractor that introduces Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath; for Translations, he may as well be the title character.

Then again, it’s impossible to name a lead character in a truly ensemble work. In addition to those I’ve mentioned, the entire cast is high energy that ranges from riveting to sobering, from funny to heartbreaking. There’s Manus (Matt Feldman), Sarah (Dasha Artemchuk), Jimmy Jack (Mark Hessler), and Doalty (David Kleinman), all with scenes and lines that make the play memorable.

Perhaps because the two Brits, Captain Lancy and Lt. Yolland (hilariously rendered by Carlos Fruzetti and Gabriel Pagan-Gonzalez respectively), are the only two English-only speakers, it is quite easy to distinguish between the two languages spoken as one. So easy that it highlights a late scene when Maire and Yolland draw close to each other making their affection known and landing on the same word–without themselves realizing it.

A word that tells us just when we need the lessons and laughter of Translations: Always.

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Info and tickets: http://www.longwoodplayers.org/join-us-for-our-spring-show-translations

‘Mom Fights the Bad Guys’

Impossible to know what is most shocking about Nobody’s Girl.

A father’s sexual contact with his pre-teen daughter? Sharing the girl with his drinking buddy? A knowing mother always with a beer can in hand but never a word of objection?

Those are just the opening chapters growing up in the boonies inland from Florida’s Gold Coast where she would find employment as a 17-year-old handing out towels at Mar-a-Lago’s spa. Before long she was spotted and recruited by an elegant, motherly woman with a British accent to work for a neighbor nearby. Mar-a-Lago’s owner gave her a reference, wished her well.

Back in the boonies she found herself a complete misfit, and so she got in with other misfits. Drugs, alcohol, casual sex, petty theft, reform school. And yet, even at her worst, her best bursts forth:

At thirteen, I would walk a mile for a fistfight. I particularly liked confronting bullies, which is probably part of the reason I befriended a boy named Jose. He didn’t call himself gay, because that wasn’t a word we used then. But he liked boys “that way,” and he refused to hide it, so he was always getting picked on.

Any reader easily perceives how the world of Mar-a-Lago and Jeffery Epstein’s equally plush, gilded mansion would seem like paradise to a 17-year-old survivor of a sordid past. And the pay, in addition to all the material comforts it bought, was as good as Novocain.

That’s how Virginia Roberts Guiffre sets the table for Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice, published just last year. On the plates is medicine, no matter how hard to take. At the very least, victims of Epstein and his ever-present accompliss, Ghislaine Maxwell, and other sexual predators will know that they are not alone–that escape and a fruitful, if not entirely peaceful, life, are possible. And at best, the book will encourage others to come forward and join those seeking to bring Epstein’s “clients” and “associates” to account.

Guiffre weaves her married-with-children life after two years with Epstein throughout the book. Sent by Maxwell and Epstein to Thailand to study a technique of massage and to recruit down-and-out young girls she might find, she meets an Australian fellow who immediately falls for her. Robbie, as he is portrayed to the end of the book, is a beyond considerate dynamo who make her laugh, and so it all happens quickly. They marry while still in Thailand before he returns to and she, in effect, defects to the Land Down Under.

Before long, back in the Up and Over, police and journalists started getting tips about Epstein, often with references to “Jenna.” They tracked her down, and from what seemed such a protective distance, she went on the record. Epstein’s world began to unravel, albeit all-too-slowly thanks to bureaucrats all too willing to believe those who can afford never ending lawsuits over those who can’t, especially those “with a past.”

Epstein may be dead, but his chilling effect retains its grip. For example, King Charles visited America last week and gave a speech that progressives, liberals, and Democrats of all stripes applauded, especially his defense of NATO and call for environmental protection. However, he declined a request to meet with Epstein survivors. He did include a vague line about justice for victims of international trafficking, but no mention of the scandal that has forced the resignations of British (but not American) officials.

Nobody’s Girl tells us that Guiffre was interviewed by ABC when she decided to go public in 2015. Because she named Prince Andrew, ABC’s lawyers contacted the royal family for comment. There’s no record of what was said except for inside sources claiming not only that the family denied everything, but they threatened a lawsuit. One source claimed that ABC caved because it feared losing access to the high-flying celebrity couple of Prince William and Kate Middleton.

ABC killed the story, but the book sheds light on King Charles’ caution.

After so many details and names, times and dates, Guiffre draws toward her conclusion with a paragraph that begins with inspiration:

As I turned thirty-eight, I realized that I’d spent the second half of my life recovering from the first. I was nineteen when I met Robbie and set off to make a new life with him. I’d now lived almost precisely nineteen more years, and I was still fighting for justice.

And ends in heartbreak:

I’d come a long way, but had yet to feel anywhere near whole. I wondered if that feeling would ever come.

In her closing chapters, it sounded possible. Guiffre was among the survivors who testified in congressional hearings and spoke in rallies on the steps of the Capitol calling for a full release of the Epstein files. She was also happily assisting her daughter with making a manga demon slayer costume for Halloween and telling her sons that “Mom fights the bad guys.”

But she also admits lapses into severe depression, disorienting drugs, and two suicide attempts. There’s also a breakup with her husband mentioned only in the “Collaborator’s Note” that serves as the book’s preface/intro. Without any hint of it in Guiffre’s own narrative, a reader must wonder how much of that turmoil was her own imagination.

Still, all of what is in Guiffre’s own words is entirely credible. Tragically, her moments of doubt at the end of Nobody’s Girl, proved prophetic: Before it was in print, another suicide attempt, this time successful.

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Playing a Doctor on TV

Here in “the Boston market,” as America’s corporate owners refer to parts of the country, we are now seeing a TV ad supporting the candidacy of US Rep. Seth Moulton in his bid to unseat Sen. Ed Markey, a progressive who has supported the Green New Deal, access to health care, voting rights, and a reasonable tax code.

As a constituent of and past voter for both Democrats, I receive their newsletters, including one from Moulton this morning which prompted the following reply:

Your TV ad with the doctor ridiculing Sen. Markey for being old is the most disgraceful, deceitful, distasteful ad I’ve ever seen. To give you an idea of how many ads that includes, I recall “I Like Ike!” Might as well be aimed at my entire generation. I wouldn’t vote for you if you ran against Jeffrey Epstein’s corpse. Not now, not ever, not for anything. Get my name off your mailing list.

When I posted that on Facebook, a comment soon arrived:

I know that if you remember the ‘I Like Ike’ ad then you remember the Willie Horton ad too. Moulton’s ad must have been really awful!

The year was 1988 when the Democrats nominated Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis for president. Willie Horton was a convict doing time for murder when some ill-considered weekend furlough program set him free. The result was another rape and murder. The George Bush (Senior) campaign’s ad made it seem like Dukakis himself singled out Horton for release, unlocked the prison door, held it open, and chirped “Happy weekend” as Horton danced away.

Years later, facts emerged that the Lawrence (Mass.) Eagle-Tribune distorted the case, giving the Bush campaign its premise to stoke racial anxiety and fear among white voters. For its effort at the time, the ET--my hometown paper, a paper I delivered when Ike was still golfing if not governing, and the first in which I ever published anything, an anti-war, anti-draft letter when I was still but 17!–won a Pulitzer Prize. That did not deter–may have actually encouraged–Ann Coulter from proclaiming about ten years back that Bush’s ad was “the greatest campaign ad in political history.”

I immediately reponded:

Thanks for the reminder. Now that I think of it, the Horton ad was in many respects worse. But I’ll stick with my call if only because, that attack, as distorted as it was, called attention to things that happened. Moulton’s ad is a slur against Markey for being old, and by logical extension against anyone for being old. Still, thanks for adding this!

Though I stood by my initial claim, the comment made me reconsider the Moulton ad. Before long I started to wonder how many others–not just my age, but of any generation who respect elderly people–would be just as repulsed. That led me to wonder if the ad may be the work of Markey supporters banking on reverse psychology.

Soon arrived an email from the Markey campaign, seeking donations. As you’d expect based on what I said above, I’ve recieved several of these in recent months, each of them outlining the senator’s position on issues as they arise, always with details to explain cause and effect and with options for what might be done next.

This morning’s mailing called for the removal of the cartoon character called Kash Patel from the FBI, but most consider pending legislation on all things threatened by an autocratic White-and-now-Gold House and a Congress paralyzed by Republicans who refuse to act: health care, the environment, voting rights, a reasonable corporate tax…

My doubt is dispelled. The Markey team has its eye on the prize. Team Moulton prizes itself.

I’ll let you know if I get a reply…

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Click of the mouse to the Newburyport *Daily News* for this pic of Moulton addressing a town hall meeting in Amesbury a few years ago. You might notice a familiar face right in the middle of it.

A Sign That’s Outta Sight

Here’s the first reaction to a social media post of the new sign on the Plum Island Turnpike, or “Causeway” if you prefer honest and accurate words:

What a joke…guess that’s where all your $ for donations went to saving that decrepit pink trash heap, congratulations, you got this dumb sign.

By my own measure, I suppose the narrow-minded assessment is at least partially correct: The sign is “dumb” because it doesn’t speak, not even if you go to the horrible, unconstitutional trouble of pressing one for English. And “decrepit” is a given when talking about a century old structure abandoned half a century ago.

Where the commenter veers over the bike lane, down the slope, and into the marsh, however, is by calling it a “trash heap.”

Could counter that assholessment with “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” but why be superficial? Like most cliches and canned adages, it misses a much deeper meaning. And like most slurs, the comment reveals nothing about the intended subject, but everything about the person making it.

The Pink House, for many of its 100 years, certainly for its last few decades, was cherished by countless artists and photographers. As a resident of Plum Island since 1982, I’ve seen the license plates on vehicles pulled over by painters behind easels recreating the two-story house on canvas, or by photographers taking shots at various angles. They came from all over the US and Canada.

The old boathouse on Bearskin Neck in Rockport may be Massachusetts’ “Motif Number One,” but the Pink House here on the Newbury marsh was as close to a runner up as any. Too late now, but I wonder if the Honda Motor Company, had it been asked when it filmed the TV commercial, might have coughed up funds to save the Pink House–racing one way in the background while a Civic raced the other in the foreground–from demolition.

A comparison to Rockport is what makes the “trash heap” slur so unwittingly revealing of the man who made it. Would he also dismiss Rockport’s boathouse as “trash”? It is by definition “decrepit,” useless except for photos and paintings…

He does come closer to truth when he calls it a “joke.” Unfortunately, he applies it to the sign that is more than attractive, both elegant and forceful at the same time. Had he applied it to the placement of the sign, I’d have no choice but to agree with him.

In case you don’t know, or in case you’ve driven to Plum Island these past few days and wonder why you haven’t seen it, the sign has been placed parallel and very close to the road. Turned out that I myself had already driven past three or four times each way without ever seeing it. After seeing the picture, I went looking, and barely spotted it while driving by. I was as dumbfounded by the placement of the sign as I was awed by its picture.

Once home, I immediately zapped a message to a woman at the forefront of the effort to save the Pink House from demolition:

Very nice memorial, but why in the name of basic logic is it parallel to the road rather than facing traffic? Does someone want to limit the views to the few pedestrians & joggers on that long road? Even cyclists, keeping their eyes on a narrow bike lane, are likely to be going too fast to notice.

When she informed me that it “had to be placed on Town of Newbury land so that it would not be removed by FWS” (National Fish & Wildlife Service), I asked if the town’s strip was so narrow, the sign could not be turned sideways, or put higher up on a single stand.

She then referred me to the Town of Newbury whose call it was to accept and display the gift. On the Plum Island side of the bridge is a much larger “Welcome to…” sign, turned sideways so that people can actually see it. But I know not where the boundaries are between the town and the FWS, not any more than I apparently know of boundaries between bureaucratic decisions and common sense.

Knowing well the untiring effort over several years of so many people dedicated to the cause of saving the Pink House, I can understand the tendency to say that this is all quite nice and feel good about it, but something is wrong here. I’m not saying that it’s nefarious, but there has been, to use the kindest term I can think of, a serious lapse in judgement.

On a road with a 40 mph speed limit, whether we call it “turnpike” or “causeway,” if a sign does not face traffic, it may as well not be there. That’s why our troll is not entirely wrong when he calls it “a joke.”

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Thick as a Brick & Mortar

When I heard very late one night that Martin Barre, Jethro Tull’s lead guitarist, had written a memoir, it took no more than that night’s sleep, a cup of coffee, and a short drive to the mainland before I was ordering a copy in Jabberwocky Bookshop.

This was this past November when A Trick of Memory was released in the United Kingdom where Tull first formed in 1967. Barre, son of a jazz musician in Birmingham, England’s second largest city, joined the group a year later and, after frontman/flautist Ian Anderson, was Tull’s only mainstay until it disbanded in 2014.

Reasons remain under wraps, which is why I, a veteran of about two dozen Tull concerts in seven states since 1970, am eager to see what Barre has to say, include it in a review, and post it on Jethro Tull fan pages on social media.

Paul, Jabberwocky’s mainstay clerk, put my order in, consulted a distributor’s website, and told me it was due to land in the USA at the end of January. They always call when a book arrives, but when the calendar turned to February, I went in to check. Some delay. A very small printing house. Later in the month, I was told. Since I’m at a coffeeshop right next door every Tuesday morning, I kept checking in.

By this time, I met Steve, another, newer clerk at Jabberwocky who recognized the name Martin Barre and lit up. A fellow Tull-Skull! He started tapping a laptop and was as disappointed as I that no news was to be had. But he did add one more copy to the order.

March came in like a lion but apparently left A Trick of Memory to a dodo bird who may yet need a few more months to touch down anywhere in North America. Friends started telling me I could get it within days if I clicked into eBay or Amazon, but I never renounced my citizenship in the United States of America for consumership in the Lazy States of Convenience. If it doesn’t come from brick and mortar, I don’t want it. If it’s available locally, from an independent business, I’ll always buy from people I can see and talk to.

A week into April, I wondered if I might learn something about the impasse on Martin Barre’s or Jethro Tull’s websites. Nothing. However, a cutesy notice for a Spanish distillery offering “Aqualung Scotch” and “Thick as a Brick Brandy” caught my attention. Yesterday morning, I was in Jabberwocky to tell Paul:

Their specialty is putting custom labels on bottles of vodka or gin or whatever you want. You could get ‘Paul’s Rum’ with your picture wearing an eye-patch and a parrot sitting on your shoulder!

His polite laughter did not hide his puzzlement: Why are you telling me this?

The homepage had a bright-colored notice across the top saying something like: Sales to the United States have been suspended due to the tariffs. We are working to negotiate lower prices.

Paul lit up: “That would explain what’s happening with this book.”

I asked if he noticed it with other books from Europe and the UK, and he said no, but also said that he wouldn’t notice it unless someone had an order in. Then I made the mistake of telling him something that he neither needed nor wanted to hear: “Meanwhile, copies of the book are being sold on eBay and by Amazon, undercutting you.”

His expression made me regret my lame attempt at sympathy as soon as it was out of my mouth: “That’s all Amazon does: Undercut small business.”

“And now they have help. Keep my order in! I won’t go to them.”

As I made my way home, the word “help” stuck in my mind like a key in an old lock. I turned it. All this time, I thought, as most others thought, that the tariffs were a tough-guy illusion to rile the base who could be counted on to somehow believe that the increased prices in American stores would be Biden’s fault.

Yes, it was that, but it was–and still is–more. The tariffs are help. From a corrupt autocrat to his billionaire donors to help their mega-corporations squeeze every dollar, every cent, every pound-of-flesh they can from the independent, local, neighborhood, and mom-and-pop small businesses we pretend to so proudly hail.

Call it a trick of democracy when run as big business here in the Lazy States of Convenience.

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