A ‘Tight’ of Passage

Every few months when I take my copy of Emblem from my mailbox, I immediately turn to the class notes and find my way to “Class of 1968.”

As usual, it is blank in this new issue of Central Catholic High School’s alumni magazine except for the name of one of my classmates back in those turbulent days and his edress for the rest of us to send him any news we would like to report. Apparently, we don’t have any.

Class of 1967, however, appears quite active, and it ended with an entry that caught my eye:

Teacher Joseph Madigan of Andover, Maine, continues to enlighten us and his local newspaper with his monthly poetry lyrics.

While immediately calculating that he must be in his late-80s, I pounced on my Rand McNally to find a town I’d never heard of despite having lived in three of the four corners of that raggedly rhomboidal-shaped state. Sure enough, Andover is in the fourth corner, way up near the borders of New Hampshire and Quebec.

Joe Madigan was the first person to tell me I could write. He was my English teacher in senior year when those of us who did well took two English classes, the other called “college prep,” or something like that.

That other class was taught by the legendary Warren Hayes whom we all had in junior year and were the better for it. Hayes was strict but dynamic, a combination that made us want to surpass the standards he set. Leaving literature to Madigan, Hayes’ college prep class was much more nuts and bolts, but even that Hayes taught with what one student eulogy in 2021 called “pep, rhythm, and vitality.”

Most memorable was “Vocaball,” a game played one day each week for which the class was separated into five teams of seven to define words, with synonyms, antonyms, etymology, roots, prefixes, suffixes, all in response to rapid-fire questions. By putting us in teams, he made us not want to let each other down. No doubt many CCHS grads who watched Dead Poets Society 35 years ago wondered how Robin Williams knew of Warren Hayes.

While Hayes was the wily veteran, Madigan joined Central while I was there. A few years later he would teach at the Essex County Training School for truants with behavioral problems. My father, a social worker there known for his rapport with the kids, noticed the trait in Madigan and befriended him. For that reason, my father took him into a rough neighborhood in Lynn when a kid ran away from the school and returned home. The two arrived at a house, and Madigan went to the rear while my father went to the front door. Don’t recall how many Lynn police arrived at that moment, but my father told me that two went to the back. Very soon, they returned with Madigan between them, securing both his arms. My father, according to his account, was so stunned that he couldn’t get the words out until Madigan begged him to speak.

Not long after that, Madigan taught at the Greater Lawrence Technical School where my CCHS ’68 classmate Dave Bodenrader had a career as a guidance counselor. When I learned that the two became friends, I couldn’t help but re-imagine my father’s story. If the Lawrence police had been called to the school to stop an altercation and arrested Dave by mistake, I don’t think Joe would have stopped them. I think he’d have smiled and enjoyed the show.

Central Catholic was likely Madigan’s first teaching gig. He ranged from lively to relaxed in front of a class, as if it was second-nature to him. He had a passion for American literature–for Poe and Melville, Hemingway and Steinbeck, and many writers among and between them. That passion was contagious, catching the curiosity of teenage boys far more inclined toward girls, cars, sports, and the shiniest new object of all at the time, rock-and-roll.

Not much older than my Class of ’68, Madigan had an instinct for making inroads with his hormonal audience. Most memorable was one of his descriptions of Romantic poetry. Though far from R-rated, his calling it “making love” years before we knew what the euphemism meant had us reading more by John Keats than the assignment called for. His mischievous smile while saying it was the suggestive sound of John Lennon’s “you know what I mean” in “When I Saw Her Standing There.” A nice echo came two decades later in Dead Poets Society when the teacher played by Williams–named John Keating–tells his all-male class that the purpose of poetry is “to woo women.”

My class at Central numbered 222, a number easy for me to recall only because I graduated 22nd. Call it deuces wild, and I was wild with classes that didn’t appeal to me. A few I loved, but English was never one of them. My interest was in Math, Geometry, Physics, Geography, and History. Anything with numbers, and I guess the endless dates allowed History to qualify.

We had perhaps ten out of 222 who excelled at everything. I was in the second tier of about 20 who excelled at a few. By the time we were halfway through sophomore year, there were never any surprises at who took the top awards in each subject. At least I don’t recall any until about six weeks into senior year when Joe Madigan held a lottery to match each of us, about 25 in that class, with 25 American novels, assigning a book report to each.

My luck was to draw the longest book in the lot, Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward Angel. I made an effort with it, but couldn’t make sense of Wolfe’s stream of conscious narration or his mountainous Carolina setting. And so, by page 50 of about 500, I got myself a copy of Cliff Notes. To be fair to myself, I did not do any plagiarizing, but I did rely on the CN analysis before returning to the book and finding passages that applied to it. That was for the sake of a few quotes from the novel that made some point with which I agreed. Maybe I’m just rationalizing, but I didn’t dodge the assignment. I just made it easier.*

I turned in my 500-word report expecting to gain my usual B- or C+ for an essay. I figured Madigan would recognize that I skimmed it but would realize that some honest effort was made on a book as long as Of Mice and Men, For Whom the Bells Toll, Red Badge of Courage, and Billy Budd combined–meaning that I was to have done as much as four classmates combined. As we say today, I expected to catch a break.

Back in class after a long weekend, not only did I catch a break, I hit the jackpot. Madigan plopped the papers on his desk, snatched the top one off and held it in the air. He stepped toward us with a wild smile and said something like, Listen to this! This is how it’s done! and then, in a line I still hear, clenching a fist I still see, “This is tight!”

Despite that excitement, my mind drifted. No doubt it was on the next Red Sox World Series game against the St. Louis Cardinals when I realized that I was hearing my own words. Seems now that I had to be elated at the time, but I recall that I froze. There were at least six kids in that class who had been the best at this for three years, and I was not one of them. Was this encroachment? Would I pay a price in the schoolyard? On the other hand, I was, like many others in that class, wondering what I might do about the military draft and bothered by American casualties in Vietnam that had started hitting close to home. That day in that class was the first indication I had that there was something I could do, and do well.

Central Catholic did assign all of us, even as incoming freshmen, a reading list of seven or so books to read by Labor Day. In the summer of 1967, our senior list included James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time (1963) and Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country (1948) set in apartheid South Africa. So you could say that my pump was primed for putting opinions in writing. Baldwin’s treatment of race was a model for my treatment of the draft, and later of the anti-war movement. But I still entered Salem State College as a math major looking forward to a lucrative career as an accountant.

That didn’t last long. By the start of second semester, I was an English major, and I had joined the staff of the student newspaper, The Log, an unlikely combination of upperclassers who couldn’t hide their amusement at my jacket and tie. Those didn’t last long either.

If Baldwin’s Fire pushed me in the direction my life took, it was Madigan’s “tight” that sent me down that road with confidence.

Twelve years later, I became a English teacher myself and spent the next 22 years channeling Madigan and Hayes, as well as Pat Gozemba–whom I still see at No Kings rallies–and the late Jay McHale at Salem State who both impressed upon me the need for critical thought, and Chuck Woodard at South Dakota State who steered me toward ironic vision. Every now and then, a student would tell me or write in an evaluation that my class recalled Dead Poets Society.

All that and I haven’t even mentioned what Joe Madigan in a poem calls “sweet music as I soon began to drift.”

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A note for those of you who live outside New England: “lewis-TUN” is Lewiston, about 50 miles southeast of Andover, and the closest city of any size.

Poem to accompany Dixfield Fuel Business Profile

Mar. 6, 2017

By Joe Madigan,
Andover, Maine

The heat had gone out
The water tank too
I called for some help
From a skeleton crew.

In snow-covered lanes
He made the long drive
Within a half hour
His van had arrived.
His fevered approach
Quickness and glee
Helped to alleviate
Worry in me.
With tool bag and light
He worked with a hum
Later he smiled and
Raised up his thumb.
I waved at his van
As he started to leave
With the heat coming on
And a propane reprieve.

On the left, Warren Hayes (1937?-2021) who retired in 2001 after 41 years of teaching. On the right, Chris Sullivan, recently retired President of CCHS and son of Mike Sullivan, one of my history teachers and manager of the school’s baseball team who did not select me for his roster.

Photos from the Central Catholic High School Class of 1968 Yearbook, courtesy of Dave Bodenrader, fellow CCHS Class of ’68.

From June, 2020, three months into the COVID shutdown:

Look Homeward, Devil

At Least the Least I Can Do

When anyone asks why I’d make a 200-mile round-trip in the dead of winter to read for ten minutes in the Moby-Dick marathon, I throw a punch-line:

I’ve been plagiarizing Herman Melville for 45 years. It’s the least I can do.

Almost always gets a good laugh, although it surprises me how nervous some people are with their own laughter. I wonder if it may be due to how suddenly aware people are of AI and the possibility of being fooled by it. Anything I write–indeed, anything anyone writes–is now suspect.

There are some who just don’t get the joke. A newspaper reporter assigned to preview the event this year went silent over the phone at my answer to the question. Finally, as if slowly coming out of hiding: “You mean you quote without giving attribution?”

While setting him straight, I could sense a memory surface after years out of mind. Over fifty years ago, it may well have been clouded over as soon as it happened in a room filled with the smoke of marijuana. Now that the statute of limitations is well past, and now that I can find no trace of the two college friends who took part in this crime, it is time to confess.

No, not a civil or criminal case that might call for a courtroom trial, much less time in jail, but an academic crime. The kind we hear of every few years that might knock a candidate out of, say, presidential primaries, as it did a young Delaware senator named Joe Biden in 1988.

The stakes for Rick, Kitty, and me were far less. A failing grade in a class, or maybe suspension from Salem State College (now University) back in 1970 or ’71, maybe ’72, whichever came first.

Time was a blur back then. The anti-war movement was at its height on college classes, and those of us in it barely cared that we were delaying our degrees a year or two. I went in as Class of ’72, finished my last class in December ’73, and graduated with the Class of ’74.

But we attempted to complete what we could of our requirements at the end of each semester. And it was within weeks of one when I found myself with Rick and Kitty seated in the corner of a room adjacent a large kitchen where a dozen of us had been planning a demonstration on campus. Planning done, it was time to “alter our consciousness” as we said back then.

Rick, a quintessential history buff, or a “nerd” decades before the word was coined, worried over a paper he had to write for a psychology class. One of those liberal arts requirements he had no feel for.

Kitty, a child psychology major, lit up: “Wish that was my assignment. I loved that class!” She took a hit and slumped back in the chair, “I have to write a book report. Charles Dickens! Hard Times! I can’t even look at it!”

A huge fan of Dickens at the time, I lit up: “I read that during spring break. That’s a damn good read. So relevant to now!” I took a hit, “Mine is a history essay. I have to cough up something about the role of Thomas Paine in American independence.”

Rick lit up, “I could write that paper right now.” He took a hit and raised his eyebrows.

It all unfolded like a round of bidding at a card game. Though not one of us was a math major, all three of us immediately did the math. And all three of us took hits getting higher and higher on the pact we made.

Rick proved he wasn’t kidding when he handed me his, or rather my paper on Paine the very next day, footnotes and all. That prompted me to compile what I had already written of what may be Dickens’ most focused novel and turn it into essay form. Delivered to Kitty that night, it may have pushed her into dusting off a paper she had already handed in and re-writing it with different examples before handing it to Rick for his psychology class just two days after our illicit academic and high-as-kites tryst.

Three students terrified of a looming deadline, we all handed in papers a week ahead of time. And we all received As for our, or rather each other’s efforts. Kitty admitted that she toned some of my vocabulary down, such as changing “famished” to “very hungry” to “make it sound more like me.”

“And a good way to increase the word count!” I added. Rick, however, was so put off by the whole subject, that he merely checked the spelling of his name on the title page and handed it in. Read it? He didn’t even scan it.

For my part, I streamlined some of Rick’s phrasing. But only after a careful and fascinated read. That paper taught me as much about American history as any single class or chapter in a history text that I’ve ever seen.

Maybe that helped me rationalize my one slip into plagiarism over fifty years ago. That and the fact that it wasn’t as if I did nothing. I did write a paper, and it did get an A.

Or I could just chalk it up to all those hits of marijuana.

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To Where We Once Belonged

Any chance the new Dylan film, A Complete Unknown, is adapted from a college course? Doubtful, but I did ask the same question four years ago about the eight-hour Beatles documentary, Get Back. Why not try again?

Back then I heard that Suffolk University in Boston offers a Beatles course, and I already knew that one Prof. Richard F. Thomas tuned up his Harvard seminar for a witty and most enlightening book titled Why Bob Dylan Matters.

Tangled up in the controversial choice of Dylan for the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature, Thomas plays the Memphis blues quite well.

From me to you, none of this comes as a surprise. For years, Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan have appeared in the course listings of colleges from coast to coast. Nor is it surprising that a magical mystery tour would be offered at a law school. At all colleges, no matter the money-that’s-what-I-want major, all bachelors’ and masters’ degrees still require some can’t-buy-me-love credits.

I don’t want to spoil the party, but the surprise is the course name. In my life as a college writing instructor, the constant reminder for every student was to be specific.

Tell that to the prof who titled the course, “Here, There, and Everywhere.” Must be a relief for him or her following professional she-said-she-said workshops offered by the Newburyport Bar Association such as “Grey Divorce: Special Issues in Middle Age Misery.”

Do you want to know a secret? I’m envious.

For years I chafed at concocting required syllabi, something always in the way of an organic, got-to-get-this-into-your-life, 16-week experience. Wish I taught at Suffolk where a song title-turned-course title would allow me to plug in any Beatles song to any day on the schedule with any number of honey pies, glass onions, and blackbirds across the universe:

“And Your Bird Can Sing” before Thanksgiving, “Here Comes the Sun” before spring break, “Taxman” for mid-April.

Not only that, but the very name would allow me to satirize the whole nowhere man notion that there should be a syllabus for any course open to creativity. Baby, can students drive a car with their eyes glued to your pre-fab plan? Or would they be getting better all the time looking through you at a long and winding road?

My Beatles course would have eight days a week, with “Tripperday” placed between Saturday and Sunday to give students an extra 24 hours for valuable research while partying with Lucy in the Sky, Polythene Pam, Bungalow Bill, and all the lonely people.

All while allowing more time for this boy’s professional development by—now that it’s legal—getting high with a little help from Sgt. Pepper, Dr. Robert, Father McKenzie, Mr. Kite, The Walrus, and Rocky, my old roommate back at South Dakota State.

Or to flirt with Sexy Sadie, Eleanor Rigby, and Lovely Rita, maybe woo Lady Madonna or Penny Lane. (Is she related to Lois?)

All that would justify a syllabus printed sideways to further aggravate fools on the ivory hill who fail to realize what goes on in the hearts of artists. As John Lennon let it be: “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”

Oh, is there anything more deserving of spoof and goof than the syllabus in what should be the strawberry fields and yellow submarines of liberal arts? Give me a once-a-week, three-hour seminar, and I’d even label the 15-minute break on the helter-skelter document with “Through the Bathroom Window.”

Now that I’ve followed the sun into yesterday, I can only say I want a revolution in how the arts are taught and pass ideas to those far closer to just seventeen, you know what I mean.

Courses such as:

          “Over Troubled Water,” architecture.

          “Say a Little Prayer,” divinity.

          “Signed, Sealed, Delivered,” business management.

          “Get It While You Can,” economics.

          “Followers of Fashion,” marketing.

          “Sympathy for the Devil,” history.

          “Fooled A-ga-ga-gain,” political science.

          “Eve of Destruction,” meteorology.

          “Thick as a Brick,” freshman classes that really are (but which no one wants to admit are) remedial.

My examples betray my age? Get back! All things must pass.

-643-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDbzB0jRH_8

Effect Without a Cause

Far more attention must be paid to a line Republicans are using to discredit Kamala Harris.

True, we hear and see it often enough in conversations and on social media posts. But that’s simply repetition to reinforce a point, a repetition geared to hide a non-existent foundation for that point. This is why the Republican presidential candidate makes the charge in his rallies–and made it in the debate–without ever mentioning the cause of the effect that Republicans want us to accept.

In the debate, it sounded like this:

She’s had four years to do all the things she says she’s going to do. Why didn’t she do it then?

Downtown yesterday, overheard:

If it was Trump in the White House, they’d be whining about why he never got anything done!

On social media:

I’m not going (in) the direction of someone who isn’t fixing the issues while they are IN OFFICE with the POWER to FIX the issues right NOW!!! They have had close to 4 years….

I’ll estimate that the latter two quotes are from people in their 40s, maybe 50s, although the all-caps emphasis on “right NOW” might suggest someone younger. Was civics erased as a subject in American elementary and high schools that long ago? Have we already raised two, maybe three generations of Americans who are completely unaware of the relationship between the three branches of government.

Or do some people just fall for this because it is so simple? Legislation is complex, demands attention, demands an attention span. And it is hard to grasp compared to the superficial ease of seeing prices go up and blaming the guy in charge, oblivious to any complications such as war, a pandemic, corporate price-gouging, diminished crops due to climate change.

Just how unaware or gullible can the American public be? Well, back in May, a New York Times/Siena poll revealed that 17% of us blame Biden for the overturn of Roe v. Wade because he was president at the time of the Mitch McConnell-stacked Supreme Court’s decision.

We might wonder what percentage of the American public is aware that a Republican-controlled House of Representatives has blocked much of what the Biden-Harris Administration attempted to do. This is most of what Harris is now offering–and what she could accomplish if the Democrats pick up a few House seats and hold the Senate.

The claim’s implied effect without a cause also ignores how much the current administration has achieved regarding infrastructure, job creation, and higher wages. Republicans making the claim want us to ignore how they themselves show up for the photo-ops when factories open or a bridge is about to be built or repaired after they themselves voted against the funding that made it possible.

In the debate, Harris reminded us of the bi-partisan immigration bill that satisfied almost all Republican demands–moreso than it did progressive Democrats–that would have passed if not for phone calls from her opponent instructing Republicans to kill the bill. Chaos is more useful as a campaign issue, what’s right be damned.

When you hear any version of “Why didn’t she do it already,” you are listening to someone who either pays no attention or who expects you to pay no attention.

Of the three quotes above, the last two are from people who have been fooled, people who have forgotten the most basic lessons in American civics–if they ever knew them. The first quote is from someone who is out to fool you, and with control of the House or Senate, Republicans will continue to play this game even if Harris is elected.

Only solution is to start emphasizing the Democratic candidates for the House and Senate. Both Harris and Tim Walz need to be making more appearances with them, which means campaigning in states that are not considered battleground, such as Texas where Colin Allred has a shot at unseating Ted Cruz if the national party put more effort into it.

Wherever they campaign, winning the Senate and House should be as prominent an issue as restoring Roe v. Wade. Why, a good 17% of the American public might wake up to the reality of cause-and-effect relationships if those two issues were mentioned together.

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https://sharemylesson.com/collections/civic-participation-youngest-citizens

To Quench Our Thirst

In a city that prides itself on support for the arts, especially for local artists, many might jump at the chance to attend a world premiere play penned by a local guitarist long-known for his flamenco, Spanish, and classical performances in downtown Newburyport.

Fuente Grande, based on the persecution of Spanish poet Frederico Garcia Lorca and steeped in the music played around town all these years by John Tavano, plays just twice at the Firehouse this weekend: Saturday at 8:00 pm, Sunday at 3:00 pm.

The title translates into English as “big fountain,” a reference to Lorca’s prominence as a poet who “awakened a nation.” As the Firehouse also tells us:

The feel is 1936 Granada, Spain, on the brink of civil war. It was a time of great social upheaval and people were being intimidated and, in Lorca’s case, murdered.

Produced by The Actors Studio, this is dual effort that is local on both sides. The director has staged all kinds of plays for young and old at Newburyport venues as diverse as the Firehouse and Maudsley Park for some forty years and counting. If that’s not enough, Rhina Espaillat and Alfred Nicol, two local poets who seem to share the mantle of Newburyport laureate, will be there to add their voices.

Guitarist-now-playwright Tavano took his first dramatic effort to Actors Studio director Marc Clopton as soon as he thought it ready to be fashioned by someone who actually knew what he was doing. Turns out Tavano was closer than he thought, as Clopton’s changes were minimal.

Or so I hear. In the interest of full disclosure, I count myself a good friend of Tavano, the only wind-musician in his weekly coffee-klatch of guitarists who tolerate me while I pretend to know what they are talking about. But I do know the dramatic process Tavano described, having been through it more than once, and I suspect that Clopton, like a any good director–or editor, teacher, parent, executive of any stripe–made Tavano think that all the new ideas were his (Tavano’s).

All I know for certain is that Fuente Grande tells a compelling and timely story in a day when debates over what is taught in schools are based on the “comfort zones” of students and parents rather than the truths of history and science.

With the participation of no less than four of Newburyport’s foremost and long-term artists, Fuente Grande can’t help but be both entertaining and satisfying.

Drama. Poetry. Music. For those of us who take pride in our support for local arts, what better chance could we have to distribute it?

Mucha suerte!

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L2R: John Tavano, Rhina Espaillat, Alfred Nicol. Photo: Newburyport *Daily News.*

https://firehouse.org/event/fuente-grande/2023-10-07/

Weeding Shakespeare

Sounds like a statewide lobotomy.

Shockwaves continue to ripple north following reports of Florida teachers censoring Romeo & Juliet to comply with the recent mandates of Gov. Ron DeSenseless to whitewash and dumb down history and literature taught in the state’s public schools, K thru Post-Grad.

Most reactions do little more than exclaim two words that should never be heard together: Censor and Shakespeare. But I wonder if liberal reaction is due more to the choice of play.

Romeo & Juliet, fair to say, is the English-speaking world’s ultimate love story–which masks the fact that it is also the ultimate statement against vengeance. For both reasons, it has had countless adaptations to fit various nations, ethnic groups, and as many generations as have been since 1595 when it first appeared on a London stage.

That includes, of course, West Side Story, as American a tale as any, which itself has spawned a healthy, colorful, vibrant share of adaptations for both stage and film. Conceived and written by my Lawrence homeboy, Leonard Berstein, its songs have lives of their own, something that British rocker Keith Emerson noted when he compiled his “America” pastiche.

His band, Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, included everything from the theme of the classic television westerm, Bonanza, to the opening of Hendrix’s “Purple Haze,” from “Camptown Races” to clips of John Philip Sousa. For the warp and woof holding it all together, we keep hearing “Maria” and “I Want to Live in America.”*

To most Americans since 1960, those songs and others from West Side Story–“I Feel Pretty” and the “Jet Song”–are like the very names, “Romeo” and “Juliet,” known even by those unfamiliar with the full story.

Which is why I wonder: Would we be so shocked if the reports from Florida named one of Shakespeare’s lesser known plays, say, Titus Andronicus or King John, or even Twelfth Night or Love’s Labor’s Lost? Would our reaction be mixed if it were a play now deemed tainted by “political incorrectness” such as The Taming of the Shrew or The Merchant of Venice?

Forgive me. My perception has been warped by recent trips to public libraries well north of the Mason-Dixon Line. Up here, “censorship” is a dirty word, and “dumbing down” a crime against humanity, as they should be. Problem is that, when you call them by a harmless sounding name and give them the veneer of technology, the result gives you the very thing you profess to be against.

That name is “weeding,” and it is now a term of art for librarians nationwide as they depend on the algorithms to tell them the frequency of circulation of each book to determine what they keep and what they discard, no thought required.

If you doubt this, here’s a challenge for you: Pick the writer you consider the most consequential in American history (say, pre-1970), walk into a public library, and count the number of volumes by that writer. Then pick a present day author who caters to pop culture and count his or her volumes.

Here, for example, in this northeast corner of deep blue Massachusetts, Danielle Steele wipes the floor with Herman Melville every time: Ipswich PL, 88-6; Newburyport PL, 82-4, Methuen PL, 65-5; Topsfield PL, 62-4; Newbury PL, 49-1.

That one, of course, is Moby-Dick, the only title of Melville’s nine novels that you can count on finding. Likewise, if you pick Willa Cather, you have a fair chance of finding My Antonia, but Death Comes for the Archbishop? Forget it. Steinbeck? Good chance you’ll find Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men, but you’ll likely need interlibrary loan to get In Dubious Battle or The Winter of Our Discontent. So much for browsing.

That last title, coincidentally, is a line from Shakespeare’s Richard III, which brings us back to the question. Good chance that DeSenseless and his thought-police might back off from, or at least distance themselves from that particular play. Far more than any chance of libraries bringing back Cather’s Archbishop, Steinbeck’s Battle, or Melville’s Redburn, the most eloquent, humane, and irrefutable description, explanation, and defense of immigration to America I’ve ever read.

So the question remains: What is the difference between sanitizing Florida schools and weeding American libraries?

The answer, my friend, is negligible, but the implication is huge. Call it a national lobotomy.

-30-

*I first heard ELP’s “America” played by Jethro Tull in a concert in Connecticut 16 years ago. Tull added several quotes that are not in the original. Here’s a recording of it on the same tour, followed by ELP’s own much wilder, hyperventilating version made longer by a drum solo.

Of Paradise & Parking Lots

Once or twice a month, two women, one who barely qualifies for a senior discount and another with but a year or two to go, arrive at the Screening Room for a Wednesday matinee.

Since that’s my day as a projectionist, we’ve been on a first name basis since about a year ago when they first made a habit of spending a day in Newburyport and taking in a movie. They have always remembered my name after I made it easy for them by pointing out that I’m in the trunk of every car.

That would include the car that takes them the 30 or so miles back and forth to where they live. I’m not going to name the town, nor am I going to use their real names in what I’m about to report. Not because they asked to remain anonymous, but because it wasn’t until the show was over and the lights were out that my own light went on.

This past Wednesday was very slow. When Nikki and Liz arrived some 20 minutes early, I was in a chatty mood, telling of the Nao Trinidad, the replica of Magellan’s ship that had been docked in Newburyport during the week of the 4th. They saw it with their husbands, and Nikki mentioned a conversation about history that included an aside, “I’m a librarian.”

Couldn’t help but file that away until the subject of Magellan had sailed out the door of the Screening Room lobby and was safely onto State Street. I gave the pause a three-count and looked at Nikki:

“You’re a librarian?”

“Yes! In X——, and Liz is on the board of the X—– Public Library.”

Looking back and forth at both: “I’m about a decade older than you. My introduction to the Lawrence Public Library would have been about when you were born. I’m sure I was assigned certain books to find, but overall, those grade-school visits were more like discovery than anything else, like Magellan sailing round the Horn into an ocean full of islands unknown and unimagined.”

They smiled, no doubt thinking they were in for a pleasant, nostalgic trip into their own profession. I paused, keeping eye-contact, one to the other: “May I ask what might be a contentious question?”

They glanced at each other and both said yes.

“Does the word ‘weeding’ mean anything to you?”

Both women registered mild surprise that a non-librarian would know what is now a librarian’s term of art, though I’d say “artlessness” would be more honest. Nikki’s explanation was consistent with what I’ve heard from librarians, what few I know, from here to the west coast, citing a computer program that lets librarians know just how often a book is checked out. She looked over at Liz who nodded agreement, and I could see that both were reading skepticism on my face.

I hoped to soften my response with a brief laugh: “That suggests that some algorithm decides what books remain and what get tossed out.”

They seemed to speak at once: “Well, no, we do look at it.” Liz went on, “We also have to consider the condition of the book, and whether it’s in or out of print.”

Sounds to me like an urgent reason to keep older volumes, but I couldn’t tell if being out of print was considered a strike against them. I told the two that such was the case in Newburyport where, among other literary and historical treasures, a two-volume collection of John Greenleaf Whittier’s letters and journals published by his family in 1894 is no more.

Nikki seemed to commiserate: “But I bet there’s plenty of Danielle Steele!”

“That’s my point. Something already well-known, safe, expected. Don’t let Magellan round that Horn!”

Liz noted that the concern was for shelf-space, and Nikki nodded, adding that X—— has a very small library. I don’t doubt that’s true in X—–, but in N-port there is no lack of empty shelves. A day after this conversation, I happened to be in the Ipswich Public Library where entire rows were empty.

Nikki turned the tables on me: “What do you think weeding is?”

I kept making eye-contact with both of them: “I think the word is a euphemism for ‘dumbing down’.”

The two women looked stunned.

“And I mean that literally! You’re paving a paradise of literature and history, and putting up a parking lot of pop-culture. Is there no difference between a library and a bookstore? And what’s the difference between weeding and what the governor of Florida has ordered for public schools?”

Liz: “That’s a total ban. We might weed books, but you can still find and read them”

Me: “No! That’s just what DeSantis says, anyone in Florida can still find and buy and read those books. That rationale is identical whether the reference is to bookstores, to interlibrary consortiums, or to websites. So much for libraries as places of discovery!”

Nikki: “But we aren’t stigmatizing books the way these right wing groups are.”

Me: “No, not at all, but you are erasing them. So the result is the same. We’re erasing history at the same time we accuse others of suppressing it. And we wonder why they laugh at us? Only real difference is that right-wingers claim credit for and boast of what they erase. Algorithms allow us to wash our hands. Who’s in denial now?”

Again, they seemed to speak as one, as well as glancing at a clock on the wall approaching showtime: “Well, yes, we do need to keep an eye on that!”

“And I thank you!”

They slid into the theater as another customer approached to buy a ticket. What I have recorded above is but an extract of a longer conversation far more in agreement than debate, and the quotes are approximate. I was glad that I mentioned my involvement in the annual marathon readings of Moby-Dick in New Bedford and my recent, public feud with the N-port Public Library without getting lost in the (forgive me) weeds of controversy. That ensures that, if they want to know more, it’s all there, a matter of public record. (As well as covered in recent blogs.)

My one regret is that my stop in Ipswich was a day after rather than a day before this conversation. The IPL at the time had just four volumes of Herman Melville at the end of a shelf of over a dozen by pop-fiction writer Brad Meltzer. Recalling Nikki’s crack, I wandered into the aisle marked by the letter S. Danielle Steele had 82.

At that moment, I hoped I had made it clear to them that my argument isn’t about any contest, or any score, or lessening anything for the sake of anything else. Beyond the aisles with S and T was just one that offered everything from U to Z.

Past that were two rows of of stacks, I think five shelves each, top to bottom, perhaps twenty feet long, completely empty.

Don’t know about X—–, but like Newburyport, that’s quite a parking lot.

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Lobby of the Philips Exeter Academy Library, architect Louis Kahn. Photo: Michael Boer https://www.flickr.com/photos/onewe/albums/72157629278698261/with/6859625645/

Really Don’t Nevermind

Delivery to a candy/ice cream store just as it opens at noon. Big, bright place, white walls, colorful signs, pics of smiling people licking cones, biting chocolates. Three young staffers and an older guy, likely the manager, putting things in place. Nice morning, too, humid but peaceful with birdsong in the air.

As soon as I open the door and step forward, a blast of guitars amplified to the max with punishing percussion ridden by a raging, angry scream, “Here we are now, entertain us!” actually knocks me back that step.

Gathering and bracing myself, I roll the dolly to the back of the store some fifty feet away, deposit two 30-lb. boxes, and start back. The lyric, which I recognize from a huge hit in 1991 that prompted much discussion in college classes I taught back then, is repeating over and again for the minute or two I am inside the store:

Here we are now, entertain us!

Likely caused much discussion in classes on many campuses. These were the years marked by reports of student protests and altercations with police all across the country, not for any military reason or call for social justice, but, as they chanted while smashing windows at the University of New Hampshire, and as the Beastie Boys urged some five years earlier:

You got to fight for your right to party!

But back to the song that near knocked me out of Happy Sweets (name changed to protect the oblivious): Yes, I knew its title and the album it’s on, the name of the band and the singer/songwriter. Years later, or eight years ago, my son-in-law was a sound editor on the documentary film, Cobain: Montage of Heck.

I recall the speculation after Kurt Cobain’s suicide that “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was intended to taunt his audience, his own fans. I took no side in that, and played the role of diffusing heated arguments between students taking opposing sides–after igniting them in the first place by bringing the subject up.

Few of my students thought his suicide stemmed from his frustration at watching head-banging fans from his perch on stage night after night, and I didn’t debate that possibility other than reading various newspaper commentaries at the time. The most telling commentary came from the song itself:

Load up on guns, bring your friends.

It’s fun to lose and to pretend.

She’s over-bored and self-assured.

Oh no, I know a dirty word.

If that’s not suicidal, it sure is nihilistic. But I pressed neither word, nor did I pounce on the call for guns or about what might be “fun to lose and to pretend.” Instead, I honed in on the one word in that stanza implied by the conundrum of “Here we are now, entertain us!” and insisted:

Whenever you say that you are “bored,” you are conveying nothing about the subject, no matter what it is. But you are revealing something about yourself, and it’s not flattering.

The way they looked at me, you’d have thought I was speaking Norwegian. Those were also the years, after all, that some popular TV show started the fad of yelling Booooorr-ing whenever someone didn’t like or want to do something. Nowadays, a remark like that might get me fired for making students “uncomfortable.” Luckily, I still had a fair share who enjoyed debate, and, not to brag, but I always had a way to lighten things up. In this case I actually sang the end of it:

Maybe “Here we are now” was Nirvana’s answer to Jethro Tull’s “Really don’t mind if you sit this one out.”

My affinity for Tull was always well-known after the unlikely–and shocking to hard-rock fans–presentation of the very first Grammy for Heavy Metal in 1989 went to that venerable, eclectic band of my ge-ge-generation. Got a lot of mileage lording that over the Metallica and AC/DC fans in my classes. I can still picture the seething face on the husky redhead looking like he was ready to kill me. I would have deserved it.*

But tempers cooled, and by the time I linked the opening line of Thick as a Brick to the refrain of “Teen Spirit,” they laughed the laugh of people who just heard an accuser accuse himself of the same accusation. Did Cobain think his music just a whisper met by shouts of the incurably deaf? That would make a guy scream.

Ah, the memories! At Happy Sweets, none of the staff seem to notice my arrival or departure, and there is no way they can hear my steps or the roll of the dolly. All of them have their backs to me as they place new posters on the wall with pictures of happy parents and children smiling over their shoulders. Not wanting to risk anything that might stall, even for a moment, my getting back outside, I remain silent all the way to the door. No question the first time I ever rushed out of air-conditioning to return to what GBH’s Henry Santoro likes to call a “hot, hazy, and henry day.”

At the last moment, between the “Here we are now” and the “entertain us!” of the twelfth or twentieth time I hear the lyric, I hear, “How are ya?”

Turning my head back, just enough to pass for polite, I step out the door and hear my voice answer, “I don’t know.”

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Stills from an animated sequence of Cobain: Monatge of Heck:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4229236/

*https://loudwire.com/metallica-gentlemanly-1989-grammy-loss-jethro-tull/#:~:text=The%20nominees%20that%20year%20were%20AC%2FDC%20%28Blow%20Up,the%20viewing%20audience%2C%20but%20other%20musicians%20as%20well.

What’s in Your Library?

Call this an update.

With few exceptions, newspaper columnists avoid writing follow-ups or sequels to what we put in print.

We’re a century and a half removed from the days of Dickens and Twain when writers could serialize their work. As Boston University professor Natalie McKnight, author of Idiots, Madmen and Other Prisoners in Dickens, reports:

[Dickens] characters would become part of their lives, and readers couldn’t wait to get the next installment. There’s the famous (and true) story of people standing on the docks in New York City waiting for ships coming in with the next installment of The Old Curiosity Shop, desperate to find out whether Little Nell would live.

Most renditions of that story tell us that the shipment of magazines was not on board, and a riot ensued. Ah, the days when the public craved the written word!

Today, we write stand-alone commentaries with ever decreasing word-counts to accommodate a rapidly disappearing attention span. So let me simply state that last summer I wrote one headlined, “Weeding our reading,” regarding a recent policy of public libraries across the USA that took hold at the Newburyport Public Library.

Makes no difference now whether or not “weeding” is related to the head librarian’s recently announced resignation. What does matter is that a replacement be more committed to reading than to weeding.

Put another way, in a bookstore, you might expect a pop-culture novelist such as Brad Meltzer to have ample shelf space while literary giants from the 19th and early 20th centuries have but one or two volumes of their best-known titles. That’s commerce.

Nothing wrong with libraries providing everything Meltzer ever wrote, but shouldn’t there be a commitment to writers who have stood the test of time and helped shape American history and culture?

The NPL’s answer to this question–de facto or otherwise–is an emphatic no. And it has been “no” for at least a year when I started noticing that directly under the eight or nine novels of Brad Meltzer would be just one or two by Herman Melville.

Fiction is arranged alphabetically, so this is easy to find and see for yourself. A week ago this day, you likely saw two. Of course, that assumes that they put the partial anthology I returned the day before—a gift of the late and beloved former mayor, Edward G. Molin—on the shelf rather than weeding it. The other is an unweedable but highly readable copy of Moby-Dick.

No Billy Budd, no Confidence Man, no Redburn, no Piazza Tales that include “Bartleby the Scrivener,” “Benito Cereno,” and “The Enchanted Isles.”

Other valued, spirited literary chroniclers of American history and geography fare not much better at NPL. Of course, if I based my case on, say, Willa Cather or John Steinbeck, a narrow mind might interrupt me to ask: What do Cather’s O Pioneers! on the Plains or Steinbeck’s In Dubious Battle in California have to do with an historic Massachusetts seaport?

With Melville, the question answers itself.

Imagine going to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown and finding a few slight mentions of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, Satchel Paige and Roberto Clemente, while images of popular players in this year’s line-ups dominate the hallowed halls of America’s pastime. What chance would Louis Sockalexis or Josh Gibson have of being known at all?

That’s NPL.

Fortunately for Newburyport, all of those titles are available at Jabberwocky Bookshop which, while commercial, has dedicated itself to literature of all tastes, ages, and fields.

Wish I could recommended Illume, a new bookstore in Market Square, but its “highly curated” minimalist vibe is 180 degrees from Jabberwocky’s relaxed keep-browsing ambience.

Single copies of books face you from the shelves, each with a handwritten one-line recommendation, mostly pithy and memorable, such as Winston Churchill calling Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels “the one book I’d want to take with me to Purgatory.”

But then you see All Quiet on the Western Front named “one of the greatest books ever written,” and you might stagger out onto the sidewalk wondering which is worse: A bookstore offering recommendations by Donald Trump or a library curated by Bottom Line, Inc.

Yes, let’s give the library credit for its many educational and other civic programs, for its esteemed archival center, and for featuring books lately banned in schools elsewhere in the country.

Still, the brakes must be slammed on weeding done for the sake of a bottom line as much as for cultural conformity.

After all, isn’t a strict adherence to a bottom line itself cultural conformity?

One of Moby-Dick’s most descriptive chapters concludes that “Nantucket is no Illinois.” Today, the NPL must show that Newburyport is no more Walmart than it is Tallahassee.

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Don’t know how architectural groups rate “best” and “worst” when they decide their top and bottom lists and give out awards, but the section that connects the modern addition on the left to the Federalist Tracy House on the right deserves at least an honorable mention. Inside, the transition is seamless, and the entire building feels as one.
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/newburyport-public-library-52-squares-of-north-country-unfading-black-roofing-slate–391250286359115418/

Jokers Need Not Apply

When the supplemental checks ceased some 18 months after most places were shuttered for the plague, I realized I had to get back to work to make ends meet.

Wouldn’t take much, as I’m already on Social Security, but I’m one of those who, let’s just say, joined the workforce late. As I tell my friends, I had my retirement in my twenties, so now I must work till I drop.

Fair enough. Problem was that the cinema I’d been with since 1998 changed hands during the shutdown. When it finally reopened with so many restrictions on attendance, I couldn’t imagine how the new owners could possibly afford an employee. So I never asked.

I had also been driving a delivery van for a chocolate and fudge company that hadn’t called. Since I had already asked for a reduced schedule before the shutdown, they may have figured that I had finessed a painless, de facto, “never-can-say-goodbye” retirement.

Was it just lucky coincidence that my third gig at a Renaissance festival began on the very day that the COVID payments ended? That’s just eight weekends, but it covered me for three months. I bought time.

And I finessed it. With my year-round employment seemingly off the table, I recalled a previous life–1986 to 2002 to be specific–when jobs began just after Labor Day, broke for the holidays, began again after New Year’s, and ended with sessions called “summer” even though they were over by the Fourth. If you’re good at riddles, you recognize the life of a teacher. In my case, the adjunct circuit for college writing instructors.

This allowed me to make myself known to the heads of English departments at the ten or so remaining campuses within a forty-mile radius where I did not burn bridges 20 years ago. By applying after Labor Day, I was able to delay any commitment until after New Year’s while letting them know I’d be ready on a moment’s notice.

Bizarre as it seems, that’s how a lot of that scheduling was done back in my day. According to the five dept. heads I heard from, that’s how it’s still done. They even gave me specific dates in January 2022 to get back in touch.

I never did. Two weeks after the start of the renfaire, the Screening Room brought me back for a night a week. Since they, a married couple, can double-team on busy weekends, and since all theaters require technical preparations and book work on Thursdays and Fridays, we settled on Wednesdays. With that, I’d need just one class each semester, the Tuesday-Thursday format always preferred by adjuncts, a far cry from the four, two each at two schools covering five days and who knows how many miles, that most adjuncts juggle.

That need disappeared two weeks after the faire ended. With the holiday season about to start, I recalled the various friends and relatives of the chocolate company’s owners showing up to make various special deliveries, mostly large orders for businesses to give their employees. A few of those would get me to January, so I dropped in.

“How would you like a regular Thursday route?”

“You mean year round?”

“Yes.”

“Yes?”

“Yes.”

“Yes!”

My enthusiasm amused him, but he had no way of knowing what was behind it. He thought he was offering me a part-time job, but what he really gave me was a ticket to avoid a return to the classroom.

At dinner on that Thursday in late November, 2021, I was most thankful for that.

Thankful for my own sake, rueful for what it says about all else.

When I began teaching on the adjunct circuit, and before that in the early Eighties when I taught as a graduate assistant in South Dakota, classrooms hummed with curiosity and expectation, engaging and vibrant. Maybe it was just me and my own bring-back-the-Sixties wildness, and I was too naive to notice anything else. Maybe it was having students brand new to college taking their first classes outside of their hometowns and tight-knit high schools.

In South Dakota it all began when students smiled and smirked and laughed openly at my Boston accent. When they heard me laugh back, it was all I needed: “What’ll your parents say when you tell them you have an English teacher who can’t pronounce the letter R?”

In one class, some wag shot back: “They’ll say you should be disqualified from correcting our spelling!”

I knew he would do well. I also realized that, with or without a regional accent, if I could make a class laugh, the subject would teach itself.

And that’s how it went through the Eighties and into the Nineties when college and universities for some bureaucratic reasons started making everything standard and formal. I call it “The Yawning of the Age of Appropriate.” There was no room for improvisation and even less tolerance for any challenges that might be out of any student’s “comfort zone.” Education at its best was out of bounds.

Laughter? Better be in bounds, and those bounds are small. You could make all but one laugh, but if that one took it literally, took offense, you were toast.

I was toast, and when I asked at a faculty meeting, “Is this a college or a nursing home?” I was burned toast. It was a slow process, and I saw the effect in the classrooms where students had slowed down, perhaps because they knew that they were the ones being processed.

Since then, reports from friends in academe have not been encouraging. Without realizing it at the time, I did leave just in time to avoid the advent of cellphones and ringtones sounding in classrooms. Never mind hurting a student’s feelings, I’d be hurting their noses and knocking out teeth if I or another student were interrupted by one of those–or I’d make a wisecrack about it and hurt cellphoner’s feelings.

In academe as I left it and as I hear it described today, spontaneity means suicide, and there’s no room for serendipity on the syllabus.

Argue that if you will, academe has become no country for this old man. Despite that, when it came time to find work a few years ago, I figured I’d silence that sound when I heard it.

And so the emails went out and a few were answered. What happened next was blogged in real time under headlines “Call Me Rip” and “I Are Not Stupid.” The first was my reaction to technological requirements that did not exist 20 years ago–the same amount of time that Rip Van Winkle took his snooze before awakening to a new world. The second my response to what are called “preferred pronouns,” in which I propose e (e, es) as a non-binary option to avoid the awkward confusion of a plural used for a singular for an otherwise identifiable individual.

Had I gone though with it and made those phone calls in January 2022, I’d have been tempted to change any requirement that I state “preferred pronouns” to “preferred adjectives.” Why not? If people can possess pronouns–as in my pronouns–why not other parts of speech?

To this day, I wish I had, as I imagine expressions on the faces of Ph Ds named Diane and Michael who felt the need (or obeyed a requirement) to add, respectively, “she, her, hers” and “he, him, his” to their names upon receiving my application with preferred adjectives: witty, erudite, articulate, charming, handsome.

Would they at least laugh before throwing it in the trash? Or is laughter “inappropriate”?

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