Our Lady of Good Voyage

Ask and I did receive.

A few days ago I posted a review of the Hopper exhibit at the Cape Ann Museum in Gloucester, Mass., in which I described a painting by his wife, Jo N. Hopper, while admitting regret that I could not find it on-line.

Kind thanks to my friend, Tom Febonio of Rockport, a quaint fishing village right there at the tip of Cape Ann with Gloucester, who found it in a review of the exhibit by the Washington Post:

What fascinates here is the bend of the telephone pole toward the cross, as if drawn by a magnet, and the readiness of the Madonna’s outstretched hand to hold it up.

From a modern perspective, there may not be much more to say of it, but one century ago, Jo Hopper was looking at a brand new technology with an infrastructure that literally towered over the towers that congregations–that people–built to worship their God. When Europeans first settled in North America, most every village had a rule that nothing could be built anywhere nearly as high as a church steeple. Did Jo Hopper see an offer of collaboration or an imminent revolution? Was the hand raised in acceptance or resistance? And what of the identical T shape?

Since this is a much closer look at the church than was the painting I posted with the review, it’s worth noting the Spanish Revivalist architecture that we associate with the American Southwest and which, in this case, jolts many an unsuspecting New Englander visiting Gloucester for the first time.

Originally built in 1892 to serve a large Portuguese population that came to work in the local fisheries, it burned down in 1914, but was rebuilt by the 1920s when the Hoppers began spending summer vacations on Cape Ann.

The new church is nearly a replica of the Santa Maria Madalena church on one of the Azores islands from which most of the immigrants came. Our Lady of Good Voyage was added to the list of National Register of Historic Places in 1990.

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Postscript: In addition to the fishing industry, many Azorean natives joined both the whaling and shipping industries, as Herman Melville tells us in a magazine piece from the 1850s titled “The ‘Gees” (with a hard G). Following descriptions that are mostly laudatory–including an unsurpassable work-ethic–and at other times reflective of the prejudices of Melville’s day, the summary line is more characteristic of Ishmael, his open-to-all and dismissive-of-none narrator of that novel he penned at about the same time:

’Gees are occasionally to be encountered in our seaports, but more particularly in Nantucket and New Bedford. But these ’Gees are not the ’Gees of Fogo. That is, they are no longer green ’Gees. They are sophisticated ’Gees, and hence liable to be taken for naturalized citizens badly sunburnt.

Painting by Alpini Gionatan of the volcano on one of the Azores, the main cause of emmigration.
https://www.inkroci.com/culture_movie/the-stories/classics/herman-melville.html

Hoppers on Cape Ann

When New Englanders say The Cape, it’s always understood to mean that imposing arm of a sandbar that flexes its bicep in the Atlantic and shakes a clenched fist at the Old World.

Those of us who live north of Boston are fine with that, as we play host to enough tourists who know of the beaches, the promontories, the lighthouses, the docks, the harbors, the woodlands, the trails, the fishing villages, the clam shacks, the orchards, the farmland, the castles, the theater troupes, the dance companies, the music ensembles of Massachusetts’ Other Cape that reaches from the coast like a hand open to all.

While many artists have captured the beauty of Cape Cod on canvas, it’s hard to imagine that any have so thoroughly and repeatedly brought it to life as Edward Hopper (1882-1967) has done with Cape Ann.

May be hard to think of the creator of Nighthawks as a landscape (or seascape) painter, but the proof is on exhibit now through Oct.16 at the Cape Ann Museum in Gloucester, a thriving fishing port that Hopper and his wife, fellow painter, frequent model, and life-long muse, Jo Nivison Hopper, frequently visited in the Roaring 20s.

Any scape is equally misleading for an exhibit with so many paintings of buildings, featuring architecture as diverse as the dual towers of the Portuguese church and the mansard roof of the home of a wealthy merchant.

But the overall impression is not so much of wood and bricks, boats and railroad cars, streets and water, or even trees and rock, harbor and surf.

All those subjects are on canvas, making the exhibit well worth the view. But Edward Hopper & Cape Ann: Illuminating an American Landscape is most memorable for the lighting in which we see the buildings and boats. Hopper was the artist, but Cape Ann is the star of the show.

*House by ‘Squam River, Gloucester,* Edward Hopper

Tempting to say the show was stolen by Jo N. Hopper as she signed her name to the ten or so canvases the filled a middle area surrounded by her husband’s work. A telephone pole curving toward the church steeple strikes me as an essay I dare not write, although a few draughts of Fisherman’s Ale at Blackburn’s Tavern may change my mind.

Her husband’s portrait of her is memorable for the ingenious angle at which he took it, and her self-portrait well past middle-age fascinates us with an inevitable comparison to another of her as a teenager. Called The Art Student, this was by Robert Henri who taught at the art school where Josephine Nivison and Edward Hopper met. According to the paragraph on the wall, she appears as “a little human question mark.”

But there’s no question over how either painter regarded Cape Ann. Every canvas is a statement, an offer made by an open hand.

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https://www.niceartgallery.com/Robert-Henri/The-Art-Student-Aka-Miss-Josephine-Nivison.html

No photos allowed at the Cape Ann Museum, and Jo N’s painting of Our Lady of Good Voyage with the telephone pole leaning toward it is nowhere to be found on-line. (If you can, please let me know,) Here’s one she did of the Portuguese church from another angle.

Prior to Cape Ann Museum, the only Hopper I had seen up close was *Nighthawks* at the Institute of Art in Chicago in 2008. Photo by Michael Boer: https://www.flickr.com/people/onewe/

A painting by British painter Phil Lockwood (born 1941) in which every window is Edward Hopper’s painting, even the bar-cafeteria is a Hopper.

A Rye Toast to Salem 1691

Yes, I’ve joined the cast of Salem’s Cry Innocent, but I’m tempted to plead Rye Guilty.

As kids, every American hears of Salem’s witch trials, and every October reminds us of them in living black and orange. An official holiday or not, Halloween is Salem’s night to moonshine.

Missing here is why. We know what: An estimated 150 people were imprisoned for witchcraft. At least 19 adults, most of them women, were executed—though we rarely hear of the two dogs also put down.

In lieu of any scientific reasons, all of the hallucinations, the convulsions, “St. Anthony’s Dance,” the skin lesions, the screaming and erratic behavior are attributed to the devil.

I’d say all of the mischief as well, but one theory holds that a Rev. Parris pushed some accusations to acquire vacated land. Another emphasizes the panic caused by a smallpox epidemic. Both, however, may be called pretexts for exploiting or misinterpreting teenage girls acting, looking, and sounding abnormally, often with menace.

For nearly three centuries, no scientific reason was offered until 1976 when a doctoral student at Renssalaer Polytechnic Institute noticed that similar outbreaks occurred earlier in various parts of Europe, all of them with identical symptoms suffered mostly by young girls. What these regions had in common were crops of rye, a grain then far more common to diets, and exceedingly wet seasons prior to the outbreak.

That sent Linnda Caporael, who would complete her doctorate at RPI, into the diaries of Salem villager Samuel Sewall who noted a wet, warm spring of 1691 followed by a hot, stormy summer.

Though it went unnoticed through most of the 18th Century, the excess moisture caused the growth of ergots—small, purple bulbs—on rye grain. Farmers likely thought nothing of it, may not have even noticed it, as they harvested and later milled the crop. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica’s website:

Since medical knowledge was sparse, the presence of darker shoots on rye was probably thought to be the product of overexposure to the sun.

Not only is it toxic, but hallucinogenic. The young girls, with their not-yet-fully-developed immune systems, started acting out late in 1691, and the hysteria was in full swing by year’s end. Almost all of these cases, Caporael found, were on the west side of Salem Village, where there was considerable marsh compared to the rocky east side. Whereas rye was a “common crop,” harvested by and for the immediate community rather than individuals, this fit her theory. Most of the hearings and trials were held in 1692, coming to an abrupt end, Britannica tells us, “quite simply because Salem ran out of ergot-contaminated grain.”

Caporael’s finding has been rejected by some historians who point out that, even in the 17th century, midwives knew how to harness ergot for inducing labor. Says one:

(T)he visions seem to come and go with the afflicted in ways that are more controlled than a hallucination would cause… [E]rgotism leads to gangrene and there is no documentation of the accusers having gangrenous limbs–even while other symptoms (admittedly similar…) are written about with detail.

Since ergotism was unknown at the time, Cry Innocent has nothing to do with it. So I’m well offstage and away from the cast when I ask: Does an outbreak in one place have to duplicate every symptom in another to be considered the same, or even related? As Britannica tells us:

With the exception of a few events likely triggered by groupthink and the power of suggestion, behavior exhibited in 1692 fits the bill of rye-induced ergotism…

Perhaps it was ergotism that triggered the groupthink and manipulation. Perhaps an American strain lighter than that which produced gangrene in Europe. As always, when you mix history and science you get theory, never to be 100% pinned down and always ripe for debate.

No doubt due to the immediate opposition in 1976, Caporael’s report was not widely circulated. There may have been public resistance as well. After all, as any child will tell you—and as any actor or director will quickly agree—villains are the highlight of any story. Satan versus ergot bulbs on rye grain? No contest!

Be that as may, count me as among those who espouse the theory. To a child of the Sixties, the hallucinatory properties seem close enough, and it is more than glaring that no explanation other than Satan has ever been offered.

The tide turned in October of 2012 when Discover Magazine published an essay comparing Salem’s trials to the Vardo trials in northern Norway throughout the 17th Century:

Hundreds of women were accused, and 92 burned at the stake for the crime of witchcraft. Ergot poisoning has also been suspected in several “dancing mania” events in Europe, in which masses of people danced randomly in the street for hours.

Two months later, Live Science offered an irresistible parallel to account for Santa’s annual trips around the world: Hallucinogenic mushrooms in northern Finland, a place with very few people, but many of them shepherds. About as close to the North Pole as you can get, this is where the reindeer, if not the antelope, play. After bites of mushrooms, shephards saw them fly.

Another character we think of as myth, is actually based on a historical figure. According to one of a handful of theories, he used laced bread to entice children to leave a Saxon village in 1284. If true, then for the Pied Piper—my ancestor so to speak—the music was more analogous to taking loaves from the oven than to the baking of the hallucinogenic bread he fed those kids. His flute was an aural oven mitt.

Medical News Today could have had him in mind when it reported that LSD “is not the same as ergot fungus but contains some similar compounds.” The magazine did include the Salem trials in an extended diagnosis last year, offsetting the poison with a report of extracts with medicinal value for migraines and childbirth–as well as current research for Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.

Even Bon Appetit served up Salem’s contaminated rye, though it should have changed its name to Mal Appetit. One wonders if they were using the story to steer us toward French baguettes.

As for me, my sandwiches between performances will still be on dark rye. After the summer we’ve had, it may be all I need to stay in character.

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Detail of TRIAL OF TWO WITCHES by Howard Pyle (1853-1911).
http://www.granger.com.

Sources:

https://www.britannica.com/story/how-rye-bread-may-have-caused-the-salem-witch-trials

https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/this-hallucinogenic-fungus-might-be-behind-the-salem-witch-trials

https://www.bonappetit.com/entertaining-style/pop-culture/article/how-a-bad-rye-crop-might-have-caused-the-salem-witch-trials

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/ergot-poisoning#history

https://www.livescience.com/25731-magic-mushrooms-santa-claus.html

Pay the Piper! A Street-Performer’s Public Life in America’s Privatized Times (2014), page 17.

Don’t It Always Seem to Go

Possibly the most quoted song of all the Sixties classics, it is the target of ridicule in a supermarket where I make my rounds today. Joni booms from the ceiling speakers as I walk in:

They’ve paved paradise and put up a parking lot! Ooooooooooh, ya, ya, ya…

One young deli clerk’s smirking laugh nearly makes his wisecrack redundant: “So, if we don’t pave paradise, where are we supposed to park our cars? Up in trees?”

He appears to be answering someone in a back room, and I do not catch the remark that prompts or follows his car-wrecktorical questions. Indeed, I have no idea If I’m hearing one side of a debate or one half of unanimous condemnation.

Before I can learn which, the clerk is summoned away, leaving me no chance to put my quarter–or my credit card as today’s well-paved world now has it–into any meter of Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi.”

Just as well. The comment is so unprecedented, at least to me, that I’m at a loss for words. There’s a reason that it’s been among most quoted musical lines for over fifty years and counting. Just last month, I headlined a blog, “Of Paradise & Parking Lots,” and last week it appeared in my Newburyport Daily News column, “Best-Sellers R Us,” as a metaphor for the recent, indiscriminate, hi-tech-driven practice of “weeding” in public libraries.

At the deli counter today I feel as if I’m hearing JFK’s “Ask what you can do” singed in the cynicism of “what’s in it for me?” There’s no question that the Zeitgeist of the Sixties–from Joni to JFK, or from Kerouac to MLK–seems quaint to those in the thrall of America’s Algorithms-Über-Alles 21st Century, but Joni’s “birds and bees”? Please!

Half a century later, our modern day technocrats keep putting up parking lots without gloating over the loss of paradise, or claiming that those of us wanting to preserve it are a bunch of losers. Rather, they merely insist, no matter the evidence to the contrary, that the more parking lots, the better.

By now, they may be right. When Mitchell wrote that song, shopping malls were a new concept. Up until then, most shopping for clothes, hardware, and household items was done downtown in city or town centers. Groceries were purchased at corner stores in most neighborhoods where you also found barber shops, pizza shops, and fish markets. Most all businesses were owned and run by families who lived in the town; what they spent, they spent in the town. In effect, all of us spent what we spent on each other on each other.

That was the America in which Mitchell, a Canadian, arrived only to see us chain ourselves–in both senses of the word–to shopping malls. They were promoted as convenient under the banner of “one-stop shopping,” and it was easy for the corporate owners in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Tokyo, or anywhere else with skyscrapers to undersell the mom-and-pops downtown and around the corner.

In the winter, there was the added advantage of remaining indoors as you went from store to store. To make it even more inviting, mall designers placed a few chairs in the corridors, and, as my slightly older cousin enthused at the time, “had music coming out of the ceilings” while she and her girlfriends strolled those corridors in a time-honored ritual now facilitated by a controlled environment.

Because so many stores expected so many customers, and because they were all being built on outskirts of towns and cities, massive parking lots were required. No more walking to get a haircut or a pizza or fish-n-chips. No more bus rides downtown.

Often, these were open fields where kids played games, woods with trails where kids went exploring, parks where people of all ages walked, sat, picnicked, romanced, meditated, dreamt, thought long thoughts, asked what they might do for…

This is what Joni Mitchell saw paved.

Not sure if it’s even possible to communicate that to a teenaged deli clerk today. I doubt that such variables would fit any app on his cellphone, nor do I think he’d ever give up the option of one-stop-shopping for a return to mom-and-pop businesses any more than would his parents or his parents’ generation. And, so, yes, he–they, we–must have ample parking.

“Big Yellow Taxi” was a huge, instant hit playing all over the radio, AM and FM, when I was a teenage clerk in a downtown delicatessen. I loved it as much as anyone, especially the line more than one female friend at Salem State liked to sing from time to time:

You don’t know what you got till it’s gone…

Chances are they had in mind the loss of doomed relationships rather than the loss of Mother Nature to concrete and asphalt, but I was so vain, I never thought they sang about me.

That may be why I shouldn’t fault the deli clerk I heard today for laughing at it. The last laugh, after all, is his. Delicatessens such as where I worked were pretty much erased by the supermarkets such as where he works. All made possible by a few football fields’ worth of pavement.

Ridicule?

That’s the fate of all prophets.

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Joni Mitchell performing at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival in New Orleans, Lousiana on May 6, 1995. Photo Credit: Ebet Roberts/Redferns
https://www.billboard.com/music/rock/joni-mitchell-book-morning-glory-on-the-vine-8502109/

Forever Young on Dove Street

If you love block parties and already have a 2024 calendar, mark the first Saturday in August to put yourself in Newburyport, Mass., specifically on Dove Street, along the road that leads west from downtown past the US 1 bridge.

The entire street will be blocked off, so you’ll need to park at some distance, but be sure to wear or bring your dancing shoes. The band that played last night had everyone of all ages romping so long, so so fast, and so joyously, that, before they went home, the Dove St. resident who booked them rebooked them for next year.

By now, I should give you the name of the band, but what we heard last night was the birth of one. And it’s fair to say that anyone on Dove St. last night is hoping they’ll soon have a name we’ll hear for a long time to come.

Five students from Berklee College of Music who barely know each other arrived in three cars and played for the first time as an ensemble. My friend on Dove St. teaches at Berklee and months ago asked one of her students, a guitarist, to form a band. Apparently, he took his sweet time. At least two of his recruits had to be introduced while setting up their mics and amplifiers. No doubt if I heard this ahead of time, I’d give you a flippant, “What can go wrong?”

Answer: Nothing, nothing at all and far from it. The repertoire featured irresistible dance tunes of Michael Jackson, the Bee Gees, Stevie Wonder, Sly and the Family Stone, and many 80s hits that this Boomer vaguely recognized but could never identify. Friends gave me titles such as “Up Town” and “Pump You Up” that may have made me feel as old forty years ago as they made me feel young last night.

Lead guitarist Fletcher Medler, Drummer Nick White, and Bassist Leo Weisskoff were steady, precise, and vibrant from start to finish. White & Weisskoff offered solos satisfying and sharp, as did Medler on several songs while maintaining eye-contact with his new band-mates to call shots that would make anyone think they’d been together for years.

Two vocalists, Christian Donayre & Sophia Griswold kept their eyes on us, swapping leads or singing duets, with gestures, mannerisms, and inflections reminiscent of the 60s Motown groups, as did Donayre’s vocal range, from “Billie Jean” to “Stayin’ Alive.” But what sets this as-yet unnamed band apart from all others I’ve ever heard was Griswold ‘s trombone.

Yes, a trombone! She didn’t play it on every song, or even on most of them. When she did, she mostly accented Weisskoff’s bass or Donayre’s voice. But she had a few astonishing solos and on two occasions pranced her way into the dancers, mugging if she was going to move that slide right past their ears or stab their feet.

Behind the band, a driveway led to a fence, past which you could see people in the backyard of a home on Kent Street moving around. When Griswold launched into her first solo on “Party On,” they all gathered to look over the fence and down the driveway wondering what on earth they were hearing.

For a moment I thought I was at a Renaissance festival. The little kids started bouncing toward her as if to put their faces in the bell. A girl in a small wheelchair mimicked Griswold’s arm motion with the slide as her dad swayed the chair from side to side. One small boy got down on the pavement and started breakdancing. A young mother and her four-year-old daughter, in identical dresses, danced on both sides as the hopping trombonist literally blew past them. When the band launched into the always rousing Bay State favorite, “Sweet Caroline,” there were as many fists pumping the air as I’ve seen at any of King Richard’s jousts

This is the last night of the annual Yankee Homecoming celebration, and so the city is flush with visitors here to see the fireworks. For me the pyrotechnics were anti-climactic, even if the finale was the most intense and bright white I’ve ever heard or seen. But the Berklee Five did resume for just a few numbers when they sky went dark and the crowd came back up Dove Street, ending with a just-as-bright but soothing mix of “Everybody Wants to Save the World” and “Isn’t She Lovely?”

Before that, as the partiers returned, they surprised us with the Bob Dylan song that begins, “May God bless and keep you always.” A brilliant choice, the only slow dance of the night, to which the children and their young parents may not attach any emotional or generational significance. How could they?

For one who heard that song when it was new, the title strikes me as the ideal name for this unique, upbeat, makeshift band:

Forever Young.

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Sophia Griswold, wearing a headband given her by the small girl seen over her left shoulder, trombones her way across Dove Street.
All photos by Patricia Peknik.

Dove Street and friends awaiting the next tune.

Sound Check. L2R: Nick White’s nose, Fletcher Medler’s back and right forearm, and then all of Leo Weisskoff, Sophia Griswold, and Christian Donayre.

Both Sides of the Mouth*

Yes, Nao Trinidad was everything Newburyport’s tireless public servant Bob Cronin claims in his letter of thanks to all involved.

Especially satisfying for me were crowds flocking to the replica of a 500-year-old ship during the very week two other letters faulted me for clinging to the 1840s.

So much they don’t know. For instance, my blog includes 20 reviews in the past 24 months of books from the “New Releases” display in the Newburyport Public Library’s lobby.

Before that, I offered NPL eight links to start a website feature with “reviews of books, especially new or recent releases, written by patrons.”

On June 7th, 2021, came the then-assistant, now-acting director’s reply:

“Thank you for your suggestion and if we decide to highlight reviews from community members, we will advertise this option. I took a quick tour of your site and you’ve done a great job with the reviews!”

No room for patron reviews, but for at least three weeks NPL’s site did prominently display the harassment charges made by the NPL staff against eight volunteers.

Daily News readers saw it June 14. The volunteers’ response the next day was no more welcome on NPL’s site than patrons’ reviews of new books.

On June 27, I went to City Hall to inquire about the propriety of airing dirty laundry on a city-sponsored site.

One City Hall official agreed to meet with me, but while closing his office door behind us, said pointedly: “I don’t want to talk to you, but I’ll hear what you have to say.”

He saw nothing wrong with the NPL posting, so I focused on the charge that the volunteers “accept money” from patrons. Quoting the vols’ rebuttal that this “simply refers to taking a quarter for a Xerox copy,” I asked: “So that’s all it is?”

He nodded, “Yes.”

“So, even though you know it’s just pocket change, you see nothing wrong with their posting the insinuation on a city-sponsored website?”

He denied this made any insinuation.

“But it gives the impression of something much larger.”

“It’s money.”

“One cent is worth Fort Knox?”

He shrugged.

“You see nothing ethically wrong in this?”

His glare was indifferent. As he said up front, he didn’t want to talk to me.

Later that day, I described that look to a friend who replied: “If you want to see it again, come to Salisbury Town Hall.”

Three weeks later, I crossed the river to watch an entire Board of Selectmen look indifferently at citizens who spoke against their appointment of Samson Racioppi to the town’s Housing Board in 2018.

Prior to 2018, Racioppi had a well-documented history of promoting anti-gay and anti-Semitic groups, but no one else applied, and the board preferred not to know.

Now, however, Racioppi’s commitment to what ought to be called “Trump Uber Alles” is well-known:

He hired buses to bring people to the January 6 insurrection, organized protests in support of Wisconsin gun-boy Kyle Rittenhouse, and led the anti-gay parade in Boston in 2019.

Racioppi caught wind of the opposition and withdrew his application for renewal, but a few speakers, accompanied by loud applause, made sure that his would-be appeasers did not escape unstained.

Wind? A winter’s worth of Nor’easters pound Salisbury’s sand with no more ferocity and force than that with which citizen-activist Monique Greilich slammed the board members’ “shameful” tolerance of Racioppi and their “cowardice” in not speaking up long ago.

Board members were visibly shocked when she informed the small but packed hall that Racioppi would’ve missed the deadline to reapply had not one member contacted him back in June.

Greilich’s masterstroke was to leave the one unnamed. All had been silent, making all complicit, and so her conclusion was as sweeping as damning: “Shame on all of you!”

Thus, a hatemonger was erased in Salisbury just as dirty laundry, after at least three embarrassing weeks, was deleted in Newburyport.

Problems solved? No, because those responsible for both still call the shots. Best we can do, as Greilich said when it was over, is:

“(B)e willing to stick your neck out, take the heat, and persevere.”

She could just as well have said that of Magellan’s trip around the world. Why else would we flock to celebrate his ship five centuries later right here in the Mouth of the Merrimack.

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*Readers, both casual and faithful, of “Mouth of the River” may recognize passages from at least three recent blogs. Originally, this was intended as a column in the Newburyport Daily News, and it has become the first column–of about 500–I have submitted to that paper in forty years that has been rejected. Editor says that the dialogue with the mayor’s chief of staff “feels like a personal beef” and cannot be substantiated. I offered it without the official’s name (which I have kept out of this version) and without direct quotes (which I have restored). Still no go. I still maintain that, in every version, nothing personal is said, that it is very specifically about a posting on a city-sponsored website that is itself unsubstantiated with any specifics. And anyway, there’s not much to substantiate about one and two word responses. As the official also said in that meeting, speaking of the volunteers, they are free to respond. As of now, so is he.

https://www.tideschart.com/United-States/Massachusetts/Essex-County/Plum-Island-Merrimack-River-Entrance/

A Note to Subscribers

All these forty years I’ve been writing columns for the Newburyport Daily News, one of the most, perhaps the most frequently asked question is, Have you ever been censored?

Happily, save for a handful of phrases that I have harmlessly softened at an editor’s request (always for the better I’d later realize), the answer has always been no.

Until now.

Here’s advance notice that tomorrow I will post a blog headlined “Both Sides of the Mouth.” You may recognize passages from at least three recent “Mouth of the River” blogs. Originally intended for the Daily News, it is now the first column–of about 500–the paper has rejected.

Editor says that the dialogue with the mayor’s chief of staff “feels like a personal beef” and cannot be substantiated. I countered that nothing personal is said, that it is very specifically about a posting on a city-sponsored website that is itself unsubstantiated with any specifics. And anyway, there’s not much to substantiate about one and two word responses.

Still, no go.

And so I intend to post it as a blog with hopes of circulating it on a Newburyport website or a local page on social media. That requires a link. As the chief-of-staff himself said of people smeared on a city site, they are free to respond. Well, so is he.

As consolation for those hoping for something brand new, here’s a response to “The Return,” a new short story by Joyce Carol Oates just published in the new (August) issue of Harper’s. Yes, it is indirectly related to the controversy hinted at above, more directly to two blogs I have written about “weeding,” now a term of art in libraries across the country, although the story, set in rural New Jersey, does not use the word:

Weeding Our Reading

When the widow in “The Return” (August), wonders what to do with her late husband’s books, I wonder if author Joyce Carol Oates knows her complaint is about a national trend in American libraries called “weeding.”

Says the widow: “Libraries no longer want such special collections, eighteenth and nineteenth-century first editions, classics of science….” As librarians from here in Massachusetts to the west coast have told me, the higher-ups are now using computer programs to show how often a book is checked-out. Books gathering too much dust get weeded; those in demand are available in multiple volumes.

Hence, today, in the Ipswich (Mass.) Public Library, you can count 82 books by Danielle Steele compared to four by Herman Melville, one of them a Modern Library of America edition. His other three MLA entries are not available in Ipswich but can be obtained on interlibrary loan. So much for browsing.

Oates’ widow goes on to say that a library would not accept “the complete works of Charles Darwin, his Life and Letters.” Harper’s readers may think that a part of her prolonged delusion. Not at all. In the past year, the Newburyport (Mass.) Public Library weeded two volumes of The Life and Letters of John Greenleaf Whittier, published in 1895, no matter that Whittier lived barely ten miles from Newburyport and was a friend and sometimes ally of Newburyport native William Lloyd Garrison.

The widow concludes: “The local library is always downsizing, selling books, it’s shocking to me to see the books they sell, priced at a dollar in a bin like something at Walmart.”

As crude as the word is, “weeding” is a euphemism for dumbing down. Republican governors do it with legislation. All public libraries need is an algorithm.

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We call this one “Jack at the Mailbox,” taken at the end of my driveway, March 2006. Photo by Michael Boer: https://www.flickr.com/photos/onewe/albums

Worth More Than Admission

Not much I can add to the unanimous praise for Past Lives that Screening Room patrons have already posted on social media, but I can relay one unlike any I’ve ever heard from one woman who saw it last night.

And to that I’ll add a “don’t be late” for the sake of an opening act unlike any I’ve ever seen.

Regret to say that it plays just one more day, today (Thursday, July 20) at 4:30 and 7:00 pm, after which Oppenheimer will take us out of a world that never ends into one that could end at any time.

Last night in the last minute rush before our last show, I overcharged a woman’s credit card by $20. That’s the difference between the Screening Room’s general admission and senior passbooks, so it wasn’t that noticable. Plus, it was showtime and we were both hustling. Didn’t realize it until after the film started, so I withdrew a $20 bill to hand her as she left.

She and her friend were the only two in the audience who, bless them, sat through the end credits, so she was easy to catch. But when I approached and held out the bill, she said:

“Keep it. That film is worth twenty extra dollars.”

I thought she was joking, but she was choking up as she kept refusing to take it. And so into the theater’s general maintenance fund or an Oscar College Fund it has gone. Let me hasten to add that I do intend to resist any temptation to do this again.

A review? As much as I might like to try, nothing I could conjure up would endorse Past Lives better than that.

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A Muse I Hope I Amused

Hoping for something both local and personal to mark the 40^th anniversary of the Daily News’ “As I See It” column, my wish was granted in the shadow of William Lloyd Garrison’s statue across from City Hall last month.

And I regret it.

News of the passing of Sarah Bodge was as hard to register as her age, 87, was hard to believe, even by those who knew her. And they are many.

For years, and right into early June just three weeks before passing, Sarah served at various local assisted living facilities. Years ago, she helped establish the Salisbury Senior Center’s food pantry.

On this side of the Merrimack, Sarah established BodySense, a most popular beauty shop downtown, in 1973, and ran it until the mid-80s. According to current owner Lisa Gianakakis, Sara remained helpful through the years, “a lovely, most considerate woman.”

Meanwhile, Sara volunteered her service on many of the Port’s civic boards.

In her prime, she was an acrobatic dancer who graced the stages of venues such as NYC’s Apollo, and ever since contributed her artistic vision to arts organizations that perform here in the Port.

I knew her as a long-time, frequent patron of the Screening Room, and without her ever knowing it, I turned her into something else.

Though “As I See It” is now 40—with the venerable Stuart Deane and I the only remaining members of the original cast—I never posted on social media until about ten years ago.

That coincides with the rise of the Tea Party that quickly combined the ugly undercurrents of white nationalism in the Republican Party which soon propelled a crude but charismatic huckster to power in 2016.

And which to this day presents a clear and present danger to this country—most immediately to Black and Jewish people each and every day.

Out of self-assigned necessity, I, a white guy, began writing about race.

At the time, I knew few Black folk. After living seven years in the Dakotas, I’m more familiar with Native Americans than with African-Americans.

And so it was that Sarah Bodge became my muse.

Writers do this all the time. Writing teachers coach students to think of someone whose opinion they value and who knows more than you about the subject. Not someone close who thinks alike, but at some distance they sometimes talk to.

A simple thumbs up would let me know I put enough emphasis in the right places. Her comments filled in what I missed but could file away for next time.

Hoped I’d see her at the reading of Frederick Douglass’ “What to a Slave is the Fourth of July?” speech, but she passed four days before.

Unlike my commentaries on events in far-flung places, I’d be writing about an event we both attended. The test was welcome, but like all tests, it makes one nervous.

Would she agree with me that the single line capturing what Douglass faced in 1852 is what we face today:

Where everything is plain, there is nothing to be argued.

Maybe that’s why I never heard Sarah argue, or express any impatience, much less anger. Even now I can’t picture her without a smile on her face.

Her quiet responses were enough to let me know where she stood—that if I wasn’t on the right track, I was at least headed in the right general direction.

Perhaps I should let it go at that. Better that she be remembered as her many friends knew her, and as her daughter describes her: “my adorable, kooky, formidable mama.”

Still, I can’t help but be rueful thinking that the person for whom I write is no more.

Then again, a muse is inspiration. Sarah’s reached me long before she hit “like” or added a comment. It came long before I hit “send”—in this case before I left the shadow of Garrison’s statue.

Writers do this all the time. It’s as we see it.

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Sarah Bodge. Photo by Tracie Ballard, Charlotte, No. Carolina, May 2016
https://www.gofundme.com/f/donate-to-support-sarah-bodges-favorite-cause

Democracy by Default

Across the Merrimack from Newburyport in the northeast corner of Massachusetts is one more town before you cross into New Hampshire. Known mostly as a beach resort with a honky-tonk playland on the North Atlantic, Salisbury’s year-round population is barely 5,000.

Size, however, does not matter to the MAGA crowd whose organizers in the recent years have strategically run for local elected offices and sought appointed positions on commissions and boards.

Salisbury must have seemed ripe for MAGA inroads thanks to one bizarre auto body shop on a main drag that features large political signs targeting such Democrats as “Joe and the Ho.” To be fair, many Salisbury residents have complained about owner Rob Roy’s signs only to run headlong into the First Amendment, which the MAGA crowd interprets as the right to be crude and stupid.

Salisbury’s town officials were neither when they appointed Samson Racioppi to the town’s Housing Authority in 2018. But they were careless, if only because no one else applied for the post. Prior to 2018, Racioppi had a well-documented history of promoting anti-gay and anti-Semitic groups.

Since then, he has hired buses to bring people to the January 6 insurrection, oranized protests in support of Wisconsin gun-boy Kyle Rittenhouse, and organized the anti-gay parade in Boston in 2019. More recently, he ran for a seat as a state rep, but Massachusetts Republicans are not so Trump Uber Alles as they are most elsewhere in America, and so Racioppi was defeated in the primary, receiving just 112 votes of 2000 cast.

Another verdict will be cast on Racioppi tonight when Salisbury’s selectmen decide whether to renew his membership on the Housing Board. Difference is that this time they know of his affiliation with several right-wing hate groups.

Anybody paying any attention knows, as it has been reported on the front page of the Boston Globe as well as detailed by the New England chapter of a group called Confronting White Supremacy. He also made Newsweek, while hatemonger Roy had to settle for the Boston affiliate of CBS. Word is circulating that the Globe intends to cover tomorrow’s Board of selectmen meeting, but I have not been able to verify that. I do know that a Newburyport Daily News reporter and at least one of the paper’s guest columnists will be there.

No doubt Racioppi will be there on his best behavior. My friends in Salisbury tell me that the recent law school graduate knows how to carry himself and play the role of Mr. Polite & All-Smiles. And he’ll be sure to show up without close friends such as Diana Ploss whose campaign for governor he helped last year. Ploss, for those who never noticed her fringe existence, is a known anti-Semite who featured a ” Minister of Hate” in her live Facebook feeds. Charmingly, she indicated July dates as ” Jew-lie.”

As he told one reporter, “We’re looking at it as if it’s a war, right?” When asked if he would participate in another January 6, he enthused,” Of course I would do it again.”

By sundown tonight, Salisbury town officials will decide whether this man will continue to hold a civic position. Says my friend, “This is not about politics. This is about right and wrong. This is about decency. This is about gay people and Jewish people feeling comfortable in their own community and knowing their elected officials have their backs.”

This evening I hope to see and eventually report that the Salisbury Board of Selectmen repudiate people who associate with anti-Semites, engage in the intimidation of minorities, and, oh by the way, aid and abet attempts to prevent the peaceful transfer of power. Looking ahead–because the MAGA crowd will persist in this in all corners of this state as much as every other–the Board might also consider a resolution to investigate applicants for official boards before making appointments.

If you want to see democracy at work–or possibly destroyed–the meeting is open to the public, Salisbury Town Hall, this evening (July 17) @ 7:00.

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Samson Racioppi

As for Rob Roy: https://www.cbsnews.com/boston/news/salisbury-auto-shop-owner-defends-controversial-signs/

Looks like a nice place to spend a Monday evening.
https://www.legendsofamerica.com/salisbury-massachusetts/

Samson Racioppi with his “Straight Pride” flag: