Earlier today I received an email from the fellow who organizes events in Ipswich, including the No Kings rallies which I often attend on Saturdays. He added an item that struck a chord:
WBZ-CBS is airing commercials for ICE, threatening immigrants. I saw this while watching the news tonight and immediately contacted a friend who had worked at the station.They said to contact the Station Manager, Chris Ruggeri to complain. His email is cpruggeri@cbs.com. Phone 617-746-7140.
I’ve been seeing these for weeks during football games, college and pro, on various stations. I even mused at the idea of joining, grabbing the $50K signing bonus, then quitting to use that bonus to help defeat Republican candidates for the US House and Senate. Turns out, as my friend Woonsocket let me know, those bonuses are to given only after five years of terrorizing service, by which time, the gig will be up, and the masked suckers who joined will go empty-handed.
Then came the double-homicide in Minneapolis, soon followed by a name, a position, and an edress. Within seconds I zapped off this under the subject line, “In the Service of Hate”:
To Station Manager Chris Ruggeri: What is it like to profit from a terror campaign that has just murdered two people in cold blood? Will you show the videos of those murders with the commercials? What’s it like to be in the service of hate? Jack Garvey Plum Island
In just as little if not less time, my inbox had this:
Thank you for taking the time to contact us and share your feedback.
We understand that viewers sometimes have questions or concerns about national CBS News programming. While we value hearing from our audience, our local station does not produce or control the editorial content of CBS News’ national broadcasts.
To ensure your comments are reviewed by the appropriate team, we encourage you to direct any feedback regarding national CBS News programming to the CBS News Ombudsman at the link below:
Thank you again for reaching out and for watching CBS.
Sincerely, Your CBS Boston team
Passing the buck with a form letter! I may have been in triple digits on the Celsius Scale. Oh, I’ll contact the CBS ombudsman, but not without adding my response to the “CBS Boston team”:
Does the name Pontius Pilate ring a bell? Or are you playing Lady Macbeth? Speak now or plead for mercy at Nuremberg… Jack
This drew no response, automated or otherwise. Now that at least four hours have passed, I might even wonder if I’ve been reported to Trump’s heavily-financed-by-taxpayers goon squad as a domestic terrorist?
Surely, my two emails today were more combative and insulting than anything they heard from Renee Good or Alex Pretti. And, look, I have something in my hand that, when I click it, even before I click it, could accurately be called a threat, not just to ICE, but to the Reign of Hate that has unleashed it on us.
At least I hope it’s a threat. Why else would I spend any time with it?
Stock up and hunker down was my plan from Sunday all the way to Wednesday if necessary. And so here I am watching the snowflakes fly every which way out my panoramic window overlooking the whiteness that blankets the marsh before it becomes one with a white sky over a distant horizon.
Barely an hour since the first flakes fell, so plows have yet to make their island rounds. Tire tracks left by a few brave or careless motorists are quickly covered. Honestly, I don’t care if the plows take today and tomorrow off. As for Tuesday, I’ll miss my weekly coffee klatch in Cafe Chococoa for a chance to tell my guitarist friends that Song Sung Blue is about much more than Neil Diamond and well worth seeing. Then again, I now have plenty of time to put that in an email.
By wild coincidence, on a 2026 appointment calendar that is almost entirely blank, Tuesday is marked for an annual check-up with my dermatologist before the klatch, and a bi-annual check up with my primary care physician soon after it. Yesterday, I left messages on two phones that I wanted to “cancel as a precaution, but if I can get my car out of the driveway, I’ll show up anyway in case the time is still open.” The “precaution,” of course, is to avoid the fee one is charged for failing to show up.
For now, I sit awaiting the start of a football game in Denver where the forecast is sunny, at least at kickoff. With my modest flat-screen propped against that window, I look forward to a surrealistic combination of colorful picture in a massive dull frame. Picasso surrounded by, say, the architectural plans for almost any structure built in America these last 40 years…
Wait! What is this coming into view? Five of them, all with stocking caps pulled down and scarves wrapped around their face and tucked into thick parkas. If they had guns and were chasing Somali-Americans, I’d be watching more than one ice-storm. (A Somalian connection, you ask? Other than votes cast blue, just what else do you think Minnesota and Maine have in common?)
But I ingress… Kickoff is at 3:00. I’m tempted to wait until 3:15 to avoid the National Anthem. Used to be that I always tuned in early to hear it. Not only that, but I wrote letters of complaint to the Boston Red Sox, to WEEI, to one sponsor, and to both Boston dailies during a year when it was omitted from the radio broadcast. When that failed, I contacted the Massachusetts Attorney General on the grounds of false advertising, as WEEI returned from a commercial break saying, “the National Anthem was brought to you by…” even though they never aired it. At gatherings of friends and family to watch games, I’d ask for silence before it played.
Now, however, the Trump Administration has turned “land of the free” into a glaring lie. And the Republican Party has turned “home of the brave” into a sick joke. Why should I stand for that? On the other hand, it has been NFL–and NBA–players and coaches that have made the loudest statements against the rise of racist authoritarianism starting back in Trump’s first term. That includes the refusal of entire teams–the Golden State Warriors and the Philadelphia Eagles–to accept the traditional invitation to celebrate their championships with the president in the White House. Last night, the Minnesota Timberwolves postponed their game with the Warriors in honor of the nurse murdered by ICE that morning.
While I wouldn’t bet on any kind of statement being made this afternoon in Denver or tonight in Seattle, reports suggest that the Superbowl’s halftime show with Latino star Bad Bunny may yet prove that Colin Kaepernick did not lose his career in vain.
Whatever does or does not happen, and no matter who wins, both games will serve as consolation for what has not happened on social media today. No one is sending me any message hoping that I’m safe, telling me to stay safe, worrying for my safety, offering me safety on the mainland. For years, I’d receive at least a dozen such alarms, and at first, I simply reassured those who worried. But not long after the serial deluge began, I began making fun of them, and so, I just now realize, they have forgotten me.
As the concluding line puts it in what has to be the most popular summertime beach song ever sung, “It was my own damn fault!”
All the more reason to wrap this up, log out, tune in to the pre-game show, and find that lost shaker of salt.
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The Shoebox during Snowmageddon–as well as the Snowpocalypse and Snowzilla–of 2015. Photo by Kim O’Rourke
Well, it’s been a loud week in Minnesota, not far from where I once lived out there on the edge of the prairie.
In a previous life, I would have been snug in my trailer barely a dozen miles from the state’s border on a winter weekend. On an early Saturday evening, I’d have been tuning into Minnesota Public Radio to hear A Prairie Home Companion. Listened to it here in my coastal home for over three decades before it ran its course.
What would today’s “News from Lake Wobegon” sound like?
That question was on my mind when I left a No Kings rally in Ipswich, and I might try to answer it except that Garrison Keillor is about to begin a US tour on Jan. 31.* He can and will speak for himself. Quite a coincidence that the closest the tour comes to me will be on April 16 in Portsmouth N.H.–right across the Piscataqua River from Maine where ICE began its second state invasion just days ago.
Remember all those indignant Republican invocations of the 10th Amendment–a.k.a. “States Rights”–during the Obama years? No doubt a PHC show this week would include a skit on memory loss. Would Guy Noir try to find it?
One detail right up Keillor’s alley is the name that ICE has given its second Confederate attack on yet another state of the Union disdained by its authoritarian master: Operation Catch of the Day. So clever that we shouldn’t be surprised if someone with a sense of humor urges either Noem or Trump to claim the name is a sincere attempt to advertise Maine’s seafood industry.
As a satirist, Keillor might have a hard time trying to make fun of an operation that appears to satirize itself. “Catch,” is here intended as a double-entendre: We catch “aliens” where you catch fish. And when you’re out in your little boat hauling in cod or lobster, you have to preserve them, and so what do you need for all the time it takes to bring them to market? Along Commercial Street in Portland, tubs of it surround you in fish markets as the clerks take fish atop them to weigh on scales, and then throw more fish on the tubs, straight off the docks just steps from their back doors.
ICE! The name must have seemed fitting enough in Minnesota. Don’t know about records in Wobegon or Minneapolis, or even Lake Benton where I went on dates, but I recall hearing a radio report of minus-35 temps in International Falls. Reports tell us that thousands of Minnesotans braved sub-zero wind chills yesterday to protest the cold-blooded murder of a 37-year-old mother–only to witness the cold-blooded murder of a 37-year-old nurse whose only crime was taking a video of what he saw.
Included in those numbers were 100 members of the Twin City’s clergy at the Minneapolis Airport as they tried to convince airlines to stop serving ICE. In Ipswich today, signs with the outline of the K-shaped state seemed to replace the Greenland flags of last week. When I mentioned this to a woman who asked what “Mpls” stood for, I added that I long ago met two Methodist ministers in Minneapolis and wondered if they were there. She looked around: “I wonder if any of them are here.”
What would be the sermon at Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility if the young Father Wilmer delivered it? And would the semi-retired Father Emil approve? And what would the staid Lutheran Pastor Ingqvist say? Or the lively Pastor Liz? Or Max and Georgiana, lively characters as I recall, who both laughed when I told them, “There’s Methodism to your madness”?
What of the rest of us? Are we perpetually responsible? Are we responsible at all? Would those questions be considered at The Chatterbox Cafe, Cafe Boeuf, or The Sidetrack Tap? What would Harold Star opine in his Herald Star?
If Lake Wobegon was “a little town that time forgot,” time has caught up to it now. Today it is very much a part of a nation that appears determined to be one that “the decades cannot improve.” It’s as if we have forsaken The Enlightenment for the Dark Ages, a repudiation that was actually called for by a candidate for president in the Republican primaries of 2012. Her name was Michele Bachmann, and she was elected to the US House from 2007 to 2015 by the northern suburbs of, ah, um, yes, Minneapolis, Minnesota.
And that’s the news from Lake America, where the land is no longer free, where people at home beg senators and representatives in DC to be brave, and where children are used as bait to bring adults with dark complexions within reach of masked goons eager to fill quotas that are as apparently open to murder as to deportation.
Running 40 minutes behind schedule, the 30th Annual Moby-Dick Marathon dives past midnight into Sunday’s wee hours. So sorry if I’m keeping you up waiting for me to breach on the livestream.
Here at the New Bedford Whaling Museum, no one appears at all bothered by it. The twenty readers following me, all the way to 3:30, are all smiles when they take to the podium and when they leave. While up there, expressions change to capture Ishmael’s excitement, Ahab’s rage, Queequeg’s resolve, Starbuck’s meditation, Stubb’s flippancy, Flask’s complacence, Pipp’s innocence.
Yes, that’s all in the present tense, as I now have a seat outside the auditorium in a room just off the lobby where coffee is here for the taking. Only chowder cups remain from which to drink it, but caffeine is caffeine. There’s a large screen with the livestream a few feet from where I sit, and the sound, frankly, is louder and more clear than in the auditorium.
Only because I glanced at the screen do I realize that viewers may have noticed an odd bit of drama when I took my seat. Indeed, when I checked messages before starting this report, I learned that a friend had patiently waited those 40 minutes before writing: “I’m here. Where are you?” And then:
There you are… what? That guy just took your book and kept it? You are such a gentleman.
Don’t know about the “gentleman” part, but I need to describe the Marathon’s format to explain what happened:
On the auditorium stage are two podiums and one chair. The dual podiums work like a relay race to keep transitions up to speed. Each has a microphone, and so the reader on deck, so to speak, is ready to start as soon as the one reading is finished. Two monitors are seated in the front row facing us, and one will say “Thank You” at the end of a paragraph nearest our allotted time. The reader who is finished leaves the stage, and the reader waiting in the seat goes to the vacant podium. Since we wear numbers on lanyards around our necks, it is very easy to see when we should leave the audience and take that vacated chair.
So it was that when 128 finished, 129 started, and 130 went from chair to podium. At that moment, I, 131, took the chair. And then it happened. Stepping back toward me, in a whisper, 130 seemed in distress and said something. I thought he had lost his place and wanted me to point it out. Already following along, I held my book up and pointed to the paragraph that 129 was then reading.
130 took the book! I was surprised, but he soon brought it back, saying he was still lost. I’m quite familiar with those ten or so chapters (that’s why I always choose the “midnight watch”), so I was able to point to it. Again, he took it to the podium, and got ready to read from it.
This time I was stunned. How could he not have his own? And they have a stack right there from which anyone can borrow. One of the monitors, perceiving what happened, and knowing that I had to be following along as 130 read, gave me one of those books, open to the page.
As if to add insult to injury, 130 got “The Dart,” the chapter I hope to get every year. For one, it’s an op-ed column written 70 years before newspapers began carrying such things, and 120 years before the term was coined. Other chapters in Moby-Dick fit the description, but, just as the best op-eds end with “kickers,” this one ends with a metaphor showing that Melville had a lot more than whaling in mind.
And then my bad luck turned to gold. They cut the book thief before the last paragraph, which I know by heart, so I was able to look up into the audience and camera, and deliver it as the kicker it is:
To insure the greatest efficiency of the dart, the harpooneers of this world must start to their feet out of idleness, and not from out of toil.
Gave it two beats to sink in before buoyantly announcing “Chapter 63, The Crotch” and putting on my glasses. Grateful that no one snickered at the name of the fixture that holds harpoons in place on the boats that give chase, I then read the chapter’s delightfully calm, organic opening line:
Out of the trunk, the branches grow; out of them, the twigs. So, in productive subjects, grow the chapters.
The audience laughed, and for the first time, despite having read Moby-Dick five times, I heard Melville’s anticipation of critics who would complain that he attempted too much. As he writes in a later chapter, “I try all things; I achieve what I can.”
Not sure if it was that realization, or kicking of “The Dart” with point and purpose, or both that took my mind off the book thief and animated me like a child on a boogie board riding the waves of a playful surf through Ishmael’s provocative prose.
Yes, I’m sorry if I kept you waiting, but not at all for what you got while you waited. Nor would I apologize for any of the 25 hours these marathons average, with or without an extra 40 minutes this year.
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No screenshots awaiting me this year, as those prone to send them sent them in previous years. This may be from two years ago, before the event was moved into the auditorium. I won’t know if my opening recitation had the desired effect until I see the video, which the museum usually posts about two weeks after the event. Judging from the message from Woonsocket, the affair of the book makes an impression. I’ll post it in a blog as soon as I can:
Sunday after Christmas: When I awake, I sense commotion out my window and across the street.
Two cars are parked, the second with two people opening doors and getting out as a third car stops behind them. With a camera the size of a bazooka, the third driver also steps out.
Counting the driver of the first car, I soon have four photographers aiming weapons of mass illustration at me. Because I live atop a slight hill, they aim upward.
Keeping away from the window, I rub my uncaffeinated eyes, and quickly throw a shirt on. It’s doubtful they can see this far through the window, especially with a glaring morning sun facing them. And if they did, it would be from just the neck up.
Without coffee, and necessarily concerned more about urination than illustration at that moment, I leave them to their own devices. In the bathroom, I resolve to stop being so specific in my Daily News columns about where I live, and my expansive view over the marsh next to this wildlife sanctuary that serves as a bi-annual pit-stop for migrating birds.
While walking in the sanctuary, I’ve seen how cars converge on a spot to photograph a red-tail hawk, a peregrine falcon, a snowy owl, an occasional bald eagle, a rare king eider. Happens on the one and only road across the marsh connecting us to the mainland, a causeway absurdly called a “turnpike.”
While walking the road in the sanctuary, I’ve chatted with them, learned something of their MO, and have been treated to their cameras’ views that can make a blue heron a half mile away look like it’s on the other side of a card table ready to take you on in a game of cribbage.
Birders–call them “bird watchers” at your own peril!–have an app on their phones which they can use to alert others of a sighting. Since most all of them frequent Plum Island with license plates from all over New England any given day, a quick gathering of three or more cars with perhaps five or seven birders is common.
Fans of Moby-Dick might be reminded of the “gam.” When two whaling ships sighted each other on the high seas, they would pause the hunt and join side-to-side to exchange information. The captain of one ship would board the other while the first mate of the other would board the first. Never occurred to me to ask birders if they have a specific word for their impromptu gatherings. And might it be possible that that word is “gam”?
Happens along the causeway. I have no idea how anyone in a passing car one day could have noticed the falcon at least fifty feet away, slightly down from the higher road, and in the tall marsh grass. But that’s why birders tend to travel at least two to a vehicle. By the time I was on my way home, five cars were in the breakdown lane, and the birders lined one side like a baseball team from home to first following introductions.
This morning, in the bathroom long enough to heat water for a full French press of a Tanzanian dark-roast, I throw on my gym shorts just in case my own personal paparazzi is still trying to capture my sorry posterior for posterity. A few sips is all it takes to see that their cameras are aimed not at my window, but up to my roof, and to the roof next door.
Do I throw on more clothes and a pair of shoes to get out and look up? Nah! It’s 16 degrees, and whatever it is or they are, I’ve seen them before and will see them again.
Better to settle here on my posterior and record the story for posterity even if it does reveal that I’m so vain, I positively thought that gam was about me.
-753-
You can tell where the road is by the bottoms of the telephone poles. This pic was taken by a friend, or a friend of a friend, on a summertime sunset cruise. Sorry I cannot recall who that was.
Christmas Day: Before driving south some 70 miles to join family for dinner and an exchange of presents, I stopped at a convenience store to pick up a gift for a friend who has spent the entire month and will likely spend another in a rehabilitation center.
No, no addiction, but Parkinson’s Disease at a stage where he can do little more than read between meals that are served on his bed-tray or in the dining room at the end of the hall where a wheelchair with someone to push it will take him.
And read he does, always asking for the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, a dual habit he has sustained for as long as I’ve known him going back to the Reagan years.
WSJ does not run on holidays, so I settled for the NYT only to be startled by the large over-the front-page-fold photo. Did the Gray Lady really put a painting of the three wise men on its cover? There was no headline above to give it away. My glasses, hurriedly applied, showed that I was looking at three donkeys, not camels, and the caption described people fleeing the war in Sudan, seeking refuge in Chad.
Still, the choice of image for December 25 could not be mere coincidence. Or am I just haunted by an uncanny thread in what might seem like a seasonal scarf around my own neck? Began three weeks ago when I prepared a Christmas column for the Daily News, a feel-good story about a package delivered to the wrong address due to a wrong turn called by Siri. As a spoof of the carol, I used “App of Wonder, App of Night” as the headline.
Barely two weeks ago I joined a No Kings rally of about one hundred brave-the-cold souls on a small town green where they usually have a drum circle. Just two drummers showed up, but that was enough. Improvising to their beat, I played all the standard Christmas carols I knew except for one I just could not find, and not for lack of trying: “We Three Kings.” That kind of irony is a blog that writes itself, though the headline was its best joke: “The We Three No Kings Band.”
While I was writing that blog, a friend of Middle Eastern descent posted an editorial cartoon:
The image arrested me as emphatically as that wall halts the kings. If we were to be honest about Christmas in America, 2025, it would be available as a greeting card, and I’d have sent it. Instead, it prompted a column headlined “Merry Exclusivity!” which has yet to hit print–likely next week, after which it will become a blog, available to all.
As always, I was last-minute getting cards to send out. For at least forty years, I always picked out large cards with images of the Archangel Gabriel and his trumpet or, if unavailable, of any wind-musicians or wind-instruments. The reason for large cards is to stuff them with a newspaper column or blog or two or three I’ve written over the past 12 months I think the recipient will like.
By the time I arrived at Jabberwocky Bookshop, no Gabriels, no flutes, no piccolos, no group of carolers, no drummer boy, no brass, no chamber orchestras, no angels with harps were on the card racks to be had. But I spotted a card with the three kings which was perfect for the enclosure I had in mind, the “No Kings” blog. You’ve heard the saying, “Sometimes the jokes just write themselves”? In this case, it was the card itself.
All that came to mind in the convenience store in the brief time it took to buy that newspaper. When I handed it to my friend in the rehab center, I said nothing of it, though I awaited his reaction. At first glance, he gave a start, but right away focused on the caption. His look told me that he noticed what I had noticed.
You’ve heard the saying, “A picture is worth a thousand words”? In this case, it was worth a thousand to appear accommodating us with what we celebrate this day, and then a second thousand to remind us of what we actually have this day.
A Christmas card-turned-reality check. If you happen to have a copy of the Christmas Day NYT, hold onto it. You’ve heard the expression, “hiding in plain sight”? Unannounced messages in large publications tend to become collector’s items–especially when placed over the fold of a front page.
On screen, this is much brighter and clearer than in print. Try to imagine a darker look at a distance of three or four feet to approximate what I thought I saw. The first ever screenshot I have done knowingly. According to the icons on my screen, I did one of Sinclair Lewis and Dorothy Thompson. That icon has been there for at least three years. I recall finding the photo and posting it, but I have no recollection at all of noticing the word “screenshot” while I did. Is it possible to do without knowing it?
And on the day before Christmas when I saw no newspaper:
Christmas eve, I awake at 11:00, finish breakfast at 1:00, and put off all last minute errands until Friday or even Monday. Snowflakes the size of silver dollars starting to pile here on the island. Always piles more on the mainland, so why cross the bridge? Why test Stick-It’s tires on my steep driveway on my return? There’s bound to be a gas station open between here and Boston tomorrow when I trek to the South Shore for a couple days. Nine IPAs are enough in my fridge till Saturday. And who needs cash when you have a credit card? Or those rosemary-sea salt rolls from the Italian bakery when you’re making pancakes, that great excuse to have maple syrup, for breakfast and will be having holiday feasts away from home?
I say “Merry Christmas” when I know someone shares my general background, and “Happy Holidays” when I do not, but in both cases what I really mean is “Feed Me!”
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:
As an eighth-grader in a Catholic elementary school–we did not classify “junior high” back in 1963–I gained the assignment to spend homeroom delivering crates of milk to the lower grades. This began with a trip down into the basement where the janitor, with ever a cheerful greeting, had them ready, all counted out, for me to haul off.
One day I found the crates all set to go, but the janitor hunched over a static radio, one hand over his mouth. He put his other hand up to silence me as soon as I said hello, and I listened. Before long I could make out the words shot, Kennedy, and pronounced dead.
The janitor, a middle-aged man of average height and build and a dark complexion under a lot of black hair, sensed my oncoming panic and held both my shoulders as he stood and looked down at me:
“You need to tell the nuns.”
I nodded.
“Can you do that?”
I nodded again.
He shook me: “You’ll be okay. Tell them I went to the rectory to tell the priests.”
Off I went with the cart to the rooms of each grade where I was greeted by a nun at each door whom I would soon bring to tears. The tears were fought back as soon as they appeared by young women, as most were, as they soon realized they needed to explain this to a class of six-year-olds or 12-year-olds and each age in between. In the younger grades, I recall looking in to see all of them with their heads down on their desks. It was nap time.
Looked as well at the walls and blackboards of classrooms where I had taken my turn a year at a time. Same maps, same grammar and arithmetic charts, same musical scale, same crucifix, same American flag with two stars added along the way, and a different calendar but with similar Biblical pictures. Only noticeable addition was the portrait of the young, handsome John F. Kennedy, the first Catholic president. From Massachusetts and Irish to boot! Ours in more ways than one.
I waited for each nun to give me instructions–ask what I can do for her–but they had none, and I continued my daily delivery route until I was back in my own classroom. By that time, word had already reached my teacher.
I can’t recall what happened next. Did the priests make the rounds to console us? Were we assembled in the auditorium? Were we sent home early? I have two friends on social media who might see this and be able to–and are most welcome to–fill the gap.
My memory skips to later in the afternoon where I sat at the corner of Ames and Haverhill streets, the two main drags on Lawrence’s Tower Hill, awaiting a pile of Eagle-Tribunes I would deliver on well-to-do streets with names like Yale and Dartmouth. Neither of my parents were at home, so I just changed clothes and went early, even though the assassination, as I figured, delayed the press. But a busy street corner was a good place for a 12-year-old, this one anyway, to figure out his own thoughts. Turning cars suggesting order for twisted assumptions and a crashed ideal. The sky grew overcast and, before the truck finally arrived, menacing.
The front page looking up at me combined dark headline with bright smile. The incongruity gave me pause before I packed my oversized bag and started my route, delivering the news to people who already knew it:
Years later, I would start joking that Nov. 22, 1963, was the beginning of my life on the fringes of journalism, bringing bad news to people in hopes that they could overcome it. Years after that, I wondered if the same day was also the beginning of the life that has subsidized my writing–that of making deliveries with the satisfaction of bringing people what they want. Perhaps that offsets the necessity of saying things most people would rather not hear.
Really don’t mind if you sit this one out and take it for the purely academic exercise that it admittedly is. Written for my fellow Jethro Tull fans (“Tullskulls”) with my fellow Moby-Dick fans (“Dickheads”) also in mind, I thought I’d offer it for possible conversation or at least amusement as much for those who defy categories as for those in them.
Call me sophomore. That’s what I was in 1971 when I took a college elective titled “Hawthorne & Melville.” Moby-Dick had already been assigned me in high school, but I Cliff Noted it and wrote a paper more about the Gregory Peck movie. In college, I was ready for it, immediately identified with Ishmael, and was the first to answer the professor who wanted to know what we thought.
“Woody Allen should make this his next film,” I began. The prof laughed hard and out loud, no doubt because Allen at the time was in his early, wacky Bananas stage, but he still managed to nod his head. Other students were looking at each other, jaws dropped, wondering what to think. Such a moment that I can’t recall anything said afterward.
Less than two months later, I attended my first Jethro Tull concert at an old ocean-front casino, the Aqualung tour. A year or two later, I heard them play Thick as a Brick in the old, revered Boston Garden, and in another year, I was there for A Passion Play. Since then, I may have attended 30, mostly in five of New England’s six states, with two outliers in Minneapolis and at Kent State where I paid a scalper $20 for a front row seat. Yes, it was that long ago, just a few years after the shootings. Last heard them two years ago not long after the release of RökFlöte–back in the Hampton Beach Casino.
Minneapolis was as close as Tull came to South Dakota where I was in graduate school reading, among other things, everything Melville wrote that still survives, and all of the criticism of him I could find in those pre-internet days. How much time did I spend with the SDSU library’s microfilm readers? Back in my trailer on the edge of an alfalfa field, I read Confidence Man and Billy Budd to the tunes of Songs from the Wood and Heavy Horses.
Never gave any thought to any connection between the two. It was, after all, Led Zeppelin who titled a track “Moby-Dick.” No lyrics at all, mostly a 19-minute drum solo, perhaps intended as a soundtrack for the book’s final scene. And it was an American group called Mountain who gave us an album titled Nantucket Sleighride.
Might have made the connection in 2014 upon the release of Tull frontman/flautist Ian Anderson’s solo album Homo Erraticus (“The Wandering Man”) had Melville been on my mind. Since then I have joined the annual marathon reading of Moby-Dick at the New Bedford Whaling Museum–about 225 of us taking five- or ten-minute turns for 25 consecutive hours–and it was only a matter of time before I’d play that CD and feel that slow hunch of recognition take hold. I replayed it while reading the lyrics, and the hunch seemed obvious.
This is not at all to say that Melville’s novel inspired Anderson’s album. In fact, I’d be surprised if Anderson gave it any thought. The stories being told–a fatal whaling voyage and a condensed history of the British Empire–would never be classified together, much less compared. But the arc, the architecture of the two, as well as some minute details of style, are uncannily similar.
As I said, it’s all academic, perhaps esoteric, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth exploring. As Ishmael says: “I try all things; I achieve what I can.”
And as “Gerald Bostock,” the “lyricist” of Thick as a Brick, Brick 2, and Homo Erraticus, puts it: “Sorry–we’re coming in!”
Ishmael Erraticus
Moby-Dick opens with Ishmael (Biblically, “the outcast”) retreating from Manhattan to sign onto a whaling ship on the island of Nantucket. Anderson’s “wandering man” first appears crossing “Doggerland” from the continent to an island.
Ishmael, delayed for a day in New Bedford, lands himself in The Spouter Inn before meeting Queequeg. Horrified at first by the heavily tattooed Pacific Islander, he takes a liking to him and sings his praises. “Drown sorrow” and “sweet surrender” from the lyrics of “The Turnpike Inn” might describe that change of heart.
“Wild Child Coming” covers the arrival of Christianity in Britain circa 600 AD. In the New Bedford chapel, Father Mapple delivers a tumultuous sermon with a nevertheless hopeful message that offers “a new age dawning… to an old age plan.”
Religion is a recurring theme in both works, and it likely reminded Tull fans of Aqualung. Reminded me of a paper I wrote while in South Dakota based on a premise that most of us hear at a very early age: If the Bible is “God talking to man,” then Moby-Dick is man’s response.
Grandiose? Maybe, but how far is that from “After These Wars”:
When the Co-op gave us daily bread
And penicillin raised the dead
And combine harvesters kept us fed…
With Anderson’s characteristic touch of satire, “The Pax Britannica” both lyrically and musically waves the UK flag, celebrating an empire “generous in deed and promise.” Throughout Moby-Dick, Ishmael celebrates the whaling industry with boasts just as spirited–and seasoned to Melville’s satirical taste.
Celebrating the Industrial Revolution, “The Engineer” boasts of “Rain, Steam, Speed at Maidenhead--Turner’s vision wide.” The reference is to one of the best-known works of British painter J.M.W. Turner (1775-1849):
But Turner’s most frequent subject was the sea, especially ships wracked by storms which drew Melville’s attention. Biographers note that Melville went out of his way to view Turner’s work at exhibits, and collected over 30 or his miniature engravings. One tells us that Melville was impressed by “the air of uncertainty” Turner put over his work and wanted to replicate it in prose, starting with Moby-Dick.
Starting with the intro to Brick–“I may make you feel, but I can’t make you think”–that air has since been felt in Tull albums, right up to this year’s Curious Ruminant. Highlights include: “Baker Street Muse,” “Heavy Horses,” “Farm on the Freeway,” “Budapest,” “Sailor’s Song,” “Beside Myself,” and much of The Zealot Gene.
As a tribute, Ishmael describes a painting on the wall at the Spouter Inn. There’s neither title nor artist’s name, but, no matter how “thoroughly besmoked and in every way defaced” Ishmael finds it, he is clearly describing Turner’s Whalers:
Critics who complain that Moby-Dick is wrought with tangents are referring to chapters where Ishmael reaches back into history, philosophy, art, and literature to list names of people, places and events related to whaling. Erraticus does this with “Heavy Metals” and “Enter the Uninvited” with hints of it in other tracks.
Ahab nails a gold doubloon to the mast to motivate the Pequod’s crew; Erraticus “plays the winning card” and is “in for a pound.” Ahab is obsessed with vengeance; First Mate Starbuck pleads with him to “let us follow better things.”
That call proves futile in both works. Final chapter of Moby-Dick may be the coldest, deadest reckoning in all of literature, but it is followed by an epilogue, a single paragraph in which Ishmael tells us of how he clung to, of all things, a coffin, to stay afloat until another ship arrives.
Erraticus‘ “Cold, Dead Reckoning” ends with a brief but sweetly simple instrumental to suggest that after we are gone–with or without a lone survivor to tell the story–the trees and shrubs will eventually break through the ruins, just as you could see on the road to the top of Mount Saint Helens just eight years after it blew. The world will go on without us and be better off for it.
Call Me Gerald
Something else that can be said of all Tull and Anderson solo albums starting with Brick: Each has a consistent narrative voice. Some may be quite apart from the others. The voice of Crest of a Knave will never be mistaken for that of War Child, for example. And it may be hard to believe that the guy who wrote Dot Com was the same guy who wrote Minstrel in the Gallery.
All that matters here is that we are told in the liner notes that the same “Gerald Bostock” who wrote two Brick albums “adapted” the lyrics for Erraticus from the exhaustive work of some whacked out historian. It’s a satirical layer of authorship that echoes Moby-Dick‘s “Extracts” and “Sub-sub librarians” as an elaborate and somewhat zany preface to an identity layered with “Call me…”
Many English teachers and majors parrot the lazy view that Ishmael is an example of what they call “the unreliable narrator.” What is so unreliable about telling a story in full, issuing warnings that need making, revealing the history behind it, and the facade that often lurks beneath? Is it a bent toward entertainment that they do not trust? Is it the natural appeal? Is it human nature?
What they smugly call “unreliable” is the surprising originality and artistry with which a story is delivered by a story-teller who can range from flippant to sincere, objective to satirical, obsessive to cautious, provocative to reassuring, skittish to incisive, silly to reverential, whimsical to defiant–all with a narrative command that refuses to spell things out, but instead exposes them for our own verdict. Moby-Dick is not for cubby-holing critics.
Apply all of that to any Tull album starting with Aqualung, and you may have the reason why the group is not in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
More than anything, the similarity of narrative voice makes Homo Erraticus comparable to Moby-Dick. Admittedly, I remind you, this may be a mere figment of my hyper-imagination. Truth is, I’ve often explained my attraction to the novel by saying that, had I been born in the early-19th Century, you could call me Ishmael.
Now I realize that I’m just as close to this 21st Century version.
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Ian Anderson on stage at Balboa Theatre on October 17, 2016 in San Diego, California. (Photo by Daniel Knighton/Getty Images)
Finally rejoined the No Kings rallies after eight weekends in a Renaissance faire, two in witch-trial re-enactments, and one to celebrate my grandson’s 11th birthday.
Put another way, after two months in 1510, two weeks in 1692, and two days recalling 2014, I’m back in 1968 trying to prevent Project 2025 from destroying any more than it already has.
If that’s not enough, I always spend the first weekend after New Year’s taking a turn in the Midnight Watch of a marathon reading of Moby-Dick, which puts me in 1851.
Some people are all over the map, but I’m all over the millennium, and my estimates are admittedly liberal. I’m a throwback to the Pied Piper of Hamelin (1284), but most of the tunes I play at the renfaire, Celtic and Baroque, were first heard in the early 1700s. As if to balance that, all my banter about Chaucer (1343-1400) and Gutenberg (1393?-1468) make the renfaire’s 1510 a reasonable compromise. The same music pre-dates Salem’s trials, but it was still played, and I found it easy to add colonial hits such as “Gathering Peascods” and “Virgin Pullets” to my rotation. As long as I refrain from playing “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” and the theme from The Godfather, the artistic director is pleased.
Yesterday, I went armed with a small, high-pitched pipe hoping for a drum-circle in Newburyport. Instead, an amplifier or two belted out classic rock. Given the low temps and the vigorous wind-chill, I was quite content to keep my hands in my pockets though I quietly wished I had trekked to Ipswich where my chances would have been better.
Just before the much larger, nationally held, and heavily attended No Kings rally on Oct. 18, a woman in Newburyport sent me an email saying I had been spotted playing with a drum circle this past summer. She wanted me to know that Newburyport would have one at No Kings, and would I join them?
Wrote back to thank her, but also to say I’d be at Renaissance festival that day, literally playing for a king.
Had that in mind when I turned north instead of south on US 1A after leaving Plum Island. These weekly rallies may not receive much media attention, but the No Kings rallies on Oct. 18 were all over the news with estimates of over seven million protesters nation wide–over 2,000 in a city as small as Newburyport, and approaching 300 in the small town of Ipswich. Each week? I’d say Ipswich drew between 100 and 150 in the dozen weeks I attended, and I’m told that Newburyport averages 200.
Windchill kept this weekend’s numbers down. At least 50 of the 75 or so protesters in Newburyport this weekend could have been with me in DC in 1968, more likely for Mayday in 1971. Same was true of all the “stand-outs” I attended before Labor Day, including one in Peterborough, N.H. In Ipswich, not only have I joined Salem State classmates, but also one of our profs who greeted us by yelling, “I can’t believe we’re doing this same shit!”
L2R: Retired Salem State English Prof. Pat Gozemba and two of her students who shall go unnamed to avoid the attention of their respective parole officers. Photo taken in Ipswich, July or August by either Karen Kahn or Marilyn Humphries.
No classmates or profs this weekend, but one fellow who knew I was looking for a drum circle greeted me by asking: “Are you going to play?”
Though touched by his mere interest, I called as much attention to the windchill as to the lack of drums to decline. Apparently one of the organizers, he offered me a bullhorn. I laughed, “That’s just for voice-“
“Do you sing?”
That deserved a laugh, but it conjured up a memory: “About 20 years ago, I learned three songs just for the sake of a break from piping. Tried them first in Salem so I wouldn’t embarrass myself here on the home court. It did not go well. So, no, I do not sing.”
“What were the songs?”
“Two by Stan Rogers.” He nodded, which I took to mean he recognized the late-Canadian folk-singer’s name. I launched into ‘White Collar Holler’:
He smiled as if to say not bad, but I told him I couldn’t sustain more than a verse. I then named the other two: “Roger’s ‘The Idiot’ and Stephen Foster’s ‘Hard Times’:
His reaction took me by surprise: “Weren’t Stephen Foster’s songs racist?”
Maybe renfaire and witch-trial credentials make it easy for me to place myself in the shoes of 1854 when, as I answered: “Foster was staying in Cincinnati, in lodgings overlooking the Ohio River where he could see the random small craft of the Underground Railroad unload people escaping the South. That’s why he wrote this song. I guess I recall Uncle Tom stereotypes and words like ‘darkie’ in other songs, including ‘Old Kentucky Home,’ but for me, ‘Hard Times’ eclipses all of that. And anyway, I’m not going to pass that kind of judgment on an artist from a time so far removed from me–in a Zeitgeist I myself never had to endure.”
My new friend appeared satisfied, so I offered an upbeat sequel:
“About 20 years ago I visited a friend in Louisville who took me to Bardstown where the ‘Old Kentucky Home’ is now a tourist attraction. As soon as I saw the loudspeakers on poles around the parking lot, I quipped before we got out of the car, ‘You can bet they won’t be playing ‘Hard Times’. As soon as we stepped out, we heard:
Let us pause in life’s pleasures and count its many tears While we all sup sorrow with the poor There’s a song that will linger forever in our ears Oh hard times come again no more”
We soon turned our attention to the rally at hand, perhaps to prevent me from torturing anyone’s sense of hearing any more than I already had. Driving home, I realized that I had made the same assumption of the Foster museum that my friend had made of Foster.
Might seem like a cute little story except for its parallel that has been a ubiquitous landmine in the American culture war that has raged for time out of mind. Many now appalled by the banning of books treating racial, gender, and environmental issues today are the same folks who called for the banishment of Huckleberry Finn at least once a decade before this decade of our malcontent.
As with Foster, objections all aim at Mark Twain’s use of words, mostly in dialogue, common to the 19th Century and stereotypes held today only by the willfully ignorant and hopelessly shut-in. No matter that the whole point of the book is delivered when young Huck is tormented by his “Christian” belief that he must turn Jim in. No matter that a 14-year-old white boy tells us he’d rather “go to hell” than surrender Jim back into enslavement–that he chose the freedom of a Black Man over the grace of a White God.
Heavy stuff for 1884. And heavy stuff now, which may be the real reason it’s condemned by both left and right.
And maybe why I keep looking for answers in the past.
Mouth of the River 