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.
As much as I love irony, sometimes it goes too far.
Despite that, I attended “The Rise of Authoritarianism,” a forum held in Newburyport just two days after the re-election of a mayor and city council president who have effectively erased checks and balances from local government.
Of course, the Greater Newburyport Bar Association’s guest-speakers focused on a national political party that has forfeited checks and balances in favor of an authoritarian federal government.
That was among the dozen or so “markers” that one of the panelists listed as characteristics of what Americans readily call authoritarian–or dictatorial, or fascist–in other countries, but are reluctant to admit are possible, much less true at home.
Much of what the legal experts said confirmed what the eighty or so of us in the old Superior Courthouse knew, connecting legal dots for us lay citizens in an otherwise confusing big picture.
Available to anyone interested is the full video, an excellent primer for those who seek details beneath the surface of events. Demanding attention here is a surprise that left me wondering where and why I was:
A 90-minute forum on authoritarianism made not a single reference to George Orwell.
Didn’t occur to me until time expired on a Q&A session that was all too short. And ever since, I have been formulating in my head what I might have said.
Truth be told, I do this for most everything I write, and much of it while driving, as if speaking. No doubt I appear to those in cars aside me to be lecturing if not damning the driver in front of me.
While the panel did well to dissect the legal machinery of the Trump administration, they never applied the grease that sustains its relentless pace:
Repetitive language.
This makes Orwell conspicuous in his absence. Wish I had interrupted the panelist who called the bombings of boats off Venezuela’s coast “murder.” Not to disagree, but to add:
We hear the word “invasion” repeated over and again to justify the bombs. We never hear that those boats would have to refuel some 25 times to reach the Florida Keys, which would expose “invasion” as the lie it is.
Some tricks of MAGA-speak, as Orwell said of Newspeak, are glaringly hideous and comical, such as “Big Beautiful Bill” and “Gulf of America.”
But they serve to make words like “invasion” plausible. The hammer of constant repetition drives the nails home. “Crisis” and “emergency” justify a military presence in our cities. “Waste and fraud” allow for slashing funds allocated for the public good.
Orwell emphasized euphemism as an authoritarian tool. Twenty years after he wrote 1984, the Johnson and Nixon administrations used one of his examples, “pacification of villages,” to cover up the fact of bombing them into oblivion.
Today we are bombarded with malphemisms, making something good sound bad. Once upon an attention span, most Americans considered awareness a civic obligation. MAGA-speak abbreviates the word and spits it out with contempt.
Right-wing cranks are now elected governors in southern states for declaring a “war on woke.”
Malphemisms are not new. For years, anti-choice activists have constantly decried “abortion on demand.” Do we buy cars “on demand”? Do they buy guns “on demand”? Does payment constitute “demand”?
No, no, and no, but the phrase sure makes accessibility sound menacing. Plus, as Orwell wrote, it “gives an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
In 1984–the year, not the book–the Republican Party issued a pamphlet with instructions for all their candidates on the use of words. Among them:
Always use “extremist” or “hard-liner” in combination with “feminist” and “environmentalist.”
Through the 80s and 90s, I was one of countless college teachers who marveled at how often students would say, “I am not a feminist, but–” or “I am not an environmentalist, but–” before making a feminist or environmentalist statement in class.
In the 1988 presidential campaign, most everyone noticed George H.W. Bush’s use of “card-carrying” in front of “member of the ACLU” to describe his Democratic opponent, Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis. Most lawyers are members, and most groups issue cards. With a classic case of something out of nothing, Bush was harkening back to the McCarthy era when Americans kept hearing the phrase, “card-carrying member of the Communist Party.”
No one, however, noticed a far more subliminal trick used by the Bush campaign. The mid-80s were extremely hard times for farmers on the prairies. Severe drought caused numerous foreclosures which led to a suicide rate that made front-page national news. Dukakis’ agricultural advisor–from Iowa as I recall–gave him a list of nine crops to recommend that farmers put in rotation.
Among them was Belgian endive. The Bush campaign pounced, ridiculing it as “exotic” and insinuating that it was the only one proposed. Others on the list were better known, but “Belgian” is a foreign name all by itself, and back then it was often followed by “Congo,” which insinuates something else, something in common with the infamous Willie Horton ads. The Dukakis campaign never challenged it, and not until the election was over did we read reports of the Reagan-Bush Dept. of Agriculture issuing a block grant to farmers on the Delmarva Peninsula to grow a new crop: Belgian endive.
In 1996, irony wrote itself when Republican presidential nominee, US Sen. Robert Dole apparently thought he could win the White House by repeating the word “liberal” as often as possible. Resulting speeches and interviews were so awkward that it was a wonder how reporters and interviewers kept straight faces. The kicker was that he also boasted of his American heartland upbringing in the small Great Plains town of Liberal, Kansas.
Irony haunts me.
My last column (also adapted and posted as a blog) noted the phrase “background noise” repeatedly used by the mayor’s supporters to dodge his wretched record on personnel matters. No matter that some of those personnel still work in City Hall, and that others are filing lawsuits against the city.
His supporters complained that all of us detractors were “re-litigating the past,” a horrible sounding phrase to malphemize “holding to account.” Before it was over, euphemism prevailed with a letter-to-the-editor headlined, “Vote for joy and optimism.”
And pay no attention to the toxic work environment of which City Hall staff are risking their jobs to inform us–or to the lawsuits from those who have already lost them.
Instead, we were treated to one constantly repeated phrase that allowed the mayor’s supporters to avoid the record on which he supposedly ran: “Move forward.”
Worked so well that it easily qualifies as Newburyport’s version of Republicans’ “thoughts and prayers.”
George Orwell would call this beyond ironic, but George Carlin would have a field day.
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Intended as a cautionary tale, MAGA has turned Orwell’s novel into a blueprint for authoritarian rule. Back after Bonespur’s first inauguration, the book was flying off bookstore shelves, and the publisher hustled another edition into print when Kellyanne Conway casually mentioned “alternative facts.” Many of us thought, great, the public is catching on, but apparently many customers wanted the blueprint. Maybe that’s why Walt, in Newburyport, had it turned into a wooden spoon–“to stir things up.”
Rummaging through past writings looking for something I never found, I found this instead: A draft of a commentary on James, Percival Everett’s 2024 re-telling of Huckleberry Finn in the voice of Jim, the runaway who joins Huck on the raft to escape enslavement.
Yes, I said “commentary.” For a review, please see the website in the photo caption below. Also, if you do not recognize the name Everett, it may help to know he’s the author of the 2001 novel Erasure that was adapted for the Oscar-nominated film American Fiction in 2023.
Not that it matters now, but I laughed when I saw the mid-July date on the draft. That’s when my Lenovo went kaput, and I went a full week without a laptop while I was also unwilling to sit for any length of time in a library. Meanwhile, other matters claimed my attention, and I just forgot it was there.
Be that as it may, for those of you who spend many winter nights with books, as well as those maybe looking for holiday gift suggestions, I now hasten it onto screen:
Checked James out of the library after recommendations from a couple who both thought it preposterous–“literary revisionism”–and two other friends, unknown to each other, who found it incisive and enlightening. Though busy the rest of the day, I thought I’d give the book a look before falling asleep. The need for sleep did not reclaim me until 30 pages later.
Next morning, as always, I made a pot of coffee and returned to bed before breakfast. Before the need for breakfast claimed me, I was on page 95. My watch said high noon. After an omelet and with another pot of coffee, I set up outside under a shade tree and read the book right to the end, page 304. I don’t recall ever getting out of the chair.
To say I found it fascinating would be a gross understatement. No doubt, the amount of dialogue and first-person narrative gave it quick pace. And no doubt my just having finished Willa Cather’s Sapphira & the Slave Girl–a 1940 novel that would be condemned by both right and left if a high school teacher put it on a syllabus today—prepared me for the duality of enslaved life.
From a literary viewpoint, this book atones for the ridiculous ending Twain slap-stuck onto an otherwise brilliant novel. Even those who call Huckleberry Finn America’s greatest novel condemn the final chapters. But more than anything I admired the relevance to today, especially the white insistence on stereotypes. After the King & Dauphin boast of how easy it is to con people out of their money, James tells us:
After being cruel, the most notable white trait was gullibility.
And the scenes. Con-artists were common enough on the Mississippi that Melville wrote a novel about them called The Confidence Man years before Twain started writing short stories for magazines. Steamboat explosions were rather common when they were overloaded. Rapes were matter-of-fact. How much of those three 19th Century American realities is ever mentioned in the history and literature taught in schools or presented anywhere today?
For all that, James is as hilarious as it is horrifying. A great read, and a valuable addition to American letters, you can bet it will be banned from many public schools and libraries by many cruel state legislatures that thrive on public gullibility.
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James also reminded me of a review of an art exhibit I wrote four years ago:
Lucky am I to have two nice musical gigs every year.
First catch is that they run at the same time of year which, at my age, is anything but luck. Second is that things catch my eye or ear demanding commentaries that bring them to attention.
This was my 25th season at King Richard’s Faire, well south of Boston in the cranberry bogs that lead to Cape Cod, and my third with a theater troupe called History Alive in downtown Salem. Together they run from Labor Day through Halloween with me at the faire every weekend and in the Witch City many weekdays. “Strolling minstrel” is a demanding role for a Jack no longer nimble and quick, but I persevere. Price is that, when I get home, I’m too beat to pick up a phone, let alone peck at a laptop.
This season was the best ever at faire, as measured both by tips and by the quality of music played. Much of this was due to the new location, which most of us dreaded when first announced but embraced by the third week. For me it was the logistics made possible by the layout which created a just-wide-enough walkway of 200 feet from the parking lot to the ticket booths, our only entry and exit. Building on one side had recessed doorways, so when we played through rainy days, I still had a spot–which the overhang amplified, which in turn makes it easier to articulate notes and play with nuance. At times I played as if in a trance, turning improvised variations on old songs into new songs of their own.
Made things a bit easier for my fickle feet by playing more with the Buzzards Bay Buccaneers in the wide opening just inside the booths. Unlike the bench on the ground at the old place, we had seats on a stage, making us far more visible. Our repertoires overlap enough so that we can offer a variety of soft, elegant Renaissance tunes with medieval hard-rock, but we usually play Celtic jigs and reels which renfaire patrons and playtrons crave.
Here I am with the Buzzards Bay Buccaneers back at the old place. Often when I sit in, I tell people that we are the Buccaneer Bay Buzzards, and it turns out that the new place has a body of water near the entrance that the faire owners named “Buccaneer Bay.” I chose this photo because it shows their instruments better than any other I have. Photo by Nancy Cushman Rice.
On Irish bouzouki, Bob Littera plays melodies so clear and precise, and Kelly Ann Hathaway’s autoharp adds a rhythm so full, that it’s not at all difficult for this piper to embellish songs I never played solo note for note, so long as I stay in the key. This was true even at our fastest pace, which was also our most frequent pace. Among our best was “Banish Misfortune,” a dance tune said to be George Washington’s favorite. Biographers agree that he was a celebrated dancer, and imagining him with Martha in the tune’s descending bounce was all I needed. Suffice to say that we pushed him to the limit and let him strut his stuff.
By the time it was over, I was playing a few of BBB’s songs solo in downtown Salem. As “Goodman Piper,” my role is to play on the the same pedestrian mall where I had busked some 40 years to call attention to Cry, Innocent, the witch-trial re-enactments in the Old Town Hall. I position myself where we perform the introductory scene: A town crier delivers “news of the day” from the old world, from the port, from around town, from the frontier, from Boston (“wherever that is,” as I like to add), until interrupted by a breathless constable who has a warrant for the arrest of Bridget Bishop on the grounds of witchcraft. After the arrest I play a processional and stand at the door as people file in.
Could say I’m the opening act, and I have a field day with audiences as they gather. As at renfaire, I walk face-flush into cameras aimed at me, rolling and crossing my eyes. This year I would pause between songs so that I could name them: “That was ‘Awaiting the Town Crier,’ and for my next number I will play ‘Awaiting the Town Crier Part Two’.” Twice I made it up to “Where, Oh Where Is the Town Crier?” And on one raw, wet day, I played “Why Did I Get into This Line of Work?”
And, also as at faire and as a busker, I would use the names and graphics on people’s clothing to engage in banter. I’m lucky that NY Yankee fans are such good sports, or I’d surely be in traction well into the 2026 season. And that couple from the Twin Cities may have already daytripped out to Pipestone, Minnesota, to see the gargoyles. Geography and music, yes. Politics and nihilism, never.
I count my blessings that there were so few Trump or MAGA shirts or hats at either the faire or in Salem despite record sell-out crowds at faire and the mobs that fill Salem all 31 days of October. Just five or six at faire, half of whom stopped to give tips, as did one more whose hat read: “Charlie Kirk – American Hero.” His shirt said more, but I have to avoid eye-contact with any of these people for the sake of anyone around us, and couldn’t risk looking his way. Amazingly, just one I recall in Salem, a young fellow whose hat announced, “Trump 2028.”
Nihilism? Salem is soaked in it. Witchcraft and goth go hand in hand, and if there’s a place where more people per capita wear black, I’m glad I’ve never been there. But it’s part of the territory–in fact, of the history that now gives me such a nice gig–and I can ignore it in favor of so much else. The folks from Tennessee, Arkansas, and Wisconsin were so friendly, as were the couples from Chicago, Philadelphia, San Antonio, and so many more that I heard not by name, but by accent. No idea how or if any of them vote.
Most of Salem’s superficial nihilism is skull and bones nonsense, but there’s also gratuitous provocation. For example, one shirt on a young man in Salem broadcast a four-letter word beginning with C. Large, thick white letters on a black shirt, you could read it across a tennis court. Of course, this is a country that has elected and re-elected a president who boasts of his ability to grab any C he wants.
That’s but one reason any and all shirts and hats promoting Trump and Trumpism are, at best, gratuitous provocation–or, a middle finger to the public.
Sorry to turn a musical memoir into yet another sociological commentary, but as I noted at the outset, some things demand attention. Before I pay any more of it, I’m off to the gym to start peddling a recumbent bike. Doctor tells me that it will help me regain my ability to walk without making people think I’ve been hit by a stray bullet.
Need to do that if I’m going to play and banter and notice things next year.
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Looks like an A#, but on a sopranino recorder, I’m never quite sure. This is taken at King Richard’s Faire about halfway along the 200-or-so-foot walkway from the parking lot toward the ticket booths behind me. That white vest was my mother’s white sweater that she was throwing away. I spotted it on a table by her back door atop some rags, and asked. She told me to take it, and before long I ripped the sleeves off and it was a gift of garb. Yet another photo from Paul Shaughnessy.
Months ago, an ad slipped through my filters with a subject line I could in no way resist:
Say Goodbye to Spoons.
As soon as I clicked in, the next line made me wonderland what oz I had mistakenly dropped in my morning coffee:
Meet ThermoStorm.
Turned out to be an ad for a new “automatic mixing mug” that will “revolutionize your daily routine,” sparing you the ordeal of having to stir your own coffee or protein drinks.
Did it occur to the manufacturer or the marketing team that protein drinks are typically gulped down by people who also exercise and, if I may go out on a limb, are not looking to avoid swirling a wrist for a few seconds?
My first reaction was that this, indeed, signals the end of western civilization. But I said and still say that of the cellphone. Three decades ago, I said it of personal computers. Five decades ago, I said it of disco. And, had I been born about when my father learned to drive, I’d have said it of the automatic transmission.
Oh, I’m fully aware that I’m outnumbered on all those counts. In fact, I caved on computers 25 years ago, and today cannot imagine life without my Lenovo. But, much to the dismay of my worrying daughter, I’m still the only adult she knows without a cellphone. Also, my Nissan’s name is “Stick-It,” and I still think anyone who dances to disco should be required by law to wear a dunce cap.
Having grown up in an era that gave us dishwashers, clothes washers, clothes driers, pop-up toasters, fast food, and TV dinners, I can tell you that America’s headlong race toward perpetual convenience began in tandem with its obsessive pursuit of lower costs. Must admit that I can hardly condemn it anymore than I can my own upbringing.
One incident, though, when I was no more than six seems to have foreshadowed my lifelong dissent: Every morning my mother had toast, already buttered, on the table by the time I arrived. Toast with butter I always liked, but on this one morning, the butter was exceptionally sweet and rich, and I let her know it. She answered by showing me a package of a brand other than what she usually bought. I looked at the kneeling Indian woman in the foreground of a vast horizon strange to my young Merrimack Valley eyes and read: “Land O Lakes.” Not sure of the exact wording, but I do recall waving the small box over my head and the excitement of insisting that she always “get this one.”
In retrospect, it may have been the first time I tasted actual butter. What we had been calling “butter” was likely the cheaper and easier-to-spread substitute popularized in the Fifties called “margarine.” About 25 years later, desperate for a cup of coffee while driving across North Dakota, I would stop at a Dairy Queen where, when I asked for cream, was directed to a bowl of packets on the counter. “Non-dairy creamers” the labels said. The powder in those packets were–to many back then and perhaps now–“cream,” just as margarine was “butter.”
Ever since, I have called that chain “Non-Dairy Queen,” and I often repeat what I have since heard from more than one gourmet chef: “Margarine is one molecule away from plastic.”
Today, with inflation so high, it’s hard to fault anyone for doubling the ratio of Hamburger Helper to lower that of beef in the family meatloaf. But it is heartening that our 20th Century faith in the superiority of “factory-made” and “store-bought” has faded in favor of today’s renewed appreciation of the homemade and homegrown.
Alas, our obsession with convenience remains. You can invoke the First or Second amendment, you can sing “land of the free,” and you can recite “with liberty and justice for all” all you want, but convenience has long been America’s guiding principle.
Freedom runs at best a distant second. We have enough proof of that in recent years, from the repeal of Roe v. Wade to the current intimidating presence of ICE in our cities. There’s a perverse poetry in a word that immediately suggests “freeze” for law enforcement which the MAGA movement no doubt enjoys. If ICE existed in any other country in the world, we’d call it “the Gestapo.”
We favor convenience stores–another product of the American Fifties and Sixties–even as we lament the loss of the mom-and-pops they replace. We are now so used to doors that open themselves that we are surprised by doors that remain closed–and sometimes wait a bit for them as if they might change their mind. So used to lights that shut themselves off that we leave lights on even when they are coordinated with fans that keep running. What awaits us when we have a few more years of toilets that flush themselves and cars that drive themselves?
Has our craving for convenience undermined our ability–indeed, our willingness–to govern ourselves?
Yes, I came of age in the Sixties listening to those who preached a gospel of participatory democracy, civic involvement, and paying attention. Among them was Robert Kennedy who likely would have been elected president in 1968 by offering challenges rather than promises:
The answer is to rely on youth — not a time of life but a state of mind, a temper of the will, a quality of imagination, a predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over the love of ease.
That was then. Last year, we saw a presidential election in which over 37% of the electorate did not vote.
This year, after many of those folks woke up to the consequences, numbers were up in states that held elections with national ramifications. From other states came reports of voters calling to complain that polls were closed, only to be told that there was no local or statewide election. They were that eager to vote in some way, in any way, against Trump & MAGA.
Are we beginning to rebound? Last year, Democrats said that the presidential election was a choice between democracy and oligarchy. Said it myself, and I don’t disagree now, but we may do better to talk about coming elections as choices between the consequences of convenience and the rewards of effort.
There has to be something more appealing about stirring things up yourself than in having them stirred for you.
Anyone with only the Daily News‘ opinion page to describe Newburyport may well deduce something quite unusual:
The term “background noise” is a local get-out-of-jail-free card that can be used by supporters to dismiss any and all criticism of a mayor.
Such is the case with Newburyport Mayor Sean Reardon, no matter how well-known or documented the criticism is.
Since Labor Day, there have been numerous letters, several columns, and an editorial or two that have been pro or con Reardon. About equal in number I’d say.
Those endorsing the mayor for re-election always ring the bells of “moving forward” and “growth.” They praise Reardon for projects that were in the works long before he became mayor as if he alone made them happen. And they praise him for things yet to be built, much less prove any success.
Endorsements also come from groups who emphasize his support for them.
With all due respect to the heads of local cultural enterprises of which I have been part, to the PEG Center which has a strong hand in the anti-Trump rallies in which I take part, and to the alliance called LGBTQ whose rights I fully endorse:
None of what you say has anything to do with the inner workings of government.
Yes, he appears at your rallies, raises your flags, and smiles with you for cameras while handing you framed certificates proclaiming your goodness and worth.
Problem is not what you say, but what you don’t say. Do you really not know or do you choose to overlook that he robbed about a dozen seniors of continuing their public service of local, historical research which they loved and at which they excelled?
Did you not read the investigator’s report? Or just the conclusion? As one letter-writer observed, it “should have been a career-ending document.”
Did you also miss reports of the entire City Clerk’s office beseeching the City Council to intervene in the “toxic work environment” created by Reardon?
All of this and more lurks below the superficial gloss of flag waving and photo posing for which my friends in the arts so easily fall.
What if a PEG activist had been among the library volunteers banished by Reardon and defamed for a month on a city website?
No matter? OK, then let’s change the slogan to “Think Globally, Ignore Locally.”
How about the woman from the City Clerk’s office who fought back tears while telling the City Council that after a dozen years of service marked by commendations, she now feels “I have a target on my back”? What if she was either L or G, or B or T?
Matter or no matter, that’s not gay pride. That’s gay privilege.
How do so many otherwise well-intentioned folks justify ignoring the maltreatment of others to sing praises of those who favor them, all while the maltreatment is well-documented, public knowledge?
Since Labor Day, the term “background noise” has been as much a fad here and in social media as has any juvenile slang in any junior high school.
Many endorsements of Reardon include it in the opening sentences. They boast that he “runs on his record,” but then they cling to a phrase that says half his record simply doesn’t count.
Two Reardon supporters have admitted to his “missteps,” as if, instead of demoralizing most of City Hall, he chose the wrong color drapes.
These are not missteps. They are Reardon’s MO. There was no mistake about taking advantage of technicalities to retain a solicitor and an HR director the council did not want–the first due to a missed deadline by the anemic Council President Ed Cameron, the second a finesse with the budget’s line items.
As an exasperated outgoing councilor Connie Preston put it to the full chamber in a debate regarding the HR director:
“This is not how democracy works… There have to be checks and balances.”
Those supporting Reardon will dismiss that as background noise. Otherwise, they’d have to admit that, in their privileged view of the city, “checks and balances” stop us from “moving forward.”
And that “democracy” itself is an obstacle to “growth.”
If you’ve been to any of the No Kings or Hands Off rallies this year and heard any of us Boomers say we “can’t believe we’re still doing this,” the title of this film is for you.
As is the film. Though the promos offer scenes from an action-packed thriller, One Battle After Another is impossible to categorize–which makes it worth all of its two-and-a-half-plus hours.
My endorsement comes right away because the opening scenes had me wondering if I should sit so long through something that seemed so outdated and misleading. A subtitle at the start telling us that we are 17 years in the past would have helped. Instead, we get one identifying an immigration detention center, which reinforces the misconception of being in the present. In retrospect, that may have been intentional.
Despite that, the clashing political and sexual intrigue in every breath of revolutionary Perfidia (Tenyana Taylor) kept me in the thrall of what-happens-next. About then, we get the subtitle, “17 years later,” and it all falls into place–especially for those of us who placed ourselves at Anti-War and Civil Rights rallies 50 and 60 years ago, only to reprise our roles in 2025.
Falls into place not just as a story of its own, but as the latest bid for inclusion into the catalog of films that capture a national era. With police raids of a workplace and a school looking so much like the ICE raids described daily on TV and radio, One Battle‘s place should be as secure. Yes, we are inescapably in the present.
For comparison to others fitting that description, One Battle is as incisive as Wall Street (1987) and at times as zany as Network (1976). Sean Penn’s Col. Stephen Lockjaw, as weird as his name, loudly echos Dr. Strangelove. Characters played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Benicio del Toro could have been drawn out of an early Woody Allen movie; their scenes together more like the stylized sight-gags of director Wes Anderson than of Director Paul Thomas Anderson who is best known for Boogie Nights (1997) and the film that One Battle most closely resembles, There Will Be Blood (2007).
The women are more seriously drawn, even if one has a name that, like “Perfidia” and “Lockjaw,” sounds like it’s from an R-rated version of Rocky and Bullwinkle. Deandra (Regina Hall) does all she can to protect the young while devoted to the revolution. And it is her charge, Willa (Chase Infiniti), conceived and born in those explosive first twelve minutes, who emerges as the film’s center and soul until she answers the call of a ham radio and drives off to Oakland for yet another dubious battle.
While car chase scenes fill movies I tend to avoid, Anderson puts brakes on one that screams up and down rolling hills with cameras that put us in the car. But there are no brakes in the father-daughter relationship. This is DiCaprio at his best–as pliable as he was in Don’t Look Up and yet as scheming as in Flowers of the Flower Moon–in scenes with Infiniti whose performance may well earn her an Oscar nomination.
For that, you can add “Character Study” to “Action Epic,” “Political Thriller,” and “Dark Comedy” as yet another tag. But if I had to settle on just one category, I’d propose a new one:
With the effortlessly hilarious June Squibb channeling a squinting Queen Elizabeth on the poster, you might think Eleanor the Great is a feel-good comedy and no more.
Oh, there’s more, much more to Scarlett Johansson’s directorial debut despite all the laughs from the opening credits to when Eleanor Morgenstein (Squibb) turns out the night-light.
Before long you might squirm with laughter at references to the Holocaust, but memories of it steer the plot when we learn that Eleanor had been an inseparable companion to a Holocaust survivor who passed away before the film begins.
All the comedy serves as disguise; Eleanor the Great is about how we deal with grief.
To tell you what Eleanor does would be to spoil most, if not all, of Johansson’s deft surprises. To avoid that, I’ll say only that it catches the attention of a novice journalist, Nina, played by Erin Kellyman, which, in turn, catches the attention of veteran journalist Roger, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor.
Roger hosts one of NYC’s most popular TV news-shows, New York Fabric, and is about to make Eleanor famous much to the dismay of Erin who has learned something after the fact. Their story becomes as central to the film as Eleanor’s when we consider that they are father and daughter, both dealing with a heavy, recent loss of their own. The humane professionalism of both offsets the antics of what most critics call “the witty, proudly troublesome” Eleanor.
Most critics–and many Screening Room patrons this week– have called the film surprising. As surprised as anyone, I tried to think of a film to which it might be compared–a film about which you could say, “If you liked Eleanor, you might also like ________.”
Of course, if you’re a fan of the nonagenarian June Squibb, there’s her breakout hit. As an octogenarian, she stole the opening scenes of the show with a supporting role in the little-noticed but superbly crafted indy film, Nebraska (2013). And she could have been auditioning for the role of Mr. Magoo’s soulmate in the title role of the wild and wacky Thelma (2024).
As for the tone and feel of the film, however, the only comparison my memory offers to Eleanor the Great is Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont (2005) in which an aging Joan Plowright, also in the title role, also tells a story that may be called wrong, but is her way of making things right.
Like Eleanor, and like Roger and Erin, Mrs. Palfrey was also dealing with grief.
Mouth of the River 