A Note to Subscribers

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

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

Until now.

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

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

Still, no go.

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

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

Weeding Our Reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Idiot Detection Systems

When Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker told Northwestern University’s graduating class, “If you want to be successful in this world, you have to develop your own idiot detection system,” he offered examples but no red flags.

Examples so rich the Class of 2023 may have heard the melody of Bob Dylan’s “Idiot Wind” as the soundtrack and ended each one by singing the last line, “a wonder you still know how to breathe.”

Obvious looney tune quotes from conmen such as Donald Trump and George Santos made them laugh out loud, and Marjorie Taylor Greene’s warning of “gazpacho police” may have sent a tidal wave across Lake Michigan. Still, a list of signs would be in order.

Such was the reaction of Guardian columnist Arwa Mahdawi following her report of that section of Pritzker’s commencement address that went viral:

I think we could all do with a bit more of a comprehensive guide, don’t you? So I’ve helpfully put together the beginnings of one. Behold, five golden rules for spotting an idiot.

For me, the operative word in that is “beginnings.”

Mahdawi’s five-point list (see link below) emphasizes boasting, whereas Pritzker emphasized cruelty. Most fascinating is her mention of people who boast of not reading books. For years, yes decades, I’ve taken in for granted that few people ever read books and have heard no one ever bother to boast of it. However, I have increasingly heard–over these past eight years especially and specifically, people boast of not reading (or watching or “following”) the news.

That would top my list which emphasizes laziness, but I’ll offer it as an addendum to Mahdawi’s point and add five more:

6) Anyone who says that they will not watch a film with subtitles (the visually impaired excepted), though I admit that’s not so much a sign as an open admission;

7) Anyone who pops into a cinema and asks, “Is this film any good?” What I want to answer: “Get a dunce cap, why dontcha?” What I answer: “Greatest film ever made! Cinematography the best since Galileo! Acting the best since Shakespeare! Dialogue the best since Hemingway!” and on and on in that vein until the light bulb goes on;

8) Anyone who condemns Congress without specifying or distinguishing members and parties, who says “They’re all the same.” We hear that declaration a lot less of this lately, for obvious reasons, but it is implied in the generalized condemnations of “Congress,” often conveyed in the pronoun “they”;

9) Anyone who wants to avoid controversy by saying “There’s a lot we don’t know” when there’s already enough that we do know. If this isn’t an excuse for laziness, then it’s an excuse for complacency, or, worst of all, cowardice;

10) Anyone who habitually uses the word “appropriate.” This takes people by surprise when I mention it. Which, in turn, often takes me by surprise because I’ve been harping on and writing about it a full forty years since I first heard it so often in the administrative ranks of higher education.

Then in politics. In 1985, when then-New Hampshire Governor John Sununu dismissed the “linkage” between the construction of a nuclear plant on the coast and the storage of nuclear waste some 80 miles inland as “inappropriate,” I knew I’d never trust anyone who used the word again unless they specified what they meant. And unless they didn’t mind my interrupting to ask every time.

That didn’t go over well in department meetings, no matter how liberal you think colleges and universities may be. To the Aproprios, the word was–and still is–as much an all-purpose ticket to slide as it was to Sununu forty years ago. Gone were the complex realities of necessity, relevance, and ethics. In was the simple efficiency and smug presumptuousness of “appropriate.” When the Aproprios started to outnumber Educators in the administrative ranks in the ’90s, my days were short-numbered.

Readers of this blog, or of my columns, may be thinking right now, “Oh, no! Here he goes again!” But what better sign, what better red flag is there for idiocy than a reliance on words that have no specific meaning? If you start asking for specifics, you’ll soon see it for yourself.

Of course, questions themselves aren’t always welcome these days, now, are they? My hunch is that this is what Pritzker was getting at in his commencement address and what Mahdawi, in her uniquely satirical way, aimed to re-inforce.

Only question I have is: Which is the more sure sign of idiocy: Refusing to answer questions? Or the failure to ask them in the first place?

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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jul/23/how-to-spot-idiots-jb-pritzker-northwestern-speech?CMP=oth_b-aplnews_d-1

Pritzker on the campaign trail in Chicago: https://www.chicagotribune.com/politics/ct-met-barack-obama-jb-pritzker-20181031-story.html

https://genius.com/Bob-dylan-idiot-wind-lyrics

Put Yourself on a Roll

Friends who take a week-long vacation in the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts every summer are always sure to send me news of Arrowhead, Herman Melville’s home that is now open for tours offered by the Berkshire Historical Society.

Today they tell me that Arrowhead now offers “Musing with Melville” for anyone wanting to sit and write at his desk with the window that looks out at Mount Greylock 17 miles to the north.

Thanks for the notice, but at $300 per hour, I’ll continue to write while looking out my own window over a very flat Plum Island Sound here on Massachusett’s Atlantic Coast rather than at the majesty of it’s highest peak by its New York border.

However, I was fascinated by something else they mentioned, and took more time considering its possibilities: For just $10.99 at a nearby deli, you can pick “The Melville” from the sandwich list: Tuna with Swiss cheese, tomato & onion on sourdough.*

Seems an easy choice for how to spend three bills: One hour at his desk, or 27 sandwiches with his name?

Of course, Melville would have tuna, if only because there’s no whale to be had on today’s “Save the Whales” market. And I bet the tuna is not albacore, but yellow fin, because the first rule of food and drink is: The darker, the better.

When at the Thanksgiving table, do you choose the always moist dark meat or the relatively dry white meat? Is your rice brown or white? Now that corn is in season, will you insist on bright bumblebee or settle for pale canary? If you are particular about coffee, do you prefer dark or light roasts? If about beer, do you enjoy light or amber? Dark or milk chocolate? White or wheat bread? Or rye?

So many preferences got me to thinking: If you had a sandwich named for you, what would it be?**

Call me rosemary ham with sharp, aged cheddar, a Calimari tomato, and ranch dressing on pumpernickel as dark as there is. Dark rye is fine, but pumpernickel makes for good conversation. I have yet to have lunch with anyone who did not enjoy the story of how the word came to be:

For it we can thank Napoleon. When he went on that ill-fated campaign to conquer Russia, he camped outside a Saxon town where he took a liking to a local bakery. One very dark bread may have been the reason he had his army linger there a few days. Be that as it may, he sent his officers into the town to get it.

We overlook that Napoleon was Corsican, really more Italian than French, hence his black hair and darker complexion. His officers, of fairer skin and fairer tastes, thought that their general was indulging in crudeness for this bread, and did not want to admit to the German baker that a French general would want such a thing.

So they made a point of telling him that the bread was for Napoleon’s horse, Nicole. In French, bread is pan, and for is pour, and so the German ear heard pan pour Nicole. Adopting that phrase to name his bread auf Deutsch, the baker coined pumpernickel.

I tell the story now as an example of how to craft a sandwich named for you into something you can craft conversation around. In addition to European history, I can parlay the rosemary into mention of a realtive who avoids it eleven months out of the year because it reminds him of Christmas. Calamari tomatoes are a recent discovery for me, and the first that I ever liked putting into omelets. Ranch dressing I like to say is a tribute to my years in the Dakotas, which it really isn’t, but it starts a good story if anyone should say, “Oh yeah? What’s it like out there?”

Last night when I began typing ideas for this, a friend now living in Western Pennsylvania rang my phone wanting to know if I knew anything about Hunter Biden vacationing years ago on Plum Island. That interested me about as much as would Spam and Velveeta with Miracle Whip on Wonder Bread, so I ignored the question, and spoke excitedly:

“M———, if a friend of yours opened a delicatessen and wanted to name a sandwich for you, what would it be?”

I’d have been thankful if it just made her forget about Hunter Laptopper, but she dug right in with relish. Well, not relish relish, but as if she was starved and about to chow down on grilled chicken and mozarella topped with tomato and basil on sourdough.

Not sure what she would have to say about any of those items, but the word “grilled” could well serve an historian and genealogist who does a lot of writing, which she is, and therefore asks a lot of questions.

Another friend, answering the identical question, didn’t hesitate: “It would have to be roast beef from a cow still mooing.” She mentioned mayo as if she’d turn the jar upside down rather than bother with a knife, as well as “lettuce with a crunch,” presumably to drown out the poor cow’s mooing, and a heirloom tomato all on the sesame-seeded, crusty white rolls crafted by the legendary Virgilio’s Bakery in Gloucester. Now that’s loaded with conversational possibilities, as well as argument from the well-done crowd.

So there you have the first three items– “The Garvey,” “The Mel” (preferring her nickname), and “The Annie” (preferring her first name)–on the sandwich board at the Cold-Cuts-R-Us Deli. My travelling friends have not yet responded to my invitation to add theirs, which makes me worry that their Melvilles may have turned into Moby-Dicks and sunk them.

To stay afloat, I am taking suggestions on-line in the comments section–or, as we call it in the real world, over the counter. In time, with apologies to another famous Berkshire resident, I hope to be able to boast that you can have anyone you want at this oh-so personal restaurant.

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*Everyone has likely seen these. Within my rounds, I can recommend the Maine Diner’s “El Tiante,” named for the legendary Red Sox pitcher of the ’60s and ’70s, corned beef hash with poached eggs and a side of fruit. And the Early Bird in Plaistow, N.H., reaches back to the 50s with the “James Dean,” Hollywood’s rebel without a cause, biscuits with gravy and sausage.

For later in the day, Wild Willie’s “Annie Oakley” up in York, Maine, a burger with blue cheese–Yes please! Here in Newburyport, the Port Tavern’s “Tom Brady,” a burger with avacado–No! Just no!

But my all-time favorite was on the beverage menu at the Great Lakes Brewery when I visited Cleveland in 2008: “Eliot Ness IPA.” Now that’s gloating at its finest, and the brew lives up to it!

**The word itself is from the Earl of Sandwich who, in the 18th Century, was the first person to put corned beef between two slices of bread. Turns out that his obsessive gambling was the mother of his invention:

https://allthatsinteresting.com/john-montagu

Worth More Than Admission

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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A Muse I Hope I Amused

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

And I regret it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And so it was that Sarah Bodge became my muse.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Democracy by Default

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Samson Racioppi

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

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

Samson Racioppi with his “Straight Pride” flag:

https://www.masslive.com/?chr=1627222035675

Of Paradise & Parking Lots

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

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

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

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

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

“You’re a librarian?”

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

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

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

They glanced at each other and both said yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The two women looked stunned.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And I thank you!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Love at First Sound

Began for me my freshman year in college when I was still a commuter, back in my room in my family home while classmates partied late in the dorms.

For them, turntables played the soundtrack of their first year of freedom, and the music was rich. Beatles were at the end of their not-all-that-long winding road, but the Stones were still a crossfire hurricane when Carole King reset the Sixties’ stage with the tapestry of adulthood. Pete, Bob, and Joan went with the furniture and kept us forever young.

There was no lack of color or variety. From purple haze to mellow yellow, from let the sun shine in to rain on the roof, and from a pinball wizard in Soho to tin soldiers in Ohio, we took turns heeding Aretha’s “Think,” joining Grace’s Volunteers, and puffing magic dragons.

No question that the Fifties and early-Sixties were American rock-and-roll’s Golden Age. But I came of age right at the time of the British invasion, and it is that rock that many devoted radio stations have dubbed “classic.” Books celebrating the era, from the mid-Sixties into the early-Seventies, keep appearing every year. Just last decade there seemed to be a contest to pick rock’s most significant year:

1965: The Most Revolutionary Year in Music (2015)

1967: A Complete Rock Music History of the Summer of Love (2017)

1969: The Year Everything Changed (2011)

Never a Dull Moment: 1971, The Year That Rock Exploded (2017)*

As a high school grad in 1968, the year when everything–politically, socially, psychologically–did actually, thoroughly change, I heard all of this and had my favorites. As a freshman in the academic year of 1968-69, I may not have partied night by night with new college friends, but I spent weekends with my old high school crew, cruising the backroads of Groveland and West Newbury in the court of the Crimson King.

It was during weeknights in between when turntables spun in college dorms that I was more in tune with a shortwave radio, a high school graduation present to satisfy a fascination I had since eighth grade. When doing homework, I’d find BCN on the FM dial and leave it there, but during any break and before turning in, I’d turn to the weird band at the top and scroll sideways through the static. At any voice or music, I’d stop, but most were far from clear, and I’d move on. Then came the night that I heard talk that was crystal clear.

Couldn’t understand a word, but I could tell it was Eastern European before I thought I heard the announcer say the names “Brezhnev” and “Khrushchev,” suggesting it was Russian. He went on, and I turned out the lights and hit the pillow staring straight up at the ceiling wondering if I was listening to Radio Moscow or Radio Free Europe. Quite a difference there.

He talked at length, and I was about to pull the plug–closer and easier to find in the dark than the small on-off switch–when he paused briefly and resumed in a whole new tone. Before long I heard, in English, the name “Rolling Stones,” which snapped me wide awake even though I had no idea of what was being said of them. Then came the words, “Gimme Shelter,” followed immediately by the sultry guitar opening of that song.

That night, like most others, I probably smoked a joint before I turned to shortwave, but it had to be redundant. Could it get any higher for a teenager in Lawrence, Mass., in 1969 than to bask in the devil’s sympathy broadcast from the USSR in the dead of night? Take my newfound wings and learn to fly…

Over 50 years later, I spend Tuesday mornings sitting in Chococoa, a Newburyport coffeeshop, with three guitarists who often talk about chords and progressions and diminished this and major that while I, a flautist, quietly pretend I know what it means. That’s fine. I’m content to inhale Kenyan dark roast and savor a lemon-ginger scone in blissfully ignorant silence, so such talk does not fret me.

More often we speak of music that we hear, that we like, that we play, and so we talk about our gigs–for me that’s now just the fall Renaissance festival, sometimes jamming with the Buzzards Bay Buccaneers–and whatever musical news we’ve heard or read since we last met. If I’m the odd-man out in the guitar-talk, I make up for it with a projectionist’s advantage of describing films such as Elvis, Chevalier, and Summer of Gold before my friends have a chance to see them–as well as documentaries such as Little Girl Blue, Amazing Grace, and I’m Your Man in fine detail.

Comparisons, from near to far-flung, abound. A mention of chordal suspensions in Tommy will draw one of the same in Henry Purcell’s Renaissance operas. An account of a performance of Seals and Croft at the Blossom Music Center outside Akron years ago will trigger memories of folk, rock, jazz, and classical concerts at venues such as Red Rocks in Colorado and Tanglewood here in Massachusetts, as well as Steve’s view from onstage at the Alaska Folk Festival.

And random connections. When John insists that “Summer in the City” was the Lovin’ Spoonful’s best song, I let him know that the bassist wrote a biography of the group a few years ago and titled it with the lyric: Hotter than a Matchhead. I also let him know that I once dined in Chez Piggy, wacko lead guitarist Zal Yanofsky’s restaurant in Kingston, Ontario.

Borrowing Dylan’s word, our conversations are all free-wheeling. And the wheels ran on both tracks of comparison and connection when Rob reminded us of the repeated hammering note that serves up Janis Joplin’s wail, “Cry Baby.” Whatever the subject before he mentioned it, the rest of us launched into a list of songs with riveting openings, single phrases that command attention, and remain through the years immediately identifiable.

First that came to mind is what I called the single “chord” that opens “A Hard Day’s Night.” John half agreed: “‘Chord’? That was more of a musical mash.”

Mash? How about one of memorable instumental openings? If you like pinacolada, all day and all of the night, let me take you down to the House of the Rising Sun on a dark desert highway where the taxman has got you, babe!

We agreed that as far as we knew, Beethoven should be credited as a forerunner of this category, if it be a category, with the iconic four-note command opening his Fifth Symphony–made all the more suggestive when adapted as a basis for its sweeping, celebratory third movement. As John notes, we limit it with the oft-used description of “opportunity knocks” when the tempo he gives it later on sounds more like opportunity realized. And I have since learned that it is the only musical composition that has a scripted “audience part.”**

From four notes to six opening Jethro Tull’s “Aqualung.” Not long ago I headlined a Daily News column, “Sitting on a park bench,” knowing that anyone close to my age would hear that with a force that grabbed their attention. Whether they kept reading was another matter, and a peaceful, pastoral piece about taking walks along a salt-marsh may have been quite a surprise to those who did. But readers in the following days confirmed my hunch.

Before Tull’s six were the Rolling Stone’s eight to open “Satisfaction,” although we might credit just the first two notes for doing the trick. The Supremes’ topped–or bottomed–that with a single word, “Stop!” before singing “in the name of love.” Could we credit Aretha with yet more efficiency by using a single letter? I vote no, as the R is too musically linked to the E-S-P-E-C-T to stand alone, although I certainly agree that the seven letters qualify the song for a place high on the list of commanding openings.

Back to instrumental intros: After reliving my Moscow Night in 1969, I fast-forward to a summer afternoon aside Mount Wachusett in Central Mass in the early-Nineties when Shenandoah took the stage and launched into a riff that had us, about 2,000 strong as I recall, bouncing for a few minutes. We barely noticed that Arlo Guthrie was onstage with them, strumming away, before he edged slowly toward the mic front center and, in that distinct, nonchalant nasal tone of his, exhaled, “I don’t want a pickle.”

I still hear the roar. But for the sake of a category of music commonly known, let’s stick to riffs on best-selling records. We might credit Sonny & Cher for “And the Beat Goes On” and Nancy Sinatra for “These Boots Are Made for Walking,” but both of those openings were improvised and offered on the spot by Carol Kaye, virtuoso bassist with the legendary studio musicians called the Wrecking Crew that recorded to perfection the songs of many groups–including the Association, Gary Lewis and the Playboys, and at times even the Beach Boys–who then played them on stages where standards were less exacting.

So Kaye gets two entries, as might Paul Simon if we count the lyric invitation of “Hello darkness my old friend.” Yes or no, there’s what he calls the “banjo-roll” that opens “The Boxer.” Once asked why he never played it in concert, he said, “because I can’t,” but I see that recently he has had banjo virtuoso–and superb interviewer/host of a PBS show, My Music–Rihannon Giddens join him onstage. I know that she has added lyrics that extend the reach of Simon’s “American Tune” to 1619, but have yet to find that she delivers that intro.***

When America delivered a victory to Barack Obama in 2008, Stevie Wonder’s “Signed, Sealed, Delivered” opened the victory celebration with a joyous bounce that fit the faces of the Obama family and everyone on the stage with them as soon as the first note was heard, well beforethe added exhilaration of Wonder’s voice. Here’s hoping we hear it again in November next year.

Rather than keep adding to this list into next year, let me state the obvious: Anyone could make a list as long or longer, as strong or stronger, with completely different titles. Anyone twenty or fifty years younger than I could do it with a list of songs I don’t know, musicians I’ve never heard of. Anyone older might opt for the instumental accompaniment to “Moon River,” “That’s Life,” and “One o’clock, two o’clock, three o’clock rock!”

Not to mention the demographics of glam rock that would favor David Bowie and Queen, yacht rock with Steely Dan and Loggins & Messina, and heavy metal for the musically impaired, the mentally challenged, and the emotionally stunted.

For demographics that include me, Stan Rogers’ ominous opening of “Barrett’s Privateers” is my pick for folk music, while the defiant raunch that opens the Standells’ “Dirty Water” is irresistable to fans of Boston’s pro sports teams. For wind musicians what can possibly outdo Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s opening bars of “Serenade for a Cuckoo”? Really gives us the bird, and the bird is most welcome.

How about I say that I’m here only to start the list, and anyone reading is free to add? Of course there are emphatic openings of songs that immediately devolve into idiot wind. The absurd pronouncement of Arthur Brown’s “Fire” and the cackling laughter of the Surfaris’ “Wipeout” would, in my book, be more fitting in a petition to repeal the First Amendment than on any list of songs I’d recommend. But that’s just me.

One I have not mentioned only to save it for last. And, yes, it is my choice for best, but more importantly it’s my choice for most relevant. In the Sixties it was intended to wake us up and keep us woke. And, oh, how we need that now! From the Chambers Brothers:

“Time Has Come Today.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2aEj5U8kHbc

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*The books on 1969 and 1971 are page-turning, eye-opening reads, and I urge anyone interested in rock music or in the era to read both. The 1965 and 1967 entries are delightful treats that I recommend for those my age who care to indulge in nostalgia.

https://www.classicfm.com/discover-music/humour/audience-part-beethovens-5th/

***John adds that, though called a “banjo roll,” it can be played on guitar. And so it is on the original single in 1968 and on the album, Bridge Over Troubled Water. Whether Simon could play it then but can’t now, or if it was played by Fred Carter Jr. who has a guitar credit on the album is not clear. Meanwhile, here’s Simon’s duet with Giddens on “American Tune”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPWNiVdnU8Y

A Lot We Do Know

In a supermarket in Fort Myers, two women trade notes about news from family back in the North of Canadian wildfires, poor air quality, difficulty breathing. One uses the term “climate change,” and the other agrees that the severity of the fires and the unprecedented smoke is a consequence.

A man overhears and rushes toward them, speaking loudly with the emphasis of a jabbing index finger aside his face: “No! People light fires! Not climate change! People! People light fires!”

No matter how loud his voice, with it we hear the echo of “Guns don’t kill people! People kill people!” And so a canned excuse to deny the need for gun control–even modest regulations that would still allow any sane adult to obtain one or more–is adapted to deny climate change.

For the record, the fires in Ontario are the result of a prolonged, record-annihilating drought rendering forests vulnerable to bolts of lightning. Unlike the firing of a bullet, there’s “no human required.”

Put it that way, and denialists such as the fellow in Fort Myers may simply reverse objection. If people are innocent, then nothing can be done. Contradiction? Maybe, but the aim is the same: Inaction.

Guns’ rights advocates also have an alternate objection to any attempt at regulation. They’d never call it an “objection,” but it serves as one, and they sure as hell know it. Works like an anesthetic. We hear it all the time, some of us repeat it:

Thoughts and Prayers.

On a local television station in Des Moines, a meteorologist begins linking changes in Iowa weather patterns to human-driven changes in Mother Earth’s climate. Days later, citing mounting harassment and death threats, he resigns.

Another adaptation? Yes or no, this has been happening at polling venues all across the country where long-time poll workers have been harrassed and threatened for not excluding certain batches of votes–usually those delivered from precincts with large minority populations. Many have quit their jobs; some have moved to other towns.

An elderly woman and her daughter in Georgia went into hiding after Donald Trump accused them of counting cases full of what he called fabricated Biden votes, showing a surveillance video of them handing a case. Never mind that the case later proved to be legit, Fox News played the insinuating video on a loop and the MAGA crowd fell for it.

Did I mention that the two women were African-American? Do you think that might have mattered to the MAGA crowd? How so?

But those questions take us off subject. Question to get back is this: Will other meteorologists ever start telling their viewers of the connections of extreme droughts, severe storms, and increasing erosion to climate change? Or will the threat of violence in America’s heartland keep them presenting daily weather–from 115-degree days in the Pacific Northwest to a deep freeze in Texas, from ruined apple and pear crops in New England to floods along the Mississippi–with smiles and jokes and soothing laughter?

I’d ask why every woman meteorologist I ever see is always dressed in clothes so tight, she’d be far more comfortable and her smiles more convincing if the desired colors were just painted on, but that question might be off-limits for an unpreferred pronoun.

From all over the country we can add similar stories, both from local news and from friends and relatives who witness it first hand.

Over the years, my friend in Santa Rosa has described encounters much like that in Fort Myers regarding a full range of environmental disasters from flooding and mudslides to wildfires. This week my friends in Vermont are posting pictures of raging rivers flooding places where floods have never before been seen, only to gain comments that deny the obvious cause.

Our attempts to penetrate this wall of denialism has been difficult enough, but I’m afraid we are making it worse by accepting, agreeing with, and even parroting the ultimate denial that is now gaining traction. First noticed it last month in the statements of congressional Republicans looking to cut American aid to Ukraine–and last week, aimed at me for publically taking a side in a local controversy:

There’s a lot we don’t know.

Well, of course! We know little of the history between Russia and Ukraine, but we do know who invaded whom. We know little of the inner workings of a public institution, but when a conflict becomes public, we know who makes it public.*

Such controversies raise questions that must be asked, not buried under the rug of “There’s a lot we don’t know.” The line is insidious. Because it can be applied to anything, it describes nothing. But it does serve as an all-purpose rationale for inaction.

There’s a lot we don’t know about climate change, but there’s more than enough that we do know. If we don’t use it to confront the finger-jabbers that cross our paths and rally behind scientists willing to tell us what is real rather than what is comfortable, ha-ha-ha, the forecast is obvious.

Not to mention as hopeless as “thoughts and prayers.”

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*This refers to the Newburyport Public Library, a conflict described in my recent blogs, “No City for Volunteers” and “American Zeitgeist.”

https://www.aarp.org/politics-society/history/info-2021/climate-change.html

Aboard the USS Neversink

While I was consumed over the week of the 4th, of all times, by a controversy over a public library, of all places, Mouth of the River Editor-in-Chief Helen Highwater, of all people, has kept her eye on news from DC that demands attention.

Perhaps to rechannel my attention, she begins with a quote from Herman Melville:

If there are any three things opposed to the genius of the American Constitution, they are these: irresponsibility in a judge, unlimited discretionary authority in an executive, and the union of an irresponsible judge and an unlimited executive in one person.
White-Jacket, 1850

From that springboard, Highwater dives into the recent Supreme Court decision invalidating affirmative action, citing with her eagle-eye and talon-pen, a fishy footnote on page 30:

The United States as amicus curiae contends that race-based admissions programs further compelling interests at our Nation’s military academies. No military academy is a party to these cases, however, and none of the courts below addressed the propriety of race-based admissions systems in that context. This opinion also does not address the issue, in light of the potentially distinct interests that military academies may present.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, reports Highwater, pounces on that note to argue: “The majority does not dispute that some uses of race are constitutionally permissible.”

The dryness of that sentence does not dull the blade. Sotomayor’s thrust is that, while ladders into legal, medical, engineering, and business professions are taken away, there will always be a ladder, nay an escalator, for people of any color into the armed services.

And where else but in a footnote could six Supreme Court justices try to finesse such irresponsibility?

Highwater followed this lead into the amicus curiae filed by the Biden Administration on behalf of Harvard and the University of North Carolina, which the Supreme Court decided against. In the summary, she found this:

Diversity in the halls of academia directly affects performance in the theaters of war. … Indeed, because most of the military’s officer corps come from service academies or ROTC, the diversity of these institutions and programs directly impacts the diversity of our military’s leadership.

The importance of maintaining a diverse, highly qualified officer corps has been beyond legitimate dispute for decades. History has shown that placing a diverse Armed Forces under the command of homogenous leadership is a recipe for internal resentment, discord, and violence.

“In other words,” translates Highwater, “white supremacy is a recipe for disaster.”

In an aside, she adds, “Not that I have ever been a fan of ROTC, but SCOTUS has just decimated (perhaps literally if not figuratively) ROTC’s potential effectiveness.” Highwater and I are both graduates of South Dakota State University, home of a fairly large ROTC program, so she knows whereof she speaks, and I can vouch with certainty. Moreover, it occurs to me that, though ladders and escalators will continue to take people of color into the service, they will no longer reach the higher ranks.

A footnote to mask the face of systemic racism.

Over 170 years ago, regarding class if not race, Herman Melville made that same critique of the US Navy in White-Jacket, a book that the publisher made a point to send to every member of the US Senate and House of Representatives. The restriction of officers’ ranks to the privileged class survived the expose for decades to come, but officers had one less prerogative to flaunt their privilege.

Melville’s detailed descriptions of flogging aboard naval vessels surpass anything that we read twenty years ago about waterboarding. Quentin Tarantino would envy the visual precision; the Marquis de Sade would admire the effect; Dick Cheney might have thought it a blueprint. Not long after the publication of White-Jacket, the widespread practice of flogging was banned.

Though the book doesn’t directly address slavery as did Melville’s short story, “Benito Cereno,” it does portray a few African-Americans as respectable, dignified, amiable sailors. Treatment of them by the officers speaks for itself, including one scene that might make the hair on your arms stand on end. Then there’s this rebuttal to the first and foremost rationalization for enslavement and Jim Crow always made by Southerners:

Nor… is the general ignorance or depravity of any race of men to be alleged as an apology for tyranny over them. On the contrary, it cannot admit of a reasonable doubt, in any unbiased mind conversant with the interior life of a man-of-war, that most of the sailor iniquities practiced therein are indirectly to be ascribed to the morally debasing effects of the unjust, despotic, and degrading laws under which a man-of-war’s-man lives.

Quite easy to substitute the words “the country” for “a man-of-war” in that passage. It’s a parallel that Melville draws throughout the book with a ship named the Neversink to represent the USA.

Coincidentally, Highwater responded to the Melville quote in my recent blog, “American Zeitgeist,” that critiques the complicity of Christian chaplains with abusive captains on board naval vessels. Melville noted “how efficacious, in all despotic governments, it is for the throne and altar to go hand-in-hand.” Highwater seeths:

“The throne and the altar.” That’s the MAGA deal, isn’t it? I’ll leave you to run your things from your altar if you secure the throne for me. Deal? I’ll pack the courts to back us. I will repudiate any interference as fraud. I will be your retribution. All I demand is total faith and loyalty.

Add White-Jacket to the list. Would a nation familiar with Moby-Dick put a monomaniac in the White House? Or with Melville’s Confidence Man put a huckster there? Or with Redburn tolerate cruel treatment of immigrants?

Forgive me, but the controversy I mentioned up top began for me when I complained about the absence of those books, save Moby-Dick, from the local library. All I’ve gained, apart from privately expressed support, are two rebuttals in the local press, both of which dismissed my mention of Melville.

But don’t pity me. Something quite satisfying about being told, publically, to “let go” of the Pequod, a whaling ship memorialized in 1851 during the very week that Newburyporters flock to see the Nao Trinidad, a replica of the ship Magellan sailed round the globe circa 1521.

As Highwater quipped when she first saw Sotomayor’s deadpan stab at her right-wing colleagues’ equivocating footnote:

“Somtimes the satire just writes itself.”

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