Once plays the Firehouse just one more weekend. Wish I had seen it sooner so that my endorsement here could give you more time for an experience that truly is beyond categories of “play” or “musical.”
More than any other theatrical event, including the film on which it was based (a huge hit at the Screening Room 15 years ago), it recalls this line from the introduction to a book published in 2008:
The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel is not a painting. It is an event.
Once at the Firehouse is an event. It begins before the program tells us it starts, and it continues after we leave the hall and make our way toward the stairs or elevators. In this sense, it recalls Renaissance faires–where I will be the next eight weekends*–that begin and end outside the gates before they open and after they close.
Between times at the Firehouse, the acting and music in Once could not be more entertaining or enjoyable. So, too, innovations in sound and lighting and the ingenious positioning and movement of at least a dozen characters and all kinds of musical props.
My reluctance to offer any specifics is only to avoid spoiling any of many surprises. Instead, I’ll just say that this production of Once will be as memorable as the lines of the great Celtic ballad that it evokes:
… a time to rise and a time to fall Come fill to me the parting glass Good night and joy be with you all Good night and joy be with you all
-30-
* A strolling piper at King Richard’s, Carver, Mass., weekends, Sept. 3 – Aug. 23, at the gate opening and closing.
First time I ever saw a cellist wear and walk with the instrument while playing. I’m at least thrice his age and have been around musicians all my adult life.
When the September issue of Harper’s appeared with the headline, “Gall-Peters Reflections,” it rang a bell.
A short entry in the monthly magazine’s “Readings” section, it was a whimsical label for seven tweets posted by a Kenyan journalist this spring to report what was happening in Western countries.
No doubt many Americans would find it insulting to hear the USA called a “banana-exporting republic… where many reject modern medicine due to Christianist superstitions.”
If it’s any consolation, America is but one of many nations north of the Tropic of Cancer in the Kenyan’s scathing sights. The “tribally-divided” United Kingdom; “disease-ridden, war-torn sub-Scandinavian Europe”; and the Russia of “Slav warlord” Vladimir Putin all combine to form what Patrick Gathara, said Kenyan, vilifies as the “Caucasian bloc.”
All of it, he tweets:
… observes holy weekend of Easter, when shopping festivities mark ancestors’ sacrificial murder of Jesus Christ, a radicalized preacher of Mideastern appearance.
A lot going on there. Holy shopping? Ancestors’ murder? Jesus a radical? Brown skin! No doubt many Americans who identify themselves as “Christian Nationalists” and the Republican Party that now panders to their paranoia would demand that such talk be cancelled–along with books that teach honest American history–all while they condemn “cancel culture.”
As many cable news and social media pundits have pointed out since the 2016 presidential campaign, this is called “projection,” accusing your perceived opponents of doing the very things you yourself do.
As a movie theater projectionist since 1998, I’m a bit leery of the term, and opt for other ways to describe defensive deceit. Whenever possible, I’ll let the matter speak for itself, as does Gathara with hard-to-argue observations such as:
Fifteen killed during traditional school shooting in separatist region of Texas, in violence-prone, far northwestern U.S. republic, where surviving school gun attacks is a rite of passage and seen as preparation for adult life in a country with more guns than people.
Even the most adamant advocates of gun-safety legislation must flinch at the word “traditional” in this context. Clearly hyperbolic, but the obvious grains of truth in it are as irrefutable as in this:
Baby-food shortage is latest blow to the troubled nation once considered a stable lynchpin in Caucasian bloc but which has now endured years of corrupt rule, political and ethnic violence, disputed polls, an attempted coup, deadly disease, and climate-related disasters.
Wait! No matter how valid, if exaggerated, we think the Kenyan’s assessment, there is one factual, geographical error: Texas is not in the northwestern US, but in the southwestern US. Or did he intend that word to mean the entire USA? Before we charge Gathara with an error, let’s consult Gall-Peters.
In 1855, cartographers James Gall and Arno Peters offered a correction of the distortion that enlarged the northern hemisphere and diminished the southern on the widely used–to this day–Mercator map.
Gerardus Mercator drew his projection in 1569 when there was good reason to allow more space for the known European countries and the about-to-be explored and settled New World, most of it on or north of the Equator. No matter what history has done to that reason, you can bet that it will remain the preferred–nay, insisted upon–map of those who have manufactured and those who believe in the “Critical Race Theory” scare tactic that helps elect and re-elect governors deep in the heartlessness of Dixie.
Put it this way: If they are going to distort and suppress history and literature, they pretty much have to insist on distorted geography. Little have we realized that the teaching of geography is itself just as gerrymandered as our congressional districts.
Attachments below show a difference in what, in recent years, has been a recurring controversy in both political and educational spheres. Do Americans and Europeans view the world with a diminished view of African and South American nations, or an inflated view of our own? Do we groom our own children with that view?
As we all know, opinions here are sharp, hot, and polarized, but no matter which side you’re on, you can see why a Kenyan could not possibly apply the word “south” to Texas and would feel fully justified calling it “north.” Geography sides with him.
Turns out that “polarization,” like “projection,” plays tricks with meanings. So I learned when I asked my editor, Helen Highwater, another Harper’s subscriber, to weigh in on “Gall-Peters Reflections”:
Calling herself “an amateur Fullerite,” she favors the Dymaxion projection of 1954 which puts the North Pole at the center. (For a pic of Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion along with Mercator and Gall-Peters, see below.)
As flat renditions of a round surface, all maps unavoidably have some degree of distortion of size and/or shape of land masses. Imagine carefully peeling an orange to keep the peel in a single piece and then trying to press it to a flat surface. Dymaxion mitigates this by carving out empty spaces in what would otherwise be overly vast oceans.
What would Herman Melville say of so much oceanic redaction of his “watery world”? Answer to that may be the line in Moby-Dick where Ishmael tells us of Kokovoko, a South Pacific island that “is not down in any map. True places never are.”
While Dymaxion is more true to size and shape than Gall-Peters and Mercator, it is wildly disorienting regarding direction. Ditto a comparison of it to projections favored by National Geographic–Robinson of 1963 and Winkle tripel of 1921–which curve all four corners and correct Mercator’s distortion at the Equator (both also below).
To plan a trip with Dymaxion, you would no longer draw lines, but curves. The words north, east, west, and south would have no bearing, although you could use “north” to mean “center,” and “south” to mean “perimeter.” How could that possibly be helpful?
Here’s how:
With the Arctic melting away and shipping lanes already starting to open, Dymaxion could prove the most practical of all, especially to oil companies. Environmental writer Rebecca Solnit nailed this about five years ago when she wrote in Harper’s that Putin’s main motive to interfere in our 2016 election was not so much to elect Trump as it was to elect any Republican who would ease the sanctions that followed the Russian invasion and annexation of Crimea in 2014.
Those sanctions limited where Gazprom, Novotek, and Rosneft could drill in the Arctic. Moreover, Russian oil companies would gain four years of American refusal to approve any United Nation attempts to protect the Arctic.
Anyone who has paid any attention to news from Moscow in the ten years since Putin became president knows that he and his oil industry executives form an oligarchy that controls the country. As the late Sen. John McCain told CNN in 2015:
Russia is a gas station masquerading as a country. It’s kleptocracy. It’s corruption. It’s a nation that’s really only dependent upon oil and gas for their economy, and so economic sanctions are important.
Since sanctions are based on an expected result, we turn from geographic to economic projections. With a chuckle at how Dymaxion in 1954 indicated mean low annual temperature with colors, Highwater writes:
I have not studied why that scheme was given priority. Is it conceivable that mean low annual temp is the glue that bound civilizations (and capitalism) together (up to and including 1954)? In 2022, we might be more interested in mean high annual temperature.
“Might be”? She’s a master of understatement:
Seems to me humans as trend-observers will default to extending whatever trend they perceive at the moment that seems to deviate from the norm, rather blindly projecting that that trend will continue, unstoppable. Economic trend analyses seem especially prone to this, with the result that inflation is almost a kind of self-fulfilling phenomenon. When these trends follow novel paths, the economists resort to inventing new terms (e.g., stagflation), as if there must be a limited number of scenarios, rather than admit that the models are all impossibly simplistic.
We, especially policy-makers, hate admitting that random events will have (unpredictable by definition) effects. We might have better policies some of the time if we designed them with the help of the I-Ching or a coin toss!
So much for projections. Whether economic or geographic, psychological or political, they are all in play. This is why a Kenyan journalist has as much credence as anyone else at projecting a vulnerable developing nation’s view on industrial superpowers and military might. And why he can write about America being “a stable lynchpin” in the past tense while putting “Caucasian bloc” in both past and present.
Me? I’ll keep my projections on the big screen. Maybe Gathara will show up someday, and we can talk about a rectangle that never changes any sizes or shapes on it no matter who the projectionist is.
When the sound check with the lights still up morphs into the opening act, you know you’re in for something memorable.
Don’t know if Joe LeBlanc does this every month at the Bluebird Invitational Mic Night in Georgetown, Mass., or if he even does it consciously, but it works wonders to put a collection of ten or twelve performers in this new and unique venue at ease. The transition was so detailed–with guitar used as percussion and momentarily put on a loop–that each member of the audience could decide just when the show did, in fact, start.
His test, test, test as soundman was fascinating by itself, enabling him to jokingly hush the audience before strumming and singing Elton John’s “Rocket Man” as I’ve never heard it before, a soulful appeal to attend what comes next.
Making the familiar sound new introduced Bluebird’s co-hosts, Alyce Underhill and Lynne Deschenes, who initiated Bluebird’s monthly offerings in this second floor atop a small firehouse just north of Georgetown center.
All acts are local, and the first–John Hicks on guitar and Madeleine Downs shifting from violin to viola–got Bluebird off to a racy start with sets of Celtic jigs and reels. Hicks introduced one as “where I get to play my favorite instrument” and promptly sat in the audience where he tuned his ears to Downs’ endearing rendition of the traditional, “Down by the Salley Gardens,” named for William Butler Yeats’ love poem.
Composer Dianne Anderson followed on keyboards with “a piece from the Great American Songbook” that had the nostalgic feel of a Great Plains soundscape before playing her own “What to Wear” accompanying singer Anne Grant. The duo then torched Loren Allred’s “Never Enough,” a title that couldn’t be more American or up to date.
Underhill herself delivered a rapturous rendition of “The King of Rome,” a ballad by Dave Sudbury based on a true story about a carrier pigeon sent on an impossible journey that had us so enthralled we awaited the bird’s return through the Georgetown firehouse’s open windows.
Late in the show, Audi and Peter Souza evoked the working maritime days of Newfoundland and Nova Scotia with traditional songs that ranged from jolly-ho chanty to plaintive lamentation. Most moving was Cyril Tawney’s ballad, “The Oggy Man,” about food vendors selling oggies–something of a meat-pie shaped as a turnover–on the docks before the arrival of fast-food chains:
Well the rain’s softly falling and the oggy man’s no more I can’t hear him calling like he used to before As I pass through the gateway, I heard the sergeant say The big boys are coming now, see their stand across the way And the rain’s softly falling and the oggy man’s no more The rain’s softly falling and the oggy man’s no more
Spaced among the musicians, two poets shared the mic, the first, Jac-Lynn Stark who ranged from wistful poems about love and aging to a blithe romp about gardening titled, “My Life as a Zucchini Sex Facilitator.” As one who never tended a garden, I found myself paying attention to the act for the first time in my life, only to wonder how long it will be before I plagiarize the line about sautéing.
Poet Lee Moss mixed an adamant resolution regarding Russia’s war on Ukraine with several ironic takes on everyday life, including his hilarious and equally stunning “Redial,” in which, out of pure curiosity, he dials–or punches in–his deceased Father’s cell-phone number. Whether you are hi-tech or neo-Luddite, you laugh at satire that cuts both ways.
Along with music and the spoken word, Bluebird features musicians playing instruments rarely seen or heard apart from period films. Filling that role were Adrienne Howard on hurdy-gurdy and Emily Peterson on concertina–both taking turns on fiddle. When they were done I tried to recruit them for King Richard’s Faire, but it’s too late for the season that opens Labor Day weekend. Keep your eye on listings of local coffee shops and perhaps an ear out at Beverly Depot where they sometimes perform.
And keep your eye and ear on all the venues for live performance throughout Essex County, from Newburyport to Lynn and from Lawrence to Gloucester. Coffee shops, bars, cafes, churches, schools, train depots, pedestrian malls are where you will find those who perform at The Bluebird Performance Venue in Georgetown.
There was one other act, but I should perhaps recuse myself from reviewing myself. So I tack this on as an optional sequel:
Had I any sense, I’d have begged off until the November show when I’d be fresh off the eight-weekend run of King Richard’s. But it was a great advantage to be scheduled next-to-last, and a patient and kind audience kept laughing at the good natured jokes I was able to poke at most everyone before me as a way to offset the rust.
Most were of the had-to-be-there variety, such as when I hinted at what the last lines of Lee Moss’ “Redial” implied about someone who never has and never will own a cell phone. That may have been the second-loudest laugh. He laughed, everyone laughed–except me.
Since I was asked to talk about my life as a street-performer–40 years ago this month I first played in downtowns Newburyport and Salem–I read a short piece from my book, Pay the Piper!, a street scene that captures both the joy and challenge of busking in America today titled, “Slip-Jig for Flute & SUV.”
I filled the back of the SUV with “zucchini awaiting sautéing.”
Bluebird’s September and October offerings are featured performances, full shows:
Sept. 10, 7pm — Unlaunch’d Voices: An Evening with Walt Whitman, a one-man play written by Michael Z. Keamy and performed by Stephen Collins.
Oct. 8, 7pm — Mark Mandeville & Raianne Richards, an eclectic duo with an eclectic assortment of instruments for songs both serious and humorous.
In November, Bluebird will resume its Invitational Mic.
Joe LeBlanc. Photo by Lee Moss.John Hicks & Madeleine Downs. Photo by Lee Moss.Anne Grant and Dianne Anderson. Photo by Lee Moss.Jac-Lyn Stark. Photo by Lee Moss.
Alyce Underhill. Photo by Lee Moss.
Audi & Peter Souza. Photo by Lee Moss. Catch them every other Monday, 5 to 8 pm, at Jalapenos in Gloucester with fellow singers known as Three Sheets to the Wind. .
Lee Moss reading at the Walnut Street Coffee Cafe in Lynn. Photo by someone other than Lee Moss. https://walnutstreet.cafe/
Today the two doors leading into Newburyport’s busiest supermarket were disgraced by tables nearby with the clipboard petitions of people soliciting signatures.
“Illegal aliens!”
A man at each repeated those two words as often as he could in a spiel about stopping a law that has to do with the issuance of drivers’ licenses in Massachusetts. The two men stepped toward approaching shoppers as they spoke while a woman seated at each table with more petitions, empty or full, cheered them on.
Those roles may have been reversed from time to time throughout the day for the sake of vocal chords if not feet. They were loud, and two words, repeated no less than every ten seconds, no matter the sense of the sentence, were emphatically loud:
“Illegal aliens!”
Took me by surprise. Newburyport?
The place wasn’t all that busy, and I was grateful that the few folks I saw go past them paid no attention. Me? Couldn’t resist:
“What would Jesus do?”
At first they didn’t know what to make of it, but when I kept walking with no move to sign, they must have realized that they had just “owned a lib” or “pissed off a libtard” or whatever their low-life expression is of late. And so they shared a laugh behind me.
On the way out, I was tempted to ask where they would be the next morning, a Sunday morning. Will they be at the doors of Catholic and Protestant churches filling the air before and after worship with “illegal aliens”? Are they so stupid that they’d take this crap to a synagogue? Would the contradiction even register on them? Or is there a separation of the Sermon on the Mount from their Sermon at the Mart?
No, I did not waste the time. And I left through the other door where the other couple was engaged with shoppers. One was signing. I looked over at the first table. A few shoppers there as well, one signing. A lot of talk, all of it punctuated by two words that rang aloud at both tables:
“Illegal aliens!”
Couldn’t help but note that everyone at both tables, shoppers and petitioners, was of Caucasian decent, as am I. Chances are that they all have grandparents or great-grandparents or ancestors further back, who arrived in America as immigrants, as did mine. By the definitions of their own slurs, their own ancestors were “aliens,” nor were they legally here until they had been processed through customs–a process that most everyone they call “illegal” has either been through or is going through.
But doesn’t “illegal aliens” sound so much more menacing than “undocumented immigrants awaiting naturalization”?
The sight of shoppers, mostly middle-aged, some elderly, signing those hate-sheets was demoralizing. No telling how many are well-intentioned folk fooled by the slur or how many are racists grateful for yet another excuse to express it without admitting it. Surely, none of them realize the implied denunciation of their own ancestors.
Don’t know what their deadline is to submit signatures, or if I’ll see them and hear their slurs again. But, if so, I will sign. They want a name? Oh, I’ll give them a name! Not going to give it away right now, but my initials will be IA.
Somewhere in New Hampshire a friend wrenched his shoulder while unloading a truck. As men do, he tried to ignore the discomfort, believing it would go away.
Instead, it turned to pain. Before long, he didn’t think he could drive a car and had to ask his wife for a ride to the hospital.
Listening to this, not wanting to slow the story or inhibit the telling, I took no notes, but based on where I know they live, they went to either Portsmouth or Exeter. Whichever it was, as soon as they walked in, they saw a crowd and walked back out.
Somewhere else in Rockingham County they found one of those medical chains that have appeared everywhere in recent years. This one was Convenient MD, where they received a very nice, soothing welcome from a friendly receptionist, filled out some forms, including billing information of course, and were soon introduced to a nurse.
The nurse worked her fingers around my friend’s shoulder only to admit that there was nothing she could determine for certain without a x-ray, and that the staff’s radiologist had already gone home for the day. She referred them to a nearby medical center.
Third time’s a charm, and not long after they arrived at the center, my friend had some treatment, some pain-killers, and a sling he wore for barely a week.
All’s well that end’s well as whatshisname put it–except that the story doesn’t end there.
One month later, my friend received a bill for $15 from Convenient MD. Well, alright, the nurse did spend some time with him and gave the referral. And it is a pittance. He did raise his eyebrows at the amount, there on his bill, that Convenient MD charged Medicare–just over $200 as I recall–but, hey, if this is what America wants as a healthcare system, ain’t nothin’ we can do about it.
Except the story doesn’t end there either.
Weeks later, Convenient MD sent him another bill, this time for over $160, and the charge to Medicare was proportionally higher. My friend was soon on the phone.
After calls to both Medicare and Convenient MD, not only was he able to rip up the bill in front of him, he was told he’d be reimbursed for the bill he already paid. When he told them that he’d “have no choice but to contact Medicare” (even though he already had), he was assured that it, too, would be “fully reimbursed.” Days later, a $15 check arrived in the mail.
“Hush money!” I yelled.
“Yes!” he laughed.
“And it was your own $15!”
He laughed again, but he wasn’t hushed. He made a second call to Medicare to report what happened, giving them all they need to pursue reimbursement if Convenient MD reneged on what they told him. Put another way: The ball is in Medicare’s court.
We can only wonder about how widespread this is. In our privatized healthcare system, the elderly on Medicare must appear as low hanging fruit. They (we) are less prone to question bureaucratic details, as when my friend simply paid the first bill–even though he noticed the $200 charge to Medicare for a thirty-second shoulder massage.
The second bill was either a mistake, such as confusing him with another patient that day, or Convenient MD, for whatever reason (or haywire algorithm), thought it could bilk him for more–and in the process, Medicare for a lot more.
It’s an old trick, and on the internet it’s called phishing. Nor is it confined to the private sector.
Back in the ’90s, the city of Boston put cameras over busy intersections to photograph plates of cars at the end of those lines that cross as the light turns from yellow to red. Tickets would be sent out automatically.
This was already ruled illegal by courts across the country, but the higher-ups knew that most people would pay the fine rather than take a Tuesday afternoon off work to find their way into a downtown courtroom to contest the ticket.
Those who did show up in court had the ticket repealed. Every. Single. One.
If enough of us keep an eye on the bills we receive and are willing to drop a dime and raise a voice, Medicare’s court should work just as well.
A friend tells me that he was recently on the phone with a relative who, while climbing a corporate ladder, was transferred to Charlestown, South Carolina.
Most memorable was a statement screamed into my friend’s ear. He wanted to convey the emotion he heard, but tried to muffle it so as not to attract the attention of other diners at Newburyport’s Park Lunch, as loud as the din in that place can be:
These people still think the war isn’t over! The Civil War! They call it the War of Northern–they say Nawthun–Aggression or War between the States! Whatever, they don’t know they lost!
Before his attempt to muffle himself expired, I tried to calm him down: “And we expect them to know that an election two years ago is over?”
“Yahhhhh!” he bellowed. That caught some attention from nearby, but it was easy to deflect in a sports bar.
“Damned Yankees!” I shouted just as loud.
The two of us then smiled and nodded in agreement with all those around us who had no idea what they were agreeing to. All of it went unquestioned likely because the Boston Red Sox just took two out of three games from the New York Yankees in a series that ended Sunday night. Had I been sitting at another table, I’d have made the assumption myself.
Reminds me of how geographically, culturally, psychologically, and politically telescopic the name “Yankee” is.
Most historians think the word evolved from Native American attempts to say “English” throughout the colonies, and was then applied to all European settlers, including the Dutch in what was first named New Amsterdam. This may be why, to this day, every American from any state is a Yankee overseas.
Come back here, and it is just us in the North and Midwest who are Yankees in the suspicious South. To Mid-Westerners, the name is not for them, but just for New Yorkers and New Englanders, maybe New Jerseyans and Eastern Penners. Up in Northern New England, they embrace the name as their own, but in Southern New England, Yankees are a detestable baseball team with deplorable fans that we would not root for if they played Al Qaeda.
Even in New York City, many residents of its five burrows place “Yankees” specifically in the Bronx, a name not to be used for anyone or anything in Queens, home of a rival team named New York Mets–and certainly not Manhattan where the Giants played or Brooklyn where the Dodgers played before both teams moved west. No word on Staten Island’s preferred proper noun.
From the sound of it, many elderly fans in Brooklyn think the Dodgers are still there, dodging trolleys that aren’t there either. Like my friend’s relative in Charlestown, they prove that Yogi Berra was wrong. It ain’t over even when it’s over.
Both cases remind me of the chasm between what Americans like to know and what we need to know. Unless you are employed by one of the 30 major league teams, baseball has no direct impact on your life. What happens at the polls in November of every even-numbered year in all fifty states does, no matter how far you want to think you are removed from it–no matter how far above you think you are from it.
As it is, Republican nominees for the US Congress and for statewide offices all over the country have won primaries by declaring that the 2020 election was stolen, and will do what they can to undo that result–state by battleground state where, if they win this November, they will be the ones to certify electoral ballots in 2024. In effect, 2020 ain’t over any more than 1860. The Confederacy did rise again, flags and all.
But that warning will be heeded only by those who seek what they need to know.
Those content with only what they like to know may want to consider, at least, what the chant, “Yankees Suck!” actually means in the real world.
A new book provocatively titled The Color of Abolition offers a look at William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass that few have ever seen and that many may rather not see.
Any quick description of it would be enough for those who regard everything in absolutes to either dismiss it as “bashing” or revel in having yet two more progressive heroes brought low–no matter that no one on either side of that divide will ever read the book.
As one who has read it, I’ll offer that, while it reveals shortcomings of Garrison and Douglass, allies-turned-rivals, it does far more to highlight the work of both as vital to bringing about the Emancipation Proclamation.
As well as highlighting the mostly unknown work of one Maria Weston Chapman of Weymouth who gets equal billing in a book subtitled, How a Printer, a Poet, and a Contessa Moved a Nation. Born of the manor–and with five sisters “all single and all devoted to the movement” serving as her staff–Weston Chapman helped underwrite the Underground Railroad and raise legal fees to protect those caught in the North after escaping the South.
Here’s where the surprise regarding Garrison begins. Weston Chapman didn’t just keep The Liberator afloat. She became its de facto business manager, and often its editor, filling in for Garrison during his speaking tours and more-than-occasional medical leaves. Like Garrison, she also wrote much of the copy.
If that wasn’t enough, she arranged Douglass’ speaking tours and gave him introductions to influential patrons in both America and England–all while organizing auctions of pricey European donations held by a network of women throughout New England and New York.
This triumvirate worked well enough to force the issue of slavery onto the floors of Congress following years of a gag order imposed by the South. Among the highlights of The Color of Abolition is its treatment of the debate–still maddeningly relevant today–over whether the Constitution is a pro-slavery document.
This is where Garrison and Douglass parted ways. Garrison held that it was, and therefore there could be no political solution, only disunion. Douglass saw potential in the document for a political solution. He negotiated with Whigs, Northern Democrats, and the short-lived Liberty and Free Soil parties before befriending Abraham Lincoln who, two months before the assassination, told him that there was no one in America whose opinion he valued more.
On the surface, it was a meeting of two true Americans while the uncompromising, humorless (due to chronic ill-health?) Garrison and the intense, “privileged” Weston Chapman fade into oblivion–except that author Linda Hirshman doesn’t let us forget that it was Garrison’s (and Weston Chapman’s) Liberator that moved the earth in ways that would put Lincoln in the White House, and made it possible for Douglass to get anywhere near it.
We can also credit Hirshman for filling us in on this unknown role of women–and a leading role of one woman, not to mention her own literal sisterhood–in the Abolitionist movement. As she says in her introduction, “no social movement in American history matters more.” As the author of Reckoning: The Epic Battle against Sexual Abuse and Harassment (2019) as well as Sisters in Law: How Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg Changed the World (2015), she should know.
My hunch is that she undertook a history of Abolition for its parallels to what is unfolding today regarding abortion. Seemed clear to everyone with the exception of senators Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska that all three Trump appointments to the Supreme Court were intended to overturn Roe v. Wade.* Just as clear as when the Fugitive Slave Act was intended to impose Southern oppression in Northern states, no matter the South’s own claims of “states’ rights” and the euphemistic “popular sovereignty.”
Hirshman describes the anguish of Massachusetts Supreme Court Justice Lemuel Shaw in upholding the hated law. Prior to that he was legally able to rule in favor of those who escaped enslavement. She notes that Shaw was the father-in-law of Herman Melville who turned him into a model for the anguished Capt. Vere in his last novel, Billy Budd.
Today, Shaw and Vere may both serve as models for judges across the nation faced with state laws that place bounties on women who cross state lines, with severe penalties for family, friends, nurses, and doctors who assist and care for them. Hirshman’s description of the Fugitive Slave Act makes it easy, if chilling, to see how it will serve as a model for a national law to outlaw abortion should the Republicans regain control of Congress and the White House.
But Hirshman’s ultimate verdict is not entirely bleak. Speaking of her three leading characters:
Their relationship raises all the questions of whether an alliance across race, sex, and class can survive. The answer is unsurprisingly yes. And no. Their paths to abolition reflected the rise of the movement. Their alliance fueled a crucial decade. And their breakup, sending Douglass to the politicos, perversely led to its triumph.
What if the Republican breakup of Roe v. Wade sends women and men who never before voted–as well as young people who have just reached voting age–en mass to the polls?
Could it be that Trump’s three cynical appointments to the Supreme Court will perversely lead to America’s way out of today’s Dark Ages?
*If you wonder why I name just two Republican women when every Republican senator voted in favor of Trump’s three appointments, it’s only because the rest of them, including a few women, were–and still are–in on the scam.
In 1989, the year that Salman Rushdie went into hiding, and in the years immediately before and following, I frequently wrote columns about cross-country travels with my daughter that proved quite popular with readers of the local paper.
She was just 11 that year, four years older than Rushdie’s son, Zafar, who was suddenly and necessarily estranged from his father. To maintain some connection, the author of probing novels with deep historical, religious, and philosophical content, wrote a children’s story and engaged his son as his first-read editor.
After hearing the first draft, Zafar told his dad that it was a good story, but it needed “some jump.” Rushdie took that to mean “quicken the pace” and told Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross that Zafar liked the “jump” of the second version.
In September, 1990, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, the adventures of an irrepressibly happy young boy who finds himself living in a city so sad that it has forgotten its name, appeared in bookstores and libraries all over the world where speech is–or at least was–still free.
These were years when I spent more time downtown playing music than anywhere writing anything, and in the holiday season I would bundle up with fingerless gloves that allowed me to pipe Christmas carols along with my standard jigs and reels, bourees and minuets.
On the very day before Rushdie’s interview aired, a woman approached after I finished a song and handed me a $20 bill rather than putting it the basket. She insisted on a condition: That I would turn it into “a present for Rachel.”
‘Twas a few nights before Christmas that I had her open it. I figured it would take five or six nights of bedtime installments, but Haroun has more jump than Zafar may have bargained for. Several times I had to stop my voice from racing. Rachel loved it, only conceding to sleep when we were halfway through.
I took it to bed and read to the end before turning out the light.
When we woke up to pouring rain, we finished breakfast and rejoined Haroun and his story-telling father through pages of magical realism that she found exciting page by page–and that I found as thoughtful and satisfying as the novels of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Robertson Davies.
One recurring item in the dialogue we adopted into our own father-daughter vocabulary: The label that Haroun used whenever he could not answer the boy’s questions, 2C2E for “too complicated to explain” Sure sounded better than “I don’t know” and “Because.”
In the age before internet shorthand and texting abbreviations, both the sight and sound of it struck us as hilarious, and yet it had a weird echo of Hamlet’s 2B or not 2B that kept us guessing about subjects rather than shrugging them off.
Perhaps that’s my response this weekend to the news that Salman Rushdie is on a ventilator, likely to lose an eye if not his life: 2C2E. No matter what we might guess or learn about why it happened, we cannot shrug it off.
Buried under the news of an FBI search of Mar-an-Ego for classified documents was the report of that Ego answering questions in the New York State investigation of his fraudulent tax claims.
Make that not answering.
After his name and address, he invoked the Fifth Amendment. He named it just once. To every question that followed he responded with the same two words: Same answer.
There are many adjectives that describe Donald Trump. Reticent was never one of them. His performance in New York last week was so out-of-character that it could leave anyone dumbfounded, and for most it defies description.
At first, I wrote it off as yet another bizarre quirk in Trump’s bottomless barrel of bizarre behavior. But before long I was taking my laundry out of a dryer, folding a t-shirt I bought at gift-shop at Arrowhead, Herman Melville’s farm in the Berkshires. Though I’ve been wearing it for three years and have given identical shirts to family and friends as gifts, I froze when I held it in front if me. It reads:
I would prefer not to.
What Trump kept repeating last week was what Bartleby kept repeating in Melville’s cryptic tale of a socially comatose scrivener on Wall Street.
By itself, that’s nothing to get hung about. Not until you consider that this is a man frequently compared to two other Melville characters that are as far from Bartleby as they are from Mr. Rogers. Indeed, ever since he descended the escalator in June, 2015, Trump has often gained comparisons to both Ahab and whoever is (are) the title character(s) of The Confidence Man.
Captain Ahab, who leads his whaling ship to destruction in pursuit of his own fantasy, foreshadows Trump’s “I could shoot someone” with an equally hyperbolic declaration: “I’d strike the sun if it insulted me!”
Confidence Man (or men) employs the tricks of fast talk, repetition, deflection, projection, conflation, flattery, false claims, passive verbs, and vague attribution for scenes that could illustrate Trump’s ghost-written (speaking of con-jobs) The Art of the Deal.
For all of that, the most incisive explanation for the enthrallment of his fans goes beyond the Pequod’s crew’s lust for Ahab’s doubloon, beyond genteel riverboat travelers’ wanting to believe in Confidence Man’s altruism.
That honor goes to the seething narrator of “Benito Cereno,” Melville’s story of a slave revolt on a Spanish ship:
A man with some evil design, would he not be likely to speak well of that stupidity which was blind to his depravity, and malign that intelligence from which it might not be hidden?
As is true of the American captain who found the Spanish ship in distress, many Americans can neither comprehend what is right in front of them nor believe it when it’s spelled out. When it blows up, such as on Jan. 6, it’s something else (“a normal tourist day”) or someone else did it (Antifa), or it didn’t happen at all (crisis actors, false flags).
As I write, Republicans are claiming that the files recovered from Mar-an-Ego were declassified by Trump and that they were planted by the FBI. One has to be “blind to… depravity” to think both statements can be true–and “malign that intelligence” that states the obvious.
We keep hearing that we need to read our history to avoid repeating mistakes. Yes, I agree, but I can refer you to a writer of fiction who dramatized American history in summaries just as true today as they were when he called himself Ishmael.
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Drawing for the 24th Annual Moby-Dick Marathon at the New Bedford Whaling Museum in 2020, two months before the pandemic. The 2021 and 2022 readings were virtual, but they plan to return to a live reading this coming January.
While sitting on Plum Island overlooking the marsh reading Melville’s early novels, it’s easy to imagine I’m on a lush tour of the South Pacific.
A headset offering “virtual reality”? I would prefer not to.
In semi-retirement and with an insistent preference for hardcover, I’d go broke buying Typee, Omoo, Mardi, Redburn, and White Jacket—not to mention tired and blind trying to find them in bookstores.
Among many other things—civic archives and events, children’s reading programs, on-line resources and the computers to access them, not to mention technical assistance for all of the above—this is what libraries are for.
So, off to the Newburyport Public Library I went searching for Omoo (Tahitian for “rover”). Not there. The Modern Library of America’s four Melville compilations I had borrowed in the past? All gone. In fact, all I found was a single copy of Moby-Dick.
The on-line catalogue for the Merrimack Valley Library Consortium listed just one Omoo, and so I had it sent from Methuen. Next day, I spotted a friend from out-of-town who works at a library upriver photographing City Hall’s Juneteenth celebration and inquired.
He told me it’s called “weeding.” With so much on-line, many books never circulate. And then there’s MVLC.
“So, one Omoo is enough for over 30 city and town libraries?” I asked. He shrugged, I shrugged, and the mayor began to speak. That night, I sent him a message asking if weeding was a secret.
Here’s something that’s not a secret: Public libraries are as high as public education, public transportation, public everything on the Republican Party’s hit list. Are librarians now doing their dirty work for them?
While mulling that over, I received this:
It’s no secret. All libraries weed. If a book doesn’t circulate over a period of time, it’s removed. If the book is worn, meaning well read, we purchase another copy, if still in print.
Some are replaced by new trendy volumes on the same subject. You may not be able to get contemporary accounts of historical events, he cracked, but you can always get some “name-the time-or-place History for Dummies.”
If another MVLC library has the same title, removal is to avoid duplication, unless it’s a hot title:
“You can see it for yourself. Just walk through the literature and poetry sections.”
I did. As he says, “pretty anemic.” The Reference section looks empty. A bookcase on the 3rd floor with coffee table books—atlases, photography, fashion, art, etc.—is now gone, “so too the oversized books because they didn’t circulate.”
His voice rose in print:
Of course not! Too big to take home. But I witnessed many patrons read/browse/enjoy them in our library. Most people can’t afford to buy those books. The library can.
I saw many parents with children looking at atlases and photography books together and teens sharing books. We’re weeding not just books, we’re weeding people.
Given the overall demise of print, I asked, shouldn’t public libraries be increasingly vigilant safeguarding books?
Ha! A story from your own library circulated throughout MVLC that a patron wanted a second look at the two volumes of The Life and Letters of John Greenleaf Whittier. Perhaps that patron delighted to think someone else had them, but when unable to place a hold, he inquired.
Weeded.
No matter that Whittier has deep Newburyport connections and that the books, published by a relative in 1894, contain his letters, always of deep local, historical value.
How are empty spaces on shelves better than those books? Than any books? This is not the product of careful thought, but of “policy and procedure,” the very antithesis of thought that turns thinking people into badly programmed robots. At a library no less.
Oh, the irony! Just 21 years ago NPL expanded to the tune of $6.8 million for what? More books, they said back then. Maybe they think Washington, Jefferson, Lafayette, and John Quincy Adams are coming back through their door and they need bunk beds.
From my first inquiry, my librarian friend and I kept using a phrase: “with so much on-line.” Yet more irony! This dialogue began at a celebration of an American historical event as overlooked—perhaps as weeded—as Omoo all these years.
What’s on-line? I would prefer we start thinking of what’s on the line.
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The 2001 expansion is the curved structure from the left into the center as well as the entrance that links it to the old Tracy Mansion, built in 1771, into which the library moved in 1866. https://www.newburyportpl.org/
Mouth of the River 