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June 29th, 2009
08:09 am - Writer's Block: Childhood Firsts
Why? My generation questioned authority.
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06:14 am - Down on Copperline
When my father's parents came to this country they settled in a small town in New Hampshire. My father left but his parents stayed there. His brother stayed there and married a local girl. One of their daughters still lives there, as do her daughters and new grandson. In fact the daughter with the son lives in the house my aunt and uncle lived in until they got too old and frail to keep it up.
I loved going up there with my father. As we approached I could literally see the tension and aloofness fall off of him.
I never lived there but as a kid spent as much time as possible there and still go up as often as I can.
I went up Saturday for my aunt's 90th birthday. Like many wonderful places it's been developed almost past recognition but in me it's still the same sleepy little refuge that it was back then.
James Taylor wrote a song called Copperline about the area of Carolina where he grew up.
Thought I'd go back as if I could.
All spec house and plywood.
Tore up, tore up good
down on Copperline.
It doesn't come as a surprise to me,
doesn't touch my memory.
I'm lifting up and rising free
down on Copperline.
I know it's about Carolina. I've been to that part of Carolina. But to me it's about New Hampshire, because that's home.
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June 26th, 2009
11:42 am - They Wanted a Buzz But I Can Only Bellow.
Have I mentioned that I hate hype?
I'm better than I used to be. Back when I was a kid I got so sick and tired of people telling me that Huck Finn was the greatest American Novel that I got turned off of Sam Clemins for decades.
There's nothing like flogging something to death to turn me agin it.
Take football, for example. I don't enjoy football, I never have. But I don't hate it. Until the Superbowl hype starts. And continues. And continues. And then continues some more until I explode in a frenzy of loathing, scream at the TV and suppress the urge to rear-end cars with New England Patriots stickers. (Which reminds me; why do the NBA finals last longer than the regular season?)
This is probably a large part of the reason I don't watch movies, especially "blockbusters". There seems to be this cycle of five weeks of hype followed by three weeks of endlessly reported box office figures followed by five weeks of hype about the DVD release. By the time all this is done the mere mention of the movie will send me into a rage. Opie's recent allegations that the Vatican tried to interfere with his filming of yet another Dan Brown badly cobbled together bit of gobbledygook is the only time in my life I firmly aligned myself with the Vatican. I'm sick of Opie, sick of Dan Brown and sick of Tom Hanks. A plague on all their houses even if it does come from the Vatican.
What brought all this grouchiness to a head is that there are several things going on in the world that I'm interested in. When I tried to catch a few minutes of news this morning while slurping #1 coffee all I got was the fact that it was raining (my window told me that, I didn't need their radar) and Michael Jackson. Now, I'm sure that there are people deeply touched and saddened by his death, maybe even more than were saddened by his life, but give me a break. Even my usually reliable BBC World Service was all Michael Jackson.
Hence I'm grouchy.
Did I mention that I hate hype?
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June 25th, 2009
05:53 am - When I Can Tell At Sight a Mauser Rifle From a Javelin
A book I was reading last night quoted a 1967 Time magazine article as describing General William Westmoreland as "the paradigm of a military professional" which struck me as very close to being the very model of a modern major general.
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June 24th, 2009
01:13 pm - From the Pearls Before Swine Department
I was walking back to my car at MIT when I was accosted by a young man wearing a badly cut light brown suit with a dark purple shirt and a black tie.
"I beg your pardon," that peculiar sound of a Yorkshire accent trying to speak Oxbridge, "but can you direct me to the Faculty Club?"
"Certainly." I give directions. "While you're there do look in on the bar. They stock the liquor in Klein Bottles."
Blank stare.
They just don't make geeks like they used to.
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11:44 am - Lucille Bogan
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) natevw sent me a cd of Lucille Bogan recordings (thanks Nate!). Although she only recorded from about 1923 to 1935 her work had a huge impact on other blues men and women. Unbelievably I had no recordings of her, even under her psuedonym of Bessie Jackson although I'd heard many recordings, especially Shave 'em Dry which she recorded with Josh White.
I'm telling you this because I had to go to MIT this morning. I was listening to the CD on the way in and while stopped at a light a kid crossing the street stopped and knocked on my window. I rolled it down and he asked what I was listening to. I told him. He wrote the name down in a pocket notebook and told me he was going to look for the CD. "That woman's got some voice!"
I couldn't have said it better myself.
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06:43 am - It's Raining!
Hereabouts it's been raining steadily since about 1913.
There was a time when this did not bother me, I simply put on a waterproof layer and went about my business.
That was before I moved to the suburbs and had to drive everywhere. Many cars seem to have a device that is activated with the windshield wipers. This device injects extra levels of stupid into the driver. For reasons that any third grader can understand wet pavement increases the time/space needed to accelerate or decelerate. Most drivers think that it decreases the time/space needed.
So a car ahead of me is stopped waiting for a gap in traffic to take a left turn. A gap appears. Driver of car stands on gas and spins wheels, driver of car coming in opposite direction stands on brakes. Car decelerating loses traction and slows fitfully, car accelerating gets traction and shoots like a rocket into car decelerating. That part of the intersection not blocked by two dead cars is a tire slashing debris field.
So, we continue to continue
to pretend
our lives will never end
and chassis never bend
with the rainfall.
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06:06 am - Thank God it was just reality
There is a young woman who works in this building who always dresses like it's 1969; jeans, boots, and what we used to call a peasant blouse. She has long, straight hair parted in the middle. Yesterday I saw her drive up in a VW microbus camper and thought I was having a flashback.
It turns out her father was doing some repair work on her car and she was borrowing his.
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June 23rd, 2009
05:54 am - Adventures in Academia
Sometimes, for the sheer hell of it, I don my Captain Spaulding Explorer uniform and venture into the dark pit of Academic Literature. Sometimes this is quite valuable, sometimes a dead waste of paper and sometimes downright funny.
When it's funniest is when you get a professor who, after a long day of faculty meetings and ignoring students, likes to come home and watch the television. Since everything they do must, by definition, be Intellectually Important they need to justify this habit by cloaking it in scholarly raiment.
One of my favorites is a "historian" who was able to discern the degree of anti-war sentiment in the country by a close analysis of Star Trek episodes. Last night I read the same "historian" interpreting the Beverly Hillbillies as a thinly veiled attack on the American Consumer Society and acquisitiveness in general. It was all assertions and no defense of those assertions. It was, essentially, shoddy work.
After I stopped laughing I asked myself how it could be that this idiot had a teaching job and had been published while my friend Alan, a true historian if there ever was one, works in a bookstore. Is there something in the PHD process that turns a student's mind to self-important mush? Is this why college level education is declining in quality?
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June 17th, 2009
02:26 pm - A Rustic Interlude
As some of you know liddle_oldman natevw floundah and I went to the same shool. I'm told another schoolmate is on LJ but damned if I can find her.
Anyway, I thought you might like to see what it lloks like.
This is the veiw from the building the science classrooms were in.
This is from near the main administration building.
.
This is the main administration building. At various times it was also used as classroms and dormitories.
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June 4th, 2009
06:26 am - The Kids Are Alright
One of the reasons I enjoy my contact with kids is that they come up with some very cool ideas.
The kids at the local voc-tech have been very active in a number of civic activities, from Habitat for Humanity to cooking for the Senior Center. They also raise a ton of money for the Public Library.
I was talking with some of them yesterday and some of the Auto Mechanics kids put forward an idea and asked who they should work with on it.
Their idea was that people in such strained circumstances that they need the food pantry are probably ignoring maintenance of their cars. They want to establish a program for Food Pantry clients that will provide free oil changes every three months. They'd eventually like to expand it to other services but figured they'd start out small. They got the school to let them use the shop after class (under supervision) and to dispose of the waste oil (they burn it for heat), and they got the teachers to agree to supervise. They need to round up donations of oil and filters and get the Pantry organization to issue vouchers to their clients.
The Who was right, the kids are alright.
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06:25 am - Writer's Block: Grimm Question
"...with liberty and justice for all."
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June 2nd, 2009
12:00 pm - From the Department of Futile Gestures
Thursday, June 4 will mark the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. In preparation the Chinese government has already shut down access to Twitter, Hotmail and Flickr.
Since that day the picture of a lone man standing in front of a T-59 tank has never been far from my mind. It was a brave and optimistic act but futile. In the end the Chinese army killed hundreds, possibly more than a thousand, and it is illegal in China to discuss it.
It is legal to discuss it here but there's too much money to be made in China to protest about it.
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June 1st, 2009
07:36 am - It's All Henry's Fault
Back when I was in college we took a kid from Oshkosh, Wisconsin to Harvard Square. What impressed him was not the kid walking around with a monkey on his head but that nobody else noticed.
Harvard Square is a lot different now.True it still attracts small groups that think a silent vigil outside the T station will materially help the people of Tibet (sorry, Myanmar) but all the funky little stores where you could buy things that were perfectly good and excessively groovy have been replaced with the kind of chain stores you can find in almost any mall anywhere in the country. The kids are a lot more grim, too. This is probably because they're about to graduate, hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, with no job prospects.
One thing that hasn't changed is the square's ability to attract Conspiracy Theorists.
When I was there last week a couple of Earnest Young Things were canvassing for Amnesty International. Heading for a stationary store that still carries narrow ruled pads I noticed that one of them had been beset with a well known Kissinger Whacko. He's not like the other Kissinger Whackos who blame everything in the last 40 years on Kissinger, he blames everything that ever happened on Kissinger. As I got closer I saw that the Earnest Young Thing's eyes were glazed over and heard that he was droning on about how Kissinger's evil spirit was behind the War of the Roses.
It's nice to know some things haven't changed.
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May 27th, 2009
12:00 pm - The Further Adventures of Bailey the Wonder Cat
Mrs. Blevins came home last night, put her purse on the sofa and ran to her study to check e-mail. Bailey hopped up on the sofa, sniffed the purse, said "How nice, a pillow!", put his head down on it and slept peacefully.
Until her cell phone rang.
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06:21 am - Late in the Evening
Happy, Day Nine
This was planned to be a general rant about the wonderful music I've heard over the years, the joy it's given me and the incredible people it's brought to me. But the chance arrival of an Artie Shaw CD last night changed it to memories of one specific person I did not meet through music but whose love for music was part of our deep and lasting bond.
I speak of my Father-in-law. His collection of jazz recordings was exceeded only by his knowledge of the music. He had no musical training beyond basic sight-singing but he had the visceral understanding of it that no amount of teaching can give you. Whenever we were together jazz was in the background. It didn't matter if we were in the car, on the back porch or passing the port around the table, jazz was in the background. Many nights he and I sat late into the evening, sipping whiskey, listening to music, talking about the music and swapping stories of hanging around musicians. My epic win was hearing him reminisce about The Red Onion Jazz Band, a Dixieland band that worked New York and New Jersey back in the sixties and seventies, and I pulled out a recording.
One Christmas he gave us a big box of tapes and a four inch three ring binder. The tapes were copies of rarities from his collection and the binder was annotated notes of the music on the tapes. He must have spent the best part of a year putting it together. I still spend hours with it twenty years on.
Sometimes, when it's late and the music's been on for hours and the whiskey is going down smooth I'll play one of his favorites and look across to the club chair he used to favor and there he'll be with a glass and a Camel, keeping time. If music had given me nothing else, this would be more than I could repay.
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May 26th, 2009
06:48 am - A Belated Memorial Day Post
Memorial Day is supposed to be a day of remembering those who have died in service to the country. I should think about them. I should think of the ancestors who died in such service and those who survived such service, but I don't. I think of a forlorn group of ladies.
Each year the city where I grew up put on a big Memorial Day parade. Amidst the splendor of marching bands, marching troops and the Boy Scouts who would follow them there always walked a group of women who seemed old, often squinting at the sun through tears. They were Gold Star Mothers. My father explained that they were mothers who had lost children "in the war", meaning World War II. As I grew up they became fewer and grayer. I suppose they're all dead now.
They're the people I think of on Memorial Day; the living, breathing pain of wars won or lost, just or unjust.
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06:11 am - Teach Your Children, Part 2
Happy, Day Eight
Although I have not taught nearly enough to pay my debt I've managed to do some teaching. Except for teaching that's a part of my job it hasn't seemed like work because I teach things I love to people who are interested so it's more like introducing new friends to old friends. I always do it as a volunteer and don't have to stick to an institutionally approved curriculum so I've got an incredible advantage over the teachers in the schools.
I've taught metaphorical reading to adults and basic reading to adults who got really short-changed by the ed system. I've taught kids history, poetry and logic. I've taught kids about political activism (which reminds me that I should post my notes) and seniors how to use the web to research their past. A couple of times I was asked to try to explain to WWII vets why they should help Vietnam vets and how the two wars were different.
But by far my favorite bit of "formal" teaching is something I've been doing for about 13 years; widening the scope of high school kids' musical range. It started as a dare. An acquaintance said it was impossible to get the kids interested in "better" music and I said "bullshit" and it just grew from there. I started by playing some of my favorite music from Popular, Folk, Jazz and Orchestral music and telling them why I liked it. I asked that next week they bring in things they really liked, play them for me and tell me why they liked them and we spent the rest of the semester connecting the dots. At the end of the first run I was asked to do it again and the person who dared me asked how I did it. He'd been there the whole time and should have known that all I did was show them things they could listen to in addition to what they were already enjoying rather than telling them what they should listen to instead of what they were already enjoying.
Of course being a great uncle gives me all kinds of scope to teach and I'm happy to say that all of the great nieces so far have shown remarkable curiosity. The oldest two have both shown intelligence and talent beyond their years and combined it with a wonderful ability to just be kids that leaves me, who sucked at being a kid, breathless with admiration.
And the best thing about this is that it gives me a chance to "feed them on my dreams".
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May 22nd, 2009
06:28 am - Teach Your Children 1
Happy, Day Seven
Not a day goes by without me being happy about some of the wonderful teachers I've had.
Of those in the formal teaching role I think particularly about my sixth grade teacher. Her joy was to open doors to knowledge and interest and see which ones we kids ran through. She lent me books and records from her own library, she raised hell with the public library until they gave me an adult card, she arranged for her husband, who was a lawyer, to take me to court to witness a trial. She did similar things for all of us.
In college I had a professor who made Shakespeare dance in my mind and another who led me deep into Eliot.
Among less formal teachers I had my father who taught me that it was OK to be different so long as you could function. A rabbi taught me that religious faith is something you can use to order your own life but that you should never use to order another's life. My uncle taught me that being decent to others was the prime measure of success.
This is a special one. He was a carpenter on the maintenance staff at my high school. He taught me a lot with his stories, like how uncomfortable he was trying to go to college after the Korean War. Mostly he taught me by the simple act of being a carpenter because he came back from Korea with just one leg and one arm. When something seems impossible I picture him driving nails. He'd grip the head of the hammer, holding the nail to the head between two fingers. In a single fluid movement he'd start the nail by slamming down the hammer, toss the hammer in the air, catch it by the handle and finish driving the nail. I asked him once if he didn't sometimes wonder what life would have been like if he hadn't lost his limbs. He said he did and that it was often hard keeping what might have been from interfering with what was.
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May 21st, 2009
11:35 am - Merrimack County
Happy, Day Six
Way up North,
In Merrimack County,
I was born
Well, actually I was born in a dying Milltown in Essex County, Massachusetts, but Merrimack County, NH was home. My father's family still lived in the same small town that he grew up in and our visits there were sheer joy. Like most places it's changed and is no longer a small town but it was the foundation of my love of New England. A touch of irony there because my father's family came here in 1912 but began the link to New England. My mother's family had been here forever (the first record I have mentions them returning in 1630) but since I could not establish a link to them they could not help me establish a link to the area.
I spent my high school years in a very rural part of New Hampshire on land that had once been farmed but since been reclaimed by the wilderness. Over and above the sheer beauty of the landscape, frequently coming across abandoned walls and cellar holes taught a great deal about life, possibly more than anything the teachers could give me.
In later years I took to going to Cape Cod off-season and wandering the Cape Cod National Seashore, learning the ways of hte shore in a far better way than I could have if President Kennedy hadn't set it aside as a National Park back in 1961. If not for that the whole are would be the beachy equivalent of McMansions.
In summer we go to mid-coast Maine and stay in a working harbor. We get up at dawn and watch the lobstermen go on thier morning rounds and listen to them speak the language that book after book tells me is extinct. "A lot of vapor this morning, dear. Best take care."
Maine and the cape have a connection beyond the shore and that's Henry Beston. He's famous for his book The Outermost House, an account of living year-round in a dunes shack. But after that he bought a farm in Mid-Coast Maine that was the topic of his Northern Farm and where he did most of the work detailed in Herbs and the Earth. There's a group trying to get the farm turned into a historic site now, and not to far from it is a publisher who puts out books by long-dead local authors.
Many people never find the place they love and that loves them back. I have and, though I love to travel and find most places just fascinating, it allways makes me happy to get back to New England.
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