Late this summer, nephew Jeff bought my motorcycle. He sent me a check; I sent him a signed bill of sale and some notes explaining why we don't need a title; and then we waited for a man with a truck to collect the bike and carry it off to Florida. After a week and a couple of postponements the truck appeared. I've dealt with enough motorcycle guys that I didn't expect promptitude.
The departure of the Beamer reminded me of nephew Brian's adoption of my father's string bass. It was a bit sad to see it leave -- it had been in the house all my life to that point and then some -- but it was going to a good home. To my surprise, both Brian and his son have some idea how to extract music from such a thing.
The day the motorcycle arrived at Jeff's, he posted a picture of it on Facebook. It looked better than I remembered, its informalities discretely blurred. In fact, the motorcycle guy with the truck enthused about what (comparatively) good shape it was in -- in comparison, that is, with some of the near-basket cases he has driven around. He also explained that the term "basket case" arises from motorcycle parlance and refers to a bike that arrives in baskets. My cousin Bruce bought one of those once; but that's another story. So my bike also has gone to a good home and was soon seen on Facebook in pieces in Jeff's garage.
Then one fine day on Route 2 in Fitchburg, my car began emitting vapor from under the hood; the temperature indicator established itself in the red zone, and the engine light went on. The car eventually came to rest at TJ & Sons Auto Repair in Gardner, where Tommy diagnosed a blown head gasket and implied that it wasn't fixable. Of course, anything can be fixed; but a blown head gasket is major surgery, and I had already spent too much on repairs to that car. Tommy agreed to deal with the car in exchange for the towing fee. Unable to think of a better option, I agreed. Paula and I cleared out the car and we left with a promise to drop off the title at my leisure.
It seems that Paula, too, was working on replacing her car. We went to some classy-looking dealership in Greenfield that had about one used something-or-other that I might have considered buying. But it was priced higher than I had hoped; and although low in mileage, it had had three previous owners, the first of which was described as "commercial." That, the salesman admitted, probably means that it had been a rental car. Paula's then-current car had a stint as a rental on its résumé, and she had had major trouble with it: "You don't know that somebody didn't put a boat on top of it and drive it up Mount Whitcomb," she pointed out. Anyway, the car in Greenfield looked huge -- after my little Civic I suppose most cars would -- and the ugly gun-metal-gray color made it look even bigger. Paula didn't find anything she liked the looks of either. So much for Greenfield.
Over the next few days, Paula drove all over central and western Massachusetts and southern New Hampshire looking at cars. I enlisted my daughter-in-law: "Car stuff is her job," said Justin about division of labor in their household, the day Amanda related on Facebook that she had changed a tire in 90o heat, including chiseling out a corroded fastener on the tire compartment. She credited her father with teaching her well in such matters. "I enjoyed teaching my daughters manly things," Tim posted back.
Amanda and I went car-shopping; Justin was sick and not at work, so the kids stayed with him. I never can get over how readily other people's young kids can be left largely on their own, with distant adult supervision. Justin at the 4/5½ that his kids are now would have been on top of the refrigerator the next time anyone checked on him.
The first dealer Amanda and I tried had one possible car, which turned out to be another reincarnated rental. That Wouldn't Do. We proceeded to an establishment in Walpole that seems to specialize, though not exclusively, in second-hand Priuses. They remembered Amanda from when she and Justin bought one of their Priuses there and were, as she thought they would be, inclined to please a satisfied customer with another prospective buyer under her wing.
After some driving and dithering, I eliminated a rather elegant-looking dark-maroon Honda hybrid (another vehicle with low mileage and a history of rental-car employment) and settled on a red 2011 Prius. When Amanda mentioned that its brakes were vibrating unhealthily, the dealer gave it new brakes all around. -- saving me, she estimates, at least $600 in future trouble. Paula helped me to collect my purchase a few days later in the Subaru hatchback she had settled on.
Meanwhile, the Civic was still languishing at TJ's. Justin and Amanda wouldn't hear of abandoning it for a $60 towing fee. So a day or two later, Amanda, who had business in western Massachusetts later in the day, met me at Enterprise Rent-A-Car in Gardner and proceeded to TJ's with intent that we should drive the Civic home. We set off for Otter River in tandem, me and the Civic in front, Amanda and the kids following.
We almost made it. Just over the railroad bridge, with the engine firmly in the red and making noise and the engine light flashing, I oozed to the side of the road and stopped.
"But you're so close!" Amanda objected. I reported on the car's behavior and reminded her of the hill up from the paper mill. She told me to let the engine cool for five minutes. I gave it exactly five minutes, and tried again.
Again, it was close. A couple of hundred yards from the house I turned right and then left (I have never understood what was meant by that attempt at a rotary in Otter River; if I had ignored it and gone straight, we might have arrived triumphantly at our destination; then again, we might have found ourselves stranded in the few yards of asphalt that is One Way and been creamed by the next car that came through too fast). As it was, the car ground to a halt in the mouth of the Old Winchendon Road.
I sat there looking stupid, while Amanda sailed into the Winchendon Road, parked car & kids, and dashed over, followed by two guys who had stopped to see what was wrong. One of them verified that we had a car problem but that no one was hurt, and went his way. The other stayed to help.
Meanwhile -- this was a complicated few seconds -- Amanda called directions at me to put it in neutral and steer to the curb, there actually being a curb in that spot, which isn't to be taken for granted in Otter River. She flung herself at the back of the car and pushed without waiting for the remaining guy, who came around and joined the party. Amanda, with her artist's eye for clothing and color, was wearing a very becoming medium-green dress and, of course, shoes not ideal for car-pushing. She is a tall, strong young woman; but pushing even a Civic uphill, even slightly, is a tall order. She must have been glad of the offer of help. We got the car out of the intersection, thanked the guy, piled me into Amanda's car (where the children were waiting patiently, presumably watching through the window).
Amanda left me and the kids at home and set off on foot with a gallon of water to pour on the engine of the Civic (turned out she didn't use it, the engine having cooled enough that she was able to persuade it to start) and pulled up the driveway in solitary splendor. She then took pictures of the car for the benefit of eBay, where the car sold in a day or two for $300.
As Amanda explained to a suitably impressed audience consisting of my mother, Mother's home health aide, the kids and, of course, me, "I grew up with mechanics and worked at a parts store." We will hope that the kids watching from the windows have added "car stuff" to their understanding of what women do in the world.
Thursday, October 6, 2016
Friday, July 29, 2016
THE PEOPLE'S PARK
Strolling idly through YouTube the other day, I clicked on something purporting to be The Best Hippie Songs of All Time, “from this historic era of freedom, expression and rebellion.” Included, of course, was Buffalo Springfield’s counterculture anthem For What It’s Worth. I first heard that haunting “Stop, hey, what’s that sound” from the radio of a convertible parked on a curb in Berkeley. I lost track of it after that until Justin told me a few years ago what it was, adding that every movie that has anything to do with hippies or the Sixties uses it.
The images that accompany “For What It’s Worth”: begin with the 1970 photo of the girl at Kent State kneeling beside the body of a slain protester. Do I remember correctly that at the time the powers that were congratulated themselves on having taught these protesters a lesson, maintaining that now that they know they can get killed they’ll stop demonstrating and otherwise making trouble?
Other familiar photographs follow: the Vietnamese villagers with the naked, badly burned 11-year-old girl in the center; young people facing National Guardsmen and spiking their guns with flowers; psychedelic buses and improbable pyramids of riders on trailers; and the obligatory naked young people with flowers in their hair smoking dope.
A minute and a quarter into the song a video shows a group of motorcycles leading off a crowd of demonstrators, followed by a view of a street packed with marchers ("A thousand people in the street/Singing songs and carrying signs"). A later photo showed a crowd of people outside a high chain link fence looking through it at a bare patch of ground littered with bits of paper; another featured young people in the street apparently replacing a piece of pavement with grass. That, it occurred to me, had to be the People's Park March in Berkeley in 1969. I gleefully emailed it to my son and his wife: "Natalie and I were there." Amanda pronounced that to be cool.
As I remember it at this distance, the People's Park was a small lot south of campus. It belonged to the University, but it may have been vacant and have functioned as an informal neighborhood playground, rather like the Junkyard in West Medford where Justin and other neighborhood kids had their adventures. The University announced plans to use the space for a parking lot; but before the plan got started, people in the neighborhood took it over and built a park there. The University fenced off and padlocked the lot, and bulldozed the park. There was some kind of sit-in, and at least one demonstrator was killed. (A professor commented that during the events leading up to and including the Free Speech Movement, a year or two before I came to Berkeley, the students kept doing these provocative things and the University invariably reacted in the worst possible way, perpetuating and deepening the crisis.)
The pro-park forces organized a mass demonstration. For days beforehand, rumors flew: tear gas would be used, the National Guard would be posted on buildings with orders to shoot to kill, other scary things I don't remember. Our intrepid group at Kip's and the Rathskeller declared that they would have nothing to do with the march Natalie and I went by ourselves. She told me that if we were gassed, to close my eyes and stay with her since, like Nydia, Bulwer-Lytton's blind flower-seller who guides her friends out of Pompeii through blinding and suffocating fumes and volcanic ash, she would have no difficulty finding her way home (Natalie also read Victorian fiction; she may also have had Nydia in mind).
The march was led off by a motley group of motorcycles and scooters: Hell's Angels, some news sources said. My impression of those vehicles was that no self-respecting Angel would be caught dead on any of them. One effect of my years in Berkeley was a firm sense that news sources aren't necessarily to be trusted. Among the marchers, I remember seeing Vincent Duckles, the professor of musicology who taught the course in Music Reference and Research that I took in library school. Natalie and I joined the parade somewhere toward the end. I remember a great deal of standing around as all those people threaded themselves into the narrow city streets.
The march began west and perhaps a bit north of the university, as I remember, and made its way southward past the campus, where it turned east up the hill and ended at the chain link fence where the park had been. It was a day of bright sunshine, hot and dry, and a festive air prevailed. Along the route, people watched from windows and roofs, often wielding stereo systems: "This Is the Dawning of the Age of Aquarius" poured from the rooftops of Berkeley in the blazing California sun.
Somewhere along the way I was startled to hear from behind me the trilling double-whistle that I associate with my father; turning around, I identified the whistler as a woman (somewhat, irrationally, to my relief). Toward the end of the march a young man with a black beard and a decent voice started to sing: "Do-na no-bis pa-cem, pacem/Do---na no-bis pa---cem." Others in our vicinity picked it up and sang in harmony, and I joined in. Natalie didn't; she said she felt as though she were in the midst of a bunch of religious fanatics. I have since had a fondness for Dona Nobis Pacem because of the circumstances under which I learned it.
When we got to the park there was a movement in the direction of damaging the fence or digging up the street. Some group had brought shovels and picks for the latter purpose and Natalie wanted to join in; but I had a plane ticket for Boston at home and wasn't up for getting arrested. I'm not sure I remember seeing any armed gendarmerie, although I rather think that was the march where young women came up to some armed persons and put flowers into the muzzles of their guns. There was no tear gas, and no one got shot.
"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven!" I wasn’t quite young enough to be a hippie, and always was much too sensible. I never expected that peace, love, sex, drugs and rock-n-roll would defeat the blue meanies, old Moneybags, and the military-industrial complex; but neither could I have imagined that, like Wordsworth’s French Revolution descending into the Terror, the dawning of the Age of Aquarius would disappear in the Gotterdammerung of Donald Trump.
The images that accompany “For What It’s Worth”: begin with the 1970 photo of the girl at Kent State kneeling beside the body of a slain protester. Do I remember correctly that at the time the powers that were congratulated themselves on having taught these protesters a lesson, maintaining that now that they know they can get killed they’ll stop demonstrating and otherwise making trouble?
Other familiar photographs follow: the Vietnamese villagers with the naked, badly burned 11-year-old girl in the center; young people facing National Guardsmen and spiking their guns with flowers; psychedelic buses and improbable pyramids of riders on trailers; and the obligatory naked young people with flowers in their hair smoking dope.
A minute and a quarter into the song a video shows a group of motorcycles leading off a crowd of demonstrators, followed by a view of a street packed with marchers ("A thousand people in the street/Singing songs and carrying signs"). A later photo showed a crowd of people outside a high chain link fence looking through it at a bare patch of ground littered with bits of paper; another featured young people in the street apparently replacing a piece of pavement with grass. That, it occurred to me, had to be the People's Park March in Berkeley in 1969. I gleefully emailed it to my son and his wife: "Natalie and I were there." Amanda pronounced that to be cool.
As I remember it at this distance, the People's Park was a small lot south of campus. It belonged to the University, but it may have been vacant and have functioned as an informal neighborhood playground, rather like the Junkyard in West Medford where Justin and other neighborhood kids had their adventures. The University announced plans to use the space for a parking lot; but before the plan got started, people in the neighborhood took it over and built a park there. The University fenced off and padlocked the lot, and bulldozed the park. There was some kind of sit-in, and at least one demonstrator was killed. (A professor commented that during the events leading up to and including the Free Speech Movement, a year or two before I came to Berkeley, the students kept doing these provocative things and the University invariably reacted in the worst possible way, perpetuating and deepening the crisis.)
The pro-park forces organized a mass demonstration. For days beforehand, rumors flew: tear gas would be used, the National Guard would be posted on buildings with orders to shoot to kill, other scary things I don't remember. Our intrepid group at Kip's and the Rathskeller declared that they would have nothing to do with the march Natalie and I went by ourselves. She told me that if we were gassed, to close my eyes and stay with her since, like Nydia, Bulwer-Lytton's blind flower-seller who guides her friends out of Pompeii through blinding and suffocating fumes and volcanic ash, she would have no difficulty finding her way home (Natalie also read Victorian fiction; she may also have had Nydia in mind).
The march was led off by a motley group of motorcycles and scooters: Hell's Angels, some news sources said. My impression of those vehicles was that no self-respecting Angel would be caught dead on any of them. One effect of my years in Berkeley was a firm sense that news sources aren't necessarily to be trusted. Among the marchers, I remember seeing Vincent Duckles, the professor of musicology who taught the course in Music Reference and Research that I took in library school. Natalie and I joined the parade somewhere toward the end. I remember a great deal of standing around as all those people threaded themselves into the narrow city streets.
The march began west and perhaps a bit north of the university, as I remember, and made its way southward past the campus, where it turned east up the hill and ended at the chain link fence where the park had been. It was a day of bright sunshine, hot and dry, and a festive air prevailed. Along the route, people watched from windows and roofs, often wielding stereo systems: "This Is the Dawning of the Age of Aquarius" poured from the rooftops of Berkeley in the blazing California sun.
Somewhere along the way I was startled to hear from behind me the trilling double-whistle that I associate with my father; turning around, I identified the whistler as a woman (somewhat, irrationally, to my relief). Toward the end of the march a young man with a black beard and a decent voice started to sing: "Do-na no-bis pa-cem, pacem/Do---na no-bis pa---cem." Others in our vicinity picked it up and sang in harmony, and I joined in. Natalie didn't; she said she felt as though she were in the midst of a bunch of religious fanatics. I have since had a fondness for Dona Nobis Pacem because of the circumstances under which I learned it.
When we got to the park there was a movement in the direction of damaging the fence or digging up the street. Some group had brought shovels and picks for the latter purpose and Natalie wanted to join in; but I had a plane ticket for Boston at home and wasn't up for getting arrested. I'm not sure I remember seeing any armed gendarmerie, although I rather think that was the march where young women came up to some armed persons and put flowers into the muzzles of their guns. There was no tear gas, and no one got shot.
# # #
"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven!" I wasn’t quite young enough to be a hippie, and always was much too sensible. I never expected that peace, love, sex, drugs and rock-n-roll would defeat the blue meanies, old Moneybags, and the military-industrial complex; but neither could I have imagined that, like Wordsworth’s French Revolution descending into the Terror, the dawning of the Age of Aquarius would disappear in the Gotterdammerung of Donald Trump.
Friday, May 6, 2016
APPLES
If in my days as a struggling single mother I had been as destitute as I remember, I wouldn't have been buying apples at Lawson's farm on Route 2 in Lincoln in what must have been the fall of 1984. In addition to apples and cider and vegetables, Lawson's had on offer a row of glass knickknacks on a shelf in front of a south-facing window. The only one I paid attention to was a cobalt-glass apple about 3 inches in diameter. Cobalt glass with a light behind it is, in Sherry's phrase, one of the better ends of things. Starved for self-indulgence and frivolity, I longed for and lusted after that dark blue glass object, thinking rebelliously, "If I collected apples I'd have an excuse to buy that." I decided on the spot that as of that moment I did collect apples. I paid Lawson's $15 and triumphantly carried it off.
I have since acquired a number of apples and apple-related objects, most of them given to me. Katharine and especially Sherry frequent gift shops, yard sales and dusty little second-hand stores. Laurie kept an eye out for apples, producing over the years some quite nifty ones and a couple that are actually useful.
My favorite gift apple was from Justin the year he left home and accordingly patronized a lot of yard sales. He appeared bearing the only Mother's Day gift he has ever presented me with, for which he declared that he had paid 50¢: knowing how I feel about holidays that exist to feed the gift industry, he thought I would approve of a 50¢ apple.
It's 7 inches in diameter (a bit wider at the top than at the bottom) and 7 inches high, made of 1/16" red plastic-coated wire wound horizontally 3/4 of an inch apart, and a green plastic stem and leaf. I hung it in the window of my Medford office and gazed at it fondly while typing. Later, someone gave me a wind chime featuring five melodious brass birds. I hung that in the window with the birds caged inside the apple.
In Otter River, I had a perfectly good bracket in front of the window opposite the chair in my office; but I couldn't quite picture how to re-hang the apple and birds and probably had an intimation that it would be harder than it looked. The apple and birds and the strings that suspended it sat for some time in an unsatisfactory heap on a bookshelf.
When I did gather up my courage for the attempt, my first thought was to lift up the whole thing as one piece and just hook it over the bracket. This approach turned out to be like an attempt in the nineteenth century to right one of the standing stones at Avebury: with all the resources of the nearby railroad at their disposal -- and Victorian machinery isn't to be dismissed lightly -- the engineers couldn't manage it and ultimately put the stone back up with levers and wooden supports, the same way their Neolithic predecessors did it.
I separated my birds from the apple; hung up the apple; and slipped the birds into it, as I had in Medford. It now hangs nicely in front of the window, as good as when not quite new.
I have since acquired a number of apples and apple-related objects, most of them given to me. Katharine and especially Sherry frequent gift shops, yard sales and dusty little second-hand stores. Laurie kept an eye out for apples, producing over the years some quite nifty ones and a couple that are actually useful.
My favorite gift apple was from Justin the year he left home and accordingly patronized a lot of yard sales. He appeared bearing the only Mother's Day gift he has ever presented me with, for which he declared that he had paid 50¢: knowing how I feel about holidays that exist to feed the gift industry, he thought I would approve of a 50¢ apple.
It's 7 inches in diameter (a bit wider at the top than at the bottom) and 7 inches high, made of 1/16" red plastic-coated wire wound horizontally 3/4 of an inch apart, and a green plastic stem and leaf. I hung it in the window of my Medford office and gazed at it fondly while typing. Later, someone gave me a wind chime featuring five melodious brass birds. I hung that in the window with the birds caged inside the apple.
In Otter River, I had a perfectly good bracket in front of the window opposite the chair in my office; but I couldn't quite picture how to re-hang the apple and birds and probably had an intimation that it would be harder than it looked. The apple and birds and the strings that suspended it sat for some time in an unsatisfactory heap on a bookshelf.
When I did gather up my courage for the attempt, my first thought was to lift up the whole thing as one piece and just hook it over the bracket. This approach turned out to be like an attempt in the nineteenth century to right one of the standing stones at Avebury: with all the resources of the nearby railroad at their disposal -- and Victorian machinery isn't to be dismissed lightly -- the engineers couldn't manage it and ultimately put the stone back up with levers and wooden supports, the same way their Neolithic predecessors did it.
I separated my birds from the apple; hung up the apple; and slipped the birds into it, as I had in Medford. It now hangs nicely in front of the window, as good as when not quite new.
Thursday, April 28, 2016
OMNIA SOL TEMPERAT
"Omnia sol temperat," I remarked on Facebook on the first warm day of last year after a long, cold and snowy winter. I added in parentheses, "It's about time" -- to the bewilderment of at least one Facebook Friend, who tried to make "It's about time" into a translation of the Latin phrase.
Omnia sol temperat means "the sun warms everything." I thought that would be reasonably obvious to the audience in my head to which I direct such things (that would be my son and a couple of friends). It's the title of one of the songs in Carmina Burana, a 1935/1936 choral setting by Carl Orff of 11th-13th century poems written by students traveling between universities (admissions processes were a lot looser in the Middle Ages than at present); unfrocked clergy; and other more or less educated young men with, as a much later song has it, no particular place to go. Many of the Carmina Burana poems deal with the immemorial preoccupations of that demographic group -- drinking, gambling, and fornication -- but a good number, including Omnia Sol Temperat, celebrate the coming of spring.
In Italy, Spain, Greece, and locales with similarly benign climates, spring gets a poetic nod from time to time but isn't hailed with quite the joy it inspires farther north. These wandering scholars -- who sometimes lived by begging and/or thieving and didn't reliably know where their next night's lodging was coming from -- must have wandered through latitudes where spring would have been more than welcome.
I generally take the weather as it comes; but last year I was almost as glad as a Medieval ne'er-do-well to find the sun warming the world at last.
Friday, March 4, 2016
BLUE BUS
There's a blue bus in the woods beside one of the roads into Phillipston. (A vague memory of mention of a blue bus in a 1960s rock song, possibly by The Doors, proves not to have been a retrospective hallucination but part of "The End"; but that's neither here nor there since Jim Morrison's blue bus represents something in particular that has nothing to do with the blue bus in or near Phillipston.)
That blue bus is adjacent to a house belonging, to judge from the motor vehicles on the property, to a backyard mechanic. A Phillipston resident refers to the "blue bus route" as one of the ways between his house and the rest of the world -- a bit but not quite like ”Swann's Way" and ”The Germantes Way," the two directions of Proust's protagonist's walks from his childhood home. (I tried to read Remembrance of Things Past a while back. I didn't make much progress.)
The blue bus appears not to be functional. Week after week and year after year it sits in its place in the woods in exactly the same position. I would imagine that its owner got a once-in-a-lifetime bargain on it and drove (or more likely towed) it home -- and from that day to this, there it has sat in the woods, a useful landmark but rather a failure as a bus.
In places like Phillipston, a home mechanic can easily assemble a collection of derelict automobiles. Katharine once spent most of a week in Ackworth, New Hampshire, reducing her brother's collection of dead and dying vehicles to the three that the town had abruptly set as a limit to the number of dysfunctional vehicles permissible on one property.
My father had a derelict vehicle at one point, purchased for some purpose not clear to any of us, perhaps not even to him. When Mother questioned its status he indicated an intention, conceived at that moment I'm sure, to make it the nucleus of a collection. We kids played on the truck until it came to be home to a colony of wasps. The truck subsequently disappeared, unlamented, when we weren't looking.
There is visible in our woods in Otter River -- once a pasture but over my lifetime slowly reverting to its natural state -- some rusted auto parts, surrounded by trees and nearly buried in leaves and pine needles. On closer examination it would seem once to have been most of an automobile, conceivably deposited in the pasture and left to itself while the forces of nature had their way with it. Such, perhaps, will be the fate of the blue bus in Phillipston.
That blue bus is adjacent to a house belonging, to judge from the motor vehicles on the property, to a backyard mechanic. A Phillipston resident refers to the "blue bus route" as one of the ways between his house and the rest of the world -- a bit but not quite like ”Swann's Way" and ”The Germantes Way," the two directions of Proust's protagonist's walks from his childhood home. (I tried to read Remembrance of Things Past a while back. I didn't make much progress.)
The blue bus appears not to be functional. Week after week and year after year it sits in its place in the woods in exactly the same position. I would imagine that its owner got a once-in-a-lifetime bargain on it and drove (or more likely towed) it home -- and from that day to this, there it has sat in the woods, a useful landmark but rather a failure as a bus.
In places like Phillipston, a home mechanic can easily assemble a collection of derelict automobiles. Katharine once spent most of a week in Ackworth, New Hampshire, reducing her brother's collection of dead and dying vehicles to the three that the town had abruptly set as a limit to the number of dysfunctional vehicles permissible on one property.
My father had a derelict vehicle at one point, purchased for some purpose not clear to any of us, perhaps not even to him. When Mother questioned its status he indicated an intention, conceived at that moment I'm sure, to make it the nucleus of a collection. We kids played on the truck until it came to be home to a colony of wasps. The truck subsequently disappeared, unlamented, when we weren't looking.
There is visible in our woods in Otter River -- once a pasture but over my lifetime slowly reverting to its natural state -- some rusted auto parts, surrounded by trees and nearly buried in leaves and pine needles. On closer examination it would seem once to have been most of an automobile, conceivably deposited in the pasture and left to itself while the forces of nature had their way with it. Such, perhaps, will be the fate of the blue bus in Phillipston.
Friday, February 5, 2016
STREET THEATER
In college at the University of California at Berkeley in the late 1960s, I worked for a small publisher whose primary product was lecture notes. Notetakers, by preference graduate students in the field, were dispatched to lecture courses at the University to take notes and write them up for sale by subscription. The notes were produced on a tight schedule; if they weren't in the office by 8:00 the next morning, the notetaker lost money for every hour they were late.
In the afternoon, the notetaker would appear for an editorial conference and do penance for every unclear expression, dangling modifier, misplaced comma, misused relative pronoun -- the list went on and on, and was rigorously enforced. If you could write lecture notes for Tom Winnett you could be a professional writer. I wish someone had told me that at the time.
The photo offset printing process was much more sophisticated than the purple-ink mimeograph that we of a certain age remember, but it did require a stencil that couldn't be corrected. The typist explained that she was able to produce error-free copy because she knew she had to. It takes, as someone has observed, all kinds. That woman's nervous system was wired differently from mine, that's for sure.
The notes for the six or eight courses covered in a semester were available three days after the lecture; students bought the current notes as the course progressed.
At the beginning of each semester, Tom would send his veteran notetakers to the first meetings of large classes to take notes and count potential enrollees; then he would decide whether or not to continue with the course. Checking out a class in drama, I sat in the auditorium with my pen and notebook, diligently scribbling and keeping an ear open for topic sentences for the required outline form.
The lecture began straightforwardly enough; but a page or two into the proceedings, I found increasing difficulty snagging possible outline material, or making sense of the lecture at all. I finally gave up and set my pen down and watched.
Two young women made their way onto the stage and took off the instructor's jacket and tie and, among other antics, roped his arms to his sides at the elbows. He continued speaking without missing a beat, the lecture deteriorating into utter nonsense. Finally, one of the girls led him off the stage; the other advised us, in the impassioned accents often heard at the time, to forget all this and "make theater in the streets."
I reported my experience to Tom just as it happened. "If he's going to do that sort of thing," he stated, "I don't think we'll do this course." Understandable -- but disappointing.
In the afternoon, the notetaker would appear for an editorial conference and do penance for every unclear expression, dangling modifier, misplaced comma, misused relative pronoun -- the list went on and on, and was rigorously enforced. If you could write lecture notes for Tom Winnett you could be a professional writer. I wish someone had told me that at the time.
The photo offset printing process was much more sophisticated than the purple-ink mimeograph that we of a certain age remember, but it did require a stencil that couldn't be corrected. The typist explained that she was able to produce error-free copy because she knew she had to. It takes, as someone has observed, all kinds. That woman's nervous system was wired differently from mine, that's for sure.
The notes for the six or eight courses covered in a semester were available three days after the lecture; students bought the current notes as the course progressed.
At the beginning of each semester, Tom would send his veteran notetakers to the first meetings of large classes to take notes and count potential enrollees; then he would decide whether or not to continue with the course. Checking out a class in drama, I sat in the auditorium with my pen and notebook, diligently scribbling and keeping an ear open for topic sentences for the required outline form.
The lecture began straightforwardly enough; but a page or two into the proceedings, I found increasing difficulty snagging possible outline material, or making sense of the lecture at all. I finally gave up and set my pen down and watched.
Two young women made their way onto the stage and took off the instructor's jacket and tie and, among other antics, roped his arms to his sides at the elbows. He continued speaking without missing a beat, the lecture deteriorating into utter nonsense. Finally, one of the girls led him off the stage; the other advised us, in the impassioned accents often heard at the time, to forget all this and "make theater in the streets."
I reported my experience to Tom just as it happened. "If he's going to do that sort of thing," he stated, "I don't think we'll do this course." Understandable -- but disappointing.
Monday, January 25, 2016
ICKY, STICKY GOO
It's surprising how many people, even locally, don't know about the molasses flood in the North End in 1919. On Commercial Street in Boston, near the waterfront, a 50-foot-tall steel tank containing 2.3 million gallons of molasses had been leaking for some time; mothers in the neighborhood sent children with buckets to harvest the seepage. Then on January 15, the tank burst apart, turning tons of the thick, sticky stuff loose on Commercial Street.
Water is heavy by itself and can absorb twice its volume of dissolved sugar. According to King Arthur Flour's website, ¼ cup of molasses weighs 3 ounces; cookbooks tell us that the same amount of water weighs about 2 ounces. That couple of million of gallons of sugar syrup oozed along at 35 miles an hour, breaking and crushing everything in its path. People and animals drowned in it. It wouldn't be possible to swim in any such substance, and at some depth, running through it would become impossible. Getting out of it would be rather like escaping the Tar Baby.
With a clear, open road ahead and a good long start you might outrun it. How many roads in the North End are open and runnable now? How many were then? If you saw this dark-brown mass surging toward you, how long would it take to figure out what it was and that it would be appropriate to run like hell in the opposite direction?
Twenty-one people died in that catastrophe. Imagine going through life explaining that your husband or mother died in a molasses flood -- it sounds like a joke, horrible as it must have been.
It is said that in hot, wet weather some cellars in the North End still smell of molasses, the remnant of that dark tide.
If you don't believe the above, you may consult:
http://www.stephenpuleo.com/book/dark-tide-2/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Molasses_Flood
Water is heavy by itself and can absorb twice its volume of dissolved sugar. According to King Arthur Flour's website, ¼ cup of molasses weighs 3 ounces; cookbooks tell us that the same amount of water weighs about 2 ounces. That couple of million of gallons of sugar syrup oozed along at 35 miles an hour, breaking and crushing everything in its path. People and animals drowned in it. It wouldn't be possible to swim in any such substance, and at some depth, running through it would become impossible. Getting out of it would be rather like escaping the Tar Baby.
With a clear, open road ahead and a good long start you might outrun it. How many roads in the North End are open and runnable now? How many were then? If you saw this dark-brown mass surging toward you, how long would it take to figure out what it was and that it would be appropriate to run like hell in the opposite direction?
Twenty-one people died in that catastrophe. Imagine going through life explaining that your husband or mother died in a molasses flood -- it sounds like a joke, horrible as it must have been.
It is said that in hot, wet weather some cellars in the North End still smell of molasses, the remnant of that dark tide.
# # #
If you don't believe the above, you may consult:
http://www.stephenpuleo.com/book/dark-tide-2/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Molasses_Flood
Tuesday, December 8, 2015
ALCHEMY
Musing idly, as I often do, I have wondered if, in this age of subatomic beasties and particle accelerators, we could in theory turn lead into gold. One day last summer, having nothing better to do than send frivolous emails to people who are busier than I am, I asked a few acquaintances who might be interested -- including the only physicist I know -- what they thought about it.
The physicist said:
I looked up images of the periodic table.
The gold nucleus has 79 protons and an average of (197-79=118) neutrons.
The lead nucleus has 82 protons and an average of (207-82=125) neutrons.
I suppose the way to turn lead into gold is to knock 3 protons out of the lead nucleus, probably by bombarding lead with neutrons (which have no charge, so will not be repelled by the charged lead nucleus).
As you can see, this process requires a source that emits neutrons. Pretty expensive.
I am not a nuclear physicist, so that is the best I can do.
The most complete answer came from a software developer -- not a nuclear physicist either, but keenly interested in physics and possessed of a book that related to the subject. He explained how in theory lead could be converted to gold: You would take your lump of lead and bombard it with neutrons, and an atom here and there would trade its leaden identity for a second career as a different element.
The name of the new element began with B. A search of my mental file of elements turned up six of that description. I know all the elements as of about 1960, thanks to Tom Lehrer's brilliant mnemonic (https://www.youtube.com/
Bromine is a gas; beryllium and boron sound like minerals; barium is an alkaline earth metal (whatever that is); and berkelium must be one of those temporary manufactured elements that last three quarters of a second before decaying into something else. Bismuth, like gold and lead, is a metal (with 83 protons and 126 neutrons); it's also a decay product of lead. Lets go with bismuth, and thank you, Wikipedia.
My son reminded me that converting one random atom at a time would produce a highly variegated lump of matter. With that in mind, you would bombard your piece of lead until you had a workable amount of bismuth with residual lead, assorted impurities, and presumably a bit of gold from atoms that got in the way twice. You would then refine it so as to have bismuth and not much else.
The software developer's wife pointed out that the lump would be radioactive as hell. The gold, responded he, wouldn't be radioactive because gold doesn't do that; but, yes, the lead and bismuth and impurities would be dangerous to have around. Be that as it may - after refining your newly produced bismuth, you would bombard it again and refine it a second time. You would then have a small nugget of gold that you could display in a museum with a label explaining its origins.
I can't imagine who in this world would have the time and money to expend on any such piece of whimsy. I wonder how difficult it would be to explain to Paracelsus and the rest of them that we have at last achieved their age-old goal but that the process is so expensive it isn't worth doing. We might find ourselves, like Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee explaining basic economics to King Arthur's subjects, shouting across an insurmountable barrier of paradigm shifts.
Tuesday, November 10, 2015
ONIONS
I may not make onions this Thanksgiving. I added them to the menu mainly because Laurie and Aunt Berthe liked them, and continued on the strength of a vague perception that onions are a traditional and important component of Thanksgiving.
I enjoy the sauce that accompanies Thanksgiving onions: Béchamel, or white sauce, flavored with salt, pepper, clove and bay; the recipe also recommends a suggestion of onion, which seems redundant. I can take or leave the onions themselves.
Justin makes the rest of the vegetables -- squash, turnip and potatoes -- with great energy and dispatch, resulting in a tremendous mess in the kitchen (which he and Amanda clean up before they leave).
He hasn't made onions. He might if I asked him, but without enthusiasm. He eats a couple of them when they're set in front of him, but as far as I know doesn't share my view of holiday tradition as embodied in Thanksgiving onions -- not enough to make the sauce, or peel a couple of dozen of those eye-stinging white ping-pong balls.
I usually eat about one onion, for the sauce. Mother accepts an onion or two. Justin's kids are still at an age where their tastes are malleable; they would probably partake, as would David. Sherry hates onions and has been heard to mutter about eyeballs in glue. But our two conspicuous lovers of onions are sadly no longer with us.
As usual, I will stuff and baste the turkey. Also as usual, I will intend to make a pumpkin pie if I have the time and energy, which I won't. None of my holiday functions get easier as I get older; Justin took me off gravy duty after the hissy fit I threw about it last year. With apologies to Laurie and Aunt Berthe, we may omit the onions. I'd rather have, and I'd rather make, pumpkin pie.
I enjoy the sauce that accompanies Thanksgiving onions: Béchamel, or white sauce, flavored with salt, pepper, clove and bay; the recipe also recommends a suggestion of onion, which seems redundant. I can take or leave the onions themselves.
Justin makes the rest of the vegetables -- squash, turnip and potatoes -- with great energy and dispatch, resulting in a tremendous mess in the kitchen (which he and Amanda clean up before they leave).
He hasn't made onions. He might if I asked him, but without enthusiasm. He eats a couple of them when they're set in front of him, but as far as I know doesn't share my view of holiday tradition as embodied in Thanksgiving onions -- not enough to make the sauce, or peel a couple of dozen of those eye-stinging white ping-pong balls.
I usually eat about one onion, for the sauce. Mother accepts an onion or two. Justin's kids are still at an age where their tastes are malleable; they would probably partake, as would David. Sherry hates onions and has been heard to mutter about eyeballs in glue. But our two conspicuous lovers of onions are sadly no longer with us.
As usual, I will stuff and baste the turkey. Also as usual, I will intend to make a pumpkin pie if I have the time and energy, which I won't. None of my holiday functions get easier as I get older; Justin took me off gravy duty after the hissy fit I threw about it last year. With apologies to Laurie and Aunt Berthe, we may omit the onions. I'd rather have, and I'd rather make, pumpkin pie.
Thursday, November 5, 2015
SQUAMPKINS
"Squampkin" (pronounced SKWUMP-kin) was Katharine's word for two vegetables of the squash kind that Justin harvested in his sister-in-law's back yard a few years ago. No one had planted or tended them, and no one else wanted them. They were about the size of a basketball, slightly pear-shaped, equipped with light-to-medium blue-green skin, with longitudinal lines or indentations running from top to bottom. The color was more or less that of a Blue Hubbard squash, but the smooth skin and the lines are characteristic of pumpkins. The shape was somewhere between the two.
Winter and summer squashes are closely related; gardening books sometimes caution against planting them too close together, lest some wayward bee cross-pollinate them. I once bought at a farm stand a yellow summer squash with a smooth, dark-yellow skin that turned out to be so tough and unpalatable that I wondered if it was a product of miscegenation with a butternut.
Justin shares my amusement with Blue Hubbard squashes. They're huge: an oval seed nearly an inch long produces a big, ungainly seedling which develops rapidly into the long, prickly stems and leaves of winter squashes, sprawling untidily over the landscape to the east of their starting point. The Hubbards I grew one year were about a foot long; you see them twice that size at farm stands. Light blue-green with a nubbly skin like a gourd, round and full of seeds at the flower end but tapering to a blunt point at the stem end, a Hubbard makes a marvelously ugly jack-o-lantern.
Botanically, I think a pumpkin isn't quite a squash; but they must be closely related enough to produce accidental hybrids. The more we saw of the large blue vegetables Justin brought home, the more they looked like a cross between a Blue Hubbard and a pumpkin.
One night I noticed green-ish squash peel in the wastebasket and found Justin eating from a prodigious bowl of yellow mashed vegetable. He reported having cooked and mashed one of the squampkins, and offered me a bite. We agreed that the vegetable was, in itself, rather bland, but satisfactory if seasoned liberally with pumpkin pie spices. It might have been more amusing, however, if before Halloween it had occurred to someone to turn one of the squampkins into a jack-o-lantern.
Winter and summer squashes are closely related; gardening books sometimes caution against planting them too close together, lest some wayward bee cross-pollinate them. I once bought at a farm stand a yellow summer squash with a smooth, dark-yellow skin that turned out to be so tough and unpalatable that I wondered if it was a product of miscegenation with a butternut.
Justin shares my amusement with Blue Hubbard squashes. They're huge: an oval seed nearly an inch long produces a big, ungainly seedling which develops rapidly into the long, prickly stems and leaves of winter squashes, sprawling untidily over the landscape to the east of their starting point. The Hubbards I grew one year were about a foot long; you see them twice that size at farm stands. Light blue-green with a nubbly skin like a gourd, round and full of seeds at the flower end but tapering to a blunt point at the stem end, a Hubbard makes a marvelously ugly jack-o-lantern.
Botanically, I think a pumpkin isn't quite a squash; but they must be closely related enough to produce accidental hybrids. The more we saw of the large blue vegetables Justin brought home, the more they looked like a cross between a Blue Hubbard and a pumpkin.
One night I noticed green-ish squash peel in the wastebasket and found Justin eating from a prodigious bowl of yellow mashed vegetable. He reported having cooked and mashed one of the squampkins, and offered me a bite. We agreed that the vegetable was, in itself, rather bland, but satisfactory if seasoned liberally with pumpkin pie spices. It might have been more amusing, however, if before Halloween it had occurred to someone to turn one of the squampkins into a jack-o-lantern.
Saturday, October 10, 2015
UPON A SUMMER'S DAY III
I was aware of being six years old, around 7:00 AM on that lovely summer morning as I walked along the sidewalk -- a ribbon of asphalt wide enough to walk on at that point but eroded by grass from both edges and from cracks in the middle -- proudly conscious of having buttoned my red dress up the back by myself and enjoying the bright sunshine, the greenness of the grass and the trees, and the warmth of the air. "I wish this moment could last forever," I said to my small self.
The huge, rambling old house at the corner of the Old Winchendon Road, larger even than ours and with only a couple of feet of lawn between one corner and the sidewalk, was the home of my father's friend Chag (pronounced "Shag"), who was familiar to me and to everyone else in Otter River. The Old Winchendon Road was the farthest I was allowed to walk in that direction according to the limits set after my attempt, chronicled elsewhere, to walk with my sister to our grandmother's.
As I passed the house, an old guy standing on Chag's lawn observed and another agreed, "It's going to be a scorcher." I couldn't imagine what they were talking about, on such a pleasant morning. The old men must have proved right: they knew, as I didn't, that if it's lovely and comfortable at 7:00 AM, it probably will be hot later. I remember no more of that day than my puzzlement, my red dress, and the delightful weather at that early moment.
The huge, rambling old house at the corner of the Old Winchendon Road, larger even than ours and with only a couple of feet of lawn between one corner and the sidewalk, was the home of my father's friend Chag (pronounced "Shag"), who was familiar to me and to everyone else in Otter River. The Old Winchendon Road was the farthest I was allowed to walk in that direction according to the limits set after my attempt, chronicled elsewhere, to walk with my sister to our grandmother's.
As I passed the house, an old guy standing on Chag's lawn observed and another agreed, "It's going to be a scorcher." I couldn't imagine what they were talking about, on such a pleasant morning. The old men must have proved right: they knew, as I didn't, that if it's lovely and comfortable at 7:00 AM, it probably will be hot later. I remember no more of that day than my puzzlement, my red dress, and the delightful weather at that early moment.
Tuesday, September 29, 2015
HOUSES
A house whose upkeep isn't kept up quickly comes to look run down -- recalling Stephen Hawking's illustration of the concept of entropy as what happens if you stop making repairs on your house, and reminding me of a disorderly acquaintance who refers to his apartment as the "entropium." Driving past entropy-ridden houses, I feel sorry for them and hope that someone will take them in hand.
Sometimes, someone does. There was a dejected specimen on Gray Street in Arlington whose sagging porch, peeling paint, and overgrown grounds spoke clearly of neglect until someone took hold of it and turned it around. It now sports icing-pink paint, dark blue shutters, white trim, and a tidy, straight porch.
Also in Arlington, on Pleasant Street, was a large white-ish house, paint and grounds in sorry shape. Something about it said, Old person or persons with scanty funds live here. A lighted tree that appeared in a large front window at Christmas did little to alleviate the overall impression of gloom; if anything, it highlighted it.
Then one fine day the lawyer I worked for gave me a Purchase and Sale Agreement for a condominium at that address. The house I had been passing and pitying had been spruced up and divided into two condominiums -- as, to my surprise, had the barn behind it, which I had barely noticed. Both had been quite respectably painted light yellow-ish beige with dark olive trim. I have to hope the old people, if old people they were, aren't languishing in some nursing home.
A third Arlington house, a mansion on Appleton Street built in the 1890s, with a porte cochere and a dizzying array of bow windows, turrets, corners, and other Victorian gingerbread, was long coated in dark-green shingles that couldn't have been prepossessing when new and were not at all new when the house came to my attention. One day a "For Sale" sign appeared. This augured ill, it seemed to me.
For some time I didn't have occasion to drive down Appleton Street. Then one day I did, and to my gratification the ugly green shingles had been replaced with decent light-colored paint, and a dimly-lit lobby with carpet and table and lamp was visible through a glass door. "For Sale" was still there; the house, like the one on Pleasant Street, was enjoying a second career as condominiums. An acquaintance in the real estate business told me of a condo she had sold there, occupying a turret at one of the corners of the building. Now, some years later, the paint is looking more than a bit tired. I hope the condominium association repaints it soon.
An old farmhouse just west of the Concord Rotary, trying to hide behind a high hedge too far in front to conceal it, has exhibited increasing wear and tear over many years. When it came to broken windows, I decided the poor old thing's days were numbered; buildings don't fare well when water gets into them. But then the State Police bought the property. High white fences appeared, and horses. The windows of the house were protected with boards and green paint (which is now chipping off). But the house is still there, and something may yet be done with it.
Another candidate for rehabilitation is on Elm Street in Concord, near the police station and opposite the prison. Judging from its family resemblance to others in the neighborhood, it must have been built to house prison staff. For years past and to date it has looked unwell. It needs paint. The garage is missing a door. The window shades are always down; I don't think I've seen curtains there. The lawn and shrubbery are mowed rarely and pruned not at all. Unkempt and sad as it has looked, though, it was clearly inhabited: there was a car in the garage, and flowers planted hopefully along the walk. Driving by one day, I saw an elderly woman in overalls holding a gardening implement and surveying the yard.
Then the car wasn't there; I haven't seen flowers in some time. I imagine that the elderly woman has died or been relocated to what her children consider a more manageable situation. Then, some weeks ago, a "For Sale" sign appeared. I am watching for developments.
Also in Concord, just off Route 2, at the eastern edge of that nightmare of construction that extends for a couple of miles along Route 2 from Bedford Road in Lincoln to a bit west of Sandy Pond Road in Concord, was an old, shabby house loosely associated with a horsy-looking barn. I don't think I have seen an actual horse on the premises, but there are pictures of them here and there. The house and horse farm, if that's what it is, had a guys-live-here look: horsy fences and stables, and assorted pickup trucks and other vaguely agricultural vehicles.
The house, a rectangular block too close to the road (as old houses can come to be), tried to be white, without signal success. It may have had shingles, in a dingy condition. There was a roof over the front porch, two stories up, supported originally by three tall uprights -- hardly describable as columns, they were more like 6 x 6 or 8 x 8 chunks of wood. I say originally three: as long as I have been aware of the house, the support at the eastern end has been conspicuous for its absence, imparting a corresponding sag to that end of the roof. I often reflected that if everyone who drove past the house could contribute $1 to the cause, enough money would quickly be raised to rehabilitate the porch roof. The place's only redeeming feature, and that very imperfect, was enough overgrown shrubbery that you couldn't see the house very well.
Then came the Lincoln/Concord construction project, which, among other things, does away with what we used to call the Infamous Intersection (because my husband was in a car accident there). Four roads met at not-very-right angles where Route 2 east turned right across from the Mobil station: www.openstreetmap.org calls it Crosby Corner (Google maps is incomprehensible to me; but that's another story).
Route 2 is being widened for a good distance as well, beginning just west of Route 128. Like other houses along the route, the horse-farm house, which couldn't spare it, lost most of its front yard and, divested of its semi-concealing bushes, was revealed in all its unkempt ugliness. The front porch, which seemed to be made of brick and cement, had crumbled almost beyond recognition.
A "For Sale" sign appeared. Who, please, I asked myself rhetorically, is going to buy that?
Improbably, it began to look as though someone had. Sometimes there would be a light in the attic -- left on for days or weeks on end, apparently. Sometimes there would be men on ladders. The remains of the porch roof disappeared, leaving a scar that didn't improve the house's appearance. Most telling of all, the dingy non-white shingles disappeared and were replaced with Tyvek paper. I had wondered all along if the (presumably) new owner would demolish the house and build something else on the (expensive) land. But no one Tyvek-papers a building if they intend to tear it down.
The house stayed that way all this past winter and spring and into the summer. Then one day it wasn't there. But out of the tail of my eye I thought I saw a building very like it some yards back from the road, down a small declivity, and apparently rotated about 90 degrees.
A few days later, driving east on Route 2 with a friend, I obtained her permission for a wild goose chase to try to find out what was going on. Bedford Road looked as though it might lead us to the house but failed to do so. We backtracked to the remains of the Infamous Intersection and turned sharply right and backward on what maps call the Cambridge Turnpike Cutoff. We had seen from Route 2 that Emerson Road was at least near the house, and the GPS found it.
At the end of Emerson Road and to the left on a short and nameless piece of asphalt, was the house, Tyvek paper and all, back and down from the road. A second, closer look a couple of weeks later partly confirmed and partly corrected my previous impressions; for one thing, the rotation noted earlier proved to be a glanced-at-quickly illusion. I braved the possible displeasure of the owner of the black pickup truck in the front yard -- the fate of that property is, of course, no business of mine -- and the more than possible damage to the underpinnings of my little Honda (as I have occasion to remind myself from time to time, "Civic" means "stay on the pavement"). The house is still there, albeit hard to recognize on its crisp new cinder block foundation with its new light gray siding, fresh white trim, and new windows.
Between it and the road, closer to the house than I would have thought ideal, is a building of uncertain provenance. It also sits on a new foundation and is equipped with new beige siding. A sun porch or mini-greenhouse built onto the back faces the house (and faces north, come to think of it; why would anyone do that?). On the side fronting the road is a large sliding exterior door, the kind often seen on barns, recently painted blue, with a dark-ish red door just to the left of it. A little cupola sits atop the roof. I conclude that this building began life as a barn; it's hard to tell what it is now.
Although aware of the house with the crooked porch for decades, I've only seen it up close on those two occasions and have watched the unfolding destiny of the horse farm at the end of Emerson Road from Route 2 while trying to stay in my lane (wherever it may be this week) and avoid hitting any barrels or Jersey barriers. I will continue to monitor, mostly from Route 2, the continuance of what might be called The Building's Progress.
Sometimes, someone does. There was a dejected specimen on Gray Street in Arlington whose sagging porch, peeling paint, and overgrown grounds spoke clearly of neglect until someone took hold of it and turned it around. It now sports icing-pink paint, dark blue shutters, white trim, and a tidy, straight porch.
Also in Arlington, on Pleasant Street, was a large white-ish house, paint and grounds in sorry shape. Something about it said, Old person or persons with scanty funds live here. A lighted tree that appeared in a large front window at Christmas did little to alleviate the overall impression of gloom; if anything, it highlighted it.
Then one fine day the lawyer I worked for gave me a Purchase and Sale Agreement for a condominium at that address. The house I had been passing and pitying had been spruced up and divided into two condominiums -- as, to my surprise, had the barn behind it, which I had barely noticed. Both had been quite respectably painted light yellow-ish beige with dark olive trim. I have to hope the old people, if old people they were, aren't languishing in some nursing home.
A third Arlington house, a mansion on Appleton Street built in the 1890s, with a porte cochere and a dizzying array of bow windows, turrets, corners, and other Victorian gingerbread, was long coated in dark-green shingles that couldn't have been prepossessing when new and were not at all new when the house came to my attention. One day a "For Sale" sign appeared. This augured ill, it seemed to me.
For some time I didn't have occasion to drive down Appleton Street. Then one day I did, and to my gratification the ugly green shingles had been replaced with decent light-colored paint, and a dimly-lit lobby with carpet and table and lamp was visible through a glass door. "For Sale" was still there; the house, like the one on Pleasant Street, was enjoying a second career as condominiums. An acquaintance in the real estate business told me of a condo she had sold there, occupying a turret at one of the corners of the building. Now, some years later, the paint is looking more than a bit tired. I hope the condominium association repaints it soon.
An old farmhouse just west of the Concord Rotary, trying to hide behind a high hedge too far in front to conceal it, has exhibited increasing wear and tear over many years. When it came to broken windows, I decided the poor old thing's days were numbered; buildings don't fare well when water gets into them. But then the State Police bought the property. High white fences appeared, and horses. The windows of the house were protected with boards and green paint (which is now chipping off). But the house is still there, and something may yet be done with it.
Another candidate for rehabilitation is on Elm Street in Concord, near the police station and opposite the prison. Judging from its family resemblance to others in the neighborhood, it must have been built to house prison staff. For years past and to date it has looked unwell. It needs paint. The garage is missing a door. The window shades are always down; I don't think I've seen curtains there. The lawn and shrubbery are mowed rarely and pruned not at all. Unkempt and sad as it has looked, though, it was clearly inhabited: there was a car in the garage, and flowers planted hopefully along the walk. Driving by one day, I saw an elderly woman in overalls holding a gardening implement and surveying the yard.
Then the car wasn't there; I haven't seen flowers in some time. I imagine that the elderly woman has died or been relocated to what her children consider a more manageable situation. Then, some weeks ago, a "For Sale" sign appeared. I am watching for developments.
Also in Concord, just off Route 2, at the eastern edge of that nightmare of construction that extends for a couple of miles along Route 2 from Bedford Road in Lincoln to a bit west of Sandy Pond Road in Concord, was an old, shabby house loosely associated with a horsy-looking barn. I don't think I have seen an actual horse on the premises, but there are pictures of them here and there. The house and horse farm, if that's what it is, had a guys-live-here look: horsy fences and stables, and assorted pickup trucks and other vaguely agricultural vehicles.
The house, a rectangular block too close to the road (as old houses can come to be), tried to be white, without signal success. It may have had shingles, in a dingy condition. There was a roof over the front porch, two stories up, supported originally by three tall uprights -- hardly describable as columns, they were more like 6 x 6 or 8 x 8 chunks of wood. I say originally three: as long as I have been aware of the house, the support at the eastern end has been conspicuous for its absence, imparting a corresponding sag to that end of the roof. I often reflected that if everyone who drove past the house could contribute $1 to the cause, enough money would quickly be raised to rehabilitate the porch roof. The place's only redeeming feature, and that very imperfect, was enough overgrown shrubbery that you couldn't see the house very well.
Then came the Lincoln/Concord construction project, which, among other things, does away with what we used to call the Infamous Intersection (because my husband was in a car accident there). Four roads met at not-very-right angles where Route 2 east turned right across from the Mobil station: www.openstreetmap.org calls it Crosby Corner (Google maps is incomprehensible to me; but that's another story).
Route 2 is being widened for a good distance as well, beginning just west of Route 128. Like other houses along the route, the horse-farm house, which couldn't spare it, lost most of its front yard and, divested of its semi-concealing bushes, was revealed in all its unkempt ugliness. The front porch, which seemed to be made of brick and cement, had crumbled almost beyond recognition.
A "For Sale" sign appeared. Who, please, I asked myself rhetorically, is going to buy that?
Improbably, it began to look as though someone had. Sometimes there would be a light in the attic -- left on for days or weeks on end, apparently. Sometimes there would be men on ladders. The remains of the porch roof disappeared, leaving a scar that didn't improve the house's appearance. Most telling of all, the dingy non-white shingles disappeared and were replaced with Tyvek paper. I had wondered all along if the (presumably) new owner would demolish the house and build something else on the (expensive) land. But no one Tyvek-papers a building if they intend to tear it down.
The house stayed that way all this past winter and spring and into the summer. Then one day it wasn't there. But out of the tail of my eye I thought I saw a building very like it some yards back from the road, down a small declivity, and apparently rotated about 90 degrees.
A few days later, driving east on Route 2 with a friend, I obtained her permission for a wild goose chase to try to find out what was going on. Bedford Road looked as though it might lead us to the house but failed to do so. We backtracked to the remains of the Infamous Intersection and turned sharply right and backward on what maps call the Cambridge Turnpike Cutoff. We had seen from Route 2 that Emerson Road was at least near the house, and the GPS found it.
At the end of Emerson Road and to the left on a short and nameless piece of asphalt, was the house, Tyvek paper and all, back and down from the road. A second, closer look a couple of weeks later partly confirmed and partly corrected my previous impressions; for one thing, the rotation noted earlier proved to be a glanced-at-quickly illusion. I braved the possible displeasure of the owner of the black pickup truck in the front yard -- the fate of that property is, of course, no business of mine -- and the more than possible damage to the underpinnings of my little Honda (as I have occasion to remind myself from time to time, "Civic" means "stay on the pavement"). The house is still there, albeit hard to recognize on its crisp new cinder block foundation with its new light gray siding, fresh white trim, and new windows.
Between it and the road, closer to the house than I would have thought ideal, is a building of uncertain provenance. It also sits on a new foundation and is equipped with new beige siding. A sun porch or mini-greenhouse built onto the back faces the house (and faces north, come to think of it; why would anyone do that?). On the side fronting the road is a large sliding exterior door, the kind often seen on barns, recently painted blue, with a dark-ish red door just to the left of it. A little cupola sits atop the roof. I conclude that this building began life as a barn; it's hard to tell what it is now.
Although aware of the house with the crooked porch for decades, I've only seen it up close on those two occasions and have watched the unfolding destiny of the horse farm at the end of Emerson Road from Route 2 while trying to stay in my lane (wherever it may be this week) and avoid hitting any barrels or Jersey barriers. I will continue to monitor, mostly from Route 2, the continuance of what might be called The Building's Progress.
Sunday, August 16, 2015
CELL PHONE BRIGADE
Kay doesn't use her cell phone often but brings it along to avert or control mishaps and misunderstandings when she and Bob and Chris converge on Alewife Station on Monday afternoons.
One Monday, with everyone safely in Chris's small car, Kay undertook to call her home phone number and listen to messages. She couldn't figure out how to do it: escalating mutters over five minutes or so culminated in an admission that she had tried so many things that she had confused herself and the phone and wasn't sure it was on, or functioning.
"Bob," to him in the back seat, "Will you call my phone so I can be sure it's working?"
"Sure." Bob fell to searching his pockets and the bag he was carrying, grumbling about how many different cell phones he has owned and why none of them to date suit him, interrupting himself from time to time with remarks like "Well, now, what did I do with that thing?"
Chris, meanwhile, had whipped out her phone and flipped it open. Somewhere between the Contacts menu and Kay's number, a near miss with a parked car reminded her that her first priority was to drive. Bob found his phone and got through, and all was well.
On another Monday, Kay wondered with annoyance why she had received a message within the last half hour but hadn't heard the phone ring.
"Bob, would you call my phone? I want to hear what this thing does when it rings."
Again, Chris whipped out her phone, this time handing it to Kay: "Here -- call yourself."
By the time Kay had begun to figure out the Contacts menu, Bob had produced his phone and elicited an appropriate jingle from Kay's -- accompanying himself again with a disquisition on the inadequacy and mendacity of cell phones and phone companies.
All these people are over seventy. They grew up on big, heavy black telephones that stayed in one spot and announced a call with the brrrrrring brrrrrring that you hear in old movies. They knew about party lines and long-distance operators ("number, please"). In their day you couldn't buy a telephone but had to rent it from the phone company -- a monopoly that everybody hated. They remember pastel princess phones, and paying extra for any color but black. They have dealt with pay phones and cordless phones and extension telephones all over the house.
Fortunately, they have a collective sense of humor about it all. Both of the above episodes ended with gales of laughter as they pictured their three elderly selves in Chris's little car, trying to assert control of their technology.
One Monday, with everyone safely in Chris's small car, Kay undertook to call her home phone number and listen to messages. She couldn't figure out how to do it: escalating mutters over five minutes or so culminated in an admission that she had tried so many things that she had confused herself and the phone and wasn't sure it was on, or functioning.
"Bob," to him in the back seat, "Will you call my phone so I can be sure it's working?"
"Sure." Bob fell to searching his pockets and the bag he was carrying, grumbling about how many different cell phones he has owned and why none of them to date suit him, interrupting himself from time to time with remarks like "Well, now, what did I do with that thing?"
Chris, meanwhile, had whipped out her phone and flipped it open. Somewhere between the Contacts menu and Kay's number, a near miss with a parked car reminded her that her first priority was to drive. Bob found his phone and got through, and all was well.
On another Monday, Kay wondered with annoyance why she had received a message within the last half hour but hadn't heard the phone ring.
"Bob, would you call my phone? I want to hear what this thing does when it rings."
Again, Chris whipped out her phone, this time handing it to Kay: "Here -- call yourself."
By the time Kay had begun to figure out the Contacts menu, Bob had produced his phone and elicited an appropriate jingle from Kay's -- accompanying himself again with a disquisition on the inadequacy and mendacity of cell phones and phone companies.
All these people are over seventy. They grew up on big, heavy black telephones that stayed in one spot and announced a call with the brrrrrring brrrrrring that you hear in old movies. They knew about party lines and long-distance operators ("number, please"). In their day you couldn't buy a telephone but had to rent it from the phone company -- a monopoly that everybody hated. They remember pastel princess phones, and paying extra for any color but black. They have dealt with pay phones and cordless phones and extension telephones all over the house.
Fortunately, they have a collective sense of humor about it all. Both of the above episodes ended with gales of laughter as they pictured their three elderly selves in Chris's little car, trying to assert control of their technology.
Wednesday, July 29, 2015
RAINWATER SHAMPOO
In my mid-teens I decided that washing my hair outdoors in the rain would be really cool. Like many of youth's romantic notions, that one collided with reality.
To soak hair thoroughly -- young, thick hair, albeit quite fine -- requires a pelting downpour, the kind that often doesn't last long and is associated with thunderstorms. Having a prejudice against being struck by lightning, I passed on those.
When proper hair-washing rain presented itself, the next step was to change into my bathing suit: the two obvious alternatives -- nudity, and hair-washing fully dressed -- presented difficulties. Even a July downpour is colder than one might think, and soaking wet clothes are clammy and uncomfortable. The back yard is isolated enough that nudity might have worked if no family members happened by. I couldn't count on that, and my parents would have been as firmly prejudiced against that as I against electrocution. In any case, neither option occurred to me that I can remember.
By the time I emerged into the back yard, shampoo in hand, the rain had often diminished, and I had to finish washing my hair in the shower, an ignominious defeat that always annoyed me. I managed a full rainwater hair-wash maybe once.
After one summer, or possibly two, I concluded that washing my hair in rainwater, like some of my childhood original ideas -- taking possession of one of the chamber pots in the attic and peeing in it instead of walking a few steps to the bathroom, or jumping off the foundation of the old barn on a windy day with an umbrella for a parachute -- wasn't worth the trouble
To soak hair thoroughly -- young, thick hair, albeit quite fine -- requires a pelting downpour, the kind that often doesn't last long and is associated with thunderstorms. Having a prejudice against being struck by lightning, I passed on those.
When proper hair-washing rain presented itself, the next step was to change into my bathing suit: the two obvious alternatives -- nudity, and hair-washing fully dressed -- presented difficulties. Even a July downpour is colder than one might think, and soaking wet clothes are clammy and uncomfortable. The back yard is isolated enough that nudity might have worked if no family members happened by. I couldn't count on that, and my parents would have been as firmly prejudiced against that as I against electrocution. In any case, neither option occurred to me that I can remember.
By the time I emerged into the back yard, shampoo in hand, the rain had often diminished, and I had to finish washing my hair in the shower, an ignominious defeat that always annoyed me. I managed a full rainwater hair-wash maybe once.
After one summer, or possibly two, I concluded that washing my hair in rainwater, like some of my childhood original ideas -- taking possession of one of the chamber pots in the attic and peeing in it instead of walking a few steps to the bathroom, or jumping off the foundation of the old barn on a windy day with an umbrella for a parachute -- wasn't worth the trouble
Tuesday, June 9, 2015
GRAND CANYON SUITE (with apologies to Ferdé Grofe)
On a winter trip to the Grand Canyon in the mid-1970s, my husband was determined to hike into the canyon and up again the next day -- like climbing a mountain in reverse. I wasn't interested in doing that; and by then he had been on enough hikes with me to know that he would have a better wilderness experience without me than with me. For my part, well into three weeks of midwinter camping, I was happy to spend one night in a bed with a bathroom and shower a few steps away and a restaurant downstairs.
Instead of hiking I joined three other women and a cowboy named Bill on a string of mules, and together we made our way down, down, and down some more to a point called Indian Gardens about halfway between the rim of the canyon and the Colorado River at the bottom. One of the women was from Israel; another from Australia; the third from a different far-away place. I, from the San Francisco Bay Area, was a local by comparison. Bill was a real cowboy: he told us that his previous job had been punching cows in Wyoming. Herding tourists in Arizona must have been easier than that.
On my first trip west, in 1965, I was struck by the presence in the Greyhound terminal of a couple of genuine cowboys in Levis, cowboy boots and hats, traveling with big duffel bags and coils of rope (one of them was Asian, which somehow isn't what one expects). At that time, at least, the West was still in business at some of the old locations.
On the rim of the Grand Canyon on one of the January nights that we were there, it was four or five degrees above zero. Perhaps my favorite memory of that trip was crawling out of the tent at some small hour of the morning in quest of a bathroom (trying not to step on or otherwise disturb my husband) and looking up at the sky. In the cold, dry desert air six or seven thousand feet above sea level, the stars looked close enough to touch.
One of our mule-riding company had become separated from her luggage and had only one glove. Recognizing that she would never get this chance again, however, she boarded her mule and made the trip, one hand on the reins and the other in her pocket.
Anybody can stay on a Grand Canyon mule; they don't require horsemanship. Down they plodded, saddles and harnesses creaking, sure-footed as advertised. I watched in fascination as my mount, rounding a switchback, perched at the outside edge with all four feet planted together, nearly touching.
We stopped for lunch at Indian Gardens, a formation like a peninsula projecting into thin air with the river far below. We rested, looked around us, and marveled at finding ourselves in such a place; then we re-mounted and plodded and squeaked back up. Bill gave each of us a certificate attesting that we had made the trip. We ladies drank hot chocolate at the restaurant, autographed each others' certificates, and parted cordially.
I have to say this for my then-husband: were it not for him I surely would never have ridden a mule into the Grand Canyon.
Instead of hiking I joined three other women and a cowboy named Bill on a string of mules, and together we made our way down, down, and down some more to a point called Indian Gardens about halfway between the rim of the canyon and the Colorado River at the bottom. One of the women was from Israel; another from Australia; the third from a different far-away place. I, from the San Francisco Bay Area, was a local by comparison. Bill was a real cowboy: he told us that his previous job had been punching cows in Wyoming. Herding tourists in Arizona must have been easier than that.
On my first trip west, in 1965, I was struck by the presence in the Greyhound terminal of a couple of genuine cowboys in Levis, cowboy boots and hats, traveling with big duffel bags and coils of rope (one of them was Asian, which somehow isn't what one expects). At that time, at least, the West was still in business at some of the old locations.
On the rim of the Grand Canyon on one of the January nights that we were there, it was four or five degrees above zero. Perhaps my favorite memory of that trip was crawling out of the tent at some small hour of the morning in quest of a bathroom (trying not to step on or otherwise disturb my husband) and looking up at the sky. In the cold, dry desert air six or seven thousand feet above sea level, the stars looked close enough to touch.
One of our mule-riding company had become separated from her luggage and had only one glove. Recognizing that she would never get this chance again, however, she boarded her mule and made the trip, one hand on the reins and the other in her pocket.
Anybody can stay on a Grand Canyon mule; they don't require horsemanship. Down they plodded, saddles and harnesses creaking, sure-footed as advertised. I watched in fascination as my mount, rounding a switchback, perched at the outside edge with all four feet planted together, nearly touching.
We stopped for lunch at Indian Gardens, a formation like a peninsula projecting into thin air with the river far below. We rested, looked around us, and marveled at finding ourselves in such a place; then we re-mounted and plodded and squeaked back up. Bill gave each of us a certificate attesting that we had made the trip. We ladies drank hot chocolate at the restaurant, autographed each others' certificates, and parted cordially.
I have to say this for my then-husband: were it not for him I surely would never have ridden a mule into the Grand Canyon.
Monday, May 25, 2015
...BUT I KNOW WHAT I LIKE
A couple of fragments of television drama have stuck with me, each between an aspiring young musician and a teacher of theory or composition who is pointing out an error in the student's work. The student rejects the correction as an unwarranted incursion on his artistic voice; the teacher defends the correction; and a clash ensues between the stuffy old defender of rules for their own sake and the ardent young spokesman for originality and artistic integrity (with whom American audiences can be counted on to identify). I wasn't interested enough in either of these shows to stick around and find out how it all turned out. I suppose the student sticks to his guns and ultimately triumphs in the teeth of The Rules.
It doesn't work that way. Within the context of any art or genre there are things that work and things that don't, and rules and techniques that you ignore at your peril. While there probably are teachers who can't see beyond the letter of the rules and would allow themselves to be sucked into the kind of altercation depicted in these TV shows, any teacher with his wits about him would point out that the young musician can do anything with his own music that he can get his band, friends, and relations to go along with; but a passing grade in the class or a degree from the institution presumes mastery of certain material. A student who has learned those techniques can go beyond them, but breaking a bunch of rules because one doesn't know any better usually doesn't work well. An artist who is honest and genuinely talented will recognize that it doesn't, and either give up or re-invent a lot of wheels trying to fix the problem.
Thirty years or so ago some tune from The Godfather was being played a lot. I always knew that it annoyed me, but I didn't care enough to figure out why until, after hearing it one time too many, I found myself humming it, to my dismay (Laurie and I had some satisfying Ain't It Awful moments on getting music you don't like stuck in your head). Unable to rid myself of the Godfather tune, I turned around and looked it in the eye and noticed that it violated at least one rule of melodic writing that has been in force in Western music since the days of Gregory the Great in the seventh century: a wide upward leap in a melody is usually followed by a more or less corresponding descent; if such an interval is part of a continuing rising line, the effect is awkward; and the longer the upward motion continues, the more of a bad debt, so to speak, is created. The Godfather tune exactly, unrepentently and repeatedly took some big upward leap and kept on going.
Another time, annoyed by the background music in a restaurant, I asked Laurie, "What's the matter with this thing, anyway?" "Oh, it's all parallel," he said in disgust. Centuries ago, when Europe was figuring out how to manage music that consisted of more than one pitch at a time, we discovered that in most contexts we prefer the sound of contrary motion -- melodic lines sounding simultaneously and moving in opposite directions -- to parallelism, where lines move together the same distance apart. Obviously, if there are more than two parts they can't all move in different directions. We settled on keeping the bass line as independent as can be managed, and eschewing parallel octaves and fifths. Laurie was a sophisticated enough listener to recognize the problem with the restaurant music as parallel fifths. I just knew that I didn't like it.
When you invoke rules in the arts, people roll their eyes and accuse you of pedantry; but it tends to work the other way around. You don't think, Oh, god, parallel fifths, horrors, this
song must be terrible; you think, What is wrong with this thing?? and then notice the parallelism, if you can hear it. If you can't, you may just go on liking that piece of music less and less without knowing or much caring why.
It doesn't work that way. Within the context of any art or genre there are things that work and things that don't, and rules and techniques that you ignore at your peril. While there probably are teachers who can't see beyond the letter of the rules and would allow themselves to be sucked into the kind of altercation depicted in these TV shows, any teacher with his wits about him would point out that the young musician can do anything with his own music that he can get his band, friends, and relations to go along with; but a passing grade in the class or a degree from the institution presumes mastery of certain material. A student who has learned those techniques can go beyond them, but breaking a bunch of rules because one doesn't know any better usually doesn't work well. An artist who is honest and genuinely talented will recognize that it doesn't, and either give up or re-invent a lot of wheels trying to fix the problem.
Thirty years or so ago some tune from The Godfather was being played a lot. I always knew that it annoyed me, but I didn't care enough to figure out why until, after hearing it one time too many, I found myself humming it, to my dismay (Laurie and I had some satisfying Ain't It Awful moments on getting music you don't like stuck in your head). Unable to rid myself of the Godfather tune, I turned around and looked it in the eye and noticed that it violated at least one rule of melodic writing that has been in force in Western music since the days of Gregory the Great in the seventh century: a wide upward leap in a melody is usually followed by a more or less corresponding descent; if such an interval is part of a continuing rising line, the effect is awkward; and the longer the upward motion continues, the more of a bad debt, so to speak, is created. The Godfather tune exactly, unrepentently and repeatedly took some big upward leap and kept on going.
Another time, annoyed by the background music in a restaurant, I asked Laurie, "What's the matter with this thing, anyway?" "Oh, it's all parallel," he said in disgust. Centuries ago, when Europe was figuring out how to manage music that consisted of more than one pitch at a time, we discovered that in most contexts we prefer the sound of contrary motion -- melodic lines sounding simultaneously and moving in opposite directions -- to parallelism, where lines move together the same distance apart. Obviously, if there are more than two parts they can't all move in different directions. We settled on keeping the bass line as independent as can be managed, and eschewing parallel octaves and fifths. Laurie was a sophisticated enough listener to recognize the problem with the restaurant music as parallel fifths. I just knew that I didn't like it.
When you invoke rules in the arts, people roll their eyes and accuse you of pedantry; but it tends to work the other way around. You don't think, Oh, god, parallel fifths, horrors, this
song must be terrible; you think, What is wrong with this thing?? and then notice the parallelism, if you can hear it. If you can't, you may just go on liking that piece of music less and less without knowing or much caring why.
Thursday, April 2, 2015
A VOICE FROM THE PAST
Looking through my late husband's effects for something to read, I came upon The Glenn Gould Reader, a 1984 collection of record jacket notes, articles for music and audio magazines, and other writings from the 1960s and 1970s by Canadian pianist Glenn Gould (1932-1982). Goul
Gould's many eccentricities are the stuff of legend, to the point where they could obscure his merits as a musician. He loathed performing. He stopped giving concerts early in his career, predicting "that the public concert as we know it today [will] no longer exist a century hence, that its functions [will] have been entirely taken over by electronic media." He gives an intriguing account of the extent to which recordings of concert music are doctored and patched, cobbled together out of many takes, to produce the kind of musical experience that performers and listeners have come to expect.
In The Prospects of Recording (1966) he explains how, as recording and editing skill and equipment become more widespread and sophisticated, listeners will be able to produce their own definitive recordings: "Let us say, for example, that you enjoy Bruno Walter's performance of the exposition and recapitulation from the first movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony but incline toward Klemperer's handling of the development section. . . . You could snip out these measures from the Klemperer edition and splice them into the Walter performance."
Prophecy is a risky business. Presumably, music-loving audiophiles now have the equipment and the know-how to make the kind of edited recordings that Gould describes; but I have trouble picturing who would bother. I would think that hobbyists with that level of editing savvy would be more interested in generating projects of their own -- like Eduardo Antonello, who posts videos on YouTube of himself in quadruplicate playing sixteenth century dances on krummhorns. https://www.youtube.com/watch?
The evolution of harmony has been central to Western music since we began to invent polyphony around the turn of the tenth century. Gould describes how harmonic development culminated in the work of such turn-of-the-century post-romantics as Richard Strauss (1864-1949) and Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951): chromaticism and dissonance, he says, have expanded to the point where key orientation is no longer workable. While Strauss stuck to tonality, Schoenberg and the other atonalists, as Gould sees it, pointed the way to further development of music by avoiding tonality and "liberating" dissonance.
This development has been greeted with a certain lack of enthusiasm in musical circles. In a mid-1970s conversation with a recorder player who worked in a music store, I mentioned a question from a musically naive individual who asked if "classical" music -- symphonies, string quartets, and the like -- was still being composed. "Oh, yeah," the recorder player said, "but hardly anybody likes it."
Gould acknowledges with some reluctance that the "fundamental effect [of Schoenberg's works and ideas] has been to separate audience and composer. . . , shattering irreparably the compact between audience and composer, . . . separating their common bond of reference and creating between them a profound antagonism." In other words, hardly anybody likes atonalism.
At one time I tried to figure out what all the post-tonality shouting was about and could find nothing attractive or interesting about that music. I would love to have an atonality aficionado explain to me, YouTube link in hand, just what one is supposed to hear in that mass of dissonance and strained, screaming sound. In the meantime, I stick to my suspicion that that particular emperor really isn't wearing any clothes.
It is often assumed that innovators are ahead of their time and the public will eventually catch up; but the professor with whom I studied theory at DeAnza college in the mid-1970s - like Gould, a great admirer of Schoenberg -- pointed out that it had been nearly seventy years since Schoenberg's 1908 venture into atonality, and that if something is going to catch on it happens faster than that. I also heard in music school that radio stations know to a nicety for how many minutes their audience will sit still for an atonal piece (the number was in the single digits, as I remember) before changing the station. From 1908 through the 1960s and 1970s to the present time, the music-listening public hasn't taken to atonality.
Gould, in a 1967 essay, was still waiting, expecting atonal music, you might say, to sneak in the back door: "If you really stop to listen to the music accompanying most of the grade-B horror movies that are coming out of Hollywood these days, or perhaps a TV show on space travel for children, you will be absolutely amazed at the amount of integration which the various idioms of atonality have undergone in these media." I've noticed that, actually. Gould goes on to express an expectation that scary movie music will accustom the public to the sound of atonality. Maybe -- but in the decades since Gould wrote, I haven't noticed any such effect.
These two preoccupations -- the inevitability and rightness of atonality and the imminent replacement of concert performance with recordings -- intersect in ways that Gould seems not to have considered. He takes for granted the continued forward march of Western concert music; it seems not to have occurred to him that the listening public might respond to all that discordant shrieking by walking away altogether from the kind of music often called (erroneously) "classical."
Neuroscience researcher Daniel Levitin (This Is Your Brain on Music) claims that concert or "classical" music hasn't been written since about 1950. His book emphasizes the psychology of rhythm and tone color (or timbre) and barely mentions harmony at all. I have known other rockers -- often with a defensive edge -- to refer to "classical" music as passe. The decline in concert attendance that Gould takes as evidence of the obsolescence of public performance applies to electronic music reproduction as well: the "classical" section of CD stores has shrunk steadily since Gould's time, and radio stations playing that kind of music are now few and far between. Meanwhile, rock concerts continue unabated. Something other than preference for recordings over live performance must be going on.
Photography hasn't replaced painting but has become an art form in its own right. Film hasn't replaced stage drama. Similarly, electronic sound reproduction hasn't replaced acoustic public performance so much as spun off another kind of music altogether. I have been saying since the late 1960s (when anyone would listen, which has been seldom) that the possibilities of harmonic development seem to be played out; that the experimenters who have been trying to create electronic music for as long as electronics have been around have developed sounds and techniques that are interesting but not clearly music; and that the first efforts to come to my attention that are electronic and also undeniably music, would be the Beatles and others like them. (Paul McCartney was a fan of Karlheinz Stockhausen, an electronic music pioneer.) The Beatles weren't the first or the only ones to combine conventional sounds and techniques with electronic ones, but they must be the mostly widely-heard.
My favorite Beatles song is Tomorrow Never Knows (Revolver, 1966), with its steady, insistent percussion (not produced electronically, as it probably would be now, but left to Ringo Starr's impeccable rhythmic sense) supporting what might be described as a collage of electronically generated sounds. Tomorrow Never Knows is studio music that in the 1960s couldn't be performed live, although Paul McCartney has said in an interview that it could be now.
None of the above is at all what Gould had in mind. In a piece on Petula Clark (whom he detested), he takes a sideswipe at the Beatles, calling them "amateurish" and faulting their voice leading. I'm sure he would have been horrified at the suggestion that their productions were comparable to what he was doing with his own recordings. And the Beatles' studio pieces were far more innovative than Gould's endless picking over of historical works that were never meant to be handled that way. As little enthusiasm as I have for the decline of Western concert music, it rather amuses me to reflect while reading Gould's sarcastic putdown that the Beatles won: they beat Gould at his own game, and arguably the future of music rests more with them than with him.
Gould's many eccentricities are the stuff of legend, to the point where they could obscure his merits as a musician. He loathed performing. He stopped giving concerts early in his career, predicting "that the public concert as we know it today [will] no longer exist a century hence, that its functions [will] have been entirely taken over by electronic media." He gives an intriguing account of the extent to which recordings of concert music are doctored and patched, cobbled together out of many takes, to produce the kind of musical experience that performers and listeners have come to expect.
In The Prospects of Recording (1966) he explains how, as recording and editing skill and equipment become more widespread and sophisticated, listeners will be able to produce their own definitive recordings: "Let us say, for example, that you enjoy Bruno Walter's performance of the exposition and recapitulation from the first movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony but incline toward Klemperer's handling of the development section. . . . You could snip out these measures from the Klemperer edition and splice them into the Walter performance."
Prophecy is a risky business. Presumably, music-loving audiophiles now have the equipment and the know-how to make the kind of edited recordings that Gould describes; but I have trouble picturing who would bother. I would think that hobbyists with that level of editing savvy would be more interested in generating projects of their own -- like Eduardo Antonello, who posts videos on YouTube of himself in quadruplicate playing sixteenth century dances on krummhorns. https://www.youtube.com/watch?
The evolution of harmony has been central to Western music since we began to invent polyphony around the turn of the tenth century. Gould describes how harmonic development culminated in the work of such turn-of-the-century post-romantics as Richard Strauss (1864-1949) and Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951): chromaticism and dissonance, he says, have expanded to the point where key orientation is no longer workable. While Strauss stuck to tonality, Schoenberg and the other atonalists, as Gould sees it, pointed the way to further development of music by avoiding tonality and "liberating" dissonance.
This development has been greeted with a certain lack of enthusiasm in musical circles. In a mid-1970s conversation with a recorder player who worked in a music store, I mentioned a question from a musically naive individual who asked if "classical" music -- symphonies, string quartets, and the like -- was still being composed. "Oh, yeah," the recorder player said, "but hardly anybody likes it."
Gould acknowledges with some reluctance that the "fundamental effect [of Schoenberg's works and ideas] has been to separate audience and composer. . . , shattering irreparably the compact between audience and composer, . . . separating their common bond of reference and creating between them a profound antagonism." In other words, hardly anybody likes atonalism.
At one time I tried to figure out what all the post-tonality shouting was about and could find nothing attractive or interesting about that music. I would love to have an atonality aficionado explain to me, YouTube link in hand, just what one is supposed to hear in that mass of dissonance and strained, screaming sound. In the meantime, I stick to my suspicion that that particular emperor really isn't wearing any clothes.
It is often assumed that innovators are ahead of their time and the public will eventually catch up; but the professor with whom I studied theory at DeAnza college in the mid-1970s - like Gould, a great admirer of Schoenberg -- pointed out that it had been nearly seventy years since Schoenberg's 1908 venture into atonality, and that if something is going to catch on it happens faster than that. I also heard in music school that radio stations know to a nicety for how many minutes their audience will sit still for an atonal piece (the number was in the single digits, as I remember) before changing the station. From 1908 through the 1960s and 1970s to the present time, the music-listening public hasn't taken to atonality.
Gould, in a 1967 essay, was still waiting, expecting atonal music, you might say, to sneak in the back door: "If you really stop to listen to the music accompanying most of the grade-B horror movies that are coming out of Hollywood these days, or perhaps a TV show on space travel for children, you will be absolutely amazed at the amount of integration which the various idioms of atonality have undergone in these media." I've noticed that, actually. Gould goes on to express an expectation that scary movie music will accustom the public to the sound of atonality. Maybe -- but in the decades since Gould wrote, I haven't noticed any such effect.
These two preoccupations -- the inevitability and rightness of atonality and the imminent replacement of concert performance with recordings -- intersect in ways that Gould seems not to have considered. He takes for granted the continued forward march of Western concert music; it seems not to have occurred to him that the listening public might respond to all that discordant shrieking by walking away altogether from the kind of music often called (erroneously) "classical."
Neuroscience researcher Daniel Levitin (This Is Your Brain on Music) claims that concert or "classical" music hasn't been written since about 1950. His book emphasizes the psychology of rhythm and tone color (or timbre) and barely mentions harmony at all. I have known other rockers -- often with a defensive edge -- to refer to "classical" music as passe. The decline in concert attendance that Gould takes as evidence of the obsolescence of public performance applies to electronic music reproduction as well: the "classical" section of CD stores has shrunk steadily since Gould's time, and radio stations playing that kind of music are now few and far between. Meanwhile, rock concerts continue unabated. Something other than preference for recordings over live performance must be going on.
Photography hasn't replaced painting but has become an art form in its own right. Film hasn't replaced stage drama. Similarly, electronic sound reproduction hasn't replaced acoustic public performance so much as spun off another kind of music altogether. I have been saying since the late 1960s (when anyone would listen, which has been seldom) that the possibilities of harmonic development seem to be played out; that the experimenters who have been trying to create electronic music for as long as electronics have been around have developed sounds and techniques that are interesting but not clearly music; and that the first efforts to come to my attention that are electronic and also undeniably music, would be the Beatles and others like them. (Paul McCartney was a fan of Karlheinz Stockhausen, an electronic music pioneer.) The Beatles weren't the first or the only ones to combine conventional sounds and techniques with electronic ones, but they must be the mostly widely-heard.
My favorite Beatles song is Tomorrow Never Knows (Revolver, 1966), with its steady, insistent percussion (not produced electronically, as it probably would be now, but left to Ringo Starr's impeccable rhythmic sense) supporting what might be described as a collage of electronically generated sounds. Tomorrow Never Knows is studio music that in the 1960s couldn't be performed live, although Paul McCartney has said in an interview that it could be now.
None of the above is at all what Gould had in mind. In a piece on Petula Clark (whom he detested), he takes a sideswipe at the Beatles, calling them "amateurish" and faulting their voice leading. I'm sure he would have been horrified at the suggestion that their productions were comparable to what he was doing with his own recordings. And the Beatles' studio pieces were far more innovative than Gould's endless picking over of historical works that were never meant to be handled that way. As little enthusiasm as I have for the decline of Western concert music, it rather amuses me to reflect while reading Gould's sarcastic putdown that the Beatles won: they beat Gould at his own game, and arguably the future of music rests more with them than with him.
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