Lizkdc Dislocation

Dickensian



This week you may have seen the Google doodle that marked the 200 birthday of Charles Dickens. Sometimes the dates they choose to honor can feel eccentric or narrow or precious, and sometimes you are the exact target audience and think " THAT"S RIGHT!"

I have read every novel Dickens wrote, many of them many times. A few, like Great Expectations or A Christmas Carol, I began with so young and have read so often, that they shaped my very sense of language, time, and that unnameable inner sense, how stories are.

For a twentieth century child,  perhaps the most vivid effect that reading Dickens has on you when young is to produce a startling sense of strangeness, of otherness---a world of things, objects, atmosphere, smell, of roles and words that are as unknown in your daily life as if they were a fictional society on Mars: coal and fog, orphanages and servants, waistcoats and wigs, horse-drawn coaches and treacle and gruel and ale and stockings and child servants and stick-weilding teachers and shivering exile in a vast dark London and incredible rescues and compassionate, just-met strangers who take you in.

And at the same time, those same stories fill you with a sense of startling recognition, of familiarity,  because Dickens' stories always feel as if their spine, somehow, is shared with fairytales and ur-stories, primal legends and myths about lost parents, unrecognized merit, miraculous meetings and recovered love.

Dickens's stories in one way another at their heart usually figure the child or the outsider, not only lost, but shamed, powerless, rejected.  And at the same time, these works provide a voice--often the author's--saying "this didn't just happen," and "what does it mean about our society that this is how things are?"  As a young adolescent struggling with my own culture's (and consciousness's) overpowering narratives that insist that suffering, injustice, pain, humiliation, loss, are just the way it is (and you deserve it), I found in Dickens a way to experience the hopefulness and pleasure of imagining, what if it doesn't have to be?

Of course, I realize that for many people, that isn't the effect he has at all. Instead, reading Dickens may produce a feeling of oppressive boredom, of excessive alienation, creating ---not a forgettable indifference--but an absolute distaste, a revolt against a canonical burden forced on them by stifling schoolmasters (especially sad because Dickens loathed bores). A friend of mine, a great reader, has told me that reading Dickens (for the briefest of spaces) "makes her want to poke her eyes out!" Well! I must clutch my thick paperbacks and recognize that the Dickens audience is, by the very nature of things, a limited one,  a lingering, but slowly retreating and shrinking body of readers for whom Dickens remains a warm touchstone, the author of a living, vivid imaginary space, a fictional city that at the same time provides a path into actual history, someone who speaks to our personal inner lives of loss and abandonment and hope.

 

 

 

Toast and Yoga

This yoga instructor at Mike's Fitness in JP gave the following lecture.  

Happy New Year! Some of you, he said, have been complaining to the front desk. You complain that there are too many people and the mats are too close together. You complain that some people come late and their entry disrupts the class. You complain that I, HERALDO, talk too much!

* Heraldo says his name in capital letters. Even his Facebook name is in CAPS.

Well. Listen. Yoga is not only the pose, you see. Yoga is the practice. Yoga is the mindfulness, it is the what is in your heart. If you are thinking how mad you are at the person who comes in late, you are losing whatever it is you could be getting from the pose, from the right now.

In Japan, in Zen, they have a saying: If you are so upset when your toast burns, what will happen when your house catches fire?

Open your heart! Love the person next to you! If you step on their mat, that is so wonderful, because it is an an opportunity to look them in the eyes and connect to this person. If you touch them, you share the energy and have twice as much!

If you do not like these things, if you want me to shut up and stop talking, if your practice stops with the pose, this maybe is not the class for you! 

I definitely decided that this was the class for me.

And all week I drove around thinking about my life's burnt toast.

 

Spies and Sense Memory

On New Year's Eve,  mom and I went out to Regal Beagle in Brookline and had salt cod cakes and some sort of warm whiskey and lemon concoction called  a "Wisecracker" and then went to see Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy at the Coolidge Corner Cinema.

 This is the film version of the John Le Carre novel, filmed long ago as a famous miniseries starring Alec Guinness as a depressed and unwillingly retired British intelligence agent named George Smiley. The old version aired on the BBC in 1979 and in the US on Masterpiece Theater, and my father and I watched it together on Sunday nights on our aged TV set with the bent rabbit ears. 

 I was about fourteen and Dad was about fifty, when we watched together. I went by day to a big, shabby city school to be smart and miserable, and he went by day in his crumpled raincoat and wide '70s tie to a job in state government in a faceless downtown Boston office block. A job that left him tired, I think, and represented a disappointment of his younger-day dreams, but he stuck to it for his family's sake, and he cheerfully attended all us kids' band concerts, art shows, football games, Scout dinners and such, and went to Mass and supported the doings of his and my mom's vast and complex families.

 But when he needed to get away, he read voraciously, histories of Renaissance Europe or the American Civil War or the great World Wars that had shaped his own family's lives, and in fiction, Saul Bellow's sad-sack, wise-cracking antiheroes, and Mario Puzo's salty Mafioso revenge cycles and George V. Higgins' tragi-comic Boston noir, and John Le Carre, too.

New Year's Resolutions I Will Definitely Keep

I will practice insight meditations in which I wish lovingkindness to the world and even my most dire opponents and long-standing foes, or if I cannot get the dial up to lovingkindness, I will strive to send out vibes of lessenedanimosity.

This will be the year I stop over-thinking things. Unless...!!!

I will stop indulging in futile wishes, like unrealistic dreams of wealth, or for a new Joss Whedon series that succeeds on television.

I will take more bold and empathetic photos of the vivid human beings and complex urban spaces around me, and fewer pictures of things in my yard.

I am going to make peace with having bought an Android phone.

When I hang up the bird feeder in the yard, I will stop worrying that I am making the squirrels fat.

I will awaken early for sunrise meditation more.  I will not spend my dawn meditation time thinking about dinner which is twelve hours away.

I will consume more kale and less beer, although if someone wants to create a Kale Beer, I am okay with that.

I will spend more time on crafting insightful blog posts, and less time with my laptop balanced on my tummy laughing at the Honey Badger and guys dancing on YouTube and stuff (BTW, I did definitely not watch either of those again just now).

I promise to be extremely authentic and truthful in what I report about myself on social media, unless it makes me look bad.

Stay tuned.

Over That River, Through Those Woods (Thanksgiving Travel)

The day before Thanksgiving, I was driving my much-cherished tiny commute to work in Brookline and I had one of those odd and intense bursts of sense and memory triggered by association. They happen when you do a thing on the a particular day of the year that you have done on just about the same day in manyyears past. In this case, driving at Thanksgiving time.

Wednesday was one of those grey and wet November days.  After the red and gold leaves have fallen, only the faded pale ale of old grasses and reeds, the grey and sliver planes of pond and river, the dark curved stems and thin fingers of leafless trees. An inkbrush world. The holiday itself and the rest of this weekend have been that other kind of November day: pure blue sky and brief afternoon light, fading too quickly, leaving the senses confusedly protesting at being robbed of time.

Now my Thanksgiving week trips this year are brief--to a half day of work in Brookline on the eve of the holiday, to family in Lexington on the day itself, home to Roslindale. But for a long time for me, Thanksgiving was about journeys,  sometimes grey and stormy, sometimes in bright chill sunshine, always a holiday framed by time and distance.

There were the years with my then-husband: the years we made it up from Washington, DC to Boston to spend the holiday with my family. He loved driving and hated flying, so we'd get up in the navy blue pre-dawn in Washington, DC, start onto the road at 5 AM to beat the early rush hour. Roll across the Delaware Bridge at sunup with coffee in hand. By the time the sun got bright, we'd be in New Jersey, packed in among vast lines of barreling trucks and the great holiday flood of travellers in mortion. We'd have a packed lunch from the Korean Jewish deli in Adams Morgan, washed down with swallows of whiskey with slow intakes of joint and cigarette for dessert. We didn't do much planning besides jeans and sweaters and having a good stack of cassette tapes. Led Zepplin, Richard Feynman, David Bowie, the Smiths. Sometimes we stopped along the way to have get physical. I can't even remember what it was like, to not be able to go 12 hours without touching and affection. It sounds like a sappy joke.

There were the years after my marriage ended. I flew a couple of times, but the crowds were tense, the airports miserable, the flights unreliable.  After 9/11 and about a thousand factors made air travel in the US even more of a burden, I just began to drive by myself. And oddly, weirdly, I loved it.

Me and the Buttons: a Bevvy of Social Accounts, and Anxiety

You know that metaphor about challenging times, where you talk about having to rebuild a plane while you are still flying it?

It's interesting how much social media feels like that, all the time. Right now I am having one of those moments where I feel like I am unscrewing the tail while rejiggering the wheels and talking to someone on the ground and, now, the metaphor is dying out.

Vintage Postage Stamp Social Media Buttons courtest of Dawghouse Design via Tutorial9.net

But suffice it to say, I'm just in the middle of a fairish-ly big life change—a new job—and it's making me stop and think about the accounts and channels and networks represented by the plethora of buttons on my toolbars, and just how to use them. And evento  try to retrace how they got there, over the last few years of my life.

I started this blog on Typepad in January, 2007, after just having moved back to Boston from Washington, DC.  As I went through that previous massive life change (city, job, friends, family), it was a way to reach out to a few people close to me but far away.  It was also a way to create a practice around writing and reflecting,  and a means to push myself to share a little of that work, against the grain of my tendency to put on a game face with much of the world.  Even if  the audience was only a few people. Even if it the audience was occasionally, only a theoretical one.

At times, I wove this space into my professional life, with occasional posts about the craft of web content, or, like so many others, used it to register a meta-comment on social media itself. But mostly I wrote about my life outside of work.  Though, at the same time, I generally found myself to shying away from using it as a form of reportage.  I've written about a hike, a film, a moment in political discourse or a glimpse of a neighborhood scene. But not, generally, about what I did at work this week, an argument in my family, worries about the economy or my bank account. Although, those realities must often have leaked through in what I did write, and especially in the many long gaps between posts.

East of Boston: Great Brewster Island

Sandspit at Great Brewster Island

Yesterday I travelled with the Friends of the Boston Harbor Islands to one of their islandy flock, a  worn, ancient nubbin called Great Brewster Island, nine miles out from the busy bustle of the waterfront.

Long ago, Native Americans paddled out to these islands in search of fish or refuge from enemies.  For a very long time in recent centuries,  they were part of a busy, messy, fast-changing Boston culture that lived and died by the sea.  For four centuries, Boston built on these islands,  lighthouses and docks, forts and prisons, hospitals for contagious diseases and catch-alls for orphans and delinquents and those who fell under wartime suspicion.  Families lived out here on some of the islands, fishing and managing tiny farms and crafts, connected to the mainland by small boats and an incredible hardihood. On others, wealthier sorts seeking peace from the reeking city built the occasional summer home and played at boats and picnics and watercolor painting. The guide showed us old black and white photos of Gilded Age ladies in enormous hats, posed on the beach with their long skirts sweeping the wet sand.

During the Second World War, a fear of dark dangers that might track across the Atlantic caused the US armed forces to take over almost all the chain, building in great guns and mines and radar nearby the crumbling forts from the Civil War and War of 1812.

Undiscovered Worlds (At the Museum of Science)

Undiscovered Worlds: Trailer from Jason Fletcher on Vimeo.

 

My niece and nephew Milo and Annabelle were staying with Nana and I over the weekend, and because of that, I got to do things I never do. Not can't do, just, usually, don't.  Read Harry Potter out loud. Play chess on the rug.  Watch cartoons. Brush someone else's hair. And awesomest of all, go to the Science Museum.

 What an amazing constructing of the high-tech, and the low.  Annabelle put on a bee-striped cape, and climbed into a giant plastic honeycomb. Milo put on a grey squirrel cape, and raced around a climbing- fort clutching a giant acorn, declaiming MINE MINE in a way that I am sure a real squirrel would cheer. 

 A brilliant volunteer presented them with an enormous box of bones, and challenged them to assemble them back into a skeleton, without telling them what it was a skeleton of!  With coaching and handling and speculation, together they slowly made sense of the parts until it became a creature, a monster, something more familiar--a bird! A really big one! Named at last: an ostrich.   A pretty amazing demonstration of the deep satisfaction kids can get from hands, and touching stuff, and brains, and pictures in books, and a smart teacher.

Castine

I finally began working with some photos from my trip earlier this summer to Maine. We were up the coast further then I'd been before, in Hancock County, near Mount Desert Isle, but away from Bar Harbor, overwheening metropolis that it is, and off among the quieter peninsulas nearby. Castine and Blue Hill and Deer Isle were the principal places we visited, and along the way Searsport and Bucksport and even tinier crossroads.

This is a place of character, full of lost pasts, but also people who enjoy their present and work hard at making it possible, work hard at the job of being able to live someplace that is unto itself, and not a way station on the way somewhere else.

All around are the reminders of the past. Castine is a town that has as its point of pride how many times it was destroyed: overrun, burnt down, abandoned, resettled, renamed--and all as a part of a struggle that has largely been forgotten in modern America. It was a waypoint and a battleground in a grinding of frontier against frontier in a struggle of empires we're barely aware of anymore.

Pièce de résistance

It's been a month on overflow. I had these personal commitments around my work life and  plans for coming phases of it that I needed to work on each evening after work, some changes to how I manage my personal time for creativity, fitness, and intentionality, a huooooge bunch of family times that I enjoyed and had been pledged,  but that had to fit in around all that. 

I feel like everything is about TIME, TIME, TIME and paradoxically, I am at long last and after much prodding taking up a meditation program. Which I clearly need (BE MINDFUL OF THE PRESENT floating over my head in fiery letters) and at which I currently suck.

Meditation consists of the things that I am stupid at, like living in my body and being with my emotions and letting go of suffering and verbosity, and  right now, I am a big ball of RESISTANCE. I'm resisting like the French Resistance, like a mutant virus overcoming your big damn cure, like an insulating thingie resisting all that nasty electricity.

But what I do know is that usually all that commotion signals I have gotten somewhere near the top of a thicketed slope, and am about to come out into clearer ground.

I think.

Maybe.

Wait, I'm not supposed to be about getting meditation "right"? DAMMIT.

Trotting back to starting line again.

Mysterious (Stone) Skin: Another Urban Woods Question

Ok, urban detectives: somebody out there may know what these fragments are?

 

Another favorite place I have in our corner of the city is Millenium Park, the rewarding but not overly-prettified piece of rescued riverland scrub along an upstream bend of the Charles River near the VFW Parkway.  This undramatic wetland, long snubbed and left aisde for graveyards, DPW storage, a dump, and the backyard of the Irish Alehouse, got rescued a few decades ago, and turned into a really well-thought out park and the home grounds of West Roxbury High, as well.

It retains an air of strangeness, if you feel it.  Exit through one wooded side, and you can wander into the grounds holding a few fragments of the long-vanished Transcendentalist commune called Brooke Farm, where Hawthorne and Margaret Fuller and their pals messed incompetently around at idealized rural living.  Away along one of the graveyard drives is an old marker stating that Civil War troops long ago trained in what were open fields.  Follow other paths, and you can wander through Gethsemane and several other miles of abutting graveyards. Over there, a train bridge, and the commuter rail carrying business people headed down town. The other way, Route 1 and a couple of miles of McDonald's, Bed Bath and Beyond,  and discount carpetlands. That way, the top of the Blue Hill. Another way, the distant ice of the Hancock Tower.

My Fairly Safe-ish Dangerous Youth

Yesterday, my brother and I, grown-ups both, spent a few minutes of our Fourth of July chortling in the kitchen (away from Nana's ears) about the great traditional tie between our national birthday, and doing goofy, unsafe stuff.

When we were in grade school, the two "big kids" on the street would sidle away from the eyes of parents and light off fireworks, recruiting us as the audience (they were smart enough to not to give them to little kids to hold, except sparklers). There was the fountain firework, which was pretty, and the cherry bombs, which they dropped in the sewer and made a giddy bang (probably would not make the  DPW or the taxpayers happy, either) , and the wonderful time we donated a toy Fischer Price Little People School Bus to the cause and they rolled it down the street exploding with fireworks and flames! I hope we took the little peg-headed passengers out first.

And my brother, since he was younger when us older kids went off to college, got the chance later to tag along with some cousins and uncles up at a lake in New Hampshire who would float out onto said lake in canoes, possibly fueled by beer, and light off their works from the canoes! Because that was stupider, and therefore, more fun!

I mean, that was stuff we weren't officially supposed to be doing! But there was SO much stuff we were let to do, which now has been relegated to the category of unsafe.  Even though everyone knows our Mom was "strict," and our Dad would (mostly) back her up and could yell really loud. Because these were all stuff that everybody did!

A Great Movie Scene for the Fourth

 

From "1776"

The Signing, Philadelphia.

"We are about the brave the storm in a skiff made of paper."

 

A People's History of the Fourth of July in Boston

Pops Concert By Garrett A. Wollman. (From The Archives @ BostonRadio.org) [CC-BY-SA-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

 

Whilst scrubbing my grill, ordering three types of meat and other patriotic tasks, I find myself diving back into childhood memory of this national holiday. 

There are a few small-town Fourth memories, the times we were at the beach somewhere for the weekend. The parents would drive a car into a field of scratchy, dry sun-bleached grass, and settle us kids for the fireworks to come.  You could have convertibles and kids back then: not only did we not have car seats, we drove around with our precious little noggins caressed by the murderous highway breezes, HOW ABOUT THAT. 

So you could sit in that attractively unsafe car, or on an old blanket on the grass, and watch some part-time volunteer firemen--doubtless without the appropriate training--make pretty explosions in the sky.

Other times you got to have your big city Boston Fourth, heading downtown to Pops' giant bandshell to see their deathless leader, Arthur Fiedler, lead the storied band through a medley of Burt Bacharach, Broadway, and George M. Cohan hits that really heated up those World War One-era gramophones, plus a few Beatles tunes for those crazy kids.

Legend has it that when the Pilgrims first arrived upon the shores of Massachusetts, Fiedler emerged from the woodland shadows in his spotless band leader's suit with his snowy white mustache, and foretold that one day, a new nation would be born, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all people were created equal, but that it would take a really, really long time for folks to get that through their heads.

Who Are the People in the Neighborhood? (JP Cut)

 

People you see in JP on a sunny Friday afternoon.

Guys with braids on bicycles. 

Guys on those tallbike things (when tatts and dork glasses are just not enough to announce your demographic niche).  Guys riding up to other guys with braids and slapping hands as if to say, yo is your band playing tonight, and did you see my girlfriend's knitted bike cozy she is selling on Etsy. No? Then check my Tumblr. That sort of handslap!

People going into the corner store for cigarettes and chips and cheap beer and money orders, and people going into coffee shops to co-work on their code for that site about crowdsourcing social change they won't finish before they head off to grad school.

Big Latin guys headed to work out with weights at Mike's Fitness. Little hippie non-profit women headed to work out with weights at Mike's Fitness.  

People headed to the co-op store for whole grain bread and hemp soap.  People headed to that Meatland store for pork sausage and the joy of shopping at a place called Meatland.

Parents taking their progressively-named children to Music Together classes (Emma Mae, please hold hands with Linus and Deliverance). People on their way to their Tribal Dance or Belly Dancing lesson (Note on schedule:  *Students must buy finger cymbals and a 3 yard silk veil from Susi to participate in this class.)

People headed to the Irish bar, the other Irish bar, the other again Irish bar with the mural and corned beef hash and eggs on Sunday, the Scottish bar, the bar in the former brewery that sometimes has a gay line dancing night now, but no more bowling.

Who you don't see:  the invisible people, who invest their lifeblood and InDesign skills in all those free newspapers stacked in the front of all Jamaica Plain businesses, toiling away in their mysterious dens somewhere, delivering their precious freemedia to the careless masses until they can no longer carry on and throw themselves from the top of the Brewery smokestack or move to New Hampshire to become Republican lumber yard owners.*  (* theory)

Yes.  It is a July afternoon in Jamaica Plain, and though I could muse upon the rivalrous charms of my own dear Roslindale, I am going to go to the Scottish bar instead.