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.

 

 

 

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.

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.

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.

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.

All Souls: Halloween Is Weirder Then We Let On

Here we are again this weekend, on our National Holiday of Candy, Children, and Death.  Which is a confusing mixture, almost as much as as the National Festival of Rebirth, Snow, and Materialism.  Also, skeletons and spiders are scary, but not as frightening as a man coming down your chimney who's also following you in his magic snow-scope all year, detecting when you're Bad.

No, there actually is a point to it all, beyond our weird habit of ingesting the folklore of ancient peoples and making them available at Walmart.  As the days shorten and the leaves flame and then fall in northern lands, October has always seemed psychologically the right time for a day to deal with the dead. 

The church, in its liturgical way, meant for All Souls day to be all serious business and fasting and prayer for sinning souls, but the popular folk of Europe in their more literal mode said "hey, all this calling upon the names of all the dead and stuff . . . isn't that a little effed up and scary?"

Beauty and Creepiness (Forest Hills Cemetery, Halloween Week)

You know about the Puritans and their whole death thing, if you grew up around here.  Because when you were just a weeny New England kid enjoying your schoolday of crayons, off-key singing and those tiny cartons of tepid milk, suddenly you would get dragged off to one of the local historic boneyards and given a tour of the places where all the famous history people were buried.  Paul Revere holding a silver teapot and all the Pilgrims and all the Colonial time people were down there somewhere. The Pilgrim people in their black and white uncomfortable outfits, the Revolution dudes with their triangle hats and wigs and kneesocks, the ladies in little squishy bonnets who were so useful about spinning cloth and making soap and boycotting tea.

Well, so the Puritans and other early colonists were pretty up front about death.  You look at their graves and what do you have? Skulls.  Cross-bones. Timeglasses with time-running out. Sometimes a full-on skeleton in a hoodie with his death-dealing scythe. You know, they didn't pretty things up much.

Sometime around the Civil War and all its sorrows and the Victorian period and all its proprieties, things changed, though.  The folks in Boston went out to what was then the edge of town and made this huge spectacular death park, with an ornamental lake, and a thousand graceful trees, and fancy gates, and filled it with stone lilies and wreaths and ornate urns instead of bones,  and monumental ladies covered in drapery and gentle regret. And angels--lots and lots of angels.

R Is for Rocket

This week, the country remembers the fortieth anniversary of the moon landing.

What I remember is how my parents got me and my brothers up in what was, to us, the middle of the night.  And we came downstairs in our footie pajamas.  And some ghostly men jumped around on the TV.

But it was the start of something.  My brother Peter became obsessed with space adventures, in the way that sensitive little boys still do.  His favorite toy, Billy Blastoff, led expeditionary missions to the top of the dogwood tree, accompanied by a motley crew composed of my dolls in their torn dresses and rat's nest hair.  An ice cream truck sang as it circled the block.  The summer air beat down on the cement sidewalks and tiny green yards.  We left Billy mid-moon-conquest and went to Elmer's Store for Hoodsie's ice cream cups with those little wooden spoons.

Today, my nephews believe in space, though the real-life moon walk and the workaday Space Shuttle with its plumbing problems are inextricably wound together with the fictional film world of robots and heroes. It's both the past AND the future, their version of the Wild West and King Arthur's court, and a place they could envision actually growing up and visiting.

Old Shipwreck, Wellfleet: Skeleton

Old Shipwreck, Wellfleet: Skeleton, originally uploaded by lizkdc.

The framework of the old schooner looks very skeletal in this misty shot.
The remains of a nineteenth-century schooner appeared on Newcomb Hollow beach this winter. For more: www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2008/02/01/wrecked_sch...

I love shipwrecks. I love old ships, and tales of ships, and storms.

It has to do with childhood influences, growing up in a harbor city and being taken early on to our heroic USS Constitution, floating still in Charlestown after two hundred years, and the Whaling Museum in New Bedford, and the replica Mayflower in Plymouth.  A whole local mythology about how we got here in these impossibly tiny, fragile yet resilient vessels.

And books about boats, too, C. S. Forester's Hornblower and Kipling's "Captains Courageous" and bits of RLS's "Kipnapped," and later, Melville. My father and uncles adored Samuel Eliot Morrison, the great historian of the sailing age

It's also about how beautiful sailing ships are, and how intricate, floating worlds with their own rich vocabulary and hierarchy and food and work.

Perhaps, as a child, too, even though every narrative emphasized the raw danger and salty hardship of the sailing world, still I was deeply attracted to a fantasy of extraction--if only there were a way for me to saw straight through the tough ropes of family and neighborhood and my severe personal limits and float away to the far side of the world.

More pics.