Wednesday, November 14, 2012
New Haven to Boston, Part 8 of 8
POST ROAD HISTORY
The original Post
Road went through Hartford, Springfield and Worcester MA, and into Boston.
The “Post Road” originally went from New Haven to Hartford.
[Long list I wrote down of the order of
towns on the three separate Post Road paths- the ‘Lower’, ‘Middle’, and
‘Upper’.]
[Sketch of 1775 map of Boston environs: the “Shawmut
Peninsula”, significance of the landmass. “Boston Neck” –Orange St—is the
connection to the mainland.] Puritans settled on the peninsula for the
excellent spring water. (Springs where the Old State House and King’s Chapel
stand today.)
The main library. Busts with the irises dug out. Beautiful
reading room with hunching green lamps all down its length, vaulted ceiling. At
the old reading tables, a vinegar smell in the skin-oils trapped in the wood. A
graceful place to be, high in the air above the city streets, looking out onto
a courtyard, the smell of books.
1620- The Mayflower
lands at Plymouth. Governor John Carver.
The Royal Governor of New York during the time of the first
mail carrier was Francis Lovelace, and he designated that the mail delivery
operation be carried out. (John Winthrop was the governor in Connecticut at
this time.) The idea of a royal mail-carrying route actually belonged to King
Charles II.
The first mail in America was dispatched from NYC on Jan 22, 1673, and appeared in Boston on or about February 5th.
(I find the spot where the mail arrives, the old newspaper building). The mail
would have been dispatched on Jan 1, but the unknown rider was held up waiting
for dispatches from Albany, New York. Lovelace stipulated that the rider should
be “a stout fellow, active and indefatigable, and sworn as to his fidelity.”
(He went by way of Hartford.) Pequot Indians made travel dangerous through
these forested reaches. Shortly after the rider’s journey, the mail was forced
to stop for 2 years on account of King Philip’s War. Nov. 5, 1639: Order of the
General Court of Mass.
“Richard Fairbanks
his House in Boston” Site of the old
Globe office.
--I think of Iraq. Who is excited for Iraq’s threshold of
‘Liberty’? Last night, Bush announced the “surge”: 21,500 more troops in Iraq,
for starters.
--What’s “the news”? What’s truly new? What transpires. Qui
transtulit. Qui sustinet. (‘Novels give us the news.’ About how we live.)
January 6, 1868: despite great protest by Roxbury residents,
Roxbury is annexed to Boston. (Like Brooklyn to NYC: date??)
Capt. Nathaniel Urig, visiting Boston in 1710: “The Neck of
Land betwixt the city and country is about forty yards broad, and so low that
the spring tides sometimes wash the road, which might, with little charge, be
made so strong as not to be forced, there being no way of coming at [Boston] by
land but over the Neck.” (Travel can be a bitch.)
**
I walk around Boston
past nightfall, eventually I go wait in a diner for the first Amtrak train of
the morning, back to New Haven.
Nice to be in a big city, a wintery one. Boston seal: ‘SICUT
PATRIBUS SIT DEUS NOBIS’. I’m wearing the Ace bandage as tight as it will go
and taking pain relievers, but it seems like a good night’s sleep took all the
little points of ache out of my back.
The map kiosks around downtown are printed with the motto:
“BOSTON: America’s Walking City”.
Across the Charles: the obelisk commemorating the Battle of
Bunker Hill, June 17, 1775. The patriot army of irregulars ran out of ammo
defending the hill, but it was a courageous stand and very costly for the
British.
(At 12:30pm I start the walk from the outskirts back into
Boston.) Forest Hills: ‘You are at the transportation center of the streetcar
suburbs.’
In the 1630s Puritan settlers arrived in this area, and they
constructed the toll road from Roxbury to Dedham.
-The SMELLS when you move to different terrain.
-The cool earthiness of Rhode Island.
-The particular chemical cocktail as you approach Boston.
-The gentle complexity of downtown: smells of human grease
and street grit.
Jamaica Plain: graffitti-style ads for real products, like
Axe Deodorant. New, quaint, small-scale housing projects.
John F. Eliot Square: (b. 1604, d. 1690)
“On this hill the Puritans in Roxbury built their first
meetinghouse, in 1632.” Eliot was known as ‘Apostle to the Indians’: in 1663 he
translated the entire Bible into Massachussetts Algonquin (the language of the
people of Neponset).He was the second minister of the First Church in Roxbury.
(Seems like a fascinating story, converting Indians. How did he approach the
philosophical problems of holy writ translation?)
April 18, 1775: William Dawes sets out from the Meeting
House Hill Common, riding to Lexington and Concord, at the same time Paul
Revere was riding from Charlestown. This Town Common was occupied by patriots
as part of the defense of Boston. The grand 1804 church now standing on this
common is the fifth one to occupy this spot. It had been one of only three
churches in Puritan Massachussetts to admit Indians as members. Speaking of
converts: Near the Common, Washington Square intersects El-Hajj Malike
El-Shabazz Boulevard. As a teenager, Malcolm X lived in the Dudley neighborhood
of Roxbury. He made the pilgrimage to Mecca in 1964. There are beautiful,
decayed 19th century buildings boarded up here. It’s a distinctively
black shopping thoroughfare. I’ve been seeing the spines of churches and other
large buildings on the horizon way out to the east.
A big ‘T’ distaster happened the day before I arrived. Human
error. Several crewmen were killed. –In the ‘Chinatown’ area the streets have
New York City streetnames. (There was some reason for this.) The information
kiosks all have big graphics that say “BOSTON:
America’s Walking City”.
In the late 1700s, Revolutionary War patriots began to
settle along Washington Street south of what is now East Berkeley Street.
(Recall: in July 1824 the single avenue of Washington was consitituted out of
all the main boulevards.)
1801: Charles Bulfinch lays out the streetplan for the South
End. (George Washington had recently made a tour through the area.) This region
was built-up in the mid-19th century. In the 1830s-1850s, the city
filled in the tidal flats on either side of the peninsular neck. These flats
were full of oysters, and the oysters were used for paving. In the 1870s, with
the rise of the streetcar, most of the well-to-do left this area and moved to
the Back Bay. An immigrant population moved in here. By 1855, there were 55,000
Irish in Boston, because of the famine. In the 60s, yuppies took over the old
Victorian houses.
ULTRA DIAMONDS
-Thriving 2-story Borders
across the street from the old Ticknor and Fields. The Borders has just
ousted a Barnes and Noble, as if to provide here a perfect concrete example of
the banality of ‘alternatives’ and ‘choice’ offered by modern chain retailers.
Spring Lane. [Sketch of The Old South Meeting House; Old
State House.]
“Rich’d Fairbanks,
his house in Boston is the place appointed for all the letters and hee is to
take care that they bee delivered or sent according to their directions.” Order
of the General Court, November 5, 1639. This plaque, by the original site
of the Globe office, was placed in
1924.
The Old State House: the Declaration of Independence was
read from the east balcony on July 18th.
I watch junior high hockey pregame warm-up at Sterrit Rink
(Suffolk University). It’s Winthrop vs. Revere, very Boston school names. The
hockey action is pretty cool to see this close up, the swerves on the ice.
Community roundtable meeting (tenant association?) visible
from the ground-floor window of a building in the Concord Housing Projects;
there’s Dunkin Donuts pastries and coffee in the middle of the table.
“The largest solar system model east of Peoria, Illinois” is
distributed through the malls and public buildings of Boston and its suburbs,
Newton, Cambridge, Jamaica Plain. The Sun is located in the Hayden Planetarium.
Here in the food court at South Street Station, on a pedestal, is the model of
Jupiter, in textured bronze showing its bands of cloud in relief. It’s about
one and a half feet in diameter. “Visit all 9 planets and experience the
awesome vastness of space!” I like this. Note: the giant planets orbiting the
sun farther out from Earth protected the fragile blossoming of life, because
they attracted away the giant intergalactic debris that could have smothered,
knocked around, disrupted Earth.
12 am, 40 degrees, I’m wandering the south half of the
Freedom Trail. The first skyscraper in Boston is the 1911 tower addition on top
of the 1847 Greek Revival Customs House on State Street. Today, the clock up
there is lit colorfully.
Winthrop’s daughter Ann (Pollard) was ten years old when she
came over with him. They landed near Prince Street. She later described the
landing site as having been “very uneven, abounding in small hollows and
swamps, covered with blueberries and other bushes.”
The old South Street Diner: the only place downtown to eat late
at night, it seems. A young waitress with a black and white tattoo up the
inside of her pale left arm. “It’s an octopus strangling a swan. …It’s…I have
this whole thing,” she tells me. I play ‘Going Back to Cali’ by B.I.G. on the
jukebox at my right, as I eat my eggs, toast and coffee.
I take the 6:05 (Amtrak #95) back to New Haven, but I’m
asleep for the ride and the sunrise, even with the cup of coffee on the floor
by my feet. Shooting pain in my knee makes it hard to get into a good position
to rest in.
MIGRATING: I get a thrill whenever I see a backpacker
wandering in the city, in the subway, or crouching in a train station or on the
train next to their gear, opening a book, face sharpened and eyes slightly
fuzzy with the effort of the day’s forward motion. I’m ready to plunge right
back into a book again, a book about walking forward where I can walk forward
vicariously. (There’s always somebody somewhere stomping toward the horizon.)
Over the landbridge from Siberia into the New World, following game herds and
heartsickness or religious mystery.
**End
New Haven to Boston, Part 7
DESERT FLOWER: vast clean lines of Gillette Stadium. In the
thin morning light, perched in its fata-morgana depth-trick, it looks exactly
like the architectural model it once was. All the forest around it has been
cleared. There is a sprawling holocaust of parking lot. A guy drives around one
of the lots in a suction-hose truck, sucking up junk from Sunday’s game. What a
terrible job. (I think of Sim City, when you place the giant Stadium down on
your cleared land: CHUNK!)
From the north you can see inside the gap in the stadium
wall. Beautiful, it’s so empty and clean and finely detailed against the forest
on all horizons.
A light snow. I panic. I’m out on an overpass, which is
under heavy construction. The workers scold me as I weave my way through. I
turn right after the construction.
[Sketch of Boston skyline view, shadow of cloud on treetops]
Suffused cloud cover. In an instant the sun breaks. BAM: too
bright for the pupils, I can’t look at the beercans and the median marks
gleaming on the highway!
(July 6, 1824: the various streets of Orange, Newbury,
Marlborough and Cornhill are all given the name of WASHINGTON, to form a single
long avenue into the Shawmut Peninsula.)
This is where I leave Route 1, I think, which continues
north from Dedham and skirts Boston to the west. I am following Washingston Street in Dedham all the
way up into through Stony Brook, Jamaica Plain, Roxbury, into downtown Boston. By
nightfall I am in Dedham and I’ve moved inside the circle of 128, the highway
that rings metropolitan Boston. On a
hilltop I can see the lights and skyline profile of downtown. Leading down the
hill, a gold chain of streetlights, which is my clear path. It is a clear shot.
The lights taper off and blur together into the far dark, bumping up rises and
falling down into obscurity again. I’m here for real.
A great-looking used bookshop near Roslindale Center. I get
a library card and use the internet in the library to find a hostel. I buy a
last energy drink and catch the T here and crash out into sleep in the hostel
in Back Bay, near the music school. I come back out here the next day to
officially finish the walk.
Before leaving the hostel: I get up at 9:30 and have coffee
and a raisin bagel in the hostel canteen. Back in my room, the guys who arrived
the previous night are getting their stuff together. I tell a guy about my
walk. He’s a happy, excited guy having a good trip around the US with his
buddies. He wears a small steel hoop earring. U. of Louis*, Lafayette. He
studies quantum computing. What do you think of string theory? We had to learn
the basics, he says, but you can’t do experiments on it, which is what science
is, he says seriously. He is amazed to meet a character like me on this walk
and remarks on the interesting things one sees, one can tell others about. So,
he probably told people about me. He and his friends are headed to New York
next, and then back home to the university.
New Haven to Boston, Part 6
EAST GREENWICH. Established 1677. Exhausted, I conjure: If this was an indie movie, a silver deer
would lead me somewhere, and I would wake up there, with police around me, and
the deer scene would turn out to have been a dream sequence dramatizing my
exhaustion. This is the sort of dreamlike fugue I often pass into after
twenty-four hours on foot.
LIFE, it seems, has to be sustained by idle chit-chat and
BUOYING narratives of success, struggle, valor, deserving, repentance and
condemnation, disgrace and triumph. An ADVERSE world (men like “sports” gossip
for this purpose; women prefer “relationship” gossip).
A middle-aged woman in black jogging gear picks up a
flattened plastic bottle from the roadside and jogs away with it.
High up: I see to the ocean, below and to the east.
1791: Construction of the Methodist Meeting Hall on Main
Street where the Rhode Island Constitution was adopted in 1852.
(Days—Views—Unforgiven Apotheosis) We go through our history
and in each epoch everyone prospers and obeys and no one ever has any CLEARER
idea of what the LAST MAN should look like. What is the termination point of
human history. Why are we doing this. We make all this fuss over the lives of
kids we haven’t conceived yet. Aren’t we forgetting to answer one simple question
before we crank out more human beings? What is the endgame of this supposed to
look like? Are we closer?
2pm, 43 degrees. Planes climbing steeply westward from the
airport, through clear skies. A blue plane with a red tail jogs my memory back
to the fond stirring colors of my Octopus Battlebeast, that first Christmas I
can really remember.
Stuck in a puddle
fully reflecting the sky, a shard from the rim of a plastic garbage can gives
the appearance of a whole can submerged, out of view. (Sort of a haiku sentiment)
The ONLY NOTE… I can stop now, I think, this is the note I
was looking for:
Damn it, Grab what you can get. Take what there is of life’s
feeble schematics. Grab tight, claw, uproot; the blood-scream of greed to get
it. –I imagine myself petting the blonde lady’s boxer and then weeping. “My dog
died,” I tell the blonde lady, and perhaps she weeps as well. What’s as kind as
the heart of a dog, and as useless?
Apponaug Village, founded 1696. The sun just blazing an
outline around the top line of a great massy cloud in the west. Cemeteries: How
can they put SOMEBODY in to the earth, you wonder: a human being, how can they
put them down in the dirt like that!
[Illo: HOPE anchor]
I see the big red WARWICK water tower in the distance down
the hills. Hideous new condo units facing the cemetery, in hideous green-grass
flattened clearing.
The first European to set foot on Rhode Island: Giovanni
Verrazano, 1524. He was exploring for the French crown. In the library I’m
reading stories about how the English colonists would loose their mastiffs on
the Naragansett Indians.
1636- Roger Williams founds Providence on land bought from
Naragansetts. 1644, Williams is granted a charter to the colony by the English
crown.
It is the 100th anniversary of the “LEVITON”
Company, housed in a long stately brick building. In the same district, the
“RHODE ISLAND MALLEABLE IRON WORKS”, founded 1912. A sign on this shuttered
building reads “Ironworks Tavern Coming Soon”.
A Hebrew cemetery: Chased Schel Amess Association, organized
1908. A hair salon across the street has opened a mini-business on its
premises: “Bonnie’s Tatoos”. From the radio in a deli I learn that oil costs
$55.64 a barrel today.
Route 1A: Across the Pawtuxet River. I follow Main Street
across the river into the heart of Providence. (The first indoor mall in the
US, built 1828 in the Greek Revival style, known simply as “The Arcades”. 3
stories, covers an entire block on Weybosset Street.
8:39, 36 degrees. The State Capitol is majestic, situated on
an inspiring overlook, but it happens to look directly across at a gigantic
ugly shopping mall. I try to sleep in the bus station for a while, but it’s not
designed for sleep, and there are people checking for tickets. When I’m among
the last ones on the benches, I go out into the night again, walking along the
quiet highway toward the Massachusetts border. North Attleboro, to Plainville,
to Foxborough—suburbs of Boston.
Across the state line stop for a coffee and donut and the
guy from Kings of Convenience is on tv, performing on one of the late night
interview shows following a professional athlete. The music is soft and
melancholy and beautiful, it gets me. There are only a few night patrons here,
reading the newspapers and chuckling with the woman behind the counter who
might be Middle Eastern.
After another two hours or so, the police flag me down.
“What did you, lose a bet?” the cop asks in a thick
Massachussetts accent. (Whoever pukes first has to walk Route 1 from New York
to Boston.) The talkative younger cop confers with the older, silent cop, who
was pulled up in a separate cruiser. These are iconic cops. Every day is
another wacky civilian to sort out.
“Stay off the road!” says the other. They point out the
white sign that marks the end of their jurisdiction as town officers, and they
tell me to get out beyond it and continue to do whatever crazy thing I want.
They think I’m the guy who was vandalizing storefronts around here, but I
suspect it was probably a local job. They read my passport into their radio:
“Sierra, Alpha…”
Why are so many roadside motels in this region owned by
Hindus? I can see the lit prayerwheels and devotional posters from the road.
I’m half-heartedly looking for a place to stay, I’ve been up for basically two
days.
5:41 am, 29 degrees. Past the “7 MILE” marker on Route 1.
Got to get up over the black hill that stretches across the
horizon. (This will turn out to be a long journey, up and down the wooded hills
leading into the port of Boston.) I think of the swamps and wild little
mountains in northwestern Massachussetts; this land is not so different.
Near the bottom of the hill now. Sitting in Dunkin Donuts.
Hoping the old guy with the leather jacket and blue track pants will get up and
leave me his Times. I realize I’m staring at it too hungrily. I’m just sitting
here with my coffee, a little shell-shocked. “Do you want the paper?” the guy
finally says. It turns out to be the Boston Herald, of course, not the Times.
Why have I been on this peak of horniness? Especially considering
I’ve been exhausted enough to get diarrhea. Why is my libido so cranked up?
Up and down hills along side mirrored lakes, a Scrap
Fortress of car junkyard, with huge sheet-metal doors that slide on chains. It
seems like in my exhuastion, all sorts of weird left-over emotions are popping
up, from various dimly-remembered narratives: different places I was, different
things I was waiting for or was about to accomplish; any kind of thing, happy,
sad, indifferent but full of strong emotional detail. Emotional memories out of
the blue.
[Sketch of hill in Norfolk]
New Haven to Boston, Part 5
-->
Back before, in the beginning, the ‘New World’—they didn’t
have even a culture, only the CONGREGATIONAL Church and its earnest
prescriptions for civil society. In time, these people acquired neighbors. They
were eventually able to move freely in a whole network of Connecticut towns,
seeking jobs, spouses, trade, education.
**
Yellow spartina, in the little Lieutenant River. By the
road, one half of a metal scissors. “LAX” bumper sticker on a white Chevy
Tahoe.
A brook in a backyard. The people in these homes can live
with nature in harmony no more than with a good white wine: they must lay it up
in order to quaff it at their leisure, cycling through it expensively as they
go about life’s business.
KAFKA’S ECSTASY: The ecstasy of the desk. Exhilaration of
continuing at your desk-work.
The road follows the riverbank north. The gassy smell of
leaves rotting, trees in shallow swampwater. Griswold Preserve in Old Lyme. IN
THE FOREST IN JANUARY. It’s unusually sunny. I walk through whole hillside
developments around Jericho Drive. There are excavators parked in cleared plots
of mud.
Wood fence in front of a beautiful private lake.
“Do you enjoy
annoying all the neighbors or just us” –A handwritten sign affixed
with masking tape to the fence, facing the road.
It’s going to rain overnight tonight. So: ?
So quiet in the highland hills. Obvious suddenly: Why am I
so ANGRY? At everyone who has judged me, on the general criteria, without
reservation, without questioning the criteria; as a transparent failure. A
misguided half-person. –Without even considering, What is the origin or
societal function of the judgment. Remember
to think of EVERYONE, the very best.
[Did people really judge me, or was I just depressed and
imbalanced enough to believe this.]
The colonists would be very afraid of the hilly terrain away
from the shore and riverbank. People didn’t move up here to these forest homes
until the late twentieth century. Thinking of the real thing, kids like my old
friend B, one’s scorn and pity and shame. Everyone who wants to
get up an argument, between our different respective choices. Makes my own work
so much harder—(the belief in an undivided world of intentions!) the enemy—the
opponent—the demarcation—the blood-drinking ego.
Just past the East Lyme border, a shuttered roadside bar for
sale by owner. [Sketch: lichenous brownstone milepost, 10 MILES to New London]
A glorious day for all the multicolored spandex bikeriders
to be out. Two men, one woman resting at an intersection, one man says, “You
know, I don’t mind that we did this instead of mountain biking today.”
(Indian grocery: ‘Please don’t go behind there, that’s
Indian groceries’. Warning me off.)
Orange sweater guy at credit union reaching out car window
to use the drive-through ATM, puffing on the curved stem of a pipe.
3:15pm: I FIND THE PLASTIC ALLIGATOR, “Taber”. The highway sweeps above 95. I remember
losing a toy in the Sound, and my mother telling me it would be swept out to
China. Because I stop to pick up the tiny plastic alligator, I notice the
six-person cemetery next to the highway here.
A single length of cold rebar rings the overgrown grounds. I
step through the pricker bushes and clear away the grass and dirt from one of
the horizontal tablets. I read the weathered inscription: In memory of Samuel
Taber, who died January 6th, 1813, in his 39th year.
(That was yesterday!) [See sketch] In Memory of Mr. Samuel Taber Junr, who died
Septr 6th, 1798.
One would wish to know why there is no Nobel Prize for
needlepoint. [This sounds like a quotation but I don’t remember from whom or
why I was moved to record it.]
Stout young guy with red-outline tattoo of the Raymond
Pettibon Black Flag logo on his right tricep. He tells me there’s no bathroom
at this gas station, but I can pee out back. In the gas station: much heated
debate over Tony Romo’s critical fumble.
Lacrosse is big in this region. The sign for youth lacrosse
in East Lyme: the decayed netting of a stick, affixed to a post at an
intersection. It looks like a Joseph Beuys sculpture.
“CONGAHAVATH CHESED” Jewish Cemetery. I spot graves from
1926. I place a rock on the memorial of an Army private; there’s already a
bucket of rocks and an American flag there. Some of the headstones give the
Jewish date:
“LUBCHANSKY: Sep 2 1950/ Elul 20, 5710”
Route 1 at night: neon signs. (But by day it’s picturesque.)
In Waterford, I can still pick up a New York City tabloid newspaper, but I can
also eat at a Tim Horton’s, which is right down the street from a Starbucks.
NEW LONDON: Established 1646. A car parked behind a
multi-family home is bumping reggaeton; migrants part of the economy here. A
pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses walking their bicycles up the hill of Beckwith
Street. Here in New England, liquor stores are called “packies”, and I pass a
business actually called “The Packy”. I make my way down the hill, toward the
lights of downtown New London.
5:53pm, 39 degrees.
The US Customs House/Maritime Museum: There’s an inscribed
cement placque out front about the first US trial where a slave got his legal
freedom. During the proceedings: “’Do you want to be slave or free?’ The slave
replied, ‘Free!’”—Note: Enslaved by my own cynical depression, I interpret this
dialogue as Beckettian tragedy.
Little whales everywhere here, like picaninnies in the Deep
South. A bar with $1 PBR. The home of CT’s first newspaper press: a gorgeous
space being refurbished to house a bar. I-95 over the Thames River. A shredded
diaper on the shoulder. Nothing to do about it now: I’ve committed myself to
walking across this dangerous bridge. (I-95 melds briefly here into Route 1.)
Groton obelisk?
A state cop on the Groton line on the bridge flashes his
lights behind me. A very thorough frisking (my crotch), he gives me a ride
across the river. He drives surreally fast. We whip off the exit. I brace
myself for carnage and death.
“Do you think your laptop could take a bullet?” I ask.
“Ha. It’s a tough book,” he replies. The thing looks like it
could burn you a DVD out of recycled plastic bottles. “Don’t walk across
bridges no more,” the state trooper says. He must have discovered my incident
with the state trooper in Old Saybrook!
The night still holding clear.
10pm. MYSTIC 5 MILES (regular road sign).
Shopping cart on the rocks at Trout Hole Brook.
Highways wend past ancient, incidental cemetery plots.
Scattered soft rain begins, lightly tapping the fallen leaves.
11pm: Mystic Historic Downtown. Settled 1645. (The year
before New London) The huge white Baptist church lit up. Glow from within the
high arched columns. The name of the town is supposedly derived from a Mohegan phrase--“great
tidal river”.
AVALONIA: A beautiful
paradise of spartina reaching way out along the road. Nature preserve.
1649: First settlement of Stonington. (Again, Seye-Brook was
1635.) Lichenous green trees in a watery area: a river or brook. It’s raining.
I have to stay at a motel. I can’t sleep under this rain, even in the shelter
of a tree with the moisture running all over my coat. The rain is in my
eyelashes and I’m chilled to the bone. (I stay the night and watch ESPN in my
cold bed. Blow out the hairdryer trying to get my socks and shirt dry. There’s
a story on about the footballer who played right through with the bleeding broken
leg, and that gives me courage. Stupid courage, perhaps.)
PAWCATUCK. The next day. I get a bite to eat and coffee at
Tim Horton’s, down the road from the motel. “Mechanic Street Historic District
has been placed on the National Register of Historic Places by the US
Department of the Interior.” There’s a sign up in the window of the
chiropractor’s office: “We accept Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Insurance”. Route
1 goes through a pretty, vintage old downtown here. There’s a new sunset. A
sign on the other end of a road bridge across the high, flush river, within the
same downtown:
“WELCOME TO WESTBURY”, incorporated 1669. Half of this
downtown lies in Westbury, Rhode Island. “Pawcatuck River: Mentioned as the
western Boundary of Rhode Island in the Charter of 1663”. Big old red brick
buildings wall off the north bank of the river. I look in on some newspaper
employees, they’re leaning over their desks and trying to wrap up an edition of
the WESTERLY SUN. (The office is a historical site.)
4:53pm. 48 degrees. “Victorian Strolling Park” behind the
grand romanesque terra-cotta library. (There’s a phone number for a room to
rent, I write it down.)
To travel to Block Island, you can take a ferry from here,
or you can fly from Westerly Airport.
I get onto Route 1A (scenic diversion) in the town of Cross
Mills. There’s a little cemetery. 1A is quieter, although not far from the main
highway.
1:38 am, Kingson, RI: “I can’t stop ya.” RI State Trooper
lets me go, gives me a cynical lecture about how I’ll be run down in the dark
by an automobile. I show her my passport. Against the chill night wind, I attempt to project composure and gravamen.
The highway comes out of the woods. Marina. Galilee State Beaches. Still dark.
There’s a lighter blue in the sky ahead. The stars that way are fainter. I’m
hungry.
“Wow. It’s actually only 1am. No wonder I’m not sleepy.” To
1A, scenic route further east toward coast. I see a fox dart across the
highway.
1:36 am. 37 degrees. Some wind.
Around 2am a tall local cop, South Kingston PD?, stops me,
and he wants to know where I live. “You come to Rhode Island to walk around at
night?” I’m pissy and I get a little standoffish with the cop, I chew my gum.
I’m in a bad mood now, and it lasts until I get to the beach. The breakers
rolling in from the bay, tide in from the Atlantic. The state’s archipelagic
web shines from darkness as an array of more or less distant lights on the
horizon. North up the coast, I can see the twinkling span of the
Newport-Verrazano Bridge. Far off on the dark horizon the points of lighthouses
appear and disappear.
Cops: My race (white), as well as certain class cues I’m
aware of deploying (“Yes, officer, this gentleman spoke to me”). The road wends
up a stately hillside, the black bay spreads out below to my right.
At Casey Farm, I rest and take in the view of the
Newport-Verrazano Bridge. I listen to some tunes by Amadou and Miriam on my
iPod (music from Cassie). I am exhausted, cold, in pain. The bridge is
beautiful and far enough to appear radiant in its nearness. A whole swath of
the world, the ocean, the rough coast of Earth here. The music helps me, as I
prop my back against the stone wall demarcating this farmland. Later on I will
listen to some B.I.G., and that will help me push forward when all else has
failed. Cars blip across over the bridge slow and steady.The cars are like
soundless sprites on an LED display screen.
North Kingston: Incorporated 1674. The roadside puddles
haven’t frozen all the way through, but they have a thin layer that looks like
when you tap your finger on the scum of your hot chocolate. The town sits on a
pretty bay. The graceful, weathered concrete bridge, built 1920s by McLaughlin
in New London, CT. [see sketch]
A local paper has
a headline: “What’s In the Lost and Found?”
An editorial, written by a liquor store proprietor, in The North East Independent (I’m reading
it over breakfast at a quiet diner):
“If you want to
see businesses that are totally quaint and unique to Wickford village
added to the already vacant spaces in Wickford, [i.e. if you
want to get rid of these quaint businesses] and if you want to see several
businesses located on Post Road [sic] go down the tubes and if you want to see
the former Mancini’s Hardware remain vacant and so on, then by all means
approve and allow the prepared big box development at Quonset, but don’t ask
the few of us who remain to help you wash the blood off your hands!” (He’s
talking about a Home Depot.)
Last night I passed the Krystal Penguin Inn, outside
Westerly. The name is worth writing down. The inn was to my left. A sign in
Wickford: “JAIME’S CAFÉ-DELI: NEW YORK SYSTEM”. I discover that ‘New York
system’ means a hotdog with ‘the works’.
According to a tourist brochure, the state of Rhode Island
is 37 miles across and 48 miles from
north to south. Not so bad, I can make it.
I reflect on things which have become abstracted somehow into
total hilarity as I have walked. At present these subjects are sublimely comic
to me--paragons of the Platonic ideal of the comic.
--Luc Besson’s Joan of
Arc
--the comic strip Shoe
(they’re songbirds, they have these hard-bitten reportorial lives, they’re
fantastically cynical about songbird politicians, etc) --(Part of walking is,
you can look back and criticize the zany abstractions of your walk-addled mind.
You can have delusions from walking. “Shoe”?? I don’t even see it anymore, at
all.)
New Haven to Boston, Part 4
[All this info from plaques near the Route 1--Baldwin
Bridge.]
These northerly hills sloping down to marshland—Essex and
the tranquil towns of Middlesex County, the tidal estuary ebbing around and
between Nott Island, Lord’s Cove, Goose Island, Calves Island—250 million years
ago, this land lay encompassed in the spine of a mountain range thrust up by
violent tectonic collisions.
It was around 25,000 years ago that the last of the Ice Age glaciers
swept down over New England and scored the land so deeply, furnishing the soft
outlines of future river valleys. Paleo-Indians arrived here 10,000 years ago,
over the Siberian land bridge from Asia. North America was then a vast tundra,
and the humans were most likely following herds of caribou.
During the course of
our most recent glacial epoch, a much greater portion of the world’s oceans
were locked up in Earth’s ice caps, and world-wide sea levels were about 400
feet lower than they are today. The Connecticut land mass once extended out
about 100 miles south of present-day Long Island, out to where the Atlantic
Ocean now washes the continental shelf. Ancient forests stretched to this
southern coast, their petrified remains today reposing off the Atlantic
beaches, and here also roamed the shaggy mastodon herds memorialized in
Neolithic cave paintings. For hunter-gatherers, it was a gold coast.
The course of the Connecticut River was established 13,500
years ago., During one of Earth’s periodic climate shake-ups, with global
temperatures climbing, the packed ice of taiga and tundra retreated northward
all across the crust of the earth, and this once-compressed layer of crust
began to rise. To the north, where the heaviest layers of ice had pressed down,
the crust now rose to the most dramatic elevations, forcing the glacial
lakebeds of North America to drain southward. Over time this continental
drainage managed to effect the north-south cut of America’s main riverways, and
the river channel of the Connecticut was laid during this thaw.
By 5,500 years ago, the North American climate had grown
mild and hospitable, and the human societies which had immigrated so recently
now began to settle into permanent villages. Some time in the last four
thousand years, a rich alluvial soil was deposited along the banks of the
Connecticut, establishing the bounteous marsh environment of the present day.
By 3,500 years ago, the Connecticut River had become an
important commercial waterway. Copper from Michigan, chalcedony spear-points from
Labrador—these were traded between established cultures up and down the coast. Disputes
over land claims along the riverbank began to simmer as early as a thousand
years ago, after corn, beans, and squash had become well-established in vital
croplands attached to agrarian communities.
Today, most
vessels on the Connecticut carry gasoline and home heating oil, hauling these
necessaries upriver as far as Hartford.
NEW LONDON: 14 MILES
New Haven to Boston, Part 3
CONNECTICUT BEGINS WITH THE SOUTHERN, NORTHERN TRAFFIC OF
THIS RIVER.
YOU GOT I.D. ON YOU?
8am, sitting on the bridge, Connecticut state police pulls
up. Among the drivers passing, “a couple people” have made worried calls about
me. He’s either a jumper or a terrorist. The cop takes in the view and says “I
can see why you’re doin’ this, though.” The spare, straightforward beauty
against the slow action of the sunrise. My whole mind is transformed and
brought to a good state. (The first automobile bridge was built here in 1911,
the toll was five cents. This eight-line bridge was put up in 1993.) [See
sketch.] The cop sets me back on my way, gets me walking again.
[The last great impression I had was the solace from that
sunrise? I felt like a poet. I’m a little depressed now, late at night, poring
over these weather-beaten old pocket notebooks in order to type them up. But I
should strive to be faithful to the original, hard-won impressions of the
world.]
“Having lived, one has done more becoming [I wrote,
flinching and striving], one must have become more of something.” And—“ART: you
have to collude with a big lie, but it’s the GREAT LIE that humans can truthfully
depict ORDER and PROCESS (to a goal).”
New Haven to Boston, Part 2
-->
On my night train to New Haven, a little girl with pointy
teeth and a punk-rock mommy is singing “Die, Monster, Die” by the Misfits.
11:35: Stopped by the Branford Police near Branhaven Plaza.
There’s been some sort of incident here earlier. The cop has a blonde marine
cut. He wants to know if I’m coming from the big bar, called SBC (a chain).
“That a grenade in your pocket?” he demands. Nah, I just get a hard-on from
hilarious cop humor! I give over my passport so he can write my name, birthdate
and residence. I notice the year, looks like 1671, on his green town-seal
shoulder patch.
Branford keeps attractive fire trucks: banana-yellow, almost
green.
I have passed the same ancient steam shovel three times. Its
arm is strung with cords and pulleys, instead of pistons. A light drizzle.
2:30 am, near Orchard Market, Guilford: “Stand in front of the
car.” This is a Connecticut state trooper, and he attempts to ‘run’ my
passport. “Stay dry,” he says finally. I am clean. He’s a nice cop.
From a late-night incident when the whole Fairfield P.D.
tried to interrogate me, I’ve learned not to excite cops by telling them the
entire truth of my journey. I don’t know why but this revelation turns me into
an attractive police catch. “Congratulations, boys, you found Osama Bin
Walkin’!” You could say it sends up a red flag.
4:30am: Back in historic downtown Madison. For some curious
reason, the only vehicles on Route 1 at this time of night are red pick-up
trucks. I’ve noticed this before.
Outside the travel agent’s office is a gag milepost with hands pointing
in all directions: “Quebec: 408 Miles”. Feasible,
I think. Seductive.
The outdoor amphitheatre in Hammanassett State Park. (Did I
see a performance of Romeo and Juliet
here as a boy with my family? It rained lightly for the last scenes, the
audience swooned a little. I think I remember this store called “The Book
Room”. Friend from childhood overdose, I flash on this, what’s the story?)
January 6th. A very early diner breakfast, lots
of coffee, beneath a TV showing ESPN. Today is NBA player Gilbert Arenas’s 25th
birthday, he’s younger than I am. I read a local newspaper. Story of a man
honored for forty years of work at the New London water facility. A profile of
an English professor at the Naval Academy, also in New London. One of his
students, now a fleet lieutenant, told the professor how impressed the enlisted
Latinos were with the lieutenant’s knowledge of Garcia Marquez. The Wall Street Journal picks the Giants
to lose.
Clinton Historical District. A replica milestone says 25
MILES TO NEW HAVEN. The landscape out here reminds me of way out on Long
Island, where I went for a wedding once: wide open marshes, ancient telephone
poles, the occasional old man on a bicycle. Salt hay is a high-nutrient feed
crop, it provided well for settlers. I take a detour down Grove Beach Street to
the shoreline, look at the Long Island Sound for a while, and return to Route 1
via Menunketesuck. Private beaches, dead ends, low stone fences between
charming houses sitting in sand. Breeze over the water, pulling clouds along to
the East.
Steel-deck bridge over the meandering Patchoge River. Amtrak
lines against a low hill to the north, across the marsh. 10 am.
THE BODY.
Bad pain in my left kneecap, and blisters. My body already
feels wrung out, hot ears, dry eyes. Maybe pop some multi-vitamins. When I lie
down there’s a tingling rush all over. Aw, what a pansy! The lesson of the
other day (when I walked from Stratford to Hartford, CT) is, Don’t give up. But
what a miserable condition to be in. [So nice to be comfortable and typing this
up in my warm dining room.] I just want to focus on this landscape: when I
crossed the Westbrook, everything turned beautiful, boat dealerships and wooded
coastland under the warming white sky. Bad diarrhea.
Tough nap against a stone field fence out behind some
historic house, closed for the season.
Interesting animals that live here: shad, alewife, eastern
cottontail, mockingbird, box turtle.
Ah, the waste land segment of this Route 1 stretch, where
all the motor vehicle sales lots are. Prices. Brand names.
Saybrook. A nice Slavic man, his wife at his side, stands
before the vending machine in the Days Inn motel hallway. He holds up a coin in
earnest and utters, slowly and fluently, a scintillating English sentence: “Can
you break a dime?” The Days Inn is $64, it’s Saturday night.
The motel clerk is
from Bronxville, New York. He asks me what I do, seeing as I’m alone. I am
unintentionally cagey. To another room go two big girls, one a Filipina taller
than me. In the bathroom of my motel room I use a Days Inn ballpoint pen to pop
a blister on my big toe. I have to really force it through, and a sudden jet of
serum blasts me in the right eye. In my room I study an Old Saybrook tourism
brochure. “The Fire Department owns such
equipment as ‘Jaws of Life’ and a heavy-rescue unit.”
7am, I have an English muffin at the continental breakfast
and leave the motel. Birds are singing. On the Baldwin Bridge, a vast arcing
span, I stop to watch the morning light on the
Connecticut River. The sun has just cleared the hills. To the north, a
vast span of power cables with the red and white marker-things strung on them,
they look like volleyballs. They hang suspended in the pale dawn like planets.
The river is pale blue without detail or depth. North upriver the land runs to
hills, the town of Essex. (The Tylenol took away most of the pain in my ankle,
but I wonder how far I will end up traveling.)
The river is flawless. –I have believed that I will go to
Hell to suffer, for the sin of not allowing divine light through: not being
fully hospitable to God’s grace and not living charitably. Moreover, not being
aligned correctly in faith, not having PURE INTENTIONS. But, the admirable ones
are those who continue on their path of righteousness and set aside the
knowledge of their own mixed motivations and their baseness. The ones who push
ahead anyway. (The walker- or else the steadfast one, who doesn’t leave but
only moves forward in time, accepts the passage of time.)
Sun more full now. The flat winter hills repose toward the
water, meeting it at a border of tawny marsh. South: the x-girdered truss
bridge for the Amtrak and the Shoreline East trains. The marshes and the dark
copses at the sunlit mouth, where the Algonquins made their base, and then the
Seye-Brook Puritans built their forts, looked out with their guns—like the
watch house that stood then on Academy Hill in Stratford (that frozen coppery
grass).
New Haven to Boston, Part 1
-->
The wonderful mosaic of historical scenes at Acton Library,
Old Saybrook, was funded by a summer resident from New York City. Reading the
mosaic, I learn:
Connecticut became the fifth state in 1788.
The coat of arms on the state flag, adopted in 1897, is an
adaptation from the original seal of the Saybrook Colony. The image is supposed
to have come from a signet ring worn by the plantation governor Fenwick. The
seal’s grapevines represent the fifteen patentees who settled the original
Saybrook plantation under English colonial law. It was in 1620 that Lord “Seye,
and Sele” of Brougton Castle in Banbury, Oxfordshire, decided to establish a
Puritan plantation settlement. He received in 1631 a patent from the Earl of
Warwick, a patent shared with Lord Robert Brooke.
The two lordly names were combined in “Seye-Brook”, the name
of the plantation. Its settlers arrived in 1635 on the ship Blessing, out of the Massachussetts Bay
Colony. Seye-Brook was established on the mouth of the Connecticut River, a
good harbor that had been explored recently by the Dutch. In 1614, Adriaen
Block (of Block Island, RI), became the first European to explore the
Connecticut River. He named it “Fresh River”. He was hired to scout for natives
to trade with.
The land had been inhabited perhaps since the beginning of
terrestrial life.
‘Noah’s Raven’- The three-toed dinosaur footprints in the
Connecticut River Valley, discovered 1802. This was the first fossil evidence
of dinosaurs in the New World. Dilophosaurus, a medium-sized carnivore with an
odd double crest on its skull.
‘Connecticut’ in Pequot means
“LAND ALONG THE LONG TIDAL RIVER”.
1636-7 was the first Indian war in New England, fought
against the Pequots at Saybrook.
At the mouth of the river (which flows from Canada), there’s
a shallow estuary about a mile wide full of shifting sandbars. Because
deep-draft ships can’t navigate here, the Connecticut is one of the longest US
rivers without an urban center at its mouth.
December, 1718: “The Battle of the Books”
In 1701, the Connecticut Colony founded a ‘Collegiate
School’, with forty folio volumes
donated by ministers. In 1714 the school got its big endowment, a donation of
seven hundred books, including an autographed edition of Newton’s Principia. In 1716, the school was moved
from Saybrook to the bustling commercial center of New Haven, some thirty-five
miles west, where it would become Yale University. Residents of Saybrook
rebelled against the move and attacked the carts transporting the library’s
collection, destroying some 250 volumes.
New Haven had been founded as a Puritan colony in 1638. In
1665 Charles II forced the town to unify with the Connecticut Colony.
Friday, November 9, 2012
Like a Beckett play
"Chinese authorities blanketed Tibetan neighborhoods with armed police in riot gear bearing fire extinguishers"
--
"In China, Self-Immolations Continue as Party Congress Opens", Los Angeles Times, November 9, 2012
--
"In China, Self-Immolations Continue as Party Congress Opens", Los Angeles Times, November 9, 2012
"Use the Internet in a Legal Manner"
The 18th Party Congress convened yesterday in Beijing to anoint a new supreme leader. In the city center, construction projects are being halted and taxi drivers are being instructed to remove the window-rolling levers in their cabs. The shifts of giggling youths in charge of x-raying commuter baggage have put on grim faces. The censorship guys are going crazy. A notice translated at CDT:
... Fuck the 18th Party Congress.
Use the Internet in a Legal Manner
Strive to be an honest Internet user. Encourage the Internet’s civilized development. Strengthen civilized Internet awareness. Establish self-respecting, self-disciplinary and self-empowering awareness. Strengthen the ability to tell right from wrong. Strengthen one’s ability to protect oneself from negativity. Do not propagate illegal, criminal or false information. Do not use QQ, Weibo, forums, email or other Internet platforms to hurt others. Do not violate the privacy of others. Do not disrupt the order of the Internet. Do not casually meet Internet friends.
Self-respect and self discipline start with you. Let us join hands and work together to promote a civilized, safe and positive Internet environment. Let us provide a civilized, safe and green Internet for the 18th Party Congress.
Beijing City, Chaoyang District Internet Monitoring Team
Beijing Kangjing Property Management Company
Guangdong Yingxin Information Investment Company, Ltd. Beijing Branch
Guangdong Yingxin Information Investment Company, Ltd. Beijing Branch
October 23, 2012
... Fuck the 18th Party Congress.
Friday, November 2, 2012
Large Disparities
A press release from the Ministry of Environmental Protection:
"In Chinese cities, the evaluation of air quality is usually based on the concentration of 10-micrometer particulate matter (PM10). In Beijing, the American Embassy has been releasing its evaluation of the city's air quality based on PM2.5 for an extended period of time. This data and Beijing government's data usually showed large disparities, causing outcry and prompting the city authority to adopt the new standard."
A look at this contentious "disparity":
"In Chinese cities, the evaluation of air quality is usually based on the concentration of 10-micrometer particulate matter (PM10). In Beijing, the American Embassy has been releasing its evaluation of the city's air quality based on PM2.5 for an extended period of time. This data and Beijing government's data usually showed large disparities, causing outcry and prompting the city authority to adopt the new standard."
A look at this contentious "disparity":
- According to the Ministry of Environmental Protection, today's air quality in Beijing was "slight [sic] polluted".
- According to the US Embassy's Beijing Air Quality Monitor webpage, it was "Very Unhealthy", verging on "Hazardous (Everyone should avoid all physical activity outdoors)".
- Today's been one of the days when you can stare directly into the mid-afternoon sun. (You probably shouldn't; you probably shouldn't live in Beijing.) It appears flat and featureless, like a full moon behind thick cloud. Opaque pale pink. I went jogging today, which was basically taking bong rips off a muffler. Still can't bring myself to buy one of the insect-like filtration masks you sometimes see rich foreigners wearing in the streets.
Friday, October 26, 2012
Wednesday, October 17, 2012
Prioritize This Management Task
"State Council Information Office: To all websites nationwide: In light of Mo Yan winning the Nobel prize for literature,
monitoring of microblogs, forums, blogs and similar key points must be
strengthened. Be firm in removing all comments which disgrace the Party
and the government, defame cultural work, mention Nobel laureates Liu Xiaobo and Gao Xingjian and associated harmful material. Without exception, block users from
posting for ten days if their writing contains malicious details.
Reinforce on-duty staff during the weekend and prioritize this
management task."
-- An October 12, 2012 directive from one of several behind-the-scenes governing bodies known collectively as China's 'Ministry of Truth', translated and quoted at China Digital Times
-- An October 12, 2012 directive from one of several behind-the-scenes governing bodies known collectively as China's 'Ministry of Truth', translated and quoted at China Digital Times
Monday, October 15, 2012
Bagel or Donut?
I'm going to put up this quick post because I'm baffled about this snack I just bought at 7-11.
It looks like a donut - i.e., it's fried to a golden color - but it appears to have some cream cheese-like substance smeared between its two bisections. More to come when I eat it.
Did you know? 7-11, in China, is owned and operated by a Japanese company. A few weeks ago, during the big anti-Japanese protests all over China, 7-11s were closed! Or, had a sign outside proclaiming "The Diaoyu Islands Belong to China". Look it up! (Do they? Who knows!)
Mo Yan has won the 2012 Nobel Prize for Literature.
He is the SECOND CHINESE WRITER TO CLAIM THIS HONOR sorry China but he's the second.
No one in China knows that Gao Xingjian won the 2000 prize. It's Orwellian.
It looks like a donut - i.e., it's fried to a golden color - but it appears to have some cream cheese-like substance smeared between its two bisections. More to come when I eat it.
Did you know? 7-11, in China, is owned and operated by a Japanese company. A few weeks ago, during the big anti-Japanese protests all over China, 7-11s were closed! Or, had a sign outside proclaiming "The Diaoyu Islands Belong to China". Look it up! (Do they? Who knows!)
Mo Yan has won the 2012 Nobel Prize for Literature.
He is the SECOND CHINESE WRITER TO CLAIM THIS HONOR sorry China but he's the second.
No one in China knows that Gao Xingjian won the 2000 prize. It's Orwellian.
Saturday, July 28, 2012
Graham Greene's Last Night in Villahermosa
From The Lawless Roads (record of a journey taken in 1938)
What books to take on a journey? It is an interesting - and important - problem. In West Africa once I had made the mistake of taking the Anatomy of Melancholy, with the idea that it would, as it were, match the mood. It matched all right, but what one really needs is contrast, and so I surrendered perhaps my only hope of ever reading War and Peace in favour of something overwhelmingly national. And one did want, I found, an English book in this hating and hateful country. I am not sure how the sentiment of Dr Thorne - of Frank Gresham divided from Mary by his birth and by the necessity of marrying money if Greshambury were to be maintained, and of Mary's rich inheritance from her scoundrelly uncle after he had drunk himself to death - I am not sure how it would have gone down at home. I think there would have been mental reservations before one surrendered to the charm, but here - in this hot forgotten tropic town, among the ants and the beetles - the simplicity of the sentiment did literally fill the eyes with tears. It is a love story and there are few love stories in literature; love in fiction is so often now - as Hemingway expresses it - what hangs up behind the bathroom door. Dr Thorne, too, is the perfect 'popular' novel - and when one is lonely one wants to claim kinship with all the simple friendly people turning the pages of their Home Notes. With what superb skill Trollope maintains a kind of fictitious suspense. We know exactly from an early page that Frank will be faithful to Mary, that Sir Roger Scatcherd will die and leave her a fortune, that Lady Arabella will be humbled and old Dr Thorne be able to resume his friendship with the squire, that Frank and Mary will live happy ever after; but we co-operate with the author in his management of the plot, we pretend to feel suspense, and that frank co-operation is a mark of the popular novel, for the great sentimental popular heart doesn't care for real suspense, to be in genuine doubt of the lovers' destiny. In Barchester Towers Trollope says in so many words that he will have no mysteries in his story - the widow, he tells you, will not marry Mr Slope: the reader need have no fears. In this more 'popular' story, he doesn't deny his creed; the suspense is patently unreal, but he allows us to pretend we fear, and sometimes it was a real strain - to stop after twenty pages and lie and sweat upon the iron bed and not to know.
But it was worse to have finished the book altogether, to have finished with proud delightful Mary Thorne and have nothing to fall back on but the hopeless dentist and the hotel proprietor swinging in his chair dreaming of Diaz. I had badly miscalculated in Mexico City - I thought I should be back in three weeks, and the three weeks were half gone already. How slowly while the beetles flocked in I spun out the last paragraph! 'And now we have but one word left for the doctor. "If you don't come and dine with me," said the squire to him, when they found themselves both deserted, "mind, I shall come and dine with you." And on this principle they seem to act. Dr Thorne continues to extend his practice, to the great disgust of Dr Fillgrave; and when Mary suggested to him that he should retire he almost boxed her ears. He knows the way, however, to Boxall Hill as well as ever he did, and is willing to acknowledge that the tea there is almost as good as it ever was at Greshambury.'
So England faded out and Mexico remained. I had never in my life been so homesick, and the fault was Trollope's. His England was not the England I knew, and yet... I lay on my back and tried to project myself into home. Jules Romains once wrote a novel about just such a possibility; I built up the familiar in my mind carefully, chair by chair, book by book -the windows just there, and the buses going by, and the squeals of children on the Common. But it wasn't real: this was real -the high empty room and the tiled and swarming floor and the heat and the sour river smell.
What books to take on a journey? It is an interesting - and important - problem. In West Africa once I had made the mistake of taking the Anatomy of Melancholy, with the idea that it would, as it were, match the mood. It matched all right, but what one really needs is contrast, and so I surrendered perhaps my only hope of ever reading War and Peace in favour of something overwhelmingly national. And one did want, I found, an English book in this hating and hateful country. I am not sure how the sentiment of Dr Thorne - of Frank Gresham divided from Mary by his birth and by the necessity of marrying money if Greshambury were to be maintained, and of Mary's rich inheritance from her scoundrelly uncle after he had drunk himself to death - I am not sure how it would have gone down at home. I think there would have been mental reservations before one surrendered to the charm, but here - in this hot forgotten tropic town, among the ants and the beetles - the simplicity of the sentiment did literally fill the eyes with tears. It is a love story and there are few love stories in literature; love in fiction is so often now - as Hemingway expresses it - what hangs up behind the bathroom door. Dr Thorne, too, is the perfect 'popular' novel - and when one is lonely one wants to claim kinship with all the simple friendly people turning the pages of their Home Notes. With what superb skill Trollope maintains a kind of fictitious suspense. We know exactly from an early page that Frank will be faithful to Mary, that Sir Roger Scatcherd will die and leave her a fortune, that Lady Arabella will be humbled and old Dr Thorne be able to resume his friendship with the squire, that Frank and Mary will live happy ever after; but we co-operate with the author in his management of the plot, we pretend to feel suspense, and that frank co-operation is a mark of the popular novel, for the great sentimental popular heart doesn't care for real suspense, to be in genuine doubt of the lovers' destiny. In Barchester Towers Trollope says in so many words that he will have no mysteries in his story - the widow, he tells you, will not marry Mr Slope: the reader need have no fears. In this more 'popular' story, he doesn't deny his creed; the suspense is patently unreal, but he allows us to pretend we fear, and sometimes it was a real strain - to stop after twenty pages and lie and sweat upon the iron bed and not to know.
But it was worse to have finished the book altogether, to have finished with proud delightful Mary Thorne and have nothing to fall back on but the hopeless dentist and the hotel proprietor swinging in his chair dreaming of Diaz. I had badly miscalculated in Mexico City - I thought I should be back in three weeks, and the three weeks were half gone already. How slowly while the beetles flocked in I spun out the last paragraph! 'And now we have but one word left for the doctor. "If you don't come and dine with me," said the squire to him, when they found themselves both deserted, "mind, I shall come and dine with you." And on this principle they seem to act. Dr Thorne continues to extend his practice, to the great disgust of Dr Fillgrave; and when Mary suggested to him that he should retire he almost boxed her ears. He knows the way, however, to Boxall Hill as well as ever he did, and is willing to acknowledge that the tea there is almost as good as it ever was at Greshambury.'
So England faded out and Mexico remained. I had never in my life been so homesick, and the fault was Trollope's. His England was not the England I knew, and yet... I lay on my back and tried to project myself into home. Jules Romains once wrote a novel about just such a possibility; I built up the familiar in my mind carefully, chair by chair, book by book -the windows just there, and the buses going by, and the squeals of children on the Common. But it wasn't real: this was real -the high empty room and the tiled and swarming floor and the heat and the sour river smell.
Both Readable and Rich in Knowledge and Thoughts
"BEIJING, July 26 (Xinhua) -- President Hu Jintao has urged SDX Joint
Publishing Company, a reputable domestic publisher, to strive for
innovation and produce more quality publications to assist in the
country's cultural drive. [...] Hu urged the company to create innovative operation systems and
develop 'more quality publications that are both readable and rich in
knowledge and thoughts.' "
("President Hu Calls for More Quality Publications", from China's official news agency)
Just to throw it in there, here's a picture of the Chinese edition of a certain quality publication.
Monday, May 21, 2012
Herp Update
Just now on a pedestrian flyover near the Sijiqing Bridge, I saw a man selling a single, live, adult snapping turtle in a shallow plastic washtub. There was an inch of water in the washtub and the man was moistening his fingers and flicking them along the turtle's reticulated shell. Once in a while a pedestrian crossing the flyover would stop to prod the turtle. I asked the man how much for the turtle, and while giving the traditional marketplace hand sign for the figure, he accidentally flicked water in my eyes and mouth and now I'm anxious about turtle-born disease.
He was asking for 1,500 yuan, about $240. Nothing doing. The turtle would ootch its neck if people rapped it on the shell. I thought of the baby snapping turtle I found in Croton Park in the Bronx. Readers will remember that little guy.
He was asking for 1,500 yuan, about $240. Nothing doing. The turtle would ootch its neck if people rapped it on the shell. I thought of the baby snapping turtle I found in Croton Park in the Bronx. Readers will remember that little guy.
Monday, May 7, 2012
Friday, May 4, 2012
Tuesday, May 1, 2012
Transcription of a Plaque from the Forbidden City
ZHONG HE DIAN (Hall of Central Harmony)
A throne is placed in the center of the hall and a board hangs above the throne with an inscription written by Emperor Qianlong. The inscription reads:
"Yun Zhi Jue Zhong,"
meaning
"The Way of Heaven is profound and mysterious and the way of mankind is difficult. Only if we make a precise and unified plan and follow the doctrine of the mean, can we rule the country well."
A throne is placed in the center of the hall and a board hangs above the throne with an inscription written by Emperor Qianlong. The inscription reads:
"Yun Zhi Jue Zhong,"
meaning
"The Way of Heaven is profound and mysterious and the way of mankind is difficult. Only if we make a precise and unified plan and follow the doctrine of the mean, can we rule the country well."
Monday, February 27, 2012
Dream Diary
I dreamed I was drawing a huge map of the United States on a whiteboard. I began with the region I'm most familiar with -- the Northeast. Everyone was asking, "What's that?"
"The United States," I said. I drew the Great Lakes exactingly. I was proud of myself.
Then I dreamed I was walking. I was somewhere in the Northeast. I woke up in a hotel, or a hospital, and I asked the desk attendant how to catch a bus, and she took me out onto the main road and explained to me. It was morning, it was early spring or early autumn. I decided not to catch a bus and I went walking north up the main road. Trees, nature. You know what I mean.
"The United States," I said. I drew the Great Lakes exactingly. I was proud of myself.
Then I dreamed I was walking. I was somewhere in the Northeast. I woke up in a hotel, or a hospital, and I asked the desk attendant how to catch a bus, and she took me out onto the main road and explained to me. It was morning, it was early spring or early autumn. I decided not to catch a bus and I went walking north up the main road. Trees, nature. You know what I mean.
Wednesday, January 18, 2012
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