Georgeann Murphy

Practical Humanism and the Will to Live

  • Fall Back

    4 November 2023

    OMG. Already?

    At 2 pm yesterday GBH newscaster Henry Santoro reminded listeners that we return to Standard Time tonight, “moving from sunshine and happiness to darkness and misery.”  As I type this at 6.20 pm, I’m hearing some fireworks—early Guy Fawkes reveling?  Or just someone protesting this tipping of too-delicately-balanced psyches toward Seasonal Affective Disorder?  Tomorrow night, 5 November, the sun will set in Madbury NH at 4.31.   Oy.

    I’m wondering if you, Dear Readers, also find this time of year a trial.  The news remains debilitatingly oppressive, and since I last posted about “the helpers” on whom I try to focus, Robert Card killed 18 people in Lewiston, Maine and then himself, despite repeated alerts from all who knew him that he was mentally unstable, armed, and dangerous.  The morning after he was discovered dead but before I’d heard the news that he’d been found, the first thing I saw out my bedroom window was a man in camouflage holding a rifle walking along the edge of our woods to the west.  It took a skipped heartbeat before I recalled it was hunting season.  And ever since, I’ve tried to avoid too much news of children in Gaza writing their names on their arms so that they can be identified, and local moms taking photos of their kids each morning before school to record what they are wearing—just in case.

    Down and Out at the Fox Run Mall

    And then yesterday I went to the Fox Run Mall in Newington NH for the first time in years, pursuing a futile quest for martini glasses to replace my chipped ones.  Even though I find my constitution no longer up to any but the teeniest of martinis, guests are coming soon who are, I suspect, heartier than I am.  Sears, one of the Mall’s anchor stores, closed there in 2019 about the time that original big box store declared bankruptcy after 130 years in business, and the Mall now is a mostly deserted, depressing husk of its former self evidencing another retail era gone by.

    The Big Empty

    When I was a child in the late ‘50’s and early 60’s, my mother and I dressed up (crinolines and gloves!) to go to downtown St. Petersburg’s Maas Brothers, or, when visiting the grandparents in Ohio, downtown Dayton’s Rike’s, where she had once frugally, piece-by-piece, purchased with her IBM secretarial salary her 1947 trousseau.  My off-to-college clothes in 1970 all came from either J. C. Penney’s or Sears, which I then thought a significant step up from anything my mother had sewn for me.  But Penney’s and Sears’s much ritzier relatives, the grand emporia established at the end of the 19th century, even then could not long endure.  By the time I got to grad school at Tulane and worked in the summer of 1977 as a waitress at D. H. Holmes in New Orleans, one of the first department stores in the country opened on Canal Street in 1849, that Grand Dame was already in decline.  Patrons at the in-store restaurant Potpourri most evenings were widows living in the Quarter taking advantage of wonderful cooking at budget prices.  I didn’t make much money there, but boy, did I eat well!  I can taste the red beans and rice, bread pudding, and Peacemaker sandwiches (buttered French bread and fried oysters) in my mind’s palate now.

    A far cry from Potpourri on Bourbon Street & Canal
    Bargain Fashion?

    With the passing of the department stores, those magnificent cathedrals of commerce, came the malls.  When I taught summer school at Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter NH in the summer of 1985, I thought Newington’s Fox Run the nonpareil, certainly without rival in my new Kentucky home.  Foxy no more, that mall is now a rather creepy ghost of its former self, its affect made all the more grotesque by the early intrusion of Christmas trimmings juxtaposed with marked down Halloween crap.

    Where have all the Santas gone?

    Falling back indeed.

    So how is it that in lieu of martini glasses of appropriate proportion (not the impossibly capacious ones that seem to be all that’s on offer these days), finding a clever cabbage-leaf platter for a coming cocktail party marked down at Target from $20 to $2 can, however briefly, lift my spirits?

    Prized Purchase

    Actually, I think it was less that bargain purchase that perked me up than it was the overheard half of a phone conversation entertaining me as I waited in line to pick up my new leaf blower at the Home Depot customer service desk:  “You want to return a kitchen?  We don’t have $12,000 on hand to refund.  Wait, l think I remember you.  Let me speak to the manager.”  At which point, the HD associate on the phone and I exchanged eye rolls, a shrug, and a silent laugh.  Once she hung up, she clued me in:  “They came in with credit cards and buckets of cash; he used a card, but she used the cash.  I’m really hoping to learn the rest of the story!”  Ah, capitalism in these latter days.

    Maybe all I need is more such encounters with mysterious absurdities connecting strangers.   And that extra hour of sleep.

    Set the clocks back and enjoy.

    Pleasant dreams!

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  • October Miscellany: The Helpers

    23 October 2023

    Display at Wentworth Nursery, Rollinsford NH

    As my birth month draws to a close, I can report I’ve enjoyed weeks crowded with happy personal incident.  And so, Dear Readers, as I suggested last post, it’s the helpers I catalog here, turning away quite deliberately from the horrors of the 24-hour news cycle.

    Here they are, in chronological order:

    Heather Cox Richardson, whose daily, always grounding posts, “Letters from an American,” both inform and solace with the balm of historical perspective.  Her 29 September appearance at the Portsmouth Music Hall’s “Writers on a New England Stage” program, beginning hours behind schedule due to that day’s extraordinary rainfall in NYC, testified to the loyalty of her following.  NO one complained; rather, we all waited patiently and gave her a rock star welcome when at last she arrived on stage.  As my friend Carol remarked:  “That audience would have followed her over a cliff.”  Richardson’s account of how our democracy got to where we are now, what has changed, and how we can move forward bear review:  https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/heather-cox-richardson-2023/id1709704692?i=1000630049353. 

    Richardson’s offhand remark about how hard it is for an author to let go of her book also struck a personal bull’s eye with me as I so slowly review my editor’s track changes to my own magnum opus, Will to Live:  Learning from Shakespeare How to Be—and NOT to Be (coming asap to Amazon, Dear Readers!).  The problem:  by the time you finish writing the book, you know more than you did when you began, so the impulse is to go back to the beginning and re-write—a vicious, unending cycle.  Richardson’s friend’s advice:  when you get to the end of your book, START THE NEXT BOOK!  Since Richardson and I are fellow Libras and share a birthday, I am taking that advice as also meant for me.  She is, however, a decade younger, and on her birthday this year earned fourth place on the NYT non-fiction bestseller list.  Well, you gotta have a dream, right?

    Rob and Pam on the jetty at Great Island Common, New Castle NH
    Cruising Great Bay aboard Portsmouth Harbor Cruises vessel Heritage

    My nephew and niece, Rob and Pam Andrew, visited me from Oklahoma over my birthday weekend and made good on their insistence that I am an important part of their family.  Among their thoughtful gifts:  a Shutterfly album full of family photographs of my late Andrew parents-in-law, who departed this life before I could ever meet them in person, and a book formative in Rob’s young life so I could “get to know him better.” Also, a fine dinner out, and—best of all—their comfortable, excellent company, which made turning 71 a real pleasure.

    Barrier Beach Trail, Laudholm Farm, Wells ME
    Birthday cheesecake at Dufour’s with SP and Brian

    The next week Shiao-Ping and Brian made sure the celebrating continued by introducing me to a wonderful, nearly deserted beach, part of the Wells Reserve in Maine, after which we had a fine meal at Dufour in South Berwick, another first for me.  That Friday, 13 October marked exactly four years since they and so many other friends and family gathered at Gnawwood to remember my David.  Still in the initial throes of grief shortly after David’s death, SP and Brian scooped me up and took me to another beautiful shore, Parsons Beach in Kennebunk, for the salutary balm of a day by the sea.  Helpers indeed, those two.

    Brian tests the temperature, Laudholm Beach, Wells ME
    FAT HAM set by Luciana Stecconi

    The day after our Wells Preserve visit I made my way back down to Boston to see the Huntington’s production of Fat Ham, James Ijames’s reinvention of Hamlet as a comic Southern backyard barbeque and coming-out party.  The Wimberly Theatre at the Calderwood/Boston Center for the Arts is an intimate 372-seat space, and I sat in the center of the third row, happily close to the action.  Riffs on Hamlet are lots of fun for me, and I always feel right at home in theatres, so while the play itself lacked some of the pizazz I expected, the mise en scène and jolly, OTT performances helped me shuffle off care for a tight 90 minutes. 

    Susan Sinnott, NH Library Director of the Year
    The beautiful Madbury Public Library

    The next Monday, 16 September, brought a delightful opportunity to celebrate someone else:  Susan Sinnott, Director of the Madbury Public Library, where since last April I’ve been serving as an alternate trustee.  Nominated by us trustees and now in her 10th year of serving Madbury, since 2019 in the lovely new library she helped establish, Susan won this year’s NH Library Director of the Year award offered by the New Hampshire Library Trustees Association, further distinguishing the MPL among the other 233 NH libraries.  So gratifying to see the hard work of a saavy, modest professional appreciated for the talented helper she is.

    Jack and Vicky Myers at the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens, 24 June 2021

    Then two days ago, an extraordinary helper of another kind, Dr. H. Jack Myers, who passed away last February, was eloquently celebrated by his friends and family in a very well attended and gratifying memorial gathering at the Durham Community Church.  Surgeon, pianist/organist, and vocalist with perfect pitch (he and his wife Vicky, also a gifted musician, met in local vocal group Amare Cantare), Jack was clearly adored by patients and fellow medical professionals alike, and with Drs. Sonneborn and Paul co-founded the excellent Seacoast Cancer Center at Wentworth Douglass Hospital in Dover.  Vicky and Jack lived just down the road from me for years, though it took my meeting Vicky at a Tai Chi class just a few years ago to introduce me to Jack, who bore his own final illness with humor, fortitude, and grace.  Each of the 13 speakers (13!) who shared memories of Jack was succinct, witty, and affecting.  A good day, celebrating a good man who touched—and saved!—so many lives.

    “Heavenly Blue” morning glories in bloom–in late October??!!

    And then, there is Public Radio, my constant helper and companion, filling my days with entertainment, enlightenment, and the best company:  my Public Radio Pals.  Most recently, a re-broadcast of Radiolab’s “The Fellowship of the Tree Rings” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4e-HMtsdOY) helped me put into context the blooming of my morning glories well into late October (a phenomenon also confirmed by my friends Marianne and Otto in Munich) and brought home once again the importance of the phrase E. M. Forster used as epigraph for his novel, Howards End:  “Only connect.”  Listen, as I did, to learn how tree rings yield information about hurricanes, shipwrecks, pirates, low solar activity (the Maunder Minimum from 1645-1725), sugar plantations, slavery, and the birth of capitalism.  Dendrochronologists and paleoclimatologists unite to reveal how the past predicts the future.  Here’s to the scientists and the science they serve.

    Jennifer and Friends on West 10th Street, NYC

    Closer to home and Halloween, there’s my good friend Jennifer, enjoying a moment on a West 10th street stoop in NYC, and helping me recall how much I have always loved Halloween.

    Victory memorialized
    Homestead at Wagon Hill Farm, Durham NH

    And thanks to the Durham citizens, led by John and Maryanna Hatch, who in 1974 saved Wagon Hill from the oily grasp of Aristotle Onassis, a real David-over-Goliath victory. Because of them we still have preserved in perpetuity some of the most beautiful views on the seacoast.

    Helpers all, I salute you!

    Madbury reservoir, 23 October 2023

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  • Close Encounter of the Feathered Kind

    12 October 2023

    Owl as Narcissus, courtesy of Jay Richard

    Last night I was out on our deck having my usual evening chat with my late husband David, my habitual practice ever since he left this dimension some four plus years ago.  I sit and look at the stars and report out loud how I spent the day—both a good test of memory and a way to keep track of all that can too easily slip away without my noticing; I’ve learned this is a hazard of a retiree’s less structured time.  Just a few moments into this outdoor recital, I heard a scratching on the deck railing less than a yard in front of me as I sat in the deck’s southwest corner sunk in my Adirondack chair.  I snapped my head around at the noise and yelped, so startled was I.  I then saw only a flash of feathers as who or what had tried to perch there took off away from me, sailing in low flight down the hill to the south.

    Methinks my visitor was likely an owl, to whom I then apologized for my less than welcoming response.  Wish I hadn’t made a noise; I would have loved a closer look.  But I was so taken by surprise that any bird or beast would come so close while I was speaking.  I always associate our barred owls with my late father George.  Back in April 2002, I was awakened by a sadly expected early morning call from my mom telling me Daddy had just died.  I was in bed with David.  When I hung up the phone he asked if I was all right.  I answered yes.  And then, just moments later, we heard the owl’s “Who cooks for you?” cry just outside the bedroom window.  “George?” we both said, hoping perhaps that was George Murphy’s parting adieu as he made his way out of this world.

    The Barred Owl

    And then there was that time at the Grand Canyon.  After a day of sightseeing, David and I returned to an overlook toting fixings for Canyon Cocktails to enjoy while watching the sun set.  We lingered there appreciating the view until it was quite dark.  Then, on the way back to the car just a few feet behind us, I heard and felt on my cheek the whoosh of a wing sweeping by me at very close range.  I’ve learned from my photographer friend Jay (who sent me the stunning shot you see above last Halloween; see https://www.jayhawkphotography.com/ for other remarkable photographs) that owls are specially adapted for near silent night flight.  According to the Cornell Lab Bird Academy, their large, broad wings let them stay aloft at a slower, and therefore quieter, pace.  Specialized feathers take soundproofing a step further, and comb-like serrations on the leading edge of wing feathers and fringes on trailing edges reduce air turbulence and the noise they make as they fly.  Another marvel of the natural world.

    The Grand Canyon at Sunset

    I’m especially grateful for last night’s close encounter because this past week, my birthday week, while graced with a visit from my dear nephew and niece, has been full of overwhelmingly awful news.  Aside from our unbelievably broken Congress and the appalling criminality of our ex-president (not to mention the absurdly egregious behavior of George Santos with his grifting lies, Bob Menendez with his gold bars, and Clarence Thomas’s complete disregard of judicial ethics), the war in Ukraine rages on even as Hamas militants let slip the dogs of war on Israel.  My poor sister, herself having the fight of her life with cancer, was reduced to tears by the televised carnage; just the audio NPR coverage is enough to lay me low.  The day before my very dear friend Diane endured 14 hours of surgery.  And today I heard from my friend Trish in New Orleans, who writes that a “saltwater wedge” is moving up the Mississippi River; she worries that it will damage the NOLA water pipes.  Both the City and Jefferson Parish are putting in pipelines to get fresh water from Kenner.  To quote Jack Boyle in O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock, “The world’s in a terrible state of chassis.”

    So, Dear Readers, I have decided to focus these next few posts by taking advice from Mr. Roger’s mother, and “look for the helpers.”  I know they are out there.  I had a brush with one just last night.

    And guess what?  Immediately after I typed that last line, I went downstairs to make my weekly call to another dear friend, Cameron in North Carolina.  And as we spoke, George returned just outside, where s/he surely heard my voice as clearly as s/he had last night on the deck.  I discovered I can both talk and snap photos on my Samsung Galaxy S10 at the same time.

    Owl encounter?  Or Visitation?  I’m happy to embrace the mystery.

    And grateful.

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  • Telluride by the Sea

    23 October 2023

    Lining up for the first of seven films

    On this Saturday, the grey first day of autumn, the last rose of summer blooms on my kitchen window sill and I am for the fifth straight day under the weather, still reacting to the RSV vaccination I got last Monday afternoon.  I’ve not had a bad cold for so long I’d forgotten how annoying and debilitating colds can be.  If I’m suffering only a minor response to the Respiratory Syncytial Virus, I shudder to think what the unprotected might endure.  The struggle to breathe certainly gets your attention.

    Moved by an approaching birthday, I’ve finally begun my self-publishing journey with a mixture of elation, anxiety, and a fit of pique over my Amazon project manager’s skipping our first scheduled meeting, belatedly getting his assistant to call me and only further testing my patience.  Clearly not at home with English, the assistant’s abominable grammar and limited understanding did NOT inspire confidence.  But I’m carrying on, having sent on my completed manuscript and some suggested cover designs while trying to rise above what will undoubtedly prove a series of frustrating complications.  Gentle Reader, we’ll see.  Stay tuned for the progress of Will to Live:  Learning from Shakespeare How to Be—and NOT to Be on its brave progress to the Amazon catalog.

    The combination of pre-publication angst and really annoying congestion accounts for my week’s delay in addressing last weekend’s delightful Telluride by the Sea film festival in Portsmouth’s historic Music Hall.  Seeing seven films over one evening plus two full days put me in an enjoyably altered state:  there was really no time to do or think about anything beyond being captivated by the dream world of cinema, reality intruding only long enough to discuss same with my fellow cinephile and good friend, Carol, while stretching our legs with a short walk to Portsmouth’s new Hearth Market to grab a coffee or a bite.  Settling in the Hearth’s high-end food court or remarkably quiet and sunny outdoor piazza in the middle of downtown Portsmouth was really pleasant, especially given the anticipated bluster of Hurricane Lee that brought only limited gales and no rain.

    Inside the Hearth
    Outside the Hearth: a Portsmouth Piazza

    Back in the theatre, we enjoyed the Bergsonian (repetition-as-source-of-humor) trial of listening to seven different Music Hall staff members muddle through the same stock introduction to each film, thanking the donors, including the “Big Brains” at UNH—that made us snort—and stumbling over how to pronounce the name of the local river (It’s Pis-CA-ta-qua, not Pis-ca-TA-qua).  And please note:  The title of that famous upcoming film is The Sound of Music not Sound of the Music.  Gosh, but that blunder made me feel old!  But Telluride by the Sea founding father, the late Bill Pence, and his wife Stella certainly deserved the seven rounds of applause for what they brought to the New Hampshire seacoast twenty-four years ago.

    As luck would have it, the only real disappointment among the seven films was the one most eagerly anticipated, Poor Things, starring the most famous actors:  Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, and Mark Ruffalo in director Yorgos Lanthimos’s retelling of the Frankenstein story.  The promise of a “funny, furious, proudly feminist” version of Mary Shelley’s classic was unfulfilled by (we finally agreed) a tedious script that made every obvious point at least three times over, bizarre Jules Vern-ish mise en scène, the occasional repulsive surgical procedure, and LOTS of gratuitous sex as Bella (Stone), the revived corpse of an adult woman given her unborn infant’s brain acquires carnal knowledge in spite of the hypocritical Victorian society she inhabits.  Stone’s is a brave performance, but how she transforms from a jerking doll happily stabbing a cadaver’s eyeballs to an intelligent, humanitarian medical student is inexplicable.  My take:  nothing can redeem a bad script.

    On the other hand, I’m hard pressed to rank the other six films shown, each entirely captivating even after a long day of sitting in those less-than-comfortable Music Hall seats (and watch out if you’re stuck next to a man-spreader who commandeers your arm rest and half your leg room).  The Friday night film, I suspect, might be everyone’s favorite:  The Holdovers, starring Paul Giamatti as an aging classics professor at an elite New England prep school.  Set in 1970 and filmed with 1970’s equipment, the plot turns on the relationship of a rigidly uncompromising and unlikeable teacher stuck with babysitting a group of preppies with nowhere to go over Christmas break.  I suspect many of the Portsmouth audience could vouch for the veracity of the temporal and local setting—I myself spent a summer teaching at Phillips Exeter—and there were plenty of knowing laughs from the teachers in the audience.  Filmed in part at Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts, Giamatti’s character was well matched by the smart, charismatic, but self-destructive Angus played by his young co-star Dominic Sessa, who amazingly won his role in an open audition at Deerfield Academy where he was at the time a student.  He more than holds his own again Giamatti’s star turn, and so does Da’Vine Joy Randolph playing the grieving school cook Mary who has lost her son in Viet Nam.  If you think you might anticipate each turn of this plot, you’d be wrong, and I expect Giamatti’s earned an Oscar nomination for his performance in Alexander Payne’s fine film.

    Carol and anonymous crowd wrangler

    Pedagogy was back on display the next morning with Ilker Ҫatak’s The Teacher’s Lounge.  The winner of several German awards, this film’s plot follows a winning new teacher (played by Leonie Benesch) as she tries to navigate a series of increasingly difficult dynamics set in motion by the interrogation of her students over a series of alleged robberies.  Initially my heart sank at how well these German sixth-grade students were able to learn challenging mathematics (you can bet none of our U.S. sixth graders could have matched them), but I was quickly was caught up in the dilemmas facing so accomplished and earnest a young teacher as everything and everyone turn against her even as she consistently finds a way to do the right thing.  I think this was my favorite of the films, especially because it dovetailed with research of which I’d heard recently on Hidden Brain about how “the jigsaw classroom” consistently outperforms the traditional model of classroom competition when each student vies with all the others for top marks.  Psychologist Elliot Aronson’s 1978 research determined that both performance and sociability soared and racism diminished when a group of students were each given only one paragraph of a short essay about Eleanor Roosevelt to learn well enough to explain to the others.  They would be tested on the entire essay, and so had to attend to and depend on each other to learn what they needed to know (see the “Outsmarting Yourself” episode of the Hidden Brain podcast).  In The Teacher’s Lounge, the script, performances, and ancillary tensions that unfortunately upend contemporary education were brilliantly rendered.  All of us teachers were wrung out at the finale.

    My other favorite film was the Finish film Fallen Leaves, directed by Aki Kaurismäki, billed as a somber romantic comedy about two marginalized outcasts suffering the indignities and fragile economic status common to laborers and factory workers, a pair who belong together as clearly as Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan did in Nora Ephron’s Sleepless in Seattle but who, like them, repeatedly miss each other via one maddening plot twist after another.  Meta about cinema—the couple watch a zombie movie together on their first and likely to be only date—and drolly on point about loneliness and the persistence of desire—this is a hilarious and totally charming picture.  And the leading man, Jussi Vatanen, is a dead ringer for a young Jimmy Stewart.

    Lines diminish as the weekend rolls on

    The longest film of the festival at 2 hours 30 minutes was Anatomy of a Fall by French director Justine Triet, but another that held one’s rapt attention throughout as it dissects a marriage through the lens of a whodunit.  Billed as a cross between Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage and Agatha Christie, the script shifts our sympathies from scene to scene following a husband’s fall to his death and his successful novelist wife’s trial for murder as their clever, vision-impaired son grows up suffering their marital storms.  Competition, creative drive, resentment, and guilt power a most intelligent, carefully crafted script.

    These German, Finish, and French films were my favorites, but two more deserve mention:  the gorgeously filmed Danish epic The Promised Land (directed by Nikolaj Arcel), based on the true history of an 18th century Captain who set out to tame in the name of the King the vast, barren Jutland heath despite the resistance of the grotesquely brutal nobleman Schinkel, and the completely different documentary, American Symphony (directed by Matthew Heineman) about an eventful year in the life of musician Jon Batiste as he navigates a career soaring toward the premiere of his ambitious symphony in Carnegie Hall coinciding with the return of his wife writer Suleika Jaouad’s leukemia:  a moving portrait of an artist of stupendous talent, stamina, and heart.

    So, 6 thumbs up, 1 thumb decidedly down, and a wonderful weekend of Big Time Cinema in our little port town.  Now I return to the the day’s tasks bolstered by the creature comfort of Trader Joe’s pumpkin waffles.  Happy autumn!

    The last rose of summer

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  • Mills, Massage, and Madbury Day

    12 September 2023

    Lower Mill, Salmon Falls River, Rollinsford NH

    Reading Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead after Dickens’s David Copperfield is a déjà vu delight, though one can only hope Kingsolver’s epigraph borrowed from Dickens resonates for readers:  “It’s in vain to recall the past, unless it works some influence upon the present.”  The present rhyming with the past is right up my street these days, as you, Dear Reader, will have noticed, and is perhaps the inevitable consequence of aging.  Boston College historian Heather Cox Richardson’s millions of subscribers to her Letters from an American can perhaps testify to the grounding solace of learning the history behind today’s politics, though perhaps some Stoicism is required when considering how much does not change for the better where human endeavor is concerned.

    The juxtaposition of past and present was very much on my mind this past weekend, beginning with my first visit to my wonderful neighbor’s studio in the lower mill building of the Rollinsford NH Historic District.  The Salmon Falls River there was first dammed as early as 1623-24 (also the publication year of Shakespeare’s First Folio) to power a sawmill; in 1822, a Portsmouth merchant purchased the water privilege and established a successful woolen mill on the site.  That burned in 1834 and was soon replaced by a cotton mill, eventually purchased by Boston textile industrialist Amos Lawrence and eventually incorporated as the Salmon Falls Manufacturing Company.  Lawrence built a second mill building, introduced the new turbine technology perfected at Lowell, Massachusetts, and the Industrial Revolution in New Hampshire was underway.

    Salmon River Falls and Lower Mill
    1916 Power Plant
    The “Flying Frames” of the Salmon Falls Manufacturing Company in 1888
    (Notice: No lighting system of any kind)
    Stairway to Third Floor Studios

    The Salmon Falls Manufacturing Company ended production in 1927, but the buildings, most structures built of brick in an unusually consistent industrial Italianate style, remain on the National Historic Register, many currently occupied by over 100 artists, along with local businesses, the Rollinsford Public Library, and the new studio of my accomplished friend and next-door neighbor, Anne Marple, LMT (https://www.annemarple.com).

    Last winter, I was several times, right in my own home, the beneficiary of Anne’s practice as she pursued her Licensed Massage Therapist credentials.  Having eagerly volunteered to play the role of client, I enjoyed Anne’s ministrations while listening to morning ragas, comfortably settled on the massage table she set up in front of the fireplace.  The rich are different (thank you, Scott Fitzgerald), and with Anne’s help, I could pretend I was—just like the Meryl Streep character in the Roy Scheider/Streep vehicle, Still of the Night (1982).  Bliss.

    Having now earned her LMT and opened her Salmon Falls studio, Anne trained in an earlier chapter of her life as a professional aerial artist, working as a performer and coach for over a decade, and so learning about movement and how to use stretches and exercises to support a healthy body.  Also a certified Reiki practitioner, Anne complements her physical work with training in the Myrrophore tradition of healers and a background in etheric work, using a blend of Myofascial release, Swedish massage, and reflexology—among other practices well beyond my ken:  if some of those terms sent you to Google, I’m right there with you.  But this I can avow:  a Marple massage is transcendently different from and superior to the few I’ve had before, and highly recommended.

    Suite 353
    Salmon Falls employees in the picking room, 1888

    Still, on Friday I could not help but remark the disjunction between what once went on in those mill spaces and what goes on there now; having so incongruously pierced the veil of history I associate with such a setting, I felt pretty otherworldly for the remains of the day.  Only as I write this do so many other Dickensian associations with “dark Satanic mills” (thank you, William Blake) return to mind.  Aside from Dickens, there’s the brief film UNH Master of Arts of Liberal Studies candidate Brenda Whitmore made in 2002 as her final MALS project, The Lighting Up, examining the untenable conditions in textile factories that led to the Mill Women’s Strike in Dover NH in December 1828, the first labor strike by women in the United States.

    And then, too, I recall the 2004 visit David and I made to Heywood in the metropolitan borough of Rochdale, part of greater Manchester, England, to see the town in which David’s great (or great great?) grandfather Frederick Chadwick Andrew was born in 1820, and from which he emigrated to Salt Lake City, where he died in 1878, part of a substantial British immigration to Utah in 1850-70; from 1860-1880, 22% of the total Utah population and 67% of those foreign born were from Britain (see “Imperial Zion:  The British Occupation of Utah” by Frederick S. Buchanan in The Peoples of Utah, 1976, pp. 61-113).  The 27 cotton mills operating in Heywood by 1833 are shuttered now, but seeing the smoke stacks and imagining the air quality when they were all in business was not hard, and informative signs posted about the town made clear the diminished quality of life those 19th-century mill workers suffered.  The Latter-day Saints’ promise of Zion in the New World—as well as the sanctioned taking of a second wife along with the first—must have been irresistible.

    One of Heywood’s 27 Cotton Mills

    What would Grandfather Andrew have made of the repurposed mills of Salmon Falls, I wonder?  Far less removed in time from big cultural changes within my own lifespan, I still struggle to adapt, and with A.I.’s burgeoning presence, I expect what’s to come while I’m still around will be well beyond my imagination.

    So, on Saturday morning, Madbury Day, it was a comfort to see how much pleasure the Madbury Library’s book sale brought to me as well as to them who donated books and them who carried them away. 

    Young library patron pleased with her new board book

    Little Madbury, with a population of only 1,931 according to the 2021 Census, could easily be mistaken for Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, yet well past that play’s 1901-1913 setting, a substantial number of its citizens still read and value BOOKS!  I felt more proud than silly marching in the skimpy Madbury Day parade behind two illustrious Friends of the Madbury Public Library:  Anne, not only purveyor of excellent massage therapy but also chair of the Friends, and long-time Friend and library advocate, Joan, CEO of book sales.

    Friends of the MPL Joan and Anne
    Parade forming at Cherry Lane
    Madbury’s Finest Fire Fighters

    The size of the appreciative crowd was underwhelming, surely.  But the books that changed hands on Saturday do inspire some optimism, as did the folks who came to the library for the first time and shared their delight in the lovely space.  Here’s to more such connective tissue for the body politic— and the creative repurposing of old institutions for new times.

    Books in the Boot, headed for readers new

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  • Labor Day Weekend: Return to Hamilton House, Chores, and a VERY Good Read

    7 September 2023

    Makis E. Warlamis, Utopien 04, 2007.01.05, Daskunstmuseum

    Labor Day may mark the unofficial end of summer, but the weather in New Hampshire today begs to differ:  the actual temperature outside is 90o, the heat index 99o, and here in my un-air-conditioned study it is 86o.  My sister Jane in Florida and I have been texting back and forth, recalling and wondering at our ability to survive our public school education in St. Petersburg in schools with no ac.  I recall the unnatural contortions of my right arm as I struggled to find a way to keep my sweating hand off the test paper I was trying to complete, and the exquisite joy of being allowed at recess to buy a 10¢ waxed paper carton of thirst-slaking, ice-cold orange juice from a hall vending machine.  Many schools in New England are still not air-conditioned, and in this “heat emergency,” some have closed for the rest of this week.  In Jane’s and my day, we hoped for hurricanes to delay the start of school, and fairly often got our wish.  Perspectives change with responsibility and property; I’m very grateful Hurricane Idalia missed Jane there in Safety Harbor, and hope Hurricane Lee still brewing in the Atlantic will keep its distance.

    Despite my status as a retiree, I did my best to substitute pleasure for workaday chores over the holiday weekend, discovering that Lexie’s at the Great Bay Marina (with excellent fish tacos) is staying open on weekends through September this year—a perk of climate change?

    Lexie’s Landing at the Great Bay Marina, Newington NH
    Fish taco by the Bay
    AKA “Disposable Income”
    R U a robot? How many modes of transportation do you see?

    And I was pleased to find I could still hike from shipping merchant Jonathan Hamilton’s striking Georgian mansion (c. 1785) picturesquely sited on a bluff overlooking the Salmon Falls River into Vaughn Woods State Park, navigate the ups and downs and trip-threatening roots of the River Run trail, and return on the more level bridle path to a perch in the Hamilton House garden where I caught the cooling breeze from the river below.  Most gratifying.

    Hamilton House, c. 1785, South Berwick ME
    Salmon Falls River and Hamilton House from the Vaughn Woods River Run Trail
    The Warren Homestead Site along the Bridle Path
    Hamilton House Garden Facade

    Even with such holiday embellishments, I still managed to get a few things accomplished at home:  the deck railing is now once again shining with the penetrating oil that should protect it through the coming winter; the Behr brand I once had to smuggle in from Canada is now once again available at Home Depot, illustrating the vicissitudes of earlier environmental regulations.

    And I managed to get all the mowing done without again suffering the consequences of disturbing a cicada killer wasp nest that I’d earlier mistaken for a more harmless groundhog excavation.  I do like mowing, especially since switching to a quiet, lightweight, electric machine that doesn’t turn gas into stink and noise:  the benefits are good exercise, money saved, a sense of accomplishment, and a chance to commune with my late father George, who did all the sweaty work of maintaining the lawn and landscaping of the Murphy home in St. Pete.

    Best of all, I finished Anthony Doerr’s hefty 2021 novel, Cloud Cuckoo Land, a paean to texts and those who preserve them.

    Initially challenged by the fragmented narrative weaving together lives lived in the 15th, mid-20th, early 21st, and mid-22th centuries, I was nevertheless drawn into following with increasing urgency the seemingly unrelated breadcrumbs finally integrated into a central action:  the compulsion of such very different souls alive in such very different times to preserve an ancient but timeless story.  Dedicated by Doerr “to librarians then, now, and to come,”  the novel

    “is an epic of the quietest kind, whispering across 600 years in a voice no louder than a librarian’s. It is a book about books, a story about stories. It is tragedy and comedy and myth and fable and a warning and a comfort all at the same time. It says, Life is hard. Everyone believes the world is ending all the time. But so far, all of them have been wrong.

    It says that if stories can survive, maybe we can, too.”

    (Jason Sheehan, NPR book review, 28 September 2021)

    Given the state of textual expurgation in my home state of Florida (censoring Romeo & Juliet??!  Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!), the words of Licinius, the eldest of Doerr’s characters, a dying Greek tutor to rich children in Constantinople, take on new resonance:

    “A text—a book—is a resting place for the memories of people who have lived before.  A way for the memory to stay fixed after the soul has traveled on.” 

                His eyes open very widely then, as though he peers into a great darkness.

    “But books, like people, die.  They die in fires or floods or in the mouths of worms or at the whims of tyrants.  If they are not safe-guarded, they go out of the world.  And when a book goes out of the world, the memory dies a second death.”  (Cloud Cuckoo Land, 51)

    Have we in our current fit of “alternative facts” and ignorant censorship entered “a great darkness”?  Certainly the daily news suggests the answer is yes.  But then, there’s this:

    “Sometimes the things we think are lost are only hidden, waiting to be discovered.” (408, 474).

    So here’s to those who labor to discover and preserve.  As the heroic character Zeno Ninis, once a midwestern POW in Korea captured along with English classicist Rex, remembers:

    “Of all the mad things we humans do, Rex once told him, there might be nothing more humbling, or more noble, than trying to translate the dead languages.  We don’t know how the old Greeks sounded when they spoke; we can scarcely map their words onto ours; from the very start, we’re doomed to fail.  But in the attempt, Rex said, in trying to drag something across the river from the murk of history into our time, into our language:  that was, he said, the best kind of fool’s errand.” (462)

    A Labor Day Salute to those who keep stories alive

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  • Janus: Looking back, Looking Ahead

    30 August 2023

    The Madbury Reservoir starting to look autumnal

    The last humanities course I taught at UNH in the spring of 2020—which with the arrival of COVID at mid-semester unexpectedly became the last semester in my 43 years of teaching—was HUMA 513, an interdisciplinary introduction to the modern world.  As the HUMA team prof covering the literary beat, I referred repeatedly to the Roman deity Janus, the god with two faces, one looking forward and one looking backward, my attempt at a mnemonic device to help students both think back to historical precursors shaping the arrival of modern drama, poetry, and the novel, and also think ahead to what these (to the students, “ancient”) texts would lead.  We went from Wycherley’s 1675 The Country Wife to Sheridan’s 1777 School for Scandal, from Wordsworth and Coleridge’s 1798 Lyrical Ballads to Shelley’s 1818 Frankenstein, finally arriving at Ibsen’s 1879 A Doll’s House.  Saying when, exactly, the modern world materialized is, of course, an academic debate shifting over time.  When I was in graduate school in the late 1970’s/early 1980’s, the historical period in which I specialized was mostly known as the Renaissance, a label looking backward to the “rebirth” and influence of the re-discovered classical world.  The Renaissance was, however, soon re-branded as “early modern,” looking forward from those early texts toward what was to come.

    Goldenrod and grasses at Gnawwood

    Having slipped the surly bonds of academia, I’ve been feeling pretty Janus-faced myself of late.  Partly I’ve been looking forward, among other things, to the new cultural season approaching; I’ve gotten my 2024 calendars and filled in dates to avoid double-booking upcoming performances in Boston and environs.  I‘ve counted down the payments left before our home’s mortgage is paid off, and renewed my driver’s license for another five years.  But looking forward also means thinking about the “mort” in mortgage, lists of things to do, and some things one must do, while there is still time.  My new driver’s license will expire in 2028, though because I renewed online, the photo on it remains, Dorian Gray-like, the same.  What’s my expiry date, I wonder?  Tonight is the first super blue moon since 2009, and the next won’t occur until 2037.  Actuarial tables suggest I’ll still be around in 14 more years, but in what condition?  I’ve come a long way from What Color is Your Parachute; now the parachute I most often contemplate has a lot more to do with being mortal, and bailing out when the time is right.

    Hope to view a super blue moon like this tonight

    Still, this day has given me reason to be less morbid.  My house cleaner Sarah called this morning to say that her truly malevolent landlord has been bested by the redoubtable former NH district court judge Atty. Bill Shaheen, who took her case and stood up for Sarah pro bono.  Bobbie at Regan Electric called to let me know I could pick up the ginger jar lamp I’d had since 1974, now endowed with a new switch; I wouldn’t have to discard it for lack of anyone still willing to make that simple repair (thank you, Charlie, who rescued me from the much less accommodating Rockingham Electric).  My ailing sister and her family in Safety Harbor suffered no harm from Hurricane Idalia, which last night seemed so threatening.  And my former International Research Opportunities Program student, Procheta, responded to my happy birthday wishes from the beaches at Harihareshwar and Aravi in Maharashtra, India with both photos of him and his wife Sugandha on holiday at the shore and a shot of the birthday cake with which Sugandha surprised the birthday boy sitting improbably on the dunes.  Procheta’s delight, shared simultaneously with me via WhatsApp (which Procheta taught me to use back when I attended their Bengaluru wedding in 2019), brought back the enormous joy I felt then, a gift of his family’s extraordinary hospitality as I visited beautiful Karnataka on my solo passage to and from India.

    Sugandha and Procheta’s wedding, Bengaluru, 22 Dec 2019
    Birthday Boy Procheta and Sugandha visit the Indian shore, 30 August 2023

    Still weirdly attached to Tom Hanks thanks to my recent absurdly blissful dream about him, I’ve been working my way through his extensive filmography these past few nights:  Philadelphia, Captain Phillips, and, last night, Cast Away.  I’d forgotten that the film is NOT titled Castaway, and so missed the enormous importance of that caesura.  The Hanks character was indeed cast away, but finally did NOT despair, but rather made the best use of what WAS cast away (ice skates, the memorable Wilson, and the love of his life), including the angel-winged package that “saved his life” and led him to the hopeful crossroad in the last frame of the film.  See this film, Dear Reader.  Well worth re-visiting.

    Hanks as Chuck Noland in the 2000 Zemeckis film

    In my darker mood earlier in the week, I’d been thinking of another script, Tennessee Williams’s 1961 play Night of the Iguana and the 1964 film John Huston made of it, most specifically the poem it contains that I was surprised to discover I had mostly memorized:

    How calmly does the olive branch
    Observe the sky begin to blanch
    Without a cry, without a prayer
    With no betrayal of despair

    Some time while light obscures the tree
    The zenith of its life will be
    Gone past forever
    And from thence
    A second history will commence

    A chronicle no longer gold
    A bargaining with mist and mold
    And finally the broken stem
    The plummeting to earth, and then

    An intercourse not well designed
    For beings of a golden kind
    Whose native green must arch above
    The earth’s obscene corrupting love

    And still the ripe fruit and the branch
    Observe the sky begin to blanch
    Without a cry, without a prayer
    With no betrayal of despair

    Oh courage! Could you not as well
    Select a second place to dwell
    Not only in that golden tree
    But in the frightened heart of me?

    Yes, the darkness falls earlier now as we reach September, and what’s to come is still unsure.  But there’s great pleasure both in looking back and looking forward—to the ties that bind over time and distance, and to the coming beauty of another New England autumn.

    The other day I discovered that my Silver Brocade bromeliad, which last bloomed at David’s memorial in October 2019, had found a reason to bloom again.  No betrayal of despair there.  Carpe diem.

    Happy Birthday, Procheta!

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  • Birthday Party

    21 August 2023

    My friend Stephanie’s idea of a birthday party: give gifts of Byrne and Carlson chocolate to her guests

    For a decade now, I’ve been the happy beneficiary of my friend and former colleague in the UNH English department Stephanie’s penchant for celebrating her birthday in generous high style.  Over these many years, Steph has introduced me to some of Maine’s finest summer retreats, and this time it was the White Barn Inn in Kennebunk.

    Among the many delights of the occasion was the chance to meet new folks and share their insights, with Stephanie hospitably guiding conversation.  This year she proposed a round table sharing of lessons learned in the past year, with her leading off:  the value of NOT pushing through when one is really tired.  Friend Susan provided the corollary:  the mistakes one makes when one attempts to carry on while exhausted create many more problems than simply deferring a task until rest “knits the raveled sleeve of care” (that’s Macbeth, not Sue, but you get the picture).

    The seasonally planted picture window view at the White Barn

    Steph proposed that students don’t mind waiting another day for return of their papers; Sue pointed out that NOT running over a wheel stop in a parking lot is a course preferable to driving on when too tired.

    White Barn Bar Still Life

    I suspect I would not have left the bathtub telephone shower head in the “on” position–and thus treating the library below to a cascade that threatened the Steinway and called for major ceiling and wall restoration–had I not tried to pursue chores on the morning after a compromised sleep.  BTW, kudos to AAA insurance and the team that promptly set that stupid mistake right.

    Favorite dish: Strawberry Pavlova Sundae

    I learned from Rebecca that it’s wise to keep checking the Portsmouth Music Hall site even when an event is sold out, as sometimes tickets are returned (and with this intel I subsequently scored a seat to hear Heather Cox Richardson on 29 September).  Rebecca and her mom Marsha also recommended Québec City as a getaway destination only six hours’ drive away.  So noted!

    An inviting pool–for guests only
    Mandevillas and hydrangeas abound

    Most of all, Monday’s gathering reminded me of the joy a blithe spirit like Stephanie’s can spread, a prompt to spend more time in good company.

    Birthday Girl Stephanie, Ken, Susan, and Linda enjoy the day

    On the way home, I re-discovered beautiful Parsons Beach just off Route 9; the hike in makes the view worthwhile, though parking is nearly impossible–as perhaps the location of the causeway-side “Suggestion Box” makes clear.  Best to wait till off season, I suppose.

    Parson’s Beach Suggestion Box and Attendant

    Back home, the grass needed mowing, and my bug-proof ensemble seemed to fascinate the dragonfly who hovered momentarily before my nose; trying to figure out the alien being, perhaps?

    Staying un-bugged

    That pleasant chore accomplished, I found the gratifying charm of Stephanie’s birthday party lingered on well into the night.  Happy New Year, Dear Friend!

    So New England, the White Barn

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  • Thanks, Mr. Hanks

    22 August 2023

    Young Tom Hanks, image from the 2014 Kennedy Center Honors

    Melissa Kirsch had a nice NYT piece last Saturday morning on “post-vacation clarity,” the fresh perspective one brings home from even a little time away from one’s accustomed place and routine.  But I owe the fresh perspective I woke with that morning to Tom Hanks, or at least to the Tom Hanks onto whom I’ve projected another persona, the one who inspired the giddy, “On the Street Where You Live,” I’m-in-love-and-miracle-of-miracles-he’s-in-love-with-me, “corny as Kansas in August” elation I felt for the only time in my life when in the fall of 1990 my then-colleague, later-husband, now four years gone, followed me home from the British Library to sit at the wobbly table in the kitchen of my rented Balcombe Street flat to declare he was helplessly and forever in love with me. 

    So, what has Tom Hanks to do with this delight redux?  Well, I’d just finished reading Hank’s new novel, The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece, which is a lot of fun.  And—like most people—I’ve always enjoyed Hanks’s performance in all the many films of his I’ve seen.  But more importantly, whenever I’ve seen or heard Hanks being Hanks—on Letterman’s show, giving a commencement address, or substituting for Peter Segal on the NPR game show Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me—I’ve not only registered his quick, well spoken, intelligent wit, but a mischievous glint in his hazel eyes that reminds me of my David, a look a mutual friend of ours once described as “good-naturedly diabolical.”

    While not fully subscribing to the accuracy of horoscopes, when I first learned that my David’s birthday was 13 July, my only thought was “Oh, oh,” as the only serious boyfriend I’d had before—ever since known as the Bad Boyfriend—was born on 15 July.  So I wasn’t surprised when after Saturday morning’s crazy, absurd-but-exhilarating dream, I learned Hanks’s birthday is 9 July.  Another Cancer.  Check.

    Most details of my just-barely asleep fantasy of unexpectedly, impossibly finding true love with Tom Hanks (!) faded soon after waking.  But still, till day’s end, the afterglow remained, that tsunami of joy, hope, and gratitude I thought I’d never feel again, the rush of dopamine or oxytocin or whatever hormonal endorphins flood the brain at those few very happiest moments of life.  I didn’t know I still had it in me.  But Hanks, playing for a limited engagement and a very private audience the role of my darling David, deliriously in love with me, let me know I did, recovering for one happy day that lightning in a bottle the brain, apparently, can retrieve.

    The other night I watched Jerry Seinfeld and David Letterman interview each other on an episode of Letterman’s My Next Guest Needs No Introduction.  Letterman kept downplaying the worth of what he’d spent his life doing, but Seinfeld wouldn’t let him get away with it.  Giving people joy, even for a little while taking them happily out of usual concerns and worries, Seinfeld insisted, is the best gift one can bestow.  And I think he’s right.

    So. Thanks, Mr. Hanks, for reminding me of the upside of being human, and the imperishable joy of loving and being loved in return.

    The gallabia DSA, c. 1993

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  • August, Strafford County (and Beyond) 17 August 2023

    Gnawwood Blue, with lightning bug

    While swimming laps in UNH’s outdoor pool this morning—my penultimate visit of the season ending tomorrow—I found it (1) boring and (2) hard to keep track of the laps completed.  In the early 80’s I swam laps in the Tulane pool because that seemed the only thing that would quiet my mind after hours of cramming for my doctoral orals:  my head was stuffed with review of Renaissance (now called Early Modern) English literature, my body cramped from hours of sitting in the Howard-Tilton Memorial Library.  (By the way, what does it say about academia that where we once looked back to classical models, we now search earlier literature for intimations of what we have become?  Smacks a bit of narcissistic solipsism, don’t it?)  The pool was tonic then, as it is now, but for different reasons.  Now I go for the exercise, of course, and the delight of watching little kids with their moms, hoping to dispel the quotidian gloom with which I typically awake, especially on yet another of this summer’s too many grey, overcast days.

    Since I returned from Wisconsin at the end of July, I’ve been very much aware of summer’s lease expiring.  Darkness falls much sooner, the goldenrod is in bloom, and we’re past the Perseids’ annual show.  The Lee Market Basket is selling mums now, for Christ’s sake.  Too soon, too soon!  Summer treats are whizzing by as quickly as those meteors:  a lovely seaside picnic to watch the first of August’s two full moons rise over the Atlantic, seeing the Barbie movie, having lunch with a former colleague returned to NH from her condo in The Villages, visiting Tanglewood and enjoying the hospitality of new acquaintance formerly at UNH and now happily retired to the Berkshires. 

    Full moon over Great Island, New Castle, NH
    Carol and I as Barbie Girls
    The BSO assembled in the Shed for Stravinsky’s Petrushka (1947 version)
    Luncheon view from Martingale’s Wharf, Portsmouth NH

    None of the big summer projects I meant to tackle are complete, the wet weather less to blame than my own ennui.  I worry for my sister Jane, brought low by seven rounds of debilitating chemotherapy, her signature Blonde Wind hair now all but gone.  My one remaining London friend—yet another widow—wrote yesterday of an amputation that’s left her unable to stand, let alone walk.  And as “back to school” days near, I am both relieved I have no courses to prepare and bereft of purpose.  And I miss my darling David.  Watching the video he shot for my 40th birthday—clever, bawdy, cute, and dear, filled with joyful anticipation of our life ahead—beggars the life I lead now.

    And then there’s the Orange Menace, four indictments in and still leading the party of Lincoln.  HOW IS THIS POSSIBLE??!!  How could the Founders ever have foreseen such a test of their Great Experiment?

    Well, the good news is that Heather Cox Richardson’s coming visit to the Music Hall in Portsmouth where she will flog her new book, Democracy Awakening, sold out as soon as it was announced.  And, to avoid a spiraling dive to despair, I’m taking up my friend Carol’s astute conviction voiced as we sat together anticipating the start of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie:  that movie’s phenomenal success is a Good Sign.

    Margot Robbie as Barbie (Warner Bros./Jaap Buitendijk photo)

    During the past week and a half, Barbie passed the billion-dollar mark at the global box office, and is likely soon to overtake The Super Mario Bros. Movie to become 2023’s highest-grossing movie worldwide.  As Kyle Buchanan noted in the New York Times (16 Aug 2023), “no movie directed by a woman has ever topped the yearly box office, and it’s been well over two decades since a live-action film without any significant action elements became the biggest movie of the year.”  Carol and I had earlier seen Christopher Nolan’s fine Oppenheimer, and the two films’ simultaneous release begs comparison:  the ethically wracked genius become “the destroyer of worlds” (and, as the film reveals, of women, the mistress driven to suicide and the wife to alcohol) vs. the epitome of unattainable perfection doll whose journey outside Barbie Land, where she discovers sexism as Ken discovers the patriarchy, unites an estranged mother and daughter in a quest to make being female possible.  Barbie’s early mistaking a billboard of attractive women for the Supreme Court may be a bitter joke in light of the real Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, but it is Barbie that has bested Oppenheimer at the box office.  As of 13 August, Nolan’s film has grossed a terrific $649 million worldwide, but Barbie has brought in 1.2 billion.  And it is Margot Robbie’s (Barbie’s) zinger of a last line that suggests the political power of female anatomy (no spoiler, I) to swing an election.  We can only hope.  I also predict that the film’s America Ferrera’s (Gloria’s) ferocious feminist philippic on the impossibility of being female will become the most-often rehearsed audition piece for the next year or so.  (Google it, Dear Reader.)

    And why not?  You Go, Girls!

    Another iconic woman saved the day last weekend at Tanglewood, when Yo-Yo Ma, scheduled to play the Shostakovich Cello Concerto No. 1, tested positive for COVID.  So Renée Fleming stepped in to substitute, singing six Strauss songs with orchestra.  She did not disappoint.

    Renée Fleming in the Shed, Andris Nelsons conducting, 13 Aug 2023
    (photo by Hilary Scott)
    Tanglewood Types Picnic on the lawn

    Neither did Susanna Mälkki, conducting the BSO on the previous Saturday night, when pianist Seong-Jin Cho first enchanted the audience with Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 9 in E-flat, K. 271 plus a Chopin encore, and then Mälkki (her assurance at the podium reminiscent of Cate Blanchett’s Tar) absolutely nailed Bartok’s demanding Concerto for Orchestra in a thrilling performance.

    Susanna Mälkki conducting as Seong-Jin Cho plays Mozart, 12 Aug 2023
    (phtoto by Hilary Scott)

    Our generous hosts for the weekend, Gary and Beth, had treated us to a pre-concert stroll through the grounds of Edith Wharton’s mansion, The Mount, with its free display of large-scale sculptures.

    Vicky, Gary, Beth, and Georgeann at The Mount
    ByeongDoo Moon’s I Have Been Dreaming to Be a Tree, stainless steel wire, for sale at The Mount ($110,000)

    The success of Wharton’s career evidenced by the opulence of her Gilded Age estate now for me chimes with the theme to which I’m clinging, floating like Kate Winslet on her Titanic door above my end-o’-season blues:  the prospective hegemony of females.  I’ll even wrap our post-concert stops at the High Lawn Dairy Farm and Olivia’s Overlook into that optimism:  those cows make mighty fine ice cream possible, and Olivia’s got a superb view of the Stockbridge Bowl.

    High Lawn Dairy Farm, Lenox MA
    Blackboard sketch of a High Lawn Cow

    Traffic to and from the Berkshires was heavy and impeded by road work, so much so that sweet baby James Taylor’s “Traffic Jam” kept playing in my mind:

                   I used to think that I was cool

                   Driving around on fossil fuel

                   Then I found what I was doing

                   Was driving down the road to ruin.

    But after such a lovely weekend away, I have much to be grateful for.  Even my favorite sculpture at The Mount, ByeongDoo Moon’s I Have Been Dreaming to Be A Tree, found a living, breathing analog to welcome me back to my very own Strafford County estate.

    Gnawwood Doe, 14 Aug 2023

    It’s good to be home.

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