"Sharp, quirky, and occasionally nettlesome", Walking the Berkshires is my personal blog, an eclectic weaving of human narrative, natural history, and other personal passions with the Berkshire and Litchfield Hills as both its backdrop and point of departure. I am interested in how land and people, past and present manifest in the broader landscape and social fabric of our communities. The opinions I express here are mine alone. Never had ads, never will.
There are moments in life when something happens that only you can fully appreciate, when opportunity seems to have crossed your path because whatever it is, you are the one who was meant to find it. At such times, this is your moment to act, no matter how whimsical the impulse or hard it may be to justify to others. My mother once got a black Labrador puppy that way at a school auction, and it is a good thing the hound latched on to my father afterwards because Dad could not imagine what had possessed her to do it.
For me it began with one of those classic parenting moments when the kids were acting up in the back seat and I pronounced sternly that I was turning the car around and heading home unless they knocked it off. To reenforce my threat I turned right when I otherwise would have turned left and headed past the darkened storefronts of our town in Northwest Connnecticut. As I neared the intersection where I had planned to complete the circle and head back in the direction we had been travelling, my partner noticed something unusual poutside the Stateline Auction House and commented; "There's a statue of a beefeater over there." I practically made a U Turn in the intersection. I knew at once what it was. There couldn't be two of them.
Sure enough, it was a carved and painted wooden statue, in the cigar store indian style, of a Yeoman of the tower guard, complete with all the regalia from his halberd to his knee garters. It was cold and dark, so she couldn't give it a thorough inspection, but I was convinced it was the very same statue that had once stood in front of Maggiacomo's liquor store in my hometown, Millbrook NY. And so it turned out to be.
The beefeater was carved in 1976 by artist Peter Wing, who still lives in the area where I grew up. He arrived in Millbrook in 1969 after serving in Viet Nam. Around the time of the bicentennial, Millbrook had at least six of his carved creations in front of various stores. A beefeater was an appropriate choice for the liquor store, and John Kading's Corner News sported a classic cigar store indian. There was a clothing store called The Haberdasher which had a mustachioed gent all in black with a top hat, and the ice cream parlor Jamo's had a victorian beauty, complete with bustle, wearing a dress the color of black raspberry. The deli had some sort of a dwarfish figure rather like a punch and Judy puppet that was straddling a barrel, and the Millbrook Diner had a magnificent ship's figurehead.
Within a few years, some of the stores had closed and the statues went with them. The Diner's figurehead was so weathered that several years ago it was removed and a new one created (though not by Wing) as part of the renovation. I often wondered what became of the other pieces, and never expected to see one of them again, let alone have the opportunity to own it.
But now here it was in all its glory, and from the looks of it it was in remarkably fine shape. Wherever its journey had taken it since it left the liquor store, this beefeater had not been exposed to the elements. I decided that if it could be had for a price that would not ruin me, I would go to the auction and win it.
It turned out that this piece had already been up for auction but had not met its minimum and was not scheduled to be a lot in the next auction either. I asked whether I could know the minimum bid and the woman I spoke with said she thought the auctioneer might be willing to sell it to me for whatever it was.
When she called me back I had already determined the maximum amount I was willing to pay for this extravagant recapturing of a piece of my childhood. I figured that either the minimum bid was much too high, or that maybe it just didn't attract enough interest from local buyers who lacked the association with the piece that I did. Or maybe they had nowhere to put the thing. I prepared myself to be disappointed.
And much to my surprise, the number they gave was less than I feared, and very likely les that it would be worth to the right collector. Today I picked it up, and they tossed in the wooden pedestal they had displayed it with that had just the right colors and came form an old mill in Ansonia, CT. I learned that the auction house had acquired it from an estate sale in Millerton, NY, about midway between here and where it all started in Millbrook. Then I drove it home.
Now there is a cigar store beefeater in my living room, and someday soon I'll contact Peter and let him know that one of his creations has found the right home.
Remember that old game show Concentration, where contestants had to identify familiar words and phrases by deciphering pictures and images riddled with puns and phonetic representations? Well, yesterday for Valentines Day I gave this to my beloved...
Hopelessly romantic, especially for a girl who loves language and has a newly minted PhD.
But don't despair! Just because we are not friends on Facebook (where these have already had their debut) doesn't mean you can't have the fun of trying to crack the code in the brainteasers I offer here for your amusement.
See what you make of these mental calisthenics....
The venerable History Carnival celebrates its 100th edition this month. It all began as a fortnightly affair back in January, 2005, and carried on that way through the first 50 editions. It then shifted to a monthly schedule in April, 2007 and so it continues to this day.
This state of affairs makes it challenging to apply an appropriate commemorative modifier to History Carnival 100. I suppose one might call it something along the lines of the "Demicentimensiversary Edition", but I'm no fan of the tendency in certain academic circles to invent needless, inelegant jargon instead of communicating in clear and lucid prose. All this manages to accomplish is to problematize structural totalities under the rubric of hegemonic hermeneutics, n'est-ce pas? Damn skippy. History Carnival 100 it is.
Here at Walking the Berkshires, we serve up history the way we like our single malt: neat, with plenty of smoke and peat and a dry lingering tail. Some light agitation helps to bring out all the subtle notes and complexity: less a kick in the jaw than warm oil on the tongue...
Excuse me a moment...Mmmm....Ahhh. Caol Ila, 12 Years Old. Right, well, why not help yourself to the beverage of your choice, and we'll get on with the show!
Alternate History: The Good, the Bad, and the Downright Ignorant
I am extremely fond of counterfactual history when it is done well. So much of the actual history has to be right in order for the fabrication to hold together. There is also the possibility that 2nd order counterfactuals stemming from the first might well bring about the same historical outcome from a different direction. Sometimes, no matter where they begin, all roads must inexorably lead to Rome.
One of the first rules of counterfactual hypothesizing is to make as few changes as possible to the conditions leading up to the alternate reality. We are talking about the lack of horseshoe nails, here, not the gun that won't exist until 2419 - cool as that is - as described by the National Museum of American History Blog.
Speaking of events that may yet come to pass, the question of whether there should be a new monument to Virginia State troops at Antietam is the subject of a fascinating post at Kevin Levin's Civil War Memory. Brian Schoeneman, a candidate for elected office in the Virginia House of Delegates, gamely weighs in at several points during an extensive comment thread - every bit as interesting as the post itself - in support of his campaign pledge to make this happen.
An excellent example of alternate history done right is featured this month at Today in Alternate History, which speculates on what might have been, if only Austria's Archduke Franz Ferdinand had avoided assassination in 1914. Would you believe resurgent Hapsburgs, giving rise by 1930 to a "Triple Monarchy of Austria-Hungary-Slavonia, Turkey, and a docile but resource-rich Romanov Russia under the frail hemophiliac Tsar Alexander IV"?
Certainly that is more believable than some of the self-deceptive mangling of American history perpetrated recently by some of the most prominent faces of the Tea Party movement. I felt compelled to offer these candidates for the highest office in the land a helpful multiple choice quiz on our Revolutionary history, but J. L. Bell of Boston 1775 corrects the record on Sarah Palin's mistatements about the Midnight Rider with far more class and less snark than I could muster. Quoth he;
"So did Palin share a correct and uncommonly knowledgeable interpretation of Revere’s ride? Or was she correct only in the way that a stopped clock is correct if you look at it in exactly the right way and ignore it a second later? That argument might have raged forever, but then someone came along and made it impossible to maintain that Palin enjoys a detailed, accurate understanding of the start of the Revolutionary War. That person was Sarah Palin."
"...in his Houston speech to the Republican National Convention, Ronald Reagan fell for one of the great hoaxes of American history, surpassed in taking people in only by H.L. Mencken`s enchanting fable about Millard Fillmore’s installing the first bathtub in the White House,” Schlesinger wrote. “The author of the less than immortal words Lincoln never said was an ex-clergyman from Erie, Pa., named William J.H. Boetcker.”
Airminded examines British media claims during WWII that RAF precision bombing in reprisal for the Blitz was morally and technically superior to indiscriminate Luftwaffe bombing, and finds them wanting:
"Nearly everything in these articles is, at best, wishful thinking. Bomber Command's aircrew may as well have shed their bombs as aimed them, for all the difference it made: as the Butt Report revealed the following year, only one in four aircraft dropping bombs over Germany did so within five miles of their target point. The intention was 'accurate bombing', but the effect was indiscriminate (when the bombs didn't fall on open countryside, that is, which most of them did)...as things were, it's just not possible that what the RAF was doing to Germany in late 1940 was more effective (in any sense) than what the Luftwaffe was doing to Britain."
Still, for my money, if your history is going to be bad, it might as well be entertaining.
"This is a history that gets overlooked or ignored because of recent debates in the West over garments-as-oppression for other women–you know, Afghani women in burkhas, or other Muslim women covered by the hijab or la voile. As though Western women’s clothing has never been an issue in their citizenship or their feminism!"
And then we have certain minted pneumismatic artifacts of scholarly interest blogged about at Hypervocal. Be forewarned that these may be considered NSFW in some quarters. Are they ancient Roman brothel tokens, or possibly pornographic gaming pieces? At right, a proposed design for a modern token, suitable for use by disgraced US Congressmen in exchange for sexting services, appropriately priced at "sex asses", if I remember my High School Latin.
(I'm going to go out on a limb here and predict that certain internet search terms taken out of context from the preceding paragraph are going to single handedly make History Carnival 100 the most heavily visited edition of all time. Just imagine if I had included extended pasages from The Satyricon...)
Blinding Me With Science
It seems appropriate at this point to bring up the subject of censorship. Take, for example, the history of the active suppression of various lines of scientific inquiry. There have been a number of mutually sustaining blog discussions this month on this topic, including one at Christopher M Luna that opines;
"the tendency to label pre-nineteenth century thinkers as scientists created the “possibility of a false impression that science is somehow eternal, separate from the people who practiced it, just waiting to be revealed” and that such an impression could lead to “a problematic faith in progress, a misunderstanding of the scientific method (as though it is static or eternal), and, perhaps most popular these days, a mischaracterization of the interaction between people investigating the natural world and religion."
"The heliocentric hypothesis says that heliocentricity offers a possible model to explain the observed motion of the planets; it says nothing about the truth-value of this model. The heliocentric theory says that the universe is in reality heliocentric. In 1616 the Church banned the heliocentric theory but not the hypothesis. This might at first seem like splitting hairs but in reality it is a very important distinction."
In a similar vein, Jeannie at Tripbaseblog offers her picks for the 8 Most Inspiring American Speeches of All Time and presents their settings as potential history tourism destinations. I confess I would not have thought to include Swami Vivekananda in this lineup, but I wouldn't mind a visit to Chicago (when the Cubbies are in town).
Thomas Dixon's The History of Emotion's blog delves into emotional animals in history and offers up a 1705 account of a weeping horse in Augsberg. I'll see your horse and raise you a Beagle - Schultz's, not Darwin's.
Reading and Misreading
Sandusky Library/Follett House Museum posts at Sandusky History about The Prisoner's Farewell by Irl Hicks, a confederate POW, who upon release at war's end was selected to give a Valedictory Address to the Young Men's Christian Association of Johnson's Island Ohio.
Anchora discusses the relationship between the use of inverted commas in early modern texts as commonplace markers and Kindle's "popular highlights" feature. Here's mine from hers;
"Once you become aware of the significance of inverted commas in early modern books, though, you will never read them the same way again -- it opens up an entirely new (if, perhaps, still familiar to us) way of reading in which texts are mined for pithy, quotable passages."
Mark Liberman at Language Log takes his shots at the media bias toward "sensationalism, conflict and laziness" and offers up this post entitled "A Reading Comprehension Test". Are you smarter than the designers of this American History test for 12th graders, the educational expert who assessed its results, and the news outlets that covered those findings?
"My recent engagement with the wonderful world of blogs and Twitter has certainly shown me both more interest in and more misused history of science than I had previously come across. (I do not feel, in some cases, that misuse is too strong a word. What the Tea Party do to 18th-century American history, supporters of ID do to Darwin and both sides in the arguments about what Christianity has and has not done for science tend to do to the whole history of Western science.) "
Once again, the comment thread is as thought provoking as the post itself.
Frank Jacobs is Mapping Bloomsday in his Strange Maps blog at Big Think.
"This map is not much help in reconstructing that walk, but it does capture the elementary narrative structure of Ulysses. And it does so in that perennial favourite of schematic itineraries, Harry Beck’s London Underground map."
Ralph Luker kindly passed along this highly visual post by Lili Loufborrow writing at the Hairpin concerning women with books they're not reading in art. Mind you, El Greco's Penitent Magdalen has one heck of a Golgotha paperweight blocking her view. I suspect that Christiane Inman's 2009 Forbidden Fruit: A History of Women and Books in Art , described as "a history of women's literacy, and the social forces that often opposed it", may offer a helpful corollary for those with interest in pursuing this topic further.
The History of England gets a fix on the Anglo Saxon World View. I was particularly struck by the following citation attributed to Louise C., participating in a discussion at Historum Forum;
'A mappa mundi is a depiction of the world as a place of experiences, of human history, of notions and knowledge. It's more like an encyclopedia. It's certainly not - and was never intended to be - a chart to be followed by travellers"
History and the Sock Merchant explores Dejima: the 'Deep Space Nine' of Feudal Japan that was "the single place of direct trade and exchange between Japan and the outside world during the Edo period (1603 - 1868)."
"The volunteers I was working with started turning up some startling items amid the field reports and correspondence—pulp magazines from the 1930s, newspaper clippings with headlines straight out of the era of yellow journalism, and gruesome photos of dead bodies...And what a story it turns out to be! It has everything you’d expect (and wouldn’t expect!) from a Smithsonian expedition to tropical seas—exotic islands, fascinating wild fauna, stout-hearted scientists, a love triangle, and, very likely, murder.."
Looks like excellent beach reading. In other mysterious museum news, Galt Museum & Archives blog has one concerning Miss Edith Kirk, an artist "who came from an influential family in Yorkshire, travelled to remote towns in western Canada and then settled in Lethbridge. We don’t know why she left England, nor how she would find herself in the far northern reaches of British Columbia. Trying to fill in the many gaps of her life is an interesting challenge."
ThinkShop explores Joris Ivens and the Legend of Indonesia Calling, a film about the struggle for Indonesian self determination after WII that few saw at the time but which had an impact that was felt by many.
"By the mid-1960s Indonesia Calling had become a film that had a growing following in Holland, long before it had an audience. This made it unique in the history of the cinema. In its symbolic form it intervened in the historical process, shaping memory and providing a site for the articulation of diametrically opposing approaches to the national, and indeed international, past. The facticity of the film become tangential to it most significant impact. The film as fact had been replaced by the film as signifier."
HSP's Hidden Histories takes us out on an uplifting note with selections from a useful but often underutilized historical resource: the 1850-1880 US Mortality Schedules. Alas for the likes of poor William Shuler, age 54 , who died in June of 1869 in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, Norriton Township, "while disinterring a dead body in {a} Cemetery, having a cut on his finger, had his blood poisoned, from which he died."
This concludes History Carnival 100, brought to you this month by the Roman numeral C, and respectfully submitted by your most humble and obedient servant, a sometimes Continental in the recreated 1st New Jersey Regiment who on occasion even manages to go Walking the Berkshires. The History Carnival returns in August and you could be the host! Trust me, Sharon makes it easy and it's much more fun than your viva or junior prom ever were.
The rest of you may submit nominations here or follow along on Twitter (@historycarnival). Now if you'll excuse me, I need to see a man about a ray gun. I'm leaving the Brown Bess at home for my next reenactment. Consider this my warning to the British, à la Palin's Revere; "You are not going to take our atomic pistols!"
There used to be a much closer connection between formerly all-male Haverford College and the women of Bryn Mawr just a short stroll out the Main Line. Even in my day, when Haverford was co-ed with a vengeance, the bi-college identity was inclusive enough for there to be room for that species of male, of which I was a proud member, known as the Bryn Man, who gravitated toward the Bryn Mawr vibe.
The two institutions and their student bodies have fewer interstices today, which I consider a great shame, yet the pulse of that dynamic tension and affection of old still beats when both colleges invite their Alums back on the same weekend, and so I knew that the first night of my reunion I would spend at the Bryn Mawr Step Sing. I also suspected that when duty called, I would not hesitate to answer, but more on that in a moment.
Step Sings are important and beloved rituals at Bryn Mawr, as indeed they were in my mother and grandmother's days at another of the Seven Sisters. Classes with their distinctive owl lanterns convene under the direction of their respective songs-mistresses about the Senior Steps on the side of Taylor Hall. They draw from a songbook that includes generational anthems, rounds and ribaldries, and often punctuated by the college cheer invoking the Goddess Athena:
Anassa kata, kalo kale,
Ia ia ia Nike,
Bryn Mawr, Bryn Mawr, Bryn Mawr!
There is a Haverford rejoinder, cribbed from Jabberwocky - "O frabjous Day! Calooh, Callay!" - but there are few now who remember it.
At the Step Sing last Friday, I arrived fashionably late with a Mawrter for company, only to find "the precession had proceeded according to precedent" and thus had not yet gotten underway. There were hundreds of alumnae and their friends and families, including children swirling glow sticks and more than a few clinking glasses. We knew it was going to be an eventful evening when the class of 1940 got the ball rolling in spectacular fashion. A gray haired nonagenarian in a short skirt with long woolen stockings of some indeterminate hue and wearing her glow stick like a torc gave a rousing rendition of a song from her youth about snorting cocaine.
We thought that would be hard to top. I mentioned that in 10 years or so the class songs would be by Lady Gaga instead of Paul Simon or the Indigo Girls, and right on cue two songs-mistresses did a 4 bar intro of Poker Face. But there was also a rendition of Haverford Harry, which I have taken the liberty of sharing here in full courtesy of the Class of 1971 Songbook:
Haverford Harry
The boy that I marry will have to be
A hermit, neurotic, and wear a goatee,
A Haverfurdian.
He'll be arty and smarty and smell of raw gin.
His hair will be stringy and shoulder length.
He'll snow all the girls with his sheer brute strength.
He's a nudist, a Zen Buddhist,
And his social deportment's the crudest.
His room will be cluttered with sculpture weird.
His chin will be covered with unshaved beard.
He's terrific, he's prolific,
His demands and desires quite specific.
He seems to be haunted with some strange hex,
A complex concerning that thing called sex.
He's sublime-o, what a wine-o,
For some young thing from Shipley, divine-o.
So a Haverford Harry the boy I marry must be ... inevitably!
When they had finished, the mistress of ceremonies noted that there were also lyrics for Harry's Reply
(though sadly not reproduced in the 1971 songbook), and offered the opportunity for any 'Fords in the audience to come up and sing it. She didn't sound as if she expected any takers, but then, I knew of at least one who knew what to expect and was more than willing.
I waited a beat or two, then walked down the aisle in my panama hat and clad in Haverford's scarlet and black, acknowledging with a slight bow the delighted gasps of "It's Tim!" that came from the vicinity of the BMC class of 1990 section. I confess I was relieved that the statute of limitations on my various youthful indiscretions in Athena's demesne appears to have expired with all long since forgiven or forgotten.
I faced the crowd, accepted a microphone and the lyric sheet, and said something rueful along the lines of "Good God" Then up from my left stepped a fellow 'Ford from the Class of 1980, who I remembered afterward had been the only other person with me when this same scene played out at reunion 15 years ago. We were prepared to brazen through another duet, when another Haverford male came forward, and still others, until we may have been a dozen strong up there and game to give it our best. We shook hands and turned to face the music.
We sang the lines with gusto, and let me tell you it was at least as good sauce for the goose as had been for the gander. I recall one small part that went something along the lines of "She's precocious, hair's atrocious, If you get her in bed she's ferocious" which was a crowd favorite (and after which I could not resist getting the aside "You don't know how right that is...")
The whole thing was a lark and went over very well. Someone from the Alumnae office wanted our names afterwords in case they use any of the photographic evidence. I was greeting throughout the rest of the night with anonymous calls from the darkness of "Haverford Harry, you were great!" It was the very least I could do for Bi-Co relations, aside from love the Mawr and its Mawrters, which I do, I do.
The upcoming edition of CofC will be postponed indefinitely due to a bout of pneumonia that has laid your humble blogger low. This carnival has been great fun to compile, but also requires extra effort by the host because submissions tend to be, shall we say, either light or merely spam. For this reason, I believe we shall give it, and me, a rest for the time being.
If the picture at left whets your whistle, then by all means head on over to the source at Morbid Anatomy.
"The time has come," the Walrus said, "To talk of many things: Of shoes--and ships--and sealing-wax-- Of cabbages--and kings-- And why the sea is boiling hot-- And whether pigs have wings."
- Lewis Carroll: "The Walrus and the Carpenter" (from Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, 1872)
A bit late off the blocks but none the worse for wear, welcome to the 15th Cabinet of Curiosities Blog Carnival, a place where pigs have been known to fly above many a scalding sea.
My tender hearted daughter weeps bitter tears at the fate of Carroll's little oysters, even though you never actually see the moment of their demise in either the original artwork or the Disney version. Sometimes, as Alfred Hitchcock knew full well, what you do not see can make a greater impression on the mind than what you do.
With that in mind, what are we to make of this post and video offered up by Steven Germain at Rough Fractals, which concerns people's reactions to a work of installation art that we never get to see unless we go there ourselves? The Earth Room is 280,000 pounds of earth in a loft in Soho funded in perpetuity, and more than just dirt.
Earline Bradt at Ancestral Notes doesn't know what to make of the hand-wrought and rusty iron artifact that emerged from a backyard excavation. Who puts grooves on a Tomahawk?
Sarge describes the many guises of Kokopelli at American Indian Culture. The goat-footed balloonman whistles far and wee, indeed.
M. Diane Rogers of CanadaGenealogy introduces us to Hannah Maynard : British Columbia Photographer 1862-1912. This remarkable artist "experimented with many photographic techniques and effects – sometimes with almost bizarre or, as some will have it, surreal, results."
Currently in the pipeline is a new Snow Globe to be called "Cognitive Rocket Ship". Inside the Globe is a rocket ship that is about to take off and in the cockpit of the rocket ship sits the pilot (the pilot is a woman - for more about the pilot see the relevant parenthetical below) who is gazing into a Snow Globe of a rocket ship in which sits the pilot looking into a Snow Globe of a rocket ship. There are some technical problems in the manufacturing because the third Snow Globe in a Snow Globe is really, really tiny...
Having recently taken a crash course in delousing - one of the fringe benefits of universal primary school education - I was quite taken by this Bicentennial Cootie Cartoon by Bill Mauldin of Willie and Joe fame.
If "Schaefer is the one beer to have when you're having more than one", then how much Sherwood Premium Cider did Robin's Merry Men have to quaff to produce these sterling results?
Curiositycabi.net is a self-described trove of "bones, skeletons, dust, shadows, misremembering" and a gorgeous assemblage of images to boot.
I am certain I had a flying pig around here somewhere, but that will have to wait for a future edition.
Those of you eagerly awaiting the 15th Edition of Cabinet of Curiosities scheduled for this time slot will have to bear with us while we attend to technical difficulties at the station, including a double dose of pneumonia and head lice that has put our household topsy turvy and precludes any serious attempt at blogging. Rest assured we will endeavor to return you to your regularly scheduled programming as soon as possible
The 15th Cabinet of Curiosities blog carnival will be out in a week. What treasures will you unearth? What stories will unfold? Whatever are we to make of these wierd and wondrous goings on? Drop in next Monday and find out (or send us your finest work for inclusion via the handy submission form.
