It was a quiet and uneventful weekend. I think I spent almost the entire time on the front porch, enjoying the breeze and the shade, and the neighbor’s 1980s tunes. How long does it take to clean a grill? Pretty much the entirety of the early 1980s pop catalog.
So no big events, but a host of usual things to make your visit worthwhile. First, the most popular feature on the site, the weekly check on the kitties. They’re doing great.
Phoebe is ready for her closeup.
Poseidon, meanwhile, is laying a trap.
He’s just waiting on someone to spring it.
And here’s the daily check on the chipping away of the Poplar’s Building. It was a 1960s dorm, but that was a bust. And it was a sorority house, another bust. And it lived for a time as a hotel, the first premium hotel here, apparently. And then it was a “research and conference center” before finally becoming administrative offices for the university. It was time for it to go.
But no rush. The big machines didn’t pull any of the building down Friday. No one was even on site, as far as I can tell. They did move that big orange monster today, once.
Most of the day’s effort, though, was on the ground and just out of our view. Maybe they needed to rearrange the rubble, or move some of it off, before the peeling away of the past continues.
I finally finished this book yesterday. It had been my late night reading, slowly peeling the past away of some of the history of American journalism. I’m glad this one is now in the “read” stack. I was ready to move to something else, so, yesterday, it become afternoon reading. Wrapping it up.
You don’t have different books for different times of day? I have books for all manner of different kinds of events and occasions, and it used to be much worse. It used to be as out-of-control as my bookshelves. But I digress.
This book started off on the wrong foot.
How many errors should I accept in a (good) book? Now I want to verify every anecdote and trivial bit.
1. Technically four, but I get it.
2. Missed the date.
3. You never study the messy 1876 election. Close, but no.
4. After two years in NYC. (He spent about a year in Philly.) pic.twitter.com/YqGO9j4Lay— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith) June 27, 2022
But it grew on me over time. I stopped looking for errors and became impressed by some of the people that are in the book.
This part is about Jose Martí, a pioneer of social justice journalism. I have to agree with the authors, Gonzalez and Torres, that Martí’s “dispatches should long ago have accorded him a special place among America’s nineteenth-century newsmen.”
Almost everything he wrote seemed evocative.
There are a lot of stories in this book you’ve never heard of. For example …
“Only months after the US entered World War I, a frightening wave of racial violence rocked the country. The troubles began in East St. Louis in the spring and summer of 1917. The second of those disturbances culminated in one of the worst massacres of blacks in US history.”
Conversely, I grew up learning about the Scottsboro Nine, a 1930s Alabama case. I’d love to know who Ted Poston was talking about here, and who those people wrote for.
I might know some of their bylines by reputation.
Here’s another story I never got in a history class or any other book I’ve read.
The book is filled with a lot of tales of individuals, and some institutional and organizational anecdotes. It tells another, important side of the history of our media ecosystem. It tells of, as they make the point, the sides of American journalism history that were seldom noticed contemporaneously, and haven’t been deeply studied in retropsect. It’s a good book, if you’re interested in this sort of book. And it’s an important book, to be sure. But, and this is just the reader’s perception, I felt like I was reading it for forever.
So I finished that, yesterday, and I started this.
I bought that, and three other of May Sarton’s books, on the strength of this one quote. (Used bookstores offering free shipping are dangerous for my mail carrier and the local delivery folks.)
May Sarton – a poet, novelist and memoirist – sounds like a cyclist, @truebs.
She was born in Belgium … https://t.co/b3zAm53DXE
— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith) July 16, 2022
I googled her, found someone suggested these four memoirs and made it about a third of the way through this one last night. She’s in her mid-40s, her parents just died, and so she’s buying her first home. This is a book about that house, in a small town in New Hampshire because she had to have somewhere to put the sentimental family furniture. Sarton is a poet, but this isn’t sappy or purple. It’s just good writing. She’s visited four houses and then, the fifth house, a rundown 18th century farm, it worked out. She’s writing this memoir eight years on.
“In the end I knew I would have to trust to instinct, not estimates …. What I came back to was that moment of silence, and the oriole. Everything here has been a matter of believing in intangibles, of watching for the signs, of trying to be aware of unseen presences. In the end the oriole tipped the scales.”
And what I’ve said here, what I’ve read in this book and on her Wikipedia page are all I know about May Sarton. And, now, today, this:
May Sarton is a writer that one grows into. One can read her when young, but if one re-reads her later in one’s own maturity, her words take on extra depth and meaning. When I was in my twenties, I discovered her journals and poems, particularly Journal of a Solitude, most likely still her best known book. While I liked it, I moved on. When I re-read Sarton in my early forties, suddenly every word was alive and deeply compelling. I had grown up enough to have caught up with her.
I’m basically Sarton’s contemporary today, but not in the age-is-just-a-number sense. I’m sure I’ll have much more to think about this as I work through the book in the next day or two.
But, first, we have something else to dive into.
We need to keep up with the Re-Listening Project. I am working through all of my old CDs in the car, repeating a project I did a few years ago. Only I didn’t write about it then. Shame on me! So I’m writing about it now. Shame on me! These aren’t reviews, usually. Mostly they’re just memories, or marking the time between good times.
This is strictly chronological, which is to say the order in which I bought all of these things. My discs crosses genres and periods in a haphazard way and there’s no large theme. It is, a whimsy as music should be. And this is purely a pop and rock update.
I bought “Slang” right as it came out, in May of 1996. If you had MTV in the 80s, or a rock station nearby in that same period, you couldn’t escape Def Leppard. They are as much the soundtrack of my early adolescence as anyone could be. We’ll catch back up with some of their earlier work later, when I started replacing old cassettes with replacement discs. (Format changes, am I right?) But this was new, and it was somewhat different. Their sixth album, first in four years, first with Vivian Campbell after Steve Clark died in 1991. Half the band was going through a post-successful rock period in their lives. They were trying to steer away from the first five records, and around grunge. There was a lot going on, and you hear it right away, there’s a sarangi, and other exotic (for them) instrumentation all over the place. It charted at #14 on the Billboard 200 and #5 on their native UK Albums Chart and was certified gold in both countries.
Since I’m doing two of these in this post, just a few selections. The first thing you hear when you load this thing up is “Truth?” Campbell’s sensibilities are an immediate addition here.
Everything on the record is solid to good or better, but it’s not especially cohesive. This is a good record to skip around, which simply does not fit my listening style. I’m a bit of a completist, and will only move over songs that just annoy or embarrass. What is unique about this record, to me, is that each track has a place, you just need the right mood for the moment.
So it was a good car record. I can’t imagine a lot of group listening to this, but I do suspect it got a lot of spins on longer drives. Probably a lot of interstates. The mind was already wandering anyway, right, what’s a little aimless singalong?
This is the ninth track, “Blood Runs Cold” it’s the closest thing I would say that is a bridge from their traditional sound and the themes of this record — and it’s a bit more emo than their glam origins and massive stadium anthems.
Mutt Lange did not produce this record, and that is how this song made it on the finished project. Not that it’s bad, but Pearl of Euphoria is just … different.
Just before Def Leppard put that on shelves, Hootie & the Blowfish released their second album, “Fairweather Johnson.” And if you couldn’t avoid Lep in the 80s, everyone within earshot of a pop, alt, rock, MOR or adult AC station was getting stalked by Hootie in the mid-1990s.
I still really, really enjoy Hootie & the Blowfish. Their sophomore effort debuted at the top of the charts, but has only sold 3 million records, but wasn’t the 21-times platinum that their debut was. So, somehow, this is a failure?
The music business is weird.
Just for fun, then, because this is a good record, here are a few of the songs that weren’t singles.
I sang this around the house all weekend. (Sorry, dear.)
When I decided to do the re-listening project again I was confronted by a problem right away. And the solution was, I’m just not ready to play a lot of Nanci Griffith after she passed away (a year ago last Friday). This is, perhaps, the only exception.
I’m pretty sure Darius Rucker growls through part of this song. He’s laying the groundwork for his solo projects, and staying true to his Carolina yell.
There’s a hammond organ throughout this record, and Jim Sonefeld’s wet drum work, and there’s a moment in this track at the end of the record when it seems that all of that, and the jeans and the weather-worn hats and that whole fratastic 1994-1996 counter-to-the-counterculture aesthetic maybe should last forever.
And it would last, for a little while longer, anyway. Music is a weird business.
But the next time we come to this feature, we’ll have some blue-eyed funk, which is still a little weird, a quarter-century on.
