Armchair Travel
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
  Bibliophile's Tragic Prophecy Fulfilled
I've been looking over some of the books I picked up this summer at the tag sales and rediscovered this lovely volume calle Fancy This, by Jack Frost. It's a collection of Frost's sketches for the Boston Herald, and besides the lovely artwork, it's full of useful information.

Did you know that the House of Seven Gables actually has eight gables, if you count the gabled doorway to the garden? and that the statue of John Harvard at Harvard is actually a statue of Samuel Hoar, a student who modeled for Daniel French and later served in Congress and as US attorney under Grover Cleveland?

Under a sketch of the gate at Harvard's Widener Library, we hear the sad tale of Harry Elkins Widener, Harvard '07, who had accumulated 3,000 books and, according to Frost, the respect of book collectors throughout America and Europe.

"It was in 1912, after he had attended the Huth sale in London, that he uttered his fateful words," Frost writes. "Tucking a rare second edition of Bacon's essays in his pocket, he turned to a friend and remarked, 'I think I'll take this little Bacon with me and if I am shipwrecked it will go down with me.'"

Now I think if he had knocked on wood, he might have survived making a remark like that, but he didn't, and he didn't.

I don't think I have to tell you the name of the ship he boarded a few days later.

For the record, he was seen helping his mother and her maid into a lifeboat.
 
Monday, February 16, 2009
  Landscape and Material Life

I stumbled upon a delightful book in the stacks of the Jones Library in Amherst called Landscape and Material Life in Franklin County, Massachusetts, 1770-1860 by J. Ritchie Garrison. I

At first it looks like a dry reference work full of charts and graphs of acres tilled, crops raised, orchards planted, barns built, but as you get a sense of the whole work (I've been reading snatches at random) you see that every detail helps complete the picture of what life was really like, right down to the number of barrels of cider each town produced.

There are floor plans of the different kinds of houses and barns, different systems for balancing tillage, pasturage, orchards and woodlots, descriptions of how to grow broom corn and make brooms out of it, and descriptions of the other cash crops inventive Yankees tried, and how well they did with them.

There are drawings of the tools I see today at barn sales and detailed descriptions of the persistent ventures into industry which, despite a lot of failures, eventually led to the county's preeminence in the precision industry in the 1870s.

There are lots of human stories, too, but not the kind that wrap up neatly as they do in fiction. Garrison chooses people who are emblematic of their time like John Wilson (1782-1869), who tried his hand at printing, overseeing the poor, inventing (he patented a plow that didn't sell well), surveying, making brooms and raising silk worms.

Wilson later made a fortune developing land in East Boston and lost it in a land speculation venture in Texas. He worked for Deerfield Academy for a while and in the 1850s he tried a new crop, tobacco, and did pretty well with it.

Now you see tobacco barns all over the valley.

Or John Williams, from a Hatfield family that moved to Dalton who was apprenticed to and later worked for a merchant in Connecticut, sailed to the Indies as a cabin boy, and later started a general store in Conway, which did great for 28 years, and was still doing great when Williams cosigned a loan for his brother-in-law -- nine thousand bucks. Ouch!

Through this wealth of detail, and these aptly chosen examples, what emerges is a real sense of what life was like two centuries ago in the nucleated lowland villages and the upland farms of Franklin County, Massachusetts.

I think historians often focus too much on wars and treaties and changes in government when the real story of human progress is the history of village life through the ages.
 
Friday, February 13, 2009
  Two Cousins Reminiscing Over Granny's Family Album
Last night I attended a remarkable presentation by Charlemont Librarians Bambi Miller and Mary Boehmer at the Deerfield Teachers Center behind Memorial Hall. It was part of a series presented by the Pioneer Valley Institute.

Miller and Boehmer, dressed in hoop skirts and other late 19th century garb, portrayed two cousins, Mary Leavitt and Elizabeth Field, looking over their grandmother's family album and reminiscing.

The Leavitt-Field family was active in the abolitionist movement and the Underground Railroad. The Leavitt brothers had an enormous price on their heads Down South, and the women petitioned the General Court of Massachusetts year after year, and worked along with their African American friends Louisa and Basil Dorsey to wake up America to the evils of slavery.

In 1850 the moderates in the North got it wrong, really wrong, and agreed to the Fugitive Slave Law, requiring Northern states to turn over escaped slaves to their owners, and imposing prison terms, fines and loss of property on anyone aiding an escaped slave. That was the year when Daniel Webster and Henry Clay went from heros to zeros.

Bleep the moderates. They always get it wrong.

Basil Dorsey and eleven other escaped slaves sent a letter to the Northampton newspaper listing their names -- in print! -- and explaining the peril they were in. I'm not sure this would have worked anywhere else, but in Northampton, citizens took up subscriptions to buy the freedom of these brave men and women.

Seems to me that's something a city can really be proud of.

Mary Leavitt and Elizabeth Field read newspaper clippings about this and talked about their family's friendship with the Dorseys.

What a thrilling story, and what a great way to bring it to life! As someone steeped in this kind of stuff, it was delightful to see this complicated history presented in a way that is so accessible to everyone. Two cousins reminiscing over Granny's family album.

Sorry I don't have a picture, but they're putting on another show next week, and I'll take along my camera.
 
Monday, February 09, 2009
  Saving the Last Forests
Deforestation is a political topic as well as an environmental one. The industrialized countries, having done all the deforesting they liked in their own countries, tell poor countries they cannot do the same.

You'd think, considering what's at stake, that the already-deforested countries would pony up some dough to save the last existing forests. To compensate people who would otherwise cut down trees. Not a chance.

This goes beyond carbon offsets, beyond environmental policy, beyond any law made by any country. It concerns the world's ability to breath.

The world's forest have been assaulted during all of modern history, but never so much as they have been during this turn of the century, and the greater part of the most recent devastation has been illegal.

Deforestation is one of those things we hear about, and they sound bad, and we're sorry about them, but we're not sure what it is, exactly, that we can do to stop it.

How about, for starters, not paying for it?

If you buy a product made out of wood, wouldn't you like to know if the wood was harvested legally? I don't know. I'm just guessing.

Well it turns out there are a lot of people who would just as soon you didn't know, and you can find out all about it in an article called The Stolen Forests by Raffi Khatchadourian in the October 8 edition of the New Yorker. I picked it up in the sauna.

It's about the Environmental Investigation Agency, a private agency which is, on a shoestring, doing what the United Nations and the governments of the world should be doing: identifying illegally forested wood and tracing the profit trail through the world's economy, ending, naturally, in a well-known ubiquitous discount store here in the United States. You know who I'm talking about.

So it turns out there damned well is something we can do about it, which is not to buy these products and make it illegal to sell them. This is something governments around the world can do if citizens use cattle prods on them.

It's the only thing that's ever worked.
 
Sunday, February 08, 2009
  Sir Arthur Speaks From Beyond the Grave

I'm having a great time with my latest book, Conan Doyle's Wallet by Patrick McNamara (Garvey Publishing International, Jupiter, Florida).

McNamara is a psychic medium and he had been receiving messages from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle for many years, but knew him only as "a man with a mustache and a pleasant smiling face."

Eventually he figured out it was Conan Doyle, who was a dedicated spiritualist. McNamara was a student of his life and work.

McNamara later buys Sir Arthur's wallet at an auction and they form a closer bond and together they give a very interesting view of the spirit world. I like McNamara's matter-of-fact tone. He knows that most people are going to be skeptical and asks only that the reader keep an open mind.

We know Lucky Lindbergh got a glimpse of the spirit world on his transatlantic flight (See Lucky Lindbergh Communes With the Spirits), but that might have been a hallucination. I know sometimes doing historical research, I have got this tingly feeling, as if Dexter Marsh or Mary Phylinda Dole or Isabella Bird were sending me a tingle of recognition, but that's just a tingle.

What this book teaches -- whether you believe in the spirit world or not -- is that it matters what you think. And what you think is not just what occurs to you. You can direct your thoughts into creative and even inspirational channels.

This is the basis of The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale, which kind of illustrates the same principle with no other-wordly component.

According to McNamara, creative thoughts take on a life of their own, and because so many people have thought about and imagined Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur actually runs into him quite often on the other side. In fact, he says, "There are many thought forms of Sherlock Holmes walking around." Walking? No wings?

Here's a little sample of what Sir Arthur has to say, channeled through a medium named Karl:

"Life has nothing to do with religion... The power of God encompasses everything. It's your attitude that is important. There are many so-called religious people who are not religious or spiritual, but use it to blind people, and bind themselves to dogma and ritual. That is their power base.

"When you come over to spirit, you start to see things exactly as they really are, and some people feel very foolish when they look back. [I'll bet they do!]

"What really matters is the philosophy of love. Maybe love is the wrong word for you to understand. I mean the philosophy of love in tolerance, understanding, and patience of purpose.

"It is not the problem, but how you deal with the problem. Some react to a problem in an angry way, some react with a practical solution, others cannot cope. I must go now..."

Me too.
 
Tuesday, February 03, 2009
  Crocodile Tears - They're Actually Bubbles

Since the 15th century, and probably before that, travelers have observed crocodiles, caymans and alligators weeping as they devoured their victims, and the phrase 'crocodile tears' has become a symbol of insincere grief.


Zoologist Kent Vliet has videotaped these three species while they are eating, and he concludes that they all blow air through their sinuses while they consume their prey, which mixes with moisture from their lacrimal glands and makes bubbles in their eye sockets.


Now you know. This factoid comes from National Wildlife, the magazine of the National Wildlife Foundation.
 
  Vernon's Advice Heeded at Long Last
Back in 2002 my cousin Max was thinking about buying a travel website called GoNOMAD and he asked me what I thought and I repeated some advice my friend Vernon had given me a short while before: "Be bold. Strong unseen forces will work in your favor."

I thought at the time it was Jung, but it turns out it was someone else, I can't remember who. I guess I should ask Vernon to clear that up.

It's a variation of the words Julius Caesar spoke to a boatman who carried him across the Adriatic through Pompey's naval blockade: "Be bold and fear nothing, for the destiny of Caesar rides with you tonight."

Max decided to go for it with GoNOMAD and the rest, as they say, is history.

In that spirit I decided to buy a domain name, caduceusjournal.net, to begin to realize a vision that has been pestering me for many years: a literary journal for the medical profession.

I have run (free) writing groups for many years, and in my work at GoNOMAD, I've had the chance to work with many writers at many different skill levels. Some writers first published on our site have gone on to write for the New York Times and the Atlantic Monthly.

I like to feel I'm carrying on the work of my grandmother's cousin Edmund 'Bunny' Wilson, who brought us F. Scott Fitzgerald, E(a)rnest Hemingway, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and so many others. I love helping people tell good stories.

Do you know someone in the medical profession with a story to tell? Tell them to email me.

There will be articles about the history of medicine and historical features like "Repairing Wounded Gladiators" and "A Doctor in Homespun" and tests of readers' diagnostic skills drawn from history and literature: "What Caused the Plague at Athens?" "What Caused The Death of Ivan Ilych?"

I really can't say this is a bold move on my part, since I have been contemplating it for so long, and since it doesn't cost that much to buy a domain name, but for me it's bold because it means investing a lot of creative energy.

But it dawned on me, while watching a documentary about the Mandelbrot Set, that every web page is a magazine, a little infinity. And that got me thinking.

I've seen so many high-tech slow-loading websites with all kinds of bells and whistles, and I'm actually grateful for that because it makes such a contrast with minimalist, quick-loading pages that don't waste you time or your attention. The Google home page is the classic example. In fact it's paradigmatic!

The paradigm I'm going to use for the Caduceus Journal will be something like the DjoserUSA website. Is that cool, or what?
 
Literary gadfly Stephen Hartshorne writes about books that he finds at flea markets and rummage sales.

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Stephen Hartshorne worked in newspapers and magazines around New England for many years and served as Information Officer in the New Hampshire Senate under Senate President Vesta Roy. He worked as a material handler for nine years at the Yankee Candle Company until the company was taken over by corporate weasels. He is currently the associate editor of GoNOMAD.com, an alternative travel website, which gives him the opportunity to correspond with writers and photographers all over the world. He lives in Sunderland, Massachusetts, with his daughter Sarah, a student at Drew University, and their cat, Dwight D. Eisenmeower. This blog is dedicated to his mom, who made him bookish.

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