Cape Cod Journal, Part VI (A Brief Conclusion)

Friday 6/15

The “last day of vacation” strikes with its usual poignancy. The skies are blue, the sun is shining, but we have to head home. This is tough, but on the other hand, my eyes are so irritated from a week of sand, sun, sea, and allergens that I can’t even put my contact lenses in. Add the fact that I can still get just as petulant about being removed from the beach as I did when I was nine years old and it’s probably just as well that we decide to skip the beach entirely, limiting ourselves to one last bookstore run before we hit the road. And where else but the coast of New England do you get to go to great beaches and great bookstores?

This run turns out to be killer. All week long we’ve been driving past a shop just down the road called Isaiah Thomas, located in a large, elegant, clearly “historic,” and spiffily painted old house. So it had already registered as a likely destination, but then last night we read that it had recently been selected as one of the best used bookstores in the region. As much as I like Herridge’s, I see as soon as I walk in that this is in a different league altogether. The place is huge, and every nook and cranny, including the large basement, is stuffed with books. But this is no shabby hodgepodge; the titles have clearly been chosen with care and intelligence, across a great, and rather idiosyncratic, range of subjects and interests. They’re also well priced and mostly in very good or excellent condition. The children’s section is delightful and extensive, sporting a sofa and some very large stuffed animals, including an impressive dragon (if you’ve ever tried to look at books with a kid or kids in tow then you know how important all this is). The browsing is a real lark, and the list of titles actually purchased is only a pale reflection of the fun. I come away with J.H. Prynne’s Poems from Bloodaxe; Ed Sanders’s 1968: A History in Verse; Stanislaw Lem’s Microworlds (a collection of essays); Jack London’s The Sea Wolf (I recently reread Call of the Wild, which is brilliant, but I’ve never read this one); and Theodor Adorno’s Prisms (more essays, priced quite cheaply).

What do the books you buy on vacation say about you? Are they a practical reflection of your real interests or a dream of a different life—the one you try to invent and inhabit during the week you’re away from home? Will you ever get a chance to read all those books? Anyway, Suzanne stocks up on some Judge Dee mysteries, and Nicholas (rather relentlessly guided by us) makes a nice haul of illustrated hardbacks of fairy tales and fables, as well as a good copy of The Wind in the Willows, which is one of those books that Suzanne loved well in childhood but I somehow missed.

Now that I think of it, it isn’t much easier to get me out of a good bookstore (o the possibilities!) than it is to get me off the beach. Nonetheless, we do manage to get on the road at a decent hour and make it home in time to order our traditional Friday night pizza from Pacilio’s down the street. Topped with lobster and clams, of course.

Cape Cod Journal, Part V

Thursday 6/15

They’re calling for showers today, so we skip the beach, drive to Falmouth, and catch the ferry to Martha’s Vineyard. As it turns out, the rain holds off until late afternoon and there are even some breaks of sun, but it stays muggy all day. We make the trip over on The Islander, a pretty large boat, which turns out to have been built in my birthplace, Baltimore, MD, in 1950—so, fourteen years before I was born. The ferry ride is exciting for Nicholas, and there is apparently some sort of car show about to happen on the Vineyard because the hold of the boat is full of all kinds of classic cars in cherry condition, including a silver Rolls Royce. Below decks the engine throbs deafeningly, the hold vibrates, and the smell of gas fumes is strong as we snap a few pics before heading back up into the fresh air.

*

We have been meaning to visit the island for a long time, but as it turns out, we’re rather disappointed. Our friend Andrea has vacationed here for years, renting a house with a bunch of friends, and loves it, and I’m sure that if one knows the island well it yields up its secrets and pleasures. But we are just over for a few hours in Vineyard Haven, the town where our ferry docked (you can also get one to Oak Bluffs, which sounds like it might be more interesting) and the collection of chichi shops just isn’t particularly our scene.

The icecream at Mad Martha’s is good, but the real saving grace, for us, is an excellent bookstore called Bunch of Grapes (yeah, kinda silly). The children’s section is really good, and since Nicholas hasn’t gotten a nap the activity book we pick up turns out to be pretty crucial to our sanity for the next couple of hours. I don’t buy anything (I’m a pretty hard sell when it comes to new books) but copy down some titles as I browse the film and science sections. Film: The Other Hollywood (an, ahem, “oral history” of the porn industry); Death 24 X a Second (new theory book from Laura Mulvey, which I will probably find overblown—but I’m intrigued because I teach a film course called The Art of Time, which keeps coming back to the problem of death whether I want it to or not); Screenwriter’s Masterclass (c’mon, you know you want to write one too); and Lynch on Lynch (what it sounds like, and just as weird as you would think). Science: A Short History of Nearly Everything (I may be the only one who hasn’t read it yet); A People’s History of Science; and Pulse: the Coming Age of Systems and Machines Inspired by Living Things.

*

The long anticipated rain finally comes as we’re catching the five o’clock ferry back, and the ride home is dreary. It’s too wet up on the open-air top deck, so everyone is packed below, where it gets close and muggy real fast. Some local spice is added by a rambunctious crew of workmen making the beery commute back to the mainland after a day’s toil on the island.

Then, surprisingly, though really by now it’s a pattern, the sun breaks out for a last fling as we disembark at Woods Hole (we had parked in Falmouth and taken a shuttle there to catch the boat). We’re only there briefly, and maybe it’s just the sun and getting out into the air, but we find ourselves liking the vibe of Woods Hole better than we liked the Vineyard (or at least Vineyard Haven). We go to a place called Shuckers, sit right by the water, and get an excellent “lobster boil,” which is lobster plus mussels and steamers, for a great price (the Thursday special). There’s nothing quite like slurping seafood close enough to the brine so that you might fall in yourself if you tipple a bit too much wine.

*

Last night I finally punted the John Varley novel which has tormented me all trip, then started salvaging my vacation reading experience by dipping into Thoreau and Chatwin. Thoreau comes, as so often, like a breath of fresh air, though his chastening, relentless, anti-materialism makes me squirm more than it did when I was younger and owned fewer things. And Chatwin is even worse—he doesn’t want to own anything, it seems, and barely manages to establish a small apartment as “A Place to Hang Your Hat,” as the title of one essay has it. Indeed, Chatwin’s “anatomy of restlessness,” makes me so, well, restless, that I go back to Thoreau, as the gentler companion.

Spilling all these words about Cape Cod, about which I know really very little, I take some consolation in the fact that Thoreau had only spent about three weeks on the Cape before he wrote his book. There’s an amusing image, from “The Plains of Nauset” section, of Thoreau and his companion walking along the beach in the pouring rain, reading from their Cape “histories” under cover of an umbrella.

Returning to this book at the advanced age of 42, it strikes me that Thoreau is something of a young smartass here, bemused and ironic about what passes for received wisdom—and yet he’s also a good listener, especially in the classic “Wellfleet Oysterman” chapter, which brims with local lore relayed by his nonagenarian host. Thoreau obviously gets a real kick out of the old geezer (“the merriest old man that we had ever seen”), who can remember back to when he was a lad during the Revolutionary War: “I was a young fellow of sixteen, with my ears wide open; and a fellow of that age, you know, is pretty wide awake, and likes to know everything that’s going on.”

Anyway, Thoreau certainly gets off some good lines, and there is nary a guidebook around these days that can get by without referring to the Cape as “the bare and bended arm of Massachusetts,” where “ a man may stand…and put all of America behind him.” But if you’re going to put America behind you these days, you’d better look over your shoulder now and then.

Interesting that the Cape of Thoreau’s days seems to have been a barren, deforested place (the drearier it was, the better he liked it), a kind of ecological disaster area, even though it did manage to produce some significant crops (particularly corn). I’m sure the place still has its problems, but it seems pretty well forested now, at least to the casual observer, and its various nature preserves and wildlife refuges seem to have reclaimed significant ground, even as development has obviously continued, rapidly. At some point, I guess, people do realize, are forced to realize, that there has to be something left for a place to continue to be a real place—in other words, somewhere you might like to go.

In one passage, Thoreau writes “Generally, the old-fashioned and unpainted houses on the Cape looked more comfortable, as well as picturesque, than the modern and more pretending ones, which were less in harmony with the scenery, and less firmly planted.” And, of course, we still usually feel the same way, only now what was new for Thoreau (his last visit was in 1855) would qualify as pretty old and venerable for us. What is old, if it has lasted, always looks more settled, comfortable, and natural than what is new (and I like my Branford Colonial, from 1820, for just that reason). But we are, after all, continually having to make new things, and if we are a little bit smart, and also lucky, maybe some of the new things will settle, “in their time.” (And one notices now that a lot of the new places are, in fact, in that unpainted, and now famous, “Cape” style that Thoreau liked so much.)

T. is convinced that autumn is the best time to see the Cape. Maybe we’ll try that one of these years.

Cape Cod Journal, Part IV

Wednesday 6/14

You want to explore new territory on vacation but you also want a certain repetition factor so you will have some “sure things” to count on, and so you can get the pleasure of feeling at least a little bit like you know the lay of the land. So today we go back to Nauset, because we had so much fun there on Monday, and particularly because Nicholas was so into “zooming” and “skating.”

When I wrote about that previous visit, I forgot to mention the seals, four of them swimming together with their heads out of the water about twenty yards offshore. Today we see a few more, including a bold, curious fellow who is only about twenty feet offshore, clearly checking out a few human swimmers braving the frigid water to frolic in the surf.

After a while the wind kicks up and our umbrella pops right out of the sand and starts tumbling end over end down the beach. I sprint after it, and it feels kind of good to get the old fast-twitch muscles firing again. I realize I just never sprint any more. Maybe I should take up soccer or tennis again—except for the little matter of my knees…and oh yeah, my back.

*

After the beach we drive up to Wellfleet, on a mission to check out Herridge’s, a wonderful little used bookstore we had been to before. On the way up, with little sparks of recognition flying off various landmarks, it gradually dawns on us that we have left one previous trip to the Cape out of our accounting, so that this is actually our fourth visit rather than our third. The first was maybe fifteen years ago, back when we lived in the South but made semi-annual pilgrimages up to Maine. One year we had detoured over to the Cape, camped in Brewster, and biked the Cape Cod Rail Trail. The next visit, the one we left out, must have been (we decide) the summer of 2001, and we stayed in a little motel just south of Wellfleet. That’s the year we discovered Herridge’s, and then we returned to the store on our third trip, two years ago, when Nicholas was a little over a year old and we stayed in Yarmouth. It’s funny the way the different years can end up fusing and blending and blurring if you don’t keep track (thus, the journal experiment this time).

So today’s bookstore run is our third, and it turns out that the store has changed owners since the last time. It still looks almost exactly the same, but with the addition of a friendly old black lab who greets each new visitor to the store. I come away from this visit with Nohow On, a collection of three of Beckett’s late “novels,” from Grove Press; Tom Clark’s book of poems from Black Sparrow, Like Real People; Bruce Chatwin’s posthumous collection of essays, Anatomy of Restlessness; Susan Minot’s novel Monkeys; and an old paperback of Thoreau’s Cape Cod (because I left my copy at home and want the book with me, even though I probably won’t have a chance to read much of it before we leave). Suzanne has been brushing up on her French a bit, so she picks up a little French/English dictionary and Alain-Fournier’s Le grand Meaulnes. Nicholas scores a few books, too, though the children’s section is rather weak.

For dinner, we stay in Wellfleet and go to the not very creatively named, but very popular, Bookstore and Restaurant. The bookstore is closed when we get there, but the restaurant is open and very good. By now, some serious vacation logyness is setting in so we decide to limit ourselves to appetizers and salads. The littleneck clams in herb and butter broth are fresh, tender, and tasty, but some herb in the mix is not quite to our liking. The mussels in spicy marinara sauce are excellent, and the salads are really exceptional, especially my Caprese with basil and fresh mozzarella.

Cape Cod Journal, Part III

Monday 6/12

We drive north to Orleans and take in two beaches today: Nauset (ocean-side) and Skaket (bay). Spend most of the day at Nauset since Nicholas loves the waves, which were probably the most forceful he has ever seen. We aren’t there for more than ten minutes when a rogue three-footer takes him by surpise, knocking him down and rolling right over him. He pops right out of the water (which is frigid) saying “No lifeguards needed!”

*

Skaket is a return visit, a beach we remember with deep fondness from two summers ago when Nicholas had just begun to walk and run. When the tide is out (we get lucky and hit it that way again today in the late afternoon) there is an immense tidal flat, with tidal pools, sandbar islands, and lots of clear, shallow water to play in. Nicholas makes “ocean cakes” with “lucky mud” and gets in some work on his Frisbee toss, which is not bad at all. It’s clear most of the day, with a few clouds thrown in but also another late breakout for the sun.

*

After the beach, we hit The Lobster Claw in Orleans for the first lobster of the trip, realizing as we pull up that we’ve been there before. The lobsters are excellent—even the claws are sweet, which in my experience is often not the case. I doubt if this place had dark greens in the salad two years ago, but they do now, and that’s progress (the good kind). The elderly couple at the next table are enraptured with Nicholas, and he oblingly spends much of dinner with his neck twisted around to face their table. They have been coming to the Cape for 53 years. She was a schoolteacher, and still has dreams about lessons she meant to teach the kids that she didn’t get around to. Somehow she/they also raised eight kids, six girls and two boys. She gets confused, thinking it’s six boys and two girls, and her husband has to remind her, gently. Later in the meal I hear her asking again, “How many boys was it?”

*

Thinking back to Nauset, in the waves. Nicholas was completely exhilarated, bright-eyed and squealing with pleasure. I had the feeling once again, as I have so many times before, that the beach is a place that makes me feel totally alive and at ease in my skin. Only this time the feeling was refracted through Nicholas, and thereby intensified. We could barely keep him out of the water even after he was shivering like crazy. He talked about letting the waves “zoom” him (can’t wait to teach him to body surf one day), and he particularly liked the sensation of standing still and letting the surf rush past his legs as it receded from the beach. He called this “skating.”

*

Before bed, Suzanne and I get to watch an episode from our “Borg Fan Collective” DVD set, a collection of most of the Star Trek episodes (whatever the show) featuring the Borg. This one is from Voyager, which kicks STNG’s ass.

Tuesday 6/13

We drive south today, to W. Falmouth, and check out Wood Neck beach, which is smallish and lovely, with a real “local” feel (at least now, when we’re not quite into “the season”). This is another stony beach, but the setting is picturesque and mellow, even hushed. A photogenic white-and-grey cumulus cloud bank is piled up to the north in a Maine-like effect (as Suzanne points out), and the water flaunts a few different shades of blue and green. You have to cross two parallel bands—one of broken shells and one of good-sized stones—to get down to the water, but once you’re there it’s shallow and clear, with the same sort of sandy, rippled bottom (no stones) we had over on Skaket yesterday.

*

On the other side of the parking lot is another beach and a little marshy area with a network of tidal pools and streams perfect for small kids. A bunch of families who seem local are hanging out, and several boys of seven or eight are running around with nets catching little crabs and generally playing naturalist/explorer. This is the warmest water we’ve encountered on the Cape so far (the waters at the southern end are warmed by the gulf stream), meaning it’s warm enough, even in June, for us erstwhile Southerners actually to immerse ourselves. Best of all there’s a channel of water maybe three feet deep and eight feet across at its widest that makes a good swimming hole for Nicholas to work on his floating and rudimentary swimming strokes. Some other kids have masks and snorkels and Nicholas is very interested in those.

*

We picnic out on the deck tonight with a nice spread from Roche Brothers, a great supermarket just around the corner. Nicholas and I have a little time before dinner to get outside with the “fat bat” and knock the ball around a little (though he cries if I try to take a turn hitting).

*

I find myself thinking about the different kinds of beaches I have known at different times of my life. From childhood until I was about 22, the beach meant Ocean City, MD. When I was little, before boogie boards existed, my father and I would ride the waves on hard rubber inflatatable rafts (not the soft plastic kind) pumped up to be as stiff as we could possibly make them. I’d drag him back into the water again and again and we’d ride for hours. By the end of the day your eyes would be burning from the salt and your nipples would be rubbed raw from the hard rubber (later causing extreme pain in the shower). Lying in bed at night waiting to go to sleep, tired and happy after a whole day in the water, you’d have a ghost sensation of surf tugging at your legs.

As soon as I graduated from high school I moved to Ocean City with a bunch of friends to work for the summer (and then came back for the next two summers). The beach was still about waves, but also about sun and girls in bikinis. We lived up around 27th street and the beach there was dense with the young, exposed, broiling flesh (sunblock? never heard of it) of college kids down for the summer (we called ourselves “locals” to distinguish ourselves from weekend tourists, conveniently ignoring the existence of the real locals). My friend Wingbat and I spent long hours perfecting the art of bodysurfing—with our arms at our sides and our heads sticking up like periscopes (not blindly down in the water like some fools) we could thrash any wave O.C. had to offer. Occasionally we would use our technique to attempt to meet girls, “accidentally” crashing into them in a pretended loss of control. So many people were clueless about the waves, getting bounced around willy-nilly, that this was somewhat plausible.

After we met in grad school, Suzanne and I took our first vacation together at the Outer Banks, off the coast of North Carolina. Like Cape Cod, this is an exposed spit of land, but the water is much warmer, the beaches are composed of fine, soft sand, and the whole scene was much mellower and more paradisiacal than what I was used to. We camped right on the beach and had sun all week, so that by the end we were heading off the movies, desperate for an escape from its rays.

Our first jobs out of grad school took us to Charleston, SC and we lived just outside the city in Mount Pleasant, near two wonderful islands: The Isle of Palms and Sullivan’s Island. If you wanted a little more “buzz,” with waves, bikinis, snack shop, bars, etc. you went to Isle of Palms. If you wanted a gentler, quieter, more mellow experience you went to Sullivan’s Island. Each was a lot of fun in its own way, but Sullivan’s Island probably left the deeper mark on us, and Suzanne and I still talk about going back for a visit some day. We have some indelible memories of floating in that mild water watching the sunset slowly turn everything pink and gold.

Cape Cod Journal, Part II

Sunday 6/11

Woke up to a bright, sunny morning with a glorious blue sky and white puffy clouds. We head down the road, past the Mashpee National Wildlife Refuge (we’ll have to save that for another trip) to South Cape beach. When we step out on the beach, which is on the “Atlantic” side (though actually it’s Vineyard Sound), it feels a lot more oceany than the Long Island Sound beach near our house in Branford. There’s a steady 20 mph wind blowing that was completely nonexistent back at the condo. Enough to blow away the sleeves of the folding beach chairs if they aren’t weighted down with rocks, and even to tip over the chairs themselves when no one is sitting in them. We layer up with shirts and sweatshirts and determinedly play with Nicholas’s new water wheel for about 10 minutes. Then Nicholas is cold, so he snuggles up in a towel with Suzanne to warm up and I get horizontal and try to absorb a little solar radiation via the few uncovered parts of my body (face, shins, feet). After we’re warm enough we make a few more trips with our pails and get the water wheel spinning vigorously. That achieved, we flee the beach itself and point the van toward the ocean (okay, Sound). Parked about 20 feet from the surf, we put some Marley on the cd player, open the sun roof, and settle in for a “picnic” lunch. In my mind, this officially inaugurates the van as “surf wagon,” a concept which points backward to my days as a beach bum in Ocean City, MD and forward to my anticipated purchase of my first kayak. Anyway, the “surf wagon” thing is important, so I tell Suzanne she has to humor me.

*

In describing lunch I left out all the nagging we had to do to get Nicholas to eat his turkey sandwich. But I also left out the poem he composed as we sat there:

the waves are in the sky
the fish are jumping up and down on the beach
everything’s all mixed up!

I’m a little biased, of course, but I think this is pretty good stuff for three years old.

*

Now the question arises of whether to put in all the potty training adventures this trip has involved so far (and I’m sure there are more to come). Dear Reader, I think I’ll leave them out. But here’s a Cape Cod riddle for you: What kind of canal experiences turbulence but has no boats? Alimentary, my dear Watson.

*

After nap, we head out under overcast skies looking for Sandy Neck Beach in West Barnstable. We possess the usual crude tourist map devoting lavish care to the locations of local businesses but with no concept of scale or proportion. And the little roads on the Cape can be pretty twisty, quite unlike the straight or gently curving lines on the map, so things always seem to end up being farther away than you expect. As we drive, the skies keep darkening, and it’s 4 o’clock by the time we get to the beach (the advantage here being that they stopped charging an entry fee at 3:30). Sandy Neck Beach turns out to be not so sandy, or rather, the sand is buried beneath lots of stones. Since I watched Nicholas while Suzanne got a nap (and Nicholas didn’t) I have earned a solo walk on the beach (we negotiate for “autonomy”), so I head off right away. The initial idea is that I’ll get some exercise, so I set a quick pace at first, but before long I’m sauntering (Thoreau would be proud). The beach may be covered with stones, but it turns out that they are pretty great stones, coming in all sorts of shapes, sizes, and colors. The overcast skies have “rent asunder,” as they used to say, with big rips and tears and pools of blue shining through, and the beach is wide and flat and good for walking if you keep your sandals on. The 20 mph wind from earlier in the day has either died down or never started up over here on the bay side. Soon my pockets are full of stones—milky translucent white, dark purple, pale green, lavender, and so on. Some are big, ovoid, and speckled, like the petrified eggs of some extinct beast. And the bands of clouds in the sky seem to be doing their best to match the grey-white portion of the stony palette, going from translucent white to slate grey to pale ash.

*

When I come back from my walk (just under 30 minutes) I feel like I’ve been somewhere. Nicholas comes running toward me gleefully as I come in sight of the beach towels and my heart leaps. We spend some mellow time hauling water in our pails and dumping it a little ways up the beach for no particular reason. And while I’m taking pictures of Suzanne and Nicholas a thoughtful stranger offers to take one of the three of us. The light starts to get that “magic hour” quality as we head towards dusk, and it’s nearly six by the time we leave the beach for dinner.

*

Trying to remember that poem I composed in my head before we even left for the trip. It was brimming with pre-vacation memory and desire (to paraphrase Eliot) and went something like this:

Pathetic

These red berries, fresh and vivid
in the morning light,
are full of longing.

The crazed hearts of the
seagulls are breaking
overhead.

Even the waves
are just going all to pieces
on the black rocks.

[The title refers to the New Critical principle (actually going back to Ruskin) holding that one should avoid the “pathetic fallacy,” i.e., the tendency to attribute human emotions to animals and things. I had fun violating it, though it’s such a hoary old bugbear I can’t really get much credit for “rebellion.”]

*

After I get done reading bedtime stories to Nicholas, I make a run to the local CVS for supplies. The windows are down, the crickets are chirping, and almost all the shops have closed early for Sunday night. After CVS, I head down the road looking for a gas station, so we’ll be ready to roll in the morning. Riding alone, I get just a pleasurable tinge, or maybe call it an echo, of “lonesome highway” summer melancholy. Back to the condo to do a few dishes, and then Suzanne and I settle in with our vacation books, enjoying the hush.

*

Something very pleasing about working (writing) late at night at a kitchen or dining room table, the day’s bright bustle yielding to the night’s thoughts.

Cape Cod Journal, Part I

Just back from vacationing for a week on Cape Cod, where I kept a journal that I hope to excerpt on the blog in the coming days. I was motivated to keep this journal mostly by the fact that we’ve been to the Cape a few times before but never written anything down, with the result that we tend to get confused about where we’ve been and where we haven’t, what we liked and what we didn’t. This time I wanted to keep it straight--so this is a simple record of a 21st century Cape Cod vacation, with a few observations thrown in for good measure. But Cape Cod, despite its tourist-ification, retains some of its power as an elemental place—a raw spit of land thrust out into the ocean, blasted by wind and sea—and that’s part of its appeal. That means this account is also a little haunted by the question of how, or if, one can have an “authentic,” even “elemental,” experience in the face of all the processing and packaging that goes along, for most of us, with the word “vacation.” Mostly, though, I guess it’s just about finding cool beaches and eating good seafood (and how could I forget going to bookstores?). I couldn't help noticing, though, that even with Starbucks and The Gap just around the corner, the salt air still fills one's lungs, the sky is still blue, and the waves still leap up to meet the eye.

Part I

Friday 6/9

Rainy, just as they called for, and just as it has been all week. Today we leave for the Cape. About 5 hours of packing and the usual mix of excitement and irritation as we try not to forget anything (“Do we have Nicholas’s elephant?”), and to make sure the cats get fed while we’re gone, etc. etc. Finally on the road by 2:30, but at least with the van we have room for all our stuff. The traffic is heavy, and moving pretty slow by the time we hit Providence, so we stop in Fall River for an early dinner (to let the traffic abate) at a place recommended by the AAA guide: Le Page’s. The food is good, and the restaurant is exactly as the guide described—a place that still shows some of its humble beginnings as a fried seafood joint, but that has moved on to some more adventurous fare. My seafood platter in white sauce over linguini is quite fresh and tasty (the mussels are nice and tender), though really swimming in butter. It’s a pleasing foretaste of the sun, salt, and, yes, sand, to come. Suzanne’s clam dish isn’t as good, so I share, and Nicholas enjoys the linguini marinara. There are crayons and a child’s menu to color (very important), and the waitress is friendly in an unforced way and great with Nicholas throughout the meal.

The plan works. When we get back on the road the traffic is moving at a pretty good clip, and we find the place we’re staying, in Mashpee, with no trouble. Nicholas loves the inflatable Winnie the Pooh bed we brought along, but is so excited it’s 10pm before he gets to sleep.

Saturday 6/10

Again, rain, just as they called for, and it stays heavy for most of the day, though we keep hoping for a let-up. Lisa and her three year old son, Ben, good friends we were sorry to leave behind when we moved from MA to CT last year, drive over from Arlington to visit us for the day, and end up sharing the rain. We go to the Children’s Museum in the morning, along with a good portion of all the other cooped-up families on the Cape. It’s a lot of fun for the kids, but there’s a frightful non-stop din as all the kids charge headlong from one activity to another. We’re all surprisingly beat when we leave an hour later. Back to the place for nap time, and I escape to Starbucks at Mashpee Commons (yep, right across from The Gap) for a latte and a precious 45 minutes to read my “getaway” scifi novel. But I have trouble getting into the book, and spend as much time taking in the crowd (or rubber-necking, as my family has always called it) as I do reading. There are so many rainy day shoppers on the loose at the “Commons”—a sprawling “village”-style collection of shops--that I could hardly get the van parked. The book is John Varley’s Titan and I have a lot more trouble getting into the second thirty pages than I did the first thirty.

*
After nap, even though it’s still raining, we decide to check out South Cape Beach (we’ve never stayed on this part of the Cape before). This is one of those cases where it could be fun to stroll a little on the beach in a light drizzle, or it could end up feeling cold, wet, and nasty--but we are propelled by Lisa’s just-here-for-the-day gusto. Last summer I didn’t make it to the ocean at all, though I swam a bit in Long Island Sound, so the crash of the surf exhilarates me. After a little desultory digging in the sand at first, we all take off in a sprint and achieve pure unadulterated beach joy for maybe four minutes. Then Nicholas loses a rock to which he has already developed a tenacious attachment (as only a three year old can), and Ben remembers that he doesn’t really like the water so much. After some tears, we all head rather sulkily back to the van. But parenting has taught us to live for those bursts, so the beach expedition will definitely go down in the mental books marked “fun.”

*

Very good pizza dinner at Zoe’s, in Mashpee Commons (which sprawls over to the other side of the road), and then Lisa and Ben set off for the drive home. Before we get in the van to head back to the condo for the evening, Suzanne, Nicholas, and I meander down a little path through the woods and discover an empty skateboard park. Ignoring the obscene mottos and pictograms provided by the local skatepunks, we all run up and down the ramps. Probably not the thrashingest moves the park has ever seen, but it’s pretty good fun. Remarkably, the sun breaks through the clouds, putting in a last-minute appearance and stirring hope for tomorrow.

In Praise of Netflix

Is it ever going to stop raining? I hope so, since we’re leaving tomorrow for a week’s vacation. Meanwhile, there is an interesting article on Netflix (“What Netflix Could Teach Hollywood”) in yesterday’s NYT that I’m seizing on as a sign of hope in these days of cultural blandification. The author reports on having asked his friends how many Netflix titles they would guess to be in circulation on any given day. Most of those friends, going on the assumption that Americans have rather limited tastes and therefore flock mindlessly to the same old stuff, guessed about 1,000 titles. But it turns out that the real answer is about 35,000 to 40,000, or almost two thirds of all titles ever put on DVD. That’s a pretty great factoid, suggesting a much larger diversity of taste than people are usually given credit for, and Netflix deserves praise for recognizing the potential in stocking the 60,000 or so titles they carry. Other companies haven’t come anywhere close to that (Comcast, for example offers only 800 titles through its video-on-demand service), and thanks to Netflix a lot of tremendously good movies (the article gives the example of Coppola’s nearly disappeared The Conversation) are being rescued from the dustbin of history. Now if only Hollywood would wake up to the fact that it doesn’t have to keep serving us imitations of imitations, that we might, in fact, want to see something vivid, intelligent, and a bit different.

Of course, the article also talks about how a lot of people think Netflix is actually doomed. Let’s hope it’s not.

I have a few subjects in mind that I’d like to tackle when I get back from vacation, including the following:

* Flaubert’s Sentimental Education
* STNG’s Borg and “dirty” technology
* Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
* Palm Beach Story (another great screwball comedy)

Stay tuned!

Thin-Slicing The Awful Truth

Thin-Slicing The Awful Truth

When I was writing about Renoir’s Rules of the Game the other day, I mentioned Cary Grant and Irene Dunne, probably partly because I knew I had their inspired screwball comedy, The Awful Truth (wonderfully directed by Leo McCarey), waiting in my Netflix queue. Anyway, my wife Suzanne and I watched this movie again last night, and I found myself marveling all over again at how good it is, really one of the best screwballs of all time, with both Grant and Dunne in absolute top form. One of the pleasurable things about watching a really good movie that you’ve already seen a bunch of times before is that you have the luxury of savoring the minute details. Once the romantic complications and plot twists and dramatic turns are no longer a surprise, all the sly textural elements and cinematic subtleties can come to the fore. In this case, I found myself focusing on the gloriously refined comedic play between the two leads—the sort of stuff that looks perfectly natural and unstudied but that takes years of schooling and practice to get that way (with the schooling going all the way back to an acrobatic act in vaudeville in Grant’s case). Again and again, my eye was drawn to the quicksilver play of fluctuating facial expression, as one character reacts to the hijinks of the other. The movie is full of reversals, as first one character and then the other gets the upper hand. The guy or gal in the catbird’s seat gets to gloat, the other one is made to squirm, and the wild shifts from squirm to gloat and back again make for a crazy ride. As a director, McCarey is a great practitioner of the “slow burn,” which the critic David Thomson defines as “the deliciously delayed reacton to disaster on the part of the clown.” Here Cary Grant does a kind of reverse slow burn of delectation as he gradually realizes (and he had just been suffering a minute ago) the humiliation Irene Dunne is about to undergo on the dance floor in the company of her new beau from Oklahoma (a very funnily galumphing Ralph Bellamy). After his first dawning awareness sinks in, Grant pulls up a chair closer to the dance floor to watch the spectacle like a member of the audience. And after slipping a tip to the orchestra leader so he’ll play the same number again--thus ensuring a repeat performance--Grant lets out a sigh of perfect contentment that is the exact inversion of the expression of pained disbelief on Dunne’s face as she heads miserably back to dance floor for further torment.

Watching those facial expressions, I thought of Malcolm Gladwell’s sometimes glib but quite fascinating book, Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking, where he talks about our ability, at least at times, to “thin-slice” people and situations, i.e., to make fairly sophisticated and accurate judgments based on very little information (this is not the same as, say, stereotyping, when we use very little information to make bad judgments). One of the book’s strengths is the way it draws on a great range of human experience (art forgery, criminology, tennis, acting, birding, advertising, medical malpractice suits, marriage counseling, and so on), and in one of the its most interesting sections Gladwell talks to a couple of psychologists who have learned to read the often fleeting or covert visible signs of emotion by making use of an elaborate taxonomy of human facial expressions (they have come up with about three thousand meaningful variants).

So would it be possible to construct something like a taxonomy of comedic facial expressions that would explain what makes Grant and Dunne so damn funny in The Awful Truth? I guess this could sound like a reductio ad absurdum of the act of “criticism,” fit only for pedants of the worst sort, but I can imagine the great film critic James Agee taking on a task like that and bringing it exuberantly to life (in fact, it would seem almost like a natural extension of his classic, brilliant essay on “The Golden Age of Film Comedy”). But then again, one could also just forget all about why and go laugh at the movie one more time.

Ursprache, Glottogony, and Weltschmerz

In honor of eighth-grader Katherine Close, who won the National Spelling Bee last night, today’s Word of the Day is Ursprache:

Ur·spra·che ( r shprä )
n.
See protolanguage.
[German : ur-, original (from Middle High German, out of, from Old High German; see ud- in Indo-European roots) + Sprache, language, speech (from Middle High German spr che, from Old High German spr hha).]

pro·to·lan·guage (pr t -l ng gw j)
n.
A language that is the recorded or hypothetical ancestor of another language or group of languages. Also called Ursprache.

Both definitions are from the Free Online Dictionary.

Looking these up on-line led me further, via Wikipedia, to a totally new word for me, Glottogony, meaning “the origin of language”. The Wiki gives a fascinating overview of this complicated subject. Here’s the opening of the article:

“The origin of language (glottogony, glossogeny) is a topic that has been written about for centuries, but the ephemeral nature of speech means that there is almost no data on which to base conclusions on the subject. We know that, at least once during human evolution, a system of verbal communication emerged from proto-linguistic or non-linguistic means of communication, but beyond that little can be said. No current human group, anywhere, speaks a "primitive" or rudimentary language. While existing languages differ in the size and subjects covered in their several lexicons, all human languages possess the grammar and syntax needed, and can invent, translate, or borrow the vocabulary needed to express the full range of their speakers' concepts.
Homo sapiens clearly have an inherent capability for language that is not present in any other species known today. Whether other extinct hominid species, such as Neanderthals, possessed such a capacity is not known. The use of language is one of the most conspicuous and diagnostic traits that distinguish H. sapiens from other animals.”
And with that teaser, I leave it to you whether you want to read more. But I think the subject of the original emergence of language is something I’ll probably be coming back to in the blog.

***

On a side note, I thought it was funny, in a sad kind of way, that the New York Times article on the spelling bee defined the word weltschmerz as “a type of mental depression.” This is a medicalized and trivialized definition of a term that is actually philosophical and literary in origin. Here’s a link to a better definition, which I’m also reproducing below:

“Weltschmerz (from the German language meaning world-pain or world-weariness, see ) is a term coined by the German author Jean Paul and denotes the kind of feeling experienced by someone who understands that the physical reality can never satisfy the demands of the mind. This kind of pessimistic world view was widespread among several romantic authors such as Lord Byron, Giacomo Leopardi, François-René de Chateaubriand, Alfred de Musset, Nikolaus Lenau and Heinrich Heine. It is also used to denote the feeling of sadness when thinking about the evils of the world -- compare empathy, theodicy. The modern meaning of Weltschmerz in the German language is the psychological pain caused by sadness, that can occur when realizing that someone's own weaknesses are caused by the inappropiateness and cruelness of the world and (physical and social) circumstances. Weltschmerz in this meaning can cause depression, resignation and escapism, and can become a mental problem (compare to Hikikomori).”

So after that NYT definition I think I’m starting to feel a little schmerzy myself. Maybe we should have a National Meaning Bee.