The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry is Likely to Move You

THE UNLIKELY PILGRIMAGE OF HAROLD FRY

By Rachel Joyce

Random House, 2012, 978-0812993295

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By outward appearances, Harold Fry is about as ordinary as they come. He lives in Kingsbridge, a small village in the English countryside of Dartmoor, where he spends time in his garden and largely avoiding his wife, Maureen. Harold is the poster boy for what Henry David Thoreau labeled “lives of quiet desperation.” Now an old-age pensioner (retiree), Harold has been the classic “must’nt grumble” Englishman who never made waves, and consequently never made a splash. He dutifully served a tyrannical boss at a local brewery–though he hasn’t had a drink in decades–sired a son who despised him, and managed to be such a disappointment to Maureen that the couple have separate bedrooms. At his own request, he had no retirement party at the brewery–not that anyone would have cared one way or the other.

If you can make such an individual the center of your debut novel and leave readers deeply moved, you’ve got a bright career in front of you. This book was nominated for Britain’s prestigious Man Booker Prize; it didn’t advance to the next round, but Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies, which did win, had better be damned good to make me believe it was more deserving. Harold Fry’s life changes when he gets a letter from Queenie Hennessy, a mousy former colleague he hasn’t seen in over 20 years. It’s essentially a goodbye letter, as Queenie is in a Berwick-upon-Tweed hospice, dying of inoperable cancer. Harold scribbles his condolences and walks down the road toward the postbox… and keeps on walking.

Thus begins Harold’s unlikely pilgrimage. A set of ordinary circumstances leads Harold to believe that he can walk to Berwick, over 600 miles to the north, and that his odyssey will save Queenie. And so Harold walks, an old man wearing a tie, a sports coat, casual trousers, and a pair of boat shoes. The rest of the novel details the people he meets, the questions he ponders, the things he learns, and the unlikely phenomenon he becomes. No one, not even Harold, knows exactly what he hopes to accomplish–maybe it’s just that something had to change, or maybe it’s something more profound. Maybe it’s a miracle.

This unpretentious gem of a novel is miraculous all on its own. It’s about an old man walking, but it’s also about how we lose the things we once held dear and whether it’s possible to recover them, and about the kindness of some strangers and the unutterable vileness of others. It’s about hope and disappointment, dreams and reality, things extraordinary and prosaic, courage and foolishness, and when to remember and when to forget. It’s also the most affecting and deeply moving novel I’ve read in quite some time.—Rob Weir

The Dog Stars Humanizes the Apocalypse

THE DOG STARS

By Peter Heller

Knopf, 2012, ISBN: 978-0307959942

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If you’re a fan of Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic The Road, you’re likely to enjoy Peter Heller’s The Dog Stars. Like McCarthy, Heller sets his novel in the near future, just a few years after the world has gone horribly wrong. In this case, a flu-like pandemic has wiped out much of the world’s population—think the Doomsday scenarios associated with outbreaks such as SARS, AIDS, swine flu, and the West Nile virus. Entire cities die, governments collapse, most wildlife is extinct or endangered, and the law of the jungle prevails. Heller isn’t likely to be elected a future president of the Optimists Society. In his bleak world, survivors do not bond or cooperate; the world degenerates into vicious tribalism. The astute thing to do is kill anyone entering your compound rather than risk that that person is a disease carrier. Moreover, in this Malthusian nightmare in which resources of all sort are dwindling, chances are better that a wayward visitor is part of a murderous gang seeking to capture one’s food and supplies. Or so our protagonist, Hig, is told repeatedly by camo-wearing Bangley, the crusty old coot with whom he shares a fortified compound on the edge of an airport that once served a slice of Colorado Yuppie suburbia.

Bangley knows weaponry like the back of his hand and he’s handy with all manner of tools and machines. He might be a crafty survivalist, a psycho, or a hybrid of both, but if there’s such a thing as an apocalyptic Odd Couple, he and Hig are it. Hig has the heart of a tragic poet. He is haunted by his wife’s death some nine years earlier and yearns for the days in which he fished trout from Colorado streams. There are just two things that keep him going, the companionship of his ageing dog Jasper, and at least ten-years’ worth of usable aero gas for the Cessena he uses to get forage for supplies and search for something, anything, else that might be within a tank full’s range. In fact, he and Jasper take periodic hikes into the mountains, just to smell the pines, shoot the occasional deer, and fish for about all that’s left in the rivers: bottom-dwelling suckers.  Bangley thinks he’s a damned fool, and he might be right.

This is a novel about isolation, loneliness, and the nature of humanity. What is it that makes us human? Bangley thinks it’s a full stomach and a secure perimeter, but Hig is pretty sure that humans need something beyond the mere gratification of physical needs. We pretty much know from the outset that the Cessena is the book’s Chekov’s gun, and that Hig will eventually head out to see if he can rediscover his own humanity. Some of the ensuing adventures are terrifying, some deeply affecting, others highly improbable, and a few a bit hackneyed. But it’s hard to escape thinking about the question that occupies Hig: If life were reduced to its bare rudiments, what would any one of us need to differentiate ourselves from a dog or a trout?

Do I make this book sound a bit like The Road collided with A River Runs Through It? That wouldn’t be entirely inaccurate, but The Dog Stars has enough original spark to make it more than a derivative mash-up. For a post-apocalyptic novel whose title riffs off a star constellation, Jasper, the heavens, and flight (of various sorts) it also contains–dare I say it?–a lot of humanity. –Rob Weir

  

Darlingside a Promising Band

DARLINGSIDE

Pilot Machines

www.darlingside.com

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You might expect wall-to-wall bluegrass from a band with a name such as Darlingside, especially given that it’s a string quintet that features high tenor vocals, cello, mandolin, banjo, guitar, and bass (plus a makeshift drum kit). Don’t get too comfortable with your label, though, as these Pioneer Valley residents also like to plug in their acoustic instruments—including a skeletal cello–and, as one of their songs puts it, “blow the house down.” Darlingside is an impossible-to-pigeonhole ensemble capable of pumping out bluegrass when the mood strikes, but also of venturing into progressive rock and spinning off some classical passages. A lot of the music is atmospheric in the way that musical renegades such as Bela Fleck like to mix it, with vocals subsumed in a thick mix in which frenetic cello, fiddle, and mandolin often punch through the mix. On song ssuch as “The Woods” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tly5ObwBOOo or “Drowning Elvis” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tly5ObwBOOo it’s as if McKendree Spring, a progressive folk band from the 1970s, reappeared and merged with Snow Patrol.  As documented in “The Company We Keep,” Darlingside was a group of friends before it was a band. There is an intuitive ease between instrument and voice that comes from such familiarity, and also moments in which results feel too interior—like a musical moment in which you had to be there to get it. But give the lads props for trying to evolve something unique. There’s plenty here to suggest we are witnessing the first step in what will become a long stride.   

Overlooked Doc on Amish Resurfaces

DEVIL’S PLAYGROUND (2002)

Directed by Lucy Walker

77 mins. PG-13, Documentary

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Quick. Who throws the wildest parties in Indiana? If you answered “the Amish,” you were either: (a) being glib and got lucky, or (b) among the very few Americans who know about the doctrine known as rumspiga, which is fascinatingly documented in Devil’s Playground. I don’t know how I missed this ten-year-old documentary first time around, but thanks to Netflix I finally got around to seeing it. It remains relevant; in a tradition-bound society such as the Amish that freezes time in the pre-electrical days of the late 17^th century, things don’t change very much.

The entire notion of “Amish Gone Wild” would strike most Americans as an oxymoron, but it’s actually quite consistent with Amish theology. The Amish are part of a Reformation tradition known as Anabaptism.  The ana (against) part of that is adult baptism; that is, Anabaptists believe that only informed adults can have conversion experiences—the decision to join (or not join) the church must be a free will decision. There is, strictly speaking, no such thing as being “born” Amish.  At the age of 16, each individual raised in an Amish family is cast adrift and is free to live among the “English” (all non-Amish, no matter their actual ethnic background).  This is the rumspiga, the period of decision-making. There is no set time limit as to when one must decide whether to join Amish society or remain among the English (though most do so within three to five years) and during this period one can do as one wishes. Many Amish-raised adolescents do it all: drugs, booze, premarital sex, smoking, surfing the Internet for porn, wild parties… as if they were first-year college students! An Amish party socks in outsiders from miles around—the music booms (from high-end electronics no less!) and only the hormones flow faster than the booze.

The Devil’s Playground follows several Indiana teens through rumspiga, each keenly aware that a decision to join Amish society means that they must leave behind their current path forever. The film is a piece of documentary anthropology, but it plays like a taut drama. You will find yourself rooting for some of the kids to leave the Amish and others—such as a young man busted for drug-dealing and gang behavior—to save themselves and return to the fold. Most youth do return. One of my critiques of the film is that Walker could have explained better why that decision is made. (We can infer that the ways of the English lose their allure.) Another is that Walker doesn’t explain in much detail how kids with only eight years of education and no visible means of support manage to live among the English at all. But, then again, maybe she couldn’t or shouldn’t. (Once one is in the church, being filmed or even seeing a movie is generally off limits.) Give Walker, as an outsider, props for gaining any sort of access into closed Amish society, and kudos to her film for shedding tiny rays of light on the practice of rumspiga.

If you label yourself as a person who doesn’t like documentaries, do yourself a favor and check this out before you close the book on them. I think you’ll agree that there’s more drama and true emotion in this little gem of a doc than in 99% of the big-budget, no-heart pap emanating from that other closed society in our midst: Hollywood.

New Book Links the Dozens and Rap

This review was originally published in NEPCA Journal and is republished by author permission.

The Dozens: A History of Rap’s Mama. By Elijah Wald. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. ISBN 978-0-19-989450-3

What do you think of this/What do you think of that/Saw your mama’s picture in the dictionary/Beside the word “fat.”

That little snippet of doggerel is all I recall from childhood battles in which the choice was put up your fists or shoot off your mouth. The rule was that if someone bested you verbally, you weren’t allowed to beat them up. That was good news for a scrawny brat such as I, who was better at quick wit than a fast left hook. When I got to college and read folklorist Roger Abrahams, I learned I had been playing a sanitized white version of the Dozens, an African-American insult duel. I probably picked it up from the black kids at my elementary school.

As Elijah Wald, a Los Angeles-based musician and writer, shows, the Dozens are in lots of places you might not expect. Modified versions show up in the poems of Langston Hughes, the novels of Richard Wright and Zora Neale Hurston, and in the black comedy routines of Red Foxx and the white ones of George Carlin. You find the Dozens in the blues repertoires of artists ranging from Jelly Roll Morton and Big Bill Broonzy to Lonnie Johnson and Rudy Ray Moore. And, as Wald’s subtitle suggests, it’s alive and well in contemporary rap and hip-hop.

Lesson one: Don’t assume that surfaces are depth. Remember when Tipper Gore crusaded against obscene music lyrics? She wasn’t the only one. Gangsta rap, in particular, has come under fire for its lascivious language and messages of violence. Gore was right to think that a lot of street prose is painted blue, but she (and other critics) badly misunderstood how rap lyrics function. The surface messages are aggressive, provocative, and salacious, but remember: If you bust a rhyme that can’t be answered and you resort to physical retaliation, you lose. Rappers often defame each other in verse, but these slams seldom result in actual violence.

Wald draws upon the works of anthropologists, folklorists, and music scholars, but he also mines his own extensive knowledge and collection of blues recordings. Adding the latter might well make his book the new standard for studying the Dozens. If it fails on that level, it’s because Wald doubts that one can definitively trace the origins of the Dozens. He suspects it’s a holdover from African traditions, but he’s also aware that his sources have been bowdlerized by both collectors and by community members uncomfortable the content of the Dozens. Wald is on stronger turf when documenting the myriad ways verbal jousting has expressed itself in the African-American community.  Second lesson: Don’t leave this book lying around where young prying eyes can peruse it. The Dozens Wald documents are ribald and raw. One can readily see why the Family Values crowd turns crimson—the imagery is sexually graphic, demeaning, and veers over the edge of a misogynist precipice. But remember lesson one: It’s not meant to be taken literally. The Dozens, whether a schoolyard boast or a rap bust, might be assertions of hyper-masculinity or the cultural coping mechanisms of repressed social groups, but quite often they’re nothing more than a particularly naughty game.

Lesson three: Comedy isn’t pretty. Do the Dozens or rap lyrics make you uncomfortable? Does the answer to that question even matter? Personal views don’t alter the reality of a cultural tradition that’s been around for centuries, whether in the PG-13 versions of childhood bouts such as mine, or in the NC-17 raps of 2 Live Crew. Jay-Z astutely observed that rap shouldn’t be compared to other genres of music because “it’s really most like a sport. Boxing to be exact. The stamina, the one-man army, the combat aspect of it, the ring, the stage…” (185).

Wald’s study has blind spots. He’s open to the charge of being so enamored of the “dirty” Dozens that he sacrifices clever wordplay in favor of the graphic stuff. Folklorists might also take umbrage with eliding the Dozens—which are usually rhymed—with other insult games (snaps, retorts, one-liners). It’s not clear, for example, that “Yo Mama” jokes are truncated versions of the Dozens. (Indeed, I used to steal Groucho Marx zingers if I needed a quick one-and-done snap. Verbal jousts were longer, more complex, and involved more audience engagement.) One also longs for Wald to offer conclusions more substantive than an admission that he isn’t sure why the Dozens have endured. In like fashion, Wald’s downplay of surface content seems overly apologetic in the face of feminist assertions that rap is misogynist. It’s simply hard to ignore that the Dozens often target females and female bodies.

But credit Wald with connecting the dotted notes when it comes to music. If you want to do more than lament the content of hip-hop and rap, you need to learn how to play the Dozens.

Rob Weir 

Jason Myles Goss A Name to Watch For

JASON MYLES GOSS

Radio Dial

Jeswaldo Sounds

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Years ago I heard Jason Myles Goss singing on the streets of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and thought he was the proverbial real deal. Hey, when I’m right, I’m right!  Radio Dial, his fourth album, is the sort you’ll spin once and keep on spinning. Folksingers hit the road a lot, and Goss has apparently seen sides of America where hope and despair are flat mates. There are several semiautobiographical songs about dreamers in down-at-the-heels factory towns. That same bittersweet edges appear elsewhere. “Hospital Shirt” is a song abut coming to terms with cancer, one in which plastic tubes drip medicine, prayers, and reality; “New York City,” captures all that is wonderful, tragic, magical, and terrifying about the Big Apple. A real standout is “Bright Lights,” a boxer’s one shot at either glory or obscurity. This superb record is folk that rocks, courtesy of a crisp backing cast on percussion and electric instruments. Goss still has room to grow as a writer—too many repeated words and fillers—but he is a keen observer who isn’t afraid to plumb life’s barbed depths.--Rob Weir

Sample this superb album at: http://jasonmylesgoss.bandcamp.com/

Andrew Wyeth Weathers Well

Wyeth--"Northern Point"

Remember those halcyon days of youth when one discovery quickly gave way to another? Do you recall the heady rush of experiencing things for the first time? The days when you were such a novice that you thought the bubbles in Lambrusco made it a complex wine? Or that music simply didn’t get any more sophisticated than The Who’s Tommy album? Such things remind us that it’s not always a good idea to revisit our formative experiences. Then again, sometimes we take trips down Memory Lane in which we observe things to the side of the path that we failed to notice on the first stroll.

I confess that I tend to err on the side of nostalgia-avoidance, an experience born from gagging while re-watching too many films I once loved and now see as landfill material. Still, when the Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford opened the exhibit Andrew Wyeth: Looking Beyond, I knew I had to see it before it closed on July 12. Wyeth was my first love in the world of art. You grow up working-class poor, and art is frivolous nonsense for snobs and social climbers. Or so my boyhood self thought. But there was something about the millions of little dry-brush paint slashes on Wyeth’s canvasses that reeled me in. No doubt the soft browns, beige-tinged yellows, and steely grays of his pastoral scenes reminded me of spending time on my grandparents’ farm, in Pennsylvania no less, just a few hours down the road from where Wyeth encamped in Chadds Ford (when he wasn’t summering in Maine). Psychology 101 students could probably make a case that I saw “Christina’s World” about the time I was fixated on devloping a values system that included empathy. So I went to Hartford. Is Andrew Wyeth still my favorite artist? Not by a long shot, but I was delighted to find that I still found pleasure in pictures I hadn’t viewed in decades. So delighted, in fact, that Emily and I hightailed it to Rockland, Maine, this past summer to see more.

Of the two experiences, the Hartford show was more rewarding artistically and Rockland for ambience. The Hartford show had several of Wyeth’s signature works. One of my favorites was “April Wind,” his portrait of James Loper, a black friend, sitting on a log with his coat collar dissolving into his hunched shoulders. Yeah, that’s what early April is like—exactly! There was also the ironically but appropriately titled “Chambered Nautilus,” a shell of a different sort—Wyeth’s  gaunt, hollow-eyed mother-in-law sitting upright on her death bed, her world reduced to faint images lying beyond a tattered gauzy window curtain. There was also “Northern Point,” which was one of the first paintings that taught me that emotion can be communicated through small bits of information. (See above) It’s simply a roofline adorned by a lightening rod with empty coastline looming beyond the bird’s eye view. It’s also everything you need to know about how loneliness feels. But the image that sent us toward Maine was “Christina Olson,” the crippled woman who was the subject of his most famous painting. Here’s she neither young nor posed among sylvan splendor, rather a middle-aged, chisel-faced recluse sitting in a doorway half obscured by shadow. (left)  A metaphor for what we see and what we don’t? For our passages through life? Of dreams deferred? Sure; why not?

One of the larger collections of Wyeth outside of Chadds Ford resides at the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine. There’s even a Wyeth Center there, though last summer’s exhibit was mainly of spectacular muscular images from Rockwell Kent and not-so-inspiring ones from Andrew’s son Jamie. (Confession: I’ve never cared much for Jamie Wyeth’s art. What’s good about it is what he ripped off from the old man and what’s bad about it is what he tried to do that wasn’t ripped off from the old man!) Frankly, many of last summer’s pictures on display at the Farnsworth were underwhelming. Some, in fact, give ammunition to Wyeth critics who say he was a superb draftsman, a decent illustrator, and a mediocre painting. The highlight for me was “Turkey Pond,” which shows a crusty Maine neighbor forcefully striding across an open field. And even it, I must confess, seemed heavy—the left arm unnaturally hinged at the shoulder and almost Popeye-like in deportment. But here’s the highlight--the Farnsworth also owns and operates the Olson home in nearby Cushing, the very one from “Christina’s World,” and the place where the Wyeths often summered.

If you get up that way, do not miss the experience of visiting one of the most ambience-soaked almost-empty homes you’ll ever see. If you’ve ever wondered what inspired Andrew Wyeth’s tiny brush strokes, walk among the fields by the property. Stand at the spot where Christina gazed up the hill at her house. Look at the color and texture of the walls, and it’s like standing inside one of Wyeth’s paintings. Even Christina’s geraniums are there, as is the wavy glass through which Wyeth viewed the outside the world, the weathered boards of the tool shed he so often painted, and the multiple pastel hues of doors found in his work. Go there and let your imagination roam.

So do I think Andrew Wyeth really was an artistic genius? Compared to whom? Bah. Let others do the comparisons. Wyeth painted with a somber palette, but seeing him anew made me happy to recapture some of that revelatory light from the past.—Rob Weir