October 2026 Music Sarah Jarosz, Carla Gover and Friends, Brad Wolfe, Gray DeLisle , Surrender Hill

 

 

 

The holiday season is sneaking up on us again. As usual, I recommend the gift of music, but not of the fa-la-la variety.

 

First a public service announcement: I have reviewed Holly Lerski on this blog. Holly is British, but like so many artists she was drawn to American-style country music and has been splitting her time between England and Nashville. While she was attending the Americana Awards in Las Vegas, a massive tree fell and destroyed her cabin in Norfolk, England. A GoFundMe page is helping Holly rebuild. 

 

 

If you’re looking for a dynamite gift, you can’t do much better than a Sarah Jarosz release. My personal favorite is her 2011 album Follow Me Down, which I will discuss, but anything you pick from her Sugar Hill or Rounder Records catalogs will delight lucky recipients. Maybe Grammy Awards are handed out cavalierly to well-known pop, rock, and rap stars, but that’s not the case for acoustic artists. Counting her latest (with Aoife O’Donovan and Sara Watkins) Jarosz mow has seven Grammys. Given that she’s just 35, it’s a near certainty that many more will come her deserving way. Follow Me Down was just her second album but it already gave notice that hers was not your grandmother’s bluegrass. Her cover of Dylan’s “Ring Them Bells” dazzles, and she picks up an electric guitar to give a dark folk-rock treatment to “Run Away.” If memory serves, “Annabelle Lee” was the single from this album and Jarosz showed off her banjo skills on that one. If it has strings–guitars, banjo, mandolins, and even the innards of a toy piano– Jarosz plays it and sings like an angel from the hills.

 

 

Speaking of the hills, Williams Branch is Hard to Find is easily my favorite new release. I had the great pleasure of chatting with Kentucky singer/dancer/musician/activist Carla Gover, who produced and performs on the album. It features 17 songs written by Si Kahn, plus interviews snippets. Si is, simply, a decent man. Years ago, he taught me about the Jewish concept of tikkun olam (repairing the world) and has devoted his life, community organizing efforts, and music to that lofty goal. A generation ago, Si was well-known for songs such as “Aragon Mill” and “Gone, Gonna Rise Again.” He’s 82 now and semi-retired, but in good folk fashion passed the baton to one of his acolytes. Gover notes, “Si has long been my hero for his song-crafting and devotion to social justice.” Much of Kahn’s work has taken place in Kentucky’s coal mining regions. This album, which contains lots of songs Kahn has never released, is a tribute to the women of Kentucky and an antidote to stereotypes of Appalachia. It would be safe to say that J.D. Vance is viewed as a carpetbagger in Eastern Kentucky where eight generations of Govers have been raised. Carla reminds us that Vance is from Ohio and has never lived in Appalachia, and that his Hillbilly Elegy has damaged progress in the region by perpetuating stereotypes. As she puts it, Vance denies that “an extractive economy” is to blame for the region’s historical woes, “but, of course, it is.” She likens it “colonialism,” and she’s not wrong. She grew up just 30 minutes from Harlan, site of some of the bloodiest labor battles in American history. Her own father worked in a mine that broke the union and hired scabs. “The bottom line is that when society as a whole views people as ignorant and backward, it’s easy to exploit them.” She’s even irritated by how even liberals “play into the stereotypes.” 

 

Carla Gover

As you might infer, Kahn’s songs are poignant, powerful, and sometimes defiant. Gover sings “Moonshiner’s Daughter,” but it was an abandoned wife making the hootch and an embarrassed runaway daughter who returns to make good: What goes around will come around/And the moonshiner’s daughter/Is the mayor of this town. She also sings the album’s namesake song. Sue Massek has been singing and playing banjo and guitar for over 50 years, so she earns the right to sing, “As I Grow Old with You,” and dulcimer artist Sarah Kate Morgan offers the poignant “Drifting.” “Queen of the Kitchen” is an older Si Kahn composition, but rising star Ella Webster nails her cover. She also assumes a beyond-the-grave strike victim role in “Harlan 1934.” In another incident of folk music’s pass-it-on tradition, 13-year-old Rosie Gardner sings “We Say No” like a polished vet. Maizie Barett, Charity Gilbert, Jeri Katherine Howell, Dawn Milner, and Maddie Rae Wells also add their talents. Overall, the project reminded me of a Works Progress Administration agit-prop play from the 1930s. Not in an old-fashioned way, rather one that speaks to everyday life, work pride, enduring hardship, making music, keeping the faith, women finding their place in the world, hard lives, and hard living. The songs were written by a man, but Si Kahn adds his voice to the distaff call for freedom.

 

 

 

Brad Wolfe is another with an admirable project. Under the moniker Brad Wolfe & The Moon, he has launched a three-part look at what he calls “loss, love, mortality, resilience, and what it means to live fully.” Part one is titled Loss and began when his childhood friend died of cancer at the age of 21. He sang for her at the hospital and when she passed, formed the Sunbeam Foundation to both play music for kids with cancer (and their families) and to raise money for research. But this is not a depressing do-good album. Wolfe investigates loss in numerous forms, including heartache and time’s passage. Mickey Hart is on board, as is Ben Lee, Sara Bareilles, and others– a movable & The Moon, as it were. Wolfe’s voice alone is a comfort for sad times, but the depth of the album is another reward. Try “Why Wait,” a tribute to his grandmother Sally, an Auschwitz survivor who died at 102. You must watch the video to see how Wolfe navigates between hope and sorrow. Its theme is embedded in the rousing porch-party chorus, I woke up today … and remembered I am alive. “Why Wait” is a litany of how to live before the final day. If you are fully alive, it will move you to tears. “Cover You with Flowers” is another mix of sadness and joy” that might make you think Wolfe is the best-adjusted person on the planet! “Champagne Dreams” shifts the focus to relationships, but it too evokes what Kahlil Gibran called, “a tear and a smile.” Okay, more smile on this one, but my overall take on Loss is that it’s a remarkable EP and that Wolfe is what my grandmother called “good people.” Don’t we all need more of them these days?

 

One of the most surprising recent releases comes from Grey DeLisle. I have heard and reviewed material of hers before, but Don’t Turn Around ups the ante for verve and polish. You might know her work as a comedian and/or as a voice on cartoon and animation projects (Scooby Doo for one), but on her latest album the California-born DeLisle emerges as a devotee of a branch of country music known as the Bakersfield sound. It thrived in the 195os and its devotees included Buck Owens, Merle Haggard, Connie Owens (who married and divorced both Buck and Merle), and Dwight Yoakum. It drew upon honky-tonk, early rock n’ roll, and Dust Bowl tunes as a reaction against overly processed Nashville country, though some of those Bakersfield concert costumes made Dolly Parton look like she was dressing for church. The Bakersfield sound was sometimes lampooned as cornball country or defended as a hundred percent more honest! DeLisle’s sound is slicker than 50s Bakersfield but the songs employ straightforward storytelling. “The Lights Off but Somebody's Home” opens with that line followed by: Your pickup’s in the driveway, but you won’t pick up your phone. Two lines we know it won’t end well. Watch her vamp her way through the honky-tonk on “There’s the Door.” You won’t need AI to get its message of if you don’t love me, darling, there’s the door. When we see her with an autoharp in hand (“Driving Round”) or sing an homage/parody “Open Mic at the Stumble Inn,” it’s clear that DeLisle is having a good time. But she’s an actress and we’re never quite sure if she’s paying tribute or assuming an alter ego. Either way, she’s loads of fun.

 

 Surrender Hill has appeared on this music blog before. By way of reminder, this country music duo is the unlikely duo of South African-born Robin Dean Salmon and Alaska native Aften Seekins Salmon. They attack their music with gusto on their newest album Wild Country and its 15 tracks give you your money’s worth. The downside, though, of a long album is a danger of wearing out listeners. “Dancing with the Woman I Love” is a sweet song that, if taken down a notch, could be a folk song. By contrast, the title track sounds cluttered and overdone. “The Other Side” is likewise a nice piece; “Witness” is even better because it’s controlled and contained. “They All Stood Up for Love” is an earnest testament to faith, albeit needlessly loud and theatrical. In my view, Surrender Hill is best when they stay within themselves and stray from convention. It also wouldn’t hurt to let Aften take more leads! Mind, this is still a good country music release. 

 Rob Weir

Standard Time: An Antiquated Idea?

 

 

DST Forever: We Are Not Farmers

 

This weekend we have to set the clocks back an hour for Standard Time. I loathe Standard Time! It’s not just that it’s freaking depressing to live in New England and watch the sun set before it’s 4:15 in the afternoon. Worse, it’s the season of Stupid arguments. It’s not as if we don’t already live in a nation with an excess of Stupid.

 

We Seasonal Affect Disorder sufferers get grumpy from too much darkness. Perhaps few noticed back when I was working on my angry young man act, but it wasn’t pretty. Too Much Stupid makes people grumpier. We live in the Age of Too Much Stupid and it’s not just uber-Stupid politicians I have in mind.

 

Politicians in really Stupid places will insist that farm kids are needed for morning chores. Say what? Just 1.3 percent of Americans make their living from farming of any sort, including ranching. We’re not talking about Ma and Pa Kettle; it’s more like Ma Cargill and Pa Archer Daniels-Midland. In my childhood, there was some validity to the farm-chores debate. My grandparents engaged in “mixed farming,” meaning they sold grains, hay, eggs from their many chicken roosts, fruit from their orchards, and meat from butchering hogs and bulls. Milke was the biggest revenue source. Each morning, they awoke in the dark to hand milk lactating cows. My mother and her sisters helped, and I too have pulled a few teats. I wasn’t good at it, but free labor was valued and I liked milking more than haying in the hot summer sun.

 

Even then, the business clock was ticking. Dairy conglomerates like Agway and Hershey Foods bought and closed local creameries. You sold milk to the Big Guys for whatever they offered, or you poured it down the drain. Milk checks shrunk and my grandfather took a part-time job slaughtering chickens to keep the farm afloat. It was but a thin veneer of farming as it is mythologized. Farms were auctioned off, mainly to real estate developers. Under corporate culture, only “craft farmers” do much by hand. Dairy farmers get more sleep in because cows are self-milking. In good behavioral modification fashion, cows walk into stalls where food is dispensed, lasers detect their teats and attach automatically, and milk runs into a tank. The process repeats in the evening. Egg production is often automated and once-arduous field work is done from the comfort of air-conditioned tractors decked out with sound systems and ergonomic seats. Those suckers cost a fortune, hence roughly one of three “farmers” is actually an employee.  Federal child labor law exempts farm kids, but most of them are well-educated; their toil is not needed like it was a hundred years ago. Let’s call “family farms” what they are, hollow inventions of vote-seeking politicians.

 

Town and city dwellers have their own kind of Stupid in defending Standard Time. Many say they look forward to Standard Time because they “get an extra hour of sleep.” Solution: Go to bed earlier! Clocks are turned back on Saturday night; very few of us have to be at work, church, in back alleys making Sunday mornings drug deals. Science tells us that an “extra hour” of sleep doesn’t help much. It takes two-three weeks to reset Circadian rhythms.   

 

Parents protest they don’t want kids walking to school in the dark. Look out your window Sunday at 8 am. That will be Monday’s 7 am sky; Mr. Sol is already out of bed. One might ask, do you know any kids who actually walk to school? In my Western Massachusetts town elementary students start at 8 am and get out at 2:10 pm, times in which muggers seldom lurk in the shadows. Kids in my neighborhood could walk to and from school faster than the bus deposits them, but today’s helicopter parents forget that their kids have already been walking more than half of their lives. One local woman drives her kid a half block to the bus stop and they sit in the car until the bus arrives. Never mind that mom is actually obstructing traffic and could drive Muffy to school in 5 minutes! Solution: Start school an hour later as high-schoolers do.

 

Standard Time is bad for the latter; their school day runs from 9 am to 3:15 pm. If they have sports practice, theater rehearsal, or detention, it will be in the dark when they leave. Of course, no self-respecting (or disreputable) high schooler takes a school bus unless they are being punished. Student parking lot are filled, because teens will cajole, beg, or bargain with Satan to drive to school rather than walk 5 blocks. Just what we need; inexperienced teen drivers on the road after dark. I suppose we could see it as Masshole Driver Education!

 

Standard Time is a really bad idea. Maybe the worst since shift work. But that’s a barrel of Stupid for another day.

 

PS: Yes, I do know about solar time. I also know a year isn't 365 days. It's 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, 45 seconds. That's why every fourth year is a "leap" year. Give us one every year and it nearly corrects the solar year issue.  

 

PSS: Railroads pushed for Standard Time in the 19th century, Daylight Savings Time came in 1908, and we didn't change clocks in the U.S. until 1966!  

 

 

 

 

Standard Time: A Red States Plot? 

 

 

Remarkably Bright Creatures: Nice Novel, but Remember it's Magical Realism

 

 

 

 

 

 

Remarkably Bright Creatures

By Shelby, Van Pelt.

Harper, 384 pages.

★★★

 

 Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt was a runaway best-selling novel about a very intelligent giant octopus. It takes place in both California and Washington State and centers on the forementioned octopus, Marcellus McSquiggles. He has a friend at his aquarium, Tova Sullivan, widowed septuagenarian a cleaning lady. She is Swedish, though her parents immigrated to the United States when she was quite young.

 

Readers of National Geographic and viewers of shows such as Nature have learned that octopi demonstrate intelligence that one would not expect in such an unlikely marine body. They can solve all manner of startling tasks, such as opening locked boxes, untying knots, and demonstrating awareness that indicates high intelligence. They also share with crows (another remarkably bright creature) an attraction to bright objects and a love of hoarding. Marcellus likes school rings, keys, and drivers’ licenses. Van Pelt’s debut novel builds upon such findings. Of course, observations alone are not scientific evidence of human-level understanding. You can train a dog to do incredible tricks, but you can’t teach it to hold a philosophical discussion. We infer, but simply don’t know what constitutes intelligence in the animal world because we can’t speak dog, whale, crow, octopus….

 

Remarkably Bright Creatures has been made into a Netflix film. The consensus opinion is that the book is far more engaging than the movie. I’ve not seen the movie, but novels are usually better crafted than a flick told in under two hours. Van Pelt’s book is satisfying and uplifting, but it is magical realism, not science. I enjoyed Van Pelt’s novel, but I also found that it telegraphed what is going to happen in both improbable and obvious ways.

 

As noted, it also takes place in California, which is where we meet Cameron. He has had a lot of trouble getting started in life. He has been a mainstay in a punk band, called Moth Sausage, but the lead singer and his best friend have gotten married, are starting a family, and have taken “responsible” jobs. Cameron hasn’t had an easy life either; his mother Daphne split and gave him to her sister Jeanne when he was a child. She has been generous and patient with Cameron, but he knows that he owes her big-time. Cameron’s serious abandonment issues and horrible work history have given him wanderlust. Cameron sets off in a down-market camper van hoping to trace what happened to his mother and identify his father. He lands in Sowell Bay Washington, where he meets Ethan Mack, a friendly Scottish grocer/rock fan, who allows him to park his van in his yard. We soon learn Ethan has a crush on Tova, who has other plans.

 

Circumstances, including Cameron’s desire to pay back his aunt who sacrificed her vacation funds for the van, leads him to take a job in the aquarium owned by a friend of Ethan’s. He’d also like to have some pocket change to charm the lovely Avery, the owner of a surf shop who is two years his elder, the owner of a surf shop, and definitely Cameron’s senior in life lessons. Tova has long been the nighttime cleaner in the aquarium and has struck up and unlikely friendship with Marcellus the octopus. She speaks to him all the time and he shows signs of understanding her. Marcellus also intuits that Tova is deeply grieving for her dead husband their son Erik, who is presumed to have drowned. In other words, we have a lot of human creatures during what alas they do unremarkably: endure emotional pain, but get stuck.

 

I remind again, the tale involves magical realism. Marcellus is indeed intelligent, but I doubt he keeps a mental diary involving the more than 1300 days of his “captivity.” Nor do we have evidence that sea creatures have an exacting sense of their lifespan. Marcellus has made escape efforts because he “knows” that his species only lives for 4 to 5 years. You also will need loads of tolerance for, dare, I say, remarkable coincidences. Perhaps because I read so many mysteries, I don’t like it when I can see what’s coming and how. Mind, I’ve nothing against happy endings. I admire this book for not dragging me through mud and murder; I just wish it had taken turns I hadn’t anticipated.

 

Rob Weir

 

Mary Oliver: An Uplifting Documentary

 

 

 MARY OLIVER: SAVED BY THE BEAUTY OF THE WORLD (2026)

Directed by Sasha Waters

Kino Lorber, 91 minutes

 

I worried a lot. Will the garden grow, will the rivers

flow in the right direction, will the earth turn

as it was taught, and if not how shall

I correct it?

Was I right, was I wrong, will I be forgiven,

can I do better?

Will I ever be able to sing, even the sparrows

can do it and I am, well,

hopeless.

Is my eyesight fading or am I just imagining it,

am I going to get rheumatism,

lockjaw, dementia?

Finally, I saw that worrying had come to nothing.

And gave it up. And took my old body

and went out into the morning,

and sang.

 

 

Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World is an uplifting documentary about the woman who might be the most famous poet in the history of Western society. There are many poets more renowned for their literary grace, more praised by scholars, more philosophically profound, more socially significant…. But have any been more embraced by ordinary folks, the sort who would rather endure a root canal than wrestle with iambic pentameter or trochaic meter?

 

Whenever someone professes to dislike poetry, somebody is bound to ask, “Have you ever tried Mary Oliver?” Chances are good that query will come from the last person in the room you would have expected to read poetry. Oliver (1935-2019) is generally considered a nature poet, though she was more than that. She eschewed fancy rhymes, meter, and structure for commonplace expression that evokes deeply emotional responses. In the film we watch Stephen Colbert struggle to recite from memory Oliver’s “The Summer Day.” He is fine until he gets to its most famous line, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” It took numerous takes before Colbert could recite that line without choking tears. Surely wise guys like John Waters or Steve Buscemi are not so sentimental. Wrong! They too worship the ground upon which Oliver sat among resplendent nature.

 

Numerous poet-talking-heads appear on screen. You might not recognize some of their names, but all sing Oliver’s praises. So do Helena Bonham Carter, Lucy Dacus, and Oprah Winfrey. Oliver won a Pulitzer Prize in 1984, a National Book Award in 1992, collected five honorary doctorates, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and countless other prizes.

 

Though Oliver was loved by millions, she was more guarded; director Sasha Waters reveals a lot about Mary’s wild and precious life. She was born in a Cleveland suburb, but hers was not a happy childhood. Details are sparse, but Oliver later spoke of being sexually abused as a child. Emily Dickinson sought solace in her room and front yard; Oliver retreated to nature. Some have compared Oliver to Dickinson, but to me she seemed like a plain-spoken Ralph Waldo Emerson with the ego stripped away. Oliver always listed Emerson and Thoreau as among her poetic inspirations, along with Millay, Whitman, the 13th century Persian/Sufi poet Rumi, and Elizabeth Bishop. She also admired haiku master Matsuo Bashõ (1644-94), which helps explain Oliver’s penchant for succinct verse.

 

Oliver tried college, but it didn’t take. She landed at Steepletop, Edna St. Vincent Millay’s home in Austerlitz, New York, where she befriended Millay’s sister and spent more than six years organizing Edna’s papers. She held multiple writer-in-residence positions (Case Western, Bennington, Sweet Briar, Bucknell, and others) but in Austerlitz she met photographer Molly Malone Cook, her lover, partner, and agent for 40 years. Mary and Molly moved to Provincetown in 1964, and Cape Cod became one of Oliver’s greatest joys and creative sparks. She was known to spend hours lost in local forests, sitting by the sea, wandering alone, and silently following her inner muse. It has been said that she loved the natural world, but such a statement is inadequate; Mary saw a personified Nature as her teacher and spiritual advisor. Oliver was spiritual, but not religious in any conventional sense. She had little time for dogma or doctrine.  

 

There is one glaring dodge in this otherwise superb documentary. Molly died in 2005 and Mary still had 14 years of life remaining. As has been documented, Cook’s death devastated Oliver. Shortly after Molly’s death, Oliver shocked those who knew her best by leaving Provincetown at the behest of her final partner Anne Taylor. Oliver moved to Hobe Point, Florida–north of West Palm Beach and south of Stuart–to be with Anne.  Waters and Oliver’s friends hinted that that the Taylor/Oliver relationship was toxic and that Mary disliked Florida, but details are sketchy. Why pull punches? An attempt to keep Oliver’s reputation intact? Taylor’s silence? Fear of being sued?  Perhaps none of it matters. Were Oliver here she’d probably ask, “… what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life,” tell us to give up worrying, go into the woods, and sing.

 

Rob Weir

Icelandic Film The Love That Remains is Missing More Pieces than One

 

 

 

  

THE LOVE THAT REMAINS (2025)

Directed by Hlynur Pálmason

STILL VIVID, 109 minutes, Not-rated (language, an up-the-dress shot)

In Icelandic, English and Swedish

★

 

My Wednesday posting is late because I needed to contemplate The Love That Remains. Director Hlynur Pálmason’s previous film, Godland, was among my favorite films of 2022. His latest reminded me of past days of evaluating submissions for the Northampton Film Festival. There were two categories of films I felt should tossed into the Coliseum with the lions: those whose point was how hard it was for the filmmaker to make the film, and those whose point might have been apparent to the director, but no one else. The Love That Remains is in the second category. 

 

I have had Icelandic friends, rank my trip to Iceland as among my best travel memories, read a lot of Icelandic folk tales and mysteries, and watch Icelandic TV shows and movies. To date, nothing Icelandic comes close to being as boring as The Love That Remains. It should have told me something to discover that only Panda won an award at the Cannes Film Festival; he won a Palm Dog for Best Lead Animal Actor. I’ll give the film one star because Panda, an Icelandic sheepdog, is cute and cuddly.

 

This film is ostensibly about a coming-apart-at-the-seams family in which Pálmason cast his own children as eldest daughter Ída, and her brothers, þorglis (THOR-glis) and Grímur as her younger brothers.  Anna (Saga Gardarsdóttir) and Magnus (Sverrir Guðnason) are the parents, though they are separated. Anna wishes to leave their coastal home and live in “the city,” which can only be Reykjavik, as its metropolitan area contains two-thirds of Iceland’s 350,000 residents. She fancies herself an artist and blames her isolation for why her art isn’t selling. I’m no expert on contemporary Icelandic art, but I hold open the possibility that Anna simply wasn’t a very good artist. Her work consisted of cutting metal sheets into geometrical shapes, placing them over pieces of canvas, weighting them down with wooden skids and rocks, and leaving them to the elements. At the end of the year there are rust patterns on the canvas. It’s conceptually interesting, but aesthetically unappealing.

 

Magnus is an involved separated husband and parent. He loves Anna and wishes to be with his children. Unless he’s at sea on a herring trawler, he’s at his old home frolicking with Panda, rough-housing with the boys, chatting with 17-year-old Ída, eating dinner with the family, trying to bed Anna, leading family outings, and dealing with things Anna would rather not (like getting rid of a troublesome rooster). When at sea, he’s morose and misses all five. (Let’s not forget Panda!) “Maggi,” as Anna calls him, is so betwixt and between that he’s surly and clashes with his ship mates.

 

These are things we can understand, but Pálmason throws in surrealistic elements, such as a giant rooster attacking a sleeping Magnus and a Joan of Arc dummy that comes to life and pulls out arrows shot into her by Anna and her children. For the record, only research told me the dummy was supposed to be Joan of Arc; it’s another of Anna’s “art” projects and looked like a soggy soft sculpture scarecrow with a tinpot head. (Gee, how could I have not seen Joan of Arc in that mess?) Anna is no happier with Magnus out of the house, except she only laughs when he’s there. The boys drop F-bombs and ignore her chastisements. Soon we realize that Ída is the closest thing to an adult in the household. What we never figure out is why Anna can’t live with a man who adores her, supports her art, and wants to co-parent.

 

That said, Saga Gardarsdóttir is the most interesting actor on the screen. She intrigues physically, as we can see world-weariness etched on her face. She is pale, blonde, heavily freckled, and tall (6’0) like many Icelandic women, and would have been 37 when the film was made. In the film, she dresses in an unkempt manner and looks as if 50 are rushing up to greet her with the intent of bypassing her 40s. Her aloofness and the fate of Magnus ultimately tell us as little about the collapse of a family as the film’s opening sequence of a crane lifting a roof from a shed. Slowly. Like the rest of the film. 

 

Rob Weir

Let Me Be Frank With You and the Literary Magic of Richard Ford

 

 

 

LET ME BE FRANK WITH YOU (2014)

By Richard Ford

HarperCollins, 238 pages.

★★★★

 

Welcome to another book from my recent book fair shopping extravaganza. Richard Ford has long been a favorite of mine, though I confess his fiction is often on the cranky white male end of the literary equation. Lots of writers have alter egos, most famously Samuel Clemens (“Mark Twain”) and John Updike (Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom); Ford’s is Frank Bascombe. In earlier books, Frank has been a sportswriter, a grieving parent whose oldest son has died, a divorcee, and a New Jersey realtor, but in Let Me Be Frank With You he’s a 69-year-old retiree in a happy second marriage. His greatest desire is to empty himself of his past and pretty much everything else that bothers him or requires effort.

 

This novel’s cover features the skeletal remains of the roller coaster at Seaside Heights, New Jersey, in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. In a case of the (not-so) great American pastime of historical amnesia, 2012’s Hurricane Sandy has faded from collective memory, but if you lived on the Eastern Seaboard anywhere from Jamaica to Ontario, Sandy took out power, produced floods, killed 254 people, and left billions of dollars of damage. (Remember footage of Vermonters kayaking along Montpelier streets by the State House?)

 

Frank was lucky, as a few years earlier he sold his Sea-Clift waterside dream house to Arnie Urguhart when made an offer he could not refuse. Frank hadn’t spoken with Arnie in ages before getting his request to come to Sea-Clift and advise what should be done with the remains of the house and ruined property. Despite the fact that Frank closed his realty office years ago, he is badgered into telling Arnie he’d be lucky to get $500,000 for the land.

 

What he doesn’t tell Arnie is that he has no desire to rekindle old clients or friendships, and that even being asked for an opinion is more mental effort than he cares to expend. Let Me Be Frank is not a novel in which much happens, rather a journey inside Frank’s thought bubbles. If you will, it’s an internal war between what Frank says and what he thinks. It’s a breezy read divided into four sections: “I’m Here,” “Everything Could Be Worse,” “The New Normal,” and “Deaths of Others.” Ford pared down themes to unleash Bascombe to be Ford’s mouthpiece for his opinions on scores of random subjects. They’re not really unrelated, rather they show us Frank (Ford) carries a lot of mental baggage for a guy who allegedly wants to unburden.

 

For those who might wonder why they’d wish to be part of some old guy’s rants, I offer this: There’s a reason that Richard Ford was a Pulitzer Price winner. He is a literary stylist, has an enormous vocabulary, and knows how to walk the tightrope between pathos and bathos (though parts of the books are quite funny), satire and maliciousness, awkwardness and overly mannered, and intrusion and genuine interest. Through it all, Frank at least thinks his mind, even when he feels the pull of social constraint not to speak it. I leave it to readers to determine whether Frank is disingenuous, disengaged, cowardly, intellectually lazy, or sensible. I will say, though, that the “Everything Could Be Worse” section is an incisive look at white liberal guilt. It unfolds when an older black woman rings Frank’s doorbell. Frank twists his liberalism into knots into how to deal with a woman whose family used to live in Frank’s house in Haddam when his neighborhood was black working-class rather than upwardly mobile white middle class. Frank parses his conversation, but is never sure if what he said was the right thing or unintentionally offensive. Through it all we can tell that he is working too hard to prove he’s not a racist.   

 

In many ways Frank is a fraud, but he knows and feels that. There is an air of toxicity in his attempt to be civil to his ex-wife, who is in a memory care unit; or attend the deathbed or a guy he only pretended to like.  Frank is either frank with himself or the kind of jerk he believes others to be. Again, it’s up to the reader to decide, though Frank wouldn’t care one way or the other! But the prose… the boldness… the style… Ford is a writer par excellence.

 

Rob Weir

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Eugenics in Vermont

Vermont for the Vermonters: The History of Eugenics

            in the Green Mountain State (2023)

By Mercedes De Guardiola

Vermont Historical Society, 177 pages + appendices and back matter

★★★

 

 

 

When I was a high school teacher in Vermont, Nancy Gallagher was one of my favorite colleagues, even though she taught science courses and I was a social studies instructor. Years after I left, Nancy published Breeding Better Vermonters (1999), the first major work on the eugenics movement in Vermont.

 

Gallagher’s work concentrated heavily on Henry Perkins, who headed Vermont’s Eugenics Records Office for 11 years. Breeding Better Vermonters was a major inspiration for Mercedes De Guardiola, who looked deeply into available records across Vermont and published Vermont for the Vermonters. Guardiola would be the first to admit that even her study is incomplete as many records are missing–thrown away, destroyed by floods and fires, misfiled, or still undiscovered.

 

Eugenics is soiled by its association with racism, ethnocentrism, ableism, intolerance, and other now-unsavory assumptions. Because of its unsettling association with Nazi Germany, the eugenics movement is not broadly taught in the United States. Nor is it comfortable to acknowledge that eugenics passed for “science” in much of the Western world or that Hitler’s reign of hate drew upon American sources as well as European sources. Although adherents in Vermont and elsewhere argued that “positive” eugenics would literally produce better traits among humans, selective breeding was an ideal more suited to crops and livestock than humans. It thrived between the 1890s-1940s and its logical extension was to identify “subnormal” humans and prevent them from passing on their “defects,” either by voluntary or forced sterilization. In Vermont and elsewhere, chapters of the Ku Klux Klan endorsed eugenics. A large KKK rally in Montpelier during the 1920s was thus less shocking than one might assume. In retrospect, the truly shocking takeaway from Vermont eugenics is that so many educated and prominent luminaries embraced eugenics, including doctors, college presidents, governors, women’s club members, judges, scientists, and other professionals. 

 

De Guardiola pored over records from the Waterbury Hospital, the Brandon Reform School, the Perkins-led Eugenics Survey, state records, gubernatorial speeches, newspapers, and Vermont Country Life Commission reports. Among the many contradictions of eugenics is that “improving” the human race involved identifying those who would drag it down. Vermont eugenics dovetailed with the 1931 Vermont Commission on Country Life, whose 1931 Rural Vermont: A Program for the Future, sounded the warning that the state’s “Old Stock” was in decline, which in turn threatened to alter Vermont’s special rural characters. Thus, other commissions on everything from potatoes, apples, poultry, and dairies to woodworking, tourism, land use, and “religious forces” voiced opinions on eugenics. In essence, what was at stake was old-time Vermont versus emergent Vermont. The Old Stock was Protestant, Yankee, and rural. Eugenics targeted those of supposedly low IQ, but it was far too easy to assume that African Americans, French Canadians, Catholics, Native Americans, mixed bloods, delinquents, epileptics, the poor, and the under-educated were prone to mental deficiency. Not to mention unscientific assumptions that retardation and intelligence were genetically based. Today, many would also find it distasteful to deny the right of procreation to those of lower IQs or physical challenges. (Some genetics advocates did allow for the possibility that “high grade imbeciles” and “morons” could perhaps handle family life, but not “idiots” or “low grade” and “medium” imbeciles. 

 

Classification also lacked academic rigor. The Eugenics Survey of Vermont highlighted six “families”–the “Pirates,” the “Gypsy,” the “Chorea,” the “Doolittle,” the “Rector,” and the “Furman.” Of these, the first three were not families at all, rather generalized collectives to describe those who lived on boats, travelers and peddlers, and those poor souls driven insane by Huntington’s Chorea. Nor is the data from the latter three biologically-related families consistent, as some family members led quite productive lives.

 

It would be far too simplistic to condemn all eugenicists as bigots. I reiterate that eugenics passed for science at its height. Science is a dynamic field in which rigorous observation drives conclusions until new tools and methodologies proves them wrong. I am a historian, not a medical doctor or scientist. I would say, though, that one of the jobs of a historian is to warn citizens to ask hard questions lest the errors of the past repeat themselves. Hats off to my old friend Nancy Gallagher and to Ms. De Guardiola for illuminating the dangers of predetermined assumptions.

 

Rob Weir