Planning Your Post-Coronavirus Trip

A dead-of-winter rite is ordering a bunch of seed packets and visualizing spring planting. With COVID-19 still ravaging the world, summer travel brochures are the new Burpee catalogues. Another mind game to occupy your mind during quarantine is contemplating an overseas adventure. Here are some places that are beyond the usual.

I once lived across from the playing field!

Tours of New Zealand often bypass its capital city of Wellington because its airport is too small and too windy for today’s big jets. Grab a domestic flight and go there. I’m biased after living there for a time, but it’s a hidden gem. Pack good walking shoes as it’s hilly enough to make San Francisco seem like Iowa. Wellington’s cable car system is actually used by commuters. Take it to the very top and linger in the botanical gardens. Check out the “Beehive,” which is unique among national capitals. Wellington is also the home of Te Papa Museum, often has leaping dolphins in its harbor, and sports neighborhoods catering to all tastes. Cuba Street isn’t as countercultural as it was in the Sixties, but echoes remain. It’s also a cool café town, has a vibrant arts community, and is home to both Victoria University and filmmaker Peter Jackson’s Weta Studios.  

So very Dutch

Thinking of Amsterdam? Go, but don’t forget The Hague, another capital city that doesn’t get a lot of love. The Hague is well worth a day or two. Like most Dutch cities, it is spotless and there are lovely strolls through and around gardens, palaces, ponds, old churches, monuments, and parks. There’s even a beach, though I don’t recommend North Sea sunbathing. Its big draws are its museums, including the wonderful Mauritshaus, where you can feast on Rembrandt, Hals, Vermeer, and Dutch Golden Age painters, but also modernists and surrealists. It also has terrific public art and cultural events. If you wonder why it’s called The Hague, it’s because it’s a collection of towns that fused as a city.

Hidden delight

Portugal is still overlooked among European travelers. If you go—and you should—don’t restrict your trip to Lisbon. Obidos is just an hour away, but this small town (just over 11,000) is a journey back to the Middle Ages. It’s a white-washed beauty mostly contained by thick medieval walls, many of which you can climb. (Be careful. There are few guardrails and often the pathways are narrow.) Scrumptious pastries, a delicious cherry liqueur special to the region, beautiful tiles, and lots of history make Obidos a delightful visit. There are also tourist shops with a higher quality of items than the ordinary.

Crusader fortress

Can you go wrong on any of the Greek islands? Well, maybe Mykonos, which is crawling with pasty British tourists. My favorite, though, is Rhodes, whose Colossus (now vanished) was one of the Seven Ancient Wonders of the World. You can get in touch with your inner Crusader on Rhodes. Other than Carcassonne in France—another to put on your bucket list—you’d be hard-pressed to find a better example of a medieval walled city. Some have said the appearance of this World Heritage site is not “authentic,” but its fortress is as close as you can get without a time machine. Plus, there is ancient, Ottoman, and Jewish history to discover. 

Be prepared to eat

France? By all means go to Paris, but don’t neglect Lyons. It’s where the Rhone and Saone rivers merge, and where terraces of hillside churches and bluffs provide gorgeous panoramas of the waterways at your feet and the Alps in the distance. You will find art, design, ethnic, history, and science museums galore, impressive cathedrals, unusual markets, Roman ruins, and the home where the Lumiere brothers birthed the film industry. Best of all, Lyons is a haven for foodies. Some of its best restaurants are in Vieux Lyons, a Renaissance-vintage section at the foot of Fourviere Hill. Lyons earns its status as a UNESCO World Heritage city.

Tranquility along the Mersey

Unless you’re on a Beatles tour, Liverpool isn’t high on anyone’s must-see list. But Port Sunlight is a reason to venture nearby. This village of fewer than 1,500 souls is where Lever Brothers­–now Unilever–set up a corporate utopian experiment in 1887, named for their popular soap product. Corporate benevolence faded in the 1980s, but Port Sunlight remains a sylvan bubble within an otherwise gritty postindustrial corridor. When you get off the train at Bebington, litter and seediness are all around. Then you walk through a tunnel to the Port Sunlight side and everything is green and tidy as a pin. Lever Brothers built all manner of amenities for workers: parks, wetlands, sturdy brick row homes, free schools, a swimming pool, and even a temperance hotel. The goal was to educate, Christianize, and elevate workers. The crowning jewel is the Lady Lever Art Gallery, which features Pre-Raphaelite paintings of such quality that you’d need to ferry across the Mersey to Liverpool to see anything that rivals it.

Xi Valley

I was underwhelmed by China, a nation hell-bent on obliterating its past in the name of generic modernity. One exception, though, is the Xi Valley. Cruise down the river that cuts through sugarloaf mountains, small villages, and riverside fields tended according to time-honored methods. In no time, you will understand every Chinese watercolor you’ve ever seen. You can also sample snake wine if you can get past the pickled poisonous serpent in the bottle. I didn’t. I couldn’t.

Take that Sydney!

Valencia always staggers visitors to Spain. It’s the place to eat to eat paella, is filled with its own blend of Gothic architecture, has nearly two dozen museums, and is home to vestiges of Roman, Muslim, and medieval cultures. It even has a sunny Mediterranean beach and holds what seems to be some sort of festival every week. But what really grabs the eye is its City of Arts and Sciences. Until 1957, the Turia River periodically flooded the city, leaving swaths of death and destruction. That year, the city diverted the flow of the river around rather than through the city. Twelve kilometers of old riverbed is now a sunken park whose greenery is strategically offset by some of the world’s most innovative architecture. You can see jaw-dropping examples from such masters as Felix Candela and Santiago Calatrava. The latter’s opera house puts the one in Sydney to shame. It’s what you get if you crossed a hooded cobra with a bicycle helmet.

The hills are alive...

Switzerland has many charms, but to get your full Heidi on, head for the village of Gruyeres, as in the cheese. Pig out on raclettes, paving stones of cheese that come with a tableside contraption that melts it for easy schmears on your delivery device of choice. There is a castle, an arts center, loads of eateries, and stunning scenery, including mountainside pasturelands. Plan your visit well and part of the journey involves a narrow-gauge open car train that wends through Alpine villages, where school children and shoppers hop on and off.

Shetlands most colorful residents

If that’s not rural enough for you, try Scotland’s Shetland Islands where you can get up close and personal with puffins at Sumburgh Head near the airport. Rent a car because the Shetlands are all about nature. It lies 110 miles north of the rest of Scotland and consists of over 100 islands, just 16 of which are inhabited. Oddly, its biggest island is called Mainland, where one finds Lerwick, its only sizable settlement whose 7,000 residents make up one-third of those who live in the Shetlands. As you might expect, not much happens on the isles—unless you go in winter for Up Helly Aa, a Viking fire festival. The Shetlands are definitely more Norse than Scottish. Be independent; it can be hard to find decent food, but the pubs and beer are warm, there is amazing music to be heard, and Iron Age culture to explore.

Rob Weir

An Easy Intro to Anthony Trollope

The Barchester Chronicles (1982)

Directed by David Giles; Adapted by Alan Plater

BBC TV, 7 episodes (55 minutes each)

Years ago, Emily and I used to have delightful afternoon teas–in proper china cups–with a friend’s (now deceased) elderly uncle. He was a mild-mannered, erudite bachelor who reveled in literature. The closest he ever came to pique was to express shock that his local bookstore did not stock the complete works of Anthony Trollope. We never had the heart to tell him that we had never seen a bookstore that did so. Not in Boston, Midtown Manhattan, the Village, or even in Paris’ legendary Shakespeare & Company. 

Trollope was a man of the mid-19^th century, not a writer for short attention spans. I’ve just begun The Way We Live Now, which is considered his master work, and it runs close to 1,000 pages. This brings me to another passé phenomenon. Do you remember when Masterpiece Theatre used to feature actual masterpieces with occasional forays into lighter fare rather than the other way around?* Writers like Trollope lent themselves well to dramatization. Trollope’s The Warden and Barchester Chronicles together run about 550 pages. You might prefer Masterpiece Theatre’s 1982 The Barchester Chronicles, a 7-part series that brought both Trollope stories to the screen.

It is a superb way to familiarize oneself with Trollope in easy-to-digest portions. As fine a stylist as Trollope was, he could not paint in words the central character of Septimus Harding with the color and humanity of actor Donald Pleasence (1919-95). It as if Pleasence was born to play a mild-mannered and guileless cleric in a quiet English village. The widowed Mr. Harding is the warden of Hiram’s “hospital”–think retirement home–for a dozen elderly men. He loves, in order, God, his daughter Eleanor (Janet Maw), music, the old men under his charge, his eldest daughter Susan Grantly (actual offspring Angela Pleasence), and quiet contemplation. He has no stomach for power, anger, gossip, or scandal. Alas, too many around him favor the very things he abhors, including his son-in-law, Archdeacon Grantly (Nigel Hawthorne).

Mr. Harding’s peace is punctured when Eleanor’s fiancé, John Bold—a crusading journalist­—investigates the Hiram’s charter and raises the question of whether the warden’s pay is too high. That cause is taken up by a radical newspaper and Mr. Harding becomes the tempest in a very large teapot. The archdeacon sputters and rails, but the magnanimous Harding suspects that Bold is correct and that he should renounce his comfort. At heart, Trollope’s six Barsetshire** novels capture a moment in history in which the Church of England was (rightly) under attack for its greater devotion to luxury and the English upper system than to faith or the poor. In the game of politics, Harding is a lamb among lions, one who—in Grantly’s estimation—suffers from distressing bouts “of Christianity.”

The tidy world of Barchester will be disturbed by further challenges. John Bold dies of flu (!) leaving Eleanor a widow with an infant child, but also a small fortune and too many disingenuous suitors. The local archbishop also passes, leaving the appointment of a new warden to his successor, Archbishop Proudie. An exotic prodigal returns from Italy, the beautiful but lame Signora Madeline Neroni (Susan Hampshire), and holds court with two equally suspect friends. The new Archbishop is a milquetoast incompetent, but he is really just a pawn in a truly venomous battle of wits between Mrs. Proudie (Geraldine McEwan) and the Archbishop’s odious chaplain Obadiah Slope (Alan Rickman). Watch the petticoats and the cassocks fly!

It is rare to see acting of this quality. We watch Pleasence battle to keep his calm, yielding now and then to the nervous tic of playing air cello when pushed to the brink. Hampshire strikes the right balance between seduction and boundaries, and Maw likewise hews a thin line, as hers is a world in which women are in a seam between scripted social roles and tentative liberation. I think that Nigel Hawthorne goes over the top in his histrionics but all can be forgiven in David Giles’ direction, as he had the good sense to let McEwan and Rickman go at each other with nail and claw. McEwan’s very glance can separate the wallpaper from its paste, and few have ever done obsequious villainy as well as Rickman. Let’s also give a shout to Trollope, who like many 19^th century novelists, embedded meaning in character names: Proudie, Bold, Slope, Neroni (Italian for black), and even a secondary character named Quiverful, who has fathered 14 children!

To risk an anachronistic analogy, Trollope’s Barchester is a cleric-riddled version of Peyton Place. If there is anything good about being in quarantine, it is that it encouraged us to revisit The Barchester Chronicles. I think I’m now steeled to dive into The Way We Live Now. Someone we miss would be delighted.

Rob Weir 

* In 2007, Masterpiece Theatre aired some cherished past offerings. The next year it dropped “threatre” from its name and now favors contemporary works over classics.

**The spellings differ because Barchester is the name of the fictional village and Barcester that of Trollope’s fictional county. Trollope based the investigation that sets things in motion on a real case, an 1849 query into St. Cross Hospital in Winchester, England.

Metropolitan a Film Worth Resurrecting

Metropolitan (1990)

Directed by Whit Stillman

New Line Cinema, 98 minutes, PG-13 (some language)

★★★★

Whit Stillman hasn’t made a film in a while, and one hopes it’s not because he has nothing left to say. His 1990 debut Metropolitan has been compared to a Jane Austen novel. That’s ironic, as his last feature was Love and Friendship (2016), which was based on Austen’s novel of that name. Metropolitan was the first of what Stillman called his “doomed-bourgeois-in-love” series. It was followed by Barcelona (1992), The Last Days of Disco (1998), Damsels in Distress (2012) and Love and Friendship. In each case, Stillman looks at groups he saw as in decline.

Metropolitan is sharply written and penetrates the world of Upper East Side socialites during the winter debutante season. They are the ultimate children of privilege, but are also children without a clue. They think of themselves as urbane, witty, and intellectual, though the latter is often the conceit of a deluded college sophomore.

The film begins when Princeton student Tom Townsend (Edward Clements) happens to be walking along a Manhattan street when Nick Smith (Chris Eigeman) thinks he and his friends have commandeered a cab Tom had flagged. They insist he get in the cab with them, though Tom protests he hadn’t hailed a ride. Along the way, Tom is invited to a debutante ball.

Tom pronounces that he isn’t interested as he’s actually a radical Fourierist. And so he might be in a vague sense, but the bigger reason lies with the raincoat he is wearing on a freezing New York City night–he is the son of a single mother who struggles to keep him at Princeton. On a whim, though, Tom decides to attend. He instantly becomes a sort of mascot for the Shelly Fowler rat pack, though his soirées put a strain on his budget. The rat pack dresses to the nines: tuxedos, flouncy dresses, black tie, and strings of pearls. Were it not for the city externals, you might think you had walked into a Cary Grant movie.

The conversations are black comedy vapid and revolve around whether or not the preppy “class” has a future. Nick is the resident cynic in all things. We also met Charlie Black (Taylor Nichols), who fancies himself a philosopher, though he’s of the sort who could talk himself out of tying his shoe laces. He prattles on, oblivious of the fact that he is uttering utter rubbish. There is also sad sack Fred (Bryan Leder) and Rick Von Sloneker (Will Kempe), who has the body of a god, but an empty head and the morality of a jewel thief.

Sally (Dylan Hundley) heads a coterie of selfish, pampered, and often amoral young women. This includes Cynthia (Isabel Gillies), who shocks everyone by being proud of her libidinous sins. The one lady of virtue is pixyish Audrey Rouget (Caroline Farina), a kind soul with a crush on Tom, though he still pines for his highly

inappropriate ex-girlfriend Serena (Ellia Thompson), who is pretty much in love with herself.

Stillman shows the utter vacuity of the preppy class. They put on airs because they are essentially aping their absent parents. When so much is given with no strings attached, reflection is like Charlie, a matter of form over substance and rhetoric over detail. Even Tom admits he never reads novels, only about them. In an odd way, Metropolitan is a coming-of-age film in an era in which a way of life is allegedly coming to an end.

It is instructive watching Metropolitan now, because Stillman was wrong to see the bourgeoisie as doomed. We now speak of the “New Gilded Age,” and we certainly live in a time in which the upper classes have honed their let-them-eat-cake callousness. Rick Von Slonecker is now, metaphorically speaking, President of the United States. But Stillman got it so right to see the wealthy as devoid of class in any sense other than economic.

This film was nominated for best screenplay and that honor was well deserved, even though it did not win. This is a funny film, but of the kind that makes you clutch and groan out of the side of your mouth that is not laughing. Metropolitan is all the more effective for using actors who were and are not household names. We thus see the characters, not familiar faces.

Take a look. Those of us who aren’t wealthy are sometimes guilty of wallet envy. This film will make you glad that you have functioning brains rather than just an expense account.

Rob Weir

Tarantino's Act Wearing Thin

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019)

Directed by Quentin Tarantino

Columbia, 160 minutes, R (language, graphic violence, drugs, sexual references)

★★

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was the final chapter of Oscar-nominated Best Picture nominees I saw. Confession: I’ve been bored with Quentin Tarantino’s hipster bad boy antics for quite some time. He has a devoted coterie who will watch anything he does in the mistaken view that by doing so they accrue cultural capital. It bears saying that Tarantino’s alleged satirical use of violence just isn’t funny in a society as sanguinary as that of the United States. Mainly, though, I think Tarantino is repeating himself.

He is redundant two times over in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. There is again violence, plus Once Upon a Time is another counterfactual movie along the lines of Inglorious Basterds [sic]. His latest follows Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio), a former TV Western star, and his longtime stunt man/personal gofer Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt). The year is 1969, and it’s been a long time between gigs for both men­–Dalton because Westerns have gone out style and he’s sick of them anyhow, and Booth because of his hair-trigger temper, a DUI conviction, and rumors that he killed his wife. Cliff spends his days at Rick’s home assuaging the latter’s ego, watching old shows with him, and smoking dope; at night he returns to his trailer and his pit bull. Maybe if Rick could only meet his new neighbors, director Roman Polanski (Rafaeŧ Zawierucha) and his starlet wife Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie), he could wrangle a movie role and help Cliff as well.

Rick isn’t the trendy kind of guy Polanski would deign to meet, though his fortune does shift. Rick is offered a part he’d rather not take, a guest appearance in a new Western series. He struggles at first, but it revives his career and even gets to make some “spaghetti Westerns” in Italy. In the interim, Cliff is ogled by and eventually gives a ride to a hippie chick calling herself “Pussycat” (Margaret Qually), who offers to fellate him, but even he knows jailbait when he sees it. Cliff delivers her to Spahn Ranch, whose owner George (Bruce Dern) was once a friend. Now the place is crawling with hippies giving him the hairy eyeball, and one named “Squeaky” (Dakota Fanning) goes ballistic when Rick insists on seeing George. For good measure, Cliff beats the crap out of the guy who flattened his tires and forces him to change them. Later we learn that the ranch is the crash pad of the Charles Manson family.

Cliff blows his Hollywood comeback with his wise-guy attitude and his beat-down of Bruce Lee, but he goes to Italy with Rick. After six months, Rick acquires a glamorous Italian wife who doesn’t want Cliff hanging around. So far, Tarantino’s film is, as they say, “loosely based” on a lot of things that actually happened. Tarantino based Dalton on Steve McQueen from an old Western titled Wanted Dead or Alive, though McQueen wasn’t exactly washed up at the time; Dalton is more properly viewed as a composite of numerous actors in 1950s’ Westerns. Booth is patterned on Bert Reynolds’ double Hal Needham. Most of the TV shows, movie titles, and people mentioned are also real.

At this point, Tarantino could have made a paean to Hollywood in the 1960s or, alternatively, a refocused update of The Day of the Locust. He also could have fashioned a better version of the disappointing Helter Skelter. Instead he opts for a counterfactual descent into “ultra-violence” in which Rick and Cliff turn Dirty Harry² and save Sharon Tate and her guests from Manson Family droogs. That’s it, folks—two and a half hours of filler so Tarantino can have us contemplate a world in which Sharon Tate lives and Squeaky Fromme gets blowtorched.

Don’t get me wrong. Charlie Manson was evil and his followers seriously deluded. I would rather they had perished instead of Tate. That’s not how it went down, and having her survive isn’t exactly in the category of “What if JFK had lived?” Robbie is very good as Tate, and plays her with airheaded starstruck wonderment. Pitt is strong (in several senses of the word) as Cliff, and DiCaprio is Leo—accomplished, but a bit like latter days Jack Nicholson in that we still see him and not his character. The film also feels like an excuse for Tarantino to reward his rat pack with role crumbs. The cast is way too big for secondary characters to have any depth, so we end up people watching to catch glimpses of Lena Dunham, Maya Hawke, James Marsden, Steve McQueen, Al Pacino, Luke Perry, Rumer Willis, and (literally) dozens of others.

The ending of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is a big Nothing Burger. Is it supposed to be commentary on the ultimate vacuity of Hollywood? Or is it that Tarantino has everyone dressed up and provides no direction of where they are supposed to go? Allow me to call Tarantino’s meta references and up the ante with one of my own. If you want to see the ultimate in senseless violence that actually has a point, check out the aforementioned droogs in A Clockwork Orange.

Rob Weir 

How to Reform the Police

Is it supposed to comfort us that "just" 1 in 4 is bad? And where are people of color?

And so it happens again. Change the victim. Change the place. Change the names of the murderers. Another black man killed by those sworn to uphold the law and protect all American citizens.

I have no words to add about the senseless death of George Floyd. His death is akin to those killed by gunmen with automatic weapons. We are horrified. We weep. We are angry. We bury our dead. Then we move on. Just more numbers for the data bank. Do we need more numbers to tell us that American society remains deeply racist? Or that police departments contain more than “just a few” bad actors?

Others have spoken more authoritatively and elegantly than I about race in America. This essay is about law enforcement—a topic I know from several perspectives. First, I worked in probation services for six years. Later I studied the sociology of crime. Then I taught college-level Crime in America for four years. As a citizen, I have witnessed the alarming militarization of police forces. I have informed views on what needs to happen to reduce police violence.

When Bill Clinton became president he pledged to appoint a Cabinet that “looks like America.” I will leave aside the many ways he managed to disappoint and assert that American police forces need to look like America. Nearly 80% of all police officers are non-Hispanic whites. Right away we have a problem; just 54% of the American population is Euro-white. Latinos make up 17% of the population, African Americans 16%, and Asians 7%. (The remaining 6% are a smorgasbord of Native Americans, Pacific Islanders, and non-white immigrants.) The following can and should happen starting tomorrow.

·       An immediate end to all-white patrol squads. It should never be acceptable for a white officer to respond to a call without at least one person of color in the car.

·       An immediate freeze on hiring white police until racial and ethnic parity is achieved.

·       Immediate and mandatory racial and cultural diversity training. Officers who do not pass a post-training exam should be placed on leave until such time as they pass said test and remain on probation for 6 months after reinstatement.

Here’s another alarming statistic. Nearly 88% of all police officers are white males, though white men make up just 31% of the population. This underscores the need for:

·      A freeze on hiring white male police until parity is reached.

·      Sustained recruitment and hiring of women.

About one in five police officers has a military background. Speaking of things we have known for a long time but haven’t corrected, it’s well-established that the U.S. military has a distressing track record toward women and people of color. More ominously, one-third of those engaging in mass shootings are ex-servicemen. What to do?

·      End preferential hiring practices of veterans and …

·      Improve psychological screening of all candidates.

·      Tie the military budget to significant improvements in recruitment practices, personality profiling, diversity training, and psychological support for military personnel.  

This will upset “soft” liberals, but towns and cities should follow the European model and increase the use of security cameras on the streets. If you're worried about ICE raid, tapes can be erased daily if no crime or police conduct is image-captured in a 24-hour period. Some have argued cameras don’t decrease crime. That’s a debate for another day, but there are good reasons to turn on the cameras:

·      It should not have to be the job of Smart Phone-bearing citizens to risk their own safety to record the malfeasance of police.

·      It would actually help cops who aren’t jerks. Too many people bear animus toward police, have agendas, or do not see everything that occurs during an arrest. Good cops ought not be tossed into a he said/he said situation in which every perp cries police brutality, or someone with a grudge posts a misleading YouTube video.

Here are a set of no excuses, no forgiveness reforms.

·      The moment police are called to a scene, they should be required to activate vest cameras.

·      It should not be excusable for a police officer to claim the situation was too “hot” to turn on the camera. If cops have time to unholster a gun, they have time to turn on the camera. As noted, it should be done on the way to the scene.

·      Any police officer failing to have his/her camera running should immediately be suspended for a week without pay, unless…

·      A serious incident occurs, in which case officers in question should be immediately suspended. If a death occurs and there is no video, the officers should be fired.

These are not radical ideas. Nearly all could be funded by axing unneeded military-style hardware. Black lives matter. Moreover, if we don’t reform police procedures, we condemn ourselves to a society in which none matter if the white guy with the gun decides they don’t.

The Water Dancer an Impressive Debut

The Water Dancer (2019)

By Ta-Neshi Coates

★★★★

Conduction: The transfer of heat, energy, or acoustics within or through a substance due to a change in temperature and without moving materials. It’s what happens when we turn on a radiator, heat a tea kettle, or hold onto an ice cube as it melts. In Ta-Neshi Coates’ debut novel, it’s also linked to the various meanings of conductors, the kind that transfer or store energy, those who orchestrate, and a crew member on a railroad.

Hiram “Hi” Walker is the protagonist of The Water Dancer. He is a slave on a declining Virginia tobacco plantation, but occupies a semi-privileged position as the half-white son of widowed plantation owner Howell Walker, who (rightly) sees Hi as the more promising of his two sons. He educates him and hopes that his commonsense will rub off on his white heir, Maynard. Coates gives us a memorable look at life at Lockless Plantation and Freetown, the adjoining hamlet. It is a world divided into “the Quality,” the white elites; “the Tasked,” those held in bondage; and “the Low,” who are essentially poor white trash and all the more dangerous for their degraded status. It is they who make up Ryland’s Hounds, who round up runaways and jail them, after they’ve had their sport with them. Coates never specifies the date, but one can infer that the novel is set sometime in the 1850s due to its references to escaped slaves such as Box Brown, Jarm Logue, and Harriet Tubman, all of whose abolitionist works took place after 1849.

Hi grows up thinking he will have a role at Lockless, even though Thena warns him against it. She is the hardened and outwardly unaffectionate older woman who acts as his surrogate mother. (Hiram’s actual mother, Rose, disappeared when he was a toddler.) Thena proves correct. A carriage in which Hi and Maynard are riding plunges into the Goose River. Maynard drowns, but Hi makes it to the bank after having a vision of Rose dancing on the water. Howell is outwardly kind, but Hi learns the hard way that the Quality do not cross social color lines. The upside is that Hi is more than a little attracted to Sophia, the slave and sex partner of Howell’s brother Nathaniel. That too is a reminder that Quality and Tasked live in different worlds, as is the coldness Hi receives from Corrine Quinn, Maynard’s betrothed.

Hi and Sophia attempt an escape that goes very badly–­at least for Sophia. Through circumstances outlined in the novel, Hi’s tormentors and captors are actually members of the Underground Railroad testing his mettle. In Philadelphia, Hi experiences the sweetness of liberty for the first time and immerses himself in a free community. There are many surprises awaiting, though, not the least of which involve those who are other than whom they appear to be.

Coates wishes us to see abolitionism as a higher calling—literally so. This brings us back to conduction. Hi is singled out because others see him as having special abilities. He is like his guide, Harriet Tubman, who takes him on his first journey on the Underground by bending the fabric of time and space. It’s not exactly like a wormhole, but that’s the best I can do. In other words, this novel is shot through with magical realism. Coates skillfully mixes magic with the real—Chautauqua gatherings, the ways in which fear sustains slavery, the potential treachery of all whites, and the serial affectionate bonds of slaves, just to name a few. For Virginia slaves, being sold “down Natchez way” was the ultimate fear, it being a symbol of the Deep South where the Quality neither put on genteel airs nor spared the lash. Escape from Natchez was exceedingly difficult. Coates presents water dancing as a gift, but not a superpower. The Underground was valiant, but not always successful.

The Water Dancer is beautifully written. It is especially impressive as a first novel. Many know Coates as an award-winning journalist and social commentator, but non-fiction and fiction share only a homonym, not a skill set. As in all first novels, there are details that don’t add up. I was quite underwhelmed by an ending and resolution that defied logic, but not in a magical way. A deeper critique is that The Water Dancer bears a lot of resemblance to Colson Whitehead’s 2016 Pulitzer Prize-winning The Underground Railroad. Plus, Coates’ magical realism strays very close to some of Octavia Butler’s science fiction devices.

Nonetheless, The Water Dancer is a terrific book. Even with its borrowed elements and homage it remains a rare original perspective on slavery. I don’t mean that as a cavalier remark. Like the Civil War, slavery is one of the topics that so dominate the output of historians that it is hard to put an original slant on it. Like a modern-day conductor, Ta-Nehisi Coates delivers us to unexpected places by transferring our gaze from the ordinary to the extraordinary.

Rob Weir            

Me, Groucho, and Job Searches

I found it in a box of old things: a picture of a younger me brandishing a fake cigar and wearing a Groucho Marx nose, glasses, and mustache ensemble. Unusual? Not really. The plastic Groucho face remains a popular novelty item. I didn’t look a thing like Groucho, but if anyone had the right to wear it, it was I. Groucho, was and remains one of my idols.

What marked this decades-old fading black and white photo as significant was its purpose. It was my “official” portrait for a job application. I bet you’re wondering what sort of job required such a shot. Comedy club? Traveling circus? Sales promotion? Nope. It was for a high school teaching job I knew I didn’t want and, yes, I will explain. The following is a (mostly) true story.

You may have noticed that COVID-19 has left the economy in shambles. It’s going to get much worse, and this saddens me because I thought I had already lived through what would be the worst financial crisis of my lifetime. I mean the one in the 1970s, not the one from 2011-16 that gets mislabeled the “Great Recession.” Let me assure you, the 1970s downturn was bleaker. It started with the first OPEC oil boycott in 1973 and, though it had brief breaks, lasted well into the 1980s and didn’t really break until early 1992. (Ask me about Reaganomics and I’ll fill you in on why it’s a myth.)

I had the misfortune to graduate from college in the midst of the 1970s muck. I was lucky enough to ditch my retail job, but unlucky to get hired as a juvenile probation officer. What I wanted to do was teach students, not bust them. History jobs are hard to secure today; in the 1970s, you couldn’t buy one, though I tried to do exactly that. We’d like to believe that hard times bring out the best in human beings. Actually, they tend to encourage pirates. In my case, the scurvy dogs masqueraded as an employment agency that found openings and, if you secured one of their leads, you agreed to dump 10% of your salary for the first three years into their treasure chest. You also had to apply for each lead they sent you, or they would stop looking.  

I should have known better, but I dutifully tossed resumes into several rings already mounded knee-deep. Then came the one that sent me over the edge: an opening at a rightwing Christian academy. We’re talking mouth-breathers and fire-eaters, not gentlefolk and do-gooders. I no longer remember where it was. Tallahassee sticks in my brain, but so does Georgia. What to do? When reason fails, try sabotage.

Take the application. Please. It went (more or less) like this:

            Q: Do you accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior?   A: I thought he was supposed to redeem all of humanity, not just me.

            Q: Do you drink?  A: Not much, but I’m open to suggestions.

            Q: Do you smoke? A: No, the cigar is made of rubber. (See attached photo)

            Q: Do you dance?  A: Not very well, I’m told.

            Q: Do you go to movies? A: Yes, but I’m rather picky about what I see.

            Q: What are your views on pornography? A: The same as Justice John Marshall Harlan. I don’t know what it is, but I know it when I see it.

            Q: Do you believe in original sin? A: No. It appears to me that people just keep committing the same ones over and over. I can’t recall seeing an original one.      

            Q: Do you believe in premarital intercourse? A: It totally depends on the young lady in question. (Had I really been honest, I might have made some reference to demand outstripping supply!)

There were some theological questions that allowed me to be more seriously argumentative, but the application ended with this: Attach a recent photograph of yourself. It didn’t occur to me until years later that they probably wanted to make sure I wasn’t black, but you know what I did. I wanted to make absolutely certain that I had a less than zero chance of being interviewed!

So I went back to the social work job I so desperately wished to leave. As most of you know, my tale has a happy ending. I got married, Emily and I moved to Vermont, and I got my first teaching gig at a place the pirates had never ventured. If you are one of my former students (at any level) and think I helped with your education, don’t thank me. Thank Groucho.

Rob Weir