No one knows who they were or what they were doing

September 27, 2017

Burnt Hill; photo by Hans-Joachim Zillmer

Recently I learned about a stone circle on Burnt Hill in Heath, Massachusetts. Naturally I want to visit; naturally, I do not believe that there is anything particularly spooky or pre-Columbian-contact about them. It should not be a source of amazement that a local native people of the area had the skills and interest to rearrange rocks, even quite large rocks, into the shape of a circle, for the purpose of ritual or astronomical observation.

My lifelong obsession with archaeology never quite picked up in the area of European megalithic stone circles. It would have been a natural obsession for a bookish girl; I am no doubt descended in part from a people who constructed them. But no: for me it was Egypt, then Mesopotamia, then Greece. Even when you can’t read hieroglyphs — even when no one could — a temple speaks so much to the observer: the sacred, the terrible, the sic transit of the gloria mundi.

Stone circles are … well, there they are. That is an accomplishment, but it seems to be the only one. The stones are more than silent; they are dumb, in the oldest sense of the word, as mute as glacial erratics. The sole awesome power that they have had, over generations, is to inspire enough superstition (and require enough brute effort) that farmers and landowners would decline to tear them down. The great wonder, I now know, is beneath them and around them — the burials and ritual deposits that are just in the past few decades receiving the kind of detailed attention that they deserve.

The excavations, though, cannot be open to the public, or if they are, they only reveal a lot of kneeling and scraping and measuring and cursing. What the public can always see, if they are willing to hike to nowhere in particular, are cup-and-ring marks.

Near Baluachraig, Argyll and Bute, Great Britain (photo by Patrick Mackie)

I am fond of the cup-and-ring marks. They appear all over Europe, and vary from elaborate to crude. And they, like the stone circles, are unreadable. As Neolithic village and fort remains are often circular, I am inclined to guess that they are representations of homesteads since vanished. Perhaps the marks were a way of solidifying property rights and obligations before the public, and before the local gods, directing (or warning?) travelers at the same time. I doubt, of course, that the cup-and-ring marks had a single significance over thousands of miles and hundreds of years. My guesses are, of course, worth twice butt, but they are at least a little informed.

“A Service that is a Service.”

September 25, 2017

In the front pages of the Clark’s Boston Blue Book for 1916, you find this:

The function
of detective service
at social events

Etiquette requires that the guest be the recipient of the most solicitous consideration.

While in attendance upon any occasion in response to an invitation, a guest, and the property of a guest, must be adequately protected from any possible depredations not only by means commonly exercised, but by especial measures made necessary by the event.

It is essential at all times when valuables are on dis play, whether as personal adornment, or on exhibition as gifts, as in the instance of wedding presents, that private detectives be employed by the host or hostess.

Men or women who know thoroughly the traits of the class of culprits who confine their activities to the social events heralded by newspaper publications and social periodicals must be secured through a reputable detective private agency.

A month or so prior to the date set for a wedding, or as soon as any presents are received, it is advisable to engage a detective to guard the gifts during the night, and also during the daytime, for a period of at least several days before the ceremony, or during the absence of household members from the premises.

When delegated for service of this kind, the detective in company with the host or hostess makes an inventory of all the articles which are to be protected, and this is added to and cheeked up periodically. Before the departure of the detective, after everything hasbeen packed and safely put away by its owners, a final accounting is taken.

Detectives, dressed as the occasion requires, are generally employed at the time of the ceremony to mingle with the guests in order to prevent any undesir able persons from frequenting the premises. It is usually advisable to have a detective in street dress on the grounds to prevent photographers and reporters, etc., from entering the premises or annoying the guests or gaining access to the church or house at the time of receptions, parties, and rehearsals or other social affairs.

INVESTIGATION

Detectives afford the only real protection against blackmailers and slanderers which can be given to girls and young men who are in schools of any sort away from home, or any place where there is a reasonable amount of wealth represented by students.

Careful investigation from time to time, of actions and habits of young women attending schools and colleges away from home and away from the guidance and chaperonage of parents, especially of their companions of either sex, unvouched for hostesses, and their surroundings in general, may enable parents to keep all concerned from various sorts of unpleasant entanglements.

SHERMAN DETECTIVE AGENCY
“A Service that is a Service”

EXECUTIVE OFFICES
16 STATE ST., BOSTON
Telephone
Day and Night

We have not yet returned to the point of income inequality in which detectives openly advertise that they will prevent your sons and daughters from dating the Wrong Kind of People, but no doubt it is a service still quietly offered.

This was, it appears, some of the nicest work that the Sherman Detective Agency, later the Sherman Service, ever did. They were known as strikebreakers, sowing ethnic strife to accomplish the breakdown of labor movements. See also The Legendary Detective: The Private Eye in Fact and Fiction, by John Walton. Sherman Service eventually dedicated itself to the “industrial conciliation” business, assuming aliases that cause the corporate trail to break down. Perhaps there is some shard of the institution existing somewhere today.

What directories direct us to

September 21, 2017

If you get into genealogy, you soon find yourself looking into old city directories, and when you see old directories, what strikes you, as a resident of the early 21st century, is how much information they give away. They don’t just show names and addresses, but spouses, children, and — if the resident died or moved away since the last edition — they’re liable to tell you so, and where to find them next. This is a bizarre amount of public information to give to a random thumber-through, by our standards. We are much more comfortable giving this information to large, unaccountable corporations to look after.

I’ve recently found Clark’s Boston Blue Book: the Élite Private Address, Carriage and Club Directory, Ladies’ Visiting List and Shopping Guide. This directory, printed between the 1870s and the 1920s, gives away information just by its index. Those included were listed by street number — and by their club membership.

Clark’s, swank as it is, has some useful information as well. At the back of the 1879 edition is a listing of the street corners where you could find fire-alarm boxes for the city of Boston and environs. In a time before the widespread ownership of phones or centralization of emergency services, knowing how to get help was as important as knowing when to get it. Some of us today remember learning, as children, how important it was to have separate numbers for the police, fire and ambulance right next to the phone. Now we don’t have to remember any of that; three digits will do.

This is a fascinating source. I’ve seen several amazing topics and I’ll be back to it.

Why do we haunt a house?

September 19, 2017

It’s not ghosts and demons who do it. Life would be considerably more exciting if it were. We are the ones who haunt houses, with our memories, or — if we have never set foot inside — with our projections, with the stories we were built to live our lives with. I thought about this when I saw IT, and again when I went home from the theater, and saw the Stoneholm on the way to my new place.

The Stoneholm is a stunning Beaux-Arts apartment building, full of what used to be called French flats — that is, luxury apartments the size of a whole floor — which are now condominiums worth a high six or seven figures. It was built by John P. Webber, owner of a vast tract of timberland in Maine. The Webber Timberlands in Maine remained a going concern one full century after the Stockholm was built.

Photo by self, 9/2017

 

In IT, the eponymous IT dwells in the sewers of Derry, Maine, and before that dwelled in Derry’s woods and hills, eternal and malevolent. While in town, IT makes its home at 29 Neibolt Street. Absolutely every key on the haunted-house keyboard, black and white, has been mashed down and held to create the house at Neibolt Street. No one, in the movie or the audience, fails to understand its visual message right away: Haunted with a capital H, for Hot Topic. The building is unpainted, untended, overgrown, and boarded up. Still, the most haunted-house of its many haunted-house details might have done the visual job all by itself. The house at 29 Neibolt Street, you see, is Second Empire.

The Second Empire style of architecture, developed in France in the 1850s, enjoyed a brief popularity in America from the 1860s through the early 1870s. The popularity it chiefly enjoys in America, however, is as the face of the haunted house. In America, the later nineteenth century was full of now-forgotten financial crises — the Panic of 1857, of 1866, and the Long Depression of the 1870s, to say nothing of the self-inflicted wounds of the seceding states. The social safety net was not yet thought of. It was also not yet thought of, among those with pretensions to gentility, for ladies to take any notice of the business affairs of their husbands or fathers. So it might happen that a man came home to tell his wife and family, in the midst of a great, plush, carpeted home, that they were penniless. His sons could at least manifest some destiny by heading out to work, but his daughters, if they had no family wealth or genteel accomplishments to trade on, might be left entirely behind in their attempts to marry or assume one of the few ladylike professions. The sight of a great old French-influenced Second Empire mansion, unkempt, abandoned, or half-occupied by ghostly women and invalids from a vanished world, became common enough to engender the peculiarly American variant of the haunted house.

When I first laid eyes on the Stoneholm, with its lush curves and French windows, I thought, with a deep thrill: I have got to tour that place. Something terrible has happened there. Immediately, I thought of all the terrors of the moneyed world, of an Edith Wharton-like chill madness descending on some brittle Brahmin family behind the Juliet balconies. I am, of course, entirely making that up. For all I know, everyone in that building has lived amiably with their chosen partners and family until a peaceable death of old age. But everything in my cultural experience has primed me to associate such great beauty with great tragedy. And I adore it.

The Great Gilly Hopkins: the kids, the neighborhood, what I was not

May 25, 2016

The Great Gilly Hopkins, Katherine Paterson. 1978.

When I was eight or so, I had to spent a lot of time at my great-grandparents’ house. It was a tiny, tumbledown thing with low ceilings. My Papaw and Mamaw didn’t move much. Neither did their faces. Mamaw had Alzheimer’s, so you couldn’t blame her; she mainly nodded and swayed in her towel-draped chair. Papaw was fine; his face was just set like that. He had the color and scowl of a cigar-store carving. He was not unkind, but he had little to say to me, or to anyone, and I did not know what to do with myself while I was there with my father.

The house had almost no privacy, and certainly no cable. If the weather was nice, I might go in the little backyard, and find some blackberries in season, but there was no seat and no shade. There was Mama-cat, who often lay in the driveway, but she had other local responsibilities, and she didn’t care to be much company. I wasn’t allowed to walk through the neighborhood, but I could see that there were children in the yard of the house across the street, and I wondered if I could make friends. Not those kids, I was told. Those are foster kids. They’re mean. One of them’s retarded. I’d leave them alone if I was you.

This place was where I imagined the world of Gilly Hopkins. Read More

Daphne’s Book: isolation, cars, stories

May 24, 2016

Daphne’s Book, Mary Downing Hahn. 1983.

It must have been 1988 or ’89 that I got hold of this one. I re-read Daphne’s Book often, but not all the way through, because I only liked being in one particular time of this book.

Daphne’s Book is told in the first person by Jessica, a seventh-grader. Her English teacher designates all of his students into teams of two for an inter-school Write-a-Book competition, in which the winning students will have their picture-book published. Jessica is assigned to work with Daphne, who is weird, arty, and essentially mute. Daphne is the seventh grade’s designated scapegoat, and Jessica is desperate to get out of associating with her, although the clear subtext is that she is beautiful, raven-haired and dresses like Stevie Nicks.

Read More

A new post series

May 24, 2016

Well! The semester is over and I am a person who can enjoy the “on line” world again.

What I want to do, now, with all the world before me, is to spend some time talking about the books that I spent a lot of time with as a child.

I don’t mean the all-star classics, the ones we all loved like Charlotte’s Web or the Ramona Quimby books. I don’t want to examine them critically, review the lives of the authors, or look up the afterlives of the books. I want to see who I was in the book – to understand why I spent so much time with it.

As a child, I liked spending time inside books. I re-read a lot. When you are grown, you generally want to experience a book in the one way: for novels, straight through, in and out; for nonfiction, reference and citation, unless of course it is a narrative and you switch to Novel mode. But when I was a kid, I would just read the first parts of a book again, or the last parts, because I wanted to be in the time that Meg had hot chocolate with Charles Wallace, or the time that Bilbo had to answer riddles from Gollum.

With my current access to ILL books from the college library system, I can go back and see what it was that I liked about these books. I can never know whether or not they were worth liking, not without being a child again. Since I am not, I can at least place these stories into a kind of context, if for no one else but me.

Amazing! I am alive —

March 5, 2016

And I’m in a new fantasy anthology that just came out from 18th Wall!

Those Who Live Long Forgotten II

Myths never die. They cough away into obscurity, and settle into the comfortable spot just beyond our vision.

You would never believe the broken down salt who moves from ship to ship, never staying long, was once the mile-high marvel Alfred Bulltop Stormalong. Nor would you believe John Paul Jones caught the attention of a spirit of the ocean, a spirit out to collect her due two hundred years later. Nor would you even stop to question the impossibility of a tree nymph’s troubles with otherkin, the scraps of belief a ha’penny goddess must subsist on, or just how far into the past Dracula’s history stretches.

No, you wouldn’t believe a word of it.

Featuring stories by Dale W. Glaser, Wm. Bernan,  Elizabeth Hopkinson, Marc Sorondo, L.T. Patridge, Owen Kerr, Edward Ahern, Ken MacGregor, and Ro McNulty.