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Through the eye of the needle of Orkney

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Over a delightful meal with Fran Flett Hollinrake — historian, storyteller, tour guide, writer, and the manager of St. Magnus Cathedral for the Orkney Islands Council — I asked for her recommendation of a book to read about this remote, windswept, northern outpost of Scotland. She didn’t hesitate.

“Anything by George Mackay Brown will do,” she replied. In a wonderful independent bookstore on our next stop in the Shetland Islands, I bought two volumes and immediately dived in to one of his early works.

Magnus, the second novel of George Mackay Brown, the acclaimed Orkney writer, was published in 1973 (and republished by Polygon in 2019). It is the fictional account of the real-life murder of Earl Magnus of Orkney who “walked calmly, knowingly and completely unarmed to a terrible death at the hands of his cousin Hakon Paulson.” Told through the eyes of several peasants, most notably the farmer Mans and his wife Hild, as well as the tinker Jock and his blind wife Mary, it is both atmospheric in capturing the spirit of the islands, and descriptive in recounting the hardships and terror of life in the 12th century.

George Mackay Brown (1921 – 1996) was one of the greatest Scottish writers of the twentieth century. A prolific poet, admired by such fellow poets as Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney, he was also an accomplished novelist, dramatist and a master of the short story. Bar a brief period in Edinburgh … Mackay Brown spent most of his life in Orkney, and his work is saturated with references to his native islands. 

Seamus Heaney once remarked that George Mackay Brown passed everything “through the eye of the needle of Orkney.” That is true in Magnus, where Brown takes off on a dream flight in the midst of the description of the killing of the 12th century martyr to meditate on the murder of famed German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer at the hands of the Nazis near the end of World War II. He returns with a short tale of Jock and Mary three years after the murder, where Jock prays over the recently buried bones of Magnus and a miracle follows.

I finished the book after we left Scotland for Norway, but I was certainly called back to that haunting landscape, in part because of Mackay Brown’s use of language and images. In fact, lines from Hamnavoe, his most famous poem, speak to why he is so effective and evocative.

In the fire of images
Gladly I put my hand.

In reading Mackay Brown, I recalled our day in Orkney with National Trust Tours and the visit to the majestic St. Magnus Cathedral in Kirkwall.

St. Magnus Cathedral, Kirkwall

Known as the “Light in the North”, the cathedral was founded in 1137 by the Viking, Earl Rognvald, in honor of his martyred uncle. Built of red and yellow standstone, this internationally recognized site has a striking and unique appearance.

The worshipping community over the centuries has been part of the Roman Catholic Church, the Norwegian Church, the Scottish Episcopal Church, and the Church of Scotland (Presbyterian). The worshipping community thus inherits an ecumenical tradition. 

View towards the altar

I mentioned to Fran that in my research for the trip, I found stories that suggested that the residents of the Orkney Islands were both resilient and pragmatic souls. She suggested that was true and told a short story as an illustration. St. Magnus Cathedral had weathered the Reformation physically and in spirit. The same clergy who just weeks before were Roman Catholic priests simply became Scottish Presbyterian ministers following the change. Same team, different uniforms.

That resilience is seen in the stories around Skara Brae, Western Europe’s best preserved Neolithic village.

Skara Brae

The stories we tell give us a sense of why particular places matter. Stories connect people to a certain place in a certain time, yet they add to the continuum of a community’s narrative. Stories don’t have to reveal something new. Often, they are more about tapping into our memories, our values, and our deepest longings, and so they resurrect what is very old, and very wise, and very precious.

People and places are intertwined.  It is why, when discussing their communities, so many people focus on the stories attached to places and less on the intricate architectural details of the buildings. 

Consider the stories surrounding Skara Brae. If a landmark’s essential feature is not its design, but the place it holds in our memory, then the stories of this Neolithic village are ones for all humanity. Stories place Skara Brae in the larger context of human history — predating the pyramids in Egypt and Stonehenge in England.

We learn from places like Skara Brae that life doesn’t stand still. Ritual ― trying to make sense of the changing world around us ― is part of who we are. Resiliency is an important part of our make-up as humans, but so is adaptability. Skara Brae was abandoned around 2500 ― but we are unsure why. Even those places that no longer exist as living communities still have lessons to teach us and imbed stories into our collective consciousness.

Historian David McCullough likes to remind us that history shows that we have been through difficult times before. Yet in face of difficult times “we have an all-important, inexhaustible source of strength. And that source of strength is our story, our history, who we are, how we got to be where we are, and all we have been through, what we have achieved.”

Ring of Brodgar

Sometimes, stories in Orkney are enigmatic, like the stone henge of the Ring of Brodgar. We visited the ring — part of the Heart of Neolithic Orkney World Heritage Site, a series of important domestic and ritual monuments built 5000 years ago in the Orkney Islands — with master archaeologist Nick Card.

It was a magical day, one that provided images and stories of Orkney that will remain for a lifetime.

More to come…

DJB

For other posts on my reports and impressions from the Scottish Islands and Norwegian Fjords National Trust Tours trip, click here for Glasgow and the Scottish Highlands, here for the cultural landscapes of Norway and here for the Edvard Grieg home.

Image: Skara Brae by DJB

Do not abandon us to our foolishness and fallenness

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This was one unforgettable week in America. If ever we needed comfort, understanding, and direction from power greater than ourselves, this was that week.

Writing on the day after 19 children and 2 of their teachers were butchered in Uvalde, Texas — not just murdered but cut down with repeated fire from an assault rifle — Heather Cox Richardson spoke for many of us. “I have been coming back to this” she wrote:

How have we arrived at a place where 90% of Americans want to protect our children from gun violence, and yet those who are supposed to represent us in government are unable, or unwilling, to do so?

This is a central problem not just for the issue of gun control, but for our democracy itself.

How indeed have we arrived at a place where one political party, representing a shrinking minority of our fellow citizens, acts as if it has the right to dictate through force, if necessary, how the rest of us will live…or not live, as the case may be.

Today, we arrived at the American Cathedral of the Holy Trinity in Paris, seeking answers. Interim Dean Timothy Safford gave an emotion-filled sermon full of question, doubt, love, and grace. One of his questions, like that of Dr. Richardson, was how one group of politicians could make the argument on today’s talk shows to suggest that it was constitutional — indeed normal and essential for our way of life — for someone to be able to legally buy an assault rifle and 300 rounds of ammunition before they are legally old enough to buy a beer.

The altar at the American Cathedral in Paris, with the Memorial Day wreath from the 100th anniversary of Armistice Day

In the cover note to the congregation, Dean Safford wrote:

Is your heart broken? Mine certainly is.

In our opening prayer, we petition God “not to leave us comfortless.” Yes, God, please comfort me, but more importantly, please comfort (if it even possible) every mother and father who lost a child to needless, avoidable violence in Uvalde, Texas.

On this the second anniversary of the senseless and brutal murder of George Floyd, comfort all who experience the daily pain and violence of racism and exclusion. In the horror of Uvalde, we must not forget the evil unleashed in Buffalo, New York, where 10 died to racist violence.

On American Memorial Day, comfort us as we honor those who have died in heroic service while we also grapple with the pain that so many are dying in Ukraine because humanity cannot save itself from ourselves.

Maybe my prayer is, “God, do not abandon us to our foolishness and fallenness.

I am weary and I am sad. But I still come to pray, to hope, to praise, to glimpse glory. I know that you will be here with me to hold me up when I want to sit down, to face me forward when I want to turn away, and lift me up when I fall.

Dean Safford noted that we are in the ten-day period in the church year between the Ascension and Pentecost. In church language, Jesus has “left the planet” and the “Comforter” has not yet arrived. The French translation for the plea “not to leave us comfortless” is not to leave us inconsolable.

It is easy this week to feel inconsolable when contemplating our future as a country and as a people. But no matter how we find the strength, we must stand up, we must face forward.

We simply cannot keep turning away.

The view in the American Cathedral in Paris as one heads out into the world.

May you find the strength to keep working.

More to come…

DJB

Another in the series of Observations from… (in this case, Paris).

Image by Pexels from Pixabay

Life is just as strange as folk music

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Yes, life is just as strange as folk music tunes; you never know whether they unfold in a major or minor key.

These lines from a letter Norwegian composer, pianist, and conductor Edvard Grieg wrote to a friend, begin a short biography that I read after visiting Grieg’s home in Bergan, Norway earlier this week.

Edvard Grieg: His life and music is a 2002 work written by Erling Dahl, Jr. and published by the Edvard Grieg Museum — Troldhaugen. It was an excellent short intro for those — like me — who may have heard a number of Grieg’s compositions through the years but do not know much about the life, influences, and work of Norway’s most famous composer.

Grieg’s grandparents were involved with the Bergen Symphony Orchestra and his mother was a piano tutor who taught her son to play in this most international of Norway’s cities. The violinist Ole Bull “discovered” the young Grieg’s musical talent and convinced his parents to let the young man attend the conservatory of music in Leipzig, Germany. Grieg, never a committed student, hated the experience but clearly learned important elements of harmony and found his calling. The Hungarian composer Béla Bartók later said that “Grieg was the first to cast off the yoke of Germany.”

There is much packed into this short biography: Grieg’s marriage to his cousin and fellow musician Nina Hagerup; his bouts with depression; his friendships and connections with Liszt, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Saint-Saëns, and many more. I was most fascinated by Grieg’s connections to, and love of, Norwegian folk music which flowered in an especially creative period in the mid-1870s, when he lived in western Norway. The “synthesis of life experienced, the artistic endeavor and the power of the Norwegian landscape and folk music is expressed in the profundity of these exalted and highly personal, heartfelt compositions.”

The beauty and power of the Norwegian landscape as seen from the Flam Railway

Edvard Grieg died rather early in 1907 after suffering most of his life from a childhood bout with tuberculosis. Piano Concerto in A Minor (Opus 16) is his most famous work, and everyone knows those stirring opening chords.

It was a treat to visit the home that he and Nina bought and named Troldhaugen (or the Troll Hill) outside Bergen. The composer’s cottage overlooks a beautiful lake and would be a magical place to write for any creative individual. The house museum is rather old-fashioned in its presentation, but one still gains the essence of the place and its relationship to the life of Edvard and Nina Grieg.

Interior of Edvard Grieg’s Composer’s Cottage
The Edvard Grieg Home
The house recently reopened to visitors, so the presentation was no doubt influenced by the need for social distancing in a small space.

Dahl ends his work with an assessment of Grieg’s life and music.

His preference for the smaller musical forms has, for example, led to their describing him as a miniaturist — a drawing room composer. Such an assessment merely shows a failure to realize that greatness can manifest itself in simple and small forms.

Grieg himself said that he was not in the same class as Bach, Mozart, or Beethoven, but, like Thalberg, he noted that “His province is the smaller forms, but in this he is great.”

Enjoy the famous In the Hall of the Mountain King from “Peer Gynt” with photos taken around the house and grounds.

More to come (from my recent adventures in travel)…

DJB

For other posts on my reports and impressions from the Scottish Islands and Norwegian Fjords National Trust Tours trip click here for Glasgow and the Scottish Highlands, here for Orkney, and here for the cultural landscapes of Norway.

Image of the composer’s cottage at the Edvard Grieg House by DJB, as are all photos from Norway in this post.

For lovers (of cities)

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As I was leaving to visit some of the world’s most treasured landscapes and one of our most beloved cities, I returned to a work I reread every few years for refreshment and inspiration.

Bedside Essays for Lovers (of Cities) (2012) is architect Daniel Solomon‘s call to arms for all of us — architects, planners, politicians, developers, citizens — to understand and care for our cities. In this short collection, Solomon is focused on what makes cities vibrant. What makes cities livable. What makes cities sustainable. What makes for a great city where we would all want to live.

Cities are complex places with innumerable moving parts. The need to find solutions that work in cities is made more urgent by factors such as climate change, justice, and inequality. And there are many voices in the mix. “Like the fifteenth-century’s great voyages of discovery,” Solomon writes, “the twenty-first century’s path to sustainability is a highly competitive sport.”

But Solomon has important things to say. To support sustainability in urban areas, we need to pay more attention to nurturing what Solomon calls “continuous cities.”

While for many cities growth is inevitable, the form that growth takes is not. There are three main ways in which cities can grow, each profoundly different from the others: (1) Cities can sprawl and decentralize; (2) cities can erase themselves and build anew; or (3) cities can regenerate themselves more densely within their own structure.

Daniel Solomon

Forms one and two are lumped together, in Solomon’s description as the Ruptured City, while the third form of growth constitutes the Continuous City. The latter is “the old champion with victories in all the great cities of the world large and small.” There “streets are lined and shaped by city blocks. The blocks in the continuous city are known as perimeter blocks because buildings usually face streets all the way around.” Then Solomon turns to the challenger, “still battling hard despite a record of all defeats and no victories.” The Ruptured City is “where streets and buildings each go their own way without a nod, and blocks, where they exist at all, are freestanding slabs of building. This is the grandchild of the city laid out in ninety-five dogmatic prescriptions in 1943 by Le Corbusier in The Athens Charter.”

In continuous cities, Solomon points out, there is always change.

The continuous city is not a static thing. It changes all the time because that is what living organisms do. But change in the continuous city is evolution, not upheaval; the living honor the dead and make sure that the unborn get to know them. New buildings, new institutions, new technologies in the continuous city don’t rip apart the old and wreck it. They accommodate, they act with respect, and they add vibrant new chapters to history without eradicating it.

Altar at San Carlo
Altar at San Carlo

I’ve written about Solomon’s book before, most especially when discussing San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane (Saint Charles at the Four Fountains) in Rome. This design — a masterpiece of architect Francesco Borramini — is both “extraordinary and complex.”  Working with a very difficult site and needing to include a number of elements to complete the architectural program, Borramini came up with a design that works and thrills at the same time.

Dome of San Carlo
Dome of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane

To give you a sense of Solomon’s style and perspective, I’ll leave you with this paragraph about Borramini’s masterpiece.

Never have the ordinary and the extraordinary been reconciled with more sublime elegance than at San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane.  Its interior is nothing less than a three-dimensional cosmological map depicting in its intricate geometries and its filtration of light the relationship of heaven and earth.  But the sanctuary of San Carlo sits on an unremarkable street corner on the consistent street frontage of via Quirinale, leading to the magnificence of Palazzo Quirinale and Piazza Quirinale a couple of blocks up the street.  Mediating between the glories of the interior and the important but subservient role of the exterior is a subtly undulating wall, true to the demands of both inside and out.  In this most complex of mediations, Borromini leaves the enduring lesson of how to be both a humble city builder and an architect of thundering power.

Lovers of cities should read Daniel Solomon.

More to come…

DJB

As always, this Weekly Reader features links to recent articles, blog posts, or books that grabbed my interest or tickled my fancy. I hope you find something that makes you laugh, think, or cry.

Glasgow image by Pirkko Seitsenpiste from Pixabay.

Richard Thompson finds his voice

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I came late to an appreciation for the British singer-songwriter Richard Thompson, and I’ve never been sure why it took me so long. His 1991 song 1952 Vincent Black Lightning is so well-crafted that it stands among the best story songs of all time. I’ve heard it — and loved it — for years. And he’s considered one of the best, and most influential rock guitar players of all time. But sometimes I suspect that your mind is elsewhere in your formative years when a musician is making their initial mark on the world, and he or she just slips past your consciousness. We’re lucky, as I have been in recent years, to discover true genius that has been there all along. Richard Thompson is that person for me.

And it was why I was delighted to read his 2021 memoir which I picked up at Books, Inc. on a recent trip to Alameda.

Beeswing: Losing My Way and Finding My Voice 1967 – 1975 (2021) is Richard Thompson’s witty, moving, and un-ponderous (to use one reviewer’s description) memoir of his early musical career.

It is, to put it simply, a delight to read.

There are unforgettable lines, as when he talks of his band, Fairport Convention, deepening their love of British folk music. “We were starting to connect to a lineage that was ancient, pagan and alive with the dreams of the dead.” There are thoughtful passages about working through tragedy, such as with the 1969 crash of their van which killed Thompson’s girlfriend and the band’s drummer. There are throwaway bits of humor, such as Thompson’s note that when both the Beatles and the Rolling Stones sent flowers to the hospital after that crash, “it impressed the nurses.”

And there are laugh-out-loud stories, such the one of sitting in a coffee shop in the Detroit airport and hearing the men in the next booth cursing about the “hippies” under their breath. Thompson carefully looks around and is shocked to see that it is county music star Buck Owens and his band the Buckaroos. As Thompson and his mates get up to leave, Thompson — who had one of his albums — goes back and shocks Owens by complimenting him on his most recent record and asking for his autograph. Then he recognizes the good work of the guitar player and the pedal steel player, calling them by their names, and he has them in the palm of his hands. He notes that he lost the signatures somewhere soon afterwards, “but that really wasn’t the point.”

My favorite of these vignettes of life on the road is when the band — living in a dump of a house named “The Angel” — went to see the local vicar and offered to do a concert to support the church’s organ restoration fund as a way of pacifying the locals who were concerned about a bunch of dirty hippies showing up in their rural community. All went well, and a couple of days later a policeman knocked on the door. Thompson, whose father was a policeman, describes band members frantically hiding drugs under the table when the superintendent of police said, “Stand easy, lads. … I’m here on unofficial business.”

It turns out the local police were impressed with the concert for the church organ fund and wanted to know if the band would do something similar for the police orphan fund.

This did not seem like an offer you turned down, just as you would probably not turn down the offer to play at Al Capone’s wedding. These were people you did not want to piss off, so we readily agreed. If we could do organs, we could do orphans.”

The concert was a huge hit, and when the superintendent came by the next morning to thank them for the significant lift to the orphan’s fund, he asked if there was anything they needed. “Well — we could use a dishwasher.” Later that afternoon a brand-new dishwasher showed up, and the band also noticed that there were no more parking tickets!

This is a wonderful read, full of details about life in London in the 60s, rock stars, and the writing life. Midway through Thompson leaves the band, works some as a session guitarist for hire, and goes on the road as a duo with his wife.

But the singer who really changed the course of his life and helped put the stamp on English folk-rock music was Sandy Denny, heard here with Fairport from the Unhalfbricking album with her Who Knows Where the Time Goes? Thompson plays lovely guitar on this classic.

“Genesis Hall” was an abandoned hotel in London’s Drury Lane, originally the Bell Hotel. It had been occupied by hippie squatters. The London police had evicted the squatters, and eventually caused the building to be razed. Thompson’s father was a member of the London police force at the time, and the lyrics — which Thompson wrote — refer to the incident.

Thompson writes about how much Fairport Convention was influenced by The Band, and especially their album Music from Big Pink. Upon hearing that album, Fairport realized that they needed to stop trying to mimic American roots music and focus instead on their British roots…leading to their move toward creating English folk rock. There is a terrific all-star version of the song online put together by Elvis Costello that features Band founder Levon Helm along with Nick Lowe, Ray Lamontaigne, Allen Toussaunt and Richard Thompson. It is magical.

One of the loveliest of Thompson’s tunes came from the time when he and Linda were singing as a duo. Dimming of the Day is simply sublime, with Linda’s haunting vocals and their exquisite harmony. It is an unforgettable piece, and their original is better than almost every single one of the many covers. (Bonnie Raitt and Alison Krauss both have wonderful versions that are beautiful interpretations.) The tune Dargai which follows is Richard’s take of a J. Scott Skinner fiddle piece of the same name.

I also enjoy this lovely version of Thompson’s 1994 tune Beeswing with Richard and Northumbrian concertina player Alistair Anderson at Alistair’s ‘Diamond Dazzler’ 60th Birthday celebration concert at The Sage Gateshead, in 2008.

In the Financial Times, writer David Honigmann conjurs up memories of Beeswing by writing of this wonderful tune, and what it has meant to him and other musicians.

In the summer of love, the song’s narrator comes to Dundee and falls in love with a laundry worker, as “fine as a bee’s wing”. They go on the road, busking and fruit picking and tinkering. He wants to settle down and have a family; she refuses. “As long as there’s no price on love I’ll stay.” After a drunken quarrel she leaves. Now he hears only rumours of her, sleeping rough; once marrying but finding “even a gypsy caravan was too much settling down”. Free-spiritedness shades into solipsism. And yet he remains obsessed.

Thompson’s writing skills are amazing here, with the equisite line, “And maybe that’s just the price you pay for the chains you refuse.”

Thompson, who is still going strong in his 70s, has a wonderfully playful side, which comes through in his memoir and in this cover of the Britney Spears pop hit Oops I Did It Again. And I haven’t really mentioned that he’s one of the top guitarists in rock music. You can hear that here. Stay with it all the way to the end!

And finally, one of the best versions I’ve heard of Thompson performing his classic 1952 Vincent Black Lightening came in 2012 at the Americana Music Awards at the Grand Old Opry House in Nashville.

“Red hair and black leather, my favorite color scheme.” One of the all-time great lyrics.

Thank you, Richard Thompson, for finding your voice and sharing it with us for so many years.

Enjoy!

More to come…

DJB

Image: Richard Thompson (credit: RichardThompson-music.com)

History, myths, and victory in Europe

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After much speculation that Russian president Vladimir Putin would use the country’s May 9 Victory Day celebration to announce he was escalating his war on Ukraine, Putin’s actual speech was rather subdued. You can be excused if you have trouble sorting out the significance of Victory Day in Russia, along with all the competing claims around who “won” World War II. If you don’t follow European history of the 20th century, it is easy to get confused.

Thankfully, historians can help provide some of the context.

But first, let’s clarify the different dates. The United States and most of the Allies honor V-E Day on May 8, which was the day in 1945 that “jubilant celebrations broke out as news spread of the Nazis’ unconditional surrender in Reims, France, on May 7, 1945.” The Russians celebrate victory over the Nazis on May 9, as Heather Cox Richardson notes, “for by the time the Germans surrendered to the Soviets in Berlin, the different time zones meant it was already May 9 in Moscow.”

Timothy Snyder is one of the smartest historians on 20th century Europe and tyranny. His slim but vital On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century is a must-read at this point in our life as a nation. On May 9th, Snyder used his Thinking About… Substack site to post 9 Theses on Putin’s Fascism for 9 May. In it, Synder distills work he’s done over the past decade to nine key points about how Putin can “carry out obviously fascist policies, such as a genocidal war of destruction in Ukraine, while claiming the mantle of anti-fascism.” Snyder shows how Putin identifies Russia’s invasion of Ukraine with the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany in the Second World War. “The past becomes a way for the aggressor to claim victimhood, as well as the right to commit any crime.”

The entire piece is fascinating and informative, and worth your time. Here are a couple of key excerpts:

Soviet usage lacked a clear notion of what fascism is. In the 1930s, Stalinism went back and forth on whether or not fascism was a bad thing. As a result, fascism in Soviet usage never had any very clear content. This was especially apparent after 1939, when Soviet newspapers reprinted speeches by Nazi leaders. In 1939, Stalin sealed a de facto alliance with Hitler, which meant that fascism became praiseworthy in the official Soviet public sphere. This act of collaboration was the most important of the Second World War, since it allowed it to begin. (Speaking of any of this in Russia today is a criminal act.) In 1941, Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, and so fascism became the enemy of the Soviet Union. But what was chiefly wrong with fascism was the invasion itself. Fascism was never really defined. It was simply the creed of the outsider.

As time passed, Snyder notes, the usage of the word “fascists” became even more vague. “In the cold war, the Americans and the British could be assimilated to wartime Germans as ‘fascists.’ In time, so could Israelis.” “Fascist” — Snyder points out — now just means “enemy.”

Such Soviet nostalgia was ideology, in the negative sense meant by Marx when he used the word. Actual Marxists would have remembered that Soviet victory of 1945 depended upon American economic power, for example in the form of lend-lease aid to the USSR. But Soviet leaders preferred to forget that. It goes unmentioned today in Russian history textbooks, and practically no one in Russia talks about it. And this of course is a great difference between the Second World War and the current Russian invasion: US economic power in 1942-1945 was very much on the Soviet side, but it is today arrayed (if on a smaller scale) against one post-Soviet state (Russia) on behalf of another post-Soviet state (Ukraine). Russian ideology today focuses entirely on the will of Russians as the source of Soviet victory in 1945, rather than on such structural factors. National will is of course the central category of fascism. …

Go read the whole thing.

For her May 9th Letters from an American post, Heather Cox Richardson looks at how Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, filmed outside walking down Khreshchatyk Street, the main street in Kyiv, answered Putin’s take on history. Then she turns to look at one area where Putin has been successful: in the outsized influence his country — our geopolitical enemy — has exerted over the Republican Party since 2008. Chilling.

Finally, Anne Applebaum is a journalist, not a historian, but in her 2020 book Twilight of Democracy she provides a compelling argument in the chapter The Future of Nostalgia that British conservatives’ belief that England was the only European country with a real claim to victory in the Second World War — “the country that was never invaded, never surrendered, the country that chose the right side from the beginning” — led directly to Brexit.

I grew up getting my U.S. history in the late 1950s and the 1960s. We learned that it was the U.S. that not only saved Europe, but saved civilization, from the fascists. It is easy to see how different countries build their national myths on different perspectives that do not account for complexity. Myths don’t handle complexity very well. But history can.

Snyder ends his piece with the following:

Russian propaganda about 1945 and 2022 is summarized in the popular slogan: “We can repeat!” But history, of course, does not repeat. And we cannot make it do so. The whole idea of repetition involves choosing a particular point in the past, idealizing it, ignoring all the context and everything that followed, and then imagining that it can be relived. Whoever performs this exercise eliminates any sense of responsibility: we were right back then, therefore we are right now, and we will always be right — no matter what we do. 

Question the myths, even those of your own country.

More to come…

DJB

As always, this Weekly Reader features links to recent articles, blog posts, or books that grabbed my interest or tickled my fancy. I hope you find something that makes you laugh, think, or cry.

A mother’s helping hand

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Mother loved the old-fashioned iris. We had them in our garden patch at home when I was young, and when I see them today my thoughts inevitably turn to her and the lessons she taught me about the beauty of the earth, respect for all, the importance of life-long learning, the need to stand up for the marginalized, and the value of an empathetic approach to living.

My sister Carol wrote a lovely remembrance of Mom for this Mother’s Day. In it she notes that “If each of my four siblings compared notes to what we loved and remembered about our mother, we would have five completely different perspectives,” as we each perceive her through the lens of “birth order, years of life, school and church activities, marriage partners, and even vacations.” She’s right, and I would only add that major events in the world as one grows up also have a huge impact on our personal and family perspectives.

Turning the corner near the Koiner Urban Farm on one of my recent walks, I saw my first irises of the year. That sighting came during what has been a tough week for anyone who cares about rights and democracy in America. With all that front of mind, my thoughts of Mom went to how she dealt with similar challenges. *

Irises near Koiner Urban Farm

Mom passed away on New Year’s Day in 1998, but her life and the lessons she taught me still provide a helping hand here in 2022. Lessons such as:

  • Women are to be respected and valued as people. Mom was the first woman elected as a deacon at First Baptist Church. She worked most of her career under Briley Adcock, a woman who ran our municipal library system. Helen Brown was no radical feminist, but she also did not buy any of the “woman’s place” on a pedestal nonsense we hear so often from right-wing zealots today. Mom was a quiet but effective leader and she valued other women who were leaders. Two of the best bosses in my career were women, and I worked easily in that environment thanks to Mom’s example.
  • Books are meant to be read, not banned and burned. Mom was a lifelong reader and learner. She loved books and as both a mother and a librarian she loved teaching young children about books. I am appalled at the push by right-wing zealots to ban books today, as if we learned nothing from the fight against the fascist in World War II. Our country is filled with problems. Reading too many books isn’t one of them.
  • Vote in every election. Mom and Dad were informed citizens who voted in every election. They both had a strong BS detector when it came to politicians and pundits. Oh, and they were independent. I know of more than one occasion when Mom cancelled out my father’s vote. I’ve followed Mom’s lead and voted in every election held since my first, the 1976 presidential contest.
  • Treat everyone with respect. And that means everyone. We simply were not permitted to be rude to others, no matter how different they were or how marginalized by society. I haven’t always followed Mom’s guidance, but as the country and its leaders have become more intolerant, I frequently remind myself not to fall into that trap.
  • Be the person you are meant to be. When I look at my four siblings, I think that Mom and Dad probably succeeded with this life principle beyond their wildest dreams. Even when it was tough, they stood by their belief that each person has to figure out what is in store for them in this world. I have tried, generally with success, to follow their example with our children.
  • You have no right to complain if you don’t do the service. Mom did not like cynics who complained without making a serious effort to work towards a solution. She took her turn as PTA president, even though it was the year our local schools were being desegregated following the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision. She did it because she felt it was the right thing to do, and I know in this day and time, I must follow her example. Mom was always “in the arena” as Teddy Roosevelt would say. **

When I see the patch of iris, I am reminded that Mom is still here, helping me see that we are facing another moment in America where we can change our narrative and our future for the better. It will not be easy, but we need to see everyone — even the marginalized — as humans of value with the same rights we have. We need to educate ourselves so we don’t blindly follow the tribe. We need to do our duty as citizens in a democracy.

It will not be easy, but we have to continue to try, for ourselves, and for our children and grandchildren. Our mothers are calling us.

Happy Mother’s Day.

More to come…

DJB

*As historian Heather Cox Richardson wrote, the leak of the draft Supreme Court decision overturning a woman’s right to control her own body — based on right-wing talking points, shoddy history, and the writings of a 17th century English jurist who, it should be noted, had at least two women executed for witchcraft and wrote a treatise supporting marital rape — is “an alarm like the 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision.” Dred Scott declared that “Black Americans had no rights that a white man was bound to respect,” and also “that Congress had no power to prohibit human enslavement in the territories.”

The “reasoning” (and I use that term loosely) in the draft opinion, opens up other rights to question, such as the right to use contraceptives, the right to marry the person you please, and the right for interracial couples to live without government interference. Already, Republican state legislatures are preparing laws that would allow law enforcement to cross state lines to pursue citizens seeking abortions in states where it remains legal. What is the difference in those bills and the pre-Civil War fugitive slave acts that allowed Southern slaveowners to cross state lines and “retrieve” their property? Same concept, different property.

**In his famous Citizenship in a Republic speech, Roosevelt railed against cynics who looked down at those who were trying to make the world a better place. “The poorest way to face life is to face it with a sneer,” he said. “A cynical habit of thought and speech, a readiness to criticize work which the critic himself never tries to perform, an intellectual aloofness which will not accept contact with life’s realities — all these are marks, not … of superiority but of weakness.” It is the person (man in Roosevelt’s day) who is actually in the arena, who comes up short but keeps striving, who counts.

Image by dewdrop157 from Pixabay

The books I read in April 2022

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Books start conversations. Each month I have a goal to read five books on a variety of topics and from different genres in order to learn and to start conversations with readers and others I encounter along the way. Here are the books I read in April 2022. If you click on the title, you’ll go to the longer post on More to Come. Enjoy!

Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism, (2020) by Anne Applebaum is a clear-eyed look at the motivations and tactics of authoritarians and their followers who have taken over political parties formerly dedicated to democracy. These authoritarians — individuals driven by resentment and envy, true believers in the righteousness of a moral system that elevates them while punishing those they do not like, grifters looking to make a windfall, elite intellectuals who will destroy their countries to maintain power, and those who cannot tolerate complexity — have adopted a similar playbook in a variety of countries. Applebaum is a compelling narrator who brings context for those who only occasionally become attuned to European affairs. She also has a way of synthesizing history over centuries into digestible portions. Highly recommended.

Short Stories by Jesus: The enigmatic parables of a controversial rabbi (2014) by Amy-Jill Levine is the highly praised study of the parables of Jesus written by a self-described “Yankee Jewish feminist who teaches in a predominantly Christian divinity school in the buckle of the Bible Belt.” Levine writes in an easy-to-read style spiced with humor. But she is serious in wanting her readers to understand the parables in the same way as their original audiences did. She notes that these stories are less about revealing something new and more about tapping into “our memories, our values, and our deepest longings.” Parables should reframe our vision, serving “as keys that can unlock the mysteries we face by helping us ask the right questions: how to live in community; how to determine what ultimately matters; how to live the life God wants us to live.” Powerful and recommended.

Being Home: Discovering the Spiritual in the Everyday (1991) by Gunilla Norris looks at the tasks we do — from awakening in the morning to locking the door at nightfall — and puts them in the context of living in place. “How we hold the simplest of our tasks,” writes Norris, “speaks loudly about how we hold life itself.” All of us have daily routines and Norris posits that “as human beings we have a strong intuition that deep within our dailiness lies meaning, a huge dimension.” Her search is for how best to speak of that sense of the sacred, especially when it is both fundamental and beyond knowing.

Why We Are Restless: On the Modern Quest for Contentment (2021) by Benjamin Storey and Jenna Silber Storey makes an interesting, sometimes compelling, but ultimately unsatisfactory case as to why our pursuit of happiness makes us unhappy. To understand how the modern sense of happiness developed and to ultimately make their case against liberalism, the Storeys examine the writings of four French philosophers from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries. But the book misses the point that democracy itself is a moral position that allows people to make their own choices and that is messy by design.

Being There by Peter Keese is a short book of stories that came from the author’s Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) career. Our third stage group chose to read it with the hope that the stories would help us in expanding our knowledge of how to “be there” with others in our changing circumstances. While the book did stimulate conversations among us around being there for others, there is not enough of value to recommend it.

Every now and then you get a dud. But keep on reading!

More to come…

DJB

NOTE: To see which books I read in January, February, and March, click on the links.

Image: Detail from the library at Biltmore estate, Asheville, NC, by DJB

Thinking about what we know but don’t know that we know

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Knowing of my life-long challenges in using a foreign language, I’m very sympathetic to non-natives trying to learn the idiosyncratic English language. Throughout middle and high school, I struggled with Spanish classes. * During my sabbatical, cab drivers in Rome would laugh whenever I tried to use Italian to give the location of the American Academy.

Learning different languages is one way of showing respect for others and widening our perspectives. However, I am the first to recognize that I don’t have an ear for foreign languages. It isn’t something I’m proud to admit.

This tin ear syndrome had me worried, as I have travels upcoming for National Trust Tours to Scotland (English speaking, but with that often-undecipherable Scottish brogue) and Norway (the name of the National Trust there is Fortidsminneforeningen, for goodness sake!), along with a personal trip to France (my friend Janet Hulstrand tells me to just say bonjour).

Another friend, who was born in Union City, Tennessee, has traveled the world as a beloved educational expert with tour groups but still lives in her hometown. When I told her of my fears, she had the perfect remedy.

“David, just tell them you’re from Tennessee,” Grace suggested, “and that we’re not allowed to say foreign names.”

Hey, works for me. And it has the added advantage that it is entirely believable.

The topic of learning English came up around the dinner table with Andrew the other night when we were discussing the correct order that adjectives have to be put in front of nouns in English. Adjectives, writes Mark Forsyth, author of The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase,

“absolutely have to be in this order: opinion-size-age-shape-color-origin-material-purpose Noun. So you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. But if you mess with that order in the slightest you’ll sound like a maniac.”

We tried a few phrases at dinner, and yes, it does work most of the time. Another writer notes that the data from tests suggests that, in fact, the conventional order is followed 78 percent of the time. So, it is natural to say that you’ve adopted a “cute little black puppy” but not a “black little cute puppy”. However, the rule isn’t hard and fast. “Big bad wolf” places the opinion adjective after the size.

I don’t know about you, but I never heard this rule taught in school. My children — who have had exceptional educations in grammar through the years — were never taught this rule. Candice, a teacher, never heard it while she was growing up.

The point is, there are some things as native speakers we just know, but we don’t know that we know them. Such as the correct order for adjectives.

I got to thinking about this “what we know but don’t know that we know” situation in relation to other parts of our lives. Like in leadership positions at work. There were times in my career when I was frustrated because someone else on the team didn’t seem to know how to respond to a situation. Something that, in my mind, was perfectly obvious. But on reflection, I’ve seen that a great deal of what I learned that shaped my references around how to work effectively came from being exposed, beginning at an early age, to that world. I saw how other people (usually white men) reacted and dealt with opportunities and challenges.

It didn’t occur to me until later that perhaps others who did not have that same privilege — because of their gender, race, or country of birth — didn’t “know” the same things I took for granted. And of course, just like with the “correct order of adjectives before a noun” rule, a good many of the things I “knew” to be so in my bones could be handled differently and just as effectively.

Part of this has to do with strengths, as I mentioned in a 2020 post. Business consultant Robert Glazer explained his past frustration in coming away from situations where he was asked to step in to meet a challenge and quickly helped solve the problem. Why couldn’t the others see what he saw so easily? His perspective on this changed permanently, he writes,

“…after I heard a speaker share a crucial insight on the topic….“What’s easy for you is often hard for someone else.” She explicitly pointed out that we frequently assume, often wrongly, that something that is easy for us should be just as easy for everyone else.”

There are so many things we “know but don’t know that we know” because of our cultural background and our personal strengths. The next time the thought comes into my mind that someone should just “know” how something is done, I’m going to stop and remember the words of the great Satchel Paige, “It’s not what you don’t know that hurts you, it’s what you know that just ain’t so.” **

We could all benefit by taking it easier on ourselves and especially on our fellow travelers along life’s highway. So, lighten up!

More to come…

DJB

*I thought I remembered the correct Spanish phrase to use for directions to the library, until my kids told me one day that I had it totally wrong. And it really didn’t matter, because if a Spanish speaker had responded to my question, I would not have understood a word they said.

**The quote is often attributed to Mark Twain, with this adaptation by the great Negro Leagues pitcher.

Image by Amador Loureiro on Unsplash

Echoes of the past

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On a picture-perfect spring day, the treasured Dentzel Carousel at Glen Echo Park — fresh off celebrating its 100th anniversary in 2021 — opened today for another summer of joy, laughter, and memories, as it has done for generations of Washingtonians. We were there to welcome the carousel on the first day of the new season.

As we approached, that familiar sound of the Wurlitzer organ could be heard in the distance.

Installed in 1921 by the Dentzel Carousel Company of Germantown, Pennsylvania, the Glen Echo Park carousel is one of only 135 functioning antique carousels in the country and one of the few still in its original location. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the carousel is truly a Washington area treasure! Known as a “menagerie carousel” because of the variety of its animals, the Glen Echo Park carousel includes 52 animals: 40 horses, 4 rabbits, 4 ostriches, 1 giraffe, 1 deer, 1 lion and 1 tiger. It also features two circus chariots. With its playful animals and striking ornamentation, the carousel has been an iconic symbol of the Park throughout the site’s amusement park years and into its current phase as an arts and cultural center for the past half-century.

Glen Echo Park

We were there with local friends, three of whom had been in the same Sacred Ground class, an Episcopal Church film- and readings-based dialogue series on race, grounded in faith. One of our friends, Lacey Gude, had memories of riding the Dentzel carousel as a child, and she had told the study group of its role in the civil rights movement of the 1960s. The class decided that a field trip was in order!

Picketers, including future Maryland State Senator Gwendolyn Greene Britt, stand outside Glen Echo Park in 1960. (Photo source: National Park Service)

In the summer of 1960, Howard University students led protests at the Park along with local residents. The students rode the carousel and were arrested for doing so in violation of the privately-owned amusement park’s segregation policies. The case went all the way to the United States Supreme Court. Their continued protests under the heat of the summer sun – and the active engagement of community members in the fight – led to the amusement park’s desegregation, opening the venue to everyone for its 1961 season and beyond.

Glen Echo Park
Lacey (center) with DJB and Candice in front of the 1921 Wurlitzer Organ
Candice and DJB take a turn on the carousel.
Parents helping their young charges prepare for a ride…as they have done for generations.

Carousel of Memories is an excellent 2021 production from Maryland Public Television that covers much of the history of the carousel, from its installation to the work to desegregate it in the early 1960s, from the preservation effort to save it from being sold to a collector (the last gift coming in anonymously on the afternoon of the deadline) to the loving, 20-year restoration.

Lacey, Candice, and Linda at the Glen Echo carousel

It was a lovely day to recall echoes of the past, remember those who put their lives on the line for democracy at another time that it was threatened, and to hear the laughter of children making memories.

More to come…

DJB

Image: Ticket for the 2022 season at the Dentzel carousel, by DJB