This newfound habit of mine, in which I post here on Monday through Thursday and then don’t post at all Friday through Sunday, is not an intentional habit at all; it’s just one of those seeming habits that gets dictated from without by external realities. In this case, it’s that we left town Saturday and did not return until Sunday. The reason for our trip was our annual visit to the Sterling Renaissance Festival. I took a lot of photos on this trip, and you can see them all at the Flickr album here (I’ll have more to say on the general topic of photography later this week, I hope), but here’s a small selection:
God save the Queen!The Falconer’s owl
Melee!I think this photo captures best the feeling I love so much about the Renaissance Festival.The jousting fieldEnd of Day Revelry: the pub sing!I got NO sauce from my turkey leg on my white shirt. Victory! (And no, I didn’t get any on the overalls, either.)
The Sterling Renaissance Festival remains one of our favorite getaways of the year, and this year’s was especially delightful because we all hadn’t been able to attend since 2019, before COVID. The Festival was canceled in 2020 and I’m not sure if it happened in 2021 or not, but that year we couldn’t go anyway, because of Reasons. In 2022 we were able to go and we pre-ordered three tickets, for The Wife, The Daughter, and myself–but then The Wife had ankle surgery in early summer, and that ruled out her attendance. The Festival is a ton of walking, and it’s rustic walking, with the Festival grounds occupying the side of a forested hill. Getting around the Festival for an entire day is tiring for a fully healthy adult, believe me!
We did notice that the Festival is showing some signs of wear around the edges, if that makes sense: buildings in slightly greater disrepair than usual, some decorations in desperate need of re-painting, and some vendor booths and buildings actually empty (though some of those boasted signage that their particular vendors would be joining the Festival later in the year). And the crowds were definitely smaller…but that did make for a bit more enjoyable time. I do hope that none of the above was indicative of a Festival in decline, and that they’ll be back up to full strength moving forward. It’s a quirky and fun way to spend a day, even if it costs quite a bit of money. Most things do, nowadays.
Instead of driving all the way home, we stayed overnight in Palmyra, NY, after having dinner at our favorite fried chicken joint in Webster, NY. One note about staying overnight in Palmyra: that town is literally holy ground for the LDS Church, so you will almost certainly be surrounded by Mormons. This doesn’t bother me particularly, but it might bother some…and who’s to say if I bothered the Mormons! I’m not usually attuned to people staring at me, but it was hard not to notice some of them being somewhat flummoxed by a long-haired bearded guy in overalls and a poofy-sleeved shirt walking through the lobby of the Best Western by the Hill Cumorah site.
Anyway, getting out of town and doing something fun was a delight–and as it happens, this year it felt like a necessary delight. (More on that…someday, perhaps.)
(NOTE: I am aware of the controversy that has erupted in recent weeks surrounding the Sterling Renaissance Festival, the people who own it, and one employee there. My comments section is not the place to litigate that situation, and I will approve no comments referencing it.)
I haven’t seen the movie yet, and likely won’t until it hits a streaming service, but I’ve heard the music, and I can say that in that department at least, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Distiny fires on all cylinders. Of course, how could it not? The score is by John Williams, after all.
Here is the arrangement of “Helena’s Theme” for violin and orchestra. This is a complex and sophisticated theme, less obviously melodic than earlier lyric themes for these movies–Marion’s Theme, Willie’s Theme, and the Grail Knight Theme, for example–but it is no less heartfelt and moving, for all that. It sounds to me like a blend of an old-fashioned emotions and a new personality, as well as a complex musical introspection noting the difference between youth and age. That seems appropriate for this movie, which I do look forward to watching.
A literary anniversary went by last week, and I do want to mark its passing: on June 26, 1948, seventy-five years ago, The New Yorker published a new story by author Shirley Jackson. By this time Jackson was an established writer, albeit early on in her career, and her June, 1948 appearance in The New Yorker is the event that put her on the literary map, so to speak. And what an event that story’s publication was: that story became one of the most controversial ever published by that magazine, and to this day the story is a classic of the horror genre, which is even more notable as it does not contain one bit of supernatural behavior in it. No, this story is a simple one of the horror of human interactions and human adherence to tradition, and most disturbingly, the oh so human way of managing to put human life into a position of secondary, or even tertiary, importance.
The story is “The Lottery”. You can read it here. I recommend doing so; it’s a great work that has lost none of its ability to disturb in all its years. It’s not a long read, and I wouldn’t dream of spoiling it, if you haven’t read it.
Jackson would later write a lecture about her experiences with the reaction to “The Lottery”. I don’t know where or when she actually delivered this lecture, but it’s been anthologized in a book called Come Along With Me, which anthologizes several of her stories, a couple of lectures, and a novel draft on which she was working at the time of her untimely death in 1965.
Here is a portion of that lecture:
On the morning of June 28, 1948, I walked down to the post office in our little Vermont town to pick up the mail. I was quite casual about it, as I recall–I opened the box, took out a couple of bills and a letter or two, talked to the postmaster for a few minutes, and left, never supposing that it was the last time for months that I was to pick up the mail without an active feeling of panic. By the next week I had had to change my mailbox to the largest one in the post office, and casual conversation with the postmaster was out of the question, because he wasn’t speaking to me. June 28, 1948 was the day The New Yorker came out with a story of mine in it. It was not my first published story, nor my last, but I have been assured over and over that if it had been the only story I ever wrote or published, there would be people who would not forget my name.
I had written the story three weeks before, on a bright June morning when summer seemed to have come at last, with blue skies and warm sun and no heavenly signs to warn me that my morning’s work was anything but just another story. The idea had come to me while I was pushing my daughter up the hill in her stroller–it was, as I say, a warm morning, and the hill was steep, and beside my daughter the stroller held the day’s groceries–and perhaps the effort of that last fifty yards up the hill put an edge to the story; at any rate, I had the idea fairly clearly in my mind when I put my daughter in her playpen and the frozen vegetables in the refrigerator, and, writing the story, I found that it went quickly and easily, moving from beginning to end without pause. As a matter of fact, when I read it over later and decided that except for one or two minor corrections, it needed no changes, and the story I finally typed up and sent off to my agent the next day was almost word for word the original draft. This, as any writer of stories can tell you, is not a usual thing. All I know is that when I came to read the story over I felt strongly that I didn’t want to fuss with it. I didn’t think it was perfect, but I didn’t want to fuss with it. It was, I thought, a serious, straightforward story, and I was pleased and a little surpised at the ease with which it had been written; I was reasonably proud of it, and hoped that my agent would sell it to some magazine and I would have the gratification of seeing it in print.
My agent did not care for the story, but–as she said in her note at the time–her job was to sell it, not to like it. She sent it at once to The New Yorker, and about a week after the story had been written I received a telephone call from the fiction editor of The New Yorker; ti was quite clear that he did not really care for the story, either, but The New Yorker was going to buy it. He asked for one change–that the date mentioned in the story be changed to coincide with the date of the issue of the magazine in which the story would appear, and I said of course. He then asked, hesitantly, if I had any particular interpretation of my own for the story; Mr. Harold Ross, then the editor of The New Yorker, was not altogether sure that he understood the story, and wondered if I would care to enlarge upon its meaning. I said no. Mr. Ross, he said, thought that the story might be puzzling to some people, and in case anyone telephoned the magazine, as sometimes happened, or wrote in asking about the story, was there anything in particular I wanted them to say? No, I said, nothing in particular; it was just a story I wrote.
I had no more preparation than that. I went on picking up the mail every morning, pushing my daughter up and down the hill in her stroller, anticipating pleasurably the check from The New Yorker, and shopping for groceries. The weather stayed nice and it looked as though it was going to be a good summer. Then, on June 28, The New Yorker came out with my story.
What ensues is an encapsulation of Jackson’s reaction to the reactions to her story, which roughly fall into general groups: those who wonder if the events described in the story are based on reality, those who think the story is disturbing fiction, and…well, those pretty much are the two camps. Jackson’s story even inspired a number of “Cancel my subscription!” reactions. One particular such demand is phrased quite well:
Heretofore mine has been almost a stockholder’s pride in The New Yorker. I shared my copy with my friends as I do the other possessions which I most enjoy. When your latest issue arrived, my new distaste kept me from removing the brown paper wrapping, and into the wastebasket it went. Since I can’t conceive that I’ll develop interest in it again, save the results of your efforts that indignity every week and cancel my subscription immediately.
Ouch.
The New Yorker did a retrospective of reader reaction to “The Lottery” ten years ago, which you can find here; one interesting tidbit is that the magazine did not always label its fiction and nonfiction pieces, so perhaps the befuddlement of some readers who couldn’t determine on their own that “The Lottery” was just a story with no basis in the daily life of any small town in America is to be excused. I don’t know, I wasn’t there. But surely these events would have been common knowledge if they were real, yes? I mean, wouldn’t everyone know about that small town in such-and-such a state where every year they got everyone in the town together and held a lottery to choose one of its denizens for–wait. That would be spoiling it, if you haven’t read “The Lottery”.
“Do you remember America?” the curious person will ask one night, in a darkened tavern as they nurse their second or third drink. “The country tried to codify freedom and democracy? I mean, sure, at first it was only for a few of their citizens, but it was a start, right? They got better at it. And sure, getting better took a whole lot of spilled blood over a couple hundred years, and even when they said ‘Sure, fine, you’re free now,’ they came up with ways to keep you from really being free…but really, do you remember America? That country that tamed an entire wilderness! I mean, sure, they seized that wilderness from people already living there, but still. Do you remember America? The country that made polio a memory? I mean, sure, less than a hundred years later they tried to ignore a new disease, but that was pretty neat, right? And they went to the Moon! I mean, sure, that was so they could feel better about getting there first against a country that doesn’t exist anymore, and they never went again or did much about that, but still. Do you remember America?”
“I remember,” a voice will say, probably from the back of the tavern. A raspy voice, an old voice, unable to speak loudly much at all anymore. A hat drawn down over a haunted face, scarred and weathered by time. “I remember America.” And they will lift their whiskey to their mouth.
“What happened to it?” the curious person will ask.
And the person at the end of the bar will swallow their whiskey and look off into the distance, what little distance there is, and eventually they will shrug. “We did,” they’ll say. “We happened to America.”
And the person will drain their whiskey and leave out the back door. Those remaining who heard this exchange will puzzle over it for a bit, but eventually they’ll return their attention to whatever else is going on–a sporting event on the television, perhaps, or some story about what happened at work that day. You don’t often talk about fallen nations and collapsed empires at the tavern after work, you see.
But maybe the curious person won’t turn all their attention back to the dull conversation going on around them. Maybe some part of their imagination will linger there on the memory of a nation, born in fire and too much blood, a nation that aspired but fell short, a nation that rose higher and fell lower than it should have.
Well…there’s a lot going on right now. A lot going on right now. Some of it I’ll almost certainly write about soon, when I have leave to do so; some of it I likely…won’t. But yeah. There’s a lot going on, and no, it’s not all bad. Some of it, though, is a struggle.
For now, here’s a nifty video from a professional wildlife photographer to whose content I’ve recently subscribed on YouTube. I find this man fascinating for a lot of reasons…some of which I’ll be going into at some point, soon!
Having the Titanic on the mind for obvious reasons, here’s some music from a movie about the wreck…but not the famous movie. This is the rather less famous movie from 1980 or 1981 called Raise the Titanic. I watched this movie years ago when it was on a mid-afternoon matinee kind of thing, and…well, that’s probably the best way to watch a movie like this. I don’t even remember if I watched it before or after Robert Ballard’s famous discovery of the actual wreck itself, which rendered the movie even more inaccurate than it would have been to begin with. Raise the Titanic‘s plot involves, well, a plan to raise the Titanic from the ocean floor, because there was some kind of cargo that was somehow still very valuable many years later. (All this is from faded memory; I’m not looking it up and I only watched the movie once.) I hope it’s not a spoiler to reveal that, yes, they do find the Titanic and raise her from the ocean floor in a big special-effect set-piece.
The music from the movie is by John Barry, who by this point in his career was starting to lean hard into his “big sweeping slow melody” phase that would peak ten years later with Dances With Wolves. Here is a suite from Raise the Titanic.
OK, fine, here’s the actual clip of the ship rising to the surface again. Note that at this point, most people still thought that the ship had sunk in one piece, rather than snapping in two before sinking.
No, I don’t recommend the movie…unless it’s a Sunday afternoon and you have some popcorn handy.
The teeming stars of the globular cluster NGC 6544 glisten in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. This cluster of tightly bound stars lies more than 8,000 light-years away from Earth and is, like all globular clusters, a densely populated region of tens of thousands of stars.
There are few voices I miss today more than that of Anthony Bourdain. His warm-hearted embrace of the entire world, his endless curiosity, his willingness to bridge gaps and accept differences–these are qualities our world is deeply lacking today. I, myself, fall short of his example…but I do try. Obviously I’m not able to travel as much as Bourdain did, but I do what I can. His oft-cited bits of travel advice, starting with eating where the locals eat, are always well taken.
By pure good luck, I read a book of Bourdain’s wisdom this very morning, after I checked it out of the library yesterday. I didn’t even know that today was Bourdain Day, as we’re all calling it now, honoring the life of a man who modeled a way of looking at the world to which we should all aspire. The book, Anthony Bourdain: The Last Interview, is actually a short collection of several interviews, ranging from one he gave in the early 2000s to several he gave in the last few months of his life. I realize that the temptation may be there to read those last few and try to find any hint of the demons that were lurking in the dark places of his mind, but I strongly advise against it. Bourdain’s life should stand for more than just the fact of its ending.
Here are a few excerpts from the interviews in this book:
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: How do you distinguish between tricks–and I don’t mean it in a circus sense, but just secrets–versus ten years of doing it? You serve a food to someone and they say, “what’s your secret?” as though they can just tell that to them and then tomorrow they can do exactly what you made. At what point do you say, “Look, I’ve been at this my whole life?”
BOURDAIN: There are no secrets. The secret of the restaurant business and professional cooking is there are no secrets. It is a mentoring business. Chefs spend their whole lives learning stuff, and then, because of the nature of the business, every few months teach everything they know, invest time they don’t have, in teaching somebody everything they know so that they can maybe have a Sunday off, and that they can count on a crew. It is a military hierarchy, and it is import–there are no secrets. There are no secret recipes. There are no secret techniques. Everything that you learn in a kitchen you are either told, open-source, by your immediate supervisor and that’s been shared with everybody in the kitchen, or you have learned it over time, painfully. You know, the ability to tell when a steak is cooked by listening to it in the pan or on the grill. Or determining that a piece of fish is probably ready to come out of the pan just from the sound of it–these are things you learn through repetition. And that is the great secret. It’s that this is how professionals learn, this is how home cooks should learn. People shouldn’t be intimidated by recipes. They should understand that professionals learn through getting it wrong, getting it wrong, getting it wrong, getting it wrong, starting to get it right, eventually getting it right, until it became second nature. It’s repetition, repetition, repetition. You learn all of these things, even if you don’t understand the technical, the science behind why your stew is transforming, why it’s becoming thick as it cooks longer, why your egg scrambles, why the steak gets dark on the outside when you expose it to heat. You may have no understanding of the science behind that, but you instinctively–of course through repetition–understand it, you learn to use it, and you count on it.
Bourdain on writing (this interview is from a writing conference in Sydney; the interviewer is author Jill Dupleix, whose name is apparently misspelled in the book):
BOURDAIN: I don’t work for a living. I mean…
DUPLIEX: You’re making it sound good.
BOURDAIN: I mean, writing–I have no sympathy for anyone fortunate enough to get paid any kind of money to write whining about writer’s block or how hard it is, or some sort of internal torture. You’re doing it in a sitting position, so right away, you know? I spent my whole adult life on my feet. I feel very, very lucky that anybody even gives a shit what I think. It’s not something I’m used to, and it is a privilege to be able to write and have even eight people care what you’re saying.
[A bit later in the same interview]
BOURDAIN: I’m gonna tell you something that aspiring writers or writers here will really hate me for: I’ve never written anything in my life that hasn’t been published.
DUPLIEX: Yeah, we hate you.
BOURDAIN: I have never toiled away in a garret for years writing unsuccessful or unpublished manuscripts. I wrote the article that Kitchen Confidential was based on for a free paper in New York. I figured they were lame enough to buy my piece. It ended up in The New Yorker. I got lucky. I’m always talking, telling stories. Being a little provocateur with a way with words was something that was true of me when I was a little kid. I’ve always used that skill to get the things I want, to manipulate events to my liking, to get myself into trouble, to get myself out of trouble, to hurt my enemies, to seduce people, or make people do things I would like them to do. So I was always a little…you know, my parents very early on said “You should really be a lawyer, you’ve got such a way with words.”
Bourdain on differences and contradictions within people:
BOURDAIN: I used to think that basically, the whole world, that all humanity were basically bastards. I’ve since found that most people seem to be pretty nice–basically good people doing the best they can. There is rarely, however, a neat takeaway. You have to learn to exercise a certain moral relativity, to be a good guest first–as a guiding principle. Otherwise you’d spend the rest of the world lecturing people, pissing people off, confusing them and learning nothing. Do I pipe up every time my Chinese host serves me some cute animal I may not approve of? Should I inquire of my Masai buddies if they still practice female genital mutilation? Express revulsion in Liberia over tribal practices?
Fact is, the guy who’s been patting my knee all night, telling jokes, sharing favorite Seinfeld anecdotes, making sure I get the best part of the lamb, being my new bestest buddy in Saudi Arabia will very likely later, on the drive back to the hotel, guilelessly express regret over what “the Jews and the CIA” did to my city on 9/11. What do you say to that?
Bourdain wasn’t one to hold an opinion for life, if he learned otherwise. He was very open to changing his views as his perspective evolved. I remember that he was rather disgusted by the degree to which Emeril Lagasse became a big “brand” in the 90s and early 2000s, but later on he would write an article in which he acknowledged Lagasse’s skill, knowledge, and the fact that he had paid his dues. Bourdain also famously sprang to the defense of a small-town newspaper food critic in the Midwest who praised her town’s new Olive Garden restaurant, even though he has made clear his general distaste for corporate food (see the quote in the title of this post). Here’s an example of Bourdain’s shift in perspective altering a previous strong opinion:
PETER ARMSTRONG: You said in an interview I read a couple days ago that you’ve changed your take on brunch as a result of having a kid.
BOURDAIN: Well, I hated brunch because for many years of my life, for many low points of my professional career, when I was fort of unemployable by any reputable restaurant for various reasons, I could always get a brunch gig. Because restaurants are always desperate to find somebody to cook three hundred omelettes for drunks on Sunday morning, and that was me. And so the smell of eggs cooking and French toast was always the smell of shame and defeat and humiliation until I became a dad. And now, if I want the fast track to looking cool in front of my daughter’s friends, it’s make a pancake bar for them, you know, “Your choice: chocolate chip, blueberry, or banana?”
I think what I appreciate most about Bourdain is that he rarely talks about food the way a “foodie” talks about food. He talks about the people who make it, why they make it the way they do, maybe a bit about the method of how they make it, and what it means to them in a cultural way. You almost never hear Bourdain talking about the acidity of a dish or the way it “elevates” certain ingredients or any of that Master Chef bullshit. Even when he visited a high-end restaurant on his shows, he always focused on the human connections involved with the food.
My God, I miss Anthony Bourdain. He was to food and food exploration what Carl Sagan was to science and space.
