Juxtaposing just for fun

Memorial Day weekend is the unofficial start of summer, and so it became the semi-official restart of my quest for writers’ homes. Most of my activities these days seem to be tied to multi-tasking (a current term that inspires an attitude of “I’m busy”); I don’t care for the feeling, though the activities are still fun. So I’m going to have to work on the attitude adjustment.

The reasons for a trip to Cape Cod were threefold, or four if you count the fun factor: hang out with friends, undertake a “field trip” for this blog, and experience a handful of places/activities to write as trips for Trazzler. After getting runner-up recognition in the contest I entered, the editors asked me to become a regular contributor as their New England regional writer, so I am now getting used to eyeing my surroundings as a travel writer. It’s fun. (Here, however, I’ll just be writing about the blog-related part of the weekend. You’ll have to check out Trazzler for the rest of the Cape stops.)

After getting out ahead of most of the traffic I crossed the Sagamore Bridge shortly before noon. My plan had been to visit two writers’ homes that day, but I didn’t want to cheat myself of the experiences by rushing through, so I decided to pare down the itinerary. After one Trazzler stop I headed to Yarmouth Port, former home of Edward Gorey, artist and funny-bone tickler extraordinaire.

It was time for a late lunch, but I opted for afternoon tea instead at an exceeding cheery spot called the Optimist Café. The name alone is enough to bring about a smile. I chose the place for my own amusement: I liked the juxtaposition of a place called the Optimist Café with the humorously macabre work of Mr. Gorey. The multicolored cottage is covered with fanciful gingerbread. Near the front door stands a sculpture of what looks like a maitre d’ fish—this strange specimen might get along with some of Gorey’s creations.

 Inside is just as fun and quirky. The room where I sat had sunny yellow walls decorated with paintings by local artists. Each handcrafted table featured an inspirational motto written around the edges. And the lights hanging from curving tracks overhead were shaped like suns and biplanes and hot-air balloons. Once I was seated I was sorry I had forgotten to bring my Gorey collection to read with my tea. But the repast was lovely anyway: a pot of Bombay chai and a pair of warm scones served with clotted cream and strawberry jam.

 I got chatting with the waitress and mentioned that I was just about to visit Edward Gorey’s house. She had never been there and wasn’t familiar with his work. Two women sitting at a nearby table were curious about him too, so I mentioned several of his works and again regretted forgetting my book; Gorey work really must be seen to be appreciated. By the time I finished my tea and drove the short distance to Strawberry Lane (a modest cottage with a huge magnolia tree out back), the two women from the café were already at the house. They greeted me and thanked me for the recommendation.

 Most of the docents of the house, I learned, were friends and acquaintances of Mr. Gorey, so their comments about items, the house, and his time in it are enhanced with familiarity. The front rooms are filled with samples of his work, from childhood drawings to a weathervane he designed. Bookshelves are filled with editions for which he created cover art and illustrations, and the walls are covered with posters and photographs. Many of the window sills and sashes are decorated with colored bottles and other glass items through which the sun shines; Gorey collected these from yard sales. He also liked to gather rocks from the local beaches (and always searched for ones shaped like frogs). Many of these are stacked in small cairns in the kitchen. Nearly every flat surface is covered with them (or with more colored bottles and a small fountain), leaving only a small square of counter space for kitchen prep. Obviously, the man liked creative clutter.

 He also had a healthy collection of cats, and one photo shows him sprawled with his furry friends in what was probably a common pose during his years in the cottage. A sofa in the back room makes an unusual museum piece: its notable characteristic is the frayed places where the cats used it as a scratching post.

I felt like I was in a fantastic attic, poking through the wonderful and odd leftovers of Gorey’s life. The tour guide had fun anecdotes about almost everything, and she had barely started when my friend Susanna and her daughter HaiDi arrived. Once the tour was over we chatted and continued to poke around, marveling at the breadth of Gorey’s work and paging through some of his sketchbooks.

We even enjoyed a scavenger hunt of sorts. Among all this wonderful clutter are depictions or references to the unfortunate children of The Gashlycrumb Tinies. (“A is for Amy who fell down the stairs …”) Yes, there’s Amy face down on the stairs, and there under a display case a rug with a pair of small feet sticking out from under it (poor George). Look on the mantel for a box of tacks (like the ones Leo swallowed). When she heard us discussing them, the guide informed us that there are tiny gravestones in the back yard for each of the Tinies, except Maud, who was “swept out to sea.”

 We didn’t go looking for the markers, but we did take a look at the huge magnolia tree in the yard. It’s taller than the house and blocks the window of the room Gorey chose to use as his studio—precisely so he wouldn’t be distracted by the view. There’s also a topiary frame (partly filled with greenery at this time of year) of the Doubtful Guest standing on the back lawn. “It came seventeen years ago—and to this day/It has shown no intention of going away.”

Random acts of culture

April managed to get away from me without a blog post. It’s not that I wasn’t doing anything; in fact, I was doing any number of cool things. I think part of it is that I’ve been looking forward to doing another round of writers’ home visits, and those places have yet to open, so I was thinking about future blogging.

But I was doing fun and interesting stuff …

Art is an amazing thing. The arts, I mean. The act of creating, expressing and sharing, no matter what the medium. The wonder doesn’t just happen for the artist; it’s wonder shared, because the viewer (audience, reader) experiences the wonder and the joy too. It’s a fascinating communication.

Through no purposeful planning April turned out to be a month of cultural events where I was the recipient of the pleasures of art.

The annual IMADA art show and auction to raise money for arts in the local schools was an evening spent with friends and a room filled with art made by talented, generous community members. It was an all-you-can-eat buffet for the eyes, and mine were stuffed by the time I was through. The icing on the cake was an exhibit of paintings by my friend Robin Silverman, who died last fall. It was lovely to see a collection of her work—and still to be able to feel the wonder and joy she put into it.

The following week I saw a production of Man of La Mancha by the Pentucket Players. The purpose of the outing was to get together with friends, so the vibe of the day was already a fun one—the show only upped the fun factor. The best thing about community theater is that all the participants are doing it for love. Their joyful enthusiasm filled the auditorium like an added dimension of the music.

I had a double-header of cultural events the following week. I signed up as a volunteer for the Newburyport Literary Festival, a smorgasbord of free readings and panel discussions by writers of all genres that overruns downtown Newburyport for one glorious day. (My job, fetching coffee for a gathering of poets, was an easy one.) The sun was shining, the gathering folk were smiling; it was a good day to be a writer (or reader).

The first presentation of the day I attended was a discussion of the works of John P. Marquand, a Newburyport treasure, by book critic Jonathan Yardley. Yardley is a long-time fan of Marquand’s writing, and he discussed it with the enthusiasm that comes from deep familiarity. That’s what a long-term relationship with art gives us. That joy that becomes personal.

A couple of nights before the festival I was at The Music Hall in Portsmouth for a night of theatre in London. What? The National Theatre of London has enabled a worldwide audience to enjoy its production through high-definition broadcasts of live performances. The Music Hall is one of the New England venues where these performances can be seen. On this night it was a performance of Alan Bennett’s new play, The Habit of Art. 

The story of the drama celebrates art with the rehearsal of a play within the play. The characters of the inside story are W.H. Auden and Benjamin Britten, and all the characters display the sometimes uneasy relationship that artists have with their art—and the challenges of making a life (and a living) with art.

It was a wonder and joy occasion. I marvel at Bennett’s writing—his ability to put so much into a play and weave it all together. The material begs actors to grab it and do marvelous things with it.  It’s funny and smart and sad and discomfiting, often all at the same time. Actors Richard Griffiths and Frances De La Tour as well as director Nicholas Hytner collaborated on Bennett’s The History Boys (loved this too) several years ago. So it was not just a matter of delighting in the work of people who are really good at what they do—it was witnessing what comes out of the comfortable collaboration of long-time colleagues.

It just plain makes me happy seeing people do what they love.

The writing life and Whac-A-Mole

I have thought up and discarded several ideas for blog posts this month, because each time I start one a different writing task pops up. It’s a lot like playing Whac-A-Mole (without the smell of fried dough). So rather than take on any of those topics that came to mind and took me to the library to research, I’ll just jot down a brief account of the writing I have done this month.

There are grants for writers, which not surprisingly require the writer to do a lot of writing to apply. There are jobs for writers, ditto. There are more jobs for the teaching of writing, ditto ditto.

And there’s a writing contest. This was the most fun of all the projects initially. I did the “research” on a beautiful day in Boston and Cambridge with a fun friend by my side. And the writing was concise—a requirement of the contest. So I entered the contest. The month of March is the voting phase of said contest, an exercise in social networking. I don’t think I’ve ever exercised so much in my life. Fortunately, the voting ends next week.

The object: to get the most votes for my entries by March 31. I’ve asked virtually everyone I know. And I’ve them to ask people they know. Ideally, there should be some sort of exponential growth. But I’m a writer not a mathematician, and it doesn’t seem to be working that way.

So, if you’re interested in traveling and quirky things to do, you might be interested in the website Trazzler.com. It’s a fun site.

And if you’re interested in helping one writer not feel like one of the Moles, you might want to vote for my trips. (They’re in two different categories, so you can vote for both of them.) Here they are.

Skating into Winter Romance on the Frog Pond in Boston, MA

Swooning over Incredible Edibles in Cambridge, MA
  

Thanks. My head is feeling better already.

Books and movies

I love books. And I love movies. Give me a book about movies or a movie about books, and you can imagine how thrilled I am. Well, I have enjoyed one of each this week, so I am one happy camper.

Let me tell you about them.

The first is Leonard Maltin’s 151 Best Movies You’ve Never Seen. It’s a list, but not like all the annual best lists or the AFI top one hundred that hold very few surprises. The whole point of Maltin’s book is to bring attention to low-profile films, not the widely seen ones that usually make those other lists (where the only discovery is the exact order they’ll appear).

I’m a film lover, movie nut, cinephile—whichever way you want to put it—so imagine my delight on scanning the table of contents and finding that I had seen less than a third of the 151 recommendations. Which means I have over a hundred to add to my list of films to see. Coincidentally, some of them were already in my Netflix queue, which tells me that Mr. Maltin and I have similar tastes in movies—a good sign. And of the films from his list that I have seen, there’s only one I didn’t enjoy. (I won’t bias any opinions by mentioning the name; that way you can discover them all for yourself.)

By the way, did you know that five hundred is the maximum number of entries you can have in your Netflix queue?

Among Maltin’s recommendations is a documentary called Stone Reader (2002), a film about books and the love of them. Just as 151 Best Movies makes me want to sit down and talk with Leonard Maltin about movies, Stone Reader makes me want to sit down and talk with Mark Moskowitz about books. He was fascinated by a novel to such an extent that he made a full-length documentary about the book and his fascination. That’s my kind of guy.

The book is called The Stones of Summer, and it was the first novel by a writer named Dow Mossman. Moskowitz got the book as a teenager in the early Seventies, but he didn’t read it until years later. He loved it (literally to pieces) and wanted to read more by Mossman, but the author seemed to have disappeared after the one book.

Enter Moskowitz’s curiosity and passion.

He’s part sleuth and part stalker (but not in a creepy way), and the film plays a bit like Field of Dreams without the corn—or the baseball. Usually documentary filmmakers tell other people’s stories, but Moskowitz tells his own—his love of the book (and reading in general), his curiosity about what became of Mossman, his search for people who might know something about the author as well as people who might understand the filmmaker’s passion for books.

I won’t tell you what he uncovers on his search—I hope you’ll watch and find out for yourself. But I will tell you that I watched the film with pencil in hand. As Moskowitz and his interview subjects talked about their favorite novels I made myself a reading list. And that list of books can include The Stones of Summer, because Moskowitz spearheaded the effort to get it back into print, an effort he is expanding into The Lost Books Club. (Like I said, my kind of guy.)

A list of movies, a list of books. I’ve got my work cut out me. (I love my work.)

*  *  *

Speaking of my work, I recently entered a contest on Trazzler.com, a contest that includes a voting component, so I’m on a search for friendly folk who want to participate in the democratic process. Sign up on Trazzler, and then search for “Sam Sherman.” Two trips—the skating on the Frog Pond and a foodie heaven in Cambridge—are part of the contest. Visit each page and click “Save” (that puts them on your Wish List and counts as the vote).

In the immortal words of Bartles and Jaymes, “Thank you for your support.”