by Peter Cates

Margaret Dickson

Lewiston-born writer Margaret Dickson published a 1985 novel, Octavia’s Hill, which follows four generations of a family, and from which a chapter was anthologized in the book, Maine Speaks.

The excerpt takes place during the horse and buggy days in the very rural community of Monson, itself north of Dexter and Guilford and quite close to Baxter State Park and the 100 Mile Wilderness Trail. It depicts a mother raising her eight-year-old son, Marl, by herself.

One passage that stood out describes a stone wall in the woods that the son uses for shade during his explorations. The words evoke a timeless universality in the landscape, almost spiritual in its dimensions:

“The wall was lichen-covered, its crevices turned to rich humus and scratchy rock crystals that were almost like beach sand. It was in dark, comfortable shade, because this wall went right through the pine forest. Marl sat and stared off into the soundless, sun-dappled, fly-whirling woods and chewed a piece of sweet grass. He could have used his shirt right now, maybe, to keep the bugs off, but he didn’t care. The whole hill was his to play on, and he guessed he could go down and get that old shirt whenever he wanted to. He was happy. Under the wall, his old fortress, the hill breathed and moved with things to do on other days, but for now he was like a baby settled on its breast, so close to the heartbeat of it that it sounded like his own.

“For a little while he thought about the men who had built this wall. They’d slung those old stones day after day to build these rock piles that meandered along the sides of their fields. Then they’d grown old or moved away and left the grass to turn into woods again. It was as if the hill knew something they didn’t. Somehow Marl knew you had to listen to the hill if you wanted things to last.”

Googling for additional information on both Margaret Dickson and Octavia’s Hill, I came across two intriguing off-the-beaten-path items related to these names.

A. Margaret Dickson was the name of an impoverished Scottish maid who was sentenced to death in 1722 by hanging for murdering her infant shortly after its birth. After she was cut down from the rope, she was placed in a coffin inside a wagon by her friends for burial.

On the way to the graveyard, the wagon bounced around constantly and, to the horror of her mourners, she suddenly woke up. Considering this an act of God, the authorities pardoned her and Margaret Dickson lived another few decades.

B. Octavia Hill (1838-1912) was an English social reformer who fought for better living spaces for working people and the preservation of woodlands, but detested government handouts because it eroded self-esteem and individual initiative. She was also a gifted fundraiser with the rich in her encouragement of their volunteer charity.

Black History Month

Black History Month evoked memories of reading the very powerful 1945 memoir, Black Boy, by Richard Wright (1908-1960) in its personalized account of racism during the author’s formative years growing up in Natchez, Mississippi, and Memphis, Tennessee.

Recommended viewing:

The acting of Lee Grant, still living at 97, as a bereaved widow in the 1967 In the Heat of the Night and as a cold-blooded, but very charming murderess in Columbo’s 1971 season opening episode, Ransom for a Dead Man.

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Actor Robert Emhardt (1914-1994) frequently portrayed crooks on such series as Alfred Hitchcock Presents and the Twilight Zone, and had a particularly ominous smile. During the early 1940s, he was one of the co-founders of the Actor’s Studio, in New York City.

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Recommended listening on YouTube and elsewhere – anything by the early 1960s girl vocal group, The Angels – especially The Night Has a Thousand Eyes; and, from a different category, a dreamlike gem of early 20th century music by English composer Frederick Delius (1861-1934), the Prelude to Irmelin, via the recording of this composer’s foremost interpreter, Sir Thomas Beecham (1879-1961).

by Peter Cates

Richard Aldridge

Born in New York City, poet Richard Aldridge (1930-1994) attended summer camp here in Maine most of his childhood and, as an adult, would eventually settle down with his wife in Phippsburg while teaching high school English in Bath.

Although his name is new to me, his work became renowned among other poets and he edited and published a 1969 anthology, Maine Lines.

Before sharing a poem of his that is contained in the ever-fascinating 1989 anthology Maine Speaks, I offer his own very astutely stated words on why poems matter:

“The most important thing in life to any person is another person, not a whole number of other people. That is why poetry will always fill a vital place-in essence, it is an art where three really is a crowd. You should be able to hang around with a good poem just as you do with a good or best friend. As with a best friend, a poem you really like will have said something to you in a way that touches bottom, while at the same time it will just be there, on call any time. If it could see and think, it would observe you growing and changing and reaching all the time. And you, coming back and back to it from time to time, will see new angles and depths and reaches that you never quite knew were there at first acquaintance.”

I read this credo of belief that does resonate while also remembering that most all of the successful poets in America still needed day jobs, Robert Frost being one of those select few who earned a living from his books after his first one was published in 1913 when he was 38.

Now for Richard Aldridge’s, A Sharing of Silences, with the inscription, West Point, Maine, underneath the title:

“late fall, the summer people gone
into the village store I go
six fishermen are sitting around
just talking joking supper done
because I have stuck out
now seventeen Maine winters
still have the wife I started with
have had their children now and then
up at the high school off in town
they let me in a little
by not going quiet like wind dying down
or worse just up and easing out
and yet their talk takes on
the slightest shade of guardedness
because I do teach English
after all which means of course
good grammar is my holy flame
and too (they hear) write poems
and such so who knows what
I might go off and copy down
if they could only understand
the only words I care to find
are those the counter image of
the windworn creases in their brows
the bark-like hardness of their hands
the upright carriage of their pride
and those are not for finding”

West Point, Maine, is roughly seven miles southeast from Bath where, as stated earlier, Aldridge taught and it is part of Phippsburg on the Casco Bay Peninsula.

The poem evokes a way of life and the divisions that can occur among different people living that way of life in a small community, the ever perpetual theme of aloneness in the community, of experience that is shared versus experience that can never be shared.

People want to know things about you but do not want you to know things about them, watching you yet wary of you.

The poet injects elements of great potential for more than one story in certain lines- we’d like to know more about “the summer people gone” , those sometimes obnoxious individuals from a distance who do boost the local economy with their dollars; “six fishermen…just talking… joking… [at] the village store ” who fear most all outsiders; and the poet narrator who teaches the children of those fishermen “now and then/up at the high school off in town” but still has the fishermen interacting with him in their minimally sociable manner combined with “the slightest shade of guardedness”…not ever knowing what their children’s English teacher “might go off and copy down.” God forbid!

These hints of story brought to mind another Maine poet Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935) who lived out most of his life in Gardiner and later in New York City, but who was born in Head Tide which is 26 miles northwest from Phippsburg.

Robinson’s poems such as Mr. Flood’s Party, Richard Cory, Miniver Cheevy, Tristan, etc. had innumerable hints of stories.

A poem well worth brooding upon!

In his rambunctious 1930 book on theology, Treatise on the Gods, H.L. Mencken comments – “The only real way to reconcile science and religion is to set up something that is not science and something that is not religion.”

Rachmaninoff

Rachmaninoff’s 2nd Symphony, a masterpiece of unutterable beauty, has generated shelves of different recordings in which the score is either presented in its over 1 hour complete, sometimes sprawling magnificence or with some cuts in the passages. Both approaches were sanctioned by the composer, depending on his mood.

I own a batch of different recordings, each of which has interest, but one I have consistently enjoyed of the cut version, and for more than 45 years, is a 1959 recording featuring Alfred Wallenstein (1898-1983) conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic in what might be the greatest one he ever made. It has pulse, characterful detail, and delectable notes and hangs together like no other recording I know of.

It can also be heard on YouTube .

Gene Rodemich

A 1921 ten-inch acoustically recorded Brunswick shellac disc (#2060) features one of the better dance bands of that era led by Gene Rodemich (1890-1934) who later worked for NBC Radio before dying from lobar pneumonia at the young age of 44.

The two selections are Margie and the rather obscure Irving Berlin Home Again Blues, both which can be heard on YouTube.

The Killers

Two movies that still stick in the memory are Bing Crosby’s 1944 Going My Way, in which he portrayed a Catholic priest, with the very good co-stars Barry Fitzgerald, mezzo soprano Rise Stevens, and the Little Rascals own Alfalfa; and the 1964 film noir, The Killers, starring Lee Marvin and Clu Gulagher as two highly professional hit men who do convey much nuance in their character development, as unlikable as they are; former President Ronald Reagan in what would be his last movie role before he entered the political arena, and a role in which he very convincingly portrayed a gangster; Angie Dickinson as Reagan’s devious wife; and the now underrated actor John Cassavetes as the victim of the hit men.

The film was very, very loosely based on Hemingway’s classic short story.

by Peter Cates

Woody Shaw

Jazz trumpeter Woody Shaw (1944-1989) recorded a very fine LP, United, in 1981 for Columbia records which can also be heard via YouTube. It consists of six tracks, of which three are original compositions by Shaw and one is an imaginative reworking of the Cole Porter classic What is this Thing Called Love.

Shaw was joined by trombonist Steve Turre, pianist Mulgrew Miller, double bassist Stafford James, drummer Tony Reedus and also saxophonist Gary Bartz, each of them outstanding as soloists and as ensemble team players.

For me, some of the five or more minute jazz improvisations can get quite tiresome, Ornette Coleman being an example. Shaw’s gifts are such that the music making held my interest. Some of the most beautiful blends, dynamics and sonorities are to be heard here.

Shaw wrote that his first three choices for instruments to study in school were the violin, trombone and saxophone but they were already taken; hence, he got stuck with the trumpet. When he griped to the music teacher, the latter told him to be patient and that the older man had a good feeling about Shaw’s destiny, which proved to be true.

His major influences included Harry James, Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie.

By the late 1980s, Woody Shaw was suffering from severe kidney ailments and a degenerative eye disease, and, due to being struck by a subway car in Brooklyn, his left arm had to be amputated. He had also been a heroin addict. When he died on May 10, 1989, he had been on a respirator for more than a month due to kidney failure.

In his essay Maine Speech, E.B. White writes the following:

“If you have enough wood for winter but not enough to carry you beyond that, you need wood ‘to spring out on.’ “

Inger Stevens

Highly recommended viewing recently was the gifted actress Inger Stevens (1934-1970) in the 1960 Twi­light Zone episode, The Hitchhiker and the 1967 made for TV movie The Borgia Stick, in which she and actor Don Murray (still living at 95) portray a suburban couple in New York’s Weschester County who funnel millions of dollars from a shadowy outfit known as the “Company” into legitimate businesses.

It can also be viewed on YouTube, although the quality of the video on the site I accessed was a bit below par. One hopes that a better print will be made available soon. Even so, it remains well worth watching.

by Peter Cates

The Great American Songbook

A 1991 CD (Reprise W2 26723), Sinatra Sings the Songs of Van Heusen and Cahn, contains 22 classic standards from the Great American Songbook, most of them composed by the team of James Van Heusen (1913-1990) and Sammy Fain (1913-1993), except for Imagina­tion, Polka Dots and Moon­beams, It’s Always You, Swinging On a Star, Moonlight Becomes You and Oh, You Crazy Moon, which Van Heusen wrote with his earlier longtime partner, Johnny Burke (1908-1964).

The remaining 16 have been given classic recordings by Frank Sinatra (1915-1998) and several other pop balladeers but it’s Sinatra who, for better or worse, remains associated with them.

The list:

Ring-A-Ding-Ding.
The Last Dance.
Indiscreet.
Come Waltz With Me.
The Look of Love.
The Tender Trap.
Come Blow Your Horn.
Call Me Irresponsible.
All the Way (a song no other singer could match Sinatra with.).
My Kind of Town.
I Like to Lead When I Dance.
The September of My Years (my personal favorite of all the recordings Sinatra ever made.).
I’ll Only Miss Her When I Think of Her.
Come Fly with Me.
Love and Marriage.
Star!

Some of the selections here had been previously recorded by Sinatra during what so many regard as his peak years at Capitol Records between 1953 and 1960. I would men­­tion that All the Way was sung more powerfully for the earlier label.

But Sinatra had a falling out with Cap­itol and in 1960 founded Reprise Records with the intent of giving the musical artists more control over their own recordings; rather strangely, since his friend, the singer/songwriter Johnny Mercer was one of the three owners of Capitol Records, Sinatra felt that label was restricting his artistic freedom.

Meanwhile, Sinatra, Van Heusen and Cahn became a musically joined at the hip Trinity for years and saw each other daily in their marathon rehearsals of new songs in which the singer had input on words and notes in their creation and drafting.

And Van Heusen, along with Jilly Rizzo, worked frequently as bodyguards in the singer’s entourage.

I own a few shelves of Sinatra’s 78s, LPs, 45s, cassettes and CDs. A few choice favorites for listening are the albums No One Cares, Sinatra/Jobim, A Man Alone and the very unfortunately underrated song cycle Watertown.

Much of this material can be heard on YouTube.

by Peter Cates

Recently watched:

John Wick is a 2014 film noir starring Keanu Reeves as a former, very skilled hitman for the Russian Mafia’s New York City kingpin. After one massive contract for his boss, he is allowed to retire to civilian life, since he had fallen in love (Blue Bloods actress Bridget Moynahan did good work here as his wife ) and gotten married.

A series of unfortunate events occur (due to space limitations, I won’t go into them), which ignite Wick’s very dangerous wrath and he is on the warpath with perpetrators of those events. They include his former boss – portrayed with sparing understatement by Michael Nyqvist (1960-2017) – and, even more of a villain, the boss’s spoiled rotten son.

Unfortunately, the film descends all too often into yet another series of nasty martial arts vendettas, although moments of relief are provided by the contributions of actors Willem Dafoe as a watchful former colleague of Wick’s and Ian McShane as the owner of a luxury hotel which caters to the criminal world as a sanctuary where any deadly activity against individuals is met with execution of the malefactors.

And a lovely moment at the end occurs when Wick adopts a pit bull puppy who had been caged in a euthanasia facility.

Handel’s Messiah

YouTube has a very good 1967 performance of Handel’s Messiah featuring the Croatian Maestro Lovro von Matacic (1899-1985) conducting the NHK Orchestra of Japan and a top notch chorus and soloists. I have at least 20 different Messiahs, all of them scoring individual points, and recently listened to those conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham (from 1947), Raymond Leppard and John Alldis, each of which are also accessible on YouTube.

But Matacic brought a vibrancy and eloquence uniquely his own. Highly recommended!

Elizabeth Coatsworth

The poem Winter Splendor, by Nobleboro’s own Elizabeth Coatsworth (1893-1986):

“This is a day to be compared with lions
if one considers the yellow-maned, round-faced sun,
or with an eagle for its icy glare;
or with a stag for something tense and proud
(and perhaps the antlered thickets enter in).
If men were chosen, I’d choose Charlemagne
for what was Northern in him, haughty, clear;
horns would find here their cold and proper echoes;
“magnificent” is perhaps not quite the word
but I can come no nearer. Such a day
towers above its fellows, passing by
with chargers, ermines, pennons, and with spears.”