BOOK REPORT . . .

So . . . a new semester has begun.

That new beginning seems like a good vantage point to look back at some reading I’ve done over the past 8 months. I must admit that it looks like a pretty random gathering of authors and titles . . . but maybe there was some sort of method to my madness . . .

Well, the first title that I tackled in 2011 was a Christmas gift—The Financial Lives of the Poets by Jess Walter. It was an engaging narrative about a guy going through a pre-midlife crisis. There was something Nick Hornby-esque about the book—and I think Hornby may even have written a blurb for the cover. I like Hornby. I liked Walter. A good way to start the year.
And then, because I was going to San Francisco (for the first time ever) in late January, I figured I should read something iconically associated with that wonderful city. I chose Dashiell Hammett’s classic crime novel The Maltese Falcon. I think I read it long ago, and I had certainly seen the movie. Anyway, it provided a good dose of local color and local flavor, and I enjoyed it enough that I decided to read another Hammett offering right away (this one set in New York)—The Thin Man.

Then it was on to one of my favorite books of the year—Steve Martin’s latest work of fiction, An Object of Beauty. With interpolated images of paintings, the book itself—which is about the contemporary art scene in New York—is “an object of beauty”: I thoroughly enjoyed and admired this book, for both its conception and its execution.

Next stop was one of the most heralded books of last year: Tom Rachman’s The Imperfectionists. A collection of linked stories centered around an English-language newspaper office in Rome, it certainly proved worthy (despite some unevenness) of the attention it received for its innovative concept. After that, perhaps prompted by my earlier reading of Jess Walter’s book, I took a run at Nick Hornby’s Juliet, Naked, which was published a few years ago. I’ve read and enjoyed most of Hornby’s novels, but this one seemed a little bit “thinner” than some of his previous works.

Then it was back to crime/detective fiction with Raymond Chandler’s Playback (one of his lesser-known titles, I think) and his classic The Big Sleep. Those were sandwiched around a totally different kind of book, A Seventh Man, a collaboration between British novelist and art critic John Berger and Swiss photographer Jean Mohr; I read this relative to a scholarly project I’m immersed in—it was interesting conceptually, but not really riveting reading.

Next up: Roddy Doyle’s Bullfighting, a collection of stories focused on Dublin men experiencing midlife crises. Very compelling reading—quite poignant at times. (I really should write a real review of this book. Hmmm.)

And then I read two very different memoirs. The first was Steve Martin’s Born Standing Up, which relates the launch of his wildly successful career (remember . . . he was “a wild and crazy guy”!) as a standup comic. But there is a depth to his story involving Martin’s complex relationship with his father: I was impressed by how he explored that dimension of his life. The second memoir was Paul Quarrington’s Cigar Box Banjo. I think I happened upon this title when I noted somewhere that Roddy Doyle had written the Foreword. A well-known Canadian novelist, Quarrington died of lung cancer a year or so ago: this musing on his life of books and music is ultimately an unsentimental account of his last months.

After the at-times heavy lifting of that book, I picked up Michael Chabon’s The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. Who knows how long that novel has been sitting on my bookshelf? It was one of my favorites of the year: a fully realized coming-of-age novel with all sorts of narrative and thematic twists and turns. I wish I could remember how or why I then decided to read Thomas McGuane’s Keep the Change: maybe because it had horses in it? I suppose I would describe it as a latter-day “western”—a “literary” piece of fiction exploring age-old themes involving land ownership. A good read if you like that sort of subject matter.

And finally, just as summer came to end, so did my reading of After Lyletown by old friend and former colleague K. C. (Chet) Frederick. Dramatizing how an individual’s past can have a way of catching up him or her, this very satisfying novel asks (and in its own way answers) the question of what price we have to pay for the indiscretions—even if fueled by idealism—of our youth.

ADAM McQUAID STANLEY CUP FESTIVAL ON PEI THIS WEEKEND!

The last time the Stanley Cup came to Prince Edward Island I missed seeing it by just a few hours. The year was 2004. The Tampa Bay Lightning won the Cup that Spring and PEI native Brad Richards brought the trophy home to Murray Harbour, where he shared it with the gathered masses for a precious afternoon. Alas, we arrived home on the Island just around the time it was being crated up to be shipped on to the next player on the Lightning roster who would have his turn showing it and sharing it.

This year I’m once again missing the chance to see it on PEI—but this time by 8 days as we returned last Saturday from our annual pilgrimage to the Island. This year’s Islander with his name etched in immortality is Adam McQuaid, who will be hosting and hoisting the Cup this coming Sunday in his hometown of Cornwall. From what I’ve heard, the celebration will be first-class all the way: a meandering parade will allow the expected crowd of 15,000 at least a glimpse of the Holy Grail and a well-organized lottery will give at least 54 families the opportunity to get up close and personal with McQuaid and the Cup. (McQuaid’s uniform number with the Boston Bruins is 54.) And a number of non-profit organizations will get a piece of the action through the sale of souvenir t-shirts, a raffle of memorabilia, and food and water concessions. The organizers of the Stanley Cup Festival have also scheduled live music and entertainment to keep the crowd happy throughout the afternoon.

Well, even though I’ll miss seeing the Stanley Cup on PEI, I didn’t miss seeing Adam McQuaid, who established himself during his rookie year as a vital member of the Bruins shut-down defensive corps. His +- rating of +30 was tops for rookies across the league and he proved himself repeatedly as what tv analyst Pierre Maguire referred to as a “tough hombre”: his willingness to the throw down the gloves and “oblige” opponents interested in fisticuffs quickly established him as a fan favorite in Boston. (Here’s a link to one of his bouts: his beat-down of a Dallas Stars player that added the exclamation point to a remarkable start to a game in February—3 fights in the first 4 seconds!) But by all accounts, McQuaid is a gentle and approachable guy off the ice, and I took that part of his reputation as my invitation to “approach” him last week as each of us prepared for the start of the annual Gold Cup and Saucer Parade in Charlottetown.

I wrote a little bit about the Parade last summer. This year, I chose to wear my Bruins colors as my “uniform” in the Charlottetown Community Clash. Believe me, I took my share of abuse from self-avowed Montreal fans (in particular) along the parade route: I ran the gauntlet for my beloved Bs! (For more on my love of the Bruins, click here.) I expect that as Parade Marshall, sharing that honor and a spot on a float with members of PEI’s bronze medal-winning Special Olympics softball team, Adam McQuaid got a somewhat warmer reception.

Anyway . . . just before the Parade got underway I had a chance to chat with McQuaid for a few minutes—to congratulate him and to thank him for his role in bringing the Cup “home to Boston.” And home to PEI. I was surprised that he is not bigger: he’s tall, obviously, but he’s not big-boned or even intimidatingly muscular. In person he looks pretty ordinary—and even his mullet fits in on PEI! (He has retained that classic hockey cut from a charitable event in Boston during the winter.) All he needs is a “Canadian tuxedo” (a denim jeans/jean jacket combo—I still wear mine sometimes!) and you might never guess that he has his name on the Stanley Cup!

BAD HAIRCUT . . . AND OTHER STORIES

Alright, I’ll admit that Tom Perrotta used that title first for an engaging collection of short stories (the story “Thirteen” is a true classic of adolescence awakening). I hope he doesn’t mind my borrowing it as a heading for this blog post. It seems to be a good catch-all for what follows.

MOO
So, a couple of days ago I took our Springer Spaniel in for grooming. She got the worst haircut ever: she came home looking like a Holstein calf! In fact, the next morning when my wife was out walking her, a guy in a pickup truck slowed down and shouted out: “Hey, nice cow!” My wife called back: “Hey, she’s a dog!” The man revved his engine and said: “I was talking to the dog.” Ha-ha!

WALKOFF
Okay, that story was only partly true (the bit about the bad haircut). But this is all true: for the second time this baseball season, I had drop in my lap a ticket for a great seat at Fenway Park—this time almost directly behind homeplate, about 15 rows deep. The price on the ticket was $94: my friend Joe, who invited me to accompany him to the game, got a pair as a “perk” for something or other, and we ended up getting far more than face value out of them. The game was delayed almost an hour-and-a-half because of a passing thunderstorm, but it was well worth the wait and the resulting late night as the Red Sox walked off with a win over the Cleveland Indians when pinch-runner Jarrod Saltalammachia slid in headfirst to score on a close play at the plate after Jacoby Ellsbury lined a single into center field in the bottom on the ninth inning. Exciting! Joe summed up the evening nicely in an email the next day: “I’ll not soon forget the cheese steak, the usher’s bench wipe, the rain delay, the high-quality brews, the thrilling outcome, the packed Green Line car, and the last Red Line car back home. Last night was an eleven!!!”

THE LAST OF THE MOHEGANS
One more “story” that warrants telling involves the less-than-24-hour visit to Block Island, RI that my wife and I enjoyed over the weekend. We strapped our bikes onto the back of the Batmobile then ferried over from Pt. Judith for an overnight visit with my wife’s sister and her husband and their three daughters, who had rented a place with a breathtaking outlook on the Mohegan Bluffs. The weather was perfect—mid-80s—and we savored the whirlwind getaway. As we were ferrying back to the mainland, we caught sight of my sister-in-law running along the jetty waving to us. Was she a Siren attempting to lure us to our doom on the rocks? Or was she simply making sure that we left her and her family to enjoy, without visitors, their final day on that glorious spot?

WEEKDAY MATINEE AT FENWAY PARK

The last time I attended a weekday matinee at a ballpark was long ago and far away: April 29, 1983 at Wrigley Field in Chicago, to be exact. I was a grad student at Notre Dame at the time and drove up from South Bend with a friend to meet my brother who was a visiting scholar at the University of Chicago at the time. I don’t recall much about the game: mostly I remember just that the day was miserably cold and rainy and that the hometown Cubs were an embarrassment in a 4-3 loss to the Dodgers and that the smattering of fans who weathered the game let them know it. Hardly the equivalent of that wonderful scene at Wrigley in Ferris Bueller's Day Off . . .

But I remember the date so precisely because it has achieved infamy thanks to the profanity-laced tirade directed at the fans by Cubs manager Lee Elia in a post-game press conference. I have to admit that watching it on TV that night back in the South Bend, I was caught somewhere between a grimace and a grin with every bleep inserted into the rant. Because this is a family-oriented blog (well, my daughters occasionally read it), I have asterisked this representative excerpt from the transcript of Elia’s diatribe:

F*** those f***in’ fans who come out here and say they’re Cub fans that are supposed to be behind you rippin’ every f***in’ thing you do. I’ll tell you one f***in’ thing, I hope we get f***in’ hotter than shit, just to stuff it up them 3,000 f***in’ people that show up every f***in’ day, because if they’re the real Chicago f***in’ fans, they can kiss my f***in’ ass right downtown and PRINT IT.

They’re really, really behind you around here . . . my f***in’ ass. What the f*** am I supposed to do, go out there and let my f***in’ players get destroyed every day and be quiet about it? For the f***in’ nickel-dime people who turn up? The motherf***ers don’t even work. That’s why they’re out at the f***in’ game. They oughta go out and get a f***in’ job and find out what it’s like to go out and earn a f***in’ living. Eighty-five percent of the f***in’ world is working. The other fifteen percent come out here.

Ouch! I suppose that, given our lofty academic aspirations, my brother and my friend and I could have taken Elia’s remarks personally: “the other fifteen percent,” indeed. Maybe it’s a variation on Stockholm Syndrome, but to this day I still just chuckle and nod my head and wonder if Elia was not far off the mark after all.

But what a difference 28 years can make! This afternoon, I attended the Red Sox-Royals matchup at Fenway with my friends and colleagues Len and Matt. Like the Cubbies, the hometown Sox lost 4-3 in a somewhat subdued performance (especially after they had drubbed the Royals the previous two nights). But it was a gloriously sunny day, and even though we were in the farthest seats possible from home plate—Row 40 in Section 37 of the bleachers—we enjoyed the novelty of a weekday afternoon at Fenway. Afterwards, we paid a visit to the Lansdowne Club across the street from the ballpark. Out of the corner of my eye I saw on the television screen above the bar Red Sox manager Terry Francona’s post-game press conference. I’m not the best lip-reader in the world, but I would swear that he didn’t use one word starting with an “f.”

"GIMME A DOLLAR AND I'LL SHOW YOU . . .

. . . the Queen’s arse.”

That was an old trick I fell for once as a schoolboy. Did I really have a dollar bill to spare?

I must have because I can remember someone—I can’t remember exactly who, but probably some rough-around-the-edges (as my mother would say) classmate—taking my Canadian one-dollar bill with a picture of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II on it and folding it and folding it and folding it until finally only her jaw line remained visible . . . as a reasonable facsimile of an arse (as we say in Canada).

I wonder if anyone else remembered that trick after seeing the photo of the future Queen of England—and thus of Canada—baring her arse to a Stetson-toting Calgarian a few days ago. With the British tabloid News of the World now laid to rest, the Toronto Sun was happy to fill the void with this racy snap that has been variously labeled Kate Middleton’s Marilyn Monroe moment or her Janet Jackson-esque wardrode malfunction. Cheeky.

POST-SEASON HARDWARE

Tonight certain members of the Stanley Cup Champion Boston Bruins may pick up a few more pieces of post-season hardware in Las Vegas. I haven’t gotten the call to join them, but during their 63-day playoff run I thought that I might be in the running myself for something shiny. In particular, there were 4 games in which I distinguished myself. The first was in the second round, against Philadelphia. Enlisted for long-distance chauffeur duty to bring my youngest daughter home from college, I found myself in a restaurant—Café Bruges—in Carlisle, PA in the company of a bevy of bright and lovely young women . . . but with no television in sight. What to do? Surreptitiously receiving score updates via phone texts from my wife, I finally announced: “Sorry to end the party, ladies, but I’ve got to get back to my hotel room for some beauty sleep before tomorrow’s return trip to Boston.” That allowed me to catch the third period of the Bruins’ victory over the Flyers.

It also gave me a strategy for other games where I had a scheduling conflict—such as my wedding anniversary (I was able to keep one eye on the small television over the bar at Spazio’s restaurant in Braintree), a friend’s retirement party, and the Honors Convocation at UMass Boston: in each case I managed to engineer a disappearing act that allowed me to catch the bulk of the game at home. But don’t I deserve some sort of credit for not bailing out altogether on those various social responsibilities?

Well, maybe my reward was simply that my beloved Bruins won the Cup. About 10 minutes after game 7 ended, my oldest daughter called me . . . from Thailand, where she had been tracking the score online. I told her that when the Red Sox won the World Series in 2004 I was happier for her and her sisters than for me: they were bona fide fans and were all old enough to savor the moment and to remember it; this one, I told her, was for me—almost a half-century of diehard loyalty rewarded! The morning after the game, I broadcast to the world a photograph of that aforementioned oldest daughter and me, snapped in 1988, with the caption: “This morning I feel . . . this young again!”

Anyway, I have now watched game 7 three times in its entirety . . . and two more times mostly fast-forwarding to get to the goals and certain other crucial moments. Pretty soon I’ll have all the nuances memorized. I find it apt that there is no single iconic moment—such as Bobby Orr’s goal in 1970—for this year’s championship: but the entirety of game 7 seems to sum it up—I can’t get enough of it! The series as a whole certainly produced lots of highlight-reel goals and saves and lots of video-clip equivalents of sound bites (and real bites—ouch); but for me, ultimately, the whole was far greater than the sum of even those scintillating parts. . . .

All of that being said, I must proffer a few “analytical” thoughts about the final series. While the concussion-inducing hit on Nathan Horton in game 3 clearly motivated the Bruins and galvanized them as a team, it may have been a blessing in disguise in another sense in that it led to an odd case of “addition by subtraction”: it turns out the Horton was playing with a separated shoulder suffered in Game 7 against Tampa Bay. So the Bruins lost an already-wounded Horton but gained Shawn Thornton (toughness and tenacity) and Tyler Seguin (game-breaking speed and a scoring threat), both of whom were 100% and were desperately itching to play. It all worked out. Players had their roles, they knew their roles, and they played their roles . . . even while sometimes going above and beyond. As much as I’ve always liked Claude Julien as the Bruins coach (his interview responses are always thoughtful and articulate—in both English and French, no less), I don’t think there was a lot of genius involved on his part: it was more a case of discipline among the players along with a healthy dose of determination that carried the day. Also, somewhere along the way I told someone that I believed that “the hockey gods would ultimately smile on the Bruins”—and then added, “If they don’t, then I’m changing religions.”

Part of the basis for that “faith” involved the aforementioned playing of roles. I just re-read a section of The Game, by Montreal goalie Ken Dryden, the Bruins’ nemesis from 1971. . . . Believe it or not, it’s possibly the best book of any sort that I’ve ever read. (I read it a few years ago, the summer Dryden was running for the leadership of the Liberal party in Canada. I also started a novel by another leadership candidate, Michael Ignatieff—which I have yet to finish . . . though probably I will go back to it someday. He eventually won the leadership . . . but was forced to resign a few months ago when the Liberals got utterly slaughtered in the Federal election.) One essential point that Dryden makes involves the philosophy—and the practice—of Montreal coach Scotty Bowman, who believed that the “speed” players (or “skill” players) needed to be complemented by muscle players.

Here’s what Dryden writes: [S]peed is not enough. Quick players are often small, and in smaller rinks against bigger teams, are frequently subject to intimidating attack. Bowman knows that Lafleur, Lemaire, and Lapointe, players whose skills turn the Canadiens from a good team to a special one, must be made “comfortable,” as he puts it; they must be allowed to play without fear. So never farther than the players’ bench away, to balance and neutralize that fear, Bowman has Lupien and Chartraw, sometimes Cam Connor, in other years Pierre Bouchard, and of course, Larry Robinson. With a game-to-game core of fourteen or fifteen players, Bowman fine-tunes his line-up, choosing two or three from among the six or more available to find the “right mix,” as he calls it, for every game we play. He believes that a championship team needs all kinds of players, and that too many players of the same type, no matter how good, make any team vulnerable.

This was Vancouver’s problem. The Bruins had just enough firepower, thanks to Roberto Luongo’s leakiness in the Vancouver goal, to match up with the Canucks—and the Bruins also had Tim Thomas to counteract the Canucks’ “skill”; but the Canucks did not have enough physicality to match up with the Bruins. This seems to be the verdict in the Vancouver Sun as well. I’ll betcha that next year they add some muscle and some attitude. . . . In that regard, I feel bad for the Sedin twins—great “skill” players who took abuse both on the ice and off: the Vancouver GM might have spared them both kinds of abuse by building a better-rounded team. (The comments in the media and on call-in radio programs about the “Sedin sisters” and “Thelma and Louise” were mean-spirited and took away from the series as a matchup of worthy opponents, which is all that any true hockey fan would ask for.) I have been struck for years now by how much different playoff hockey is from regular season games—how much more physical to the point of being brutal. The Vancouver-San Jose series scared me because both of those teams were so “skill”-oriented; when the Canucks won that series, I was afraid that the Bruins would not be able to match up if the Canucks dictated a finesse game. It turned out the other way around. And the rest is happy history!

SUMMER READING LIST . . .

IT TAKES AN AWFULLY BIG MAN . . .

. . . to overshadow my wife!

(And an awfully brave man to post a photo of it?)

A TALE OF TWO SEATINGS . . .

Okay, I’ll resist the temptation of saying “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”—in largest part because I would be lying. We enjoyed both of the Red Sox games we attended over the weekend. In fact, getting to go to two games in a three-day period was more than “double the pleasure, double the fun”!

On Friday night the Sox beat the Oakland Athletics 8-6. My wife and two of our daughters and I had the game marked on the calendar from early in the week, and I ordered tickets once I knew that we would have “baseball weather.” Or so we thought. We thought that we dressed warmly enough for a night game in early June, but a brisk sea-breeze made us think otherwise pretty quickly. A bad night at the ballpark may still be better than a good day at work—and this wasn’t even a bad night as the Sox got back on track and rallied from the 4-run hole they dug for themselves in the first inning—but we were sitting on our hands and shivering for a good part of the evening. I never thought I’d have a hot chocolate on top of a beer—at a ballgame, no less—but so it went, especially high up in the bleachers: section 38, row 36 . . . just about as far from home plate as you could sit.

But what a difference two days can make. Sunday afternoon was still a bit breezy and cool, especially in the shade . . . but for that game my wife and I had it “made in the shade.” About two hours before game time our across-the-street neighbor rang the doorbell and offered us a pair of tickets for the Pavilion at Fenway Park, a seating area we never even knew existed. With neighbors like that who needs a sugar mama or a sugar daddy? . . . Well, I’ll let the photo tell this tale: from where we sat, in the third row of a luxury deck directly above home plate, we could almost read the names on the lineup cards being delivered to the umpires during the pregame ritual! And the seats came with waiter service from a full bar menu. And oh yes, the Sox won 6-3 to complete a 3-game sweep of the A's: maybe it was the best of times after all . . .

“GIRLS” AND THEIR GUITARS

A few weeks ago I found myself seated at a dinner beside a woman who, in the course of our casual conversation, revealed that several decades ago she had been a serious guitar student at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. Doing the math in my head, I wondered—and then I asked—whether she had attended Berklee around the same time as the somewhat legendary Emily Remler, whose promising career ended with her early death, in 1990 (she was 32 years old), from a drug overdose. The woman I was seated next to had indeed known Remler personally and was pleased that I knew of her . . . and was surprised to learn that I even have one of her CDs, East to Wes. It is a fine recording altogether, showing off Remler’s impressive chops on tunes like “Daahoud,” “Hot House,” and the Wes Montgomery-inflected “Blues for Herb.” Here’s a great video of her playing “Tenor Madness” in Australia the year before her death.

In her time Remler was something of an iconoclast, a rare female axe-slinger in the very male world of jazz guitar. Her mentor Herb Ellis predicted that she would be “the new superstar of guitar.” Remler herself hoped that her legacy would include “memorable guitar playing and my contributions as a woman in music,” though she added: “the music is everything, and it has nothing to do with politics or the women’s liberation movement.” Ultimately, she was right: her playing did not break down any barriers (for some reason there are still very few women making noise on jazz guitar), but her music lives on.

Ditto—in part—for a woman guitar player who preceded Remler onto the bandstand by about 40 years. Mary Osborne resented being cast as mainly a “woman guitarist”: inspired by seeing Charlie Christian play with Al Trent’s band in Bismarck, ND (a year or so before he joined Benny Goodman’s band and became a legend), she committed herself to swinging in his wake (quite literally—for a while she even played a Gibson ES-150 guitar identical to Christian’s). Eventually moving to New York, she recorded with true jazz giants Dizzy Gillespie and Coleman Hawkins . . . but during the prime of her career she recorded only one album under her own name, A Girl and Her Guitar, in 1959. While the title might have a novelty ring to it, the music on board could not be farther from a commercial sell-out: in fact, it is one of the most satisfyingly swinging albums I’ve heard in a long, long time. Backed by Tommy Flanagan on piano, Jo Jones on drums, Tommy Potter on bass and Daniel Barker on rhythm guitar, Osborne soars through 10 jazz classics (including “I Love Paris,” “How High the Moon,” “I Found a New Baby” and “These Foolish Things”) and one original blues. Her playing is striking—she is wielding a beautiful Gretsch “White Falcon”—and the album is a classic, which makes it that much more a pity that it has never been released as a CD (I paid big bucks on eBay for a copy of the original vinyl recording).

Odds and ends of recordings by Osborne are available on jazz guitar compilations like Hittin’ on All Six and Swing To Bop Guitar: Guitars In Flight 1939- 1947. And there’s a terrific, albeit blurry, video clip of her playing on a television program, Art Ford’s Jazz Party. Maybe someday A Girl and Her Guitar will be reissued and her playing will live on for a wider audience like Emily Remler’s does.

LIVE AT SCULLERS . . . CATHERINE RUSSELL

Sometimes it’s good to be led into temptation . . . and to succumb. Last night, my wife and I couldn’t resist the lure of a new-to-us jazz singer in town, so we trekked out to Scullers jazz club to catch Catherine Russell live and in person. What a treat! We had first heard of her in a write-up in the Boston Globe last week, but a number of people in the audience seemed familiar with her already and she certainly rose to the anticipation that filled the room. A small woman with a big voice and high-energy stage presence, she delivered a wonderful performance of songs that my wife aptly described as being from “the anti-songbook.” That is, rather than perform indisputable “classics” by Gershwin, Porter, et al., she chose mostly lesser-known songs that were yet recorded by well-known leading ladies of jazz and blues whom she channeled brilliantly—Ella Fitzgerald, Alberta Hunter, Maxine Sullivan, Mary Lou Williams—while also adding her own interpretive touches. Her selections included several cuts from her latest CD, Inside This Heart of Mine—the title tune, “As Long as I Live,” “Close Your Eyes,” and “We the People”—plus a number of other obscure gems that she dusted off and polished up. On most of the tunes on the CD, she is backed by horns, but last night she had just a drummerless trio—Mark Shane on piano, Lee Hudson on bass, and the estimable Mark Munisteri on guitar and six-string banjo. They provided plenty of support for a vocalist who owned the room from the moment she stepped onto the bandstand.

DAYTRIPPERS . . .

When we pulled out of our just-south-of-Boston driveway on Saturday morning at 7:20, the GPS gave our ETA for the heart of New York City as 11:00. Not for the first time, my wife and I asked each other why we don’t make the trip more often: neither one of us had a really good answer. . . .

The trip down was remarkably easy . . . though not quite as easy as the GPS promised, as traffic on FDR Drive was crawling after we got to the edge of Manhattan. Still, we made it to the Museum of Modern Art by 11:30 . . . and we even found on-street parking! MoMA was our only goal for the day—we wanted to see the exhibit titled Picasso’s Guitars, 1912-14. As anyone knows who has scouted around in his enormous body of work across various media and various “periods” over more than half a century, Picasso had many obsessions: nude women . . . picadors . . . guitars. . . . As its title suggests, the current exhibit emphasizes his particular fixation with guitars at a particular point in his career. It is centered around two sculptures of guitars—one in cardboard, one in sheet metal—in the company of various other guitar-focused cubist-oriented collages, sketches, and paintings that the artist created in his studios in Paris and in the south of France just before the outbreak of the Great War. Comprising thirty-some pieces, the exhibit could obviously be summarized in aptly musical terms as “variations on a theme” . . . but in many respects it defies summary: this was that odd case where the whole was equal to the sum of its parts—each piece was intriguingly Picasso-esque in its own right, and the overall exhibit left this visitor staggered by the match of visual imagination and physical execution that I suppose is Picasso’s signature.

After viewing that exhibit, we wandered around MoMA for a while—standing in awe before one modern masterpiece after another . . . including Picasso’s “Three Musicians,” which I always find bigger than I expect it to be. Incidentally, on Friday night, whetting our appetite for MoMA, we went to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and I was surprised (not for the first time) at the small size of John Singer Sargent’s painting of the Pasdeloup Orchestra.

Speaking of appetites being whetted, after leaving MoMA we decided on a whim to find a bite to eat . . . in Brooklyn. We had never been there before, so to remove some of the randomness from our driving around in a borough that if it were a city unto itself would be the fourth-largest in the U.S., we punched into our GPS the words Blue Bottle Coffee, the name of a sister shop to a café we had visited in San Francisco in January, and that took us to the Williamsburg district of Brooklyn. It is a funky neighborhood with lots of shops and eateries catering to its predominantly twenty-something denizens. We had a nice mid-afternoon lunch at Juliette, by far the most popular place around . . .

Then we hit the road back to Boston . . . though with a “Why not?” detour down to legendary Coney Island—which proved to be less of a “destination” than we expected. That diversion got us stuck in some really heavy traffic as we tried to make our way back toward I-95. Still, we made it back to Boston before 11:00 p.m. Not a bad daytrip. We’ll do it again . . .

B-ING THERE: PRICELE$$!

I had a flashback a few nights ago to a transporting moment in sports history: the night in 1988 when my beloved Boston Bruins defeated the Montreal Canadiens in a playoff series for the first time in 45 years. I was living in South Boston at the time and didn’t have cable TV, so part of my flashback involves watching the game at the L Street Tavern. That was almost a decade before that local watering hole would become a made-over tourist destination in the wake of being featured in the Matt Damon-Ben Affleck vehicle Good Will Hunting. I lived only a couple of blocks away, on East 6th Street, but I was not a regular—and everyone there knew it on the very few occasions when I stopped in for a cold Bud. The place was the antithesis (probably not a word spoken there very often!) of the legendary Cheers bar downtown, where supposedly “Everybody knows your name”: clearly, I was an outsider and was looked upon with deep suspicion. . . . Anyway, one funny memory I have of the night the Bruins finally ousted the Habs in ’88 involves the locals toasting Bruins player Billy O’Dwyer, a native son of Southie, by singing at the television screen some lines from the mid-70s anti-war pop song “Billy, Don’t be a Hero” . . .

But last night, sitting belly up to a bar was not going to satisfy my thirst for the ecstasy of victory! By my calculation, I have been a diehard Bruins fan for at least 47 years—ever since my hometown hero Forbie Kennedy suited up for the Black and Gold back in 1964. And I have despised Les Habitants (a.k.a. the Canadiens) for almost as long. I just had to be at last night’s game . . . so yesterday morning I woke up and logged on to StubHub, my ticket broker of choice, and found a nice selection of tickets at a fairly reasonable price.

My wife and I had gone to the Bs opening night back in October—a ton of fun—but the sheer spectacle of a Game 7 was almost worth the price of admission itself: the house sure was rockin’, from start to finish, and seeing was B-lieving the outfits that some of the fans were wearing—they had more than their hearts on their sleeves, and many of them ended up being featured on the Jumbotron over center ice (maybe that was the point). I’ll not bother to tell the tale of the game—it’s happy history now. But I have to admit that when it went into overtime, I could feel one of my recurring nightmares coming on: how many times have I awakened in a cold sweat from the image of the goal scored by Jean Beliveau in double overtime in April of 1969 that eliminated the Bruins from the playoffs that year? Countless. What was it worth to feel utterly purged of that image after Nathan Horton scored the winner for the Bruins in overtime last night? Pricele$$!

BOSTON: VOICES AND VISIONS

Time flies . . . whether you’re having fun or not. And it sure has flown by as far as my blogging is concerned: I haven’t posted an entry in more than two months. I’ll not bother to proffer excuses; instead I’ll try to get back in blogging stride with the words below . . . which are actually, verbatim, a transcription of the brief remarks I had the pleasure—and the honor—of offering a week or so ago (on November 4th, to be exact) to lead off the celebration of the publication of the latest title in the catalogue of the University of Massachusetts Press, Boston: Voices and Visions, an anthology edited by my friend and colleague Shaun O’Connell. I am prompted to post these remarks in blog form partly to justify the posting of the pleasing snapshot of Shaun and yours truly (see below), taken by UMass Boston master photographer Harry Brett, that landed in my inbox this morning!

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For most of you gathered here today, Shaun O’Connell is the proverbial “man who needs no introduction.” Now in his 46th year as a member of the UMass Boston English Department, Shaun is the literal “last man standing” of the literal “founding fathers” of both the University and the Department. Picturing how the highlight reel of that exemplary career would play—the decades of teaching, of writing, of serving the Department and the University in myriad ways, of representing UMass Boston beyond these walls as a major public intellectual—we might all recall how Fyodor Dostoevsky, acknowledging the influence of short story master Nikolai Gogol, reportedly once said of an entire generation of Russian writers, “We have all come out from under Gogol’s ‘Overcoat’.” (“The Overcoat” being one of Gogol’s signature short stories.) Shaun O’Connell’s “overcoat”—in Irish (I can’t resist), his cóta mór . . . his great coat—has been just as capacious. Colleague, mentor and friend to so many of us over almost five decades, those descriptors could well chime with William Butler Yeats’s praise reserved for Major Robert Gregory: “Soldier, scholar, horseman, he . . .”

But I come not to bury Shaun—not even in mounds of collegial admiration and personal affection—nor simply to praise him inadequately, but to give some sort of context for Boston: Voices and Visions.

Actually, Shaun himself gives that context in his first book, Imagining Boston: A Literary Landscape, published 20 years ago this month. In that book Shaun established the essential coordinates for a coherent reading of—or mapping of—what he described as the “emblems and visions of place created by Greater Boston’s writers, writers who have invented and extended America’s sense of the city upon a hill.” Titling the seminal chapter “Hawthorne’s Boston and Other Imaginary Places,” Shaun set in motion his critical and scholarly analysis of a broad cross-section of writers—from our own Phillis Wheatley through William Dean Howells and Henry James to Edwin O’Connor and John Updike and beyond—who have indeed imagined into literary life not just “a city upon a hill” (or “the Athens of America” or “the Hub of the solar system”) but countless variations on the theme of Boston and environs as place and as possibility.

In one respect, Boston: Voices and Visions reads as Shaun O’Connell’s revisiting of that earlier inscription of Boston’s literary landscape by way of incisive introductions that frame the six thematic groupings of his generous selection of primary texts. The crucial difference, however, is that by way of Shaun’s carefully-chosen medley of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry—extending from John Winthrop in 1630 to Patricia Powell (our former UMass Boston colleague) in 2004—this wide-ranging and far-reaching anthology adds high relief contours to that earlier mapping of Boston’s literary terrain. In a sense, it is the complement to, or perhaps even the completion of, that earlier project. Twenty years in the making? Shaun himself should be feeling high relief right about now!

But around six weeks ago, I was chatting with Shaun about the imminent publication of Boston: Voices and Visions. As blasphemous as it might sound, we ended up talking about the “pertinence” (or was it the “impertinence”?) of such a compilation in our age of Googlebooks and other electronic media that put entire libraries at our fingertips. Shaun wondered: “What is the place of such an anthology in this day and age?” Good question. And I hope that I proffered a good answer. “It’s a way of shaping the conversation,” I started. Then I became appropriately metaphorical: “It’s about defining the topography . . . of putting the full scope of ‘literary Boston’ literally on the map, not only for today’s readers but also for posterity.” I wish that I had had my wits—or my wit—sufficiently about me to borrow from John Winthrop and say, “The eyes of all people are upon you.” I was a bit more prosaic but no less certain: “It’s your legacy, Shaun.” And today, as we come together to help Shaun launch this landmark and landmarking book, we are the immediate beneficiaries . . .

HEY ROSETTA! . . . LIVE AT THE MIDDLE EAST DOWNSTAIRS

For the past couple of weeks there’s been an annoying ad on tv. I think it’s for some model of compact car . . . though it could actually be for car insurance. It features a young woman with a bland nasally voice and uninflected delivery who purports to be in a hipster band on some sort of tour. She’s wearing cut-off shorts (denim, I think) and fishnet (I think) stockings. A couple of mornings ago, my wife asked: “Who dresses like that in real life?” Well, we found out the answer that night—that would be this past Wednesday night—when we paid our first visit ever to The Middle East Downstairs, a longstanding Cambridge music venue that seems to feature mostly alternative rock bands. And the answer was: “Just about every young woman at The Middle East dresses like that.” We were amused. I guess we didn’t read the small print on The Middle East website about the dress code!

But even if we had dressed the part, it would have been tough for us to blend in to the predominantly twenty-something crowd gathered in the cavern-like performance space to see and hear the triple-bill of bands performing there that night. We had our twenty-something daughter with us—maybe she gave us some “street cred” . . . or maybe not: maybe she just confirmed how old we really are. But we weren’t really there to blend in—we were there to see the opening act, a band from St. John’s, Newfoundland called Hey Rosetta! Or actually we were there to see the violin player, Kinley Dowling, the daughter of our good old friends Alan and Estelle. Kinley is on tour with the core quartet of Hey Rosetta!, joining with a cello player to add some Electric Light Orchestra-like texture to their basic folk-rock sound. Hey Rosetta! played a well-received 45-minute set: we have their CD Into Your Lungs, so we were pleased to see them live and in person. And we were very happy to have some visiting time with the lovely Kinley, whom we hadn’t seen for quite a few years: she fit right in with those hip twenty-somethings . . . even though she wasn’t wearing cut-offs with fishnets. Our daughter remarked afterwards: “All the guys thought she was cool . . . and all the girls were jealous of her.” I couldn’t get my camera to work in the low-low light of Downstairs, but I’ve tracked down a video on YouTube from just after Kinley joined the band in Los Angeles in mid-August on their current connect-the-dots North American tour. Check it out!

Kinley mentioned that when the tour ends in Montreal she’ll hop on a plane to Vancouver to perform with another rising star from the vibrant eastern Canadian music scene, Jenn Grant . . . who happens to be the sister of another of our old good friends. Maybe they’ll end up at The Middle East some evening. We’d know how to dress the next time . . .

TEN YEARS AFTER . . . THIRTY-FIVE YEARS LATER

A couple of weeks ago, driving by the Simmons Sports Centre in Charlottetown, PEI, I had a flashback to a rock concert that I sneaked into sometime in the early 1970s at that unlikely venue (a small hockey arena in a mostly residential neighborhood). The band was April Wine. They were formed in Halifax in the late 1960s and eventually found not only a national but even a south-of-the-border following. Their signature sound of twin lead guitars is still catchy a full 40 years later, and I have three of their tunes—“You Could Have Been a Lady,” “Bad Side of the Moon,” and “Roller”—on my iPod. As this old video shows, they were a tight band with a distinctive presence.

One flashback prompting another, I have to observe that today marks the 35th anniversary of a “road trip” that my friend Marty and I made from Charlottetown to Moncton, New Brunswick—we took my family’s old VW Beetle on the car ferry from Borden to Cape Tormentine—to see the British blues-rockers Ten Years After perform there at the Coliseum. Listening now (literally now) to TYA’s Recorded Live album, I am transported back to that transporting night when Alvin Lee lived up to (if not beyond) his “guitar hero” reputation. This video from 1975 would be pretty much what we saw and heard . . . but I remember the live show being in color!

THE BIG HOUSE + THE LANDMARK CAFE + PARADE DAY

In Ireland, the phrase “The Big House” is historically laden with baggage—political, social, economic, cultural—associated with the mansions (and sometimes castles) that dotted the countryside as homes to mostly Anglo-Protestant landholders whose identification and self-identification with Great Britain emblematized the conflicted relationship between colonizing Britain and colonized Ireland.

Believe me, then, when I say that we have our tongues firmly planted in our cheeks when we call our summer farmhouse rental on Prince Edward Island “The Big House.” By PEI standards it is a fairly substantial residence—especially for a farmhouse more than 150 years old: it includes 5 bedrooms , 2.5 baths, 2 parlors, a dining room and a spacious modern kitchen . . . all fully updated by its current owner (a descendant of the original owner . . . of Irish stock, I might add). Oh yes, there’s also a little room at the front of the house, in that little centre gable on the second floor—apparently this was known as “The Priest’s Room” because back in the day the priest coming out from Charlottetown on Saturday evening to say Sunday mass at St. Martin’s Church (about a mile up the road) would stay over in that room. The house is perfectly located for our vacation—a short walk across a road and down a lane to the south shore beach that I grew up on and that our daughters have known for their entire lives. We first rented the farmhouse in 2004 when another rental we had arranged fell through: we just spent our 7th family vacation under its roof . . . and expect to keep returning to it as our “summer home” well into the future.

A few years ago I took a photo from the back steps of the Big House that continues to please me. It shows the various barns and sheds still standing on the property: they’ve been repainted recently, but in this photograph they reflect the Island tradition of farmers painting the corner trim red on outbuildings so that they would be able find their way to them to tend to the livestock during winter blizzards. Or so my sister told me many years ago: she was working as a guide on a tour bus at the time, and such arcane knowledge was essential to her spiel. She also told how the cattle were complaining about the new technology at the time that allowed hay to be rolled into bales rather than cubed: apparently the cows claimed that they could no longer get “a square meal.”

As usual, this year’s version of our annual pilgrimage to PEI was filled with highlights involving family and friends—including various dinner gatherings at The Big House. Despite having only one week to squeeze in a whole year’s worth of visiting and general holidaying, we also managed to get “out and about.” One especially nice outing was a jaunt to the attractive village of Victoria-By-the-Sea for a meal at the Landscape Café. My wife and I had eaten there once before—around 20 years ago (it has been open for 21 years)—and our return visit with our daughters and my father was well worth waiting for: tasty food served up in the interesting atmosphere of a renovated general store.

One other “detail” of our visit worth mentioning is the Gold Cup and Saucer Parade, which for almost 50 years has added pomp and circumstance to the culminating harness race of the year at the Charlottetown Driving Park. The Gold Cup and Saucer Race also marks the end of Old Home Week . . . which in turn pretty much marks the end of summer on the Island. This year—for the first time since 2007—I marched in the parade as a member of the Charlottetown Community Clash Band . . . an intentionally ragtag gathering of local musicians (well, many of us are “former” music students) who have been showing up and creating a scene for the past 20 years or so. What we lack in rehearsal time we make up with enthusiasm and energy. Last year I watched the parade from the sidewalk and realized that I had more fun in previous years when I marched. So I found my old saxophone under a bed in my boyhood home, went to one of the two rehearsals, and then stepped out with a rush of adrenaline when the drumrolls started. Could there be a better way to observe the end of summer?

THE BLUES SCALE

Usually I don’t have to make New Year’s resolutions: my wife makes them for me. But this past January, I decided to challenge myself to shed a few pounds—20 pounds to be exact. Well, I did better than that, losing a total of 24.2 pounds in a little less than 5 months, which brought me back to my marriage weight just in time for our 25th wedding anniversary. That was in May. Since then I’ve backslid a bit: nine days in Dublin in June didn’t help; nor have all of the caloric temptations of the lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer. So last weekend I resolved to get back on the exercise wagon—well, back into the gym—with renewed commitment . . . which also required adding some new music to my iPod shuffle.

For much of my run for the roses during the winter and spring, I listened either to my 137-song “Rock Party” playlist or to my 50-song “Blues You Can Use” playlist. But at a couple of crucial points I tuned in exclusively to a couple of albums that I had been tempted by but had never gotten around to adding to my music library. The first was Piety Street by John Scofield. I wrote a lengthy blog post about Scofield and his band after I saw them perform at the Regattabar in Cambridge a year-and-a-half ago. Worrying that their recording would not come close to their terrific live act, I resisted the temptation of picking up the CD . . . but finally I succumbed—and I am happy to admit that my worrying was completely unwarranted. Ostensibly an album of gospel music, Piety Street is really a blues album of the first order, with Scofield’s guitar front and center—and it was just what I needed to keep me on the straight and narrow of the treadmill during the dark days of February.

But it wasn’t all that I needed: after years of having guitar hero Rick Derringer’s album Blues Deluxe in my shopping cart, I also finally added it to my listening mix. And what a great addition it proved to be: every single tune on the album—mostly blues standards—is a keeper . . . and the whole package certainly kept me go-go-going during March.

But now it’s August—the dog days, no less—and once again I am looking to the blues to tip the scale in my favor. So I currently have cued up on my iPod shuffle a pair of albums, by local blues bands, that I’ve been deferring the pleasure of listening to for a while . . . until now. One is Low Expectations by Ernie and the Automatics, a blues/rhythm-n-blues/rock unit that has been making some noise around here for the past couple of years. Part of their claim to fame is that a couple of the band members—guitarist Barry Goudreau and drummer Sib Hashian—are alums of the legendary “corporate rock” band Boston. Another part of their claim to fame is that the “Ernie” who lends the band half its moniker (he also plays rhythm guitar) is Ernie Boch, Jr., who sports a household name thanks to his late father, who owned several major car dealerships in the Boston area. Come on down! But the band is truly greater than the sum of its parts—which also include Brian Maes on keyboards and vocals, Mike “Tunes” Antunes on tenor sax, and Tim Archibald on bass. Low Expectations features tunes with super-tight arrangements, catchy hooks and fine guitar, piano, and sax work. I should get some pretty good mileage out of it. (I might also mention that Ernie and the Automatics are well worth catching live and in-person: I saw them at Firefly’s in Quincy back in January—they were barbeque hot!)

The other album that I added last weekend is Living in the Light by Ronnie Earl and the Broadcasters, a band that I wrote about at length on this blog a year or so ago. This album came out not long after I saw them in concert in Arlington, and coincidentally, I was in the guitar repair shop in Winchester run by bass player Jim Mouradian and his son Jon on the morning that Jim received his copy of the CD—it was just sitting on the counter unopened and unlistened to: so it has been on my radar screen for quite a while. Well, it was worth waiting for . . . though the blues stylings are really quite different from those generated by Ernie and the Automatics. First of all, they are much more gospel-oriented, fueled considerably by Hammond B3 organ player Dave Limina and also by pianist Dave Maxwell on a couple of numbers. Also, some of the vocal numbers, delivered by Kim Wilson and Dave Keller, are a bit earnest (no pun intended on Boch, Jr.) lyrically: “What Can I Do For You” might be too overtly religious for some listeners’ tastes, “Child of a Survivor” has the Holocaust as its subject (an unlikely subject for a blues tune), and “Donna Lee” is a very personal tribute to Ronnie Earl’s wife. But, almost needless to say, the quality of the music—with Earl’s guitar the main event—is first-rate. With Jim Mouradian on bass and Lorne Entress on drums, Earl and Limina deliver the goods. No less than Ernie and the Automatics, Ronnie Earl and the Broadcasters should help to keep me on track for my daily workout.

DUNKIN' DUGOUT . . .

So . . . last night my wife and I took our three daughters and a boyfriend of one of them to the Red Sox-Indians game at Fenway Park. It wasn’t the most dramatic game of the year . . . though we were already on our feet applauding the return of Mike Lowell to the lineup (he had been on the injured reserve list since late June) when he really lifted us up by hitting the first pitch he faced into the Monster seats, delivering what proved to be the winning run in a 3-1 Sox victory. Josh Beckett, who I checked out during his pre-game warmup in the bullpen, pitched very well—he allowed only three hits (one of them a solo home run) and was able to wriggle out of the several minor jams that he found himself in.

We enjoyed the game and the entire evening despite sitting in nosebleed seats—Row 48 (out of 50) in Section 41 of the bleachers: we were just two rows below the seats donated by Dunkin’ Donuts every game to kids in Boys and Girls Clubs and similar non-profit and charitable organizations. The Dunkin’ Dugout.

Fenway Park has its history, and it has its traditions—though some of them are relatively recent, like the en masse singing in the late innings of Neil Diamond’s hit “Sweet Caroline” and the Dropkick Murphys’ “Tessie” and even “Joy to the World” by Three Dog Night. (The singing of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” at the seventh-inning stretch goes without saying.) But we also have a family tradition at Fenway that involves a visit, before the game, to a particular sausage stand on the street outside the ballpark. It is run by the family of a teacher our daughters had in high school: he works at the stand himself, and he and the girls always have happy reunions whenever we make it to a game. Not that we’re superstitious, but we have to believe that our faithful observance of that tradition contributes to the success that has become another Sox “tradition” in recent years!

DOG DUTY

I’m not quite sure how this happened, but somehow I have ended up on dog duty for our neighbors, keeping an eye on their two Chihuahuas for a day or so. Are these creatures even dogs? I’m not so sure. One of them looks like a chinchilla; the other is what is known as a teacup Chihuahua—the sort of critter that hides in Britney Spears’ handbag. My cat would eat them for breakfast . . . if she could ever catch up with them: they sure are hyper, and they sure do move fast!

I think their names are Zoey and Bella, but I’m not sure which is which, so—taking a page out of Vicki Hearne’s book Adam’s Task: Calling Animals by Name, in which she emphasizes the importance of giving a pet a distinctive individual name—I call them Scruffy and Baldy.