Talk amongst yourselves

17 Friday Jun 2011

Posted by in Antietam, Gettysburg, National Park Service

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Hey everybody, I wanted to let you know that we are headed to Gettysburg and Antietam tomorrow and that I will not be posting for about ten days.  We’re looking forward to a fun and active trip.  I have been to Gettysburg the last four years and every time I visit I realize how much more there is to see.  My goal is to take at least five ranger tours, in addition to various other things we have planned.  Somehow I suspect a few regiments of toy soldiers will be making the march from Steinwehr Avenue to Brooklyn, NY as well.

This coming Tuesday, June 21, is the first day of summer.  The National Park Service is waiving entrance fees at all parks that day.  (Many are free year round, too, of course.)  I guarantee that wherever you happen to live, you are close to one of our nearly 400 National Parks and Monuments.

Enjoy your summer.

Keith

“A Soft Place to Sleep”

15 Wednesday Jun 2011

Posted by in Writing

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That night, when the fighting was over, Jacksland spread his bedroll upon the soft grass on that high spot overlooking the river. Union ironclads, moored just offshore, resembled squat drum cans set atop big sheets of metal under the stars. The masts of man-of-wars looked like tall trees. The men around Jacksland felt the expectation and terror of the day wear away into a bone tiredness from which Lance felt impossible to awake. He thought about his wife and daughter in New York. He thought about milking cows in a cold barn, the plume of his breath, the smell of manure and dry hay, remembered the deep white snow spread across rolling fields in January and the way the north winds swept down from Canada to pile high drifts along the glacier-stone-fence-rows. Lance remembered the way the Hudson River always froze solid this time of year.

The Historical Society of the Lower Cape Fear, in cooperation with alternative publication encore, holds an annual short fiction contest.  L.E. (Roy) Dieffenbach is the 2011 winner.

The National: It was twenty years ago today

13 Monday Jun 2011

Posted by in Baseball

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Over at Sports Guy Bill Simmons’s new website, Grantland, there is an oral history of the late, great National.  For those too young to remember, the National was a daily sports newspaper that lasted an all too brief year and a half in the early 1990s.  It would be difficult to explain to anyone under the age of thirty-five just what a national sports daily meant to us twenty years ago.  Today if I want to know how many home runs Don Mattingly hit in 1986 (31), I go online and find it in seconds.  It wasn’t always so.  In the years before the Web was part of our daily lives, there simply was no way to follow sports as much or well as we would have liked.  This was especially true where I grew up in South Florida, where so many of us came from elsewhere.  If you were a high school kid from, say, Cincinnati and wanted to follow the Reds you were pretty much out of luck.  Things got better a few years later when the USA Today came along.  McPaper was a considerable step up from the local rag with its one-paragraph recaps of last night’s games, but even it lacked the in-depth coverage we take for granted today.

Television was not much better.  Cable was still in its infancy in the 1980s and many of us, especially if we were latchkey kids from single-parent households, couldn’t afford it anyway.  MLB.TV was beyond imagination.  About all you could do was watch This Week in Baseball each Saturday afternoon and hope for that three minute interview with Barry Larkin, Chris Sabo, or the star of whatever team you happened to root for.

Enter the National.

Frank Deford’s paper gave you the box scores and so much more besides.  It was not just good sports writing, it was good writing period.  The National was very much in the spirit of the New Journalism of the 1950s and 1960s, when people like Gay Talese and Dick Schaap were writing “sports” articles as deep and thought-provoking as anything out there.  And it came out every day.  The only people who didn’t like the National were its accountants.  After hemorrhaging money for nearly eighteen months the paper finally went under on June 13, 1991.  In today’s digital world, such a newspaper is no longer necessary.  Still, it is something to look back at a moment in history when a newspaper mattered to us so much.

Mark di Suvero at GOIS

10 Friday Jun 2011

Posted by in Governors Island

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The Times art critic notes that

Since the city bought it for a dollar in 2003, Governors Island has evolved from a spooky relic to a postcollegiate playground to a family-friendly weekend destination.

Art has assisted the makeover. When Creative Time staged a clever group show on the island in 2009, the place still felt haunted. The artists, intervening in former officers’ residences and decommissioned military buildings, performed a kind of exorcism.

Now, with an ambitious and entirely outdoor exhibition of sculpture by Mark di Suvero, Governors Island is one step closer to becoming a proper urban park. “Mark di Suvero at Governors Island: Presented by Storm King Art Center” is the site’s most high-profile art show to date. With 11 works spanning more than three decades, it’s also the artist’s biggest New York survey since 1975.

Ten Boston lives

10 Friday Jun 2011

Posted by in Libraries

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As a librarian myself I can tell you that our nation’s libraries hold many of our country’s greatest treasures.  This goes for the Library of Congress across the street from the Capitol Building to the tiny institution somewhere in Smalltown America with its Vertical File of irreplaceable local ephemera.  Through December 31st one our country’s best public libraries has a cross-section of its Civil War era artifacts on display.  My personal favorite (seen in the video) is the William Lloyd Garrison death mask.  I have seen the Lincoln death mask at the New-York Historical Society and there is something moving about seeing such an item knowing its provenance.