Caslon series, Boston Type Foundry, 1889.

This one’s especially for you, Scott.

Caslon type sample, Boston Type Foundry Specimen Book (1889), from the trade literature collections at the National Museum of American History.

Gimme shelter (at home).

I’m visiting friends in Boston, and very glad that I arrived on the train yesterday. We’re safe on Beacon Hill on this lovely spring day, with land-line and mobile alerts coming to us from the city and the state. It’s basically been like a snow day here, but with 70-degree weather. Always good to be cooped up with friends!

A message from the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency.

Going faster miles an hour.

Scott has alerted me to this news story, which is one of those things that doesn’t really matter, but definitely brings a smile to the face of this former Mod Nite goer, who has since often listened to “Roadrunner” at full volume with the windows down speeding through the darkness on some summer night in Massachusetts. Perfect.

Okay, now you say it, Modern Lovers…

Washington to Boston in the quiet car.

Aboard Amtrak’s Northeast Regional Service, train no. 86, Thursday 6 December 2012.

08:40 An on-time departure from Union Station is signaled as we slowly begin to roll, gradually picking up speed as mass is mobilized, momentum created. The railyard passes slowly, then the city speeds into view as tracks and rolling stock give way to warehouses, then buildings, parking lots, houses, trees. We cross the Anacostia, perhaps, or maybe it is just a stream. Power lines and storage tanks and the metro and bare trees and a highway beside us.

08:48 New Carrollton, MD. A platform, across from metrorail, with a hulking parking garage and what looks like an office park across from the bus bays. The sun is shining so brightly through the window of the carriage that I squint. The clouds are thin and high.

08:57 The sun in the trees gives a flicker effect as we move through woodlands, making my newspaper appear as a newsreel before my eyes. Houses, two-lane roads, streams, a water tower, a trailer park.

09:07 BWI. Bundled passengers with luggage standing on the platform in the morning chill. All one can see of the airport is a parking garage surrounded by woodland. The existence of the airport is taken on faith. I gain a seatmate.

09:13 We blow the horn as we pass by neighborhoods, where a new platform is under construction. Modest houses’ yards abut the tracks, delineated by chain-link fences. Warehouses on one side of the tracks, houses on the other.

09:25 Baltimore. A sign on a lovely old building reads “loft apartments available.” The tracks are below street level. We pass through a tunnel, and emerge after a minute to rowhouses and a view of Johns Hopkins. A beautiful church with a copper tower stands tall above the brick neighborhoods and a construction site. You can see cranes and factories and the machinery of the port in the seaward distance.

09:45 We cross a large bay.

09:52 Another wide bay, tidal, which we cross on a high bridge. Aberdeen, I think, is the town. A huge modern warehouse, unmarked.

10:03 A strobelike effect of the light as we pass a train moving in the opposite direction, and the sun is let through only in the gaps between the cars. It’s so strobelike I stop being able to read the paper for a moment.

10:15 Wilmington. My seatmate, who, I gather, is an Amtrak employee, leaves, presumably headed to the HQ here, and I gain a new seatmate, who sits down with great force, straining against the seat as she settles herself in. Several newcomers need to be alerted to the fact that they are in the quiet car. Wilmington feels like it is in a tidal plain. The buildings, bridges, and tracks, the smokestacks and factories, and distant steam are the central features of the landscape. Then, another tidal bay, with muddy edges, rocks, and grasses. Shorebirds are sitting in the outwash plain, white spots against streaky sand and mud and pebbles. The vegetation looks windblown. We are moving slowly. Steam from a distant plant rises slowly into the bluing sky. The sun’s arc is so low it is still hitting my neck and shoulder, as though moving more south than west. Then there is a chemical plant, with a curious fountain in a pond, and the facility stretches over acres and acres. A refinery, it looks like: storage tanks amid the piping. And then dilapidated rowhouses, another factory, more plumes. And a great bridge.

10:50 Leaving Philadelphia, I have a new seatmate, a businessman. The boathouses along what I think is the Schuylkill are beautiful, turn-of-the-century Tudor masterpieces painted colorfully. The buildings along the rail line here are of similar vintage, 19th-century stone. A beautiful old sycamore near what looks like a zoo. We cross the Delaware. An old warehouse: an electric sypply co., L.B. Smith, Inc. A butterfly mural. Clear sky.

11:07 The Grundy Industrial & Office Complex, with Italianate tower, just shy of a huge bridge across a bay or river mouth.

11:09 The bayside cabins and cottages of the working class, like allotments, across the water from the slopes of a landfill.

11:15 Leaving Trenton, a school that resembles a prison, and mile after mile of warehouse and factory, junk along the tracks, piles of scree, and a sculpture of an angel on a white horse, a kind of outsider art. Aberdeen Sportswear, Inc. A lumberyard. A sculpture park. Hamilton is the town. Scrubby woodland, marsh, and field.

11:35 In the Metro Park station, an ad for trigeminal neuralgia treatment. This station reminds me of BWI, as it is dominated by a parking garage.

11:39 Approaching Newark (like the descending plane visible in the sky), the smoke from a distant factory rises straight up.

11:43 In Elizabeth, there is a building that makes me understand the phrase “alabaster cities.”

11:47 Coming into Newark, the train parallels New Jersey Railroad Avenue, which is alternately designated on signs as “NJ Railroad Ave.” and “New Jersey RR Ave.” The station is old and full of riveted steel. Spanish-language ads for Johnnie Walker Black Label feature Latino icons like Jorge Posada.

11:53 In Harrison, huge, rusty factory buildings hulk beside the Red Bull Arena.

11:56 We blow the whistle as we pass through a landscape of railroads, electricity, and marsh, where towers perch on piers in water, and piles of dirt are interspersed with swamp grasses. I love the lonely yellow brick factory in the plain, no more than two stories, perhaps an office HQ, abandoned, with curious windows. Beyond, the Manhattan skyline looms.

12:00 And then we are underground, here to remain for a while.

12:05 A brief moment of light before… the station.

12:35 Light!

12:44 Hell Gate Bridge.

12:55 The Knickerbocker Press in slate on a roof.

13:18 Stamford. Graffiti on Metro North cars.

14:00 New Haven. Listening to podcasts and crocheting. The sun is behind us now.

14:28 We skirt the shoreline, with salt marshes and tidal meadows, the sound and the sea glowing in the afternoon light, glints in ponds and pools, white clapboard houses and the bare, brown woods. The shore houses are silhouettes against the sea and the sun.

14:47 Long Island appears across a wide bay, a ghostly outline fading in and out on the horizon. Houses cluster along the tidal streams and inlets. New London cannot be far. The trees and woods are lit yellow and orange in the angling afternoon light. A power plant or factory looms, and great ships are visible out on the water, far off shore. Shorebirds coast as we cross a causeway and a barge and crane are maintaining bridge piers. The sun flickers through the trees. Is that a crane, heron, or egret I saw? Oak leaves litter the rocky ground, and the bays and inlets are so calm they reflect their shores with perfect inversion.

14:56 In New London, an obelisk monument sits atop a ridge, overlooking the bright flue estuary of the Thames. The I-95 bridge is high and flat. Ships and ferryboats move. A man plays hackey-sack on the shore trail. There is a huge hangarlike building belonging to General Dynamics. The ferry sounds its horn, and I think of Maine and the island. Our stop here is brief, and we are moving again.

15:06 Swans!

15:36 As we depart Kingston, there is a flat field bordered by trees, and the university is up on the hill above town. We pick up speed quickly; the conductor informs us Providence will be in 20 minutes. There is just an hour left to my journey, end-to-end on the Northeast Regional.

15:47 There is traffic on the highway heading out of Providence as we approach the city and all its brick through interlaced overpasses and ramps and a tunnel.

16:12 The Route 128 stop is very short indeed, as the train and crew are really speeding for Boston. You can sense that everyone is ready to get to their destination.

16:20 Boston is now in view, though we are down below the street. I will wrap up this log and gather my belongings. Back Bay in a minute, South Station in 5!

Time to stock up on travel guides.

If a travel guide is on your wish list this holiday season, point your Santa to Cambridge’s own Globe Corner Bookstore, which is currently offering 20% off all major guidebook series, as well as 15% off orders of two or more non-sale items. One more good reason to support an independent bookstore with great service, knowledgeable staff, and a fantastic collection.

Connecting to history: Cemeteries.

In a recent post about making connections to the past, I promised to write more about the books, movies, landscapes, and experiences that have been significant in how I have come to know history, personally as well as intellectually.

One of the earliest ways that the past touched my life was at my grandmother’s house. When I was young, she lived in a small town in upstate New York, on a street that backed on to the property of the New York State Armory. This was a town landmark, and I loved it as a girl: it seemed like a castle to my young eyes, with cannons out front and a graveyard in back.

When my cousins and I tired of playing in the side yard of her house, we would jump the ditch that separated her property from the armory’s, and go running across the huge field that surrounded the castle. It was mostly unmown and unkempt, and we could spend hours exploring it. Most fascinating of all to us was the cemetery: a collection of untended headstones, many broken or listing, that made us intensely curious about who these people were and why they seemed to have been forgotten. We brought out pencils and paper and took rubbings of the stones, tried to decipher their worn epitaphs, marveled at nineteenth-century dates that seemed to us so very long ago. We made up stories about them, and even concocted a mystery about the graveyard itself, and its connection to the neighborhood. We delighted in spooking ourselves just this little bit, but it was mostly a game of figuring-out, an attempt to make sense of this quiet and abandoned place in the midst of town.

One day, when we were slightly older and my grandmother was moving to a new house elsewhere, we hopped the ditch—which seemed less like a stream now—and went out to the field—which seemed smaller—to explore the cemetery again. We ventured into a small area, overgrown with Virginia creeper turning red in the autumn air, enclosed by a wrought-iron fence. Here we found graves of Civil War soldiers, stuck with faded American flags that suggested perhaps we were not the only ones to have visited this place over the years. We were mostly quiet, thinking about our childhoods, and about the graves, which no longer seemed quite so mysterious.

Cemeteries are, of course, great places to learn about the history of a place: who lived there, what they did, how they died. Because of the significant part of my childhood that I spent playing in a graveyard, I’ve never found them to be scary places, or things to avoid or hold your breath around. They are, rather, peaceful spots for contemplation. But the fact that I see them that way is a product of history as well: the rural cemetery movement of the mid-nineteenth century marked an important moment in how Americans thought about their relationship to their surroundings, turned graveyards into public parks for the living as well as resting places for the dead, and influenced the design of urban parks and suburbs to come. The template was Mount Auburn Cemetery, just outside of Boston, which is now a National Historic Landmark. Cemeteries thus offer information not just on dates and people, but also on landscape and our changing relationship to it.

Of course, I knew none of this back story when I was a girl; I was simply content to wander and wonder and imagine. But now, when I encounter cemeteries from this period (and there is one in pretty much every town) I am eager to explore them, to learn what I can while also enjoying a bit of nineteenth-century landscape sensibility. It’s a great way to connect to the past.

Wait, is that Dale Sveum doing a manager’s interview?

I must have been out of the loop, but I just learned, while watching the NLDS, that Dale “Wave-‘Em-Home” Sveum has been the interim manager of the Brewers since mid-September. I remember hearing his name over the PA when they announced the base coaches the last game I was at in Milwaukee, but, until I tuned in to Game 2 tonight, I don’t think I’d seen his face since the Red Sox’s postseason run in 2004. And then, sure enough, there he was, looking the part, we’re-in-the-postseason stress stubble and all, wearing the big clunky headseat and spouting the Bull Durham interview platitudes like he was born to do it.
Of course, tonight’s game is not going so fantastically thus far for the Brew Crew, after Sabathia walked a few to load the bases and then gave up a grand slam in the second. I’m staying tuned, hoping that Milwaukee will rally and maybe get those Philly fans to stop waving those ridiculous towels around.
New pitcher in the 5th, though: not a super-fantastic sign. Fingers crossed here for McClung. Even though he just issued a walk to the first batter.
And now the bases are loaded.
Let’s hope that Sveum brings a little 2004-Red-Sox postseason luck to the — oh, YES, Prince Fielder just robbed a guy of a hit — boys from Milwaukee. Go Brewers!

Consider the author.

Today we have Michiko Kakutani on DFW, and an homage piece from Slate. [Note: I was a little bit disturbed to find this ad randomly chosen to appear beside the article. There’s a part of me that suspects that the man himself might have found it incredibly, horribly, excruciatingly funny. Man, I hope he had life insurance!]
When I was last in the Harvard Book Store, my one purchase was a copy of David Foster Wallace reading selections from his latest (and, now, last) collection of essays, Consider the Lobster. When I checked out, the clerk told me to be prepared for what he deemed to be Wallace’s “incredibly Midwestern” accent. When Paul and I eventually popped the CDs in the car stereo on our way back to Ann Arbor, I think we concluded that the checkout guy was just incredibly East Coast.
He’ll be missed. Wallace, not the checkout guy. Though he seemed nice, too.

A good find.

Purchased for $2.00 at Willy Street St. Vincent De Paul Thrift Store on Thursday: Stewart O’Nan and Stephen King’s Faithful: Two Diehard Boston Red Sox Fans Chronicle the Historic 2004 Season. Ah, just the sight of Tek shoving his mitt in A-Rod’s face — you can spot that baby anywhere. Foxwoods commercials! Dale Sveum! “Myoolah, Millaaah, Ortizzz — who ahh these guys?” Love it. Love it.
Oh, and we may have an apartment for the fall, pending the requisite credit/employment checks, &c. Have I mentioned my excitement at being back within the warm televisual embrace of NESN? Watch out, Hazel Mae!

Click, Clack, Killian.

For me, there’s always something supremely comforting about listening to Car Talk. I don’t always remember to tune in (Saturday mornings at 9 here on WHA), but when I do I always find myself grinning like a madman, reveling in the unfettered glee and unmistakable voices of Tom and Ray. It takes me back to Boston, and to the times when I lived around people who took things apart and built things, and all of the hard work and good, dirty-knuckled fun that went along with it. It reminds me of the amazing commencement address the brothers gave at MIT back in 1999 — I had just finished my freshman year, and watched the webcast from my brand-new summer job for the MIT Webmasters (now Web Communications Services, then known as CWIS, Campus Wide Information Systems, and, in my opinion, much better back in those days) in the basement of N42. I knew as I listened that there wouldn’t be a commencement speech this good for the next several decades, and was terrifically sad that I wasn’t graduating right then so that I could receive their message firsthand, on what I remember was a beautiful June day. (I was, recall, stuck in the basement of N42.)
Our commencement speaker turned out to be James Wolfensohn of the World Bank; there were protesters (a handful, because of the weather), and riot cops (a ton, because they were being paid to turn out); and it rained, and was about sixty degrees. I had a great time in my own way, though, because of course the weather would be crappy, of course we would have to suffer to get our diplomas in hand, and of course there would be hundreds of girls who had looked out their windows that morning and decided that it was still a good idea to wear that little white dress (soon stained by the sopping-wet non-colorfast black gown covering it) and strappy high heels (doing a better job of aerating the lawn of Killian Court than of supporting their person). Of course there would be people leaving as soon as they got their diplomas, and of course I would be among the last people to walk across the stage, degree-granting proceeding alphabetically by school (Architecture; Engineering; Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences; Management; Science) and then in numerical order of Course within each school. (The effect: the only department that followed mine was Math.) By the time I returned to my seat, at least half of the students and spectators had gone. Those of us who were left were wet and grinning maniacally, and figured we might as well stick it out to the end.
As soon as the last statements were made (and this, let me tell you, was amazing and miraculous — not the statements, but what followed), the rain let up, the skies cleared, the sun came out, and it was the most perfect June day I had ever seen. I exchanged hugs with what friends of mine remained (fortunately there were several of my closest in neighboring Course VIII), and we found our families and tromped through the muck to the athletic fields for refreshments. By then, it really was gorgeous out; we were beginning to dry off; and we were finally able to take our diplomas out of their plastic bags (handed to us immediately after the diploma itself in a positively staggering logistical coup — the whole ceremony is like that, you understand: how they get 10,000 degrees to the right people in the right order like clockwork, and are also able to have bottles of water and ponchos and seat-drying towels for every guest as well as plastic bags for every diploma is really quite astonishing, and makes you believe that there really is something after all to having this MIT degree — it just works) and look at them, and smile to ourselves and to one another.
In the end, I think, it really was a perfect day.