Under protest

So, when I was teaching English, I would often use Martin Luther King's Letter from Birmingham Jail as an example of  masterful rhetoric. It still holds its power, both in content and craft, today. Go read it. It's an important piece of American history.

One thing students can forget as we immerse ourselves in Dr. King's powerful prose, even though it is in the title given to the text today,  is that the letter was written from jail. Here's how Wikipedia summarizes it (emphasis added):

The Birmingham campaign began on April 3, 1963, with coordinated marches and sit-ins against racism and racial segregation in Birmingham, Alabama. The nonviolent campaign was coordinated by the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights and King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference. On April 10, Circuit Judge W. A. Jenkins issued a blanket injunction against "parading, demonstrating, boycotting, trespassing and picketing." Leaders of the campaign announced they would disobey the ruling. On April 12, King was roughly arrested with SCLC activist Ralph Abernathy, ACMHR and SCLC official Fred Shuttlesworth and other marchers, while thousands of African Americans dressed for Good Friday looked on

King and many others were arrested for demonstrating. Of course, this wasn't the only time; Dr. King was arrested dozens of times during his activities.

Now, there have been a lot of demonstrations over the past few years, with Black Lives Matter and the the take-a-knee anthem movement started by Colin Kaepernick among the more prominent, and it's pretty clear that there are going to be plenty more in the future, with 370 women's marches planned in response to the upcoming inauguration.

But we keep hearing voices speaking out against demonstrators, saying that they have no right to voice their opinion, or that they shouldn't inconvenience anyone when they demonstrate. Protestors are apparently going to be banned from the National Mall for the inauguration, and there is even a local politician in my area who wants to criminalize disruptive protests as "economic terrorism", whatever that is.

I'm not a political scientist, but protest and demonstration seems to be part of the warp and woof of the fabric of America. We all learned about the Boston Tea Party in grade school - what was that but a disruptive demonstration? Women's Suffrage and the Labor Movement, and in my lifetime, the Anti-War Movement, Gay Rights, Women's Liberation, and, of course, the Civil Rights Movement were all made manifest in public protest and demonstration - sometimes hugely disruptive. It's how we shake things up; it's how we bring about change.

Think about that as we move forward into a polarized political system and a regressive, repressive administration. We all may be called upon to do our duty as Americans, and protest.

And we may be arrested for it.

Happy Martin Luther King Day.

An American Classic

So, Coco and I were out craft shopping or something a few weeks ago, and the hobby shop we were at had a small candy section up front, the same way an Office Max or Home Depot will. It was an odd collection of snacks, containing a lot of off brands, and in the middle was a bin of Necco Wafers.

Necco Wafers! I hadn't even thought of these in years, much less seen any for sale. The didn't even break the top 100 candies in my childhood days, not for me or for anyone else that I can remember. Catholic kids could play communion with them, blaspheming and risking excommunication, but nobody really ate them for fun. I think I saw more of them pegged at people's heads than I ever saw eaten.

To be fair, the different colors do have slightly different flavors - I tried two for this post and the pink one was a bit pepperminty while the white one was just blandly sweet - but the textures are  all uniformly reminiscent of dusty cardboard. Not great mouth-feel. Really, the only advantage they had over a candy bar was quantity of units and easy divisibility. Edibility was not high on the list of Necco attributes.

All in all, the 21st century Necco Wafers pretty much lived up to my memory, in looks, taste, smell, and feel - even the sound of the wrapper had a resonance. Looking closely at the package, I realized that when I was "eating" them, these candies had already been on the market for eighty years - that's significant for a kid who who was playing in the street before Gatorade or Pop Tarts (not to mention Superballs). Neccos are not just a piece of my childhood, but of many childhoods before mine.

One modern addition to the packaging is, of course, the nutritional information - which seems a bit ridiculous for something so clearing lacking in anything but the slightest, incidental positive value. That little notice contained the biggest surprise of Necco Redux:

Serving size one roll!? We were supposed to eat an entire package of these things? Holy cow, who would tell people that?

I'm not even sure that any of my pals could have survived eating a whole roll. Not that 55 grams of sugar or 56 grams of carbs (the only measurable constituents in the product) would kill ya, but the act of consuming so much dry, sublime flatness - the platonic ideal of drab - might do you irreparable psychic damage.

But, I dunno. Maybe you liked them.

Book 'em

So, I mentioned last time that the coolest bits of Bellingham are in the area that comprised the original four towns and I alluded to a maximally cool bookstore as an example. I have actually mentioned this bookstore in a prior post: Henderson Books.

The store is rather unassuming from the outside, sort of a typical used book store, so on what grounds do I assert its awesomeness, you may well ask. Here is my evidence, in four points.

Point the first:  Just look at it on the inside, willya!?

Is this place crazy or what? Henderson might have as many volumes here as are in Powell's City of Books in Portland - but crammed into one building instead of taking up an entire city block. The shelves go right up to the ceiling, and bridges have been built across the aisles to hold even more books. It's a bit of madhouse, but you can really find just about anything there.

Which brings us to...

Point the second: The Gandalara Saga

Back in the early eighties,  I read this relatively obscure paperback science fiction adventure series, set in the wonderful desert world of Gandalara and chock-full of swordfights, derring-do, and sabre-tooth tigers. I devoured each volume as it would come out, and then re-read the saga as a whole; in many ways, it is a nearly perfect example if its idiom. 

In one of my many transitions over the years, I found myself separated from my seven-book complete set.  I slowly built it back up, but volume six, Return to Eddarta, eluded me for years. Until I came to Henderson, which not only had my missing volume, but also two complete sets. 

Two.

Still not enough? Okay, let's move on to:

Point the third: Science Fiction by Gaslight

Sometime around 1971, I read - and re-read, and re-re-read - this book, which was in the collection of the Bay Ridge branch of the Brooklyn Public Library. It is a fascinating collection of short stories written around the turn of the last century, many of which have stayed with me in no little detail until this day. Some of the stories are prescient in their depiction of the then-future, now-present; some are curiosities whose presumptions have been overturned by later science. I left New York in 1978 and had not been able to get my hands on a copy since then, as much as I have desired to re-re-re-read the stories. I would occasionally find a copy at some rare book dealer online, at the asking price of $50 or more, and sometimes wished I had just kiped the book before heading west.

On the visit to Henderson during which I picked up Return to Eddarta, I asked where a copy of this book might be if indeed the store had one (there's no automated inventory system of any kind - this place is totally old school). A clerk to me over to a  far corner of the shop where the SF anthologies were stacked and pointed to one of the bridges across the aisles. "It might be up there," she said. "What was it called again?"

I pointed, mouth agape. "It's that one."

Point the fourth: The cherry on top.

As if that wasn't enough, after climbing up a ladder (not a step-ladder -  at Henderson you have to use real honest-to-pete ladders to get it its top shelves) to retrieve the book,  I found out the price:

Six-ninety-five! Hella sold!

QED: Henderson is one of the coolest bookstores on the planet, in the coolest section of a pretty cool town.

Where the (restrained) action is

So, Coco and I have been 16 months in Bellingham, the City of Subdued Excitement (which has manifested as a category on this blog,  replacing Jet City as the label for local news.) And while Seattle has a typical boring municipal flag, Bham has a cool flag:

From the sort-of official description:

The two stars on the flag represent the the two coastal Salish tribes - Lummi and Nooksack - while the three wavy lines stand for "noisy waters," the translation of "Whatcom" from Chief Whatcom of the Nooksack. When the flag is flown vertically, these wavy lines also become a depiction of Whatcom Falls. The four green stripes represent the four original towns of Bellingham: Whatcom, Sehome, Bellingham, and Fairhaven. The blue half circle symbolizes Bellingham Bay, which unites the four towns.

It's those four towns that interest me the most. Here's what they looked like in 1889:

We live in the south, right about the F in Fairhaven; my college is due north across the bay, where the word Eldridge is. You can see that my daily commute, whatever mode of transport, is basically a tour of the original towns.

Here's how the towns grew and consolidated between 1889 and 1922:

And here's a comparison between the original city and modern Bellingham:

Now, here's what I have discovered: with only a few exceptions, the coolest stuff in Bellingham is found within the boundaries of the four original towns, or at least within the original city limits.

In that space, mostly between the bay and I-5, we find the funkiest restaurants, the grooviest bookstores (more on which soon), the art house movie theater, the independent businesses, and, of course, the establishments (such as the Bellingham Herald newspaper) that have been around since the early days of settlement.

Further out than that, you have the Red Robin, the Barnes & Noble, the cineplex, the mall, the big box stores, and the suburbs.

I know where my subdued excitement lives, and I hope to share my experience with you over the coming year.

Off again, on again, gone again, Flanagan

With apologies to Woody Guthrie, Happy New Year!