In Vlaamse Velden (In Flanders Fields)

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By happenstance this month I watched a Flemish TV series about a family in World War I and read a book by a Flemish author who discovered his house was occupied by an SS officer in World War II. Both were set in Ghent, my mother’s home town, where I spent many happy childhood times and have visited often throughout my life. Both offered a fuller context to the stories passed down to me about my own family’s experiences in the World Wars.

I watched the ten episodes of In Vlaamse Velden on PBS Passport, in Flemish with English subtitles. It was lovely to hear Flemish, a language that surrounded me in my childhood. I felt good when I was able to pick up familiar words and expressions, even some entire sentences, but I did need the subtitles. The series tells the story of Dr. Boesman, a gynecologist, his wife Virginie, sons Vincent and Guillaume, and daughter Marie. Each experiences the war in a different way, illustrating the complex and divided loyalties of the Flemish people during German occupation.

Dr. Boesman believes the Germans will win and that he may at last gain a professorship at the University of Ghent, till now denied to Flemish speakers. The class divide between Flemish and French speaking Belgians is exploited by the Germans who claim a cultural kinship with the Flemish Independence movement. The language divide also compromises the effectiveness of the Belgian Army. The officer class are French-speaking while most of the enlisted men are Flemish and cannot understand their orders. Vincent Boesman plays a crucial role in his unit, translating for the officers and winning promotion. A scene where Vincent’s unit travels towards the front on bicycles underscores the inadequacy of the Belgian forces. Meanwhile free-spirited younger brother Guillaume deserts the army, but is captured by the French and pressed into service. His war experiences will profoundly change him.

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Maria: The Forgotten Bronte

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On My Bookshelf the biography of Maria Branwell Bronte, mother to genius.

So much has been written about the Bronte sisters, their brother Branwell, and father Patrick, that we can easily imagine we know them intimately. But one member of this extraordinary family, their mother Maria, remained a shadowy figure until the publication of this first full biography in 2019. In earlier books we glimpsed Maria on her deathbed in the Haworth parsonage crying out in despair “Oh my poor children!” Then she conveniently slipped away, leaving her children to endure the motherless youth that inspired their genius writings. What would Jane Eyre be, after all, without Charlotte’s miserable experience at Cowan Bridge School, the inspiration for Lowood. As far as literary history was concerned, Maria had served her purpose.

So it is revelatory to meet the lively, intelligent, capable young woman who won Patrick Bronte’s heart. And the young Irish curate himself is very different from the severe elderly parson, seen always bent over his books, who lived out a long lonely widowhood. 

Maria Branwell’s early life was more Jane Austen than Bronte. As a member of the gentry she enjoyed a life of festive balls in the Assembly Rooms, theatre in the Playhouse, fine dining, fashionable clothes, and afternoon visits for tea with her many friends. Instead of the bleak Yorkshire moors there was the bustling seaport of Penzance in Cornwall, a scenic little town known for its festivals, smugglers, and mild climate. Sea breezes perhaps, but no wuthering. 

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Nextdoor Neighbors

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The ideal neighborhood…

I used to love watching Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood when my children were small. So calm, so soothing, so… well, neighborly. Sometimes I even watched when the children weren’t around. A restful oasis in a stressful day. In Mr. Rogers’ world all the neighbors were nice and friendly and helpful. Ever ready with a kind word or a helping hand. None of them yelled “get off my lawn!” If only it were so.

Today Mr. Rogers is a sweet memory. If you spend any time on the Nextdoor app, which purports to bring neighbors together, you will find yourself in a dark dystopian world where every teenager in a hoodie is a potential carjacker, every delivery man a potential home invader, and every dog walker intent on spreading dog poop over your lawn. Fear and loathing stalk the posts on Nextdoor, the comment threads a cesspool of complaints, anger, stereotypes, and often outright racism. An occasional lone voice bleats for civility.

…and the not so ideal
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The King’s Bedpost

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On My Bookshelf I find a favorite history book about a very strange painting…

             Edward VI and the Pope, unknown artist, oil on wood, c1575

At first glance, maybe even a second or third, this is a mess of a painting. It’s busy with awkwardly positioned figures and decorative elements; there’s nowhere for the eye to rest. The viewer’s eye darts about the various unrelated parts trying to make sense of it all. Then there are the blank squares and the puzzling scene in the upper right, a picture within a picture. The artist is obviously trying to say something, but what?

As Margaret Aston explains in The King’s Bedpost it is best to think of it, not as a painting, but as a comic strip or political cartoon. The blank squares were intended to hold text, just like the speech bubbles of today. For unknown reasons they were not all filled in. The book turns that old saying, a picture is worth a thousand words, on its head, for it takes many thousands of words to explain this one. The painting may be no masterpiece but, Aston says, “undistinguished art can make interesting history.”

Explaining the painting takes us on a journey through the Old Testament Kings, sixteenth century Dutch art, crucial decades of the English Reformation when much of the medieval heritage of religious art was destroyed by iconoclastic reformers, and even into Elizabeth I’s private chapel. The painting is visual propaganda for the reformers’ view that all religious images and devotional objects were “Popish abominations” akin to pagan idolatry. Once thought to have been painted during the reign of the boy King Edward VI, seen seated in his Chair of State mounted on a dais, Aston shows that it actually reflects the religious conflicts and anxieties of Elizabeth I’s reign. She also details evidence that the source materials for the painting date to the 1570’s. For the unknown artist’s skills were limited, note the unconvincing size and position of the hands, so he copied much of the painting from other works. This dating is confirmed by the modern science of dendrochronological analysis; the wood panel comes from a tree that was cut down between 1574 and 1590.

Aston begins by identifying the people in the painting, recognizable because they are copies of portraits by various artists produced in the 1560’s and 70’s.. She draws our attention to a horizontal line following the base of the king’s dais dividing the painting into upper and lower sections, upper being good and lower bad. Fashion also divides the groups. In the lower section several of the men sport tonsures, the monastic hair style, branding them as Catholics. In the upper section there are no tonsures but copious beards, the style favored by the Protestant reformers.

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My Favorite Reading of 2023

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Here is my annual list of favorite books in three categories – Fiction, Nonfiction, and Mystery/Suspense. I managed to whittle it down to five favorites in each category. But I’m adding a mention of best sellers and big name books I enjoyed that didn’t quite make it into my final five. And there’s a bonus category for the Weirdest Book I read all year. I hope you find something here to enjoy in 2024.

FICTION

Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton.
I had never heard of radical gardening collectives before reading this novel set in New Zealand. Instead of disruptive acts of protest they plant vegetable gardens on any unused piece of land they can find. When a remote valley is cut off by a landslide Birnham Wood’s leader Mira sees opportunity on an abandoned farm. But don’t expect a bucolic rural idyll; this situation morphs into a page-turning thriller with a fierce moral vision. An eccentric American billionaire helicopters in claiming he intends to build a survivalist bunker on the farm. Then there’s the clueless businessman who owns the property and an idealistic investigative reporter determined to make his name by finding out what’s really going on. Who can Mira trust as the situation becomes more threatening and volatile? There are plenty of revelations, betrayals, and twists as the plot hurtles to a dramatic conclusion. Gardening has never been so apocalyptic! 

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Remember Remember…

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Remember, remember, the 5th of November,
Gunpowder, treason and plot.
I see no reason
Why gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot.
Guy Fawkes, Guy Fawkes, ’twas his intent
To blow up the King and the Parliament
Three score barrels of powder below
Poor old England to overthrow
By God’s providence he was catch’d
With a dark lantern and burning match
Holler boys, holler boys, let the bells ring
Holler boys, holler boys
God save the King!

I’ve written about Guy Fawkes Day in a previous post, but this time I want to follow up on a clue that the Catholic plot might have been hatched in a house near where I grew up. While reading Lines on the Underground for my September post I came upon this quote from Daniel Defoe, written over a hundred years after the foiled plot:

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From Abbess Roding to Yubberton

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On My Bookshelf I discover the weird and wonderful history of English Place Names.

If you spend enough time in Great Sinns, Cornwall, you may find yourself on the road to Purgatory, Oxfordshire. Don’t take the fork to Pity Me, Durham, but seek forgiveness in Come-To-Good, another picturesque Cornish hamlet. Concocting imaginary itineraries like this is one of the pleasures of reading English Place Names by H. G. Stokes published in 1948. My copy shows its age, a bit tattered and worn. Stokes writes like a rather stuffy pedantic local history enthusiast, but his book is full of fascinating facts about the origin of English place names, many of them downright Rhude (Durham) like Mucking (Essex), Spital-in-the-Street (Lincolnshire), and Stank (Yorkshire).

English place names, according to Stokes, originated as simple colloquial descriptions, word pictures of a place. Before the age of maps or GPS people found their way from place to place by carrying the word pictures in their heads. By studying the original meanings of the words we can see a picture of what England looked like as much as 2,000 years ago. The words describe a rural landscape of woodland and heath, marsh and fen, hills and valleys, rivers and streams, dotted with dwellings and small settlements. Most of the oldest names are Celtic and Anglo-Saxon. Here are some of the most common name fragments and their meanings:

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Lines on the Underground

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On My Bookshelf I rediscover a book I bought by mistake…

Have you ever bought a book thinking it was one thing and it turned out to be quite another? That’s what happened when I picked up this book in a London used book store years ago. I thought Lines on the Underground referred to the London Transport project of posting lines of poetry in the trains to give strap-hanging commuters something more interesting to read than ads. Started in January 1986 as an experiment, the project was so popular it continues to this day. I knew an anthology of the poems had been published and I assumed this was it, adding it to the pile of books I always end up buying when in London.

But when I got home and opened it up I found something quite different, but marvelous in its own way, with a clever pun in the title. This book contains not only lines of poetry but prose as well, quotations from literature, guidebooks, and historical writing from myriad sources past and present. The book is arranged by Underground Line with each station in order of travel receiving one or more quotations. So you could ride on the Circle Line, for example, book in hand, and follow along station by station with interesting snippets of reading about each place. All 270 stations that existed at the time of publication in 1994 are covered.

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Brookeville – Capital for a Day

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On this day in 1814 the tiny Maryland town of Brookeville was the Capital City of the United States. This article was first published in The Dabbler in 2014.

The charming little town of Brookeville is nestled in the suburban sprawl of Washington D.C. as it once nestled in the green and pleasant Maryland countryside. But suburban sprawl maintains a discreet distance, the better to sustain the illusion that here time stands still. Just a few minutes drive from my home in Gaithersburg, the epitome of unfettered suburban sprawl, I turn down a narrow country road that winds uphill and down dale through cornfields, woods, and farmhouses. Puffy white clouds float in a summer sky and if I blink it is just possible to ignore the asphalt and the road signs and imagine I am in a horse-drawn wagon instead of a car, traveling back to Brookeville’s one brush with history. Unlikely as it may seem standing amid the tiny cluster of eighteenth century buildings that comprise the old town, Brookeville was once the capital city of the United States of America. For just one day, and entirely due to the British.

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Slouching Towards Eden

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or A Visit to a Casino

National Harbor

We slouched through the sclerotic artery of the Capital Beltway, my husband at the wheel. I turned to my book* and read about a glittering glass city floating in the Atlantic, a haven for the rich to escape a future drowning world. The Floating City was designed in concentric circles, each dedicated to a specific class and purpose. Only the elite could enter the inner circle, an Eden where no expense or effort was spared to fulfill their every desire. The workers who toiled to fulfill the dreams of the elite were bused in each day through a tunnel from the broken, flooded mainland. 

The voice of the Navigator intoned, “You have arrived at your destination.” I looked up to find myself on a circular road ringing a massive glass and metal edifice that could have been the Floating City of my book. A monstrous golden lion stood guard over the complex, imperiously crushing dreams of luck and riches under his enormous paws. We entered through the lowest circle of Hell, the parking garage. Exit from this level was not easily accomplished. Dragging our luggage we wandered the aisles like lost souls until finally stumbling upon the well hidden elevators. Somewhere Satan was laughing.

With a mechanical hiss we rose to the Casino level. The serpentine hallway was thronged with scantily clad women teetering on six-inch stilettos followed by sharp-suited men with hungry eyes. Teams of watchful security guards mingled with the crowd. ATMs were arrayed along the walls at strategic intervals, and through doorways we glimpsed serried ranks of game machines emitting a disorienting cacophony of flashing lights and electronic sounds. The humans here were mere go-betweens for the machines, doomed to forever carry cash ejected from the ATMs to feed the ravenous appetites of the insatiable game machines, which occasionally vomited forth a dribble of coinage to keep hope of luck alive. 

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