For history, come down to the seaside for the day

I call at least two-thirds of this weekend a success. (Tomorrow is going to involve furniture moving. I'm dubious.)

Yesterday was spent in New Hampshire; schreibergasse picked me up at the bus station and after a short discussion of scenic downtown Manchester, we stashed the car in a university lot and walked for some distance down the river, behind the buildings that line the east bank of the Merrimack. These are the old mills built by the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company in the late 1830's, mostly now made over into schools, start-ups, mysterious corporate logos (I am sure Jetboil is much less interesting than it sounds, but neither Schreibergasse and I were going to ask), and a lot of space to rent, but on the water side of the railings is an incredible, post-industrial shingle of old tufa-colored bricks and jettisoned machineries: rust-congested cogs and shafts melting back into the mud, a battered piece of ventilation bending up out of dry briar canes and winter-flattened grasses. (Ensuing conversation led Schreibergasse to introduce me to Ursula Vernon's gearworld later that night, but I paid him back with Kate Beaton before I left.) There were chunks of ice lodged against the rocks, tilted over them like capstones: they looked like an installation by Andy Goldsworthy. Of course I did not have a camera. Nor for the interior of the building he showed me around afterward, which had carpeted the floors and chopped the weave rooms into cafeterias and offices, but otherwise preserved details like counterweighted doors and raw brick everywhere. Someone had painted blue sky and clouds at the top of the elevator shaft. Eventually we returned home to make dinner, which entailed a rather Dickensian, if not Ankh-Morporkian meat pie: ground beef, lamb's liver, pork heart; onions, leeks, carrots, turnip; cinnamon, allspice, parsley, grains of paradise, nutmeg, and at least one other spice we both agreed on; Schreibergasse and I were responsible for the filling, G prepared the crust, and the results were eaten enthusiastically by all, especially Peter, whose favorite part of the pie apparently is the crust. (There was also zucchini, but it was much less structurally impressive.) I finally got to try Dogfish's Midas Touch, which tasted almost enough not like beer for me to really like it; I am nonetheless glad to have bought some from the inexplicably well-stocked convenience store that Schreibergasse and I walked to on our late-afternoon tripartite quest for dental floss, the compost heap, and a turnip. After dinner, the living room was invaded by catechumens, so we left them to G and generally hung out with tea and pages of manuscript in gothic or insular hands. I read my ungodson a Boynton book before bed. I might actually have fallen asleep before two in the morning. And I woke up this morning to oatcakes and the unhelpful capacity to converse coherently for five minutes and then fall back asleep for twenty more without noticing, but eventually I sorted out my brain and the afternoon was divided more or less evenly between taking Peter to the playground and reading cartoons about the Confederation of Canada. I think everyone was kind of zoned, but it was very pleasant. There was lentil soup.

And then I took the bus back to Boston and met rushthatspeaks for Les Vacances de M. Hulot (M. Hulot's Holiday, 1953) at the Brattle Theatre. It is a magnificent movie. As Hulot, Jacques Tati resembles nothing so much as a stork or a heron or some other long-legged, ungainly wading bird which has unaccountably found itself transformed into a middle-class French tourist in possession of a pipe, a battered hat, and a stuttering, twanging, almost transcendently ramshackle little car (which I would have sworn was the original of Newt Pulsifer's Wasabi, but my cousin informs me it's a 1924 Amilcar? I mean, good for the Carthaginians, but I want to know who names a car that) full of luggage that never quite explains itself. He is very polite, very kind, not at all a joker, and a catalyst for chaos the whole summer long—a good third of which happens to him personally and all of which he meets with a kind of perpetually bemused, essentially unsurprised Zen; it is clear that the world never behaves naturally in his vicinity and he has simply gotten used to it. He doesn't even notice the sea wind that kicks in through the door he opens from offstage, like a foretaste of his presence, and blows the hotel's lounge into paper-swirling disarray. (That one time he runs the hell away, however, the audience is totally with him.) I find myself reluctant to describe any other scenes, because so much of the charm of the film is the unhurried different directions in which events unfold, like the dreamy, archetypal summer into which all summer memories are compressed. I will note that Tati was a mime before he was a director, so Hulot moves like nothing on earth; his characteristic forward-canted gait is the way a cartoon character walks, except it's taking place in three dimensions. Simply watching him negotiate a roomful of other people is a treat. In short, I recommend the film without reservations and I think its protagonist is the sweetest personification of disorder I have ever encountered, and we're going back for Mon Oncle (1959) on Tuesday.

Has anyone ever set Edwin Arlington Robinson's "Miniver Cheevy" to music? It really is one of my favorite poems. I am aware that I write this while listening to a sixteenth-century lute galliard.