Pothole Pother

Last night was the quarterly meeting of the Mattoon Street Historic Preservation Association, of which I am a member. The meeting was held in treasurer Robert McCarroll's lovely circa-1870 home, which looks like he bought it furnished from the original owner. Sitting on an assortment of Victorian slipper chairs, sipping coffee from antique porcelain mugs, we were all on our best behavior. Until Theresa Sawyer brought up the potholes in the driveway, that is. Then all hell broke loose.

The driveway in question runs from Mattoon Street to an alley which goes behind the most of the homes on the odd-numbered side of the street. Neither abutter owns the driveway. It's an easement of some sort, needed for access to the alley. The alley, while also an easement, appears to be part of the back yards of the homes behind which it runs.

Theresa Sawyer--one of the abutters--and others who use the driveway had determined that it needed repaving, and had gotten an estimate of $2000 for the project. She was proposing that the Association foot the bill. A very heated discussion followed. Some thought the proposal fair, especially as the Association had just forked over $2K to the nearby Hispanic Baptist Church towards the cost of a fence they had erected near, but not on, Mattoon Street. Others thought it unfair, since it benefitted some, but not all, Association members.

Ever-conciliatory Bob suggested that a letter be drafted to those members using the alley for access, asking them if they would consider donating $100 apiece towards the project. The Association would then pay the remainder. A motion to that effect was made, seconded, discussed heatedly, and finally, after many interruptions, passed.

I'm surprised that noone questioned the $2000 figure. Usually, any request involving money is met by decisions to obtain numerous opinions and estimates. Does the driveway even need repaving? I myself walk the dog at least twice a day up and down Mattoon Street, and I couldn't precisely recall the condition of the asphalt. On my walk this morning, I snapped a picture of it.

Maybe I've been living in Dr. Seuss-land for too long. All of this is sounding like The Butter Battle Book. "Yooks are not Zooks! Keep your butter side up!"

Bad Poetry: Statistically Improbable Phrases

Julia A. Moore, a.k.a. "The Sweet Singer of Michigan," was, like William Topaz McGonagall, one of those really bad 19th-century poets blissfully unaware of the ridicule of contemporaries. She took the Victorian penchant for writing about disaster to the extreme, at first using the deaths of children of her acquaintance as inspiration, and later any death or catastrophe she read about in the newspaper.

The Rochester Democrat wrote of her, in a review of her first book, "If Julia A. Moore would kindly deign to shed some of her poetry on our humble grave, we should be but too glad to go out and shoot ourselves tomorrow." By 1878 she had figured out that praise of her work was mostly mocking and insincere. At a public reading in Grand Rapids she admitted to her audience, "Literary is a work very hard to do." At the end of her poetry reading, she told her audience: "You have come here and paid twenty-five cents to see a fool; I receive seventy-five dollars, and see a whole houseful of fools."

Mark Twain modeled the dead poet Emmeline Grangerford after her (in the hilarious Chapter XVII of Huckleberry Finn). Emmeline keeps a scrapbook of obituaries and accidents, which she uses as inspiration for her poetry. Huck says of her "The neighbors said it was the doctor first, then Emmeline, then the undertaker--the undertaker never got in ahead of Emmeline but once, and then she hung fire on a rhyme for the dead person's name, which was Whistler. She warn't ever the same after that...."

Julia A. Moore's "hyperdithyrambic meters, pseudo-poetic inversions, gangling asymmetrical lines, extremely pat or elaborately inexact rimes, parenthetical dissertations, and unexpected puns" were an inspiration to comic genius Ogden Nash. She also had a penchant for statistically improbable phrases that would have served her well in the twenty-first century. Hitherto herebefore?

from THE AUTHOR'S EARLY LIFE:

....My heart was gay and happy,
This was ever in my mind,
There is better times a coming,
And I hope some day to find
Myself capable of composing.
It was by heart's delight,
To compose on a sentimental subject
If it came in my mind just right.

If I went to school half the time,
It was all that I could do;
It seems very strange to me sometimes,
And it may seem strange to you.
It was natural for me to compose,
And put words into rhyme,
And the success of my first work
Is this little song book of mine.

My childhood days have passed and gone,
And it fills my heart with pain
To think that youth will nevermore
Return to me again.
And now kind friends, what I have wrote,
I hope you will pass o'er,
And not criticise as some have done,
Hitherto herebefore