CSotD: Literary illusions

Mike Peterson Published: March 26, 2016 1 minute 2 comments

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Start with the one that's simply here because it made me laugh, as Dog Eat Doug often does.

My only commentary is that it scared me a little, since the day Doug talks, the strip's appeal ends, because it's based on he and Sophie being at the same level.

Doug must never speak, except to Sophie.

Beside, in parenting, this almosting stage is one of the very most fun moments of all.

Look! It's the Juxtapostion of the Day. Hey! Look!

(Daddy's Home)

(Reply All)

Not much to say about this, either, except, y'know, the child is father to the man.

Although, instead of Wordsworth, I could reference James Joyce for a second day in a row with this earworm that goes through Stephen Dedalus's mind in that opening chapter at the Martello Tower with Oliver St. John Gogarty Buck Mulligan.

Us_comic_tel_0027_16

But I will not. Anyway, I already snuck in a Joyce reference earlier.

Do you think Harry Bliss means country matters?

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Something there is that doesn't love a wall, but something there also is that doesn't love a golf ball. The idea of living on a golf course can sound very appealing, what with the open space and all, but, before you even get into cracked windows, simply the plonking of balls on the walls and roof can be annoying, and it takes a certain amount of sang-froid to sit out on the patio with the Sunday paper and a cup of coffee.

I have some extra sympathy with the dog lady in today's Bliss: An interesting fact about golf balls is that, while they are small enough to go down a dog's throat, they are not small enough to clear the digestive tract, and the cost of the subsequent emergency ballectomy goes well into four-figures.

I suspect, however, that she is responding more to the aforementioned assault on peace and quiet than to any particular danger to the dog.

Harry Bliss, Robert Frost and I are all, by residence if not by birth, New Englanders. Harry lives up near the University of Vermont and I'm over by Dartmouth, so we're both in places where the Subaru Foresters meet the Ford 150s, and he's nicely caught the interplay between Yankees and those who are, in the regional phrase, "from away."

I've recently written a kids' history of New York in the 17th Century and so now I understand why the Hudson River is not the good fence that separates neighbors in New England and New York, but that doesn't mean the ancient politics of it — either the Dutch/English politics or the much older Mahican/Mohawk politics — make much headway in my mind against the obvious geography of it all.

Wall Then again, it probably wouldn't matter. Frost makes the point that the ancient stone walls in New England are not real barriers to anything but perhaps a cow.

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out

And to whom I was like to give offence.

And so now you know, Bobby: Golfers and dog walkers.

More serious walls, more real offense

Juana Medina details her struggle to become an American at Fusion, where you can read the rest.

I will confess to a quick response of "Well, yes, but that's one specific, individual example," which quickly answered itself: "They're all specific, individual examples, you knothead. Every single one is a specific, individual example. That's the issue."

As it happens, Medina spent several of those questing years here in New England: I met her at the Maine Comic Arts Festival through Mike Keefe several years ago, and she did an internship with Hilary Price in Northampton, Mass., while she was at the Rhode Island School of Design.

But that's mere coincidence; if you're looking for irony, perhaps it is that she comes from a part of the world covered by our "Good Neighbor Policy," which FDR explained:

In the field of World policy, I would dedicate this nation to the policy of the good neighbor, the neighbor who resolutely respects himself and, because he does so, respects the rights of others, the neighbor who respects his obligations and respects the sanctity of his agreements in and with a World of neighbors.

The old stone walls of New England, as Frost suggests, are more for delineating property lines than actually preventing passage, of hunters, of golf balls, of anything with an urge to cross.

Only a fool would believe that an actual wall could keep in, or keep out, anyone with a desire to cross it. Walls, as Frost suggests, are more effective at giving offense than at actually preventing passage.

And so I'm more concerned with the bureaucratic wall we've built between ourselves and our Good Neighbors, which didn't stop us from crossing over to Santo Domingo or the Bay of Pigs but seems pretty effective at making sure we are not, in turn, invaded by cartoonists.

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

That wants it down. I could say "Elves" to him,

But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather

He said it for himself. I see him there

Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top

In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.

He moves in darkness as it seems to me,

Not of woods only and the shade of trees.

He will not go behind his father's saying,

And he likes having thought of it so well

He says again, "Good fences make good neighbours."

Now here's your moment of zen

(Feel free to disagree, if you feel you have better

standing on the topic than she does …)

Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.

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John Mara

As a New England boy I had always been told that stone walls were just a place to pile the stones which had to be moved so that the field could be plowed.
I see stone walls in the woods as a symbol of futility. Three hundred years ago people (and animals) worked to clear the woods and now the woods have taken the land back.
Perhaps, someday, the woods will reclaim the McMansions.

Mar 26,2016
Mike Peterson

Might be true for walls between fields owned by the same farmer, but property lines are defined by stone walls that snake through woods that nobody had any plans of ever plowing — and you’d be quite the fool to haul all that tonnage into the woods when you could simply dump it at the edge of whatever you wanted to plow. (The wall in that photo is in the middle of forest in Maine on the property of a logger who, at least when I took the pic, wasn’t even cutting anywhere nearby.)
A proper wall is quite a structure. This slide show is of a slightly more modern type, but, similarly, begins with a dug-out foundation. In the older days, the bottom layer was perhaps half again, but not quite twice, the width of the above-ground wall, which braced it in place. As with Frost’s wall near Derry, a few stones would fall out each year from frost heave or a bear wandering over or, as he notes, hunters tearing it down to flush a rabbit. But most of what you see out in the woods has been there since the Revolution or longer.
The McMansion builders just have to share what bits of history happen to loop past. They can always tack some dead corn to their front doors to show how authentickally New England they are.
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2011/07/07/garden/20110707-STONEWALL.html

Mar 26,2016

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CSotD: Literary illusions

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John Mara

Mike Peterson

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