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Everyone needs a change of scenery now and again, and unlike Mark, I don’t have a second home in an idyllic Irish village. So, needing a few days of quiet and separation, I booked three nights at the Hotel on North in Pittsfield, Massachusetts.

Pittsfield is the largest city in Berkshire County, Massachusetts. The area is known mostly for twee villages, upscale resorts, “cottages” built by the Gilded Age elite, and now, horribly overpriced liberal arts colleges and the fine arts accoutrements they bring with them to justify the tuition they charge their upper middle class (actually no, upper class and desperately aspirational upper middle class) families to get their degrees from Williams and Amhearst and Bard. But Pittsfield: no, it’s just Pittsfield. It is not Massachusetts, and they know it.

The ex-wife was born in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, and we used to take a drive through its downtown whenever we visited where her parents then lived, Monroeville, and it was sort of like going from a gated community to the netherworld, getting worse as our marriage went along. In the late nineties, it was just a trip from suburbia to a crappy milltown; by the time we were getting close to splitting up, oxycontin was in full swing, and leaving Monroeville and doing the swing through McKeesport was negative poetry: we should have picked up Virgil somewhere on Route 130 to be our guide through perdition. The buildings kept getting more decrepit, even as the traffic stayed constant through downtown, and with the mills closed down, you had to imagine what the people walking across the street, sometimes sullen, sometimes friendly, were marching towards.

Pittsfield had that McKeesport feel to it, and it wasn’t bad, don’t get me wrong. McKeesport today, I’m sure, is both struggling with East Coast bluesville opioid devastation, and also doing its best to attract the kind of middle class aspirational folks that have abandoned Manhattan and Brooklyn because of high rents. The midsized mill towns of New York, Connecticut, Pennsylvania and the like are all in their way renormalizing around the tertiary economy. Come here: the pot is legal, the upper floor loft space is cheap, your parents and grandparents and their disposable income is close enough to buy your bad artwork and probably very high quality foodstuffs. Come back, says McKeesport and Scranton. And post pandemic, the creatives come, out of the laziness that develops from trying to compete too long on the Lower East Side and the New Brooklyn. All good.

I went to Pittsfield because I had to do about 20 hours of online continuing education requirement for my odd gig economy job as senior employee of a mortgage servicing company. The absurdity of the entire situation every now and again give me pause, literally: I have to sit and breathe deeply, marvel at how a decent portion of my living wages are supported by a set of tasks which, if explained to an alien, would make no sense, to the point where I’d rather my job to be something like a civil engineer specializing in sewage systems. At least the value proposition would be obvious: at least the aliens would see clearly what I do to be of real, actual value. As it is, I’m particularly good at estimating the rate at which home owners will pay off their mortgages, and how that will affect the timing of certain cash flows which banks and investors like to trade. I’m good at other stuff too, but for the time being, not many people care about those other things. And the people who want to value the timing of mortgage payments are happy to give me quite a bit of money to tell them what I think.

Also I have some required licenses, which make my thoughts on the timing and value of said mortgage cash flows more valuable for the people I work for because I enable them to buy said cash flows in a highly regulated environment which requires people to be licensed. But I have to keep my licenses every year. And yes, this is rambling, because this was a week where I spent roughly 30 hours completing my annual compliance training, 20 hours of endless recorded redundancy which stretched into 30 hours of actual physical space-time consumed watching online train videos and answering meaningless quizzes designed to ensure I hadn’t simply set up a Linux bot to do this for me, and I wanted a place which was effectively a blank spot so I could conduct what was an effectively blank task in a blank spot.

But the problem is, no real place is blank. I should have gone to Dubai and stayed in a hotel suite, but because I have a dog, I had to go to a place which was dog friendly, and I made a bet that Pittsfield would be it. But it’s not. Pittsfleld is a real place, and the more I walked the dog around thd downtown for morning and late night walks, and found parks and places for the midday long walk, I realized more and more that Pittsfield is a real place. Not like Manhattan, or the West End of London (or alas, much of Shoreditch), but a real place. Don’t get me wrong, Pittsfield is a shitty place – it’s used up, GE having sold out to SUBIC which relocated its real staff to Houston; the General Dynamics plant being a hollow shell; the downtown being just where the county has decided to relocate its abandoned senior and drug addict population where they can be close to diabetes and overdose clinics – yeah, a shitty place, but it’s a place. It’s not globalized, it’s not Disney-fied: it’s its own place, no question about it.

And therefore, it’s not Massachusetts. Massachusetts has loud mouthed Red Sox fans, and bad traffic, three deckers close in to one another but set off the broad boulevards where you find bagels, and bad coffee, and pet grooming, and off-puttingly liberal bookstores. You can find that in Berkshire County, but not in Pittsfield, its largest city. There, you can find a mile long, 100 foot tall manufacturing building that is lying fallow because no one wants to manufacture electric turbines in western Massachusetts anymore (begging the question why anyone wanted to do there, ever, of course… but therein lies the point[:

(I’m going to invent a punctuation form here: [: is the way to break out of a parenthetical comment without having to go through the effort of closing out the nested thoughts explicitly}

Traveling through old New England, you’ll find ancient mills, built of brick or sometimes granite, which are limited in size and scope by the building materials available in the early 1800s, and therefore readily reusable by the mid twenty-first century economy of creatives and financials and crafts. But the mid-Atlantic – the endless shapes of mid 20th century industrial Connecticut and New York (think Rochester, not Brooklyn) and Pennsylvania and Ohio, extending in massive industrial blight from there – the mid-Atlantic isn’t friendly brick and granite: it’s massive steel framing, the kind of metal buildings which grew dark and black from absorbing the acid emissions from too-small smokestacks. These blackscapes are surrouded by paved parking lots and after-thought rail spur lines, the towns around them marked by too much parking, too many lots which used to be poorly thought out diners and used car lots and half-assed stores selling vinyl siding and bad furniture and Thom McCan shoes.

That’s Pittsfield. And oddly, it’s trying, desperately, to emerge from that mire, and become a decent town. It doesn’t have an overpriced liberal arts college; it’s off the Mass Pike by a good 15 miles; it has an oxycontin problem. It has nothing going for it, but it’s trying. It’s not relying on nostalgia from now-middle-aged undergraduates, and it seems to recognize that the nostalgia of its old milltown townies is a losing game.

But it has a couple of good bars, one run by a lesbian couple and another run by just a bog standard bearded Gen Y type. It has a lot of social services downtown which are desperately needed even as they aren’t an encouraging landscape for future tourism or service economy storefronts. It is, thankfully, not Concord, or Lexington, or god forbid Newton. It’s not Massachusetts.

I stayed there for four days, three nights, had great Korean food and a surprisingly good Neopolitan style pizza, hiked the circumference of an abandoned regional mall with the dog (who enjoyed it), passed seven states’ worth of continuing mortgage education requirements, chatted with a number of kidney dialysis patients waiting for treatment on a lovely afternoon, riffed with a nice bartender and tried (but failed) to create a good rye-based yet fruity cocktail, and left my car unlocked and no one broke into it.

It was not Massachusetts. I loved it.

When I was in my mid-teens, I watched a tv programme that presented a humorous view of suburban Britain, set around twenty-five years into the future. Two-and-half decades forward is an interesting time to speculate about, being close enough for most things to be roughly similar, but far enough ahead for some things to have changed significantly.  I recall that in the tv show there were some jokes about the improved taste of instant food and the widespread use of robot teachers at school, but neither of the two young people who were the focus of the programme had a mobile phone, which is perhaps the most visible lifestyle change that – in fact – occurred between the years when I was fifteen and forty.

One scene that has stayed with me, was a shot of the two teenagers walking down a street that was littered with rubbish, the sky busy with helicopters from which bundles of coloured papers were being thrown to the people below.  It was a time when bulk mail, as it was then called, had just started: in addition to letters, magazines, and the like, that were personally addressed to my parents – and, very occasionally, letters addressed to me – we would receive impersonal advertising material through our letterbox, usually promoting products for sale at a local store or supermarket.  These were delivered to every house in the street, sometimes with the mail and sometimes separately, as part of a blanket advertising campaign.  The tv show had imagined a vast increase in impersonal adverts, thrown directly into the streets from marketing vehicles in the air.  The idea seemed ludicrous, but at the same time a little worrying: surely, we would never allow bulk mail drops on this scale, creating vast amounts of unread and unwanted street litter.

Continue reading “Junk mail”

Driving around the countryside of Co Donegal, occasionally I will pass a temporary sign that says, Wake in Progress.  The quiet, winding lanes will be full of parked cars and vans, as the local community come to pay their respects at the former home of the departed.  The tradition of holding a wake – the time between death and burial, when friends and relatives sit and wait beside the corpse of the deceased, a period of reflection, a remembrance but also a celebration – has declined across much of Western Europe but remains commonplace in Ireland.  I imagine that today most wakes are decorous, but that has not always been the case.  There is a famous Irish song from the mid-nineteenth century about Tim Finnegan, who fell off a ladder when drunk, breaking his skull.  During the wake held at his house, an argument broke out, which turned into a fight, during which a bottle of whiskey was thrown, broke and spilled over his prostrate body, at which point he sprang back to life, saying: Thunderin’ blazes! You think I’m dead?   Excess whiskey was the cause of Tim’s apparent death and so too his return to life.

This paradox was, no doubt, why the song lyric appealed to James Joyce, who borrowed the revenant’s name for his final masterpiece: Finnegans Wake.  In this book, for some time known as Work in Progress, which takes the form of an extended series of philosophical reflections blended with multiple digressions, wordplay and jokes, there is repeated suggestion that what begins must end and what ends must begin again, that what rises will fall and that what falls will rise again, and that all of life is repetition and recycling.  Joyce spoke several languages and enjoyed inventing words that were combinations of elements from different tongues.  The name Finnegan can be decomposed into fin, the French for end, and egan a homonym for again in English: Finnegans means, therefore, to end again and again.  The word Wake might suggest the noun that means the ceremony of remembrance for the dead, or it might suggest the command that means wake up!  His title, therefore, combines ideas of both death and life.  These themes of circularity and continuity are emphasised throughout the text of the book, which starts and ends mid-sentence – the same sentence, Joyce claimed – and which is promiscuous with grammar as well as language, spelling, and narrative structure.  

Continue reading “Awake”

We were twelve in number – six executives and six non-executives – and we had spent the last five hours in a spacious conference room in Vauxhall, on a hot and humid June afternoon, discussing aspects of the company’s strategy for the next three years.  As the meeting came to an end, and the prospect of dinner together at a nearby Eritrean restaurant came into view, as Chair of the meeting, I brought the formal proceedings to a close.  “Let’s take a few minutes”, I said, “before we leave for our meal, to decompose”.   My words provoked some amusement among my colleagues: “Do you mean decompress?”  “Do you want us to turn to compost?”  On the contrary, I had meant exactly what I had said.  At the start of a Board meeting, each attendee should compose themselves, making ready to come together as a group to do the difficult work of governance; at the end of the meeting, each should feel free to decompose, to return to their constituent self, and allow time for individual relaxation and rest. 

“What do you do at Board meetings,” one of my friends asked me recently, “apart from eating sandwiches?”  In the boardroom, as elsewhere, there is no such thing as a free lunch.  Governance is a specialised form of work, and to do it well takes lengthy preparation time, high levels of concentration, the employment of good listening and discursive skills, and the ability and willingness to develop collective recommendations in a constructive and collegiate manner.  This is not easy work and should be undertaken with the serious and responsible mindset that the task demands.  The Board is ultimately responsible – legally and morally – for the oversight of the company, the effective deployment of the resources at its disposal, and for securing the interests of various groups of stakeholders, including investors, staff, customers, suppliers, and the wider community.  Good Board meetings require all participants to come to the table primed and prepared to do this work. 

Continue reading “Decomposed”

As I have grown older, I notice that I am reading more biographies.  I do not wholly understand why this is so.  In some recent cases, for example a biography of Goethe, it is because I am now more familiar with his prodigious literary output and his influence on his contemporaries than when I was younger, and therefore am now better able to understand his importance.  In other cases, for example a biography of Charles V, it is because the years when he was the Habsburg emperor encompassed several historical events about which I already knew a little and with which he was centrally involved – the German Reformation, Henry of England’s divorce, the Spanish invasion of Central America, the growth of Turkish power in the Eastern Mediterranean.  In the case of Goethe, reading about the life helps make sense of the work, in the case of Charles, knowing about the combination of momentous events helps make sense of his life. 

There is perhaps another reason, which has to do with the widespread human predisposition to tell stories as a means of explanation.  I am a little suspicious of arguments based primarily on narrative examples, as if hard facts were not relevant to the process of persuasion.  Contrariwise, I recognise the value of stories in bringing the facts, once established, to life.  The plural of anecdote is not data, but evidence in aggregate does not move us in the same was as narrated particularities do.  To understand the world in the fullest sense we need numbers and words, graphs and pictures, and data and stories.  Biographies are ideal vehicles for story telling because they are framed around the familiar human pattern of birth, life, and death.  As I have become older, the importance of this frame has become more intelligible, hence biographies more interesting.

Continue reading “Three lives”