Happy New Year! Tonight is my last night in Iowa. Tomorrow I wake up, drive to Des Moines, and catch a flight to Boston. I'm not sure if my break was as restful as I would have liked...but when you're a graduate student, who needs rest? Besides, I enjoyed a nice, long winter break (much longer than many of my friends received, though I suspect their summers will begin a lot sooner than mine). Anyway, here's a quick photo tour of Seth's Winter Break, 2006/07:

( Click to see many, many photos )

Winter break is over. The spring semester of 2007 is upon us. This could prove to be one of the most difficult semesters of my college career: I have three graduate English courses and one enormous Masters exam. When it's over, I will have a Masters of Arts degree and begin my work on a Doctorate of Philosophy.

As a great philosopher once said, "Do, or do not. There is no try."

Amen.

In conclusion to my break, here's a photo of my siblings in Iowa before the snow fell this winter:

As I said in the previous post, Nathaniel Hawthorne lived in Concord with his wife Sophia. He is also buried there, in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. His is the small tombstone at the bottom left:



Across from Hawthorne's grave is Thoreau's, marked by the large Thoreau family tombstone (Henry David's is one of the small ones beside it):



Concord is only a few miles from Walden Pond, where Thoreau lived and wrote Walden. Walden Pond is now a state park; near the entrance, you can see a replica of Thoreau's modest cabin and a statue of Thoreau pondering the transcendental mysteries of his hand:



From Thoreau's statue, you cross the highway to Walden Pond, which is probably better characterized as a small lake:



On the far side of Walden Pond, you cross a land bridge over a small (more truly pond-ish) inlet of water...



...to the site of Thoreau's cabin, marked by a sign, several cement posts indicating exactly where the cabin stood, and a pile of rocks. Each Thoreau devotee who visits the site brings an individual rock to add to the pile; I've never read Walden (I'm more of an Emerson man), so I didn't bring a rock:



The passage on the sign comes from Walden: "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life and see if I could not learn what it had to teach and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."

The cabin was long gone when they decided to turn Walden Pond into a tourist attraction. The cement posts were erected with the guidance of Louisa May Alcott, author of Little Women, who visited Thoreau at his cabin as a girl and indicated the site of his cabin based on her own recollection. Alcott is also buried at Sleepy Hollow:



Alcott spent her girlhood in Concord, and the house in which she grew up (where her Little Women adventures are based) still stands. If you watch the recent film version of Little Women (with Winona Ryder and Christian Bale), the house in that film is clearly based on Alcott's:



Those are all my photos from Concord, Massachusetts. Hopefully I'll be back in the spring or summer to catch stuff I missed (there's so much!) and also to get photos of Lexington.

"The world is young: the former great men call to us affectionately. We too must write Bibles, to unite again the heavens and the earthly world. The secret of genius is to suffer no fiction to exist for us; to realize all that we know; in the high refinement of modern life, in arts, in sciences, in books, in men, to exact good faith, reality and a purpose; and first, last, midst and without end, to honor every truth by use." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

The large tombstone in the center marks Ralph Waldo Emerson's grave, in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord, Massachusetts:



This photo was taken back in November. Somebody left him a pumpkin.

Emerson was born in this house...



...and later lived in this house, otherwise known as the Old Manse:



The Old Manse is quite a house. It was not only the home of Emerson, but also the first home of newlyweds Sophia and Nathaniel Hawthorne. As a wedding present, Henry David Thoreau gave them a garden in their front yard; there is still a garden in that site today. In their backyard, several decades earlier, the first battle of the American revolution was fought. The shot heard around the world was literally fired a few hundred feet from Hawthorne and Emerson's future home. The shot was fired from the north side of the Concord River, where now stands a monument (below) to the Minutemen who didn't (contrary to the contemporary appropriation of their name) fight to keep Mexicans out of the United States, but rather fought for the independence of the colonials and the right to establish a self-determined, democratic (for male property owners) government at the expense of Natives, exploited immigrants, and African slaves. With all that in mind, it still gave this white male quite a thrill to stand in the spot where it all started:




The Minuteman is holding a rifle and a plow, indicating that he is both a soldier and a farmer (as most were).

On the south side of the river stands an obelisk-shaped monument, marking the spot where British soldiers stood and fired on the colonials. I didn't get a chance to snap a photo of that monument (I'll likely visit Concord again next year), but I did catch a photo of the gravestone of the British soldiers, just a few feet away:



If you can't read that, it reads:

They came three thousand miles and died
To keep the past upon its throne
Unheard beyond the ocean tide
Their English mother made her moan
April 19, 1775

Very depressing.

Of course, the past wasn't exactly unthroned. The British Empire remained intact, a ready inheritance for its American progeny in the 20th century. But you forget all that when touring the historical sites of New England, and you remember that America - despite its many, grievous faults - was once a bastion of radical, revolutionary, anti-authoritarian idealism.

I'll share some more Concord photos later, and hopefully catch some Lexington photos next year.

Yes, I have friends in Boston. ( Click here to see some photos of them )

As many of you know, I'm back in Iowa. My papers are finished (or at least turned in), my semester is over, and my plane touched down on Saturday.

Flying out of Logan over Boston was awesome. There are few things I hate more than sitting on a plane and moving, then stopping, then moving, then stopping, and anticipating the take-off while nothing whatsoever seems to be happening. This seemed worse than usual Saturday morning (exacerbated by the small child screaming and crying in the seat behind me); I was in a very grumpy mood until we finally took off and I looked out my window to see Boston stretched out beneath me. It looked virtually identical to the numerous maps I've relied on over the past four months...the shoreline, the bridges, the streets, everything. It was so weird to know exactly what a city looks like from the air without actually having seen it from the air...and then seeing it from the air, realizing that you already know what it looks like but also realizing that this is the real thing. Very cool.

I switched planes in Detroit. Those of you who follow my other journal (sethfstuder) may have heard the voice post I left from Detroit, which I phoned in while eating lunch and waiting for my delayed flight to Des Moines. One inconsequential detail I didn't mention in that post: there was an unusually large number of attractive girls in the Detroit airport. Probably cute Midwestern girls returning home from colleges throughout the east.

I finally landed in Des Moines around 3:30 p.m. CST. Looking around, I realized something I hadn't before: Iowa is really flat!

Today, during a trip to Cedar Rapids with my family, I developed my most recent rolls of film. All the stress and chaos of school in the last month had prevented me from getting film developed, though it didn't prevent me from taking pictures. I'll be sharing those over the next few days (or weeks, or whatever). I may also be seeing some of you in the next couple weeks, whether over Christmas or New Year's!

In the meantime, here is a photo of the sun setting over New Hampshire on Thanksgiving:

So there's this band called Augustana. Mainstream, Counting Crows-type of band (twelve or so years too late to be interesting even by Top 40 standards). They're sort of like the Fray, except that I actually enjoy Fray songs. Yes, I enjoy Fray songs. I'm not even sure if I'm supposed to call them "Fray songs" or "songs by the Fray," but whatever they are, I like them.

But Augustana isn't the Fray. They're some new band out of California (I think) that has a song called "Boston." Kelly Anne posted about it on my MySpace a couple months ago, and I had no idea what she was talking about at the time. But here I am, at 4 a.m., watching VH1 while trying to disinfect my computer (agh a virus!) so I can finish my first paper, and I see the video for this "Boston" song.

The song is apparently about this girl from California who apparently goes through a break-up or something horrible, and she wants to leave and get away from everything, start over, yadda yadda yadda. She wants to go "where no one knows my name." Which means Boston, I guess. Though there's a bar in Boston called Cheers where everyone knows your name. She should avoid that. (I suppose that's what they're referencing...I hope.)

Anyway, here are the lyrics of the chorus, which I found particularly funny: "I think I'll go to Boston, I think I'll start a new life/ I think I'll start it over, where no one knows my name./ I'll get out of California, I'm tired of the weather/ I think I'll get a lover and fly 'em out to Spain./ I think I'll go to Boston. I think that I'm just tired./ I think I need a new town, to leave this all behind./ I think I need a sunrise, I'm tired of sunset,/ I hear it's nice in the summer, some snow would be nice, oh yeah."

Okay. So this girl must be the first person in the history of California to say, "I'll get out of California, I'm tired of the weather." Because California has the best weather on the planet. Sure, there are people from outside California who hate California weather. They're called masochists. They come from the Pacific Northwest or the Midwest or New England or the South, and they've grown accustomed to the god-awful weather in those regions. Of course, normal people from those regions naturally love California weather, which is beautiful all the time. And people from California are characterized for their total inability to deal with weather outside California, even if they occasionally complain about not having "a change of seasons."

If you're tired of the weather in California, guess what - your options for "better weather" anywhere on this planet are severely limited.

And to abandon California weather for Boston weather? You've got to be kidding me. Not dry heat in the Southwest? Not gentle drizzle in the Northwest? Not the tropical warmth of southern Florida or the mountain air of Montana? You want Boston weather? Humid summers and cold, blizzard-laden winters? All combined into a nice, wet, smelly, east coast city slush?

There is only one group of people who would consider Boston weather an improvement: Midwesterners. And only because Boston weather is identical to Midwest weather, with slightly less heat in the summer, less cold in the winter, and no tornadoes. I can only explain this girl's statement by way of another Californian characteristic: ignorance about the rest of the nation and its crappy weather. I guess she wants snow, or so she says. And Boston certainly gets snow. But somebody should tell her they also get snow on certain mountains in northern California. As she may not realize, snow is much more fun when you can control your exposure to it.

She is certainly right that Boston has a sunrise. Granted, so does California. But the sun rises over the ocean in Boston (see, he sun sets over the ocean in California), so my guess is she's referring to that uniquely east coast phenomenon. If you ask me, sunsets over the ocean are better than sunrises over the ocean. Though I have enjoyed watching the sun rise over the ocean. I guess if you've had one all your life, you might be eager to see the other.

So that's the Augustana "Boston" song. Thanks, but no thanks. I'll continue listening to the Dropkick Murphys' "Shipping Up to Boston" when I want a Boston tune.

Anyway. VH1 is still on. John Mayer is "waiting on the world to change." Okay dude.

Well, this is my first Thanksgiving in New England. To celebrate, I traveled away from all the historic Thanksgiving locations in Massachusetts and headed north into New Hampshire, where I am spending the holiday with some of my extended family. So I'm writing this from the Live Free or Die state, and looking forward to a nice Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow. When I get back to the Boston area this weekend, I plan to develop a roll of film featuring photos of historical and literary sites in Concord, Massachusetts...home of nearly every American writer ever (excluding all those creepy Southern ones).

Happy Thanksgiving!

This is a view of the Planetarium, which is adjacent to the Boston Museum of Science and overlooks the Charles River, with the Zakim Bunker Hill Bridge is the background.

Here are a couple views of Boston from the Charles River:




Turning around, here is the opposite view: Cambridge, and the bridge that connects the Red Line in Cambridge and Somerville to Boston, which is how I get into the city...

A few more photos from the Tufts Campus. First, Goddard Chapel, looking kind of crooked:



( Click here for more photos )