by Lisa Greenhouse, Librarian

In 1987, science writer Tom Horton quit his job with the Baltimore Sun and moved with his wife and children to Tylerton, one of three small towns on Smith Island in the Chesapeake, Maryland’s only inhabited Bay island.  Horton spent two years in Tylerton, working as an environmental educator with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation.  Horton’s book, An Island Out of Time: A Memoir of Smith Island in the Chesapeake (W.W. Norton & Co., 1996), is part memoir, part oral history, part ethnography, and part elegy. 

The book’s title is doubly suggestive.  It captures the sense that Smith Island is an island out of time, a time capsule where some 17^th Century folkways and speech patterns persist.  Yet the book’s title also conveys a sense of impending loss.  With multiple environmental pressures bearing down on them — overfishing, climate change, pollution — Smith Islanders don’t have much time left.  They are almost out of time.  In 1994, the population of Tylerton was 90, a 41% decline from 1980.  Currently around 50 people live in Tylerton.  During Horton’s stay, the young people were leaving, going to college or taking jobs at the mainland prison, opting out of the waterman’s trade that had been handed down for centuries.

Horton sends tapes of Smith Island speech to a British linguist and determines that the speech patterns of the Islanders are very similar to those of nineteenth century Devon in southwestern England.  Some have claimed that the Island speech patterns are Elizabethan, but the linguist tells Horton that it is not really known how ordinary people spoke in Elizabethan times.  The nineteenth century Devon speech patterns were, however, at least three centuries old.

However far back the speech patterns and folkways of Smith Islanders can be traced, Horton paints a picture of an eccentric people.  Most Smith Islanders are highly religious, steeped in a traditional form of Methodism, which has much more in common with contemporary evangelicalism than with today’s Methodist Church.  At the same time, the conversation of Smith Islanders, both men and women, is peppered with bawdy sexual references, enough to make even a cosmopolitan mainlander blush (once their meaning is understood, that is).  One Smith Islander, for example, refers to her daughter as Boss Tippet (see page 106 for a translation).

Horton paints Smith Islanders as what he terms “Christian outlaws.”  They have lived off the bounty of the Island for so long that encounters with various environmental police forces have not always been amicable.  Who are the Game and Wildlife Police to tell them they can’t shoot or trap the waterfowl that they have been harvesting for centuries?  

Islanders still talk about an incident in which a young Smith Islander was shot and killed by a Virginia fisheries patrolman as if it occurred yesterday.  Horton is surprised when he finds out the shooting occurred around 1900.  In a part of Maryland where the sea and the land blend indistinctly, borders are not an easy concept to grasp, and the border between the grassy, shallow waters of Maryland and Virginia, abundant with blue crabs, was once fraught with conflict. 

The state regulatory apparatus impinged more and more on the traditional way of life of the Smith Islanders as the twentieth century wound down.  While soft crabs were the main source of income on Smith Island, wives of the Island watermen had for many years supplemented their incomes by picking hard crabs in their homes.  In the early 1990s, Maryland made it clear that it would no longer tolerate crab picking as a cottage industry and that if the picking was to continue, it would have to be in a modern facility with state of the art hygiene and food safety features.  

Next, Somerset County, approached the Islanders about installing a modern water treatment plant.  All of this regulation seemed unnecessary to the Islanders who had been drinking water directly from the well and picking crabmeat at home for many a year seemingly without problems.  The environmental regulation seemed unfair as well.  The Islanders saw themselves as a critical part of the Chesapeake ecology.  Their harvesting of nature’s bounty, whether it be hunting for waterfowl, fishing, crab scraping, or oyster dredging, seemed to them essential to the health of the ecosystem.  They couldn’t quite explain exactly how this was true.  Yet they seemed to accept it as an article of faith as true as the ones brought to the Island by Joshua Thomas, the Methodist preacher who converted the Chesapeake Bay islands in the early nineteenth century.

The Maryland Department has many books about Smith Island.  From Amazing Grace: Smith Island and the Chesapeake Watermen by Bernard Wolf (Macmillan, 1986) to Workboats of Smith Island by Paula J. Johnson (JHU Press, 1987), the Maryland Department’s Collection is a great way to learn about Smith Island before you take the ferry over. 

by Tom Warner, Best & Next Department

When Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016, it cemented his legacy not only as a celebrated rock & roll lyricist but as a legitimate poet, period. Lauded for having created “new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition,” Dylan’s achievement no doubt inspired many other pop musicians who aspired to have their words taken just as seriously as their music. One of those bands is Fontaines D.C., who hail from across the pond in Ireland, “the land of poets and legends, of dreamers and rebels,” as author Nora Roberts famously described the Emerald Isle. “All of these have music woven through and around them. Tunes for dancing and for weeping, for battle or for love.”

Roberts’ description aptly describes Fontaines D.C., so if post-punk pop from the land of poetry and legend appeals to you, you’re in luck because you can use your library card to stream or download (mobile device only) both of Fontaines D.C.’s albums to-date, Dogrel (2019) and A Hero’s Death (2020), through Hoopla!

Fontaines D.C. are a young post-punk band from Dublin (the D.C. is for Dublin City, a suffix the group added to their name when it turned out there was a band from Los Angeles also named The Fontaines) that formed in 2017 while the lads were attending music college at the British and Irish Modern Music Institute (BIMMI). Taking their name from a fictional character portrayed by Al Martino in the movie The Godfather (Vito Corleone’s godson, the Sinatra-styled singer “Johnny Fontaine”), the musicians – singer Grian Chatten, guitarists Carlos O’Connell and Conor Curley, bassist Conor Deegan III and drummer Tom Coll – first bonded over a shared love of poetry. In fact, they collectively released two collections of poetry – Vroom (inspired by American Beat poets) and Wingding (inspired by Irish poets) – before recording their critically acclaimed debut album, Dogrel in 2019.

The title of the band’s debut is a self-deprecating homage to “Doggerel,” the working-class “poetry of the people” popularized by so-called “bad” poets like William McGonagall and later by the playful light verse of Baltimore’s own Ogden Nash that made a virtue of the trivial. Dogrel was released to critical acclaim in April 2019: it was voted Album of the Year by record label Rough Trade and BBC Radio 6 Music, and was nominated for both the Mercury Prize and the Choice Music Prize. “Shouty post-punk bands are making a surprise comeback in 2019,” hailed The Irish Times, crediting “this brutal but articulate Irish bunch” with capturing “the feeling of living in Dublin as it balances historical weight with financial upheaval.” The opening rant “Big” sets the template for the band’s sound – equal parts Mark E. Smith and The Fall vitriol, pounding beats and driving Gang of Four guitars – with lyrics reflecting the group’s upbringing in Dublin’s historically working-class southwest neighborhood, “The Liberties”: “Dublin in the rain is mine, a pregnant city with a Catholic mind”. “Chequeless Reckless” and “Liberty Belle” continue the overcast mood, but sunny pop shines through to save the day on tunes like the Smiths-friendly “Television Screen” and the album’s best song, the breakthrough single “Boys In the Better Land,” a tour-de-force of melodic pop and verbal assault that even gives a shout-out to a famous Dubliner muse: “The radio is all about a runway model, with a face like sin and a heart like a James Joyce novel.” But be forewarned: singer Grian Chatte’s brogue is as thick and heavy as a bowl of split-pea soup and at times as hard to decipher as a James Joyce novel!Intrigued? Then give a listen to “Boys in the Better Land” (YouTube)

The band’s second studio album, A Hero’s Death, was written and recorded in the midst of extensive touring for their debut, and was only released last month – yet here it is on Hoopla already (hooray!). Despite titles such as “Sunny,” “Oh Such a Spring,” and “Love Is the Thing,” the mood is mostly brooding and reserved, as if the band didn’t want to be pigeon-holed by the blunt punk format of their initial offering. In fact, Grian Chatten went so far as to call the songs “a dismissal of expectations.” Thus, the quietly hypnotic “You Said” – sounding like a slow-tempo Smiths song, with Grian Chatten playing Morrissey to a beautiful, lilting guitar solo lifted from Johnny Marr’s playbook – gives way to “Living In America,” wherein Chatten channels the spirit of Ian Curtis in a Joy Division dirge. Clearly, this a sophomore effort that shows growth and maturity, trading the driving punk assault of their debut for what one critic called “a series of existential mantras set to broody post-punk anthems.” So feel free to dismiss your expectations but don’t dismiss Fontaines D.C. just yet; you may find yourself embracing some unpredictably exciting new sounds worth exploring.The debut single from the album is the titular “A Hero’s Death.” To watch the official video, starring Aiden Gillen (“Littlefinger” on HBO’s Game of Thrones), click here.

Trick or Treat. Give me something good to read!

The chill of the autumn is here and that means Halloween is right around the corner. Get in the mood to celebrate with mysteries and thrillers in Overdrive’s Lucky Day collection. Don’t forget, the Lucky Day collection offers many bestselling eBooks and eAudiobooks that are available to download with no holds and no renewals.

by Sara Wecht, Librarian

Dear Martin was the 2019 selection for One Book Baltimore. Nic Stone recently came out with the sequel called Dear Justyce.

Dear Martin‘s main character is Justyce, a teenage boy who struggles to comprehend and cope with racism. 

Trying to help his ex-girlfriend, he gets thrown to the ground and handcuffed. Despite her and her parents’ testimonies, he remains handcuffed for hours. Even though he is released, he is traumatized by the event. He attempts to bring himself some peace by writing letters to the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Kids at school discuss racism and this leads to debates similar to those happening currently in our own society. “That ONE black person did it, why can’t you?” “I’m colorblind. Skin color doesn’t matter.” 

One day, he aimlessly rides around with his best friend, Manny, when they get yelled at by someone in another car because of their music. They don’t listen and then they both suddenly get shot. The gentleman was an unidentifiable cop who did not announce himself as such and had no reason for his distress and actions. Justyce is injured but okay. Manny dies.

The politics and media are a nightmare for Justyce. His trauma envelopes him, even as he sporadically writes letters to Martin, asking what he would do. 

This book is about love, family, friendship, loss, trauma, and racism. Justyce dates a white girl who debates with racist classmates. His mom doesn’t approve. His best friend has other, white, friends who only see him as rich, not black. There’s a scene where the group of boys, Justyce, Manny, and Manny’s three white friends, dress up as stereotypes for Halloween. One of them dressed as a KKK member. This caused them a world of problems. A fight breaks out.

Throughout the book are small instances where race is a factor where people might not expect in real life. My takeaway is about the connection between racism and trauma. The two circle each other to the point that it cripples that person’s life. We see that somewhat with Justyce, but there’s hope for him at the end- he’s happy with his girlfriend and  he’s about to attend an Ivy League college. This is a subtle reflection of racism too- that he needs to “become white” in order to be happy- to get a girlfriend and go to a prestigious school. 

However, at the very end he becomes friends with the guy who was previously racist (but didn’t realize it) which implies that it is possible for people to change and for different races to get along after turmoil.  

This is a powerful book that’s about a topic that pervades our society today. This book may be fictional, but these experiences and emotions happen daily. Although this book may be difficult to read during certain parts, it’s one everyone should pick up.

Below are more books by Nic Stone that you may also be interested in including the sequel Dear Justyce.

By: Vianey Becerra, Social Media Manager

Do you speak Spanish? So do we!

This Hispanic Heritage Month, equal access to important resources and information for the Latinx community in Baltimore was a main priority. That’s why we created the new Pratt en Español Facebook group. Here you’ll find information on Pratt programming, services, books and more, completely translated in Spanish. Our weekly live program, Más Allá de los Libros, provides the most recent updates from the Pratt Library and hosts partner organizations to share local community resources. 

Scroll down to view some of our past posts on the Pratt en Español Facebook group.

To join our Pratt en Espanol Facebook group, visit our main Facebook page: @theprattlibrary. 

And don’t forget to set a reminder for Mas Alla de los Libros every Wednesday at noon EST.

¡Hasta luego!