Damozel: The Rumcove Papers

Fri, 04 Aug 2006 10:28:21 GMT

I am relocating my blog to the following address:

http://theflatlandalmanack.typepad.com/ (THE FLATLAND ALMANACK)

I will continue to maintain this site and everything posted here but will do all my further posting there!

Do stop by for a visit!

Estuary Englishman

Wed, 05 Jul 2006 22:48:45 GMT

Hi! I've changed addresses. To jump to the updated version of this posting, click on this link.

Estuary Englishman

For Rumcove's amendment, click here.

1. The Estuary Beat

As I have mentioned elsewhere, Mr. Rumcove and I met over the internet in 1997. We didn't talk on the phone till after we'd been exchanging daily emails for a few months. When we did speak, I was totally unprepared for the trouble I had understanding him. "I have an estuary accent," he'd said in an email. As he is very interested in accents, he went on to explain some of the characteristics of estuary English: the glottal stops, the use of "w" in place of "r" for some words and "f" in place of "th" (e.g., "Orwite" = "All right"), and a highly arbitrary tendency to drop H's. [For details, see the delightful Gary's Estuary Homepage by another native speaker].

He DIDN'T explain, because I imagine he and other English people don't notice, that another characteristic is talking at high speed and often lowering rather than raising the voice for emphasis. Though maybe that is just Mr R.

At any rate, one of the first things I had to do when I met Mr. Rumcove is learn to understand his accent. As it turns out, my training has been very useful to me; I don't think I'd have been able to make much of quite a lot of English comedy if I hadn't spent quite a lot of hours listening to his high-speed mumbling over the telephone lines.

2. Which is better: 'Street' or 'Right'?

But I don't mean to denigrate his accent. I really like it. I'd say it's my favorite British accent. It's also an accent that seems to turn up with increasing frequency on BBC America and in British films and so forth. According to this page at the Department of Phonetics at UCL ("London's Global University"), the Rumcove accent is presently quite trendy though still considered infra dig by those from England's upper echelons.

Young English people prefer the estuary sound to the "received pronunciation" or "ruling class" accent of Oxford, the royal family, and people such as, for example, my husband Nick and his family. Young English people (including my stepdaughter Emma) would rather sound 'street' than refined (or as Nick puts it, "correct"). [He keeps quiet about her accent most of the time with the odd occasional outburst over a glottal stop. "Could you pass me that bottle (BAH-al), Dad?" she said the last time she was visiting. "BOT-TLE!" Nick shouted wildly. "BOTT-ULL!]

I'm with Emma. I do really appreciate the way Nick talks and am quite happy to be married to someone who sounds like that, since I have a milltown Carolina accent I have failed to outlive. (I grew up in a place where "All right" is pronounced "Ah ite.") It helps that Nick has a British public school accent. When people meet us together, they assume that I can't be as Republican as I sound.

But while recognizing the posh effect of a public school accent and some of the social benefits, I personally like the sound of estuary English or cockney best (which is similar but different, as explained here). Maybe it's because so many of my favorite English TV characters have that accent or reconstructed versions of it. Or maybe, given my own accent, I have built up a certain amount of resistance to the notion that there is a particular pronunciation that is more correct, better, more educated, more refined, etc. After all, if Nick's way of talking is the right way of pronouncing English, where does that leave me and mine?

Also I am just plain interested in accents. As kids growing up in South Carolina (the no account northern part called 'the up country') we used to make cruel fun of my mom's low country brogue, but I was secretly intrigued by and deeply attracted to the very different sounds produced by people from the Low Country: "air" for 'ear," "bear" for "beer," "steeyet" for "state," "winda" for "window," and "hoese" or "hoose" for house. I wanted to talk that way too, even though we used to mock it (ironic since her accent is considered the more refined).

Nick, originally from London, can do a very credible cockney accent. He has learned that when he puts on a cockney accent much younger women (who are otherwise inclined to treat him with respectful deference) suddenly become giggly and flirtatious.

When I mentioned this to Rumcove, he remarked sadly that HE hadn't noticed anything of the kind when he was visiting here, but I think he probably failed to factor in his tendency to glower at strangers, or at best to stare at them expressionlessly, including young and pretty women. That's an English thing, or maybe just an English-tourist-in-America thing.

To me, a characteristic of both estuary and cockney is, as noted above, a tendency to mumble words and to talk at top speed. There's a sort of ACK-ACK-ACK gunfire effect: words just keep coming at you. When Rumcove and I first started talking on the phone, he had to slow down to a crawl for me to understand him at all and there are still times when---as Alan Partridge said to his Geordie mate---it's just a noise.

The emphasis also turns up in funny places (at least to an American) ear. "This...is...RUMcove," my answering machine announces slowly. Then: "IjustGOTyourremailcouldyouGIVEmeacallBACKpleaseIwasWONDERINGwhetheryoudseenmumblemeumblemumble. I'lltalktoyoulaterbye."

But though I am frequently puzzled by the noises Rumcove produces, I always like listening to them.

3. Deadpan all the Time

I'd maintain that much of the appeal of estuary English is in its intonation and cadence.

quote from the Estuary English page begins]

There also appears to be a narrower pitch of intonation patterns in Estuary English than in RP. This is especially true where rises do not reach as high a pitch as they would in R[eceived] P[ronunciation], Rosewarne sees the overall effect as being interpreted as one of "deliberateness" and possibly an "apparent lack of enthusiasm." (Rosewarne 1994)

[quote from the Estuary English page ends]

I know what the person who wrote this means, but I'd characterize it a little differently. Whether or not the speaker is enthusiastic, depressed, elated, grief-stricken, bored, furious, or out of his (or her) head, an estuary accent sounds pretty much the same. It's got an in-your-face wryness. It sounds the way deadpan looks.

I once attended an event where a guy---not Rumcove---was doing a presentation concerning a certain aspect of, let's say, English literature. The guy in question had a faint cockney (RUMCOVE: They're completely DIFFERENT and you KNOW it") accent that his Oxbridge education had suppressed; but his cockney intonation was still very firmly in place. I attended the event with a guy I was dating who was a British comedy fanatic. Throughout this whole PERFECTLY DAMN SERIOUS presentation, he laughed and laughed.

"This poem elaborates on the same theme of frustration and impotence. Though generally considered greatly inferior to its predecessor, it uses a similar---though not identical---metre and rhyme scheme. The poet even employs the same overwrought imagery."

My friend: "HAHAHA"

"Though it is not generally known, the [first poem], universally considered one of the great poems of the English language, was written almost five years after [the second]. In 1895, [Prominent Critic], seemingly unaware that [second poem] had actually antedated [the first], remarked that "[second poem] is but a feeble emulation of [first poem], to which it stands in the same relation as a leaking tap to Niagara."

My friend: "HAHAHAHAHA"

"[Literary Maven] in 1901 summed up the general critical opinion of [second poem] thus: "Fevered or febrile--- yet feeble."

My friend: "HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!"

"Given the similarity of the two poems, we can only ask ourselves: Why? Why is one work considered to be a great poetic achievement and the other a watered-down imitation?"

My friend: "HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA"

This went on the whole time. All around us, other people---people who (as was quite possible in those days) had never heard of Monty Python---were looking puzzled and also worried. The circumstances were such that everyone wanted the presenter to feel welcomed and appreciated. They assumed that my friend was laughing because the presenter was trying to be funny. And though they didn't see the humor themselves, they evidently decided it that politeness required them to join in the laughter. As the lecture continued, more and more people began laughing along with my friend.

Naturally, the presenter was surprised and dismayed. Discomfited by the unexpected reaction, he would pause at the end of each sentence and look with consternation at the audience---who must have thought he was pausing to allow time for the expected laugh. The tittering increased; people began to feel that they were 'getting' it after all. Oh, those comical English and their deadpan delivery! There was even some sporadic applause.

I couldn't take it; I eventually got up and left. The paper was a raging success, but I am sure the presenter was scarred forever. I doubt he worked out that it was his DELIVERY that had them rolling in the aisles. I knew from having talked to him a couple of times that it was just the way he talked.

Cockney English AND estuary English lend themselves particularly well to the comic device the Brits treasure above all others (and say we Yanks don't understand): irony. The above-cited 'absence of enthusiasm' reads as the auditory equivalent of sarcastic, trenchant, wry, self-deprecating, or ironic depending on context. It's a comic effect that the English particularly prize (as well as anyone with an appreciation of English comedy), though obviously---as in the case of the unfortunate presenter--- there are drawbacks.

I imagine that the extent to which estuary English and the 'absence of enthusiasm' and "impression of deliberateness" suggested by estuary intonation lends itself to deadpan statements has something to do with its trendiness. It also has a hard edge that creates (at minimal outlay) a 'hard man' impression. Mildly funny statements come across as aggressive, in-your-face, mordant. Cf. the film "Essex Boys," starring Tom Wilkinson, Alex Kingston, and Sean Bean.

4. Accent-Related Stress Disorder.

My stepdaughter is a lovely girl but her way of talking makes her sound tough and street-wise beyond her years. I wouldn't want to go one on one with her that's for certain. And that's probably a good thing for a young girl living on her own.

I have sometimes managed that my life might be very different if I could talk with an estuary or cockney accent. [RUMCOVE: "They're COMPLETELY DIFFERENT and YOU KNOW IT."] It's not an accent that an American can easily imitate. God knows both Rumcove and Nick have tried. I might have managed to get a bit further if both didn't practice the 'teaching by ridicule' method, but I think the problem is less one of pronunciation than of things that are harder to control consciously. When Rumcove speaks, or when Nick speaks with a cockney accent, both of them move their mouths around much more than the average American and their jaws a lot less. There's also a speaking-out-of-one-side-of-the-mouth-sort-of component that I can't quite describe, even to myself. Plus there is a nasal aspect....

A few Americans can do and---much more difficult---sustain credible English accents (Renee Zellweger and Gwynneth Paltrow come to mind) but I've never heard an American do credible cockney or estuary. An ordinary English accent really just requires heightened attention to diction, awareness of when and when not to use the broad A, and projection of the voice forward instead of upward. An estuary or cockney accent requires a reconfiguration of your entire speaking/vocalization apparatus and a completely different conception of the relationship between consonants and vowels. I had to take aspirin after my attempts and then cry myself to sleep afterwards, confirmed in the knowledge that that I don't have what it takes to talk like Guy Ritchie, Madonna.

Rumcove doesn't write with an estuary accent, but something of that deadpan character infuses his work. I suppose that talking like that makes it easier to be funny if you want to be. On the other hand, it makes it harder NOT to be funny when you don't want to be. I am thinking in particular a certain expression Rumcove uses that we don't have here: "I'm not being funny!"---meaning something like "saying this for the purpose of getting at you." It's a disclaimer I'd never have to issue. I usually am not funny even when I'm trying my best to be.

For those reasons, I imagine the estuary mystique might be hard to maintain. I've noticed that with all the weight and value that the British assign to humor, and the claim of the English that they don't take themselves too seriously, many INDIVIDUAL Brits tend to take themselves very seriously indeed and to be (relative to Americans) thin-skinned, emotional (though inexpressive), and rather easily embarrassed. To be dry, deadpan, ironic, trenchant, mordant, and hard-edged would take it out of you. I think of my favorite performer in life, Ian Dury. A true poet, I think, but not for a great deal of his life a happy man.

I said as much to Rumcove, who is often morose and prone to suffer from the effects of Sunlight Affective Disorder. Despite his actual personality, he is frequently mistaken for a hard guy. Twice when he was visiting the US, the immigration officer asked him if he was a cop. He was never a cop, but he does give off a sort of hard guy vibe. How does it feel to be to be taken for a hard guy when you're just tired and hung-over?

"Living up to an estuary accent takes a strong constitution," he wrote. "Sometimes it is hard to cope with all the pressure. But those of us who live in Essex know that Essex is God's country and that when God said, "Let there be light," he said it with an estuary accent. So there you are. The answer is: we manage."

RELATED POSTINGS:

God is an Englishman. He Lives Upstairs and He’s Never Mentioned. [English manners; English culture]

English Placenames: The Cirencester Problem. [English culture]

XXX (Of a Sort) from the Mother Country: Mr. Rumcove & the Very Cruel Poll [English culture]

Estuary Englishman [English culture]

No Ordinary Profile: The Talented Mr. Rumcove [English culture; English viewpoint]

Communities & Their Souls: The Two Floridas [English viewpoint]

The Dialing Dream

A Note from Mr. Rumcove

Toxic Love 101---The Perils of Present-Giving

XXX (Of a Sort) from the Mother Country: Mr. Rumcove & the Very Cruel Poll [English culture]

Mr Rumcove's 4th of July

Tue, 04 Jul 2006 15:43:55 GMT

Hi! I've moved to a new address! To jump to the updated version of this posting, please click on this link.

The Very Cruel Poll & Mr. Rumcove's 4th of July

Actually the title of the Yahoo.com article from which I am preparing to quote says it all: "Britons Tire of Cruel, Vulgar US: poll." The results of the poll, published in the Daily Telegraph, include (but are not limited to) the following:

[quote begins here]:

As Americans prepared to celebrate the 230th anniversary of their independence on Tuesday, the poll found that only 12 percent of Britons trust them to act wisely on the global stage. This is half the number who had faith in the Vietnam-scarred White House of 1975.

A massive 83 percent of those questioned said that the United States doesn't care what the rest of the world thinks.

With much of the worst criticism aimed at the US adminstration, the poll showed that 70 percent of Britons like Americans a lot or a little.

President George W. Bush [link in the original] fared significantly worse, with just one percent rating him a "great leader" against 77 percent who deemed him a "pretty poor" or "terrible" leader.

More than two-thirds who offered an opinion said America is essentially an imperial power seeking world domination. And 81 per cent of those who took a view said President George W Bush hypocritically championed democracy as a cover for the pursuit of American self-interests.

US policy in Iraq was similarly derided, with only 24 percent saying they felt that the US military action there was helping to bring democracy to the country.

[quote ends]

Jesus. When this is what your main (and possibly only) ally is saying about you, you got trouble, my friend.

But in case you think the Brits are ONLY pissed off with the Bush administration, think again:

[quote begins]

In answer to other questions, a majority of the Britons questions described Americans as uncaring, divided by class, awash in violent crime, vulgar, preoccupied with money, ignorant of the outside world, racially divided, uncultured and in the most overwhelming result (90 percent of respondents) dominated by big business.

Huh? Hey! Damn! HEY! Uh---

"HEY! I KNOW YOU ARE BUT WHAT ARE WE?"

What else can I say, but "say it ain't so." Okay, I know that we Yanks are pretty harsh on ourselves but---but---it's different when we do it!!

I mean, some of this didn't surprise me, since I have a lot of British friends and family members---"awash in violent crime; ignorant of the outside world"; those are standard criticisms.

However: vulgar? divided by class? uncultured? This from the land of Millwall fans, soccer hooligans, and skinheads? (We are 'divided by class'?)

<<<Sniff>>>> That is COLD, man.

I am not really consoled by the remarks of a 'spokesman for the US embassy' implying that the Brits are actually mistaken about what they think; the embassy's surveys show otherwise. Furthermore---according to this same spokesman---they wouldn't think they think what they said they think if the embassy hadn't failed at "successfully communicating America's extraordinary dynamism." Finally, it is also the fault of the British press for not communicating America's extraordinary dynamism.

Who in the what now? If there is one thing the Brits didn't criticize us for in that poll, it is for lack of 'dynamism.' It seems to me that they find us dynamic to a fault.

This reminds me of my conversation last year with my friend Rumcove of Southend-on-Sea, Essex. I remember it quite clearly. "I suppose tomorrow you will be celebrating American independence," he remarked.

"Yes," I said. Having described my plans (St Augustine to see the fireworks and so on), I asked him what he was up to.

"Celebrating American Independence, of course," he said.

RELATED POSTINGS

Don’t Put Out More Flags (A Reprise!)

Image drawn by Mr. Tenniel; painted by Damozel!

The Dialing Dream

Mon, 12 Jun 2006 13:54:24 GMT

Hi, I've changed my address! Jump to the updated version of this note by clicking here.

The Dialing Dream

Probably everyone my age or younger has had the same dream. In this dream, you have some urgent reason to call someone. You try to dial the number and you can’t remember it. Instead of stopping to look it up, you keep dialing and dialing and dialing, getting more confused and anxious each time. In my dream, my fingers are slippery from my panicky flop sweat and the phone keys are too small. At a certain point (and this wouldn't happen in the dreams of anyone under, say, 40) the key pad disappears and turns into one of those old-fashioned dial phones, which slows things down even more.

And of course it’s worse when you’re dreaming that you’re calling from here to England because there are SO MANY MORE NUMBERS TO DIAL. A whole string of them.

Mr. Rumcove has made great progress in his life since he first posted that fateful internet ad. In those days, he was always around. His daughter was young; so he wanted to be around for her. I could always reach him too. For various reasons, he had to be on (the giant desktop version of Windows 97) during all the hours there were. E-mailing was pretty heady stuff back in the days before I had Windows (and I only had a computer at work). It was still really expensive to call England and there was something magical about writing someone a note and GETTING BACK A REPLY ALMOST INSTANTLY.

It was comforting to have a friend who never went anywhere, who answered immediately whenever I wrote, and who was as interested in his own culture as I was. Given that the friend was Rumcove, it was a bit like having a really morose guardian angel with an estuary accent.

Today reaching him is a whole different (MAJOR) undertaking. He has a cell phone ( “mobile”) to which he is apparently connected via a chip installed in his ear, but calling a person’s “mobile” still seems to me like something you should only do in an emergency, so I stick to the ‘land line,’ which he never answers. Now that he has a life, I don't want to keep him from it. I admit that at times I miss my invisible friend. Nobody else gets my joke. (Yes, I said "joke"). I have only one.

And I know that Rumcove is, as always, just fine. After all, he lives in balmy Southend-on-Sea and he owns both a Harley and a Vespa. He is currently enjoying record high temperatures in England, thanks to global warming. Anytime now S-on-S will be the world's new subtropical destination of choice and Florida will be under water. Mr Rumcove himself? On a record high.

RELATED POSTINGS

Estuary Englishman

No Ordinary Profile: The Talented Mr. Rumcove

The Two Floridas

The Dialing Dream

A Note from Mr. Rumcove

Toxic Love 101---The Perils of Present-Giving

XXX (Of a Sort) from the Mother Country: Mr. Rumcove & the Very Cruel Poll

God is an Englishman. He Lives Upstairs and He’s Never Mentioned.

Communities & Their Souls

Sun, 28 Aug 2005 21:46:11 GMT

To jump to the current version of this note (new address), click here.

Two Floridas

[1] Two Floridas. One of them you know. Mr. Rumcove prefers the other one.

Rumcove liked Florida a lot when he visited here. He loved St. Augustine and he enjoyed visiting the small gulfside communities on the state’s west coast. He liked Daytona and expressed a wish to someday participate in Bike Week. He enjoyed the heat, the palm trees, and the sunny winter days. He liked the restaurant in Salt Creek at the mouth of the Suwannee, where we ate soft-shelled crab and gator tail because if you come here and go there, it’s the LAW. He liked the Greek village in Tarpon Springs and the sponges. He enjoyed the long boat ride we took along the Anclote river. He loved the restaurant on Cedar Key where we ate lunch sitting on a deck built out over the Gulf. I can’t remember now if we ever got around to visiting the prehistoric and enigmatic Shell Mound at Shell Mound County Park. If not, it’s a shame. And we never made it to Amelia Island or Fernandina Beach.

He went swimming (though not diving) at Ginny Springs on the Santa Fe River, we had a look around the Ravine Gardens in Palatka (“the hanging gardens of Palookaville” to Rumcove ever afterward), took a walk on the nature trail round Fanning Springs on the Suwannee, we drove around Horseshoe Beach, took a walk around the canals in Salt Creek, and even spent a bit of time wandering round the glossy shops and restaurants at Jacksonville Landing. We visited various and sundry microbreweries, where he gave the connoisseur’s qualified nod to some of the amber varieties.

The only parts he didn’t like were (at first) Clearwater Beach, which he pronounced “too built up, like Torremolinos” and he didn’t like the Orlando area for the same reason. And he then did end up really liking the actual beach at Clearwater, once the sun was setting, the people went indoors, we were comfortably drinking in a beach bar, and there was nothing else in sight but the opalescent clouds, the reflections in the water, and the prettiest wedding I’ve ever seen at the water’s edge. He liked it the next morning too when he took a walk at dawn on the empty beach.

He never did warm to Orlando. He isn’t even interested in going to Disney. “In Southend we have the world’s longest pleasure-pier,”” he informed me, “and I hardly ever want to go there either. I don’t want to visit resorts or do tourist things. I live in a resort.”

So we stuck to the “native Floridian” dimension. And if you ever get the chance, I recommend that you do the same.

Florida really does exist on two separate and interlinking planes. The tourist level is the one consisting of the big International Airports, the expressways and other roads leading to “attractions’ and the beaches where non-Floridians like to go in the wintertime. It’s certain roads---the OBT, the Beeline Expressway, I-Drive, A-1A, Highway 19 that take people to theme parks and various so-called ‘attractions,’ not to mention the ‘souvenir’ shops, chain restaurants, miniature golf courses, and karaoke bars, and that many of them never leave. It’s time-share condos and summer homes. It’s the whole “hospitality industry” dedicated to serving the needs of the tourists. In the meantime, off those main roads and out of the main development, in a different dimension altogether is the Florida that’s the actual Florida: where people live in houses that don’t have stupid names and rarely venture into the tourist’s dimension unless their jobs require it. All of them want the tourists to have a good time, but would actually prefer that they stick to the parts of the state that were built for them.

It never seems to occur to most of them that the Florida they see driving from one theme park ‘experience’ to the next isn’t like all the rest or that the tourist experience isn’t the Florida experience. “I don’t like Florida,” said a man I met once from Blackpool---Blackpool!---“It’s so ugly. I didn’t expect that. It’s just strip malls, hotels and fast food places. It’s all built up everywhere. ” Yes, that’s the ‘tourist fallacy” at work all right; the assumption that every place is like every other place. I didn’t bother trying to set him straight.

So Rumcove and I visited small towns and out of the way places where there is nothing else much but Florida to see. It isn’t something that the average tourist in search of stimulation would ever find. Which most Floridians agree is a good thing. If you see the real Florida---and it can still be found off the highways that the tourists stick to----it’s beautiful, silent, evocative, and unexpected.

[2] Cities at the point of conjunction.

You can still find the old organic town of Kissimmee---a rather sleepy place---existing almost intact underneath the frenetic tourist’s Kissimmee if you get off the ‘main roads’ where there no longer are anything but small hotels, chain restaurants, strip malls, and asphalt. Does anyone ever bother to do that? You can turn off 192 and go into the town, where---last time I was there; I couldn’t swear to it now----there were still some pretty old Florida-style buildings with lacy woodwork and that faintly exhilarating/evocative Florida old-house smell. There’s a lake right in the center of the town called Lake Tohopakeliga (Lake Toho to the residents). It’s a popular spot for bass fishing, camping, and boating.

There are (or were) restaurants where only locals eat where people aren’t hospitality-industry friendly, but genuinely friendly, and where they will remember your name if you go back there. You can go down certain roads and be in the midst of the dense green foliage of Florida and neighborhoods with that distinctive Florida raffishness----yards in a constant state of being just about to get out of hand (it’s hard here to keep up with the undergrowth, the weeds, and the grass). If you can stand the noise, you can take airboat rides out onto shallow ponds and rivers and see what the central part of the state looks like. It’s all still there if you just make a wrong or a right turn.

At the apartments where my late husband Don and I lived, there was a small pond with giant herons (I think they were herons) that my stepdaughter used to feed, so that they got into the habit of coming every day to my door, banging on it with their beaks, and making a sound like a hundred piled-up plates clattering down. I loved those herons and when they disappeared (perhaps some of the disgruntled other tenants made away with them), I didn’t want to live there anymore. (And anyone who doesn’t believe that birds are descended from dinosaurs should definitely spend some time with really large birds).

All this has the other Kissimmee superimposed on top of it. It’s like those ancient archaeological sites where the cities were built right on top of each other, only these exist simultaneously.

In Central Florida, there are orange groves and vineyards and wineries (well, one I know of) in a certain section of the state that consists of rolling brown hills---the Flatlands aren’t really all that flat through the center--- that are weirdly evocative of Northern California, but you’d better look fast, because development is sprawling all over places like Clermont that when I lived there were still quite distinct from the outward sprawl of the Orlando area.

The tallest point of Florida, someone once told me, is the “Citrus Tower” in Clermont. You can climb up to a high tower for a small fee----it’s a roadside “attraction”-----and look all around at even more rolling brown landscape. It used to be legitimately out in the middle of the orange groves. Last time I went, I saw lots of development all around.

I have mixed feelings about all of this. The state needs the money that the tourists and retirees bring in and I don’t want them to stop coming here. I came here from somewhere else myself---I shouldn’t complain if other people who see the reality around all the development want to stay here.

But it’s disconcerting to see so much of it disappear underneath the development. And I do resent the fact that there are whole stretches where people have bought up the views. There are sections along the east coast where you can never catch a glimpse of the water because people who feel the need, I guess, to be literal lords of all they survey, have blocked it all with their houses. There are stretches where it feels like a deliberate slap in the face to people who thought they might enjoy a drive along the coast road. “Get your own [several] million dollar beachfront property if you want to look at the Atlantic!” Maybe there are places like that all over the state or all over the world. I don’t know because I mostly stick to the northern parts and to certain parts of the west coast. I’ve never even been to Fort Lauderdale or Key West, for example. Or Miami. Those are a pretty good distance from where I am.

Orlando though…..”I don’t like it,” said Rumcove. According to Mr. R, the city felt to him like a place that wasn’t a place. It felt centerless and soulless.

It isn’t, of course. At a level slightly below the streets and highways that comprise the tourist’s Orlando (and those are only a few streets), there is still a city where people live and do things that aren’t about recreation and entertainment. There are houses, communities, and---in the city of the city too----some pretty old houses and one of the pretty, pretty lakes in the Kissimmee Chain of Lakes. And the city of Orlando has a downtown which, despite the proliferation of tourist attractions, has its own miniature Lake (Eola) and its own pretty neighborhoods.

“It’s not that I can’t see that the older parts still exist,” Rumcove said, after chuckling heartily over a lawn maintenance company we passed that called itself “Mr. Sod.” “But the other parts are taking over and changing them. It’s starting to look generic. It's mutating. You shouldn't lget that happen---it doesn't have to. Southend is a Victorian town and there are bits that stay the same and that no one would touch even when everything else changes. None of this looks as if it will be the same twenty years from now. The houses, the buildings, all of it will be knocked down. They’ll put up newer places. It all feels temporary and it all feels artificial. All the newer parts are cancelling out the older parts. It’s a shame because of the nice bits. It didn’t come about the way Basildon did, but Basildon is the nearest thing in England to it.”

A place doesn’t have to have a lengthy history to have “atmosphere,” but it should have some characteristic or feeling or mood or way of being that defines it as a place.

“None of these American towns feel as if it has a center,” he said to me once when we went to South Carolina. “In England, even small places have a village center or a place. Here everything feels all spread out between shopping malls. There’s no center.” So I took him to my own town’s city center which---to be fair---is nowadays nowhere near the center, but not too far from its eastern edge.

The centers are there if you look for them. The center isn’t a matter of geography; it’s a matter of having some place where local people actually congregate. A lot of American towns, and mine is one of them, have at various times had that endangered or destroyed by development elsewhere (a single large shopping mall can give the deathblow to the center of a small town). My little city, I’m happy to say, saved its downtown from its slow slip downward into decay and disuse. It’s been reinvented and is sometimes fairly lively Nowadays most of the people who live here go there from time to time to eat, to be entertained, to use the library, to see a play or an art show or an arty film. and so on. Quite a few live there.

But you can’t build that or invent it. There has to be something underneath it, some preexisting feeling of community or the desire for one. And in places like Orlando or Kissimmee, it’s still there, I swear, though it can be driven out just like the wildlife who have lost their swamps, marshes, forests, and underbrush.

But what about a place that’s built instead of developing on its own? We have new towns now in Florida that were specifically constructed and planned as separate communities. I can think of a lot of those. They are very appealing to the eye, but can a new town have a soul? Can it ever turn into a community? Can something prefabricated be turned (assuming you can find the Blue Fairy) into something organic, like Pinnochio?

Can a place that someone fabricated before there were people to live in it acquire a soul? Can a place that loses its center get it back again?

I’m hoping that the answer is “yes.” I love my state, as you can probably tell. I also love the tourists whose “dollars” keep it going. But I don’t want to lose the parts we’ve managed to keep to ourselves.

RELATED POSTINGS:

A Proper Gallows Laugh Requires A Stiff Upper Lip (British Comedy)

(I Know All There is To Know) About the Glaring Game [English manners; English culture]

The Glaring Game Part 2: Nature or Nurture?

Tea. How It Happened to an American.

God is an Englishman. He Lives Upstairs and He’s Never Mentioned.

English Placenames: The Cirencester Problem. [English culture]

Estuary Englishman [English culture]

No Ordinary Profile: The Talented Mr. Rumcove

The Two Floridas

The Dialing Dream

A Note from Mr. Rumcove

Toxic Love 101---The Perils of Present-Giving

XXX (Of a Sort) from the Mother Country: Mr. Rumcove & the Very Cruel Poll [English culture]