Two Centuries of a Spooky Classic

 This year marks the bicentennial of Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, originally published on March 15, 1820 as part of his collection The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.  Longtime readers of this blog will know that reading The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is an annual Halloween tradition for me.  I have long maintained that the tale (not a legend about a place that wasn't called Sleepy Hollow) is the original 'Scooby Doo' episode- a slightly spooky comedic story about a a creepy presence which may or may not be a ghost.  Irving's Ichabod Crane, so different from the real man, is pretty much Shaggy, a tall beanpole with a boundless appetite and a tendency toward credulity.

Sadly, this pandemic year put the kibosh on the Sleepy Hollow Literary Festival, which was supposed to be a celebration of the 'Legend's' bicentennial.  The festival was supposed to involve a consortium of Irving scholars presenting panel discussions and lectures on the 'Legend'.  I had been hoping to attend some of the festivities before work, but that was not to be.

I was able to attend a brief lecture about the inspirations and antecedents of the 'Legend' by local storyteller and Friend of the Bastard Jonathan Kruk, who in non-plague years would recite The Legend of Sleepy Hollow at The Old Dutch Church with organ accompaniment by my Great and Good Friend Jim Keyes.  Much of Mr Kruk's lecture, held outside on the grounds of Washington Irving's home Sunnyside, was based on his book Legends and Lore of Sleepy Hollow and the Hudson Valley.  

Irving wrote The Legend of Sleepy Hollow while living in England, trying to keep his family's import/export business afloat, and not having a very good time of it (the United States was in the midst of a 'buy American' phase, with patriotic Americans bolstering homegrown industry).  Disheartened, Irving met with Sir Walter Scott, a fan of his youthful writings, and received encouragement to continue his writing career.   In The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Irving fused fact, fiction, and fable into a wonderful composite.

The figure of a headless specter is common throughout Northern Europe, with the Dullahan being a particularly vivid type specimen, by which I mean archetype specimen.  Apparently, the Dutch Americans also had a tradition of muffling themselves in cloaks and scaring unwanted individuals out of town in the colonial era.  In the journal of American revolutionary general William Heath, there is an account of a Hessian mercenary decapitated by a cannon ball: "A shot from the American cannon at this place took off the head of a Hessian artillery-man. They also left one of the artillery horses dead on the field. What other loss they sustained was not known."   

This compares well with Irving's account of the decapitated Hessian: "It is said by some to be the ghost of a Hessian trooper, whose head had been carried away by a cannon-ball, in some nameless battle during the Revolutionary War..."

 I have long maintained that much of the appeal of the 'Legend' is due to its sparse plot... at its heart, it's the story of a man who goes to a party and gets chased by what he thinks is a headless horseman.  There is a lot of scope for adding one's own spin on the tale- good-natured rowdy vs pseudo-intellectual, rural vs urban, Dutch vs English.  Even more significantly is Irving's genius at description, with his portrayal of Ichabod Crane being a masterpiece of comedic writing:

In this by-place of nature there abode, some thirty years since, a worthy wight of the name of Ichabod Crane, a native of Connecticut, who "tarried" in Sleepy Hollow for the purpose of instructing the children of the vicinity. He was tall and exceedingly lank, with narrow shoulders, long arms and legs, hands that dangled a mile out of his sleeves, and feet that might have served for shovels. His head was small, and flat at top, with huge ears, large green glassy eyes, and a long snipe nose, so that it looked like a weathercock perched upon his spindle neck, to tell which way the wind blew. To see him striding along on a windy day, with his clothes bagging and fluttering about him, one might have mistaken him for some scarecrow eloped from a cornfield. 

It's odd that a lot of modern adaptations insist on making Crane sexy. 

For me,a lot of the appeal of the story is that it is local, indeed hyper local.  The route of the 'Legend', on Route 9, is one I have driven many times.  Again, Irving's genius at description comes into play in his depiction of the Pocantico River valley that he dubbed Sleepy Hollow:

In the bosom of one of those spacious coves which indent the eastern shore of the Hudson, at that broad expansion of the river denominated by the ancient Dutch navigators the Tappan Zee, and where they always prudently shortened sail and implored the protection of Saint Nicholas, there lies a small market town which is generally known by the name of Tarry Town. This name was given by the good housewives of the adjacent country from the inveterate propensity of their husbands to linger about the village tavern on market days. Not far from this village, perhaps about two miles, there is a little valley among high hills which is one of the quietest places in the whole world. A small brook murmurs through it and, with the occasional whistle of a quail or tapping of a woodpecker, is almost the only sound that ever breaks the uniform tranquillity. 

It's the attention to detail that most adaptations tend to lose, those little flourishes which conjure up an image that remains to this day, say when you hear a woodpecker earning its keep at Kingsland Point Park.

There are some nice background pieces about the 'Legend', such as this History Channel essay or this CBS news item.  Again, the appeal of the 'Legend', a factor in its two centuries of popularity, is that it is endlessly adaptable- it was a brilliant synthesis by Washington Irving that has spawned a myriad of different interpretations in a chain of creation.  It's an appropriate genesis for American fiction, both comic and scary.

I'll include one recent adaptation, an animated short by David Hyde Costello and narrated by poet Malik Work, which is a current stand-in for a shadow puppet show present annually in non-plague years at Irving's Sunnyside, which was cancelled this year due to the impossibility of social distancing between the two puppeteers involved in the show:

 

 

I figure I'll end this post here... I've got some reading to do.

Lurid "Legend"

I'm not a TV watcher, I've never seen an episode of Mad Men or Breaking Bad. I certainly don't denigrate people who watch TV, it's just not my bag. That being said, because it is of local interest, I watched the pilot episode of Sleepy Hollow on the internet last night. Longtime readers will know that I am a Sleepy Hollow purist, even though The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is not a legend (it is a short story written in England in 1820 by American author Washington Irving, under the psedonym "Geoffrey Crayon, Gentleman" and attributed by "Crayon" to the fictional "narrator" Diedrich Knickerbocker) and there was no Village of Sleepy Hollow until 1996 (the village was called North Tarrytown, and the name "Sleepy Hollow" was coined by Irving to describe the valley of the Pocantico River).

On the most basic level, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, which is freely available online, is a humorous story about a guy who, after attending a party, is chased by what he thinks is a headless horseman . The perennial popularity of the story is that it works on so many levels- it can be read as a story of the conflict between the Dutch settlers of the Hudson River Valley and an "English" interloper, or a tale of rivalry between a mischievous rustic bruiser and an effete, "citified" pseudointellectual, or a satire of a wannabe nouveau riche striver seeking to marry into old money. There's a lot of backstory, much of it implied, to the simple chase narrative that forms the climax of the story.

Most recent "adaptations" of the story eschew the rational explanation of the events of the story (I view it as a "spiritual ancestor" of the orginal Scooby Doo, Where Are You! (sic), and bring in supernatural elements (oddly enough, Ichabod Crane's superstitious credulousness is portrayed as a humorous quirk and a possibly fatal flaw, a fact that is lost on those who have adapted the story). TV's Sleepy Hollow is firmly in the "supernatural thriller" camp. Spoilers will abound ahead, so be forewarned... I'll post the trailer for the show, and there will be spoilers ahead:





The tagline of the show could very well have been: "Ichabod Crane: He's back from the dead, and ready to kick ass!" Rather than Irving's Ichabod Crane, a neurotic and greedy yet somehow likeable geek, the Crane of the show is a man of action, a former British redcoat who deserted and joined the revolution, becoming a "special agent" for George Washington. After a harrowing encounter in which he beheads a masked "Hessian" who bears a startling resemblance to The Lord Humungus, Crane ends up in suspended animation for more than two centuries. When he comes to, he finds that himself arrested by local law enforcement officers. Meanwhile, a young police lieutenant, Abby Mills, witnesses the death of her avuncular captain (played by one of my favorite actors, Clancy Brown- as an aside, Clancy Brown and James Earl Jones, the two best voices in Hollywood, should collaborate on a show, just for the sheer awesomeness of hearing them talk) at the hands of a headless dude. Eventually, she meets with Ichabod and the two realize that they are bound by fate to combat the Headless Horseman, who is implied to be one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

The show provided about forty-five minutes of goofy, lurid fun. The two leads have good chemistry as a mismatched pair forced into a collaboration by circumstances that seem to be spiraling out of control. The character of Lieutenant Abby Mills is a strong, capable African-American female whose interactions with the temporally-unmoored Crane are played for understated comic relief. When Crane unthinkingly observes that she has been emancipated from slavery, she reminds him that she is a lieutenant in the Westchester County police force, and quips that she is authorized to use her gun on him, which elicits a stammering assertion from Crane that he has long supported the abolitionists' cause.

The basic plot has Lieutenant Mills and Ichabod Crane piecing together the phenomena that have led to the resurrection of both Crane and the Horseman. Through the course of the pilot, it is revealed that the town of Sleepy Hollow, and the entire Eastern seaboard of the United States, is home to two conflicting covens of "witches", some who are trying to hasten the end of the world, and others who are trying to thwart their nefarious plot. Some characters are revealed to be participants in the conflict, and Abby reveals that she and her sister encountered a supernatural evil that unhinged her sister... it's revealed that Crane's wife, a good witch who is based on the character of Katrina Van Tassel from the original story, had encountered the same supernatural force. The pilot set up a bunch of potential plot threads, and I imagine that most of the fun that will be provided by the series involves trying to figure out the various supernatural allegiances of the townspeople. In particular, police chief Irving (named after Washington Irving?), played by talented comedian and character actor Orlando Jones has a couple of "ominous" scenes in the pilot. Thankfully, the show eschews that all-too-common "fantasy skepticism" that a mars the "suspension of disbelief" of too many supernatural thrillers-- the characters, confronted repeatedly by tall, dark, and headless and his trail of decapitated victims, don't insist that the monster is not real. Similarly, the in-show reality does not include the Headless Horseman, or Ichabod Crane, for that matter, as well-known characters. Sorry, there's no room for a Horseman Restaurant in the TV Sleepy Hollow.

Now, as to local content, which is the sole reason I watched the show... while the show was largely filmed in North Carolina, there are plenty of aerial shots of the genuine Sleepy Hollow, which establish a sense of place. Starting at the three-and-a-half minute mark, a camera follows a southbound train on the Metro North Hudson line and at the 3:38 mark there is a great shot of the Philipsburg Manor historic site, specifically the 17th century manor house and the New World Dutch barn. If I'm not mistaken, the overhead shot at 10:45 in the show is the Broadway (Route 9)/Bedford Rd (Route 448) intersection, but I would have to do a drive-by to verify the landmarks. At the 17:03 mark, there is a great overhead shot of the Old Dutch Church and the ODC and Sleepy Hollow Cemeteries. At the 26:28 mark, the Hudson River can be seen in the upper left hand corner. At 28:27, there is a beautiful shot of the sun setting over the Western Hudson highlands, with a brief glimpse on the extreme left hand side of the Philipsburg Manor House, the Philipsburg millpond, and the curve of the Pocantico River as it flows into the mighty Hudson.

Finally, the quibbles... I can't write this without mentioning quibbles, because I revel in pedantry. One of the jokes in the show, which can be seen in the trailer, is that Starbucks are ubiquitous in Sleepy Hollow. In fact, there are no Starbucks franchises in the Village of Sleepy Hollow. If one wished to get a cup of coffee in the village, one would most likely go to the aforementioned Horseman Restaurant or perhaps get a cafe con leche at Corona's Lunch. While more of an "Easter Egg" than a quibble, the series makes a big deal about the population of Sleepy Hollow being 144,000, which is a reference to the Book of Revelation- the real village of Sleepy Hollow, as of 2010, has 9,870 residents, 51.04% of which are Hispanic, many from South America. The community portrayed in the show seems simultaneously more developed and more rural than the real Sleepy Hollow, with a couple of large buildings and undeveloped outskirts. Also, while I have seen many complaints about Katrina Crane being burned as a witch, rather than hanged (the method of execution employed by our fanatics), I am more peeved that they portrayed the witch's grave as being in consecrated ground. The Sleepy Hollow region's one witch, a midwife, herbalist, and crack shot known as "Mother Hulda", fell in a running gun battle with a British cattle rustling party and, because she wasn't an orthodox member of the Old Dutch Church congregation, was buried outside of consecrated ground, even though she routed the raiders. My biggest quibble with the pilot episode was that light didn't shine out of Clancy Brown's severed neck, but I'm a geek.

All told, the show was a bit of goofy fun, and I didn't hate it. The characters were fairly well written and the two leads were appealing and had good chemistry, essential for what boils down to a "buddy cop" show. The "fish out of water" elements were amusing without being totally farcical. I don't know if I'd make a commitment to watching the series on a regular basis, but I did enjoy playing "Hey, I know that place" during the "scene establishing" shots. If you are a fan of supernatural thrillers with some comic elements, you will probably enjoy the show. For a breakdown of the show's elements, TV Tropes has a good summary, just don't fall into the TV Tropes Time Trap... you might be trapped there for over two centuries.

Silent Hollow

This being the Halloween season, I'm up to my keister in work, so I typically set up posts in advance and use the "scheduling" option. I also rely a lot on posting videos. This being the Halloween season, and me living in the Hudson River Valley, I typically put up one or two posts about Sleepy Hollow this time of year. Today's post features Edward D. Venturini's 1922 silent film The Headless Horseman, an adaptation of Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow starring Will Rogers as Ichabod Crane. The film is overlong, and this particular video has a repetitive soundtrack, but it captures nicely the "Dutch vs English" subtext in the original story:






At the fifty-seven-and-a-half minute mark, there is a brief shot of laughing African-American children watching Ichabod Crane dancing... this seemingly out-of-place scene is actually straight out of Irving's original:


And now the sound of the music from the common room, or hall, summoned to the dance. The musician was an old grayheaded negro, who had been the itinerant orchestra of the neighborhood for more than half a century. His instrument was as old and battered as himself. The greater part of the time he scraped on two or three strings, accompanying every movement of the bow with a motion of the head; bowing almost to the ground, and stamping with his foot whenever a fresh couple were to start.

Ichabod prided himself upon his dancing as much as upon his vocal powers. Not a limb, not a fibre about him was idle; and to have seen his loosely hung frame in full motion, and clattering about the room, you would have thought Saint Vitus himself, that blessed patron of the dance, was figuring before you in person. He was the admiration of all the negroes; who, having gathered, of all ages and sizes, from the farm and the neighborhood, stood forming a pyramid of shining black faces at every door and window, gazing with delight at the scene, rolling their white eye-balls, and showing grinning rows of ivory from ear to ear. How could the flogger of urchins be otherwise than animated and joyous? the lady of his heart was his partner in the dance, and smiling graciously in reply to all his amorous oglings; while Brom Bones, sorely smitten with love and jealousy, sat brooding by himself in one corner.


While certainly not up to modern standards of propriety, this passage is pretty tame by the standards of Irving's time. I'm willing to cut "Uncle Wash" some slack regarding his racial attitudes- he was a product of his time, and in comparison to most of his contemporaries, he seems to have been innocuous. More importantly, this passage underscores the fact that people of African descent have been part of the American fabric since before the U.S. existed. The heart of "Sleepy Hollow Country" is Philipsburg Manor Upper Mills, a food-processing complex (featuring a mill, a dairy, and a bakehouse) that was operated by twenty-three slaves (listed by name along with the cattle and silverware on an inventory drawn up by a probate court when Adolphe Philipse died intestate). Irving makes mention of the mill-pond on a couple of occasions in his story:


The schoolmaster is generally a man of some importance in the female circle of a rural neighborhood; being considered a kind of idle gentlemanlike personage, of vastly superior taste and accomplishments to the rough country swains, and, indeed, inferior in learning only to the parson. His appearance, therefore, is apt to occasion some little stir at the tea-table of a farmhouse, and the addition of a supernumerary dish of cakes or sweetmeats, or, peradventure, the parade of a silver tea-pot. Our man of letters, therefore, was peculiarly happy in the smiles of all the country damsels. How he would figure among them in the churchyard, between services on Sundays! gathering grapes for them from the wild vines that overrun the surrounding trees; reciting for their amusement all the epitaphs on the tombstones; or sauntering, with a whole bevy of them, along the banks of the adjacent mill-pond; while the more bashful country bumpkins hung sheepishly back, envying his superior elegance and address.


The end of the story describes the re-routing of the roadway to its current position by the Philipsburg Manor millpond:


The old country wives, however, who are the best judges of these matters, maintain to this day that Ichabod was spirited away by supernatural means; and it is a favorite story often told about the neighborhood round the winter evening fire. The bridge became more than ever an object of superstitious awe, and that may be the reason why the road has been altered of late years, so as to approach the church by the border of the mill-pond. The school-house being deserted, soon fell to decay, and was reported to be haunted by the ghost of the unfortunate pedagogue; and the ploughboy, loitering homeward of a still summer evening, has often fancied his voice at a distance, chanting a melancholy psalm tune among the tranquil solitudes of Sleepy Hollow.


While I prefer the Walt Disney version of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, even though I'm no Disney fan, this silent version of the "legend", with all of its flaws, does include an African-American presence which has largely been erased from the history of the North.

Thanks Obama Iriving!!!

Tonight is the first episode of season two of the television show Sleepy Hollow. While I am not a T.V. watcher, I watched the first episode last year because the show touches on local interests of mine. I have periodically posted about Sleepy Hollow since my second year of blogging, and I like to visit the area, made famous by Washington Irving's story of the Headless Horseman. Note, the Legend of Sleepy Hollow is not a legend, and there was no town named Sleepy Hollow until 1996 (I covered that in my first linked post)- "Sleepy Hollow" referred to the valley of the Pocantico River as it wound through the hills on the North Side of a village named North Tarrytown.

Now, regarding Irving's story... there was a real man named Ichabod Crane. Washington Irving met Ichabod Crane in 1814- he was aide de camp to Daniel D. Tompkins, then governor of New York State. At the time, the War of 1812 was in full swing. Irving accompanied Gov. Tompkins on an inspection tour of forts on the border of our hated Canadian enemy, where he met Ichabod Crane.

Irving wrote the Legend of Sleepy Hollow in 1820 while living in England- the story was written by Irving under the psedonym "Geoffrey Crayon, Gentleman" and attributed by "Crayon" to the fictional "narrator" Diedrich Knickerbocker... pseudonyms all the way down, it would seem. The 1820 Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. was a popular best seller on both sides of the Atlantic shortly after it was released. The real Ichabod Crane went on to have a distinguished military career, and was a colonel on active duty when he died in 1857. I'd love to know what Crane's feelings were about sharing his name with a wildly popular but somewhat ridiculous comedic character.

THANKS A LOT, IRVING!!!

Coye Illustrates Irving

A week ago, I posted about Karl Edward Wagner's short story Sticks, which is a love letter to pulp horror fiction, and an homage to illustrator Lee Brown Coye.  Composing that post was a lot of fun, besides revisiting a story I like, I checked out a lot of Mr Coye's illustrations, which I am partial to.

While tracking down Coye's oeuvre, I came across an illustration he drew for a publication of one of the United States of America's oldest and greatest 'ghost' stories, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.  Reading the 'Legend' is a yearly ritual for me, it is a local story, taking place about fifteen miles north from where I live, by a local hero.  While people who haven't read the original story misinterpret it as a Gothic tale, I consider it the original 'Scooby Doo' tale, a comedy with some purportedly supernatural elements that a skeptic could debunk by using investigative techniques that the superstitious protagonist fails to employ.

Anyway, Coye drew a nice sketch of Irving's Ichabod Crane (so different from the real Ichabod Crane), a depiction of Crane riding his horse while reading a book, perhaps a lurid book by a religious fanatic:

He was, moreover, esteemed by the women as a man of great erudition, for he had read several books quite through, and was a perfect master of Cotton Mather’s “History of New England Witchcraft,” in which, by the way, he most firmly and potently believed. 

The illustration  does not depict Crane on the night of his autumnal encounter with the Headless Horseman, as one can divine from the skunk cabbages drawn in the foreground:

I really like this illustration... if I have one beef with it, it's that Coye's Crane's nose doesn't have the leptorrhine quality that Irving so lovingly described:

The cognomen of Crane was not inapplicable to his person. He was tall, but exceedingly lank, with narrow shoulders, long arms and legs, hands that dangled a mile out of his sleeves, feet that might have served for shovels, and his whole frame most loosely hung together. His head was small, and flat at top, with huge ears, large green glassy eyes, and a long snipe nose, so that it looked like a weather-cock perched upon his spindle neck to tell which way the wind blew. To see him striding along the profile of a hill on a windy day, with his clothes bagging and fluttering about him, one might have mistaken him for the genius of famine descending upon the earth, or some scarecrow eloped from a cornfield. 

All the other details check out.

As luck would have it, the Stuff You Should Know podcast had a short episode which combined the origin of the Jack O'Lantern with details about The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.  They discuss the historical Ichabod Crane, who really should be better known.

My annual re-read of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow always reveals something new about this charming story.  While the story about the Crane/Van Tassel/Van Brunt love triangle (all three characters are pointedly not particularly nice people) is entertaining, the story's main appeal to me is Irving's gorgeous, detailed description of the Lower Hudson Valley, a region I know and love, a region Irving knew and loved.

Uncle Howard Memorialized

Today marks the anniversary of Uncle Howard's death. Uncle Howard demonstrated a lot of racist and xenophobic attitudes, but seemed to be on the cusp of recovery when he was cut down by intestinal cancer at the age of 46. For a guy who claimed to embrace a cosmicist view of the universe, he sure was obsessed with the petty human concerns of phenotype and culture. In his later works, these concerns figured in his works less and less, and his later fiction was more sympathetic of the "other" (usually in the form of aliens like half-vegetable crinoidoid scientists and immense, iridescent, hyperintelligent, rugose cones.

I had forgotten that this was the anniversary of his death until I spoke with a nice couple who were attending a dramatic interpretation of The Call of Cthulhu at, appropriately enough, the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. I'm stuck at work, so I can't pop on up to hear the performance. I even loaned my copy of the excellent Call of Cthulhu silent movie to a friend:





The big author who put Sleepy Hollow on the map, and is buried in the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, is Washington Irving. Of Irving, Lovecraft had this to say:


Washington Irving is another famous figure not unconnected with the weird; for though most of his ghosts are too whimsical and humorous to form genuinely spectral literature, a distinct inclination in this direction is to be noted in many of his productions. “The German Student” in Tales of a Traveller (1824) is a slyly concise and effective presentation of the old legend of the dead bride, whilst woven into the comic tissue of “The Money-Diggers” in the same volume is more than one hint of piratical apparitions in the realms which Captain Kidd once roamed.


Irving's too whimsical and humorous ghost story has been mutated in pop culture from "Scooby Doo" progenitor (if only Ichabod had had a bunch of young hipsters and a talking dog to help him!) to supernatural thriller. Out of the two stories Lovecraft singles out, The Adventure of the German Student is a great, spooky tale, but modern readers will guess the ending well in advance. The portion of "The Money Diggers" that Lovecraft is probably referring to is the terrific The Devil and Tom Walker. I'd have to note that Irving was a much more worldly and jolly figure than HPL ever was, so his literary designs were vastly different, but the guy did know how to bring the creepiness when he wanted to... something that Arthur Rackham got immediately.

Back to Lovecraft and his Call of Cthulhu... I did manage to find an audio recording of the story on teh Y00t00b as a consolation prize for missing the live recitation:





I can't wait to hear how he pronounces "Ph'nglui Mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn."

A First in Honor of a Bicentennial

Today is the opening day of the first International Sleepy Hollow Film Festival, which I will miss because I will be busy working. This is quite the big deal for this 'little valley or rather lap of land, among high hills, which is one of the quietest places in the whole world'. The village of Sleepy Hollow was North Tarrytown until 1996, when the populace voted to change the name in order to maintain property values and jumpstart a tourism industry after the main employer in the town, a GM plant, closed. Finally, the town seems to be doing something to boost its status as a destination, having sponsored its first literary festival earlier this year.

These events are celebrations of the bicentennial of the publication, in serial form, of Washington Irving's The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., which was published in installment form from June 1819 to July 1820. The bicentennial of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, which I reread every October will be next March. The 'Sketchbook' is in the public domain, and there has been a local push to read selections from the book, with a snazzy website to promote the project, and the region. My annual reread of the 'Legend' took place last week, when I was stuck at work playing keymaster for a bunch of contractors. I am always struck by Irving's keen eye for the natural world through which his characters move, his love for landscape, flora, and fauna. The various film and television adaptations are all about tall, dark, and headless, but my beloved Hudson Valley (remember, Yonkers is one of the Rivertowns) is the star of the original story.

A Local Legend Gets Her Due

One of the more intriguing figures of local reputed, mentioned in Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow as 'a High German doctor', is Hulda, sometimes known as Hulda of Bohemia.  I have mentioned her in a couple of blog posts, having learned of Hulda's demise, at the hands of a band of Redcoat raiders, as a teenager.  Besides being a Wise Woman, Hulda was a sharpshooter, and a local partisan.  According to Edgar Mayhew Bacon's 1897 book Chronicles of Tarrytown and Sleepy Hollow, Hulda supported the local militia with her uncanny skill with a shooting iron:  

At last one day a force of British landed from one of the transports that had sailed up the Hudson and commenced a march which was to bring them, by means of the King’s highway to the rear of Putnam’s position at Peekskill. As they marched in imposing array a volley greeted them from behind walls and tree-trunks….Not to be repulsed this time, Hulda fought with her neighbors, using her rifle with great effect, so that she was singled out for vengeance; and before the redcoats retreated to their boats they had…overtaken and killed the witch.

Because she wasn't a congregant of the Old Dutch Church, and was reputed to be a witch, Hulda was granted a Christian burial but was buried in an unmarked grave on the outskirts of the burial ground.  In 2019, this slight was remedied, and a headstone bearing her name was erected in the churchyard.

Hulda of Bohemia Died c 1777 
Herbalist, Healer, Patriot 
Felled by British 
while protecting the Militia  
Buried here in gratitude 
for her sacrifice

This year, Friend of the Bastard Carla L. Hall is presenting a performance which pays tribute to Hulda, and to the enslaved women of Philipsburg Manor's upper millworks.  A second event devoted to Hulda is being staged at night in Rockefeller State Park.  After years as an obscure local figure, Hulda is finally getting her due, even though she still plays second fiddle to our handsome Headless Boy.

Current Earworm: Overlooked This One Last Year

Every once in a while, while listening to the radi-adi-o, I am struck by something about a song that is new to me.  While driving home from work, listening to one of the college radio stations I typically listen to, a particular lyric to a catchy tune caught my attention:

I didn't take the time to listen to his name
So just for now, I'll call him Ichabod Crane
My Sleepy Hollow baby standing in the rain.

Longtime readers will know that I am a big fan of Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and have a genuine affection for the working class village which, since 1996, bears the name of Irving's formerly fictional (at best fictionalish) milieu.  I also love the story of the historical Ichabod Crane, a man whose storied military career has been almost entirely subsumed by his goofy, timorous fictional landscape.

So, what was this song that hit my funnybone?  It's a paean to a guy who looks like a young Jeff Goldblum, who indeed played Ichabod Crane in a TV movie based somewhat loosely on Irving's story.  It's a pleasant tune by Mattiel Brown and her eponymous band, with droll lyrics and some nice, crunchy guitars:

The song's sound is somewhat of a departure from Mattiel's prior sound, which involved more 'soaring' vocals and instrumentation devoid of grunginess.  The new single, thankfully, reminded me of the old material, for which I am grateful.  Here's Keep the Change, which perfectly showcases her strong, clear vocals:

It's here where I note that I am a sucker for altos.  It's funny how one earworm can lead to an infestation of earworms... and here I am unable to get any ivermectin!

Pres in My Neck of the Woods

Yesterday's big local story was President Obama's appearance at the Tappan Zee Bridge to discuss the need for spending billions of dollars to repair our crumbling infrastructure. I've discussed the Tappan Zee before. While I applaud the new bridge construction, I maintain that the proposed new bridge is, basically, crippleware because it will lack a light rail component. Back in 2011, I wrote:


The very idea of nickel-and-diming infrastructure projects until they are "built broken" is asinine. The whole disposable culture has got to end. Remember when things were built to last, and one paid a fairly high price for durable goods? Now, we buy cheap crap that we have to continually replace, which is wasteful and stupid. It's wasteful and stupid when such items as shoes, clothing, and small appliances are concerned, it's tragic and suicidal when major infrastructure is concerned.


Here's the video of the president's speech, which took place in an area I know very well, the beautiful Tarrytown waterfront:





In the opening to his Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Washington Irving described Tarrytown in terms which would be accurate today:


In the bosom of one of those spacious coves which indent the eastern shore of the Hudson, at that broad expansion of the river denominated by the ancient Dutch navigators the Tappan Zee, and where they always prudently shortened sail and implored the protection of St. Nicholas when they crossed, there lies a small market town or rural port, which by some is called Greensburgh, but which is more generally and properly known by the name of Tarry Town. This name was given, we are told, in former days, by the good housewives of the adjacent country, from the inveterate propensity of their husbands to linger about the village tavern on market days. Be that as it may, I do not vouch for the fact, but merely advert to it, for the sake of being precise and authentic.


While Tarrytown is a lovely place in which to... uh... tarry, the I-287 corridor, with the Tappan Zee Bridge bottleneck, is not the place to do so. I imagine the president's visit snarled traffic even more than is typical for the already congested area, but his theme of improving infrastructure and creating jobs is one of importance. I don't know how long he tarried in the area, but I sincerely hope he made a side trip to Lefteris Gyro, my favorite restaurant in the area.

I also appreciate his shout-out to the NY congressional delegation- I am a huge fan of Nita Lowey, a former representative of mine, and Eliot Engel, my current rep. I was glad that he excoriated congress as a whole, however. Hopefully, the president will campaign for Democratic congressional candidates in the crucial upcoming mid-term election.

Rip Revisited

It's been a while since I've touched upon the topic of Rip Van Winkle. This weekend, an errand took me to the village of Irvington, which is named after beloved local figure and American literary pioneer Washington Irving, who lived on the Irvington/Tarrytown border in his sunset years. In front of the Irvington Middle School, there is a statue of Irving's beloved literary creation, commissioned by the village board in 2001 and sculpted by Richard Masloski:

The statue, which depicts Rip Van Winkle newly awakened after his twenty year slumber, reminds me of the famous statue of the Dying Galatian. Rip's pose is similar, though he is not in a state of dishabille. His head is up, ready to gaze on the new nation in which he has awakened, unlike the poor Galatian gladiator, with his downcast, dying gaze.

Rip Van Winkle was originally published in Washington Irving's 1820 Sketchbook of Geoffery Crayon, Gent., and purports to be a tale found in the papers of the late Diedrich Knickerbocker (the "marketing" campaign Irving used to publicize his "History of New York" is startlingly "modern" and "viral". Like The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, it involves nested pen names- Irving writing as Crayon writing as Knickerbocker. The tale, in which a loyal English subject of Dutch descent wakes up in an independent United States, is in the public domain. I read it every couple of years to "re-up" my local literary credentials.

Terror Trifecta

Hey, while poking around the t00bz, I found something season-appropriate which touches on several of my interests. I've never seen Once Upon a Midnight Scary, but it is narrated by Vincent Price, the second part of the anthology is a truncated (I kill me!) version of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and the third part is an adaptation of The House with a Clock in its Walls by Bastard fave John Bellairs. I can't vouch for the entertainment value of the show, but it contains elements which pique my interest:





While I've written pretty extensively on Bellairs' The Face in the Frost, I haven't written about The House with a Clock in its Walls- I may have to put up a review of the book for another weekend.

In the interest of full disclosure, I composed this post last night.

Retro, Rip-Roarin'

Didja ever hear a song which sounds like an artifact of another decade, the product of a time-traveling pop group? Lately, I've been floored by the single "Rip Van Winkle" by Oakland's Shannon and the Clams. Here's a live version of the song, be sure to turn it up to eleven:





What's not to like? We have a rip(heh heh)roaring sound reminiscent of such 60's rockers as The Pleasure Seekers, from an album with a Lovecraftian title, inspired by a beloved "Old New York" story... I'm in bliss, pity the song only lasts two minutes fifteen seconds.

For the record, I am partial to the Arthur Rackham illustrated edition of "Rip Van Winkle". I've always been a fan of Arthur Rackham's work as an illustrator, he wonderfully blends the pretty and the grotesque, the mundane and the eldritch. Here's his take on young Rip's encounter with the Henry Hudson and his enchanted crew:

Rackham also illustrated an edition of "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" and his creepy little imps almost upstage the big headless guy. Funny how the mind works, I start off with Shannon and the Clams, and end up with Arthur Rackham and the gnomes.