Header image: S.O. Grimes general store, Westminster, Md., c. 1900. Image via Library of Congress.
Another day, another shot fired in the culture wars: this time, the internet is losing its collective mind over the new logo for Cracker Barrel. If you are unaware of the controversy, congratulations—you might consider skipping reading the rest of this essay to remain in blissful ignorance.
To summarize: Cracker Barrel, that paragon of blandly inoffensive roadside dining, has decided that its long-standing theming to evoke early 20th century general stores might be limiting its appeal to Gen Z, and so has embarked on a brand makeover that downplays the hokey country charm. Part of this rebrand is a simplified logo that ditches an illustration depicting a gentleman in overalls perched on a wicker seat ladder back chair and leaning against the titular barrel. (This man, “Uncle Herschel,” was a real person.)
Cracker Barrel logos, left: 1977, right: 2025.
To say that the change has not been taken well by the chain-restaurant-going public would be an understatement. Some of those seeing red also see a political conspiracy—from “influencers” who say that the logo is stripping culture and heritage away from rural white Americans, to Fox News hosts claiming that corporate moves such as this logo change are why President Trump needs to send troops to Chicago. Underlying these criticisms is the assumption that the rebrand is part of an insidious “woke” movement perpetrated by American businesses.
The truth is, no corporation wants to touch anything political with a twelve-foot pole, especially these days. Look at what happened to the department store Target, which caught flack from the right for daring to stock pride merchandise, only to get hit even harder from the left for caving to anti-DEI pressure. Walmart and Amazon have also been subject to boycotting headaches over DEI policies and allegations of abetting the Trump administration. No, politics have nothing to do with the decision to change the Cracker Barrel logo—although it remains to be seen if political outrage from consumers can be sustained.1
The rebrand reminds me of a similar kerfuffle last year involving the British confection Lyle’s Golden Syrup. Americans may be confused that such a product exists in the first place; but they would be even more baffled by the logo for the sugar refinery Abram Lyle & Sons, which consists of bees swarming about the corpse of a lion. The company’s motto, “Out of the strong came forth sweetness” points to the source of this imagery, the biblical tale of Samson’s riddle2. All of which is to say that this is the most badass logo ever, as well as being an amazingly long-lived one—it dates to 1883. In 2024, Lyle & Sons decided that this work of art was too morbid, and replaced it with a more anodyne illustration of a syrupy lion. This change was also greeted with political accusations.
Lyle’s Golden Syrup rebrand. Original design on left, 1883; new design on right, 2024.
But just because I doubt that these choices were motivated by politics doesn’t mean the detractors don’t have a point: something basic is being lost here. In both cases the companies have discarded character and context in an effort to streamline their identity. I have written previously about the often misguided penchant art directors have towards simplifying their brands. I suspect that the lion’s share (ha) of this tendency is simply following trends, and the current fashion in corporate design is simple, flat typography and short (often single-word) brand names. To the extent that someone actually gave this a thought, the rationale is to remove any attributes that might complicate a consumer’s attitude towards the brand. It also reflects the desire of new executives to mark their territory by peeing on it—see HBO’s constant rebranding, or Elon Musk destroying the only part of Twitter that had any value, its name recognition.
If you want to be charitable, and I try to be when I can, the move towards brand simplification also reflects a longstanding adage in design—be it visual art, design, writing, or engineering: “less is more.” This saying, often misattributed to Mies van der Rohe, emphasizes clarity and utility. The goal is to focus on what is essential. Practitioners of this belief make outsized claims about the effects of this approach. In his seminal work Understanding Comics (1993), cartoonist Scott McCloud claims that idiographic drawings amplify meaning. He also claims that in simplified, “cartoony” design, viewers can insert themselves into the depiction3. I love McCloud to pieces but this all seems a bit farfetched to me.
Scott McCloud claims that simplification leads to self-identification. Understanding Comics, 1993.
There’s a lot to be said for purposeful simplicity. Growing up in the 70s and 80s I was surrounded by, and loved, logos by Saul Bass, Milton Glaser, and Paul Rand, all of whom were known for absolutely iconic, geometric, minimalist designs. But these artists, working before digital tools, had to visualize their designs as tight, abstract forms. They did not select something they liked from the font menu, slap it on a generic color shape, shut down Adobe Illustrator and call it a day. Even at their simplest, the great Modernist graphic designers had a sense of context and of play. They weren’t afraid of their work conveying an attitude.
Logos by Saul Bass (left), Milton Glaser (center), and Paul Rand (right)
And it’s attitude that’s missing from the Cracker Barrel rebrand. The original logo wasn’t great, in much the same way that the actual restaurants aren’t great. But it did have a point of view, and that’s what the new design is lacking. As a rule of thumb, good design is supposed to not draw more attention than the message it conveys. But when design fades away into no design, the message also disappears. When you look at the new Cracker Barrel logo, ask yourself: would you even know what good or service it represents if you didn’t already know the brand name? Here, look at what happens when you replace the words:
If you’re not familiar with the Book of Judges: Samson, on the way to visit his future bride Timnah, is set upon by a lion. The hero kills the beast with his bare hands. Sometime later he returned to the scene of the attack and found that a colony of bees had made a hive in the lion’s body. Samson eats some of the honey. Returning to marry Timnah, he tells the bridal party (made up of Philistines, who are his sworn enemies) that they must answer a riddle or forfeit their clothes: “Out of the eater, something to eat; out of the strong, something sweet.” Ultimately this story does not end well for Samson, Timnah, or the Philistines. ↩︎
Amusingly, in his essay “Modern Cartoonist,” comics artist Dan Clowes takes exception to McCloud’s theory: “Comics tend to lean toward the iconic (‘The Adventures of a featureless blob'”‘) because it encourages reader identification. Let’s get away from this arena of vagueness (a cheap gimmick designed to flatter the shallow reader)” Eightball 18, 1997. ↩︎
A Facsimile Edition; with commentary by the author
The author in 1974.
I published the first edition of this commentary in 1997, having just learned how to code HTML from a disreputable Usenet post. The website that this work first appeared on, ungh.com, has long ago evaporated with the rest of the Web 1.0.
Recently, however, I recalled the essay in a dream1, and fortunately I was able to find a .doc copy languishing in the recesses of a forgotten directory on a floppy disk that had fallen behind a shelf in my basement2.
It’s been nearly 20 years and the wisdom of old age3 compels me to revisit and enlarge this seminal work. So I present here the second edition, with newly scanned facsimiles, enlarged commentary, and new annotation.
A note on the text:
Fortunately for scholars, the original MSS for the works discussed here arrive to us in almost pristine condition, thanks to their having been cached in the remarkable School Days edition #566, produced in 1966 by the WinCraft corporation of Winona, Minnesota4. In addition to my earliest writings, this folio contains many other historical items, including report cards, numerous second and third place ribbons, and a certificate awarded for “knowing and making the letters correctly in the daily use of legible manuscript handwriting.”
Perhaps the most important artifact of the twentieth century.
I Sit in It
Written in Mrs. Kubasko’s p.m. kindergarten class, Harding Elementary School, 1974.
I Sit on It, #2 pencil on ruled Manila paper, 10.5″ x 8″
Text:
Jo Johl John. IS I Sit in it Meet me See Mat on it
Notes:
From 1974 until 1977 I attended Harding Elementary School in Youngstown, Ohio. Although today it seems strange to me that there should have been a public school named after the second-most hated President of the United States5, at the time I was just happy to be sharing my blocks with Nora, the little red-haired girl who was my first real crush. We would almost exclusively use these blocks to design elaborate traps, which is an interest that I now recognize as one of the stranger symptoms of autism6.
I Sit in It is the earliest extant MS in my handwriting, and it demonstrates many of the themes that would mark my later work. Written in first person, the story is plotless, simple, and relies upon suggestion for its effects. The most obvious questions for the reader are: “What is ‘it’? Why does the narrator sit ‘in’ it, while Mat is ‘on’ it? Where are we to meet?” Although these questions are ultimately unanswerable, they are essential to the story’s meaning. By the promise of rational answers and the lack thereof, the reader is led, koan-like, to a new level of understanding. It is only when the familiar categories of “in” and “on” are deconstructed that enlightenment begins.
The true subject of I Sit in It, then, is the mutability of identity. Note the strikethroughs at the top of the page: Jo becomes Johl becomes John. And then, a final period after John announces the completion of the metamorphosis. But should we assume that this teleology is valid? It seems unlikely.
The Missing Bird
Written in Mrs. Wren’s first grade class, Harding Elementary School, 1975.
The Missing Bird (recto), Crayon on Manila paper, 10.5″ x 8″
The Missing Bird (verso), Crayon on Manila paper, 10.5″ x 8″
Text:
THE “MISSING BIRD” BY John McCoy Once there was a bird. He had a mother. She said, “Hop, and fly.” He hoped, and fell. His mother cood not find him, and askek mrs. owl. “Look behind th7 tree.” she said. and there he was!
Notes:
Mrs. Mathilda Wren, my first grade teacher, claimed to have served in the armed forces during wartime8. She also had a pair of decorative plastic mushrooms on her desk which she claimed were poisonous. The poison was so strong, she said, that a child need only touch the fungi to die a painful death. Today I believe her intentions were to keep her students’ hands off of her belongings, but the result was a horrified classroom of six-year-olds. Why would anyone keep something so dangerous on their desk? we wondered. What if we brushed against the mushrooms by accident in the midst of show and tell? Eventually, the brighter students in the class realized that the mushrooms posed no real danger, and they terrorized the rest of us by threatening to force us to touch the forbidden objects.
Some of the anxiety of this situation is no doubt reflected in The Missing Bird, a story which at first appears to be straightforward, but which reveals a sinister underbelly upon closer examination. Although baby animals are often separated from their mothers in children’s literature (see P. D. Eastman’s Are You My Mother? [1960] or Eric Hill’s Where’s Spot? [1980]), it is not so typical for the mother herself to be the author of the separation.
The reader must decide for themself whether the mother truly believes that her child can fly or if she is malicious in her instructions. The central tragedy of the fledgeling bounding forth only to plummet, Icarus-like, is vivid no matter what the mother’s motivation. The chance misspelling of “hoped” instead of “hopped” is felicitous: just as the bird, we too hope for the best as we venture into the world, only to be brought low by gravity.
Owls are traditionally figures of wisdom, but the sensitive reader will question the narrative value of the tacked-on character of Mrs. Owl. Why can’t the mother see for herself where her child is? She knows he must have fallen near the tree. Perhaps the mother isn’t really looking.
The Restaurant
Written in 1976 or 1977, location unknown.
The Restaurant (recto), #2 pencil on white Kraft paper, 8″ x 10.5″
The Restaurant (verso), #2 pencil on white Kraft paper, 8″ x 10.5″
Text:
There was a restaurant where a man who sold pencils would stop every day to eat breakfast. And all the morning he would shout out loud to him self as if he wanted everyone to hear. There was also a threesome that had a favorate table to eat at. To day, however, as they where sitting down, they noticed a lady 6′ tall, long-black haired, coming in. They shuffled around nevously, collecting cups, plates, and silver ware, and sat down making it appear as if they just had breakfast. Then, the lady sat down drank half a cup of coffee, and then began talking to herself. Not outloud, like the pencil- man, but in a soft murmur. The threesome left by the backdoor. And even after the tabe was wiped & cleaned, the lady still looked on, still clutching the half-emty cup. The pencil-man glanced over, saw the lady, and ran out the door. The lady soon left. The next day, the threesome had just finished breakfast when the lady came in. They left. The lady spotted the pencil-man talkig outloud and went to the chair next to him. “It’s to cold outside! The birds are freezing, dam9 it!” said the pencil- man. “I know nobody wants to, but somebody’s got to feed the birds!” “May I have some tea, herald?” asked the lady. The man grabbed the teapot, poured the lady some. “I ain’t nobody named herald,” the man said. The next day the man & woman came together. The threesome left for good. The man & woman began to talk together. They left and moved into an apartment together wher all the do is tall softly to one another. And the restourant will never be the same.
Notes:
No writings save for notebook pages of cursive handwriting practice remain from Mrs. Vernarsky’s second grade class, which is a shame, because that means I won’t be able to point out that Mrs. Vernarsky had an enormous beehive hairdo (except in this sentence). When I try to remember what I wrote in her class, all I can remember is being caught drawing “Big Daddy Roth”-type hot rods, the kinds with monsters and big chrome exhaust pipes10.
The author in 1976. Happy Bicentennial!
Even if there is no surviving literary record of my second grade year, its importance to my personal development should not be underestimated. It was in the second grade that I was found to be nearsighted, and the resultant eyewear immured me from my playmates. Oh, they still traded their Now ‘n’ Laters with me, still dropped their Scooby-Doo valentines in my box, but dodgeball was forever changed.
It’s informative to look at a report card from this time. While I always got good marks for “Health Habits” I was slipping in “Rules and Regulations,” “Respects Rights,” and the notorious metric of “Plays Well With Others.” This, then, was the beginning of of my Bad Boy phase:
Small wonder, then, that alienation should be the major theme of The Restaurant. None of its characters are able to communicate with one another, preferring instead to shout or murmur nonsensically—or, in the case of “the Threesome,” to abstain from discourse entirely. Although I cannot recall my initial conception of The Restaurant, its obvious models are Sartre and Beckett, perhaps by way of a particularly bleak skit on Zoom.
For example, the ostensible protagonist, “the Pencil-Man,” craves attention from an indifferent world, but is paralyzed by his own incompetence. “Feed the pigeons,” he admonishes, but why doesn’t he just feed them himself? Surely there is complementary bread at the restaurant. At least the Pencil-Man is given a possible motivation by the narrator: he wants somebody, anyone to hear. When “the Lady” makes her appearance, she is described objectively, blankly, as though she were a suspect in a police line-up: “6′ tall, long-black hair.” But what is her crime? Merely her attempt to connect with another human. “Herald,” she calls the man, and in the misspelling we may see the Pencil-Man as John the Baptist, another abrasive hairy man who shouted a lot. The Pencil-Man, however, is unwilling to take the role of martyr; he instead offers tea, as though a participant in a Zen Buddhist chadō ceremony. Thus we see the contrast between Western and Eastern paths to transcendence.
Although they strike up a relationship, romance does not seem to be a remedy for the alienated Pencil-Man and Lady. Theirs is a sexless relationship, in which all they do is talk softly to one another. This would seem to indicate communication, but it is a communication devoid of either action or context. How will they survive? Who will sell the pencils?
Perhaps the most enigmatically fascinating characters of all are “the Threesome.” In contrast to the narrator’s clinical portrayal of the Lady, the Threesome are given no description, not even to differentiate them from one another. Are they men or women? Are they lovers? Why are they so threatened by the arrival of the Lady? Possibly they represent dissolution of identity, the generic, interchangeable personality of Late Stage Capitalism. If so, their aversion to the Lady makes grim sense. The Threesome attempt to absorb the Pencil-Man into their hive mind, only to have the Lady encourage his eccentricity. Theirs is the true tragedy of the story, as they are unable to even enjoy their breakfast, preferring the imitation of eating to true nourishment.
This was when CARToons Magazine was at the height of its popularity and there always seemed to be an issue being passed around by the boys in class. Looking back, I am confused by my interest here because I have always been indifferent to cars. But I do like “Big Daddy” Roth. ↩︎
Boston is a great place for cemeteries. If you visit our fair city as a tourist and walk the Freedom Trail, which is the red-brick line that connects downtown Boston’s and Charlestown’s most famous historic sites, then amongst Revolutionary venues like Bunker Hill and the Old North Church you will also find three cemeteries: Granary Burying Ground, King’s Chapel Burying Ground, and Copp’s Hill Burying Ground. Around these parts, graveyards are called “burying grounds” when they date back to colonial times, which is both charming and kind of spooky, and that makes them even better. Even out in the ‘burbs where I live you will find burying grounds: there’s one in West Roxbury, the Westerly Burying Ground, which dates to 1640. It’s almost invisible from facing Centre street as it’s behind nondescript iron fences and sandwiched between a brand-new condominium building on the left a Walgreen’s parking lot on the right. Except the Walgreens went out of business last year. But we might get a Trader Joe’s in its place!
Aside from burying grounds, there are many other, relatively-newer cemeteries in and around Boston, of which two of the best are sprawling Victorian estates: Forest Hills Cemetery in Jamaica Plain and Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge. Both are full of monuments shaped as weeping angels and half-covered urns and they are still open for new residents if you’re interested, and also have tens of thousands of dollars that you’re willing to skim off your children’s inheritances.
My point is: if you like strolling around beautiful old cemeteries looking at unique and fascinating markers, then Boston has you covered. Listed below are some of my favorite graves, monuments, and markers that you can look for the next time you’re in the area and feeling morbid.
Looking into Granary Burying Ground from Tremont Street, the eye is drawn to the enormous Franklin Obelisk, which is not a marker for Benjamin Franklin, who is buried in Philadelphia 300 miles away, but a monument to his parents, Josiah and Aviah. It’s not even their original memorial! This obelisk was erected in 1827 to replace their earlier, worn-out headstones1.
Obelisks were a huge fad in the Victorian era, following the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt in 1798 and the ensuing European excavations of ancient sites. In their ancient, Middle Kingdom usage, obelisks were associated with Ra and placed in front of the sun-god’s temples. 19th Century Europeans adopted the form as a general-purpose monument, and built them bigger and fancier; the most famous example of which (for Americans) being the Washington Monument. Anyway, to return to the Franklin Monument: I cannot over-stress that this is not Benjamin Franklin’s grave. It’s not that the marker is being actively deceiving, but most people will only clock the word “Franklin;” and once when I was walking by I overheard a tour guide tell her audience that this was the final resting place of the famous kite-flyer. So I guess the moral of this is that Ben Franklin is confusing. As the Firesign Theatre put it, the only president of the United States who was never president of the United States.
Grave of Mary Goose, 1690. Wikimedia Commons.
People will also tell you that Mary Goose—who, unlike Ben, is indisputably interred in Granary Burying Ground—was the original Mother Goose of nursery fame. This is a flat-out lie, and it distracts from the fact that there’s a gravestone for a woman named Mary Goose and that’s delightful enough.
Claude Shannon’s grave, Mt. Auburn Cemetery
On one of our visits to Mt. Auburn Cemetery, my wife Marina spied a marker which appeared to only be a mathematical formula: H = -Σ pi log pi. Intrigued, we circled around the headstone and discovered that its other side was the front, and that this was the gravestone of Claude Shannon (1916–2001), also known as “the father of information theory.”
Claude Shannon’s grave (reverse), photo by me
Shannon was a polyglot: a mathematician, electrical engineer, and computer scientist, who was there when computer science first became a discipline. In his master’s thesis he theorized that Boolean logic could be applied to electrical circuits, which became the basis of digital computing. As if inventing computers wasn’t enough, in a later paper he laid the foundation for information theory by describing a theoretical system for conveying data, which is why we have an Internet.
The formula on his marker is his entropy equation, which describes the level of uncertainty in a communication system—that is, what’s the noise-to-signal ratio a network. In Shannon’s biography A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age, authors Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman noted that Shannon’s children wanted the equation on the front of the grave, but his wife opted for the reverse. However, my wife and I spotted the back before the front, owing to the position of the grave relative to the main path. And honestly? This is the preferable way of viewing the gravestone.
Jules and Jane Marcou’s graves, Mt. Auburn Cemetery
Mt. Auburn has some of the most whimsical graves ever, and amongst the most whimsical are those belonging to natural scientists. Jules Marcou (1824–1898) has a stone which is often mistaken as having the shape of a nautilus shell. But it’s actually modeled after the nautilus’s extinct prehistoric cousin, the ammonite, a class that is closer genetically to octopi and squid. Ammonites are particularly interesting to geologists and paleontologists because there were many thousand species of the creatures over the course of 344 million years, from the Devonian period to the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event. The practical upshot of this is that fossils of ammonites (which are bountiful) are helpful markers for determining just how old the geologic layer you’re looking at is.
Jules and Jane Marcou’s graves, photo by me
Which is why an ammonite rather than a nautilus is an appropriate marker for Marcou, who wasn’t a marine biologist but a geologist. Marcou divided his working life between Switzerland and the United States, eventually co-founding (along with Louis Agaaaiz) the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard.
Alongside Jules lies his wife Jane (1818–1903). From those dates we can see that Jane was Jules’s elder by six years, which may not seem like much, but which is remarkable for an era when men generally married much younger women. They married in 1850 when Jane would be 32, so good on you guys for bucking convention. I don’t know if the oak leaves on her stone have any specific significance—oaks are generally associated with strength and longevity. But I do know that the marker pairs beautifully with her husband’s in size, color, and detail.
Dog monuments, Mt. Auburn Cemetery
Throughout Mt. Auburn there are many stone carvings in the shape of dogs. This doesn’t mean that dogs are buried under the markers. Mt. Auburn officially doesn’t allow pets to be interred (although there are rumors that some have been snuck in); these dogs are symbols of watchfulness and fidelity, standing guard over the human remains. In many folk traditions, Dogs are seen as psychopomps—spiritual guides to the afterlife, who make sure souls make their way safely to the next world. A modern reference to this tradition is in the Pixar film Coco, where the stray xolo dog, Dante, turns out to be an alebrije, a Mexican spirit guide.
Grave of Mary Prentiss Saunders, photo by me
The dog shown here has the inscription “1843-M.P.S.-1849” and is the marker for Mary Prentiss Saunders, who sadly died when she was six. I have no way of knowing, but I like to imagine this is a likeness of a loyal pet of hers.
Gracie Sherwood Allen, Forest Hills Cemetery
Many people visit Forest Hills specifically to see “the Girl in the Glass.” The memorial is something of a superstar amongst the graveyard set. However, my family and I stumbled across it by chance and with no prior knowledge while on a summer’s outing in the cemetery. This is, of course, the best way to experience almost anything, but if you’re reading this post then that’s not on the menu. Sorry.
The monument for Gracie Sherwood Allen (1876-1880) is a life-sized marble sculpture of the child, encased in an enclosure of glass something like a tiny gazebo. In her hand, Gracie holds a bouquet of wilting flowers—a bit on the nose, even for Victorians. If you aren’t expecting it, or even if you are, it can be unnerving, but in a sweet and sad sort of way. Gracie died before her fifth birthday from whooping cough. Sadly, before modern vaccines, childhood diseases were devastating: measles, rotavirus, diphtheria, polio, and pertussis, to name only a few of the worst. When you see life expectancies from years past, it’s the deaths before the age of ten that mostly drag the averages down. If you made it to age six, you had as much a chance of reaching old age as you do today. The moral of this is don’t make RFK jr. secretary of health and human services.
Many descriptions of this grave make little or no mention of the monument’s creator. In this piece by WBZ News Boston he’s simply called “a local sculptor2.” The artist in question was Sydney H. Morse (1832–1903) and he was a fascinating character: a Unitarian preacher, an anarchist, editor of the Boston magazine TheRadical, and a self-taught sculptor and painter who never quite made it in the art world. He specialized in portraiture, mostly of historic or famous figures. He had a correspondence with Walt Whitman over some likenesses Morse made of the poet. While we don’t know if the sculptures mentioned in these letters met with approval, we do know that Whitman called an earlier bust of himself by Morse “wretchedly bad.”
Here’s a TikTok by user @ghoulplease_ that provides many views of the statue, as well as giving a nod to Forest Hill’s other child under glass (they have two!):
Sons of Jabez and Lydia Sweet, Copp’s Hill Burying Ground
What’s sadder than a gravestone for a child? How about one for four children? Henry, Ebenezer, Jabez, and Jabez Henry Sweet, aged four, fourteen, twelve, and ten months respectively, share a single grave, erected some time after the last death in 1807. This is a later grave for Copp’s Hill, which was established in 1649 and which is mostly comprised of colonial stones, including many figures from the revolutionary period.
The Sweet children’s marker tells a sad but incomplete story. The names Jabez and Jabez Henry indicate that the parents were hoping for a (male) heir but meeting tragedy after tragedy. However, we don’t know if their were other children born before, during, or after these attempts. The death years are 1800, 1802, 1805, and 1807, which sounds absolutely exhausting for poor Lydia Sweet, but given the expectation of the times I wonder if another child, perhaps a daughter, was born between ’02 and ’053.
The stone has a beautiful, heart-rending poem, with a sophisticated extended metaphor of roses written by someone who must have been a gardener:
Stay, gentle reader, view this spot of earth, Sacred to virtue, innocence and worth, Four infant roses, budding in the morn, Shed their sweet fragrance in life’s early dawn, Entwin’d their parent stems, so fond careſ’d4 Each gave one smile, to glad the pensive breaſt, And dropp’d and wither’d, died! Here seek repose, Till Christ transplant them in the groves above, To bloom immortal in the joys of love.
Quentin Compson III Memorial, Anderson Memorial Bridge
To end this post on a happier (?) note, I wanted to finish this list with a marker commemorating the death of someone who never lived: Quentin Compson III, a character who first appeared as a main character in William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929) and later in Absalom, Absalom! (1936). In Faulkner’s works, Quentin is a neurotic young man, the offspring of a once-prosperous Southern family whose fortunes have fallen to the point of selling off their plantation parcel by parcel. In Faulkner’s books Quentin attends Harvard University, where he struggles with guilt over his family’s history and with the disappearance of his sister Caddy, who ran off in the night. To his Northern classmates, Quentin is an exotic curiosity, and his roommate grills him on his ambivalence to the South.
The Sound and the Fury is a notoriously opaque book, full of jumbled chronology, competing points of view, and streams of consciousness. So while Faulkner doesn’t directly depict it, the reader can eventually tease out that Quentin commits suicide by filling his jacket’s pockets with flatirons and jumping off a bridge—unnamed by Faulkner, but generally believed to be the Anderson Memorial Bridge, which on the Cambridge side leads directly to Harvard Square.
In 1965 a mysterious brass plaque, only large enough to cover a single brick, appeared on the interior wall of Anderson Bridge by the pedestrian path. It read:
Quentin Compson III June 2, 1910 Drowned in the Fading of Honeysuckle
Faulkner used the word “honeysuckle” 29 times in TSatF—all but one of them in Quentin’s point-of-view section, where he wanders about Harvard planning his eventual demise. Who placed the plaque initially was a mystery, as was whomever replaced it in 1975 following its accidental removal during renovations. That replacement plaque altered the text to “Drowned in the Odor of Honeysuckle,” which fans of the monument mostly found inferior. In 2017, following yet another renovation, a new plaque was placed on the exterior of the bridge on the downstream side, this one restoring the original wording.
A 2019 Harvard Gazette article attributes the original plaque’s placement to Stanley Stefanic, Jean Stefanic, and Tom Sugimoto, in a ceremony to commemorate the 55th anniversary of Quentin’s (literary, not literal) death.
The senior Franklins’ graves didn’t even last a century after their deaths. I hope they didn’t pay a lot. ↩︎
This article also claims that there is an “eagle sculpture atop a headstone that was the basis for the golden sculpture that greets visitors by the main entrance [to Boston College].” Well Mr. WBZ, that is a straight-up falsehood. I work in the museum that houses the original eagle, and it’s a Meiji period bronze, most likely executed by Chōkichi Suzuki (1848–1919). ↩︎
There are two long letters S in this poem. The general rule for this character, when it was in fashion, was to use it when an S appeared in the middle of the word; starting and ending letters were the round S’es we have today. However, the poet (or engraver) missed one on “pensive.” Also they use the word Till when they wanted ‘Til. Sorry, this is the stuff I think about. ↩︎
