My goodness, we live in imperfect times.

It’s been a long two-year stretch of contentious campaigns, elections, and an ensuing presidency resulting in two ensuing Thanksgiving holiday cycles when imperfect families have gathered and let loose their imperfect opinions on imperfect subjects at the most imperfect of times – like at the table during the Thanksgiving meal.

Most people subscribe to the school of thought that teaches us that politics is likely the worst of topics to discuss when the family comes together. But, for crying out loud, there’s always that one uncle, cousin, or sibling – all it takes is a little alcohol and someone to slip in just one insidious comment – that mars the merriment and turns a pleasant occasion into the personification of a potential Facebook rant complete with a steady stream of nasty comments.

Facebook, now being the extended mega horn-wielding arm of the First Amendment right to free speech, might be a regular communication media between friends, random strangers, and of course family members, but after it’s all been typed and the ‘post’ button clicked, is it wise to continue that thread during one of the likely two or three times a year when the whole family gathers in the same room to catch up on each other’s lives and reminisce about old times?

Apparently, yes.

That Thanksgiving of 2015 right after the presidential primary campaign I really hesitated to RSVP and reserve my seat at the Thanksgiving dinner table mainly because, I had to face it, my chosen candidate didn’t win and I was still pretty inert with resentment. But by my very nature I’ve always been one who preferred to regret something she has done rather than something she should have done. So I put on my big girl pants, packed a bag with the obligatory side dish, dessert, good bottle of wine, and half a Xanax, and I went with the promise that I would keep calm and simply take a deep breath and quietly excuse myself if anyone brought up politics, health care, immigration, or any of the other topics people love to argue over.

The Thanksgiving of 2016 was the year I decided a nice quiet holiday at home was in order. I mean, people were just crazy that year! And I learned from Easter dinner 2016 that people, including the ones in my family, were emboldened to speak bigly about their opinions.

My man, my son, and I invited two friends over for a small-scale intimate Thanksgiving feast at our own Thanksgiving table and passed the day feeling the way one should feel at Thanksgiving – thankful with full bellies.

With Thanksgiving 2017 upon us, so far no one in my family has issued any invitations or offered to host this year’s family gathering, which comes as no surprise because, as we all know, hosting a Thanksgiving dinner isn’t exactly an easy task to undertake. It’s time-consuming, it’s expensive, it’s stressful to a degree, and it’s a mess to clean up after. But it’s generally worth it, given that year after year what we’re primarily thankful for is that everyone is still alive and healthy and present for the occasion.

I’m lucky because my two parents are still alive, and although I’ll likely extend them an offer to have a turkey dinner at my house with the three of us here, it was just two weeks ago that I engaged in a regretful waist-deep wade through one manure mound of a Facebook argument with my dad and some family members et al.

In the aftermath, it’s clear to me what I have to do to save this year’s Thanksgiving – I just gotta quit Facebook. At the very least, until the holidays are over.

We’ve all been there. Enough is enough – the negativity, the ubiquitous headlines, the futility of engagement, the time suck of it all and the utter unfulfillment we feel after – yet later on in the day here we sit, checking in to read the replies and scroll through it all again. Lather, rinse, and repeat.

A few years ago I quit Facebook cold turkey and those six or so weeks were refreshing. You know the 16^th Century poetic expression “dark night of the soul” – that brief Facebook-free period was exactly the opposite. I never knew how much stuff I knew that I didn’t even need to know until I quite Facebook. Sure, I missed some things like birthday reminders, the food porn, and even just last night I was able to watch my niece play the oboe streamed live from Boston Symphony Hall. But it’s true that there is just so much information on Facebook that no one needs to be exposed to in order to live a fulfilling life.

Unfortunately at this point in life, quitting Facebook cold turkey – even to save Thanksgiving – isn’t a viable option. As a journalist I need to be plugged into the outside world. And who else is going to post Facebook Fun Friday on The Wanderer page? So if I can’t quit cold turkey, is there an alternative to quitting Facebook, say, quitting ‘warm’ turkey? Keeping a presence on Facebook for specific purposes while jettisoning the junk I know I don’t want to look at? Sounds reasonable, but is the human mind capable of such … such … such discipline?

I’ve gone, one could say, warm turkey now for over a week. I have caught myself scrolling, and have rectified that by ‘unliking’ groups that post things that trigger defensive or disturbed responses in me. And under no uncertain terms will I respond to or read the comments of a family member’s post about anything apart from photos of babies or pets.

Some things should be sacred in the human experience. On Facebook, nothing is sacred. Everything in existence can be attacked – facts can be subjective, the figurative is mistaken for literal, the holy is smeared until it’s unholy, truth diminished to untruth, daddies and daughters reduced to political and moral adversaries.

“I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as a cause for withdrawing from a friend,” said Thomas Jefferson once.

And of course, that should go doubly for family.

Still, had Facebook been a thing during the revolution, the infancy of a new country, the throes of the existence of slavery, and the presidential campaign between Jefferson and John Adams, that eloquent quote might have been one of his Facebook posts, or it might have been something more like, “John Adams. What a loser. #LittleJohnny.”

I wish I could quit Facebook cold turkey, but by cutting it warm turkey now, by next Thursday I might even get it down to room temperature.

So if anything I do is going to save Thanksgiving this year, it’s going to have to be warm turkey – warm turkey on Facebook, and warm turkey on the table at my house.

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone, especially to all the daddies and daughters who’ve ever duked it out on Facebook and who still think the world of each imperfect other.

By Jean Perry

Ever since she was a little girl, Darcy Lee of Mattapoisett has been captivated by the paranormal. The TV show In Search Of… hosted by Leonard Nimoy was the turning point for her, making her question every shadow, every unexplained sound, every story she was ever told about ghosts and other unexplained phenomenon.

As an adult, Lee spent a great deal of time traveling, and in each town she would visit the local bookstore to acquire books about ghosts in the area. She believes these stories represent the folklore of the region.

After living and working in Plymouth, Lee became involved in organizations associated with the town’s history. She heard tales of local hauntings but could find very little research or documentation of these stories – thus, the idea for her new book Ghosts of Plymouth, Massachusetts was born. The book was published in September.

The group gathered at Rochester’s Joseph H. Plumb Memorial Library on Monday night listened with rapt attention as Lee read aloud from her book, describing the long and sordid tale of the haunting of the Captain Thomas Phillips house. This house has the distinction of being the only house in Massachusetts officially designated as haunted, as a result of a court battle between its owner and the disgruntled former tenants.

Lee learned the particulars of this haunting from the court documents, and she recounts them with delicious detail.

The owner of the Phillips House, Josiah Cotton, in 1734 took his tenants to court over what he called slanderous stories and rumors the tenants spread throughout town describing the disturbing and terrifying hauntings they experienced at the house. They asserted that, because of the hauntings, the house was uninhabitable. As a result, Cotton was unable to rent the house to any subsequent tenants. Lee describes this court battle as evolving from merely a slander suit into an attempt by Cotton to “purge the society of superstition.”

Ultimately the court ruled in the tenants’ favor, suggesting that it is not a crime to believe in ghosts and the belief cannot be proven either way.

Based on Lee’s telling, Plymouth is rife with intense hauntings. Local residents have reported having seen a Victorian era couple walking up and down Burial Hill, whose apparitions would always disappear at a particular grave. When Lee researched the grave at which they disappeared – a grave of a child inscribed “Ida Lizzy Spear, 3 years” – she put the pieces of the mystery together.

Lee describes most hauntings as “residual hauntings,” in which ghosts, like a movie replaying, are doing what they did in their ordinary life. The ghosts at Burial Hill, she thinks, were most likely the little girl’s parents visiting their daughter’s grave.

In writing her book, Lee was determined that the stories she retold would be well researched and corroborated by either written record, photographic evidence, or some other verifiable source. She wasn’t looking to “poke the bear” as she puts it, reminding us that she isn’t a ghost hunter but rather a recorder of stories, and her book is an attempt to verify – or in some cases debunk – accounts of hauntings in Plymouth.

Lee, a former board member of the Plymouth Antiquarian Society, said part of the impetus for the book was to find out what could be relatable to the history of Plymouth. She didn’t want her book to recount urban myths, common to all places, but rather “stories related to buildings or tragedies that are part of Plymouth’s fabric and culture.”

Lee reminded the audience that it is not just old houses that are haunted – sometimes a haunting goes with the land. She illustrated this idea with a story of the pilgrims landing at Plymouth to find skeletons of the Pokanoket Wampanoags who had been tragically decimated by plague two years earlier. She wondered aloud, “The sickness, the death, the desperation – does the land hold onto that energy?”

Another haunting of great intensity is the wreck of the brigantine General Arnold in 1778. This ship ran aground in the Christmas blizzard a mile outside Plymouth Harbor, and 70 crewmen died. Lee describes the sailors’ bodies, many of which were never claimed, laid out on the floor of the 1749 Courthouse. “The same boards that are there now,” she added.

Burial Hill, where many of the sailors and captain are buried in a mass grave, the Courthouse, and the harbor are all haunted by these tortured souls, Lee says.

An audience member related her disappointment at not seeing ghosts on an overnight stay at the Lizzie Borden House in Fall River, to which Lee replied that she imagined the ghosts at that house are probably pretty tired of being bothered by visitors.

Perhaps the Borden hauntings will be included in Lee’s upcoming project, which is in the works, of the hauntings in the South Coast.

Lee is doing another reading from her new book at the Mattapoisett Free Public Library on Saturday, November 18, at 2:00 pm, where her book will also be for sale. One may also purchase her book online or directly from the publisher, Acadiapublishing.com.

Lee also has a Facebook page “Ghosts of Plymouth Massachusetts-Books and Author Events” for more information on upcoming events.

By Sarah French Storer

I Love You, Daddy. Starring Louis C.K. and Chloë Grace Moretz. Directed by Louis C.K. Running time: 123 minutes. MPAA rating: R.

Watching the edgy, abandoned-by-its-studio comedy I Love You, Daddy, which may be writer/director Louis C.K.’s last effort for a long while at least, is a saddening experience for one who has admired C.K.’s previous work in stand-up and on TV. In what has to be the most awkward case of timing since Husbands and Wives premiered after the Woody Allen scandal, the movie’s former distributor, The Orchard, mailed out its for-your-consideration screener discs, which arrived days after the schlubby auteur’s acts of sexual misconduct were confirmed and attached to real names, and after C.K. himself acknowledged that the women’s “stories were true.” So now hundreds of critics are sitting with this damn thing, wondering whether to watch it in the first place, and wondering what the hell to do with it once they have watched it.

What I can do with it, having watched it, is to say that I Love You, Daddy requires a great deal of unpacking if one is unwilling to ignore the real life surrounding it. I can say that the movie is clearly the work of a gifted weasel — a man who writes scenes and dialogue that actors can latch onto and make sing, and also a man who has, on several occasions that we know of, pleasured himself in front of women without their stated consent. The film is about perversion and neurosis, as so much of Louis C.K.’s work is. It is also unavoidably funny, due largely to the terrific cast C.K. has assembled. It would be a bummer if the hilarious apoplexy of, say, Edie Falco as a harried TV producer toiling against an impossible schedule, or the joie de sleaze of Charlie Day as a loutish TV comedy star, were lost in oblivion. Perhaps at some point in the future their contributions, and those of others in the cast, can be viewed and enjoyed.

C.K. plays Glen Topher, a successful television creator working on his second show, which he isn’t crazy about, but a prime-time slot was open and he grabbed it. Glen is also dealing with his rudderless 17-year-old daughter China (Chloë Grace Moretz), who finds herself drifting into the orbit of Glen’s filmmaking idol Leslie Goodwin (John Malkovich), who seems to be conceived as a cosmopolitan libertine in the mold of, oh, Woody Allen (whose influence on C.K.’s show Louie and on this film is obvious). Glen is appalled that the 68-year-old genius Leslie has taken an interest in his daughter. He has endless anguished talks about it with various women in his life, most of whom tell him he’s a schmuck, a bad father, a bad man. Even the movie star (Rose Byrne) who admires Glen’s work and may star in his new show soon finds herself regarding him with distaste and frustration.

The Louie persona has always attracted women, despite himself, and then repelled them, because of himself. Louis C.K. is more savage to himself (or to his character, but at this point it’s a distinction without much of a difference) than to anyone else in the movie, but that’s nothing new. What is new, and weird, is that I Love You, Daddy — in form an homage to Woody’s notorious Manhattan — both lionizes Allen’s work and deplores his pervy attention to women much younger. I wish I could say the movie worked as Louis’ apologia for his own skeeviness or as an artistic reckoning with it, but a late scene in which seeming justification for grossness — “Everyone’s a pervert” — is put in the mouth of China’s teenage African-American BFF (Ebonee Noel) is dodgy at best. Louis doesn’t dare voice this himself, so he has what he considers a beyond-criticism source — black and female — do it for him. It’s cowardly. It sucks.

It’s impossible to watch I Love You, Daddy except through the stained scrim of its creator’s actions — same as with Husbands and Wives, really, except that movie seemed to have more under the hood. Allen’s film also weighed in at just an hour and forty-eight minutes (generally he has never let his movies run much longer than that, with a couple of exceptions); C.K.’s goes on, often in bland, static two-shots (nicely photographed in b&w though they are), for two hours and three minutes. The movie has fleetingly interesting things to say about what men think female sexuality should be and about women’s “Oh, really?” response to that.

What if the movie had come from a sexually and personally unimpeachable artist? Then, oddly, it wouldn’t seem to have much point. I Love You, Daddy seems to want to be an excoriation of disgusting maleness from a man who knows the disgustingness all too well, who has lived in it and with it, but Glen isn’t disgusting, just a lame, opportunistic creator and an insufficiently assertive parent. The finger of scorn ultimately points not to Glen or even to Leslie (who seems imperiously sexless) but to the flighty China, despite Moretz’s compassionate performance. The source of male agita is a teenage girl who has no inner life, has nothing much except a body to be lusted after, protected, or barely clothed. Which makes this an art-house version of the legendarily creepy ‘80s “comedies” She’s Out of Control or Blame It on Rio, and did we really need one? Even without Louis C.K.’s real-life sliminess, this movie wouldn’t sit well on the stomach.

Corinna Raznikov, the second speaker in a three-part series at the Mattapoisett Historical Society Museum, captivated her audience on Wednesday night with an engaging account of her life in pictures.

Raznikov described her life as a professional photographer as both challenging and rewarding, but perhaps the most satisfying element of her work is how her story is interwoven with the lives and stories of her subjects.

First taken by photography after her uncle gave her a Nikon FE2, Raznikov began what would be a recurring theme in her life: a self-assigned project.

Her first project, she said, would be a largely unsuccessful attempt to capture trout moving through a freshwater stream. In a world before digital cameras, this resulted in hundreds of photos and numerous rolls of film, and it highlighted a characteristic of Raznikov that would serve her well in her profession: her tenacity for getting the best shot.

Raznikov’s love of art began as a child with her many trips to art museums, although she diverged from the path in college, first deciding to be an English major. However, a key faculty advisor suggested she take a class entitled “Women in the Arts,” and the discipline of Art History opened up a whole new world to her.

“My favorite writers told stories with small details of people’s lives,” Raznikov said, and her favorite photographers did the same thing. Photography, like writing, has the magical ability to freeze time, says Raznikov, and helps one to be introspective and understand the world around them.

After studying abroad in Scotland taking part in a year-long course in the history of photography, Raznikov began taking pictures in earnest with a medium format view camera. This camera was unwieldy and large, allowing her to only take up to 10 images at a time before she had to unload and return to the dark room to process her work. This process taught her how to slow down, and endeavor to, as she describes a photograph, “fill a rectangle beautifully.” This view camera again demanded that she look for Cartier-Bresson’s decisive moment.

Raznikov began photographing children at the start of her career, visiting people’s homes and simply spending time around their kids.

“Supermodels have nothing on children!” the photographer says, describing how beautiful and elegant children and babies can naturally be.

A local Marion resident strongly suggested Raznikov photograph her daughter’s wedding, which she bristled at, having had no prior interest in wedding photography. The woman insisted, and Raznikov agreed, provided she could shoot the event in black and white.

“A wedding is a day of stories,” Raznikov discovered, “and so twenty three years ago my love affair with weddings began.”

After giving birth to her daughter, Josephine, she realized two things. First, her work demanded that she move from film to a digital format, and second, she could not sustain both businesses. She ceased most of her portraiture work and focused mostly on weddings.

However, Raznikov kept up her routine of creating self-assigned projects throughout her career. After a visit to Rembrandt’s home in Amsterdam and seeing all the historical objects he collected, she decided to provide children with interesting objects and photograph their responses to those objects. This project resulted in a series of ethereal black and white images that appear timeless.

An audience member mentioned that she thought Raznikov’s photos looked old-fashioned or retro, which the photographer says she frequently hears.

There is a timeless quality to her photos, perhaps due to the black and white imagery, which she favors.

“Only use color if the color is important,” she said.

Or perhaps it’s the candid, natural un-posed images of her subjects that she captures which may remind us of photos from another era.

Raznikov has donated her time to the Sippican School for the last five years photographing upwards of 500 students who participate in Vocabulary Day, in which students dress up as their favorite vocabulary word. Raznikov says she loves that the students are involved in the art project with her, and the sale of the photos has raised between $3,000 to $4,000 to purchase books for the library.

She later collaborated with the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston to create a space to highlight the families and their infants who are born there – a project she felt she was perfectly suited for due to her sunny disposition.

Raznikov sees life through rose-colored glasses (and camera lens), and asks herself of her subjects, “What’s dazzling about them? What’s their best quality?” This philosophy served her well in the Brigham and Women’s project, in which she interacted with parents and newborns, sometimes in sensitive and intense situations.

“I try to be small, to not take up too much space, and not use artificial light,” she said. The project resulted in a permanent installation of twenty 20” x 30” framed photographs, located in the Department of Pediatric Newborn Medicine at the hospital.

Raznikov is working on a new project called the Walls of Healing, which is chronicling celebratory stories of good stuff happening at a local hospital. As a mother of an animal lover, Raznikov is collaborating with daughter Josephine to provide the photographic expertise to local animal shelters to improve the photos of shelter animals on Pet Finder.

            She has begun a personal project in which she is photographing people who have found something they love to do, people who are “exploring the inner light of one’s soul.” She asks the question “How has yoga (or something else) changed your life?”

Raznikov describes it as “documenting people being their best selves” while also “attempting to document the inner soul of humans and animals.”

These personal projects are vitally important to Raznikov. She acknowledged that shooting a wedding can be stressful and challenging, so she prepares for weeks prior to a shoot by interviewing her subjects, researching locations, and readying her equipment.

Quoting Henri Cartier-Bresson, she said, “To photograph is to hold one’s breath.” One must prepare for and be open to the photograph, she said. Recently she has incorporated yoga and meditation into her preparedness routine. Prior to a shoot, she will sit in her car, often with her assistant Leah Latham, and breathe into a meditation, saying, “Let me see light. Let me see love. Let me see joy.” This meditation also appears to be her mantra for how she has approached her entire photographic journey.

By Sarah French Storer