It was particularly interesting to note the other day some of the big events happening this month in Chestertown. In June, the town will host the charmingly non-traditonal National Music Festival, have a celebration for James Joyce, and will end with a community recital of T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”
Needless to say, this is not your typical fun-loving summer event calendar for small rural towns in America, but it is a great reminder of how much Chestertown loves, well, quirkiness.
As Merriam-Webster defines it, quirkiness is to be “strikingly unconventional.” Not so much an interest in the bizarre, but a very high comfort level with idiosyncrasy in general. Sudden turns or twists in programs and events that would throw other towns off their cultural rails are taken in stride here in 21620.
The June lineup is the best evidence of this.
It starts with the National Music Festival. To the countless gratitude of greater Chestertown, for five years now the NMF has provided the community with two weeks filled with the “striking unconventional” in both classical and contemporary music. From original compositions that include the use of a farm tractor to performing in the woods of Adkins Arboretum, the Festival’s two hundred young musicians offer some of most challenging work found anywhere in the country.
In the middle of the month there will be a full day devoted to James Joyce’s novel Ulysses with Chestertown Bloomsday on June 16. From breakfast to dusk, town residents and guests will be spending the day getting into the head of Leopold Bloom, the novel’s protagonist, with readings and lectures throughout downtown.
And finally, on June 26, there will be a celebration of the 100th year of the publication of T.S. Eliot’s epic “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” at the Garfield Center* with distinguished members of the community reciting parts of the fifteen minute poem with ample amounts of Crow Farm wine in hand.
Our love of quirkiness can be found in smaller ways as well. The downtown shoe store that really only sold newspapers or the gas station better known for produce than car repair. The list goes on.
When one looks for the roots of the Chestertown fondness for the quirky, Washington College is a good place to start. After literally hundreds of years of eccentric professors and off-beat students walking the streets, it’s quite likely the our enjoyment of the different simply rubbed off on the town itself. And, in due course, that encouraged those who also take pleasure in the quirky to move to the area.
Chestertown is not the only place where quirkiness thrives. In the case of Austin, Texas, another college town which has enjoyed this same dynamic, they have chosen the word “weird” to define this kind of culture. To be clear, the word “weird” in this case is just Texas-speak for quirkiness, just a little more direct for Longhorn sensibilities.
In fact, Austin have been very smart in promoting their love of the weird with their “Keep Austin Weird” campaign, sponsored by that city’s independent business association, the equivalent of our Downtown Chestertown Association. The results after almost ten years indicate a remarkable success story.
And not only was this a commercial success. The campaign was taken so seriously that at least one major work of academic scholarship has been done on the subject with the publication of “Weird City: Sense of Place and Creative Resistance in Austin, Texas” by University of Texas Press.
There have been quite a few cities who quickly started their own campaigns as well. Following Austin’s footsteps, other “hip” towns like Portland, Madison, Santa Cruz and Asheville started their own campaigns using the same exact phrase, which frankly surprised us a bit given they seen themselves as creative communities. Nonetheless, it seems they have too have enjoyed the benefits of broadcasting their interest in the weird to the weird.
Perhaps its time for the world to know of Chestertown’s own love of the quirky.
* a benefit event to support the Chestertown Spy