One of the Prettiest Villages in Maine Recently Acquired a Bit of New Jersey
Architectural Crime, Camden, Kitsch, Maine
“Christmas by the Sea.” — A drawing of Camden, Maine at Christmas.
Sippi has a posting on a new piece of home construction, a recently built house so horrible that just one photo should suffice to “harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood, make thy two eyes like stars start from their spheres, thy knotted and combined locks to part, and each particular hair to stand on end like quills upon the fretful porpentine.”
[I]t’s in Camden Maine:
Now, if you’re unfamiliar with Maine in general, and Camden in particular, I’ll try to explain both. For the most part, Maine is an undifferentiated morass of bogs, trees, mud, flies, barren-looking potato fields, wind and solar farm abominations, dotted only occasionally with trailer parks and the vinyl-sided hulks of capes, farmhouses, and bungalows. It’s huge, with no one in it. Well, except for a strip along the southern coast, which includes Camden, where Thurston Howell VII summers, and uses summer as a verb.
Camden is close to the perfect imaginary ideal image of Maine everyone “from away” thinks of when he thinks of our fair state. Despite what you see in the picture, it’s not just a yacht club that won’t let in any garlic eaters. Camden is a twee village hard by the Atlantic, just far enough from Boston and New York to feel like vacation if you’re a partner in a white-shoe law firm. It’s a mayonnaise on white bread sandwich traditionally peopled by rich swells with lots of whales on their pants and zeroes in their trust funds. These people are capable of anything. They’ll eat rhubarb for dessert, and look you right in the eye and tell you they like it.
But they’re not capable of living in a split level ranch under any circumstances, even if it costs 2.2 million spondulicks like this one does. And boyo, am I going to show you some circumstances. What this thing is doing, and doing in Maine, is a dark and bloody mystery to me.
I marvel that no one’s burning crosses on their yard.
The House of Horror.
