the books I read in 2024

There are still a dozen days left in 2024 but my progress in The black book by Lawrence Durrell is quite dismal. I probably won't finish reading it before the end of the year. I made the mistake of checking the book out because I was rewatching The Durrells in Corfu on PBS Passport. That series is an adaptation of Gerald Durrell's books about the family's years on Corfu, from the 1930s up to the spread of fascism sending the family back to Bournemouth. It's the rollicking story of a widow and her four eccentric children. Durrell's Black book is more experimental and surrealistic. I was also intrigued because I had read The black book by Orhan Pamuk (1990) many years ago. I remember very much liking Pamuk's book though the images in my brain at the moment could be from that book or other Pamuks.

These are the books I read in 2024, in chronological order.

• Orwell's roses, by Rebecca Solnit (2021)
• The sympathizer, by Viet Thanh Nguyen (2015)
• Becoming, by Michelle Obama (2018)
• Red, white & royal blue, by Casey McQuiston (2019) - I don't think I've watched the film adaptation more than 100 times yet.
• Trickster makes this world: mischief, myth, and art, by Lewis Hyde (1997)
• Didn't nobody give a shit what happened to Carlotta, by James Hannaham (2022)
• Bad gays: a homosexual history, by Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller (2022)
• Architects of an American landscape: Henry Hobson Richardson, Frederick Law Olmsted, and the reimagining of America's public and private spaces, by Hugh Howard (2022) - Bill and I walked about in Mount Auburn Cemetery in October, one of the great 19th-century public spaces.
• Theorem, by Pier Paolo Pasolini, translated by Stuart Hood (first published 1968, my copy is the NYRB, 2023 edition) - the basis for the Pasolini film Teorema (1968)
• Let's not do that again, by Grant Ginder (2022)
• Pink line: journeys across the world's queer frontiers, by Mark Gevisser (2020)
• Young Mungo, by Douglas Stuart (2022) - like his earlier Shuggie Bain, this book has a strong sense of place
• Blackbird, by Larry Duplechan (1986)
• The color of law: a forgotten history of how our government segregated America, by Richard Rothstein (2017)
• Erasure, by Percival Everett (2001) - I read a review of his new novel James (inspired by Huck Finn's companion) and read this book in anticipation of James coming out in paperback. More recently, I read a review of Colored television by Danzy Senna in NYTBR. Senna wrote the introduction to My search for Warren Harding (see below) and is the wife of Percival Everett. Will the circle be unbroken?
• The Paris hours, by Alex George (2020) - plenty of amusing name-dropping from literary Paris, e.g., Gertrude Stein, Hemingway, Proust, Sartre
• Older brother, by Mahir Guven, translated by Tina A. Kover (2019)
• What she ate: six remarkable women and the food that tells their stories, by Laura Shapiro (2017) - a lucky grab from random searching at the public library. Shapiro's voice in the concluding chapter seemed so familiar even though our life paths were different. Turns out, she was born the day after I was. It was a good read too!
• The pairing, by Casey McQuiston (2024) - more food and drink and story
• The box: how the shipping container made the world smaller and the world economy bigger, by Marc Levinson (2nd ed., 2016) - I accidentally ordered two copies and gave one to Craig. I hit "add to cart" at bookshop.org when it seemed like things were going kerflooey and didn't review my cart carefully enough. Craig enjoyed the book too.
• This is New York, by E.B. White (1948)
• My search for Warren Harding, by Robert Plunket (first published 1983, my copy is New Directions, 2023)
• The black book, by Lawrence Durrell (first published in Paris in 1938, not published in unexpurgated form in the U.S. until 1960 or in Britain until 1973; my reading copy is Dutton, 1960)

I use Goodreads to record my reading. As usual, it's about an even mix of fiction and nonfiction. If you want to see how Goodreads compiles these books and shows you a clickable cover where you can get more information, go to 

https://www.goodreads.com/user/year_in_books/2024/6837039

separated at birth: simple tasks like dealing with your shoes

They've argued. He's all banged up. She's going to her own room for the night. He sits on the bed to get undressed but his injuries prevent his reaching his feet. She helps him take off his shoes. (The Diplomat, Season 2, on Netflix)

He's a troubled kid, always carrying a gun. Mom gets exasperated and kicks him out of the house. He ends up staying with a couple ne'er-do-wells. They treat him badly and make him do criminal things. He finally can't take it anymore after they pee in his shoes. "They're expensive. We went on a special trip to London to get them." He drags himself home. She asks him about the smell. He just says "My shoes" and she sits him down and takes the shoes off and gives him a hug. (The Durrells in Corfu, Season 1, Episode 4, on PBS Passport)

Unconditional love ... though maybe intermittent and contextual.

writing in space

Sometimes my indexing or cataloging takes me to places I really want to go or where I have very happily been. Sometimes it's a bit of both. I really enjoyed my trips to Milan in 2018, including a climb up to the roof of the Duomo. Hanging out with the gargoyles. My indexing a day or two ago included an article about eL Seed in Abitare. His work usually includes some Arabic calligraphy and the work above was on the plaza in front of the Duomo in Milan. He is Franco-Tunisian so I assumed his nom d'art was derived from something like al-Said. But no. One of the bits of biography that I found on the web described his love of El Cid as a child and his appropriation and respelling of that name.

I often check the Library of Congress Name Authority File when I encounter a new person and want to see if their record looks ok. I was amused to note that the record for eL Seed was done at the Metropolitan Museum of Art so I sent them a note of gratitude. William claimed it.

Thanks, William, and thank you, Bassam Makansi on Facebook, for the good picture of the calligraphy on the plaza. The picture from the roof of the Duomo is mine from 2018.

newest trend: architectural office name from tail of personal name?

Twice in the last couple days in my indexing, I have encountered an architectural firm that invented their name from latter portions of their personal names.

This is a project by Miogui Architecture, a collaboration of Sabine Fremiot and Léo Barestegui, in Le Havre, France.

This is a project by elaNández, founded by Manuela Fernández Langenegger, an architect based in Milan.

Naming is an art. Why not do it creatively?

separated at birth: celadon shards and green tiles

 

Li Hongwei

The Origin, 2022

(exhibition on view currently at the

Alfred Ceramic Art Museum)

detail of façade

Chao Center for Asian Art

The Ringling

Sarasota, Florida

Machado Silvetti, architects

I'm an antique and like print magazines

The ceramics library did not receive the July/August issue of The Magazine Antiques and it has been claimed. I imagined that I could go over to the David A. Howe Public Library and use their copy to index the issue for the Avery Index. Both the Hornell and Wellsville public libraries used to subscribe to Antiques. Those were the days, the before days. The holdings in Wellsville stopped in mid 2020. The librarian looked in STARCat and said that there was no indication of the magazine being held at Hornell. There were quite a few other Wellsville periodicals that seemed to stop in 2020. And the display of current magazines was quite paltry, relative to a few years ago when I indexed an issue there. Sigh.

But it was too early, after I discovered there was no issue to index, to go over to Texas Hot for lunch so I meandered into the special collections parlor and then to the 700s to see what was there on art and architecture. Drifting along into the 900s for history and biography, I noticed a book entitled What she ate: six remarkable women & the food that tells their stories, by Laura Shapiro (Viking, 2017). I read the first few pages of the introduction and went right over to check out the book. Next. 

My current reading is Older brother by Mahir Guven (Europa Editions, 2019). I'm enjoying it so I should be able to get through it and What she ate before the latter is due back at the library.

visiting the Met with my older sister

My older sister Roberta lived in Queensbury, New York, about an hour north of Albany. She was a volunteer at the Hyde Collection, a museum in Glens Falls. Although she did various addressing and desk tasks, the task she talked about with the most warmth was sewing dust covers for some of the historic furniture when it was in storage.

Roberta came down to New York City for a day trip sponsored by the Hyde when I was living in the City, probably at least twenty years ago. The bus dropped them off in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Berta and I spent a couple hours or so in the Metropolitan. Since she was a regular seamstress, knitter, and crocheter, we went to the American collection and looked at quilts. It was delightful to look at textile objects with her. They were art objects but she talked about the bias of the fabric and how it worked with and against the design and preservation of the object.

We looked at other art and then walked across Central Park. We ate at a Vietnamese place on Columbus Avenue on the Upper West Side. I don't remember what we did later in the afternoon other than getting her to the Radio City Music Hall neighborhood where the bus was picking them up for the return trip.

I have been thinking especially about Roberta because she died this past week. Just days earlier, she had been on an early 80th-birthday cruise on Lake George with her whole immediate family. That is, both kids and the grandkids. She had a pulmonary embolism about two weeks before she died and then was up and down. After a downturn, she declined returning to the ICU and died in her daughter's arms.

Naturally, she has been much in my thoughts. I went up to the library to drop off a note for one of my colleagues and also picked up the latest issue of Magazine Antiques which is one of the magazines I index for the Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals. I was looking at the issue as I walked home and there was an article about the conservation of a canapé à la turque commissioned by Marie Antoinette and now in the collection of the California Palace of the Legion of Honor. The subtitle of the article mentions its "prized if drearily upholstered presence at San Francisco's Legion of Honor since the 1950s." The sofa now has new hand-embroidered upholstery. 

Daderot, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

This picture, from Wikimedia Commons, predates the conservation and reupholstering. I was not familiar with the term "canapé" in reference to furniture. The Art and Architecture Thesaurus describes a canapé as an elegant sofa developed in France in the 18th century and picked up by Chippendale and others.

Berta would never have had such a fancy piece of furniture in her residence, unless maybe if it was handed down by an elegant relative. It wasn't money. It was common sense. She was the solid rock of us kids and I'll miss that.

no more uppity teachers ... or students?

We were supposed to go on a field trip to the Cuba Block Barn today but Hurricane Debby is working her way up the eastern coast. Rain date in September. When I got to the Alfred Station SDB Church parking lot where we were supposed to combine for shared rides to Cuba, Sharon Burdick arrived and she had copies of a fact sheet on the Bedford Corners School House. The schoolhouse was the added bonus for our trip to Cuba, being on the road between the Block Barn and lunch at Sprague's in Portville.

The schoolhouse is now the home of the Portville Historical and Preservation Society. The main room had double desks to hold two students and was large enough that multiple grades could be taught. The teacher was seated on a platform in the front of the room. Later, it was mandated that teachers should not be on a different level than the students and the arrangement of the room was flipped with the teacher platform at the back.

When I was in first-third grades in New Auburn, Wisconsin, the school house was for all the grades, no kindergarten but all twelve numbered grades met in one building with shared rooms for first and second and for third to fifth. That meant that my older sister and I were in the same classroom when she was in fifth grade and I in third. One day, Roberta's class was discussing the polar regions and nosy me butted in to say that we had been to the North Pole. Roberta had to correct my story to say that it was Santa's North Pole in the Adirondacks.

The "we" of the field trip were members of the Bakers Bridge Historical Association and other interested folks.

the disappearing hours

Having lots of books around the house can be a real delight but sometimes one will just disappear. It won't be in the place that I'm sure it should be. The most recent disappearing title was the small and inexpensive, and long-owned, partial facsimile of the Hours of Jeanne d'Evreux, Queen of France. This fourteenth-century manuscript illuminated by Jean Pucelle even has a Wikipedia page. 

The facsimile is just under five and a half inches tall. When the book of hours, now in the Cloisters collection of the Metropolitan Museum in New York, was being restored, the Met displayed the disbound manuscript before it was cleaned and rebound. The "facsimile" is actually slightly larger than the original.

The other day, I was thinking about something and the facsimile came to mind. I went to that shelf of small books in my bedroom and the Hours facsimile was not there. The facsimile of the Hours of Mary of Burgundy was there. I went down the shelf book-by-book several times. I looked on a few shelves where other books of manuscript illumination are kept. I thought, for a while, that I might have lent the facsimile to an art student who was in the manuscripts class. No luck. I was about ready to resign myself to no longer having the facsimile.

This morning, it is cooler outside and I was opening the window in the middle room of my part of the family house. I realized that there was another cluster of little books at the end of the shelf just to my left. And, there was the facsimile of the Hours of Jeanne d'Evreux. Happiness. Made my day.

P.S. (an hour later) I went to move some of the other little books from the shelf near the window to the shelf in the bedroom, the most expectable collective spot for shelving my little books. There was the book on the Bosch and other Flemish paintings in the Prado that I'd really spent a lot of time looking for a year or more ago. I looked among the travel books and among the folders of stuff from trips to Spain. Nope, it was hiding in the little stack of little books.

just a normal guy

“I’ve never felt symbolic. I felt — you know, I’m just here.” He laughed. “I’m just Ken.” (This was an allusion to Ryan Gosling’s showstopping song at the Oscars, the night before the interview.) “I’m just me. I’m just somebody who’s trying to be a writer, trying to do his best. And that’s all I’ve ever wanted to be.”

Salman Rushdie, in an interview with Sarah Lyall, in the New York Times Book Review

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/14/books/salman-rushdie-knife-interview.html