in the mood for travel

Daniel said he was hoping that Americans would still be welcome when he traveled outside the United States, adding that he could always say he was a New Yorker. That reminded me that I was once rewarded with a hug and a kiss on each cheek in Modena, Italy, when I said I was from New York City.

Christie and I were traveling around Emilia-Romagna in October 2001, just a month or so after the attack on the World Trade Center. On our first night, we found a hotel in Modena and went out for drinks and then to supper.

We were somewhat jet-lagged and tired. The woman at the hotel had noted a few nearby eating places of varying character and none caught our fancy as we walked past them. We got to a small square and noticed a welcoming restaurant across the square. The owner was just writing the supper menu on the blackboard and we talked to her, in a mix of English and Italian and facial and hand expression, about what was on offer that evening. After we'd determined that we were really ready to eat there, she said she was Italian and was from Modena. She said you're American and you are from where? When I said "New York," she said "Il principe" (the prince) and gave me a hug and kisses.

The supper was extraordinary. We ended up chatting with a couple Italians who sat at a small table next to ours. We ended up staying until the restaurant closed and then we four went to a coffee bar and closed it down too.

I had another 9-11 experience on that trip. I was walking around San Domenico in Bologna. There weren't too many other people in the plaza and an airplane flew over. Not particularly low in the sky but a reminder of the airplanes flying into the Trade Center. Gave me a start.

On another trip to Italy, we were looking for a lunch place in Buccheri on Sicily. I went over to the prominent restaurant on the central square that said it was open but no one was around to ask about a table. When I got back to the car and reported that to Christie, she said that lots of people seemed to be coming and going from the Caffè Roma nearby. We checked it out and had a delightful lunch. The lesson I learned is that a bit of patience and observation can be a good travel guide.

what are you reading?

Every week in the New York times book review, there is a box on the "Letters" page with two or three short notes listing "what our readers are reading." Last week, one of them said "I am reading Herman Wouk's Marjorie Morningstar for the second time. I first read it 70 years ago. It's still a great read!"

I was reading Marjorie Morningstar way back in the '80s. When I saw Judith one day, she asked what I was reading and I said Marjorie Morningstar and held up my unjacketed older hard-covered edition, bound in basic black. She said that you shouldn't actually admit to reading Herman Wouk.

Whatever. I remember thinking then that it was a good read. At the moment, though, I'm reading the thoroughly modern Family meal by Bryan Washington.

the country house life moderne

This is the new home of Margot Beste-Chetwynde in the 2017 production of "Decline and Fall" based on the novel by Evelyn Waugh. We never get much closer than this but the interiors are extraordinary moderne. I naturally do not know if the interiors were actually filmed in the house shown here. Googling has not yet revealed the buildings used in the three-episode series from Acorn TV and BBC, streaming on Amazon Prime.

But who cares about the real house? There's plenty of good scenery and architecture jokes. If you are wondering how to say "Beste-Chetwynde," the actors say it something like "beastie cheating." The role is delightfully played by Eva Longorio.

short-term rentals and noise complaints

The Alfred Village Planning Board has been working on revisions to the zoning code. One of the new considerations is short-term rentals like Airbnb. Alfred is a college town, rather overwhelmed by its student population. A lot of the houses in the center of the village and beyond are rental houses. Some are big and can be noisy, particularly on Friday and Saturday nights. There is fear that short-term rentals will be occasional party houses and therefore should be limited to the multi-family zones (R-2 and R-3). Some of the bigger houses in the village are grandfathered for greater capacity than two units.

We board members were having an email discussion about which zones should be allowed to have short-term rentals. Someone brought up boisterous parties they knew about in such rentals. It seems to me ungracious to preclude graduation parties in the "collegiest town" in America. As a resident of the central village in R-2, I know about the noise that can burst from the house and yard of some of those group houses, especially on a warm afternoon. The boom-boom from the speakers can be especially irksome. But I do really appreciate being in the center of town, where I can walk to most every place I need to go.

This morning as I ate my breakfast, I was reading last Sunday's New York times book review, particularly the article on Antonio Di Benedetto by Michael Greenberg. "No writer has laid bare so thoroughly the ongoing predicament of the Argentine, for whom the resolution of even minor problems, such as a noise complaint or the collection of one's modest salary, seems beyond normal human effort. Di Benedetto understands this bitter ingredient of Argentine life, where the middle class is as evanescent as melting ice, subject to impoverishing currency devaluations, corrupt populists, vicious military coups, cynical guerrilla movements and useless reforms."

I don't know whether Di Benedetto's books are exactly the thing to read now, as parallels to the chaos of the moment, or the thing to avoid and let yourself slip into comfortable release. Whatever, it will be pleasant when it's nice enough to sit on the front porch and read, even if the ex frat house across the street is boom booming.

the shape of the plaza and the distant view

So I was watching episode two of One Day and enjoying the sights of Rome. When Dexter is talking to his mother outside her hotel, the space in front of the hotel was so familiar. Not just the narrow space there, opening into the wider plaza beyond. The decorated façade of the shopfront across from the hotel. It just had to be the Rome hotel that Carol and I stayed in before we went to Florence for the IFLA art periodicals conference in 1986. Dexter's father comes to the door to meet them. The sliding door has the name "Campo de' Fiori" painted on it. That's it, our hotel.

That was my first time in Rome. I was excited beyond words. Carol had gotten there a while before I did. I had been warned not to take anything but a legitimate taxi from the central train station. My cab was somewhere near the taxi stand but he drove me a very indirect route to the Campo area. I had a map and was able to follow where we were. He was having trouble finding the Campo and stopped at a business on a very narrow street to ask directions. We got close, to the nearby Piazza Farnese which is in front of the French Embassy. I told him this was close enough, paid him, and got out of the car to get my suitcase from the back. He took off. I ran after him and he went out into the clogged traffic on the Lungotevere, along the Tiber River. As I ran, I was shouting something and a guard at the embassy joined the chase. (Was this a movie?) Anyway, the guard stood on the corner and I pointed to the supposed taxi. With a uniformed security man standing there, the driver got out and opened the back of the car so I could get my suitcase. I walked sheepishly the block and a half to the Hotel Campo de' Fiori. By the time we left Rome a few days later, I knew how to take the city bus from near the Campo to the central station.

 

anybody got $170 million?

When I lived in New York City from 1995 until 2009, there was a significant coalescing of art galleries in West Chelsea. Primarily in the blocks east and west of Tenth Avenue, from West 17th to West 29th. Galleries that had been in SoHo were pushed out by rising rents. It was massive fun to go galleryhopping in those days and one of my favorite buildings was 526 West 26th Street.

(James Estrin / New York Times)

I sometimes would walk up and down the stairs as well as back and forth on several of the floors. Other times, I might take the elevator up to the top floor with galleries and walk down. The elevator was operated by a person and had one of those gate doors.

By the time I moved upstate in 2009, the smaller galleries were being pushed out of West Chelsea as gentrification in general and specifically development around the High Line forced up rents and sale prices. Crowds and monster tall buildings proliferated. Even the Whitney Museum of American Art built its new building in the southern reaches of the arts district.

Now, Deb has sent me an article from the NY Times about the listing of 526 West 26th for sale and how the sale could displace many artists and art spaces. (The picture above is from the article.) The building is being sold by the estate of Gloria Naftali, one of the early galleriests that opened in the building in 1995. Her husband had originally bought the building as a warehouse for his garment business. The Greene Naftali Gallery is still operating and has spaces on the eighth floor and now also on the ground floor. I remember how the upper floor space was significantly renovated and enlarged several times. In the picture, I see "LEVENBETTS" on a window. They are one of the smaller architectural firms that I encounter in my Avery indexing.

The building is included in the West Chelsea Historic District so there's probably little danger of it being demolished. Still, it has played, and continues to play, a significant role in the art life and life of artists in New York City.

separated at birth: WEMI

Functional requirements for bibliographic records (FRBR) is a conceptual model of the bibliographic universe to describe entities, relationships, and attributes. The first group of entities are Work, Expression, Manifestation, and Item (WEMI). A Work is intellectual or artistic creativity and it is realized in an Expression, which is embodied in a Manifestation and exemplified in an Item. This is easiest to wrap your head around with something like Hamlet. The story was created in the brain of William Shakespeare (or whoever). It was realized in something like The tragicall historie of Hamlet Prince of Denmarke which was embodied in an edition printed in 1603 in London for N.L. and John Trundell and exemplified in the copy at the Huntington Library. Lots of print resources only come out in one edition and this is a heck of a lot of infrastructure for the library catalog to carry.

In the library cataloging rules such as Resource description and access, relationships and attributes are linked to particular levels. For example, the creator William Shakespeare is a relationship to the Work. If the Huntington copy has a later binding, this is a relationship to the Item. This all gets more complex for music and visual arts and other resources. There's a concise and helpful discussion of "FRBR, WEMI & music" on the website of Gilmore Library of Music at Yale.

Even more concise is a quotation from Michael Tilson Thomas in an article in last Sunday's Times. The quotation is from a 2017 interview. "I have encouraged people to color outside the lines for lack of a better analogy. We're not trying to reproduce the notation here. We're trying to get back to the inspiration that caused the notation to exist." It is not often that FRBR and WEMI are spoken of so aesthetically.

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.