teary meltdowns in Cefalù

We stayed in Cefalù as we neared the end of our month's circumnavigation of Sicily in 2013. Our hotel was away from the center, near the sea. This view was from the deck outside our room. I was feeling quite teary about the impending return to the U.S.

The days before Cefalù had taken us from Taormina and the landscape around Mount Etna, through the mountains, along the northern coast, visiting several sites of the Fiumara d'Arte.

I am often taken back to Sicily in my thoughts, sometimes just flashback memories, sometimes by reading or films. I just finished watching From Scratch on Netflix. It's a love story of a Black American woman and a Sicilian man. She's an artist, he's a chef. He grew up in a small town not far from Cefalù. We didn't go through Pollina where his native town scenes were filmed but we were close. There was plenty of Florence and Sicily as setting, along with Los Angeles. They also thanked the town of Termini Imerese in the credits; we drove through Termini Imerese and discovered this wonderful 18th-century bridge.

At one point in the film, after Lino and Amy have moved to Los Angeles and before Lino has found his place in the sprawl, he notes that he is flummoxed by Los Angeles because there is no center. In Italian towns, even the small ones, the Centro is important. Amy, naturally and beautifully, says that she will be his center as he is hers.

Plenty to get sentimental about, as well as being tear-jerked by the story of Lino and Amy. I checked the IMDb page for Zoe Saldaña, the female lead and producer for From Scratch. She is also a June 19th-born person.

modernist moments: Villa Cavrois and Raadhuis Hilversum

Villa Cavrois, Croix, France, 1932

designed by Robert Mallet-Stevens

photo: By Velvet - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=46023775

City Hall, Hilversum, The Netherlands, 1931

designed by W.M. Dudok

(my photo, 2016)

separated at birth: Stratford/Dix

Stratford Hall, perhaps my favorite American Palladian country house. Built in the 1730s by Thomas Lee. Listed on the National Register in 1966. Located in Westmoreland County, Virginia, along the Rappahannock River. https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/historic-registers/096-0024/ Photo credit: Calder Loth, 2017

Harvey Building, Dix Park, Raleigh, N.C. Rear elevation. Photo by John Meckley. https://www.flickr.com/photos/meckleychina/52341940204/in/dateposted/

Cleveland, architecture, and CWRU

James Polshek died a few days ago in New York City. His obituary in the New York Times says that he started his undergraduate studies in medicine at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. He took a course in modern architecture and changed his major. He transferred to Yale to get a stronger architecture education and stood next to Le Corbusier in a New York City elevator on his way to Yale.

When I was doing some itinerant cataloging at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson a dozen years ago, I fell in love with the Honey House, part of a group of dormitory buildings in the center of campus. I passed it every day at least once as I went about campus.

It has that wonderful balance and proportion that is so appealing to me in Palladian villas. I discovered later that the dormitory complex was designed by Polshek. He wasn't one of those architects where you saw the building and said obviously it was by him. But there is a care and quality that shows across his work.

When I was planning my 2015 road trip to Iowa City, Denver, Albuquerque, Fort Worth, and Bentonville, with other stops along the way, the Clinton Presidential Center in Little Rock was clearly on the list of sites/sights. It is also designed by Polshek, some years later than the Honey House.

The presidential library and museum is along the riverfront and near an old bridge, now for pedestrians. I wouldn't mind going back to Little Rock since the Arkansas Arts Center (now Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts) is building a new building. The expansion is designed by Studio Gang, another favorite firm.

When I was reading the Polshek obituary, I was disappointed that my graduate alma mater, Case Western Reserve University, had not satisfied Polshek's educational desires. It was an art history program, not architecture studio. I can't remember clearly but I think I took a course in American architecture during my first year of graduate study at CWRU. The professor was Edmund Chapman who was professor from 1946 to 1972. I was very satisfied with my CWRU education. Perhaps it was Dr Chapman that taught the modern architecture class that led Polshek to changing his major.

flâneurs are not slackers

Who knows why one's brain goes where it goes? I was reading about Claire Chase's season at Carnegie Hall and decided to check her LC authority record.  Flâneurs came to mind. Probably from Flute players to Flautists which files close to Flaneurs. I segued to wondering if Flâneuses were in the LCSH authority file. No Flâneuses in LCSH. I was horrified, however, to find a see-also reference between Flaneurs and Slackers. At least, all the possibly pejorative references are on Slackers.

150	__ |a Flaneurs
450	__ |a Saunterers
550	__ |w g |a Persons
550	__ |a Slackers
670	__ |a Work cat.: Kjellen, A. Flanören och hans storstadsvärld, 1985.
670	__ |a Web. 3.
670	__ |a Random House.
670	__ |a OED.
670	__ |a Amer. Heritage dict. of the Engl. lang., via WWW, June 13, 2005 |b (flâneur: An aimless idler; a loafer)
670	__ |a Cambridge dictionaries online, June 13, 2005 |b (flaneur: stroller; idler)
670	__ |a Merriam-Web. online dict., June 13, 2005 |b (flaneur: an idle man-about-town)
670	__ |a MSN Encarta dict., via WWW, June 13, 2005 |b (flâneur (plural flâneurs): idler: somebody who is idling or loafing about (literary))

150	__ |a Slackers
450	__ |a Bums (Lazy people)
450	__ |a Idlers (Persons)
450	__ |a Lazy people
450	__ |a Loafers (Persons)
450	__ |a Loungers (Persons)
550	__ |w g |a Persons
550	__ |a Flaneurs
670	__ |a Work cat.: 2005027230: Lutz, T. Doing nothing: a history of loungers, loafers, bums, and slackers in America, c2006.

separated at birth: Roman roads

Roman road, discovered at the site of a new McDonald's in Marino, Italy, restored and now visible under glass floor; photo from Hyperallergic article, February 2017, courtesy of Superintendency for Archaeology, Fine Arts and Landscape

Roman road, exposed, at Selinunte, on the southern coast of Sicily, photo 2013

Modern roads vary in smoothness and general condition too.

As fewer and fewer people are buying print newspapers, it is getting harder and harder to find a copy when you want one. Especially if you're looking for a specific paper like the Sunday New York Times. John sent me a link to a recent article on Curbed about why it's so hard to buy a copy of the Sunday Times. Most bodegas and delis don't carry it anymore. Even Starbucks doesn't. John lives in Ridgewood, Queens, and I've walked miles unsuccessfully to find a Times on a Sunday morning when I've been cat-sitting at John's apartment.

Recently, I've been getting my Times at the local Wegmans when I'm at home in western New York State. It's usually reliable but yesterday was the second time in a couple months they didn't have one for me. A few weeks ago, they didn't get any of the New York City papers. Yesterday, they got a short shipment and were sold out by 9:15 or so when I got there. I was sore distressed since it was my first Sunday with duty at the library and I didn't have the rest of the day to drive off somewhere else (Bath, Corning, Geneseo, Ithaca, Rochester) to find a copy. I called the Top's Friendly Market in Bath. They still had a copy and put one aside for me.

I set off for Bath after my morning walk on Monday morning, to get the reserved paper and then to stop in Hornell for a dose of pancakes at Billy Schu's in Hornell. I walked up to the customer service desk at Top's with confidence and asked for my Times. The clerk looked at the small stack of reserved papers and there was no Times. Yikes. She called for assistance from someone else who said he'd just taken the unsold Times (they had extras!!) to the back room to be written off and discarded. Maybe he could still find a clean copy. And thank heavens he could.

So I hugged my Sunday Times and headed back toward Hornell. Billy Schu's was closed for Labor Day. Oh, well, the big triumph was getting the paper and there was even a special Design section.

Photo: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2008_newsstand_NYC_USA_2453239739.jpg

Black Manhattan

Sometimes you feel like you're having a virgin experience ... and you're not. When we were in Provincetown in early July, I had a drink at Harbor Lounge that they called a Black Manhattan. It was rye and amaro and angostura bitters. It was delightful as well as beautiful. So I had another.

I was reading some old journal entries a little while ago and noted that I had a Black Manhattan in January at North Square, a restaurant kitty corner from Washington Square in Manhattan, just "around the corner" from my old apartment. And just six months before the one I imagined was my first Black Manhattan.

the jewel on the screen

I've been (re)watching The Jewel in the Crown (1984). It is one of the screen depictions of India that has put the country so high on my list of places I'd like to visit. Other movies include City of Joy (1992) and Gandhi (1982). The acting in all three of these films is extraordinary. Peggy Ashcroft and Art Malik were probably the two that I remembered best from my watching of The Jewel when it was first shown on PBS. At least, by name.

Now, it is Geraldine James that I am finding most thrilling. Just her presence on screen, as Sarah Layton, fills me with emotion. It is partly because I had watched Benediction (2021) not long before I started watching The Jewel on Netflix discs. She is not someone that I particularly knew before this recent infatuation but there are other recent roles that I enjoyed without attaching her name (and career). She played Queen Mary in the first Downton Abbey movie. She is in 45 Years which has been on my Netflix queue for some time (I've just moved it up the queue). In that, she plays the friend of Charlotte Rampling who was nominated for an Oscar for her role.

When I was internet traversing for this post, I drifted across pictures of Geraldine James with Ben Kingsley as Gandhi. I was surprised to see that she had done another film set in India and then even more surprised to see that it predated, but only just, The Jewel. I guess I'll have to go watch Gandhi again now. One thing is leading to another ... like always.

(The picture is from the Apple TV page for The Jewel in the Crown. The actor in the driver's seat is Charles Dance, here playing Guy Perron, and also playing Lord Mountbatten in The Crown.)

speculative cataloging

According to the Summary of Decisions, Editorial Meeting 5, May 13, 2022, the Library of Congress vocabulary editors decided not to approve the LCGFT proposal for Speculative fiction.

The reasoning: Sources describing this genre convey a lack of consensus on the meaning of the term. The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature provides several definitions for speculative fiction ranging from a specific subgenre of science fiction to a super category encompassing all fiction that departs from "reality". Because the usage is still in flux for this term and consensus has not been reached on its meaning, the term was not approved, but may be resubmitted at a future time when the boundaries of the genre are more concrete.

I very much enjoy that the reasoning matches the term. And while I'm speaking of science fiction (or, rather, they're speaking of science fiction), we went to the movie Everything Everywhere All at Once last night and it's quite amusing and strangely optimistic. It is very nice to be in Cambridge with the Kendall Square Cinema just down the street. It was, however, one of my first visits there where I wasn't ready to rush to each of the previewed movies.