I am now reading A natural history of empty lots: field notes from urban edgelands, back alleys, and other wild places by Christopher Brown. The subtitle fits. He walks among and observes the supposedly empty places that teem with life, mostly wild. His observing is solace in tumultuous times.
Last Sunday may have been a National Brad Pitt Day. Two reviews in the New York Times Book Review included references to the actor.
Reviewer Dwight Garner included short summaries of some of the stories in his review of the story collection It Will Come Back to You by Sigrid Nunez (Riverhead). "There's a piece about a jostling mother and daughter, and one about a Brad Pitt impersonator. 'Brad' is hired by the adult children of a woman in hospice who is in thrall to the actor. The kids worry that the impersonator will be a sleazeball, a rheumy Elvis type. The story takes a turn when he turns out to be young and achingly beautiful. Nunez is picking at the seams of life."
Garner closes his review with his typically intriguing and illustrative language. "In the lesser stories (none is a flameout), Nunez's descriptive register slips. But 'It Will Come Back to You' is a reminder that she's among the best we have. I'd rather read one of her books than almost anyone else's. Her headlights are on, even in midday."
Ginia Bellafante's review of The Face: A Cultural History by Fay Bound-Alberti (Grand Central) notes that Brad Pitt is one in the two percent of the population that are affected by prosopagnosia, or face blindness. The review is accompanied by the clickbait of a photo of the achingly beautiful Brad Pitt. That's all she said about Brad Pitt: just the "so does Brad Pitt" in parenthesis and the caption of the photo.
"As I climbed the steps through the mesa and into the pyramid, the window at the top of the staircase appeared to expand. I felt drawn up the tunnel, slowly toward the stars. The wind outside sounded like ocean surf, evoking visions of mariners with their sextants." -- Travis Diehl, on Star Axis, by Charles Ross, in eastern New Mexico, in the New York Times, July 26, 2026, Arts & Leisure, page 10-13, with glorious photographs by Brad Trone.
As I read this description of walking up into Star Axis, I could only think of The Ascent of the Blessed, by Hieronymus Bosch. The painting is now in the Palazzo Ducale in Venice and a detail of the painting, from a calendar given to me by Eva, hangs on my kitchen wall, always inspiring me onward.
Today's Connections was not coming easily to me. There were four words that seemed to be somehow associated with Las Vegas. It turned out that they were associated with "strip" as an adjective or noun. So it was kind of Las Vegas but a bit removed.
Sorry if I should have warned about this being a potential spoiler. Or perhaps ... you're welcome.
300460205 | expressions | multidisciplinary concepts, … Associated Concepts Facet
300460206 | manifestations | multidisciplinary concepts, … Associated Concepts Facet
Shane's parents' cottage in Heated Rivalry in located in Lanaudière, Québec. We are informed of this by a caption while Shane is on the phone with Rose, outside the cottage.
Heated Rivalry is one of my current obsessions. Another obsession, quite the opposite, is the increasing acceptance and legalization of assisted dying. I was looking at the Times to see if the war in Iran was over or not and noted an article entitled "How Quebec, in a decade, came to lead the world in assisted dying," by Norimitsu Onishi. (article link) A few months ago I had never heard of Lanaudière, now I learn that it is the home of a new palliative care center and has the highest incidence in Quebec of assisted dying.
The book I am currently reading is The shores of Bohemia: a Cape Cod story, by John Taylor Williams (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022). We have just gotten through World War I and the Sacco-Vanzetti trial and execution. Plenty of writers and artists were involved in protesting the trial where the judge implied that the fact Sacco and Vanzetti were immigrants was perhaps the greater crime. Sounds too familiar. It sometimes seems like Trump's bullying and nastiness are singular. His narcissism and glee in being mean may be singular but othering, alas, is close to eternal.
If you want to read a review of the book by Andrew Sullivan, this one (click here) appeared in July 2022 in the New York times.
After several inspiring, friendly, and collegial days at the 54th annual ARLIS/NA conference, I took off this morning from the Hôtel Bonaventure in Montreal toward New York State. The Bonaventure is at the top (10th floor plus) of a brutalist masterwork built for Expo 67. I am fond of brutalism but the hotel is very much closed off from the outside world. There are courtyards (with ducks) as well as the swimming pool area. It was hard to know what was North or South when you were on the conference floor. Our hotel room looked out onto the city but other folks had courtyard views.
Since I drove to Montreal, it was possible to switch out the traveling a little bit. I went up to Montreal via Syracuse, crossing into Canada at Alexandria Bay. The flatness of the Ontario and Quebec landscape on the North side of the Saint Lawrence River was a surprise to me. I headed home straight South from Montreal, into the Adirondacks toward Albany in order to head over to Williamstown and North Adams, Massachusetts, for visits to the Clark Art Institute and MASS MoCA respectively.
The picture is an aerial view of the industrial buildings that have been converted into the MASS MoCA campus in North Adams, Massachusetts, a few miles East of Williamstown.
