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.
The image to accompany today's Google Doodle in honor of Earth Day is glorious. The weather here in Alfred, New York, is also pretty glorious this morning.
Oy, another word has gotten verbed or adjectived. A pet peeve of mine is "gift" and "gifted" when "give" or "gave" would be just fine.
"They home-birthed and home-schooled eight children, wore thrifted clothes, drove a rusty car and farmed." (a homesteading family profiled in "They're living off the land and preparing for disaster" by Anemona Hartocollis in the New York Times, April 12, 2026, page 13 in the national edition)
It's "thrifted" that especially stuck in my craw .... since it rhymes with "gifted"?
Footnote (a couple weeks later): One of the words that Stephen Fry would delete from the English language is "crafted" when "made" would work. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/rUDIynm7w0A
Mentioning contrapposto in a post a couple-three days ago reminded me of piuttosto, a word meaning rather or quite in Italian. I had first noted it in a daily word in Italian email list I used to see but haven't paid attention to lately. The message sent you a word every day, in a sentence, audio file at normal pace, slowed-down audio version. It's partly the doubling of the consonants in both contrapposto and piuttosto that tickle me.
When I googled piuttosto, I discovered it was sometimes but not always interchangeable with abbastanza, again with doubled consonant. You can google it yourself or click on piuttosto at the beginning of this post. The bit of text that showed in the search included "piuttosto la morte! = I'd rather die." More words that took me back to Heated Rivalry in which Yuna replies "I'd rather die!" when Shane asks her if she ever lets his dad win at cards.
When today's Artle artist biography came up, the life dates -- 1835-1910 -- looked familiar. We catalogers get to recognize life dates of people that come up repeatedly in our work. The artist was pretty well known but I just knew there was some other famous person that also had those life dates. Not only that, the person that popped into my head was Mark Twain. His dates are indeed 1835-1910 but it may be the social media trolling around "markwayne" that prompted thinking of Mark Twain.
Kip is working for the caterer at a fundraiser for St Thomas. He literally runs into Scott with a tray of some canapés. Kip and Scott have undoubtedly (Maria says for sure) been flirting with each other at the smoothie shop where Kip works as he plans his graduate studies in art history. Scott invites Kip out for Mexican after the reception and Kip asks if he minds waiting until he's done with the gig. Scott replies "not even a little."
I took a bit of a break from that rom com to read The Guncle by Steven Rowley. Imagine my surprise and delight when Grant asks his Gay Uncle Patrick, or GUP, if they are "famouth" (he lisps). Patrick responds "not even a little bit" which I definitely heard in the voice of François Arnaud who plays Scott in Heated Rivalry.
There are oodles of websters who are making parallels in something like Heated Rivalry so I'm just joining the crowd and going from one medium to another.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_Circle/Spiral_Hill
When we lived at the edge of the Sand Hills in central Nebraska in the early 1960s, my dad fetched a tumbleweed for us for our Christmas tree one year. I can't picture it any more but I think we spray-painted it with silver.
"Whenever I come to a new town, I like to get my bearings. I want to understand the layout of the streets and the layout of the people. In some cities this can take you days to accomplish. In Boston, it can take you weeks. In New York, years. The great thing about Morgen, Nebraska, is it only took a few minutes.
The town was laid out in a geometric grid with the courthouse right in the middle. According to the mechanic who'd given me a lift in his tow truck, back in the 1880s the town elders spent a whole week deliberating how best to christen the streets before deciding -- with an eye to the future -- that the east-west streets would be named for presidents and the north-south streets for trees. As it turned out, they could have settled on seasons and suits because seventy-five years later the town was still only four blocks square."
This is how Duchess describes how small Morgen is, in The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles (page 85). The town we lived in in Nebraska when I was in high school was a bit bigger ... but not much.
I too am intrigued by how cities are laid out and what effect that has on its people. Imagine how different Manhattan would feel if its street layout above 14th Street was more like the Financial District or Boston.
The books I read in 2025 are listed here, in chronological reading order. The date may not be the original date of publishing and may, rather, represent the copy I happened to read.
Another (re)post on Frank Gehry after his recent death -- 2016 road trip report by Aaron Betsky -- reminded me about the Iowa Advanced Technology Laboratories in Iowa City from 1992.
Frank Gehry died yesterday, just a week or so after Robert A.M. Stern. You would not generally mistake the work of one architect for the other but they both designed some really fine buildings. I may get to Bilbao and Arles someday to see probably the most famous of Gehry's museums but I have seen the Ohr-O'Keefe Museum of Art in Biloxi, Mississippi ...
I also remember seeing a couple of Gehry's projects in Los Angeles: the Loyola University School of Law which I walked over to see maybe forty years ago, and the Walt Disney Concert Hall where I was lucky enough to hear an organ concert with Steve Ong probably a dozen years ago.
I was particularly reminded of these buildings as I indexed a house in Ocean Springs, just up the coast from Biloxi. But that was more Venturi, Rauch and Scott Brown than Gehry or Stern.
