reading at the taverna

"Describe your ideal reading experience (when, where, what, how).

Each summer I rent a house in a village in the foothills of the White Mountains in Crete. There is one bougainvillea-shaded taverna, which shares the village square with a tiny Byzantine chapel, decorated with magnificent 14th-century frescoes. I go there at lunchtime with a book. The taverna owner, Kostas, brings me whatever he's cooking, with beer. He lets me talk my lousy Greek. Cats snooze. Dogs lollop. The local farmers come and discuss the price of watermelons. I'm in heaven."

Dan Jones, "By the book," New York times book review, January 28, 2024.

Sounds perfect, Mr Jones.

cheatle

I'll admit it: I cheat at Artle, the art game from the National Gallery of Art. They show you four works in succession and you have to guess the artist. I do try but if I'm just blanking, I'll do a Google image search. Work number three today was intriguing, kind of Daliesque, fantastic surrealism.

The first and second works were very different and I should have guessed but work number three really threw me. It's one of the interesting early works from a federal competition by an artist whose mature works are significantly different.

Spoiler here: https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.158369.html 

I justify my cheating by saying that Artle is a learning experience. The object pages are linked from the game as is the artist information page. Fortunately, Artle doesn't talk back to me or accuse me of cheating. One of my friends and colleagues at the NGA Library says she is involved with setting up Artle and I thank her every day.

When I'm done with Artle, I do Wordle and Globle. They (the famous they) say that little brain exercises are good for aging people, aka everybody.

The Diplomat

I have been bingeing The Diplomat and it is kind of scary. But then you check out the day's headlines in the New York Times and discover that the real world is just a whole lot too similar. Explosive events in the Middle East. Potential for nuclear options. Personal relationships getting tangled up. Ambition and revenge. Power hunger. Maybe I should go watch Barbie.
 

the books I read in 2023

The last book I finished in 2023 was The unlikely pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce. I was in New York City for the New Year's weekend, catsitting at John's. John had shown me an article from Harper's on "Street Life" by Rachel Kushner from the August 2023 issue. I went to the film "All of Us Strangers" on New Year's Day. The book, the article, and the movie all circled, in their way, around the banality and disappointment and glory of everyday life and how big a role observation can play in how that works out. On the 30th, I was off galleryhopping at MoMA PS1 and ran into Janis, Sherri, Julie, and Hikmet in the Court Square subway station. I joined them in visiting the Tracey Emin and Donna Huanca shows at Faurschou in Greenpoint but then split off and went to the Whitney and LGBT Center before meeting Heidi and Dan for supper. All everyday and ordinary and glorious and, well, New York City.

The books I read this past year are listed here in chronological order of reading.

• The magician, by Colm Tóibín (2021)
• Harlem shuffle, by Colson Whitehead (2021)
• Flâneuse: women walk the city in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London, by Lauren Elkin (2017)
• Piazza Carignano, by Alain Elkann (1985) - bought at a used book store in Provincetown; the Carignano Palace in Turin was one of my favorite buildings on our 2018 trip to Turin, Milan, and Genoa; the book was fine but I really enjoyed the association with the building and plaza
• Driver's eduction, by Grant Ginder (2013) - this only gets 3.17 stars on Goodreads; that's why I don't pay too much attention to review stars; I really enjoyed this book and its style
• Germania: in wayward pursuit of the Germans and their history, by Simon Winder (2010) - one of a trilogy of histories of Middle Europe; I really enjoyed all three volumes (thanks, Daniel)
• Just by looking at him, by Ryan O'Connell (2022)
• Just mercy, by Bryan Stevenson (2014)
• Mrs Caliban, by Rachel Ingalls (1982)
• Radio girls, by Sarah-Jane Stratford (2016)
• Italian days: fifty things we know about life now, by Beppe Severgnini (2022)
• Danubia: a personal history of Habsburg Europe, by Simon Winder (2013)
• The art of description: world into word, by Mark Doty (2010) - it sounds like a book on cataloging ... but it's not, it is about words and putting them together
• The heart's invisible furies, by John Boyne (2017)
• The honey bus: the memory of loss, courage and a girl saved by bees, by Meredith May (2019)
• JD, by Mark Merlis (2015)
• Girl, woman, other, by Bernardine Evaristo (2019) - it took me a while to get used to the writing style but it worked: each sentence was a paragraph, not capitalized
• The library book, by Susan Orlean (2018)
• Unsheltered, by Barbara Kingsolver (2018) - chomping at the bit, waiting for Demon Copperhead to come out in paper but did enjoy this one while waiting
• Becoming George Orwell: life and letters, legend and legacy, by John Rodden (2020)
• The promise, by Damon Galgut (2021)
• The poetics of cruising: queer visual culture from Whitman to Grindr, by Jack Parlett (2022)
• Solomon's crown, by Natasha Siegel (2023) - Richard the Lionheart and Philip Augustus, 12th century speculative fiction
• The address book: what street addresses reveal about identity, race, wealth, and power, by Dierdre Mask (2020)
• The last day: wrath, ruin, and reason in the Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755, by Nicholas Shrady (2008)
• The personal librarian, by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray (2021) - fictionalized life of Belle da Costa Greene, longtime librarian for J.P. Morgan; it took me a while to get into it but I really enjoyed it once I hit the rhythm
• Every good boy does fine: a love story, in music lessons, by Jeremy Denk (2022) - maybe my favorite book of the year
• High-risk homosexual, by Edgar Gomez (2022)
• French braid, by Anne Tyler (2022)
• Dream cities: seven urban ideas that shape the world, by Wade Graham (2016)
• The unlikely pilgrimage of Harold Fry, by Rachel Joyce (2012)

I would not advise you against reading any of these books. I enjoyed some of them very much as I read them. Several of them resonated with places I have been or want to go. I bought several of them in Provincetown, over the years. Plenty of Rachels. As usual, about an even split of fiction and non-fiction. And now I've started reading Orwell's roses by Rebecca Solnit and find it thoughtful (no surprise because Solnit) and compelling.

If you want to see how Goodreads saw my year in reading, go to https://www.goodreads.com/user/year_in_books/2023/6837039. There, you can click on book covers and see a summary of the book and how it is rated on Goodreads. I did read a note in one of my magazine newsletters that the author had given up on Goodreads (part of the Amazon empire) and was just using Google Sheets where she could add a column for author's gender if she wanted to. I would like a column for how I heard about a book. I know Carol recommended Orwell's roses.

Lady Moody's Gravesend

The Municipal Art Society announced a tour of Gravesend, in southern Brooklyn, and entitled it "Discovering Lady Moody's Gravesend." The announcement is illustrated with a picture of Trinity Tabernacle (above, screengrabbed from Google Street View). Lady Moody (born Deborah Dunch, married Sir Henry Moody) left England in 1639 where she was prosecuted for her Anabaptist beliefs. She settled in Saugus, Massachusetts, where she soon got in trouble with the established Puritan church. She moved on to Gravesend, Brooklyn, where she is the only European woman known to have founded a town in colonial America. The Dutch West India Company was more tolerant of religious dissent than the Puritans of Massachusetts. More detail: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deborah_Moody

The tabernacle grabbed my attention with its quirky massing and Gothic Revival details. I was further intrigued because my mother's family has paternal roots in Gravesend. Among Lady Moody's followers who joined her in Gravesend after she was excommunicated in Massachusetts was a Thomas Poling who had a son John Poling. John's son Samuel Poling married the granddaughter of Pieter Claesen Wyckoff, an early Dutch settler. The early Polings used various spellings of the surname, including Poland, Polen, and Polan. My mother's people had settled on Polan a few generations before hers.

I am not as obsessed with genealogy as some folks but I do enjoy the probable connections. Bunches of religious dissenters. My father's paternal ancestors come down through the Clarkes of Rhode Island.

George and Dora in Philadelphia

Great Aunt Dora was one of the most gracious ladies that I knew in my childhood. She was the longtime Dean of Women at Alfred University when that role also included playing hostess to esteemed guests of the university. Her first husband was George C.R. Degen, a stockbroker, and they lived in Philadelphia for most of the first couple decades of the twentieth century. They also lived for a while in New York City; I have seen a photo of their NYC apartment which shows a bit of the cherry dining table that became part of my furnishings for much of my adult life. That table came back to the family house in Alfred, New York, in 1995 when I moved from Texas to my studio apartment in New York City.

Aunt Dora came back to the family house in Alfred, New York, after the death of her husband in the early 1920s. She married J. Nelson Norwood, also widowed, in 1954 and they lived upstairs in the family house. Uncle Nelson had been president of Alfred University. This picture shows Aunt Dora and Uncle Nelson in 1936, both officers of the university and probably part of the centennial celebrations that year. They were not yet married but are standing in front of the family house.

The reason I have been thinking about all this history is a coincidence in the most recent book I finished reading. The book was French Braid by Anne Tyler. Most of the characters and action are set in Baltimore. The mother of the family, Mercy Garrett, mentions at one point that she went to visit her friends George and Dora in Philadelphia. Nothing about the two, no relevant twist of the plot, nothing. Just George and Dora in Philadelphia.

Connecticuters in LCDGT

I am a bit skeptical about the value of the Library of Congress Demographic Group Terms vocabulary (LCDGT). While there are demographic terms like Nebraskans and Californians that are widely used to describe people from those places, some of the terms being proposed for the vocabulary seem like a stretch, for example, Albanians (New York State) for the residents of Albany, New York. And then I saw an article in today's New York Times about Connecticut doing a rebranding. The governor and others are worried that people see Connecticut as a somewhat boring waystation between New York City and Boston. The author of the article opines that residents do not even know what to call themselves. Are they Connecticuters? Connecticutians? Connecticutites? So I checked LCDGT and the preferred term is Connecticut residents. The LCDGT record has references from Connecticuters, Connecticotians, and Connecticutensians, as well as from Nutmeggers, from the state nickname, The Nutmeg State.

Photo taken in Albany, N.Y., by an Alfredian

the subject of the Artle work

Marie Harriman, 1903-1970, gallerist and second wife of W. Averill Harriman, is the subject of the portrait in today's Artle. The portrait, in the National Gallery of Art, does not seem to me like a predictable work by the artist. Joe Biden borrowed the painting to hang in his Vice Presidential office in the Old Executive Office Building from 2009-2015, according to the NGA exhibition information on the page for the painting.

Marie Harriman's Wikipedia page is a master lesson in name dropping: Averill Harriman, Peter Duchin, Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney (son of Harry Payne Whitney and Gertrude Vanderbilt), Hall Roosevelt (brother of Eleanor), Babe Paley, Pamela Beryl Digby Churchill Hayward, Randolph Churchill (son of Winston), Leland Hayward, and Miss Spence's School. I guess this is what happens when you are in the New York upper crust.

 

perusing the paper & architecture and politics

(NPS photo)

My nephew asked me about the obituary for Dr Lloyd Watson, a bee scientist who had been a major influence on my father as he was growing up. Enough that I was named after his son. The obituary appeared in The New York Times for February 27, 1948. I looked at the obituary on the TimesMachine so I was looking at the content as a newspaper page.

An obituary in a neighboring column was for a Dr William Maxon, a botanist and expert on ferns. Probably not a relative but I am related to Maxsons, a variant spelling of the surname. LCSH uses Maxson family with a reference from Maxon family and a couple other variants.

I couldn't help myself. I turned the newspaper back a page or two, noting book reviews, letters to the editor, opinion pieces, and other items that now seem less integrated in today's Times. Next to the main book review was an article entitled "Decision to stand on Jefferson Arch: prize-winning design for huge parabola is opposed here as similar to Mussolini's." The arch, designed by Eero Saarinen, is now known as the Gateway Arch and is part of the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial.

The Jefferson Arch was criticized by Gilmore D. Clarke, the chairman of the National Commission on Fine Arts, as similar to a Mussolini arch. Mussolini had approved a parabolic arch for the international exposition in Rome in 1942 celebrating twenty years of fascism. The president of the Jefferson Memorial Association argued that the similarity of the designs was "purely coincidental." Saarinen described the parabola shape as a basic form and said he had never seen the Rome design. The connection of fascism to modern architecture, particularly in Italy, is troubling to me (and others).

As an aside, Gilmore Clarke is mentioned three or four times in the article and his "Clarke" is misspelled as "Clark" in the first instance.

 

housing inequality

The National Edition of the Sunday New York Times includes two or three pages of real estate and metropolitan content at the back of the business section. These days, when stock prices and currency exchange rates are readily available on the web, the business section has more content about business people or firms and socioeconomic context. The two real estate articles this past week, on facing pages, were titled "A name brand as an amenity" and "In Detroit, an eviction rattles a housing plan." While not explicitly about housing inequality, the amenity article addresses apartment buildings in Miami and elsewhere with condos selling for as much as 59 million dollars. The Detroit eviction article addresses the eviction of a homeowner for not living full time in her tiny house. Her name appears on the lease of her boyfriend's riverfront condo. She says that she works for her boyfriend's firm which is based in the apartment. The tiny houses are owned and operated by Cass Community Social Services and the rent is $1 per square foot on the lease-to-own basis.

(Photo by Michelle and Chris Gerard on Curbed Detroit)

Neither article is simply about high-priced or low-priced housing but I cannot help thinking about how many decent living spaces could be created with 59 million dollars. Not just tiny houses but living spaces from abandoned industrial buildings, rehabilitated houses, accessory dwelling units, as well as new buildings. Rehabilitation also can go a good distance on greenhouse gas mitigation.

I just finished reading Solomon's Crown by Natasha Siegel. When I went to the shelf to pick my next book, I selected The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal about Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power by Deirdre Mask. I guess I will be thinking more about the socioeconomics of housing.