And to think that I saw it on Mulberry Street and East 6th Street

[245 Mulberry Street, Little Italy, New York. c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click any image for a much larger view.]

It was the cat (or dog?) that caught my eye. I didn’t realize that no. 247, just north, was to house the Ravenite Social Club. I made my way down the sidewalk and noticed the cart:


I wondered what might be found at 734 East 6th Street, on the Lower East Side, or in what is now known as the East Village:


Buildings and carts, one bearing an address. The large cart suggests the rag trade. But look here:


Whoomp, there it is:


I doubt that this cart had any idea that it was featured in at least two — or more? — tax photographs.

Did you spot the woman at the window in the 6th Street photographs?

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More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)

Today’s Saturday Stumper

I always dislike it when a puzzle — a crossword, the NYT ’s Connections, whatever — uses a solver’s knowledge against the solver. Take, for instance, today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper, by Matthew Sewell. 9-A, five letters, “Two-time pianist on Bennett albums.” The reasonable answer is EVANS, as in Bill, with whom Tony Bennett recorded two celebrated albums’ worth of duets. But no, that’s wrong. The two-time pianist whose name fills the squares was indeed the pianist on two albums with Bennett. But the clue suggests a duo, a pairing. And the answer, no, not really.

As my son would say, Anyhoo. Moving on.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

1-A, four letters, “Intro for the word.” This clue gets the puzzle off to a weirdly and difficult start. Some prefix?

6-A, five letters, “Atlantican princess of filmdom.” It helps to have granddaughters.

8-D, four letters, “Roaming browsers.” Hello, friends.

18-A, ten letters, “Mojito adjuncts.” I’ve never had a mojito, but thank goodness for this clue.

20-A, twelve letters, “High-profile gridiron celebrity.” TRAVISKEL — no, doesn’t fit. There are whole areas of American culture that are off my radar.

26-A, five letters, “‘I’ve got it for now.’” Never heard it said. My two millennial informants tell me they’ve never heard it either. (I’ve never heard anyone say ‘I’ve got it for now’ either.)

35-D, five letters, “Formal presentation.” Oof.

46-A, twelve letters, “Oscar category for The Incredibles.” I’d like a generalized clue. I’d also like italics.

47-D, four letters, “Small score” and 48-D, four letters, “Small store.” Nicely paired.

My favorite in this puzzle: 24-D, eleven letters, “Out of time?” Just because I liked seeing the word.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Bleak House again

Thinking more about the recent Atlantic article about the end of reading and its horror story of college students struggling to read the opening paragraphs of Bleak House : I looked up the source (account required): Susan Carlson, Ananda Jayawardhana, and Diane Miniel’s “They Don’t Read Very Well: A Study of the Reading Comprehension Skills of English Majors at Two Midwestern Universities.” And I began to wonder: does it make sense to give students the first seven paragraphs of Dickens’s novel with nothing in the way of context, nothing to orient their reading? And: is it wrong to think it appropriate and necessary to offer some context?

I looked up the handout (that odd word) that kicked off my teaching of Dickens’s novel. Bear with me:

Bleak House

Charles Dickens (1812–1870), 1853

What connexion can there be between the place in Lincolnshire, the house in town, the Mercury in powder, and the whereabout of Jo the outlaw with the broom, who had that distant ray of light upon him when he swept the churchyard-step? What connexion can there have been between many people in the innumerable histories of this world who from opposite sides of great gulfs have, nevertheless, been very curiously brought together! [Chapter 15]

Present time: perhaps the late 1830s. The events of the novel unfold in relation to the Court of Chancery, a court devoted to matters of wills and trusts. As a note to our edition of the novel says, the Court of Chancery was “a byword for inefficiency and delay,” a world of endless legal entanglement and complication. One of those endless entanglements is a lawsuit known as Jarndyce and Jarndyce. (Jarndyce is pronounced jarn dice .)

Bleak House is a novel of “connexions,” some of them immediately graspable, others remaining mysterious or unrecognized for a long time. Jane Austen gives us a world whose connexions range across a limited cast of characters drawn almost exclusively from the English aristocracy. Dickens gives us a world in which connexions multiply unpredictably to form a vast network of social relationships among people from all walks of life. Austen describes her task as a novelist as a matter of working on a tiny piece of ivory with a fine brush. Dickens, we might say, is painting on a canvas as large as a city.

Bleak House is an example of what’s called serial publication: the novel appeared in twenty installments over nineteen months. We’ll be taking twenty-one classes to read the novel, one installment per class (at least twice as much time as many college profs spend on the novel). I want for us all to really read Bleak House, not run and stumble through it.

Some advice about reading

1. Read nothing but the novel. Consider yourself honor-bound not to look elsewhere. There are mysteries in Bleak House that should remain mysteries until it’s time to figure them out. Reading any sort of summary will ruin the novel for you. Don’t read the notes at the back of the Penguin edition (they’re prefaced by a warning to first-time readers). Don’t read anything but the pages of the novel. Some details and references will therefore be unclear, but that’s okay. We’re not going to get everything.

2. Take notes as you read. Much of the challenge—and pleasure—of the novel lies in working out the connexions among the novel’s people and in figuring out the significance of past incidents as they fall into place in the novel’s design. If you don’t make a record of your reading, you’ll be lost. We’ll spend lots of time in class putting together our sense of what’s going on, just as readers of the serialized text no doubt did.

3. Don’t fall behind in the reading. If you do, the novel will soon become impossible. Put in the time to read for every class, and come to class excited to talk about what you’re reading.

4. Recognize that much of what makes this novel the great pleasure that it is is not to be found in “what happens.” Reading for “what happens” will leave you at many points pretty disappointed. But reading for Dickens’s genius as a storyteller, as a creator of characters, as a describer of scenes, as an inventor of dialogue, will leave you (I hope!) absolutely delighted. Dickens is a great entertainer. Give him the chance to delight you as he has delighted millions of readers (in countless languages) before you.

See? I’m always optimistic.

My fear is that “They Don’t Read Very Well” feeds the assumption that we can’t ask students to engage difficult texts, that we must, as the mantra goes, meet them where they are. It’s better to invite them in, I say, and then offer a map of the territory: You Are Here.

Related reading
All OCA reading in college posts (Pinboard)

On Proust’s birthday

Marcel Proust was born on July 10, 1871. Here he is in July 1919, writing to Violet Schiff, a musician married to Sydney Schiff, who translated Le Temps retrouvé using the pseudonym Stephen Hudson:

I can feel that my caffeine is no longer strong enough to help me write you. But before saying adieu, I should like to reply to an objection of yours which moved me very much: “I feel that I shall have many sorrows.” I think perhaps by that you mean, since you so graciously regard Swann as a living person, that you were disappointed to see him become less sympathetic and even ridiculous. I can assure you that it has caused me great pain thus to transform him.

But I am not free to go against the truth and to modify the laws that control the characters. “Amicus Swann, sed magis amica Veritas.” The nicest people sometimes go through nasty phases. I promise you that in the following volume when he becomes a Dreyfusard, Swann once more starts being sympathetic. Unhappily, and this causes me much sorrow, he dies in the fourth volume. And he is not the principal character in the book. I should have liked him to be. But art is the perpetual sacrificing of inclination to truth.

From Letters of Marcel Proust, translated by Mina Curtiss (New York: Helen Marx Books / Books & Co., 2006).

Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard) : Sydeny and Violet Schiff

[Found by opening the book Augustine-style, as I’ve found other passages from letters to post on Proust’s birthday. “Amicus Swann, sed magis amica Veritas": Swann is a friend, but truth is a greater friend, a play on Plato.]

Diplomatic notebook

Mike Kells (Tyrone Power) is a diplomatic courier. And he carries a notebook. Here he makes notes in a train corridor. From Diplomatic Courier (dir. Henry Hathaway, 1952).

[Click any image for a larger view.]

I always like seeing a notebook take over the screen. I think of it as a reality effect — proof that someone is really writing something.

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All OCA notebook sightings (Pinboard)

Overheard

“I was so mad that I said all that. And the next day I was so mad that I said all that.”

Related reading
All OCA “overheard” posts (Pinboard)

[Did he say all that because he was mad? Or was mad that he said all that? Or did he say it in anger and then regret saying it? I didn’t ask.]

The end of reading?

In The Atlantic (gift link), Rose Horowitch writes about the decline of reading: “The Ending of Reading Is Here.” I haven’t read it all — too depressing (also too clickbait-y). Besides, I have a chapter of David Copperfield to get to.

One telling excerpt:

In a study of English and English-education majors at two regional universities in Kansas, published in 2024, researchers asked students to read the first seven paragraphs of Dickens’s Bleak House. The novel follows members of the Jarndyce family through a lengthy legal dispute over their inheritance. It begins:

London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.

The researchers quoted students’ attempts to parse the passage. “So it’s like, um, the mud was all in the streets, and we were, no ... so everything’s been, like, kind of washed around and we might find Megalosaurus bones but he says they’re waddling, um, all up the hill,” one student said. At least a quarter of the subjects interpreted the figures of speech literally, leading to the inference that dinosaurs walked the streets of 19th-century London. Dickens continues by describing the Lord Chancellor as he is “addressed by a large advocate with great whiskers, a little voice, and an interminable brief.” Another student interpreted this passage as “describing him in a room with an animal I think? Great whiskers? A cat?”

That students would struggle with unfamiliar references is not surprising. But the researchers gave them access to the entire internet. They could have looked up Michaelmas term or Lord Chancellor or Lincoln’s Inn Hall if they had chosen to do so. Students didn’t even know how to go about figuring out what they didn’t understand, or they didn’t bother. Most of them did not realize that the passage takes place in a court of law. Only 5 percent had an accurate, detailed understanding of what they’d read.

I’ll say it again: the crisis in the humanities in a crisis of reading.

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All OCA reading posts (Pinboard)

[I taught Bleak House with considerable success a couple of times in the early- and mid-2010s. We moved slowly, over seven weeks or so. I’m not sure how things would go in 2026. But I would want to try.]

Aaron Rupar and the current occupant

For countless revealing glimpses of the current occupant in action or inaction (zzz), Aaron Rupar’s Bluesky account is a must. It’s an invaluable public service, letting the general public see everything traditional news sources keep out of view: rants, glitches, extended blinks.

The occupant’s performance at the NATO Summit in Ankara, as captured by AR is a wonder to behold. A sample: "I predicted everything. l've been right about everything. And I have been for a long time. That's how I got to be president three times. That's how l won three elections. I did very well in the second one, won it. It was a rigged election. But I’ve been right.”

Ways of learning

Learning the alphabet with mother, followed by further instruction under strict supervision.

Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1850).

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[A note in the Penguin edition of the novel glosses the crocodile-book, a favorite of David’s nurse Peggotty: “A book adapted by Dickens from Thomas Day’s The History of Sandford and Merton, a moralistic book of the 1780s, featuring young men pursuing crocodiles and thrusting wood into their mouths.” Like many notes in this edition, it’s less than truly helpful.]

Folding

My mom showed up in a dream the other night. She was folding laundry, something she loved to do. I was helping. That is all.

A related post
Words about my mom

[“Only fools and children talk about their dreams”: Dr. Edward Jeffreys (Robert Douglas), in Thunder on the Hill (dir. Douglas Sirk, 1951).]