Words from Eleanor Roosevelt

From You Learn by Living: Eleven Keys for a More Fulfilling Life (New York: Harper & Row, 1960):

Courage is more exhilarating than fear and in the long run it is easier. We do not have to become heroes overnight. Just a step at a time, meeting each thing that comes up, seeing it is not as dreadful as it appeared, discovering we have the strength to stare it down.

These words appear on a placard for the Eleanor Roosevelt Fruit & Vegetable Garden at the Obama Presidential Center. Alas, the a that precedes step is missing there. I have to figure out how to let them know. (Now done.)

[We didn’t have tickets. We just enjoyed the grounds.]

Old notebook finds

“We’ll rock for you, but first we have to do this album”: Brian Wilson, from the Pet Sounds tour, Chicago, July 22, 2000. I wrote it down in the moment and just found it in an old pocket notebook.

“Wade through weeks”: No idea where or when, or what might have been the context for that fragment. Rain? A semester? Life?

Pickles, NYC and beyond

I’ve posted three WPA tax photographs of pickle-making establishments — 1, 2, 3 — each a lucky find. Monique Mulder and Paul van Ravestein the authors of The Pickled City: A Biography of New York Pickles, a book that I cited in that third post, consider the pickle far more methodically, tracking its journey from ancient Mesopotamia to Eastern Europe to the Lower East Side. They have a talk about their book, also an Instagram account. Incredibly deep research in the service of food and culture.

[I haven’t read the book yet, but I plan to.]

Love Nest

[8 Cleveland Place, Lower Manhattan, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Sam’s Coffee Pot seems in danger of turning into a LOVE NEST. Love Nest, “The Best Eating Candy Bar,” a product of the Euclid Candy Company, is said to have been introduced in the mid-1920s. It was “a classic nut roll recipe,“ made with peanuts, fudge, caramel, and chocolate. The candy had its own trucks. Advertising images abound. And there was at least one other Love Nest sign in Manhattan.

The candy’s name must have been inspired by a popular song. From 1920, here’s John Steel singing Louis A. Hirsch and Otto Harbach’s “Love Nest.” And a more recent version from Nat “King” Cole. If you watched enough old repeats on WPIX, you may recognize the melody from The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show .

Many details to notice in the larger image. Count the people: I see six, plus one mirrored person and a tiny, ghostly witch.

Sam’s corner is now occupied by Carrot Express, serving healthy stuff.

Related posts
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)

[The tax records say Cleveland Street. But it’s Cleveland Place, or at least now is. All Love Nest ingredients, as listed on a 1950s wrapper: No. 1 Spanish roasted peanuts, sugar, milk chocolate, corn syrup, sweetened condensed skim milk, hydrogenated vegetable o1l, egg albumen, salt, artificial vanilla flavor.]

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper, by David P. Williams, was Strange Solving. I started on paper, looked at 1-A, four letters, “Persian product” (RUGS?) and 1-D, four letters, “Confederate” (?), dropped down to 46-A, five letters, “Oedipus uncle” and 41-D, five letters, “Sample of Horatian poetry,” and soon found myself getting nowhere. I then tried the online puzzle with autocheck switched on and found everything falling into place with just a handful of wrong letters guessed. I don’t know how to explain it.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

5-D, six letters, “Egg head.” Oof.

10-D, letters, “Incredulous inquiry.” The constructor has a good ear for colloquial language.

15-A, four letters, “Bonus round?” Well, sort of.

23-D, eleven letters, “Uber-celebrator.” See 10-D.

25-A, thirteen letters, “Incredulous.” And a good ear for old-timey language. He had WHIPPERSNAPPERS as an answer earlier this month.

27-D, ten letters, “‘Join the club’ kin.” See 10-D.

29-A, five letters, “Phish food?” Now I get it.

36-D, eight letters, “Saskatoon’s silly-sider.” So we’re bringing in Canadian slang, eh?

43-A, seven letters, “Cutters’ floors.” So strange: I just looked up the when reading Bleak House .

43-D, five letters, “Theater backer.” I was too clever for my own good: I thought the answer had to be ACTII.

45-A, four letters, “Love ____.” Also so strange: it’s in the tax photo I’m posting tomorrow.

My favorite in this puzzle: 40-A, thirteen letters, “Awareness confirmation.” You said it, bub.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Willa Cather in 250 to 250

Rebecca Solnit talks about Willa Cather for Heather Cox Richardson’s 250 to 250 series of short videos. Here’s the full text, delivered in about fifty-one seconds:

“There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made,” wrote Pulitzer Prize winner Willa Cather in her 1918 novel My Ántonia. Cather was born in Virginia in 1873, but it was her family’s move to Red Cloud, Nebraska, about ten years later, that inspired her work. In her novels and stories, Cather explored the connections between people and the land on which immigrants built the nation at the same time as they built their lives. Her close observations of western life, delivered in straightforward prose, created an immediacy that evoked the profound beauty of the land, the passions of the people who lived on it, and the connections between the two.

As someone who’s read virtually all of Cather, I find this capsule picture — land, immigrants, passion — sadly inadequate. Here’s my try:

A teenage girl who called herself William, a young woman who made her way as a journalist in Pittsburgh and Washington, D.C., a Virginia-born Nebraskan who later lived in Greenwich Village and on Park Avenue, a celebrant of both immigrant and indigenous cultures, a keen observer of the dynamics of family life who sustained a decades-long partnership with another woman, a deeply American writer who loved all things French, Willa Cather stands as a major figure in modern fiction. Almost eighty years after her death, the sharp, lyrical prose of such works as My Ántonia , The Song of the Lark , and The Professor’s House invites and rewards continued rereading.

Related reading
All OCA Cather posts (Pinboard)

[At the beginning of My Ántonia , Cather glosses the pronunciation of Ántonia, which you’ll hear mispronounced in the video: “The Bohemian name Ántonia is strongly accented on the first syllable, like the English name Anthony, and the i is, of course, given the sound of long e. The name is pronounced An′-ton-ee-ah.“ And I’ve always heard Cather as rhyming with gather . The sentence from My Ántonia, mispunctuated in the in-video captions, is punctuated correctly here. And I’ll take the opportunity to say it: The Professor’s House is one of the best (and narratively daring) novels I’ve ever read.]

How to improve writing (no. 134)

A subhead from a The New York Times article about yesterday’s disgraceful Supreme Court decision regarding TPS and deportation:

The split mirrored one that has long divided Americans: how seriously to take the president’s loose, provocative and sometimes ugly remarks.

Note to the Times : it’s long past time to drop the decorousness. Better:

The split mirrored one that has long divided Americans: how seriously to take the president’s frankly racist remarks.

Related reading
All OCA How to improve writing posts (Pinboard)

[This post is no. 134 in a series dedicated to improving stray bits of professional public prose.]

Hearing or reading “Yarmouth”

Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1850).

Pretty Proustian.

Yarmouth : David :: Combray : Marcel.

Em’ly : David :: Gilberte : Marcel.

Related reading
All OCA Dickens posts (Pinboard)

[“It seems that Proust did not discover Dickens before, possibly, the age of 35, when his friend René Peter lent him a copy of David Copperfield ”: Christine Huguet, “Dickens in France: Major Writers,” in The Reception of Charles Dickens in Europe, ed. Michael Hollington (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013). Though Proust’s initial response was negative, his friend never got the book back. More here.]

Columns

[At a red light, somewhere outside Boston, a few weeks ago.]

Click for a larger view. Look closely.

Canned Heat and Dante

In the Hand of Dante (dir. Julian Schnabel, 2025) is making me want to cry zio . Zio!  But this movie is now being partly redeemed by the non-diegetic arrival of Canned Heat’s “Poor Moon.” Must keep watching. (Must?)

A related post
“Poor Moon”