The Red Leather Diary

Lily Koppel. The Red Leather Diary. New York. Harper. 2008. $23.95.

As a teenager, Florence Wolfson (now Howitt) kept a Mile Stones Five Year Diary from 1929 to 1934. She began on her birthday, four lines a day: "This is my first entry in this beautiful diary 'cause today I'm fourteen years old!"

The Red Leather Diary is a book of three stories: of Florence Wolfson's early life, of the unlikely events that reunited writer and diary in 2006, and of the poignant encounter between the diarist (who turns 93 later this year) and her younger self. Wolfson grew up in Manhattan, the child of a doctor and dress designer. She skipped three grades, was rejected by Barnard ("Too brilliant and individual"), studied at Hunter, and did an M.A. in English at Columbia. She appears in her diary entries as a young woman of tremendous energy and imagination, intellectually and sexually precocious, devoted to art, literature, and music, loving both men and women:

The museum all day — then Molière and again those damned études — it irritates me to practice them, but I cannot stop — what provoking technique — so tricky.

I went to see "Hedda Gabler" straight from school. It was marvelous.

Have stuffed myself with Mozart and Beethoven — I feel like a ripe apricot — I'm dizzy with the exotic.

Nat finally kissed me! It was pretty bad, but he was so utterly delightful about it that I didn't care. He's sweet.

She is so sympathetically identical — Why are not men like her?

Koppel, a New York Times reporter whose doorman retrieved the diary from a dumpster and gave it to her, provides choice bits of detail to put us in touch with the lost New York of Wolfson's youth. Koppel's account of finding Florence Howitt is pure serendipity, involving a typewriter repair shop and an investigative attorney with a collection of vintage phonebooks. And Florence Howitt's encounter with Florence Wolfson involves the reckoning we all must make as our dreams run up against circumstance: "I don't feel like a heroine in my own life," Howitt tells Koppel, "but I have to tell you, I've come to terms with myself."

One reservation: I've quoted the diary entries above as they appear in the book. But here is the third, as seen in the New York Times slideshow about the diary:

Have stuffed myself with Mozart and Beethoven & music & Huysmans — I feel like a ripe apricot — I'm dizzy with the exotic

Yes, music is redundant, and Huysmans not a household name, but diary entries don't seem fair game for this kind of editing. Does it run throughout the book?

And if you're wondering — yes, there's already talk of a movie.

The Red Leather Diary (HarperCollins)
Speak, Memory (New York Times article)
Speak, Memory (New York Times slideshow)

Saratoga Bar and Cafe

                   Neon in daylight is a
great pleasure, as Edwin Denby would
write

Frank O'Hara (1926–1966), "A Step Away from Them"

The Saratoga Bar and Cafe is a landmark in downtown Terre Haute, Indiana.

[Photograph by Michael Leddy.]

I dream of Dempsey

Jack Dempsey dropped by for lunch last night. His visit wasn't and was a surprise: he had awarded scholarships to our children (way to go, children!), so we knew that he was coming to our house, but we didn't know when. I answered the door wearing a T-shirt and jeans. Dempsey wore a white shirt and black suit. We shook hands, and I had one thought: how to turn off the washing machine downstairs without calling attention to the fact that it was running.

And now it's time for breakfast.

Meet Ben Whitehouse

I just discovered that much of the content of my Lifehack post N'allez pas trop vite has been borrowed without attribution by a blogger named Ben Whitehouse, in a post that he too calls N'allez pas trop vite.

ML: I like Marcel Proust’s words: N’allez pas trop vite. Don’t go too fast.

BW: I like Marcel Proust’s words: N’allez pas trop vite. Don’t go too fast.

*

ML: : . . . phone conversations, text-messaging, and iPod management . . .

BW: Phone conversations, iPod management and text messaging . . .

*

ML: It might not be practical to slow down when one has ten minutes to get from one end of a campus to the other. But a college student might benefit in numerous ways from slowing down and looking at and learning about her or his surroundings.

BW: It might not be practical to slow down when one has ten minutes to get from one end of a campus to the other. But a student (and me for that matter) might benefit in numerous ways from slowing down and looking at and learning about our surroundings.

My post went on to describe five ways in which a student might slow down and pay greater attention to the details of a campus. Whitehouse borrows the first three:

ML: 1. Learn about a building, your residence hall perhaps, or a classroom building. How old is it? Who designed it? What style of architecture does it represent? For whom was it named? Did it serve another purpose in the past? What if anything once stood where it was built? A neighborhood? A cornfield?

BW: 1. Learn about a building. For whom was it named? Did it serve another purpose in the past? What if anything once stood where it was built? A neighborhood? A cornfield?

*

ML: 2. Give some attention to the monuments and portraits that most students (and faculty) walk past. Commemorative plaques, presidential portraits, class gifts (sometimes in the form of a fountain or gate), memorials to alumni in military service: all these can help you to recognize that as a college student, you’re a member of a community that spans generations of endeavor.

BW: 2. Give some attention to the monuments and portraits that most students (and faculty) walk past. Commemorative plaques, presidential portraits (this is a tradition that's only just started here) all help connest [sic] you to a community that spans generations of endeavor.

*

ML: 3. Learn some legends. Stories, natural and supernatural, abound on college campuses. Learning some local lore (perhaps through clippings or microfilm in the library) might brighten (or darken!) your experience of campus life.

BW: 3. Learn some legends. Stories, natural and supernatural, abound on college campuses. Learning some local lore might brighten (or darken!) your experience of campus life.

What kind of person borrows someone else's words without attribution to make a blog post? I found a book review by Ben Whitehouse with a brief bio:

Ben Whitehouse works at the Guild of Students at the University of Birmingham in the UK. He has a blog [here]. In his spare time he runs a book group, film club, and finds time to campaign on issues around LGBT rights, local residents rights and he also helps entertaining his three nephews who he loves very much.

Which of course doesn't really answer my question.

Extinction

The language of the slot-machine industry:

There's a term bandied about at the trade shows: "extinction." We need to design for extinction, we need to reduce time-to-extinction, and so on.

What's extinction? That's the moment that the customer — the gambler sitting at the slot machine — runs out of money. The wallet, or credit card, is now "extinct." Mission accomplished.

Read more: The flip side of customer experience (Good Experience).

Cigarettes and similes

David Sedaris, from an account of life with cigarettes:

A light cigarette is like a regular one with a pinhole in it. With Kools, it's the difference between being kicked by a donkey and being kicked by a donkey that has socks on.

Related post
Cigarettes and similes ("Love Is Like a Cigarette")

Scriptos in Times Square

Killer's Kiss (1955), written and directed by Stanley Kubrick, is a great film noir. Running only 67 minutes, it feels like a longer, fuller film, as it's told largely in images: fight posters, dance-hall posters, photographs tucked into the edges of a mirror, a doll tethered to a bed railing, a tiled staircase. Boxer Davy Gordon and dance-hall girl Gloria Price (played by Jamie Smith and Irene Kane) meet, fall in love, and become the targets of jealous dance-hall owner Vincent Rapallo (played by Frank Silvera). There are great scenes of Times Square at night and a brutal fight in a mannequin warehouse.

Above, a still from a Times Square scene with Davy and Gloria. Imagine: an electric sign for Scripto mechanical pencils in Times Square. In 1955, people took their pencils seriously. But even better: the sign has moving parts and becomes, as Davy and Gloria talk, an advertisement for ballpoint pens: 29¢, same price as the pencils.



If you're wondering what the sign on the left is advertising, it's Himberama, "a sleight-of-hand musical revue" under the direction of orchestra leader and magician Richard Himber. Note the changing position of the rabbit: this sign too has moving parts. In another shot, the snappy slogans are readable: "A HARE RAISIN' SHOW," "THE 4D PRODUCTION."

In working out the mysteries of Himberama, I'm indebted to the New York Times obituary for Richard Himber (1966) and two articles from American Speech, John Lotz's "The Suffix '-Rama'" (1954) and the unattributed "Some Popular Components of Trade Names" (1958). The phrase "a sleight-of-hand musical revue" is from the Times. I still don't understand the fourth dimension.

*

March 9, 2021: I updated the link for Roger Russell’s Scripto pages, which are now saved at the Internet Archive.

Related post
Is there a pencil in The House ? (on pencils in The House on 92nd Street)

Overheard

Cartoon aesthetics:

"I think it would look really goofy if you had made a speech balloon with multiple teats."

(Thanks, Elaine!)

All "Overheard" posts (via Pinboard)

"When narcissism is wounded"

I find a plausible explanation of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's current "tour" in Charles Crumb's observation in the documentary Crumb (1994):

"When narcissism is wounded, it wants to strike back at the person who wounded it."

An observation that helps, I think, to explain Bill Clinton's recent behavior too.

On Duke Ellington's birthday

Roaming through the jungle, the jungle of "oohs" and "ahs," searching for a more agreeable noise, I live a life of primitivity with the mind of a child and an unquenchable thirst for sharps and flats. The more consonant, the more appetizing and delectable they are. Cacophony is hard to swallow. Living in a cave, I am almost a hermit, but there is a difference, for I have a mistress. Lovers have come and gone, but only my mistress stays. She is beautiful and gentle. She waits on me hand and foot. She is a swinger. She has grace. To hear her speak, you can't believe your ears. She is ten thousand years old. She is as modern as tomorrow, a brand-new woman every day, and as endless as time mathematics. Living with her is a labyrinth of ramifications. I look forward to her every gesture.

Music is my mistress, and she plays second fiddle to no one.

Duke Ellington, Music Is My Mistress (New York: Doubleday, 1973), 447.

Edward Kennedy Ellington was born on April 29, 1899. The above image is from the LP-sized booklet that came with This One's for Blanton (Pablo, 1972), the first Ellington recording I bought.

If you're looking for an introduction to Ellington's music, The Great Paris Concert is a great start.