Beautiful libraries

From the BBC, some of the world’s most beautiful libraries.

The most beautiful library I’ve ever used: Fordham University’s Duane Library, with tiers, nooks, crannies, passageways, mysterious doors, and spiral staircases. Here is a 1951 photograph that gives a good idea of the library’s main space. Dig the tiers! (When I was a student, tables alternated with the shelves, making for cozy little workspaces.) And here are recent photographs of the remodeled multi-purpose Duane, tiers and shelves removed, no longer a library. I liked working in the little room with the spiral staircase, which I think was in the Bs: philosophy. What’s the most beautiful library you know?

“All coming out of a tube”

Alfred Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz. 1929. Trans. Michael Hoffman (New York: New York Review Books, 2018).

A great novel, and not nearly as intimidating as you might think.

Related reading
All OCA Döblin posts (Pinboard)

Claude Lanzmann (1925–2018)

“A relentless interviewer, he used whatever it took — filming surreptitiously, posing as a French historian trying ‘to set the record straight’ — to pry astonishing stories out of his subjects”: the journalist and filmmaker Claude Lanzmann has died at the age of ninety-two. The New York Times has an obituary.

Lanzmann’s nine-and-a-half-hour documentary Shoah is available from Netflix.

[“The New York Times has an obituary”: how I hate typing those words.]

Henry Butler (1948–2018)

The pianist and singer Henry Butler has died at the age of sixty-nine. The New York Times has an obituary.

Henry lived and taught in our university town in the 1990s. He was often away, on leave to perform or record. He gave a concert here in which he played solo piano — I remember “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” and “Yesterdays” — and sang an Italian aria. He was a pianist of tremendous intensity, and a great unhurried conversationalist, with a dry sense of humor. When Elaine and I had Henry over for dinner, I picked him up at his house, where I noticed a copy of Robert Johnson’s Complete Recordings out for listening. I remember that after dinner Henry told us a story about driving a car and getting pulled over by the police. (I should mention that Henry was blind.) We played a duet or two for him, guitar and violin, probably “Pennies from Heaven.” We didn’t own a piano at the time.

Here’s Henry Butler at the Library of Congress, talking and performing.

The Gateway

A six-part podcast series from Gizmodo: The Gateway, about Teal Swan, self-described “spiritual catalyst.” All episodes are now available, and they make for compelling listening, though there’s less of a narrative arc than the mysterious music and audio effects might lead you to expect. And Jennings Brown, the podcast’s creator, has an annoying habit of left dislocation that I was unable to unnotice.

I have two questions and no answers: Why is there no Wikipedia article about Teal Swan? And why does Google include in its capsule biography claims from Swan herself? This sentence, for instance, which appears in descriptions accompanying some of her YouTube videos:

Teal Swan was born in Santa Fe, New Mexico with a range of extrasensory abilities, including clairvoyance, clairsentience, and clairaudience.

Thanks a lot, Google.

[About left dislocation: I think of scripted podcast reportage as writing, not speech. Left dislocation sounds conspicuously informal there.]

The Fourth

[“Hungarian refugee Irene Csillag pledging allegiance to new flag on first day in American school.” Photograph by Carl Mydans. Indianapolis, Indiana. December 1956. From the Life Photo Archive. This photograph appeared in a Life story, “They Pour In . . . And Family Shows Refugees Can Fit In” (January 7, 1957). The principal at the Csillag children’s school: “They’re not the first to come here, strangers to the country and to English, and soon be at home.”]

I’ve had a Jasper Johns work, Flag on Orange, ready for months. But on this Fourth of July, I’m reposting a photograph that I posted in 2016. Let’s learn from our American past.

“The Immigrants”

A new recording from Gaby Moreno and Van Dyke Parks: “The Immigrants.” The song is by the calypsonian David Rudder. Background at NPR. Proceeds from downloads and streaming go to the Central American Resource Center of California.

Five questions

The Washington Post asks “the five hardest questions in pop music.” I am happy to provide answers:

1. The question stacks the deck, but yes.
2. Yes.
3. Yes.
4. With open ears.
5. Yes and no.

“First find out what you are capable of”

Studying at Brigham Young University, Tara Westover is trying to figure out how she “could be a woman and yet be drawn to unwomanly things” like the study of history and politics. She goes to talk to Paul Kerry, her history professor, and blurts out that she arrived at Brigham Young having never heard of the Holocaust. Her parents didn’t believe in public education. Kerry suggests that Westover stretch herself and “see what happens.” He suggests applying to a study-abroad program at Cambridge. If she’s accepted, the program may give her an idea of her ability. She thinks it over:

I walked to my apartment wondering what to make of the conversation. I’d wanted moral advice, someone to reconcile my calling as a wife and mother with the call I heard of something else. But he’d put that aside. He’d seemed to say, “First find out what you are capable of, then decide who you are.”

Tara Westover, Educated: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 2018).

“First find out what you are capable of, then decide who you are”: I love that. As Westover will later write: “a life is not a thing unalterable.”

Educated is a great story about the ways in which education can open up a world beyond one’s upbringing. As Elaine suggests, the book would be excellent choice for “one book, one campus” purposes. But I doubt that many schools would dare to make Educated required reading. The book raises too many difficult questions about responsibilities to oneself and to one’s family. For Westover, there’s a price to becoming educated, and it’s not tuition and fees.

Coffee or die

In the news: “Drinking coffee is associated with a lower risk of early death — virtually regardless of how much you drink and whether or not it’s caffeinated, concludes a paper published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine.”

Related reading
All OCA coffee posts (Pinboard)