Life before air-conditioning

“Broadway had open trolleys with no side walls, in which you at least caught the breeze, hot though it was, so that desperate people, unable to endure their apartments, would simply pay a nickel and ride around aimlessly for a couple of hours to cool off”: in 1998, Arthur Miller wrote for The New Yorker about life before air-conditioning.

See also 99% Invisible on “thermal delight.”

A coffee quiz

[Life, October 31, 1938. Click for a slightly larger view.]

Insomniacs drinking coffee — sounds like homeopathy. Football teams drinking coffee at halftime — I wouldn’t know. Regular habits — like golf? No, not golf. “The gentle wave-like motion” — my inner twelve-year-old is snickering. Hangovers — my inner twenty-four-year-old is thinking that coffee cures them.

So many claims, such “oceans of notions” — and, as William Butler Yeats might have put it, “The coffee cup’s in the midst of all.” Yes, where there’s life — there’s coffee! I like that dowdy cup, steam rising, message written in cream by an exceedingly skilled barista. Oh, wait: it’s 1938. No barista.

Related reading
All OCA coffee posts (Pinboard)

Trump vs. breast-feeding

“The intensity of the [Trump] administration’s opposition to the breast-feeding resolution stunned public health officials and foreign diplomats, who described it as a marked contrast to the Obama administration, which largely supported [the World Health Organization’s] longstanding policy of encouraging breast-feeding”: “U.S. Opposition to Breast-Feeding Resolution Stuns World Health Officials” (The New York Times).

For someone like Donald Trump, women’s breasts have but one purpose, no?

And even in this story, there’s a Russia connection.

Domestic comedy

[While watching 90 Day Fiancé. It was very late.]

“It’s like Jerry Springer.”

“In houses.”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

From the Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper, by Frank Longo, is a tough one. I had to look up three answers to finish: a bit of crosswordese, a fairly obscure quotation, and a term that left me baffled, ending in BOX. (A what?)

Two clues that I especially liked: 1-Across, four letters: “Galaxy cluster.” And 11-Down, four letters: “Joiner of many clubs?”

No spoilers: the answers are in the comments.

Hi and Lois watch

[Hi and Lois, July 7, 2018. Click for a much larger view.]

I doubt that Nancy has ever stepped into a church. Or if she has, it was probably to “borrow” a dime from the collection box (for a soda). Or candles for Sluggo’s birthday cake. Or something. All that aside: today’s strip is a pleasing assembly of comic-strip characters, all of whom attend a Christian house of worship with non-representational stained-glass windows. From front to back, left to right, I see Nancy, Curtis Wilkins, Dennis the Menace, Mary Worth, Archie Andrews, Earl Pickles (where’s Opal?), Popeye the Sailor, Perfesser Cosmo Fishhawk (Shoe), and Dick Tracy. The couple in the second row, the guy with the red tie, and the angry-looking bird: no idea. Anyone? A little help?

A mystery of the Hi and Lois interstice: the guy with the red tie changes his seat between the first and second panels.

July 8: Eric Reaves, the strip’s artist, explained in a comment at Comics Kingdom: “The couple is my wife and I (the artist of the strip). The red tie guy is a character I created many years ago for a rejected comic strip idea, and the lady in purple is my grandmother!”

Related reading
All OCA Hi and Lois posts (Pinboard)

[Perhaps that bird is an Angry Bird. The Angry Birds now have a comic strip.]

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.