A bookstore in the Bronx

Tomorrow is Independent Bookstore Day. And in The Bronx it’s opening day for a new independent bookstore, The Lit. Bar. The borough has been without a general interest bookstore since 2016. Kudos to Noëlle Santos for bringing a bookstore to The Bronx.

A related post
Bookstore-less Bronx

Politicians and Joyce

At The New Yorker, Kevin Dettmar, Joyce scholar, writes about “the politicians who love Ulysses”:

When Joyce surfaces in the tweets of Pete and Beto, it reassures us that these guys are familiar enough, and comfortable enough, with a big, difficult book to just drop a reference, casual-like. At a moment when it’s not clear that our President has ever finished an entire “chapter book” — even the one that he ghost-wrote with Tony Schwartz — these small gestures provide comfort.

Biden’s in there too.

That Pete Buttigieg drew the title of his memoir from Ulysses suggests a deep connection to Joyce. But when I read Beto O’Rourke’s description of Ulysses as “the same story” as the Odyssey, ”just told in what was then modern times set in Ireland,” I cringe a little.

Overheard

“We’ve had an acorn squash for, like, seven months. It looks okay though.”

Related reading
All OCA “overheard” posts (Pinboard)

[Like Marie Kondo, I must thank the room, which was a café.]

Kidspeak

In The Atlantic, John McWhorter writes about why adults are talking like children:

Clearly, kidspeak affords its users certain rhetorical advantages—the way it playfully softens blows is part of why younger people on social media now often couch what they say to one another in the toddler-esque. But what made bright teenagers and 20-somethings start imitating 5-year-olds in the first place? And why are many older Americans following suit?

Bits of our children’s childhood kidspeak long ago entered our household language, but I’ve heard very little of what McWhorter describes. Elaine and I recently used the new all without realizing we were following a trend: “Ayexa, order all  the toys!” And I’ve used the new because just once, because Talia.

“Does there need to be?”

Pamela Paul, editor of The New York Times Book Review, in an interview about “sliding backward” on technology: “In general, when I hear the phrase ‘There’s an app for that,’ my first question is, ‘Does there need to be?’”

See also Neil Postman’s six questions. The first: “What is the problem to which this technology is the solution?”

Hillary Clinton on how to proceed

Hillary Clinton, writing in The Washington Post;

The debate about how to respond to Russia’s “sweeping and systematic” attack — and how to hold President Trump accountable for obstructing the investigation and possibly breaking the law — has been reduced to a false choice: immediate impeachment or nothing. History suggests there’s a better way to think about the choices ahead.

Clinton’s recommendation: Congressional investigations to fill in the gaps in the Mueller report, an independent bipartisan commission to safeguard elections, and health-care and infrastructure legislation from the Democratic House. Clinton sees the Mueller report as a road map to “the eventual filing of articles of impeachment, or not.”

I think that Clinton’s pragmatism might be the right choice here. I want to see Donald Trump impeached — everything he’s done and not done demands it. But I think of Omar Little’s wisdom: “You come at the king, you best not miss.” Impeachment would be a miss: the Senate will not vote to remove Trump from office, which would likely leave him boasting and gloating and feeling more empowered and reckless than ever. So instead of impeachment: lingchi, death by a thousand cuts, hearing after hearing after hearing. Even if those cuts — just metaphorical ones, please — leave Trump in office, they will likely leave his credibility and chances of re-election in ruins. The idealist in me says Impeach! Because if not Trump, then whom? But pragmatism might make better sense.

[Trump has tweeted and re-tweeted nineteen times today. Imagine what he’ll be like when hearings begin.]

“Realistic underwear”

The newly married couple share a dresser.


Johannes Urzidil, “Siegelmann’s Journey.” In The Last Bell. Translated from the German by David Burnett. (London: Pushkin Press, 2017.)

Also from this book
Apartments : “Well, that’s the Renaissance”

“Well, that’s the Renaissance”

Wenzel Schaschek, bank clerk, has stolen from a museum a painting of Eleonor, the Duchess of Albanera. The painted Duchess has begun to tell Schaschek of her life: after killing her first husband, she was determined to forgive her second husband anything. But he betrayed her by taking a lover, so she took that lover for herself, enslaved him to her body, and “worked him” until he plunged a dagger into her husband’s heart.


Johannes Urzidil, “The Duchess of Albanera.” In The Last Bell. Translated from the German by David Burnett. (London: Pushkin Press, 2017.)

Also from this book
Apartments

Oscar’s (last) Day (of teaching)

Fare forward, George.

Toilet trouble

From WBEZ, Chicago: “Democratic Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, his wife and his brother-in-law are under federal criminal investigation for a dubious residential property tax appeal that dogged him during his gubernatorial campaign last year.”

Dubious indeed: the scheme involved the removal of toilets from a mansion to render said mansion “vacant and uninhabitable.” Total Pritzker property-tax savings: $331,432.

I was never a Pritzker fan, and I have proof: this post and this one. The last thing our civic life needs is another billionaire.