Ben Leddy hosts The Rewind

Here’s the latest installment of WGBH’s The Rewind, hosted by our son Ben. Be sure to pause to read the full text of Julia Child‘s letters.

Saving Barnes & Noble

The New York Times profiles James Daunt, founder of Daunt Books and managing director of the Waterstones bookstore chain. Daunt is soon to leave London for New York to serve as the new chief executive at Barnes & Noble:

His guiding assumption is that the only point of a bookstore is to provide a rich experience in contrast to a quick online transaction. And for now, the experience at Barnes & Noble isn’t good enough.

“Frankly, at the moment you want to love Barnes & Noble, but when you leave the store you feel mildly betrayed,” Mr. Daunt said over lunch at a Japanese restaurant near his office in Piccadilly Circus. “Not massively, but mildly. It’s a bit ugly — there’s piles of crap around the place. It all feels a bit unloved, the booksellers look a bit miserable, it’s all a bit run down.

“And every year, fewer people come in, or people come in less often. That has to turn around. Otherwise . . .”

The opening anecdote in this Times piece — three degrees? four? — suggests that Daunt brings to his work a Steve Jobs-like intensity of attention to detail.

Related posts
Whither Barnes & Noble? : A as in Dante : Barnes & Noble & the future : Barnes & Noble, “final bastion of hope”?

“Our civilization”

The narrator speaks of what he calls “our civilization”:


Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities. 1930–1943. Trans. Sophie Wilkins (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995).

Can you see why I love this novel?

Related reading
All OCA Musil posts (Pinboard)

James D. Wallace (1937–2019)

James D. Wallace, professor of moral philosophy, has died at the age of eighty-two. This obituary, which appears to have been written by his family, has a detail that would be very much at home in his son David Foster Wallace’s novel Infinite Jest:

When Mr. Wallace was a brand new professor, students actually threw rocks at him, mistaking him for a fellow student sufficiently geeky to carry a briefcase.

James Wallace’s mentor in grad school days was the philosopher Norman Malcolm. Malcolm had been Ludwig Wittgenstein’s student. Wittgenstein–Malcolm–Wallace: two degrees of separation.

I remember once roaming the hallway of the University of Illinois philosophy department with my son Ben. We passed James Wallace’s office. I had read both father (Virtues and Vices) and son, and wondered what, if anything, I might have said had the door opened.

“Tearing America apart”

In The New Yorker, John Cassidy writes that “Donald Trump and lax gun laws are tearing America apart”:

Let us not kid ourselves: in many ways, the United States was failing before Donald Trump took his famous ride down the escalator at Trump Tower. . . .

But what the United States didn’t have, until January, 2017, was a President whose personal instincts and political strategy drive him to inflame the country on a daily basis.

The president of the United States, the ostensible leader of the free world, is a liar, a misogynist, a predator, a white supremacist. I’d say send him back: but where to? We have no time machines. Better: vote him out. After which, I fear, he’ll be sowing hatred and division from the toxic (and Russia-friendly) One America News Network.

[And why is Trump smiling in the posed photographs from Dayton? And why are the people around him smiling? Did the president question doctors and nurses and first responders about the traumatic injuries that assault weapons inflict on the human body? Did he talk to members of law enforcement about the danger such weapons pose to them? And to shooting victims in the hospital: “You had God watching.” Was a divinity picking winners and losers early Sunday morning? I have no more words.]

“Getting real things done”

Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities. 1930–1943. Trans. Sophie Wilkins (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995).

Related reading
All OCA Musil posts (Pinboard)

Needs studied

“A Downstate Illinois Dictionary” (Chicago). With fronted o, need + past participle, and positive anymore.

Related posts
Illinoism : “Need worked” : Positive anymore

[“Illinois”? “Ellinois?” I think either pronunciation is acceptable. But only Sufjan Stevens can get away with “Illinoise.”]

It Depends

“Pa-pa doesn’t wear diapers.”

Talia is right.

But you never know, Talia. If Pa-pa lives long enough, he might someday wear diapers. It Depends.

[Elaine is Gamma. I who was Ba-pa am now Pa-pa, still with equal stress on each syllable. Language evolves.]

Toni Morrison (1931–2019)

Toni Morrison, novelist, critic, Nobel laureate, has died at the age of eighty-eight. The New York Times has an obituary.

The final paragraphs of Morrison’s Jazz are one of my favorite things in all literature. Getting a kick from these paragraphs requires, really, reading all that precedes them. So I’ll share these paragraphs while preserving a mystery:


Toni Morrison, Jazz (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992).

Other Morrison posts
“Hi” vs. “hello” : Slow down and read : “Undercover whispers” : “Why not ghosts”

Dad, i.m.

My dad, James Leddy, died four years ago today. He’d have been ninety-one this year, climbing to ever higher and more dangerous altitudes.

In telephone conversations my dad used to bring up the names of old-time film stars and bit players for me to look into online. He’d always want to know if those under investigation were “still around.” Almost always, they were not.

In 2016, I encountered this passage, attributed to John Chrysostom, but easy enough for a non-believer to agree with: “Those whom we love and lose are no longer where they were before. They are now wherever we are.” Dad, you’re still around.

Here is what I wrote after my dad died.