Two skies

Clifford B. Hicks, Alvin’s Secret Code (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963).

The scudded in that passage has stuck in my head since I first read Alvin’s Secret Code in childhood. Here is another scudded, which I discovered much more recently:

Robert Musil, Young Törless. 1906. Trans. from the German by Mike Mitchell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

Alas, the similarities between the two works end there.

[Are clouds the only things that scud? No. Thanks, Martha.]

Candy stores

New York City Candy Stores: A Look Back: a short narrative with photographs, at YouTube.

Revery: I remember Mary’s for cap guns, comic books, and water pistols. There was also at least one plastic bust of a composer (Beethoven?) for sale. Picholz’s had a full-fledged soda fountain and a long display of magazines. I think we bought Coke syrup there (for school-day stomach jitters). A third Brooklyn candy store, nameless to me, was a source for charlotte russe. A fourth, also nameless, was a source for pumpkin seeds.

Here, courtesy of the New York City Municipal Archives, is Picholz’s location, 4417 New Utrecht Avenue, circa 1939–1941, then a candy store owned by L. Stoppick. His name is on the awning. A great location, right by the stairs up to the El. Notice the bakery next door offering charolotte russe: 5¢.

[Click for a much larger store.]

L. Stoppick was at this location in 1922.

[The Retail Tobacconist, February 9, 1922.]

I suspect that “fine smoke shop” was a euphemism for “candy store.”

Since at least 2012, 4417 has been home to an Ecuadorian restaurant, Sol de Quito.

[The name Picholz was spoken, never written. I was guessing, but it turns out that I guessed correctly.]

Tinta Azul

I know that one is never supposed to buy wine for the label, especially not a label with a picture of a critter. But Tinta Azul I had to buy for its label. Look: tile work. And the name means “blue ink.”

Tinta Azul is a red blend from Portugal. It has a dark, inky color. But I’d describe the taste as “wet.” It’s nearly tasteless. But the label is just fine.

[My dad was a tile man, floors and walls: Leddy Ceramic Tile.]

A Robert Walser biography

Susan Bernofsky, Clairvoyant of the Small: The Life of Robert Walser. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021. viii + 378 pages. $35.

Translator and, now, biographer Susan Bernofsky’s Clairvoyant of the Small is a brilliant account of Robert Walser’s life, deeply researched, and deeply respectful of its subject, recording Walser’s idiosyncrasies and strangenesses while never reducing him to a condition or attempting a diagnosis in retrospect. The writing is full of inventive turns of phrase along the way, as when Bernofsky describes the inveterate walker Walser’s frequent shifts of residence (she counts sixty-six known addresses between 1878 and 1929) as “a slow-motion real-estate version of walking.” Here is the gist of Walser’s work in one beautiful sentence: “The marginality he celebrates is that of secretly magnificent complexities hiding in plain sight all around us under the guise of the ordinary and small.” A clairvoyant of the small indeed.

For anyone curious about reading Walser in English, I recommend The Walk, from New Directions (Susan Bernofsky’s revision of Christopher Middleton’s translation).

Related reading
All OCA Walser posts (Pinboard)

[The phrase “clairvoyant of the small” comes from Jo Catling’s English translation of W.G. Sebald’s essay about Walser, “Le Promeneur Solitaire,” in A Place in the Country (New York: Modern Library, 2013). Catling gives Sebald’s German: “ein Hellseher im Kleinen,” which borrows from Walser’s “dafür ist es ihm vergönnt gewesen, in seiner kleinen hell zu sehen,” which Catling translates as “he has been granted the gift of farsightedness in his own small world.” Catling notes that “‘Hellsehen’ (‘seeing clearly’) has in German the additional meaning of clairvoyance.”]

Pomotroid

Pomotroid is a free Pomodoro timer by Christopher Murphy for Linux, macOS, and Windows. The app marks time with a clock-like ring, red for the Pomodoro, green for the break. On the Mac, the ring sits in the menu bar, tiny and unobtrusive. And on the Mac Pomotroid has a minor display problem that I hope will be fixed.

I still like Flow, but a ring in the menu bar is a nice alternative to watching time run down by the second.

A related post
The Pomodoro Technique Illustrated

Naming of parts

From The New York Times: “Taking the ‘Shame Part’ Out of Female Anatomy.” The word in question: pudendum. I knew about hysteria, but not pudendum. It’s patriarchy, inscribed in the language of anatomy.

Dip Night

In honor of Only Murders in the Building, tonight is Dip Night: baba ghanoush, hummus, carrot and celery sticks, orange and yellow pepper slices, Kalamata olives, and pita. Viewers of the show will understand. Dip Night is Elaine’s idea, prompted by an abudance of eggplant from a friend’s garden.

Are we alone in this kind of TV-centric whimsy?

A newly identified Van Gogh

Smithsonian magazine reports on a newly identified Vincent van Gogh drawing, made with the simplest materials:

Van Gogh used a carpenter’s pencil to draw the scene on a 19- by 12-inch sheaf of watercolor paper. He finished off lighter parts of the composition by rubbing pellets of bread on the coarse surface, then applied a fixative made from milk and water to better emphasize the dark pencil strokes.

Related reading
All OCA Van Gogh posts (Pinboard)
When to capitalize Van Gogh

One letter, two pages, six points

Today’s installment of Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American should make any right-thinking person’s head spin. It begins with a two-page, six-point memo for stealing a presidential election.

Just One Thing, a podcast

A worthwhile podcast from the BBC: Just One Thing, with Michael Mosley. Each short episode is devoted to one suggestion for better health. Much of the evidence is anecdotal (“I’m sleeping better”), and at least one suggestion (about the superior benefits of short bursts of exercise) has been challenged by more recent research. But any podcast that recommends morning walks, time spent in nature, and the consumption of dark chocolate is all right by me.