FSRC: annual report

The Four Seasons Reading Club, our household’s two-person adventure in reading, has finished its seventh year. The club began after I retired from teaching, so the year runs from May to May. In our seventh year we read novels, novellas, short-story collections, graphic novels, non-fiction, a Socratic dialogue, a children’s story, and a poem. In alphabetical order:

Hans Christian Andersen, The Snow Queen, trans. unknown

W.H. Auden, “Musée des Beaux Arts”

Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room, Go Tell It on the Mountain

Honoré de Balzac, The Memoirs of Two Young Wives, trans. Jordan Stump

Ronald Blythe, Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village

Emmanuel Bove, My Friends, trans. Janet Louth

Anne Brontë, Agnes Grey, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Charlotte Brontë, Villette

Jerry Craft, Class Act, New Kid

Robertson Davies, The Salterton Trilogy: Tempest-Tost, Leaven of Malice, A Mixture of Frailties

Henry James, The Turn of the Screw and Other Ghost Stories

Tove Jansson, The Summer Book, trans. Thomas Teal

Robert Musil, Intimate Ties: Two Novellas, trans. Peter Wortsman; Young Törless, trans. Mike Mitchell

Vladimir Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

Gary Paulsen, Hatchet

Jed Perl, Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts

Plato, Gorgias, trans. Walter Hamilton and Chris Emlyn-Jones

Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You

Anna Seghers, The Dead Girls’ Class Trip, trans. Margot Bettauer Dembo

Gilbert Sorrentino, Aberration of Starlight

Art Spiegelman, Maus

Robert Louis Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Treasure Island

Adalbert Stifter, The Bachelors, trans. David Bryer; Motley Stones, trans. Isabel Fargo Cole

Kathrine Kressmann Taylor, Address Unknown

Eudora Welty, Thirteen Stories

Now it’s on to Nella Larsen, Passing.

Here are the reports for 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021.

Streaming screenshots

If you use a Mac, you may have noticed that it’s no longer possible to take a screenshot with commercial streaming services. With Safari it's been impossible for some time. And now it’s the same with the Brave browser — there’s just a black rectangle where a screenshot should be.

I cannot find a Safari extension that will bring screenshots back. But there is a fix with Brave: add the Chrome extension Screenshot Tool.

I would guess that this extension works with Chrome itself, but I don’t (won’t) use Chrome. If anyone can verify that Screenshot Tool works there, please do. And if anyone has a fix for Safari, please share.

I’ve found little discussion of this problem — and no solutions — online, so I hope this post is helpful to some movie fanatic somewhere.

“America is minorities”

A soapbox speaker addresses a small crowd, presenting himself an “American American,” or what Tucker Carlson would call a “legacy American.” The speaker rails against “Negroes,” Catholics, Masons, and “alien foreigners.” A Hungarian-born professor listens with dismay: “I’ve heard this kind of talk before, but I never expected to hear it in America.” When the speaker is done, the professor talks at length to another spectator who thought the speaker made “pretty good sense” — at least until he mentioned the Masons. From the 1945 Department of Defense film Don’t Be a Sucker :

“We must never let ourselves be divided by race, or color, or religion, because in this country we all belong to minority groups. I was born in Hungary; you are a Mason: these are minorities. And then you belong to other minority groups too. You are a farmer; you have blue eyes; you go to the Methodist church. Your right to belong to these minorities is a precious thing. You have a right to be what you are and say what you think, because here we have personal freedom. We have liberty.

“And these are not just fancy words. This is a practical and priceless way of living. But we must work at it. We must guard everyone's liberty, or we can lose our own. If we allow any minority to lose its freedom by persecution, or by prejudice, we are threatening our own freedom. And this is not simply an idea: this is good hard common sense.

“You see, here in America it is not a question of whether we tolerate minorites. America is minorities. And that means you and me. So let’s not be suckers. We must not allow the freedom or dignity of any man to be threatened by any act or word. Let’s be selfish about it. Let’s forget about we and they. Let’s think about us.”

[The orator: Richard Lane. The professor: Paul Lukas. Both uncredited. A 1945 audience would have immediately recognized both.]

Gnome Bakers

[316 E. 59th Street, Manhattan, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click either image for a much larger view.]

I’ll let this New York Times article (1990) tell the story of Gnome Bakers. The Times mentions a papier-mâché gnome that once sat atop the roof, leaning against the chimney (“Unusual Breads & Rolls”). The word “Energy” is spelled out vertically above the small window between the dancing gnomes. Now there’s a sentence I could never have imagined writing.

Here, from 2015, when 316 E. 59th was for rent ($14,000 a month), are photographs of the building’s exterior and interior, with a nice glimpse of the rooftop gnome as seen from the entrance ramp to the Queensboro Bridge. Slow down, you move too fast. You got to see the gnome at last.

Nowadays 316 houses a chiropractor’s office.

Thanks, Brian.

Related posts
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives

Today’s Mutts

Today’s Mutts.

Buffalo

From The New York Times:

His writings were also riddled with racist, anti-immigrant views arguing that white Americans are at risk of being replaced by people of color, a common trope on the far-right known as the “great replacement” theory.

I can already guess what Tucker Carlson might say about it, if he dares to say anything about it: What this young man did was wrong, &c. And I never encouraged anyone to, &c. I condemn in the strongest possible terms, &c. But what happened in Buffalo should not make us close our eyes to, &c.

I fear that’s how it will go.

[The Times reports that the killer learned about “replacement theory” from 4chan.]

Egghead paperbacks

“Wouldn’t it make more sense,” Epstein asked, “to sell twenty copies of The Sound and the Fury at a dollar than one hardcover copy at ten dollars?”

In The American Scholar, Mark LaFlaur writes about Jason Epstein and “The Birth of the Egghead Paperback.”

A related post
The Eighth Street Bookshop (A 1961 advertisement)

224 > 205

From Business Insider: Jen Psaki held more formal press briefings during her fifteen months as White House press secretary (224) than the defeated former president’s press secretaries held in four years (205).

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper, by Stella Zawistowski, is about half as difficult as the last two Stumpers. Difficult, yes, but not sitting-at-the-kitchen-table-for-half-an-hour difficult. I began by filling in five letters of 14-D, seven letters, “Disgorge.” And the last letter made 33-A, six letters, “Nethermost” easy to see. 51-A, four letters, “French Toaster Sticks brand” was a gimme (though not a breakfast food I’d choose for myself), and that made 42-D, seven letters, “Largest Arab country by area” and the rest of the southeast corner relatively easy to work out. The toughest part of the puzzle: the northeast corner. 11-D, five letters, “Where to grab your spears”? My first thought was of asparagus.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

1-A, seven letters, “Acting appallingly.” Improves a familiar crossword word.

8-D, six letters, “Fancy footwork.” Not really. Footwork is in the origin, but the word’s meanings in English leave the feet behind.

19-A, five letters, “Take over.” A bit forced.

30-A, three letters, “How Timon of Athens originated.” If I understand this clue, the answer is exceeedingly forced.

36-A, four letters, “Use soap and water.” A word I learned from reading Nabokov.

36-D, eight letters, “Order to proceed.” A nice clash between the dignity of the clue and the abandon of the answer.

37-A, six letters, “Brit billiard player’s outerwear.” I don’t know why I know this word.

37-D, seven letters, “Hard to hobnob with.” Why bother?

45-A, seven letters, “‘Eighter from _____’ (casino dice roll).” Sounds like something from a Frank Sinatra–Dean Martin movie.

53-D, four letters, “Call it.” It wouldn’t hurt to have added a pronoun.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

“Indefensible”

Twenty-five paragraphs into a twenty-nine-paragraph Washington Post article about Samuel Alito’s (virtual) appearance at George Mason University: the news that Alito called the Supreme Court’s decision in Bostock v. Clayton County, which protects LGBTQ persons from workplace discrimination, “indefensible.” Or rather, he called the use of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as a basis for the decision indefensible:

While he said he wasn’t defending past actions, Alito said it was clear Congress at that time allowed and practiced discrimination.

“It is inconceivable that either Congress or voters in 1964 understood discrimination because of sex to mean discrimination because of sexual orientation, much less gender identity,” Alito said. “If Title VII had been understood at that time to mean what Bostock held it to mean, the prohibition on discrimination because of sex would never have been enacted. In fact, it might not have gotten a single vote in Congress.”

In other words, past discrimination justifies continued discrimination.

That is what’s indefensible.