NYPL

[New York Public Library, 476 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

The main branch opened on May 23, 1911. The building is now known as the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building.

I like the contrast in this photograph between the dark foreground figures (at least six of whom appear to be looking right into the camera) and the library, strangely luminous in the near distance, an urban Emerald City. You can just make out Patience and Fortitude, left and right (south and north), standing guard behind the watermark.

Related posts
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives

Today’s Nancy

Olivia Jaimes, breaking that fourth wall.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

Proust for all

From the journalist Cath Pound, some encouragement to read Proust: “Why the world’s most difficult novel is so rewarding” (BBC). Caution: if you’ve never read In Search of Lost Time, you’ll encounter many spoilers.

Here’s a (spoiler-free) OCA post with tips for reading Proust.

Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)

[“It is a common reading experience to get through the first 50 or 60 pages of In Search of Lost Time and then just give up”: that statement puzzles me. You need to read only fifty pages or so to hit the novel’s first big reward.]

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper, by Stella Zawistowski, is a true Stumper. I found an easy starting point in 14-D, five letters, “Erstwhile royalty, up and down,” and 16-A, five letters, “Good-luck pigment at Middle East weddings.” After that, I stumbled about, an answer here, an answer there. The clue that gave me the greatest trouble: 46-A, thirteen letters, “Mannered men and women.” Having that wrong made a mess of things for quite some time.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

5-A, nine letters, “Play along with.” I thought of humoring someone.

11-D, eight letters, and 31-D, nine letters, “Superior at many schools.” I like the repurposing of the clue.

13-D, four letters, “Calls for.” Pretty misdirective.

21-A, thirteen letters, “What Beethoven called a piano.” One of several keyboard clues in the puzzle. There’s also 8-D, six letters, “Pianist’s pinky-thumb pair,” and 51-A, six letters, “Pianist’s pinky-thumb pairs.” 21-A is tricker than I suspected.

26-A, six letters, “Bit of year-end debris.” I was thinking of confetti.

38-A, five letters, “It might get you down.” Emily Dickinson gave me the answer here.

42-D, six letters, “Article length.” I have never seen or heard this word. Merriam-Webster’s examples of recent use are unrelated to this definition.

54-D, three letters, “Not following.” A clever way to improve a bit of crosswordese.

56-A, five letters, “What jelly beans are made with.” SUGAR, right? Wrong. Not especially obvious.

59-A, nine letters, “Typical Saturday matinee cartoon.” It pays to like old movies.

My favorite in this puzzle: 45-D, five letters, “Mainly?”

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

A rotten sardine

“Last one there is a rotten sardine!”: that’s a line from My Little Pony: A New Generation (dir. Robert Cullen, Mark Fattibene, and José Luis Ucha, 2021).

But you don’t have to take my word for it. Hear it here.

Related reading
All OCA sardine posts (Pinboard)

[I’m not sure who that line is for. “Youngish” parents? It’s certainly not for the kiddos.]

A woman in a window

[From Where the Sidewalk Ends (dir. Otto Preminger, 1950). Click for a much larger view.]

Here’s the reason I wanted to watch this movie again: the eerie image of a woman (Grayce Mills) in her basement apartment, drowsing in a chair as her radio plays classical music. As she will explain to police detectives, “I always sleep here since my husband died. It seems less lonely. Music helps me.”

Cinematography by Joseph LaShelle, who won an Academy Award for his work on Laura (1944), also directed by Preminger, also starring Dana Andrews and Gene Tierney.

Deresiewicz on leaving academia

William Deresiewicz explains why he left academia. He begins:

If I care so much about college — about students, about teaching, about the humanities, about the transformative potential of the undergraduate experience — then why did I leave? Why, in 2008, after 10 years on the faculty at Yale, did I say goodbye not only to that institution but to the profession as a whole? A lot of people have asked me that question; a lot more have assumed they know the answer. Did I quit in disgust at the corruption of the academic enterprise? Could I no longer bear to participate in the perpetuation of the class system? If I didn’t get tenure at Yale, did I regard it as beneath my dignity to work at a less prestigious institution? No, no, and no.

Here’s why I left: I didn’t have a choice. I not only failed to get tenure at Yale — which was completely expected — I failed to land another job anywhere else. Let me explain how it works.

A cautionary tale about the academic humanities, from graduate study to the tenure track. Pairs well with William Pannapacker’s “So You Want to Go to Grad School?,” “Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don’t Go,” and “Just Don’t Go, Part 2.”

*

If I were to choose just one OCA post that captures my sense of what’s wrong with English studies, it’d be this one: Hoagies, pizzas, and English studies.

[Deresiewicz’s essay is free for a limited time from Quillette. I suspect that this will be the first and last time I link to anything from Quillette. Pannapacker’s essays are behind the Chronicle of Higher Education firewall, but available (I think) with a free, limited-number-of-articles subscription.]

Gravity and Dan Price

In 2015 Dan Price, the chief executive of Gravity Payments, established a $70,000 minimum salary for his employees. Me, in a comment on a 2015 post: “If the Gravity story ends badly, I’ll have one more reason to be disappointed.”

And here we are: “Social Media Was a C.E.O.’s Bullhorn, and How He Lured Women” (The New York Times ).

Abdul Wadud (1947–2022)

The cellist was seventy-five and long retired from music. The New York Times has an obituary.

I first heard Abdul Wadud on the Julius Hemphill albums ’Coon Bid’ness and Dogon A.D. Talk about waking-up music. I have the 1975 and 1977 Arista LPs — both in a secure location. Here, from ’Coon Bid’ness is “The Hard Blues,” recorded February 1972. Julius Hemphill, alto; Hamiet Bluiett, baritone; Baikida E. J. Carroll, trumpet; Abdul Wadud, cello; Philip Wilson, drums.

[Strange: Tuesday afternoon I was noodling on the guitar and began playing the cello figure that opens “Dogon A.D.” I hadn’t heard it or thought of it in a long time.]

“I always liked poetry”

Molly Bloom thinks: Her husband, a poet? Nah. But what about Stephen Dedalus? From the “Penelope” episode:

James Joyce, Ulysses (1922.)

A few notes:

~ “I thought he was a poet”: Leopold Bloom has written at least two poems, one for a contest when he was a boy, another, an acrostic, for Molly, February 14, 1888:

Poets oft have sung in rhyme
Of music sweet their praise divine.
Let them hymn it nine times nine.
Dearer far than song or wine.
You are mine. The world is mine.

~ Milly: the Blooms’ daughter.

~ “what age was he then at Dillons”: Molly saw little Stephen at Mat Dillon’s years ago. Could it have been at the same party where she and Bloom first met?

~ “Im not too old for him”: Molly will be thirty-four in September 1904. Stephen is twenty-two.

~ “Eppss”: Epps’s Cocoa, “the creature cocoa.”

~ Goodwin: Professor Goodwin, a pianist, at one time Molly’s accompanist. “Dreadful old case,” as Bloom remembers him.

~ John Jameson: Irish whiskey.

~ “Europa point”: Europa Point, the southermost point of Gibraltar. Molly was born on Gibraltar.

~ “where softly sighs of love the light guitar”: from “In Old Madrid,” words by G. Clifton Bingham, music by Henry Trotère. It begins,

Long years ago, in old Madrid,
Where softly sighs of love the light guitar,
Two sparkling eyes a lattice hid,
Two eyes as darkly bright as love’s own star!

Here’s a 1908 recording. Imagine that Molly is singing. Bingham also wrote the words to “Love’s Old Sweet Song,” a song that runs through the novel.

~ Tarifa: “a Spanish municipality in the province of Cádiz, Andalusia” (Wikipedia) .

Related reading
All OCA Joyce posts (Pinboard)