FSRC: annual report

The Four Seasons Reading Club, our household’s two-person adventure in reading, has finished its eighth year. The club began after I retired from teaching, so the year runs from May to May. Here’s what Elaine and I have read, in alphabetical order by writer, and chronological order by work:

Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz, The Passenger

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

Richard Hofstadter. "The Paranoid Style in American Politics"

Dorothy B. Hughes, Ride the Pink Horse, In a Lonely Place, The Expendable Man

James Joyce, Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses

Nella Larsen, Complete Fiction (short stories, Quicksand, Passing )

Robert McCloskey, Homer Price

Steven Millhauser, Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer, 1943-1954, by Jeffrey Cartwright, Portrait of a Romantic, In the Penny Arcade, From the Realm of Morpheus, The Barnum Museum, Little Kingdoms, Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer, The Knife Thrower, Enchanted Night, The King in the Tree: Three Novellas

Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

Thanks to the translators who brought three of these writers to us: Philip Boehm (Boschwitz), Constance Garnett, Leonard J. Kent, and Nina Berberova (Dostoevsky); Richard Peaver and Larissa Volokhonsky (Tolstoy).

The FSRC continues its SMS (Steven Millhauser Spree) with Dangerous Laughter, beginning today.

Here are the reports for 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 2021, and 2022.

[I just couldn’t bring myself to separate the Millhauser titles with semicolons because of Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer, 1943-1954, by Jeffrey Cartwright.]

“The power of good penmanship”

Alexander Westerhoven, manager of the Vanderlyn Hotel, is about to offer Martin Dressler, day clerk, the position of personal secretary to the manager.

Steven Millhauser, Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer (1996).

Related reading
All OCA handwriting posts : Steven Millhauser posts (Pinboard)

Seltzer

The New York Times visits the last seltzer works in New York City.

A coal-hole cover

From Ephemeral New York, the story behind one coal-hole cover.

School Trip grandparents

[Don’t skip the final paragraph.]

[Jerry Craft, School Trip (2023). Click for a much larger view.]

When Drew, Jordan, and Maury meet their friend Liam’s grandparents, Geoffrey and Diana Landers, grandma’s hand goes straight for her purse. She and her husband wonder in whispers if their son and daughter-in-law are now taking in foster children. Grandpa asks how Drew, Jordan, and Maury know Liam. They all go to the same school, Drew says, Riverdale Academy Day School. “You all go there?” grandpa asks.

And when the grandparents mention that they write a big check every year for the school’s scholarship fund (get it?), Maury, child of wealth, whose father used to be Liam’s father’s boss, says, “That’s great! So do my mom and dad.”

I think that Geoffrey and Diana Landers are drawn to look unmistakably like Logan Roy (Brian Cox) and Gerri Kellman (J. Smith-Cameron) of Succession. Am I right?

A related post
School Trip, my review

A new book from Jerry Craft

[Top to bottom: Drew, Liam, Jordan. Click for a larger view.]

Jerry Craft, School Trip. New York: HarperCollins, 2023. 250 pp. $14.99.

        Drew: “You know, never really see kids like us
        traveling in books and movies.”

        Maury: “I wonder why that is.”

        Jordan: “Hmmm . . .”

As our story begins, middle-schooler Jordan Banks is still without his “big-boy stink.” If his classmates are to be believed, he smells of baby powder and sunshine. He’s still torn between staying on at Riverdale Academy Day School and switching to the High School of Music, Art, and Mime, to which he’s just been accepted. And now, with the gift of a new beret from his parents, he’s off to Paris, with eight other Riverdale kids — Alexandra (“girl Alex”), Andy, Ashley, Drew, Liam, Maury, Ramon, Samira — and two teachers, Messrs. Garner and Roche.

School Trip brings in a wealth of cultural material: French work and play (lengthy paid vacations, slow eating), French cuisine (croissants, escargot, ratatouille), French words in English (bon voyage, rendezvous ), Black Americans in Paris (Josephine Baker, James Baldwin, Ollie Harrington, Richard Wright). There are recurring comic bits about English idioms (“Stop and smell the roses”) and language quirks (Why a pair of pants? Why pork and beef, not pig and cow ?). And of course, there’s sightseeing, with visits to the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay, and Sacré Couer, with child of wealth Maury leading the way.

But as Thomas Merton wrote, our real journey in life is interior. The kids’ room assignments lead to tension, the airing of grievances, truth-telling, apologies, and amends. The kids negotiate differences in economic status, race, and religion; ponder what it means to make a joke and what it means to be cruel; and come to understand the lasting pain of being bullied. All the kids are, as Jordan says, “new and improved kids” by the end of the trip — even obnoxious Andy.

Along the way, there’s a pre-Paris visit to a mall with a Banned Book Barn, a Jordan comic strip with a children's writer accused of having a “neo-faxo-harpo-marxo agenda” (“Lady, my book is about my puppy!” the writer replies), and a Riverdale Academy graphic-novel collection conspicuously devoid of two banned books that the librarian knows Jordan would like. As you may know, Jerry Craft’s New Kid and Class Act have been banned (really) for (supposedly) promulgating critical race theory. It’s Craft though who gets the last laugh here, as Jordan’s mom cautions her son about unrealistic art aspirations:

“Jordan Banks! You are a black kid who was born in Harlem and raised in Washington Heights . . .

“Do youreally think that one day you'll grow up to make some New York Times best-selling comic book that will win all the big literary awards, get translated into different languages, and then what? . . . get turned into a movie?”

Yes. (See the 3:47 mark.) It’s in development.

A related post
New Kid and Class Act, my review

Mother’s Day

[My mom, not yet a mom, in Florida, 1954. Photograph by my dad, not yet my dad. Shared with permission. Click for a larger view.]

Happy Mother’s Day to all.

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by Matthew Sewell. At some points I’d say that I 54-A, nine letters, “Dispreferred” it. There’s some pretty strained cluing. At other points, I was tempted to utter a 52-A, eight letters, “Declaration of frustration.” But if one 34-A, fifteen letters, “Weighs carefully,” one might find that one 20-D, twelve letters, “Concludes deliberations” — and successfully so. Which I did. I started in two corners with 1-A, four letters, “Sheet used by Greek bakers”and 46-A, seven letters, “Bonus numbers.” Those corners came together easily. The rest of the puzzle was considerably tougher.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

1-D, five letters, “Measure named for an Einstein idol.” Because I can’t believe I knew it.

7-D, four letters, “They’re there to stay” and 24-D, five letters, “It’s there to stay.” Strained, strained.

10-D, nine letters, “Aboriginal rite of passage.” It helps to watch movies.

11-D, four letters, “Round tab.” This one baffled me until it didn’t.

16-A, nine letters, “Significant change.” Yes, it’s a Stumper.

19-A, eight letters, “Many people call on them.” I was thinking of classrooms and pleas to the gods.

28-A, three letters, “Got behind.” Oy.

36-D, six letters, “Literary adjustment from past narratives.” I just like knowing what this word means.

40-A, four letters, “Smaller size treats.” I was thinking of a brand name.

49-D, five letters, “Etymology sharer with ‘sire.’ ” Now it seems obvious.

50-A, six letters, “Squeaky clean.” Clever, and not that easy to see.

55-A, five letters, “Divisive device in the theater.” Solvers might divide over whether this clue is unnecessarily strained.

57-A, four letters, “Prefix meaning ‘song.’ ” Thank you, Ezra Pound.

My favorite: 58-A, four letters, “Soft hail,” making a bit of crosswordese live anew.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Einstein Plumbing

From Letters of Note, Albert Einstein’s response to a question about the treatment of intellectuals in the McCarthy years:

You have asked me what I thought about your articles concerning the situation of the scientists in America. Instead of trying to analyze the problem I may express my feeling in a short remark:

If I would be a young man again and had to decide how to make my living, I would not try to become a scientist or scholar or teacher. I would rather choose to be a plumber or a peddler in the hope to find that modest degree of independence still available under present circumstances.

And plumbers responded.

.mov and .zip

Google has created eight new top-level domains, including .mov and .zip. Imagine the hilarity when someone clicks to open what appears to be a .mov or .zip file and gets taken to a sketchy website. Taken, indeed.

Here’s a harmless example: financialstatement.zip. As Stephen Hackett says, “Google has brought something terrible into the world.”