Going to church

I was at a church service, a Protestant service of some sort, sitting in the front pew by myself, with my guitar, uncased, at my side. The people that I was supposed to have played with — elsewhere, not at the church — hadn’t shown up. I was sitting next to a red-haired young woman named Hannah. She was the daughter of a churchgoing family but a non-believer herself.

As I didn't know what I was doing, I stood and sat by following the movements of the congregation. At one point I realized that I had been standing with my eyes closed and that everybody else had already sat down. So I sat down too.

During intermission, most of the congregation left. The pews were now mostly empty. A minister in a red robe appeared on the altar platform (if that’s the right term) to perform prop comedy. He began to place a plastic bag over his head and mimed that this was not something to do. A skit began, with several dozen members of the congregation circling the altar platform. A white woman on the platform walked over to a Black man in the circle and pointed at him angrily.

At some point during this service I noticed an illustration on my guitar that I’d never noticed before, down by the tailpiece: a cityscape of tall buildings with stylized windows — something that you might see in a Nancy cityscape.

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[“Only fools and children talk about their dreams”: Dr. Edward Jeffreys (Robert Douglas), in Thunder on the Hill (dir. Douglas Sirk, 1951). My guitar is a replica National Style O: it has illustrations etched on the front and back — palm trees, volcanoes, water, a canoe. The little Nancy cityscape is from August 1, 1950.]

A Frasier Mongol

Bebe Glazer (Harriet Sansom Harris) and a cup of pencils.

[“Agents in America: Part 3.” Frasier, May 9, 1995. Click for a larger view.]

Those other pencils? Maybe Dixon Ticonderogas. But the Mongol ferrule is instantly recognizable, in black and white or full color.

Elaine and I are watching Fraiser in the spirit of old-time moviegoing: we walked in in the middle of things (fifth season), watched to the end, and are now picking up at the beginning. I’m not sure that we want to sign on to Paramount Plus for the reboot.

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Recently updated

Mind the gap There’s someone — maybe two people? — doing laundry in that photograph.

The formula

A visitor calls on the novelist Silas Flannery to warn of unauthorized translations. The visitor shows Flannery a volume in Japanese, with Flannery’s name on the title page in Roman letters.

Italo Calvino, If on a winter’s night a traveler, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt, 1981).

Silas Flannery needs to meet Jane Friedman.

A message on an egg

From The Washington Post: a handwritten message on an egg, and, seventy-two years later, a reply.

[Gift link, no subscription needed.]

In search of lost passage

Elif Batuman asked ChatGPT to find a passage from Proust, something about love affairs in the past and present. Here’s what happened.

I think that the passage Batuman was looking for (and still is looking for?) might be this one, from the narrator’s recollections of the “young girls in flower” of his youth, girls who are now much older or already dead:

It was painful for me to have to retrieve these for myself, for time, which changes individuals, does not modify the image we have of them. Nothing is sadder that this contrast between the way individuals change and the fixity of memory, when we understand that what we have kept so fresh in our memory no longer has any of that freshness in real life, and that we cannot find a way to come close, on the outside, to what which appears so beautiful within us, which arouses in us a desire, seemingly so personal, to see it again, except by looking for it in a person of the same age, that is to say in another being. It is simply, as I had often had reason to suspect, that what seems unique in a person whom one desires does not in fact belong to her. But the passage of time was giving me a more complete proof of this since, after twenty years, spontaneously, I was trying to find, not the girls whom I had known, but those who now possessed the youth that the others had had then.

Finding Time Again, trans. Ian Patterson (London: Penguin, 2003).

Unlike Elif Batuman and ChatGPT, I have that passage (or most of it) at hand in a post about Proust gift tags and note cards. But that passage might not be the one in question.

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What’s on your nightstand?

[From Eva (dir. Joseph Losey, 1962). Click for a larger view.]

Francesca (Virna Lisi) has just one book on hers.

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“By the Book” for the rest of us

Bill Griffith and the Reuben Award

Bill Griffith has won the Reuben Award for Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year. Congratulations to him.

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Yamandu Costa in Illinois

[Yamandu Costa in Illinois. September 9, 2023. Photograph by Elaine Fine.]

Elaine and I had the great good fortune to hear the guitarist Yamandu Costa yesterday in — of all places — east-central Illinois. His free performance was part of ELLNORA (so styled), the biennial guitar festival held at the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana.

Yamandu is a household name in his native Brazil, and he performs widely in Europe and Latin America. His appearance at ELLNORA was one of only two performances in the United States this year. I’ve been following Yamandu’s music for several years via performances on YouTube and a lone CD. The chance to hear him in person was one I hadn’t counted on.

Yamandu’s range of expression on the guitar (the seven-string Brazilian guitar) is, to my ears, unparalleled. From a whisper to a storm, with impeccable taste, imaginative freedom, and extraordinary harmonic complexity — and maté at his side, which he says helps with faster numbers.

I arrived with my one CD yesterday and left with seven more. I asked Yamandu if he would sign two, and he insisted on signing them all, after slicing open the seven new ones — no hesitation — with his thumbnail.

Here are just two musical samples: an audience video from a September 7 performance in North Bethesda, Maryland, and a professional video of “À Legrand,” a composition dedicated to Michel Legrand. And here are Yamandu Costa’s website, Instagram, and YouTube channel.

Elaine too wrote about this performance, with a photograph of Yamandu at the signing table.

Note to the Krannert Center: bring Yamandu Costa back, please, before the next ELLNORA, and give him the Foellinger Great Hall, where he belongs. Obrigado.

Mind the gap

[561 Union Street, Gowanus, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Look past the wooden fence and the laundry hung out to dry: there’s a house back there. A recent real-estate listing ($2.695 million) tells the story of a property with “so much charm that even the pickiest Parisienne will melt.” At the time of this photograph though? Maybe not so much.

This is the sixth Gowanus photograph I’ve posted. I’m moving to an island in the Bronx next week.

*

September 12: An alert reader noticed the work of laundry:


[Click either image for a larger view.]

There’s someone at the window. But maybe also someone standing and waving to the camera?

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More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)