Travel by plane and book

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

The “you” of this passage is a character in the novel, a reader who is now reading On the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon by Takakumi Ikoka. That novel is one of ten (imaginary) novels that the reader in/of this novel encounters, each in the form of a few pages.

Postmodern play aside, this passage captures what flying always feels like to me: it’s not being anywhere.

Also from this novel
The formula : Novels and theories : “A fairly precise notion of the book”

[I am not now flying.]

Got stamps?

[Dustin, September 20, 2023. Click for a larger view.]

Today’s Dustin: Paterfamilias Ed is looking for stamps. Snarky Meg wonders who still uses them. Some of us do, Meg. And we mail early in the day and use ZIP codes.

Related reading
All OCA mail and stamp posts (Pinboard)

[I have heard from reliable sources about college students who don’t know how to send a piece of mail. Meg is in high school.]

Facts and truth

Reading about Russian-textbook “history” made me recall this observation, from Robert Caro’s Working: Research, Interviewing, Writing (New York: Knopf, 2019):

While I am aware that there is no Truth, no objective truth, no single truth, no truth simple or unsimple, either; no verity, eternal or otherwise; no Truth about anything, there are Facts, objective facts, discernible and verifiable. And the more facts you accumulate, the closer you come to whatever truth there is.

Related posts
Barack Obama on facts : “Facts are stubborn things” : Longhand and a Smith-Corona : Taped to the lamp

Fact-free history

In The New York Times, an introduction to Vladimir Medinsky, Putin adviser and lead author of new history textbook for Russian high-school students:

“Facts by themselves don’t mean very much,” Mr. Medinsky wrote in one of his books. “Everything begins not with facts, but with interpretations. If you love your homeland, your people, then the story you write will always be positive.”

Impossible to think about what’s happening there without thinking about what’s happening here: Stalin was a wise leader; slaves developed skills. War is peace, &c.

A related post
Reporting the teacher

“A fairly precise notion of the book”

From the diary of Silas Flannery:


One instance of the “reading” that follows:

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

In the digital humanties, it’s now called distant reading. I’ll say it is.

Also from this novel
The formula : Novels and theories

Reporting the teacher

The Washington Post has a long article about Mary Wood, a South Carolina high-school English teacher who was reprimanded after two of her AP students reported her to the school board for teaching about race. Wood had assigned her students selections from Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me.

The clips of residents calling for Wood to be “disciplined” or fired are chilling.

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What not to-do

From The Guardian :

Donald Trump has denied wrongdoing after a report on Monday said that one of the former president’s long-time assistants told federal investigators he repeatedly wrote to-do lists for her on documents from the White House marked classified.

The aide, Molly Michael, told investigators that more than once she got requests or tasks from Trump written on the back of notecards that she later recognized as sensitive White House materials, ABC News reported on Monday, citing sources.

As a longtime maker of to-do lists, mostly paper-based, I know that this is what not to-do. A scrap of paper, a fresh index card, or a page in a pocket planner is always a better choice than a classified document.

A related post
Ta-da

The rules

From a pre-school:

~ No hurts.

~ Be kind.

~ Have fun.

Useful for later life too.

[“No hurts,” as explained to me: “Keep your hands to yourself.”]

Sentences and their fortunes

Frasier Crane (Kelsey Grammer) gets his sentence tangled in a conversation with new station manager Kate Costas (Mercedes Ruehl). From the episode “She’s the Boss” (September 19, 1995):

“Some people — and this is so unfortunate — can't tell the difference between self-respect and pigheadedness.”

“Yes, but those people are usually rigid little demagogues who don’t know the difference between the kind of respect that is earned and the kind of respect that is irrespective … of what others expect.“

“Isn’t it sad when bad things happen to good sentences?”

“I think I made myself clear.”

See and hear this exchange at YouTube.

Four Duryea’s

[Duryea’s Confectionery and Duryea’s Restaurant, 2 and 26 City Island Avenue, The Bronx, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

An island in The Bronx? Yes:

City Island is a neighborhood in the northeastern Bronx in New York City, located on an island of the same name approximately, a mile and a half long, half a mile wide.

I visited City Island a couple of times with friends in my student days. The lure was seafood, inexpensive and wonderful. For now I’m going back by map. Seeing the name Duryea — though alas there’s no obvious relation to Dan — is a bonus.

Duryea was a prominent name on City Island. There was a Duryea pier at the south end of City Island Avenue.

[Port and Terminal Facilities at the Port of New York (1942).]

The New York Times has two Duryeas, Herman B. and Albert B., most likely a father and son, participating in yacht races at City Island. Herman’s name first appears in 1902. Albert’s name last appears in 1964. The 1914 Official Automobile Directory of the State of New York lists an Albert Duryea residing on City Island as the owner of a Ford. The 1940 Bronx telephone directory has an A. Duryea living at 151 Belden Street (no tax photograph), which would more or less next to Duryea's Restaurant. A New York magazine article about City Island (August 1, 1977) mentions a Norma Duryea, “whose family goes far enough back to have once owned much of the south end, including what is now the Lobster Box restaurant.”

Indeed: 26 City Island Avenue, once the location of Duryea’s Restaurant, is now part of the larger Lobster Box (no. 34). What was Duryea’s Confectionery (serving Bruckner’s beverages and Gobel’s frankfurters) is now the site of a parking lot for Johnny’s Reef Restaurant.

Today there are two restaurants with name Duryea’s on Long Island, in Montauk and Orient Point. I reached out to ask if there’s a connection and received a reply from someone who said she wasn’t sure and that “the restaurant” (I assume the one in Montauk) was bought from a family with “deep roots in Montauk.” I would suspect that there’s a connection.

Related reading
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)