“An old, empty tire”

At the zoo, Mr. Palomar observes Copito de Nieve, or Snowflake, still the world’s only known albino gorilla. “In the enormous void of his hours,” Copito de Nieve clings to a tire, “a thing with which to allay the anguish of isolation, of difference, of the sentence to being always considered a living phenomenon.”

Italo Calvino, “The albino gorilla.” In Mr. Palomar, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt, 1985).

Related reading
All OCA Italo Calvino posts (Pinboard)

Paxlovid, expensive

I read my monthly health-insurance info and was astonished the see the price of a five-day run of Paxlovid (which cost me nothing): $1381.15.

Pfizer more than doubled the price last year.

Too many movies?

We know that we may have watched too many old movies when, at a glance, we recognize the servant Mr. Oates in The Spiral Staircase (1946) as the auto mechanic in Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye (1950). The actor: Rhys Williams.

Jim has spoken before

On the PBS NewsHours tonight, Jeffrey Brown spoke with Percival Everett about Everett’s new novel James. The Jim of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Everett said, “has never had a chance to speak.”

Certainly not at length, certainly not at novel-length. But there’s an unusual piece of literary criticism in the form of a letter from John Isaac Hawkins, Jim's son, to “Mister Finn,” in which John recounts his father’s commentary on Huck’s tale. It’s Gerry Brenner’s “More than a Reader’s Response: A Letter to ‘De Ole True Huck.’” You can read it by creating a free account at JSTOR.

Joe Flaherty (1941–2024)

The actor Joe Flaherty has died at the age of eighty-two. On SCTV he was Guy Caballero, Count Floyd, Sammy Maudlin, and Slim Whitman, among others. On Freaks and Geeks, Harold Weir.

The New York Times has an obituary.

Domestic comedy

[The Salada teabag tag read: “Crashers at the boat party just barge in.”]

“God, it’s like being stuck in a room with a bad version of me.”

“How do you think the other teabags feel?”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

[Did you know that Salada is still a brand? I didn’t. The tea is not very good. But each bag has a tag with a punny or fortune-cookie-like sentence that reminds me of the little fillers in Parade or Reader’s Digest. When we found a box of Salada in a nearby salvage grocery store (weird adventures in shopping), I had to buy it — the box, not the store.]

Baking soda for the dishes

We have hard water. It’s been a fact of our east-central Illinois household forever. Sometimes we need a chisel.

But seriously, if you have hard water and do the dishes by hand:

~ Close the drain and put everything in the sink.

~ Add a small amount of dishwashing liquid and a tablespoon of baking soda.

~ Fill the sink with hot water.

~ Proceed as usual.

Yow! Everything almost washes itself. For the first time in many years we have dishes and glasses that sparkle, with virtually no hard-water stains.

How did I hit on this fix? We’ve taken to adding a dash of baking soda to a stock pot of (hard) water when we make pasta. Elaine found that tip, somewhere. So if it works for pasta, &c.

Monday in Manhattan

[From The Window (dir. Ted Tetzlaff, 1949). Click for larger clothes.]

It must have been a Monday — wash day and a high-wire show. That’s what laundry looked like when I was a kid in Brooklyn, long after this movie was made.

See also these WPA tax photographs: one from The Bronx, one from Brooklyn.

Bloody Trump

In The Washington Post, Philip Kennicott writes about a Getty Museum exhibit and “the ancient, volatile Christian ideas behind Trump’s obsession with blood”:

Whether or not Trump intended to suggest a literal “bloodbath” when he threatened economic chaos if he isn’t reelected, the reference to blood was part of a more thoroughgoing effort to tap into the violent energies of the pre-scientific and pre-modern symbolics of blood that is evident throughout this show. He is disgusted by women’s blood; he has good genes or blood running through his veins; he is defending the “blood” of pure Americans against infection and immigration; and the power he seeks is deeply connected to blood and violence. His inaugural address is remembered for a particularly blood-soaked image, American carnage, which is etymologically derived from butchery, flesh and slaughter. All of this gives some of his Christian supporters permission to reembrace the darkest aspects of the symbolics of blood that saturated their religion for centuries.

These are old ideas. They are deeply and historically Christian ideas. And they are terrifying.

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Castorini and Cammareri “Cher, she goes crazy when she eats the lard bread.”