December 22, 2020 at 1:20 am (Books, Food and Drink, Lists, Places, Recommended, Surprises)
Tags: COVID Reading, Mondays, New York, reading lists, US history
So far, in her reading of The Kidnapping Club: Wall Street, Slavery, and Resistance on the Eve of Civil War, by Jonathan Daniel Wells, self has learned that:
- “The classic dish Lobster Newburg, according to legend, was actually developed by” a wealthy slave trafficker named Ben Weinberg, a prominent member of the New York Maritime Exchange.
- The biggest slave traders “were natives of Portland, Maine . . . that town was infamous for helping to outfit ships” for the slave trade.
- One of the most prominent defenders of the slave trade was a lawyer named Gilbert Dean, a graduate of Yale and justice of the New York Supreme Court whose law firm, Beebe, Dean, and Donohue, on 76 Wall Street, “not only aggressively defended accused slavers, but also sued accusers for libel,” which included “officers of the British navy” who had apprehended the captain of a slave ship and pressed charges against the ship’s captain and its owners.
- The SDNY was so famously nonchalant for “prosecuting slavers” that a Captain Cornelius E. Driscoll boasted that “you don’t have to worry about facing trial in New York City . . . I can get any man off in New York for $1,000.”
Stay safe, dear blog readers. Stay safe.
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December 17, 2020 at 7:15 pm (Books, Places, Recommended)
Tags: book lists, COVID Reading, New York, nonfiction, reading lists, US history
Here’s the sentence of the day, about the beginning of the New York Stock Exchange.
Based on earlier models of exchanges like the Dutch East India Company’s trading in the early 1600s and Frankfurt’s even earlier stock exchange, a handful of New York businessmen had begun to trade shares under a buttonwood tree in 1792.
Chapter Three, The Kidnapping Club: Wall Street, Slavery and Resistance on the Eve of the Civil War, by Jonathan Daniel Wells
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December 16, 2020 at 8:54 pm (Books, destinations, Links, Places, Recommended)
Tags: adaptations, COVID Reading, New York, nonfiction, reading lists, US history
Three people self knows have COVID. And she found out just today. She was going to get more stamps at the Post Office, but after she got the last text, she turned right around and went back inside.
Which means, she’ll have to rely on her books to carry her through, like she did in the start of this pandemic, when she blazed through the first five books of The Expanse (and discovered the TV series).
The book she’s just starting is The Kidnapping Club: Wall Street, Slavery, and Resistance on the Eve of the Civil War, by Jonathan Daniel Wells, whose main setting is early 19th c New York.
The last time self was in New York, she stayed in the Bowery. The pictures below are from that time.
Wells does a very good job at evoking the setting. Here’s a description from Chapter One:
- Most streets were unpaved, so dirt and mud were everywhere, and horses provided the main means of transportation. The city would have smelled different than it does today, with wafts of horse manure mixed with the smoke from burning hearths and factories and the stench of an inadequate sanitation system. The loud shouts of the stevedores, bricklayers, lumber merchants, and others working in the city added to the noisy movement of railroads and omnibuses, not to mention the constant whinnying of horses pulling people or goods.
A book like this rewards immersion.
Stay safe, dear blog readers. Stay safe.
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December 1, 2020 at 2:03 pm (Places, plans, Surprises)
Tags: COVID Reading, David Remnick, New York, teaching, The New Yorker
Self suspended her subscription to The New Yorker a few months ago, since the pile of unread issues was getting ridiculous. She’s now just working her way through March/April.
But that resolution (not to renew The New Yorker) lasted just two months. There was a 20% off sale for former subscribers, and she signed up just like that. Her new subscription starts with the Dec. 7 issue.
In the 13 April 2020 issue, David Remnick in the Talk of the Town:
- The streets of New York City are so desolate now that you half expect tumbleweed to blow along the pavement where cars and cabs once clustered. There is barely a plane in the sky. You hear the wheeze of an empty bus rounding a corner, the flutter of pigeons on a fire escape, the wail of an ambulance. The sirens are unnervingly frequent. But even on these sunny, early-spring days there are few people in sight. For weeks, as the distancing rules of the pandemic took hold, a gifted saxophone player who stakes his corner outside a dress shop on Broadway every morning was still there, playing “My Favorite Things” and “All the Things You Are.” Now he is gone, too.
Self is preparing to teach a 10-week course on Creative Nonfiction for UCLA Extension’s Writers Program. She enrolled in a class that helps teachers prepare.
Self has to turn in a video Welcome message this week. She printed out the instructions and they were three pages. She is not enthusiastic. Not to mention, her looks have really gone downhill this year: she hasn’t been to a salon in months, everything about her appearance is really rough. She’ll have to do some extreme intervention. On herself. She planned 10 different outfits to wear for each of the 10 Zoom classes. Which will make her feel more confident. Also, will choose a room with nice background (art, maybe?). No bedrooms cause that’s just tacky.
Stay safe, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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August 17, 2020 at 4:41 pm (Artists and Writers, destinations, fpj-photo-challenge, Links, Personal Bookshelf, Places, Recommended, Women Writers)
Tags: art, Calyx Press, causes, exhibits, Gardens, inspiration, Literary Magazines, Mondays, New York, summer
Self was inspired by this Photo Challenge (Creativity in the Time of COVID) to give a shout-out to the USPS.
She bought a sheet of first-class stamps commemorating the Harlem Renaissance. Aren’t they beautiful?
She receives all her literary journals through the USPS. Here’s the latest delivery: the Win/Spr 2020 issue of Calyx Journal, one of the oldest women’s presses in the United States, founded by her friend, Dear Departed Margarita Donnelly (She put the whole thing, she told self, on a credit card):
Cover Art: Dale Champlin’s “Mother Nature.”
Finally, Filoli Garden, in Woodside, is one of the area’s most beautiful gardens. The current art installation is by Kristine Mays. Here’s a picture self took on a visit to Filoli in July.
Stay safe, dear blog readers. Stay safe.
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April 11, 2020 at 6:22 pm (Artists and Writers, Books, Links, Memoirs, Personal Bookshelf, Recommended, Women Writers)
Tags: memorials, New York, poetry, Saturday
Among Tall Buildings
from the collection Cornucopia: New and Selected Poems (W. W. Norton, 2002)
And nothing, not even the girl you love
with the mole on her arm, will be left. Huge
trenches will be dug just beyond the stove
the whole northeast corridor will become
and the dead will be piled in each rude gouge,
even that girl whose left ear always sticks
slightly out beyond her hair. To fix
the names of who died on tape won’t be done
since they’ll dig quick to prevent disease. Nobody
likes to hear this kind of talk. I always
hated to hear it myself until I began
loving the mortar between blocks, that cruddy
pocked cement holding up buildings so a man
and a woman can embrace in the maze
of what they’ve built on the errors of their ways.
Molly Peacock is the author of How To Read a Poem and Start a Poetry Circle (1999) as well as a memoir, Paradise Piece by Piece (1998). Former President of the Poetry Society of America, she was one of the originators of Poetry in Motion, which placed poems on subways and buses. A more complete biography can be found on the Poetry Foundation website.
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January 23, 2020 at 5:55 am (Books, Personal Bookshelf, Recommended, short story collections)
Tags: favorites, New York, reading lists, short story
Two people on the New York Subway. Self was beginning to think this was a rom-com, until:
For sixty years, we sat in that car, just barely pretending not to notice each other.
— Missed Connection — m4w, Story # 4 in Someone Who Will Love You In All Your Damaged Glory
Pain!!!
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April 16, 2019 at 2:51 am (Books, Recommended, Women Writers)
Tags: New York, novel, reading lists
We subleased a studio on Broadway and spent eight weeks doing very little other than exactly what we wanted to do, which is to say a lot of drinking coffee, eating waffles, taking long walks around the reservoir up and down Riverside Park and reading magazines cover to cover in the bath.
— Asymmetry, p. 177
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April 11, 2019 at 6:10 am (Books, Women Writers)
Tags: New York, novel, reading lists
Alice and Ezra’s relationship seems so exhausting.
Their relationship is only possible because Alice is so very young, a real ingénue, like her namesake Alice in Wonderland.
She had once counted twenty-seven different pill dispensers in that bathroom, vials with science-fiction names from Atropine to Zantac and a barrage of exclamatory imperatives: TAKE ONE TABLET DAILY OR EVERY SIX TO EIGHT HOURS AS NEEDED. TAKE ONE TABLET BY MOUTH AT BEDTIME FOR ONE MONTH THEN INCREASE BY 1 TABLET EACH MONTH UNTIL TAKING 4 TABLETS. TAKE 2 CAPSULES NOW THEN 1 CAPSULE EVERY 8 HOURS TILL GONE. ONE TABLET WITH A GLASS OF WATER ONCE A DAY. TAKE WITH FOOD. AVOID EATING GRAPEFRUIT OR DRINKING GRAPEFRUIT JUICE WITH THIS MEDICINE. DO NOT TAKE ASPIRIN OR PRODUCTS CONTAINING ASPIRIN WITHOUT THE KNOWLEDGE AND CONSENT OF YOUR PHYSICIAN. KEEP IN THE REFRIGERATOR AND SHAKE WALL BEFORE USING. USE CAUTION WHEN OPERATING A CAR. AVOID THE USE OF A SUNLAMP. DO NOT FREEZE. PROTECT FROM LIGHT. PROTECT FROM LIGHT AND MOISTURE. DISPENSE IN A TIGHT, LIGHT-RESISTANT CONTAINER. DRINK PLENTY OF WATER. SWALLOW WHOLE. DO NOT SHARE WITH ANYONE . . .
Self doesn’t know a single writer (and she knows many) who can afford this many prescriptions, even with medical insurance covering 80%.
Self wishes Alice would go off and find a man close to her age who doesn’t need to be taken care of.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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April 9, 2019 at 7:28 pm (Artists and Writers, Books, Recommended, Women Writers)
Tags: New York, novellas, reading lists
Now that his book was done, a number of deferred medical matters could be addressed, including a colonoscopy, a prostate screening, and some tests a pulmonologist had recommended to investigate a recent shortness of breath.
— Asymmetry, p. 67
Very much enjoying this collection of novellas. The first one, Folly, reads a bit like Francoise Sagan, if Aimez vous Brahms were set in Manhattan.
Another sentence:
Considerations complicated by this maddening habit of wanting something only until she’d got it, at which point she wanted something else.
Stay tuned.
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