Modern life

SHIRLEY GLORIA

This morning at two o’clock, my wife Shirley died peacefully in her sleep. She’d been at home under hospice care for six weeks after an acute failure of her mitral heart valve. She was very brave and put up with the indignities of bed-care with good humor and without complaint, or at least without too much. Willful as always, one of her last acts was to turn down a medication I was offering her. She must have known she no longer needed it. It was a long goodbye and her death was hardly unexpected. I shan’t say “I’ll miss her”;

… Read more

DAN FRANK

Dan Frank, 67, died last week. He was the editorial director of Pantheon Books, but when I knew him, in the late 1980s, he was a young editor at Viking Press working with me on The Most Beautiful House in the World and Waiting for the Weekend. This was still early days for me as a writer and I was lucky to have someone as patient yet demanding as Dan. And as supportive. After the success of Home and The Most Beautiful House in the World I might have specialized in domestic non-fiction,

… Read more

ORWELLIAN

In a 1946 essay on politics and the English language, George Orwell criticized pretentious diction and meaningless words. “Adjectives like epoch-making, epic, historic, unforgettable, triumphant, age-old, inevitable, inexorable, veritable, are used to dignify the sordid process of international politics, while writing that aims at glorifying war usually takes on an archaic color, its characteristic words being: realm, throne, chariot, mailed fist, trident, sword, shield, buckler, banner, jackboot, clarion. Foreign words and expressions such as cul de sac, ancien regime, deus ex machina, mutatis mutandis, status quo, gleichschaltung, weltanschauung, are used to give an air of culture and elegance.” What would he have made of today’s slew of popular adjectives: social (distancing),

… Read more

THE BEDPAN LINE

I spent some time in a hospital room recently, visiting. The atmosphere was distinctly technological: screens, flashing lights, mechanical beds, not to mention numerous pharmaceuticals. I was brought up short by the appearance of a device that was more Florence Nightingale than Big Pharma: a bedpan. The bedpan was plastic, but I’d always thought of them as glazed metal. Early bedpans were made of ceramic and were heavy affairs. A famous bedpan, made of pewter, belonged to Martha and George Washington, but the device is much older than the Colonial period. The Science Museum in London has a collection of old British and French bedpans,

… Read more

ROLL OVER BEETHOVEN

A musician friend sent me a recent article in the Telegraph reporting that “Musical notation has been branded ‘colonialist’ by Oxford professors hoping to reform their courses to focus less on white European culture . . . Academics are deconstructing the university’s music offering after facing pressure to ‘decolonise’    the curriculum following the Black Lives Matter protests.” According to the British newspaper, music professors said the classical repertoire taught at Oxford, which spans works by Mozart and Beethoven, focuses too much on ‘white European music from the slave period.’” Actually, Habsburg Austria-Hungary, where the pair lived and worked,

… Read more

THE TROPICAL SHIRT

In a colloquium that took place during the 2016 Driehaus Prize ceremonies in Chicago, Andrés Duany made an interesting observation. He pointed out that Florida Panhandle resort towns such as Seaside, Rosemary Beach, and Alys Beach—all planned by his firm DPZ—were actually urban experimental testbeds with potentially long-term effects. “Americans are willing in the circumscription of a resort experience to try anything,” he said. He speculated that the people who holidayed in these walkable, dense, traditionally designed resort towns—so different from their everyday suburban communities—were affected, that is changed, by the experience. Now, I’m a great admirer of the Seaside prototype,

… Read more

PLUS ÇA CHANGE

As one gets older one tends to spend an inordinate amount of time visiting hospitals. Ours is Pennsylvania Hospital, which bills itself as “the first in the nation” and was co-founded by Benjamin Franklin in 1751. The original building was designed in 1754 by Franklin’s friend, Samuel Rhoads (1711-84), a self-taught carpenter/architect. Rhoads, who was later a delegate to the First Continental Congress and would serve as the city’s mayor, laid out two wings connected to a central pavilion. Only the east wing, a sturdy Georgian brick structure, was built before the Revolution. The west wing and the central pavilion,

… Read more

HATS

The old Lit Brothers department store (built and expanded between 1859 and 1918) on Philadelphia’s Market Street has a sign over one of its corner entrances, that has always puzzled me. HATS TRIMMED FREE OF CHARGE is embossed into the metal fascia of the canopy. It’s the only such sign. But whose hats, men or women? Did it refer to a hat bought in the store, or was it—as I suspected—an enticement to walk in and get your hat “trimmed,” whatever that meant? And why was this procedure so important—and so common—that it had to be emblazoned over the store entrance?

… Read more