fauxklore

Scraps of Paper: I have a bad habit of scribbling mysterious notes to myself on any handy piece of paper. This is, in general, evidence of why I got C’s in penmanship in elementary school. Here are a couple of things I managed to decipher.

“Art mirrors the audience, not the teller.” The context is obviously storytelling, but I have no idea who said this and/or who they were quoting. I do, however, think it’s an accurate statement.

I think this is something that got mentioned during High Holiday services. Kafka wrote a story about a leopard that entered a synagogue and roared before leaving town. Three weeks later, the leopard’s roar had become part of the liturgy.

Celebrity Death Watch: Note that I am trying not to fall behind because I am going on vacation soon and would rather have less to catch up on.

Samantha Eggar was an actress who appeared in such movies as Doctor Doolittle, as well as several horror movies. Yang Chen-Ning was a Nobel Prize winning theoretical physicist. Sam Rivers was the bassist for Limp Bizkit. Anthony Jackson is credited with the development of the modern six-string bass. Jackie Ferrara was a sculptor. Sirikit was the queen consort of Thailand from 1950 to 2016. J. William Middendorf was the Secretary of the Navy in the mid-1970’s. Hamilton Smith won a Nobel Pize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on restriction enzymes. Prunella Scales was an actress, best known for playing Sybil in Fawlty Towers. Alison Knowles was an artist whose work defies my descriptive abilities.

Susan Stamberg was an NPR journalist. She co-hosted All Things Considered for 14 years. She also hosted Weekend Edition Sunday from 1987 to 1989, introducing the Sunday puzzle and bringing the Car Talk hosts to the attention of all. She was considered one of the founding mothers of National Public Radio and interviewed too many prominent people for me to attempt to list them.

June Lockhart was an actress, best known for playing TV mothers, in Lassie and Lost in Space. She was on my ghoul pool list and earned me 4 points.

Things I’ve Been Doing - Medical: I finally got in to see my dentist, which I’d been postponing mostly because my schedule has been chaotic. They’ve gotten a new sort of x-ray machine which is much quicker. I also got around to getting my flu shot and this year’s COVID vaccine. My arm was particularly sore this time around. It also probably didn’t help that I was sleep deprived because I’d been woken up at 2 a.m. by a helicopter circling over I-66.

Things I’ve Been Doing - Travel Related:I went to a Travelers’ Century Club luncheon. One person had a horrific story about breaking his hip on a trip to Surinam and having to be evacuated by canoe. There was also a guest speaker who gave an interesting presentation on travel medicine.

I’ve finally gotten all my travel arrangements set up for my upcoming vacation. I do still have a couple of chores related to that to get through. Plus, of course, little details like packing.

I’ve also got three other trips to make arrangements for.

Storytelling: The Washington Folk Festival went well, though the storytelling tent was a bit closer to one of the music tents than I would have preferred. At least the morris dancers weren’t right next to us. (They’re cute, but they’re noisy.)



I also had time to look at some of the art exhibits in another of the pavilions.





My set was titled Spare Change and consisted of stories about transformation. I explained that characters in folk tales are always turning into something and that, on my way to the festival, I had turned into a parking lot. The stories I told included an Albanian story that has the particularly charming detail of the main character being forced to collect back taxes from the snakes in a church, a Mongolian story about a camel, The Neglected Princess (an original story, which started out when I was reading about the decline in frog populations in an article in Smithsonian Magazine), and The Princess Who Turned Into a Flower Pot, which I’d learned years ago from a friend and had told at my brother’s wedding to his first wife. I thought it went very well. And I also enjoyed listening to stories by several other tellers.

I made it to the Scary Stories swap at Quince Orchard Library the other night. The drive up was mildly annoying, since there is always roadwork on the inner loop of the beltway. The really horrible drive was going home, because the state of Maryland decided it made sense to close 3 out of 4 lanes of the outer loop of the beltway for roadwork. Not that there was any actual evidence of anybody doing any roadwork. I find it mildly terrifying to be driving my little car with so many huge trucks surrounding me, knowing that if there were an accident involving one of them I would almost certainly not survive it. Fortunately nothing happened beyond it taking me two hours for what should be a 45 minute drive. At any rate, there was a good mix of stories. I told “Ida Black,” which has to do with a woman getting revenge on the man who had her hanged for witchcraft. Some other highlights included Jennifer’s rendition of “Mr. Fox” and a story about an adoptive mother confronted with a vampire baby.

By the way, somewhat related to “Mr. Fox,” our Brothers Grimm discussion group talked about The Murder Castle, which is a rather unsatisfying version of the same theme, with the added detail of a female assistant and the confusion about whose two sisters had previously been murdered (the assistant’s or the would-be victims.) It’s no wonder that story didn’t make it into later versions.

Voting: I did early voting a week ago. The really challenging decision this time was what to do about the Virginia Attorney General race. The Democratic candidate (Jay Jones) said terrible things that can be interpreted as advocating for political violence. But the Republican party is, in general, behaving in repugnant ways. Jason Miyares is anti-abortion and pro-death penalty and opposes gender-affirming care. I considered abstaining but held my nose and voted for Jones. I was much more enthusiastic about the gubernatorial race because I think Abigail Spanberger is an excellent candidate. I’m also a big fan of my delegate (Holly Siebold), who is running for reelection.

Loser Brunch: I drove to Frederick, Maryland for a Loser Brunch at The Wine Kitchen this past Sunday. The drive up wasn’t too bad so I got there early enough to have a look around a craft market along Carroll Creek. I couldn’t resist temptation when I saw Blind Date With a Book. The idea is that the books are wrapped up, so you don’t know what book you’re buying, but they tell you what genre it is, as well as what year and what its rating is on goodreads. Kathleen took a picture of me holding up my purchase.



As for its contents, the book proved to be The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman, which I had read recently but didn’t actually own. It also came with an eye mask, a tea bag, 2 bookmarks and 3 stickers. Such a charming purchase!

Re: the actual brunch, the potato and mushroom hash I got was pretty good. (I went with the vegan option because I don’t like fried eggs.) The coffee, however, was excellent. It is apparently from Dublin Roasters, which is local to Frederick. But the real point of these things is the company, not the food, and, while there were only six of us, the conversation was lively. Overall, it made for a nice morning / early afternoon.

I first became aware of the Balkan Heritage Society and their archaeological field schools several years ago, when I was browsing various listings of volunteer and field school opportunities on-line and saw a workshop they were offering on photographing Roman mosaics. I didn’t do anything about it at the time since I couldn’t have made it fit my schedule. But I would continue to browse their offerings every few years.

Being retired helps a lot with schedule flexibility and this time I saw they were offering a workshop on textile conservation, which would fit in nicely with my crafts interests. I was all set to register for that, but then I got invited to do my travel talk at my MIT reunion and - poof! My life is a schedule conflict! But I noticed that there was also a workshop on paper conservation that was a couple of weeks later. Since: a) that would fit my schedule and b) I do play with paper crafts (particularly bookbinding, but I’ve also made paper and done plenty of surface design, e.g. marbling, over the years), I thought that would be worth doing. So I signed up, and began devoting some time to figuring out how to get to Zakynthos, Greece, where the workshop would be held. I also tried to make a dent in the somewhat intimidating reading list they provided.

For those who don’t know (which is the vast majority of Americans), Zakynthos is in the Ionian Islands, off the west coast of Greece. There are flights there from a number of European cities and the least expensive route I could find involved flying to Athens and then going there by bus / ferry. Since I’d been to Athens before (way back in 2004, for the Olympics), I just spent a night there. I flew over via FRA, which is one of my least favorite airports, but it worked okay. I spent one night at the Hotel Mirabello, which is conveniently located near Omonia Square. The staff was friendly and helpful and there were plenty of reasonably priced restaurants nearby. I didn’t write down the name of the place I ate at, but I had a reasonably good moussaka. In the morning, the hotel had a particularly good breakfast buffet, by the way, with hot options that even included spanakopita. I would consider staying there again if I had some reason to be in Athens.

In the morning, I took a taxi to the Kifissos bus station, which is large and chaotic. By the way, buying my ticket on-line had been a bit stressful, because KTEL (the major bus company) apparently sells tickets on the route I needed only a couple of weeks in advance. Still, I had been able to get a ticket to Nea Manolada, which proved to take about an hour longer than Rome 2 Rio had claimed it would. It turned out that this was just a stop on the side of a road, not an actual bus terminal. There was a South African woman who was also heading to Kyllini Port for a ferry (in her case, to Kefalonia, which is the next island north) and we walked across the street to a kiosk where the proprietor called us a cab. I stayed overnight at the Glarentza Hotel, which was a short walk to the port and was reasonably nice. I had time to walk around the port a bit both that afternoon and the next morning, before boarding the 1 p.m. ferry to Zakynthos.

Our accommodations were at the Hotel Yria, which is decently central. However, the rooms are on the small side and the breakfast is just adequate. I was sharing a room with a young woman from France, by the way. This is probably a good place to note that most of the group were 20ish, i.e. young enough to be my grandchildren. Only four of us were there just for the paper conservation program, while the majority had been doing a three week program that included one week each of textiles, metal, and paper. Despite the age gap, I found them generally thoughtful and interesting people. (There were a couple of other older people, but I’m reasonably sure I was the oldest. Well, someone has to be.)

Anyway, the program started on a Monday morning and I’d arrived on Sunday. That evening I went with a couple of the other people to Solomos Square (the central square of Zante Town) to see an event called Giostra of Zakynthos, which was a sort of medieval parade, followed by a jousting tournament. It was colorful and interesting, but uncomfortably crowded. Note that there were groups from several countries - including Scotland!









I wasn’t able to get close enough to the jousting to get any pictures worth sharing of the horses and the riders, who included a young boy. Eventually, I decided I should go find something to eat. There is no shortage of restaurants in the area and I got a tasty supper before returning to the hotel and going to bed.

The workshop itself began on Monday after breakfast. We met our instructor, Dr. Nikolas Sarris (and his dog, Jimmy) and were transported in a minibus to Ionian University. The first day started with a couple of lectures (history of paper, causes of deterioration of paper) and a presentation about documentation of paper objects, before we set out to document the paper objects that had been distributed for us to work on. I had a 12-page set of what were essentially census records from 1959. There were extensive tears and cuts on the front cover, and folded edges and stains on every page, as well as rusted staples (which later on proved to be small nails / pins, not staples) and writing on the front and back covers.

We started out with a few conservation treatments and I brushed and vacuumed it. Later on, I would spend time cleaning with various tools, e.g. vulcanized latex sponges and patching with hollytex, which is a sort of paper made of non woven polyester. One of the other people in the workshop referred to it as “magic paper.” Here is a picture of the document with the pins removed and some cleaning done.



The edges of the front cover were patched but you can still see a lot of writing and stains.



Anyway, we continued to work on our documents during the subsequent days. There were some other types of (mostly Japanese) paper used in patching paper. We also spent time on humidifying and flattening paper. Our lab work was mixed in with lectures. We did have morning and afternoon coffee breaks and a lunch hour, where we ate at the student canteen, which was okay. I’d estimate that we were doing lab work maybe 6 hours a day. By the way, we had been told to bring lab coats, which gave me an excuse to dig out this personalized one, which I’d been given several years ago when I went to an event at the United Airlines catering facility in Denver.



On Thursday morning we had a field trip to the General Archives and the Historic Public Library of Zakynthos. There were lots of historic photos, many of them related to the 1953 magnitude 7.2 earthquake, which caused extensive damage throughout the southern Ionian islands. (By the way, there were a couple of smaller earthquakes at the end of my time on Zakynthos, the larger of which was magnitude 4.1. Having lived in California for 22 years, that didn’t even wake me up.)



There were also a couple of cases of dolls.



And, of course, there were shelves and shelves of books, many of which had significant damage, including tunnels from being insect eaten. Nikolas also talked about storage of books / documents. The next day, we made the most basic storage enclosures, essentially just folders.



Friday night, most of us went out to a fancy dinner at a restaurant called Manoo. You can get surprisingly good sushi in Greece (and, less surprisingly, a good gin and tonic). We bade goodbye to the people who were leaving on Saturday. The four of us who were left had the weekend free. I was fairly lazy, with some reading and puzzles to catch up on, but I did spend some time at the Byzantine Museum, which has a lovely collection. Here are a few examples.











On Monday, we were back to lectures and workshops. By the way, since we were down to 4 people, we went to and from the University in Nikolas’s car. We started learning about wet cleaning techniques and stain removal, including the use of suction tables. The rest of the week continued with paper deacification, paper sizing, removal of adhesive tape, and more advanced paper repair techniques. I’ll spare you the pictures of paper immersed in various chemical solutions. A local man had heard that there was a book conservator teaching our class and brought Nikolas some documents to look at and he had us work on them, too. I spent a fair amount of time cleaning and repairing this, for example.



On Thursday morning we went to see the Church of Agios Dionysios, followed by the Ecclesiastical Museum of the Holy Monastery of St. Dionysios. The church was elaborately decorated outside.



Inside, the architecture felt typical of Orthodox Christian churches I’ve seen, with an ornate iconostasis.



The museum had a lot of books on display, including some very old ones.



The workshop finished on Friday, which we spent making boxes to protect books. We also visited another room at the University, which had a nitrogen hypoxia chamber for killing insects. We also got our certificates for completing the course.

While I’d taken bus and ferry to Zakynthos from mainland Greece, I had opted to fly back to Athens. Sky Express was a new airline for me and I found their service reasonably good. Here’s an aerial photo of Zakynthos.




I stayed at the convenient but very pricy Sofitel Athens Airport overnight before my flights home on Swiss (via Zurich), which went smoothly. Airport hotels are always a good idea when you have an early morning (6:55 a.m.) flight.


Overall, I think the workshop was interesting and worth my time. I don’t expect to do much with what I learned, though you never know what may come in handy. I also enjoyed getting to know the other students, who generally made me feel more optimistic about young people nowadays. What more could I ask for?

I’ll get back to the catch-up stuff soon, but there are a couple of newsy things I want to write about while they are still fresh.

Ceasefire: I was going to write a long treatise on this, but I think it is better to just say that I am skeptical of long-term success but trying to be cautiously optimistic.

Art versus the Artist: The scandal du jour is, of course, the sexual assault allegations against Neil Gaiman. I do think that he has taken advantage of vulnerable young women. The question is whether or not he should be “cancelled.” And, for me, this comes down to the long-standing issue of what to do when bad people produce great art.

I first encountered Neil Gaiman in the early 1990’s when I had a long flight delay in Saint Louis and had reached the end of the book I had with me. So I stopped in at the airport bookstore and, in the course of searching for something tolerable to read on the plane, saw Good Omens, which was co-written by Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. Not being a reader of graphic novels (with a few exceptions, that tend to be on specifically Jewish themes), I’d never read the Sandman series, but I had read a few of Pratchett’s books and mostly liked them, though I found them uneven. At any rate, I bought that book and ended up enjoying it quite a bit. Sometime after that, I was in Portland, Oregon and browsing in Powell’s Books and one of the people who worked there recommended Neverwhere to me. It had a combination of real life and folkloric themes that I found inherently appealing and it remains one of my favorites of his work. I have read only a handful of his books and I saw him speak at DAR Constitution Hall a while back. I thought he was good-looking and spoke well. Floppy hair and British accent - I could see young women falling for him in the same way they might have a crush on Hugh Grant.

I obviously don’t know exactly what did and didn’t happen, though it seems clear that he doesn’t really understand power dynamics between people and he doesn’t understand the concept of consent. But what does this imply about his books? It may not be fair for me to comment since relatively few of them are the sort of thing that really appeals to me, but the more general question is what should happen to the work produced by bad people? To cut to the chase, I have no intention of throwing out those of his books that I own nor would I necessarily refuse to buy something he wrote if it fell into the types of books he wrote that I’ve liked in the past.

Let me take another example. In May 2001, I took a trip to Malta, where I saw Caravaggio’s painting Beheading of Saint John the Baptist in St. John’s Co-Cathedral in Valletta. This is an astonishing painting, considered one of the 10 most important Western paintings of all time. I was blown away by the use of color as well as chiaroscuro. But Caravaggio himself was a sorry excuse for a human being. He had a number of problematic relationships (primarily with young boys), was arrested frequently for brawling, and even committed at least one murder. Nowadays, he would be a prime candidate for cancellation. But he was also the most brilliant painter of the 17th century.

Where I am going with this is I’ve seen the suggestion that it’s okay to tolerate the work of bad people who are dead for some length of time. But if we act quickly to get rid of the works of the living miscreants, how would we ever see the good art created by bad people? And I think the world is enhanced by good art no matter how bad a person the artist is.

I’ve been fairly busy over the past few weeks. The biggest thing was the Women’s Storytelling Festival, which deserves its own entry. In the meantime, you can still buy a virtual ticket through April 1st and listen to 16 hours of recorded stories. Go to the WSF ticketing page.

In terms of other stuff I’ve been doing, here is what I can decipher from what I scribbled on my calendar and notebooks.

Leading Jewish Minds at MIT: Emily Pollock gave a talk on Continuities, Contradictions, and Carmina Burana: The Problem of Carl Orff. The short version of the problem with Carl Orff is that he used nationalistic language to get his teachings (primarily about pedagogy and primitivism) accepted. He was interested in the medieval, ancient Greek, and Baroque pasts, which led to him using simplified, repetitive rhythms, for example. As a result he did things like write music to replace Mendelssohn’s for A Midsummer Night’s Dream. His best known work is, of course, Carmina Burana, which is a scenic cantata (not an opera) and was based on medieval Latin poems. It premiered in Frankfurt in 1937.

That led to the question of whether or not music is political. Professor Pollock noted that, while his music was praised by Hitler, Orff was not a member of the Nazi party. The nuances have to do with historiography, i.e. how we tell the tory and music as a cultural phenomenon. She didn’t have any real answers to this. Orff is played in Israel, while Wagner is, in general, not.

Incidentally, in talking about other German music of the time, Pollock talked a little about Winfried Zillig's opera, Das Opfer, which has to do with the fatal Terra Nova expedition of 1912, during which Robert Falcon Scott and 4 of his companions died on their return from the South Pole. (By the way, the opera apparently does not include Evans, who died earlier than the others.) The intriguing part of this is that the chorus is dressed as killer penguins, who surround Oates and perform a victory dance as he walks into the storm to die. I have not actually heard this opera, but I do think the world needs more music with evil penguins gloating about human deaths.

MIT Presidential Tour: Sally Kornbluth, who has been the president of MIT for about a year, has been doing several trips to meet with alumni (and other community members) and it was Washington, DC’s turn on March 7th. This started out with drinks and hors d’oeuvres for Leadership Circle members (which has to do with how much you donate). The room where that was held was a bit awkwardly shaped, making it a bit hard to mingle, though I did have a few interesting conversations. Then we moved to the general reception area, where they had several food stations, as well as a photo booth and a 3-D printer making coasters. I liked the photo they got of me.



Eventually (after more eating and socializing), we were herded into a conference room for President Kornbluth’s talk. Well, actually, she was interviewed by Annalisa Weigel, who is a member of the MIT Corporation (and a big name in the aerospace world). I was glad they started off with the elephant in the room. Namely, we’d had an opportunity to write in questions beforehand and I am pretty sure I am not the only person who asked about safety of students in light of the Palestinian situation. I thought she had a reasonable reply, mostly focused on enforcing existing rules re: campus protests. There was a lot of stuff about how MIT will address other little issues, like climate change, before getting to some more frivolous subjects, e.g. her hobbies, which include a capella singing and making felted flowers. Eventually, we went back into the main room for coffee and dessert (which included chocolate-dipped strawberries). There was also more swag, e.g. ballcaps and tote bags. All in all, it was a nice evening out.

Book Clubs: R.E.A.D. discussed Clara and Mr. Tiffany by Susan Vreeland, which is a novel based on the life of Clara Driscoll, who designed almost all of the famous Tiffany lamps. Crones and Tomes discussed The Thread Collectors by Shauna J. Edwards and Alyson Richman. (You might recall that R.E.A.D. had done that book previously. I did not reread it, since it had been recent enough that I remembered the gist of it.) I should probably also mention that I took some time out from the Women’s Storytelling Festival to call into the TCC Book Club for our discussion of The Places In Between by Rory Stewart, which is about his walk across Afghanistan.

Medical appointment: The last of the catch-up on medical appointments was pretty routine. Mostly, I got the updated pneumonia vaccine that they give to old folks, as well as the final Hepatitis B booster and the RSV vaccine.

Artomatic: I leveraged off being in the vicinity already (for my medical appointment) to go to opening day of Artomatic. This is an art show (including visual art and performance art and films and pretty much anything, since it’s unjuried). On the way there, I stopped at Call My Mother for lunch and, while I know it’s popular, I still find it disappointing and a crime against bageldom.

Anyway, I started at the top floor and worked my way down, managing to look at about half of the displays at Artomatic before fading out. I did take a break to look at a couple of short movies, the best of which was a cartoon about a support group for cats, which resulted in all of the cats moving in with an elderly woman.

This is called “Pink Compass, True North" and is by Sarah Jane Rodman.



Unfortunately, I didn’t capture the name and artist for this sculpture, but I admired the balance and the use of shapes and colors.



This painting by Giovanni Zelaya is called “The Dream is Alive” and depicts Mae Jemison, Sally Ride, and Ellen Ochoa.



There was also a whole wall of little paintings and what looked like refrigerator magnets. depicting books with titles like “Everything I don’t like is WOKE: A book for basic dickheads” and “How to talk to your dog about The Fall of Constantinople.”

I need to get back and see the other three (maybe four) floors of art. One of my friends is doing a storytelling show there, so I hope to get there for that.

Other Stuff: The Saturday before the Women’s Storytelling Festival, we had a Voices in the Glen story swap. I told “Clever Greta,” which is a Grimm story and quite suitable for women’s history month. That Sunday, we had our annual business meeting. And the Sunday after the festival, the Better Said Than Done board had a postmortem of the festival.

We’ve also had three Grimm Keepers meetings because one had had to be postponed due to conflict. “The Children of the Two Kings” is one of the weirder stories, which is saying a lot since my immediate reaction to most of the stories is that they’re really strange. What made it weird is that, while several things are similar to incidents in other stories (e.g. impossible tasks that have to be done for the prince to marry the princess), there’s a recurring image in it involving the use of glass tools, which nobody had any reasonable explanation for. Our discussion of “The Little Donkey” has inspired me to think of trying to do something with the idea of a support group for people who have been turned into animals (or, who were born as animals, but became human.) Finally, we just talked about “The Turnip,” which needs a certain amount of fleshing out to be satisfactory, but I think I could make it tellable. By the way, this is not the same as the Russian story about the giant turnip that takes several people working together to get out of the ground. It’s a tale of sibling rivalry and revenge.

Also, I’ve played board games several times, including managing to make it to NPL Game Night the past three weeks. I had a stupid accident this past Thursday in which I tripped over a concrete parking stop in a supermarket parking lot, ending up with various bruises, including a black eye. At least, so far as I can tell, I didn’t break anything. And, I went to see the William Shatner movie. You Can Call Me Bill with my friend, Kim, this past Sunday, which was interesting but decidedly not what I was expecting.

I still need to do a lot more housework. And do my taxes, the hardest part of which is always finding all of the statements I need.

I think this will get me caught up on everything up until this month.

I’ve been using the same format for my year in review entries for several years now. It seems to work. Note that I took off the Volksmarch category this time since it’s been a couple of years since I managed to actually do anything there.

2023 started out stressful with mail being stolen, including a check which was washed and used fraudulently and a credit card which had to be replaced. It all got resolved, but I could have lived without the stress. There was a lot of stress later in the year, with the incompetence of the person at the local Social Security office who sat on my Medicare application for over two months without doing anything. That took way too many phone calls to get resolved. And, of course, there was the whole Middle East situation to make 2023 the Age of Anxiety.

Fortunately, things were otherwise good during the year.

Books: I read 53 books over the year. 39 of those were fiction, 3 were poetry, and the rest were nonfiction. Only 3 were rereads.

Favorites included Our Ancestors Did Not Breathe This Air (a poetry collection by Muslim women at MIT), Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozu Adichie, The Ghostwriter by Alessandra Torre, and The Caxton Private Lending Library and Book Depository by John Connolly. I also read 6 novels by Dick Francis, whose books provide a reliable antidote to ones in which not enough happens to keep me satisfied. Favorite non-fiction was The Best Strangers in the World by Ari Shapiro. Least favorite book was Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen.

I got rid of 39 books and have at least another 33 ready to go out.

In addition to my longstanding book club (called READ for Read, Enjoy, And Discuss), I joined another book club, Crones and Tomes, which was started by a friend from the puzzle world.

Other book events included the Moby Dick Marathon in New Bedford, Massachusetts, which was an amazing experience, and a talk by Ari Shapiro at Sixth and I.

Ghoul Pool: I finished 4th out of 14 players, with 220 points. People I scored on were Naomi Replanski, Steve Harrell, Bob Barker, Tony Bennett, Al Jaffee, John Goodenough, Robert Solow, Daniel Ellsberg, Sandra Day O’Connor, James L. Buckley, W. Nicholas Hitchon, and David Oreck.

Travel: In January, I went to New Bedford, Massachusetts for the Moby Dick Marathon. In February, I went to Tucson, which included going to Saguaro National Park and Biosphere 2, as well as winning some money at a casino. March included a trip to New York City to go to the symphony and the theatre and visit with a high school friend. April’s travel was to Connecticut for the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament.

In May I took a river cruise, which included going to the Kentucky Derby. The Derby arrangements were kind of a fiasco, but the stops at various small towns were a lot more interesting than I expected.

June took me to Svalbard, which featured amazing scenery, though the wildlife (or, more accurately, lack thereof) was disappointing. This was somewhere I’d wanted to go to forever, so I am glad to have had the opportunity.

In July, I went to Montreal for the NPL con. That also included eating a lot of Montreal Jewish food and following in the footsteps of Leonard Cohen. Later in the month, I leveraged off a genealogy conference in London to take a trip to Ireland (including a day trip to Belfast) and the Isle of Man. That included fulfilling a life list item by having a beer at the South Pole Inn in Anascaul. After the conference, I did a few more things in London, including side trips to Canterbury and to Ipswich and Sutton Hoo. Soon after I got back, I took a quick trip to New York City for Lollapuzzoola and theatre going.

LoserFest was in Philadelphia in September. Highlights included the Masonic Temple and the Magic Gardens.

In October, I took a quick trip to San Antonio for the annular solar eclipse, which was awesome. While I was there, I also did a day trip to the Hill Country, where I saw several sites associated with Lyndon B. Johnson, as well as visiting the town of Fredericksburg. Later in the month I went to Boston, mostly to go to a concert by Jonathan Richman.

I’m not sure if taking a day trip to Harrisonburg, Virginia in November counts as travel. But my trip to French Polynesia (Austral Islands and Aranui cruise to the Marquesas) definitely does.

Virtual travel talks I went to included one on Jewish Barbados and a few Travelers’ Century Club zoom sessions. There were also a few in-person TCC meetings.

Puzzles: I participated once again in the MIT Mystery Hunt as part of Halibut That Bass. I think the team worked particularly well together, but we had some issues with the way the hunt was structured, which resulted in our seeing only about half of the puzzles.

I was disappointed in my performance in the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. I finished solidly in the middle of the pack and I wasn’t surprised to have trouble with Puzzle 5, but I left a blank square in Puzzle 3, which was sheer carelessness. I did worse at Lollapuzzoola 16 in August, because I failed to completely read parts of some clues in Puzzle 5 there. I blame jet lag from my trip just before that event.

As I mentioned above, I went to the National Puzzlers’ League Con in Montreal. Highlights included a couple of games by Cute Mage, as well as Rasa’s over the weekend cryptic.


Genealogy: I continued to volunteer as the Subject Matter Expert for a Jewish Genealogy Society of Greater Washington Litvak Special Interest Group. I also went to several JGSGW virtual meetings. And, of course, I went to the IAJGS conference in London at the end of July / beginning of August. Aside from several interesting talks, the highlight of that was meeting a distant cousin.

Baseball: I went to a little bit of a Nationals game in May, but it got rained out. In September I went to the new Texas Rangers stadium (Globe Life Field), putting me back at having been to a game at every Major League Ballpark. I also went to two minor league ballparks to see the Aberdeen Ironbirds and the Fredericksburg Nationals.

Culture: I’m not a big television watcher but I kept Apple TV+ long enough to watch Schmigadoon and Schmicago, both of which were tremendous fun for musical theatre geeks like me.

In terms of movies, I saw 18 overall, 4 of which were in theaters, with the rest on airplanes. Favorites were A Man Called Otto, In the Heights, Blackberry, Cocaine Bear, Searching for Sugar Man, Barbie, and Remembering Gene Wilder. Most disappointing was Weird: The Al Yancovic Story.

I went to 5 Gilbert and Sullivan operettas at the G&S International Festival in England, with the best production being of Ruddigore. I went to two other operas, both by Jeanine Tesori (Blue and Grounded). I also saw two ballets and one modern dance performance, with the ballet of The Crucible being the most satisfying. As far as classical music goes, I saw the National Symphony Orchestra twice and was privileged to see Michael Tilson Thomas conduct the New York Philharmonic. The only popular music concert I went to was one by Jonathan Richman, who is always wonderful.

I saw 14 plays and 9 musicals, assuming I counted correctly. Favorite plays were All Things Equal (about Ruth Bader Ginsburg), The Lifespan of a Fact at Keegan Theatre, Selling Kabul at Signature Theatre, and The Pillowman, which is a Martin McDonagh play I saw in London. I also loved The Enigmatist, which is a mixture of comedy. magic, and puzzles and, hence, I consider sui generis. Top musicals were In the Heights at Next Stop Theatre Company, Signature Theatre’s production of Pacific Overtures. and Shucked and Kimberly Akimbo on Broadway.

Storytelling: I went to several storytelling shows, including one by my Grimmkeepers group. I performed in two shows for Artists Standing Strong Together, and also told at the C&O Canal Visitor Center with Voices in the Glen, at the Washington Folk Festival, and in a Better Said Than Done show at the Stagecoach Theatre. Some other shows I particularly enjoyed were Ingrid Nixon’s show about Shackleton and several of the performances at the National Storytelling Festival. And, of course, the Women’s Storytelling Festival (which I also emceed at) os always a highlight of the year.

On a rather different note, the Grimmkeepers discussions about the Grimm fairy tales continue to be enlightening and enriching.

Museums and Art: I went to 32 museums over the year. Highlights included the New Bedford Glass Museum, the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, two exhibitions of miniatures (the Mini Time Machine Museum in Tucson and the Small is Beautiful exhibit in New York), the MIT Museum, the Virginia Quilt Museum, and the Museum of Failure. I also really enjoyed seeing the Book of Kells, the Manx Museum, and Sutton Hoo during my travels in July. My absolute favorite for the year was the Museum of Broadway.


Other Stuff: On New Year’s Day, my friend, Cindy, and I went to the Winter Lantern Festival at Tyson’s, which was impressive.

I went to various Loser events, including the post-Post Loser Party, the Flushes, LoserFest. I should probably count Poetry and Punchlines (a poetry reading associated with Light, which is a magazine of light verse) as a Loser event, too.

My crafting group changed to meeting on-line every other Thursday and in person at one members house on the weeks in between. I make it when I can. Similarly, I occasionally managed to get to my other (mostly) knitting group, which meets at the police station twice a month.

I went to a virtual organizing conference in September, which was moderately useful.

I played board games a few times a week, when I was home. Yes, sometimes I was home.

Goals: So how did I do on my 2023 goals? I went through maybe 10% of the photos from my parents and realized I have no idea where I put the slides, so I’ll give myself a 10% there. I did go to some sort of lecture or other formal educational event, either in person or on-line, every month, so I get 100% there. I get full credit (i.e. 100%) for taking 4 international trips. I finished only 1 craft project, so only get 33% there, though I did make progress on two others. I read 53 books, out of a goal of 75, so get 71% there. I get 100% credit for going to three new (to me) ballparks. I made it to at least one museum each month so get 100% on that goal. I only went to one national park, so get 33% on that goal. And I averaged significantly less than a half hour every day on housework, so I’ll give myself 10% there. Averaging things out, I’ll give myself a 62% on the year, which is not great but not terrible either.

Which brings me to goals for 2024:

• Circumnavigate the globe going westward. The backstory is that way back in 2000, I did an eastward circumnavigation, from Los Angeles to Russia via Germany by plane, overland through Siberia to Mongolia and to China, and back to Los Angeles by plane. I’ve got ideas for how I want to do the westward circle.
  
  
• Go to at least 3 national parks.
  
  
• Clean out my saved files of genealogy related emails.
  
  
• Read 80 books with a stretch goal of 125.
  
  
• Finish organizing my bedroom.
  
  
• Finish 3 afghans.
  
  
• Find and sort through my parents’ slides.
  
  
• Go to games at at least 4 AAA ballparks.
  
  
• Exercise for at least 20 minutes at least 3 times a week, with a stretch goal of at least 30 minutes at least 4 times a week.
  
  

I finished a couple of things in the past couple of days, so it seems like a good time to catch up here.

Celebrity Death Watch: Royston Ellis wrote travel guides, particularly for south Asia (e.g. India and Sri Lanka) and rail travel. Charle Harrington Elster was one of the original hosts of A Way With Words. Leon Hughes was the last surviving member of The Coasters. Wayne Shorter was a jazz saxophonist. Tom Sizemore was an actor, best known for starring in Saving Private Ryan. Judith Heumann was a disability rights activist. Gary Rossington was the lead guitarist for Lynyrd Skynyrd. Ian Falconer wrote and illustrated the Olivia series of children’s books. Robert Blake was an actor, about equally well-known for playing Baretta and for being accused of murdering his second wife. Raphael Mechoulam was the chemist who (with Y. Gaoni) isolated THC from cannabis. Masatoshi Ito was the founder of Ito-Yokado which owns over 10,00 7-11 stores, as well as being a franchisee for several other brands in Japan. John Jakes wrote epic novels, including North and South. Dick Fosbury was a high jumper who invented the style of jumping known as the Fosbury flop. Jim Gordon was the drummer for Derek and the Dominos, wrote the song “Layla,” and later murdered his mother. Joe Peptone was a first baseman for the Source of All Evil in the Universe. Pat Schroeder was one of the most prominent women in Congress for over 20 years. Stuart Hodes danced with Martha Graham. Sean Burns was the administrator of Tristan da Cunha for many years. Fuzzy Haskins was one of the founding members of Parliament-Funkadelic. John Jenrette was a congressman from South Carolina, best known for being involved in the Abscam scandal. Lance Reddick was an actor, best known for his roles in The Wire, Bosch, and John Wick. K.C. Constantine was a mystery writer. Jerry Green was the only sportswriter to cover each of first 56 Super Bowl games. Keith Reid was a songwriter and lyricist, most famous for Procul Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale.” Dan Ben-Amos was a folklorist, who studied Jewish folklore among other subjects. D. M. Thomas was a writer, best known for the novel The White Hotel. Howie Kane sang with Jay and the Americans. Virginia Norwood designed satellite imaging systems, leading to her being called the “mother of Landsat.”

Klaus Tuber created the game “Settlers of Catan.” Kwame Brathwaite was a photojournalist and popularized the phrase “Black is Beautiful.” Seymour Stein co-founded Sire Records. Judy Farrell played Nurse Able on M*A*S*H. Roy McGrath was a former chief of staff to the governor of Maryland, who failed to show up for his trial for various corruption charges, leading to a manhunt and his death from a gunshot, though whether by the FBI or his own hand is unclear. Craig Breedlove was a five-time land speed record holder. Leon Levine founded Family Dollar. Hobie Landrith was a catcher and the first person to sign a contract with the New York Mets. Nora Forster was a music promoter, probably more famous as Johnny Rotten’s wife. Ben Ferencz was a prosecutor in the Nuremberg trials. Ian Bairson was a member of The Alan Parsons Project. Pierre Lacotte was a ballet dancer and known for helping Rudolf Nureyev defect to the U.S. Meir Shalev was an Israeli writer. Ed Koren was a cartoonist whose work appeared frequently in The New Yorker.

Robert Haimer was a singer and songwriter, half of Barnes & Barnes and known for writing the song “Fish Heads,” which got a lot of airplay from Dr. Demento.

Chaim Topol was an Israeli actor, best known for playing Tevye in the movie version of Fiddler on the Roof.

Jesus Alou was an outfielder who played for a number of teams, including the Giants and the Astros. His younger brother, Matty, died in 2011, but the oldest of the Alou brothers, Felipe, who was the first Dominican to play regularly in the major leagues, is still alive.

Napoleon XIV was best known for the novelty song “They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!”

Willis Reed played for the New York Knicks from 1964 through 1974 and went on to coach for several teams.

Gordon Moore co-founded Intel and was famous for Moore’s Law, which states that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit doubles about every two years.

Mark Russell performed his unique style of political satire on regular PBS specials, as well as live. I was fortunate enough to be able to see him perform at Ford’s Theatre several years ago.

Mimi Sheraton was the food critic for the New York Times for many years. She also wrote several books, including From My Mother’s Kitchen and The Bialy Eaters.

Harry Lorayne was a memory expert. I once commented on The Memory Book as having been written by “Jerry Lucas and some author,” which may give you an idea of how effective I found his techniques.

Anne Perry was a mystery writer. She was several years into that career when the story came out that she had been convicted of murder as a teenager. It’s a complex story, involving what appears to have been an obsessive relationship with the friend whose mother she helped kill.

Al Jaffee was one of the greatest humorists of the 20th century. He invented two features for MAD Magazine - “Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions” and the fold-in. My Dad bought MAD regularly, allegedly for my brother and me, but we noticed that the fold-in was always done already by the time we got it. He also had an interesting family history, being dragged back and forth between the U.S. and Zarasai, Lithuania by his parents because his mother was unable to adjust to American life. He lived to 102 and credited his sense of humor for his longevity. Also, he earned me 23 ghoul pool points.

Mary Quant was a fashion designer, known for inflicting miniskirts and hot pants on society. And, yes, I wore those back in the day.


Puzzle Community Death Watch: Marc Spraragen, known within the National Puzzlers’ League as Marcus Asparagus, died suddenly of a ruptured aortic aneurysm. He was smart and kind and I always looked forward to seeing him at the NPL con. He was highly devoted to his family - his wife, Pauline, and their three-year-old son, Zachary. Such a huge loss to our community.

Ari Shapiro: The last Monday of March, I went to Ari Shapiro’s book launch event at Sixth & I Synagogue. He was interviewed by Audie Cornish. He had some interesting things to say about storytelling in the context of journalism and the value of encouraging people to tell their stories. Also, a storytelling friend, Cricket, was there, and it turns out she went to college with Ari’s father.

The Eleventh Plague: My friend, Teri, works at the Library of Congress and let me know about Jeremy Brown’s talk about Jews and Pandemics. Some of the things he talked about were the threat of execution for anyone violating quarantines in the Roman ghetto and exactly how a pandemic was defined by the rabbis. For example, only deaths by people who earned a living were counted, but deaths of animals and of non-Jews were included. It was an interesting talk and the library had various books and other reference documents on display.

Pacific Overtures: Pacific Overtures is my favorite Sondheim score, for a number of reasons. In particular, I think “A Bowler Hat” is an excellent example of how to use a song to illuminate character. “Chrysanthemum Tea” has my favorite Sondheim rhyme in “it’s an herb that’s superb for disturbances at sea.” I think “Please Hello!” is a great rebuttal to those who think of Sondheim primarily as a lyricist, since it takes a lot of musical talent to produce such on-the-mark pastiches of different musical styles. Sondheim’s own favorite of his songs was “Someone in a Tree.” Signature Theatre’s production was brilliant, as I expected, with excellent use of puppets and taiko drumming. Jason Ma was very impressive as the Reciter. All in all, it was a fabulous evening of theatre.

ACPT: The first weekend of April (and the Friday night before) was the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. The ACPT deserves its own entry, which I will try to get to soon.

Grimm Keepers: Our story for the most recent meeting was “The Nightingale and the Blindworm.” This is a particularly short story, which is only in the first edition and not later Grimm collections. The gist of it is that those animals had one eye each and the nightingale asked to borrow the blindworm’s eye for a party, but refused to return it afterwards. This got us talking about other stories with similar themes, e.g. an African dilemma tale about a couple who find eyes and have to decide who to give the last one to.

Pesach: I had a hard time finding a lot of Pesach food this year. Many years, I drive to the Baltimore suburbs, but I had too much going on this year. And most of my local stores didn’t have certain things I usually look for. For example, nowhere had kosher for Passover jam. So I ate a lot of matzoh with cream cheese, borscht, chremslach (matzoh meal pancakes), and fruit and was bored.

Ballet - Anna Karenina: Last Friday (April 7th) I went to see the Joffrey Ballet production of Anna Karenina at The Kennedy Center. Cindy and I had some miscommunication, so I had an extra ticket, which my friend, Teri, took. None of the three of us had ever read the book, so we were somewhat lost. At intermission, I did read the synopsis, but it didn’t help quite enough. For example, I never understood what the scene in Parliament where Anna’s husband rails against immigrants, had to do with anything else. Still, the dancing was impressive.

Afterwards, we walked over to The Reach (the newish extension to the Kennedy Center) and looked at some of the River Run exhibit there. The theme is largely environmental, so, for example, there is this scu[pture made out of plastic pulled from rivers.



And here is an exhibit of “fabric” woven from fishing line.



We also went outside and looked at this installation called Survivors by Cuban artist Roberto Fabelo.



All in all, it was a nice afternoon, even if we didn’t completely understand the ballet.

Story Swap: The Voices in the Glen monthly story swap was last weekend. We had a small group, but an enjoyable evening. I told a Tuvan story about “How the Camel Lost Its Beauty.” I’d been thinking of it because it has some elements that are similar to those in “The Nightingale and the Blindworm.” It had been a long time since I’d told it, but I pretty much remembered it.

Crones and Tomes: This months book was The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion. This was about her experiences when her husband died and her daughter was hospitalized in a coma for several months. I thought it was a good read but a lot of people had problems with her level of privilege that let her pull in impressive doctors for her daughter.

Counted Cross Stitch Project: I’ve been working on this counted cross-stitch project for two years and a few months and I finally finished it at my crafts group on Thursday afternoon. I still have to get it framed, of course.



It was designed by Saifhon Borisuthipandit and I bought the kit in Bangkok in 2008. I can, of course, see all my mistakes, but I assume nobody else will notice them.

Taxes: I finished my taxes Thursday night. As usual, what takes time is finding all of the documents I need. The one thing that I had a hard time finding was how much I paid in property tax for my car. In the end, I had to look on the county tax administration website. I ended up having to pay a few hundred bucks because I’d owned shares in an American Depository Receipt which delisted itself from the New York Stock Exchange, triggering capital gains. It was kind of a pain to find my cost basis because I’d owned the shares for nearly 30 years. Anyway, it’s done.

Storytelling - The Musical: To continue the busy Thursday, I attended a virtual storytelling show. Carol Moore emceed and there were 6 tellers. Natalie Jones had a cute story about show piglets (as in “there’s no piglets, like show piglets”) putting on a production of “The Three Little Pigs.” Paul Strickland had a story about an enchanted apple tree with a cursed knife stuck in it. Mo Reynolds told a version of the folk tale “The Sword of Wood.” She was followed by Jack Scheer explaining his magic iPod. Jessica Robinson’s contribution had to do with her mother’s love of singing. And Sam Payne closed out the night with a story about going to church dances as a teenager. All in all, it was a very enjoyable evening and a nice way to transition out of my busy day to a more relaxed evening.

I spent the first weekend of the year in New Bedford, Massachusetts. My primary reason for the trip was the annual Moby Dick Marathon at the New Bedford Whaling Museum. Why? Well, I fell in love with Melville’s writing my senior year of high school, when we read “Bartleby the Scrivener” in our Great Books class. That led me to read more of his work, leading to Moby Dick. Having read it a couple of times, I consider it THE great American novel. When I learned about the annual marathon reading of it in New Bedford, I decided that was something I had to experience. I had made plans to go some years ago, but the weather didn’t cooperate and a snowstorm down here kept me from flying up for it. I did watch bits and pieces of the lifestream the past couple of years, but still wanted to go in person. This year, the stars aligned. So armed with warm clothing and my copy of the book, I flew north.


I’d been to New Bedford for the better part of a day back in 1998, but I still decided to fly in a day earlier than I needed to, mostly because you never know how travel will go in the winter. Fortunately, the flight was fine. When I got to BOS, I looked at the schedule for the Peter Pan bus to New Bedford. This isn’t super convenient, since it goes via Hyannis and takes longer than the DAATCO direct bus from South Station, but DAATCO is intended as a commuter service so wouldn’t leave for several hours. So I went to Hyannis, where I needed to change buses. I had a little time to walk around downtown Hyannis, but the weather was chilly and drizzly, so that was far from optimal. (And, of course, my backpack gained weight with every step I took.) I went back to the transportation center and sat down on a bench with a crossword puzzle book to kill time. The bus was delayed, apparently due to a driver shortage, but we did leave Hyannis about a half hour late. I still got to New Bedford at least an hour earlier than the DAATCO bus would have gotten me there. It wasn’t too bad of a walk to my hotel (the Fairfield Inn), with s bit of confusion on my part about exactly where the hotel entrance was. I had a quick dinner and fiddled around on the Internet before going to bed.


I had bought a ticket to the opening dinner and lecture of the Moby Dick Marathon on Friday night, so I had pretty much all day to kill. I decided to walk over to the New Bedford Museum of Glass. This was about a mile up a moderate hill from the hotel. When I got to the museum (which is downstairs in the James Arnold Mansion, home to the Wamsutta Club), nobody was there. I rang the bell several times and tried calling the museum telephone number, but got no answer. I went back upstairs and the Wamsubtta Club receptionist called the proprietor / curator, who came down to meet me, take my $8 admission fee, and show me around the museum. It was definitely worth this minor hassle, since what amounted to a private tour was very informative. The first part of the museum is focused on glass made in New Bedford, which was a major center for art glass in the late 19th century. There are a number of large and spectacular pieces, Some of the things I found most interesting included uranium glass (which glowed under black light) and glass that was shaded by reheating only part of it, changing the amber color to a darker shade. Unfortunately, I didn’t get good pictures of either of those. I did get decent pictures of some other pieces, however.

There was a fashion for Orientalism and it applied to glass, as well as art.



These lamps are beautiful, with the paintings on their interiors of the shades. Definitely something I would love to own one or more of.



My favorite piece in the museum was this glass library by Lucy Lyon. Every piece of it is made of glass, including each of the books.



I also loved a series of pieces by Edris Eckhardt, who invented a technique for drawing with a glass pen and fusing gold leaf between sheets of glass. The museum has several of her stunning works.



This isn’t a huge museum, but it is definitely worth visiting. They have an associated exhibit of glass animals at New Bedford City Hall. That is free to visit. They have pretty much every animal one might imagine. I felt nostalgic since my best friend in high school collected glass animals. Here are a few samples.












I went back to the hotel to rest for a little while before going to the Whaling Museum for the dinner and lecture. The cocktail hour was a good opportunity to meet some of the other attendees. By an interesting coincidence, one of the other people at my table was an MIT alumnus. There were a lot of semi-local attendees, but there were other people who had come from at least as far away as California and Washington State. I was particularly amused by a group of young men who had t-shirts declaring that they were “The (Moby) Dick Heads.” The food was a buffet of Italian food, which was okay, but nothing special. As for the talk, it was given by Aileen Callahan, whose exhibition “Moby Dick in Days of Pestilence and Chaos” was on display in the upper level galleries of the museum. Her art is abstract and the talk helped me understand both her techniques her intentions. It’s definitely a timely topic, but the paintings weren’t really my sort of thing.

I tried to sleep in a bit on Saturday morning, but failed at that. So I ended up going to part of the pre-marathon “Stump the Scholars” session, which featured two teams of experts (The Cods vs. The Clams) answering pre-submitted questions. In short, people can get fairly obsessed about trivia. For example, there was a particularly long discussion about pitchpoling (chapter 84) and whether it is even possible.

There was a little time before the reading started. I used it to do two things. I checked out the scrimshaw exhibit in the museum, because scrimshaw is something I’ve liked since I was taken to the whaling museum in Sag Harbor, New York as a kid. One particularly impressive piece is this violin with scrimshaw fittings.



And I listened to a couple of the Toward the Sea short concerts by Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu. Those were played by two students from the Berklee Conservatory of Music, Jessica Lynch and Eric Puente. They were quite evocative and enjoyable.



The first part of the marathon reading itself was the extracts that precede the actual novel. For this, the team of experts took turns reading the quotes about whales from the book. Then it was time for the main event. The opening reader was actress Taylor Schilling. The first hour and a half was quite crowded, by the way, and there were even people sitting on the floor. At 1:30, people who had won a drawing for seats went across the street to the Seamen’s Bethel for the chapters set there, culminating in Father Mapple’s sermon. The rest of us went back downstairs to the auditorium, where that part of the reading was live streamed. There was a glitch at the beginning with the microphone being placed too far away from the reader, but it was fixed. We had been handed song sheets and everybody rose to sing along with the hymn. The lecture itself was performed particularly well.

Then everyone went to the gallery we’d been in for the dinner on Friday night for the rest of the reading. Things had thinned out some, so it was easy to snag a good seat. The readers were a mixed bag. Some of them were hesitant, while others were too dramatic. I can’t completely fault people who mispronounce words they’d learned entirely from reading, but one would think that someone who signs up to read Moby Dick publicly would at least look up how to pronounce “leviathan.” There was also considerable disagreement about how to pronounce the name of Queequeg’s idol, Yojo. I heard Yo-Jo, Yo-Ho, and even Yo-Yo! Over the many many hours there was one girl (who appeared to be a teenager) who was nearly inaudible, despite the microphone, but most readers could at least manage to be heard. One person went on for a bit after being told to stop. There was also some confusion over how to handle footnotes. I had my copy of the book to follow along with and spent some time catching up after I took breaks to use the bathroom and to get snacks. (They had a concession stand with various things, most importantly coffee! I suggest bringing granola bars and trail mix.) I also took another break to go downstairs where they were serving chowder and selling beer and talked with a few people, leading to a longer time catching up. I also needed some breaks just to stand up and moe around and stretch, since the folding chairs got fairly uncomfortable after a while. Also, Chapter 40 (“Midnight on the Forecastle”) is presented as a play, complete with sea shanties and dances, which was fun. That was done back down in the auditorium so provided another break.

As the night wore on, the audience thinned out, though there was at least one family who set up sleeping bags in one corner of the room for their children. There were several children at parts of the event and all of them seemed quite well-behaved. (Or, at least, there parents were alert enough to remove them if they were going to be disruptive.) There was one woman who read in French, while the next reader repeated her section in English. (They had a separate Portuguese reading on Saturday afternoon, by the way. I don’t know what parts of the book that entailed.) Early on Sunday morning, you could go down to one of the classrooms and get coffee and malasadas (Portuguese fried dough).

Somewhat to my surprise, I managed to make it through the entire marathon! You could get stamps every four hours on your program and redeem that for a prize, which consisted of a few books (a comic book version of the story, a collection of maritime prints from Melville’s collection, and a book of the Captain’s specific orders to his officers and crew), as well as a magnet. They announced that 1500 people had attended some part of the events, while about 100 completed the marathon.

So was it worth it? For me, yes. I got a renewed appreciation for the book, and, in particular, a good reminder of how funny Melville could be. I also firmly believe that being around people who are passionate about something is always a good way to spend time and this was definitely an event in that category.

On Monday, I walked to the bus station to get the DAATCO bus back to South Station in Boston. While waiting for the bus, I talked with a young man from Dallas who had also come in for the Moby Dick Marathon. He was also a traveler and we had a very nice discussion about various places we’d been. He had also been to the Moby Dick Marathon in Mystic, Connecticut and said this one was better because they don’t have concessions in Mystic.

I think I’d still like to go to the other Moby Dick Marathons. Mystic, Sag Harbor (Long Island), and San Francisco are the ones I know of. Sag Harbor would be the easiest one physically since they break overnight. It’s also a place I like a lot, having gone to the Old Whalers’ Festival there with my family when I was about 9 or 10 years old. But, for now, I’m satisfied.

Hirshorn: After I got back from New York, I had one day where I had nothing scheduled so could run errands. On Saturday, I was off to the Hirshhorn Museum (which is the Smithsonian’s modern art museum) to see an exhibit of works by Yayoi Kusama from their collection. This was free but required tickets given out that day. We took the first Metro train into the city, so got in line for tickets at about 8:15. When they started giving out tickets (at 9:30) that enabled us to get in the first group.

The exhibit was actually pretty small - just 5 rooms, which included two infinity mirror rooms. The first room had this pumpkin sculpture.



Here is me in the first of the infinity mirror rooms. Only two people at a time could go in and you only got 30 seconds inside.



You got a minute and a half in the other infinity mirror room, where there was a path to follow through what seemed like a lot of disco balls.



The whole thing took only about a half hour to go through. So we continued on to the Laurie Andersson exhibit upstairs. There’s not much point in trying to photograph something which relies on multi-media so much, though I did get part of one of the graffitied walls.




The rest does have interesting stories and some rather strange conceptual art, e.g. a series of photos of her sleeping in various public spaces.

We adjourned for lunch at Jaleo, where we ordered too much delicious food. (This is a tapas place, part of the Jose Andres empire. It’s pricy, but he does such great work through World Central Kitchen that I don’t mind spending money at his restaurants.)


Washington Folk Festival: Sunday was the Washington Folk Festival in Glen Echo Park. I was telling stories at 3:30 in the afternoon, so I had time to get lunch (included for performers), browse the crafts tent, and listen to some other storytellers. Jane told a (slightly different version of) a story I had been planning to tell, so I made a last minute substitution. I mostly told stories from the U.S., Mongolia, Poland, and the deep twisty corners of my mind. The audience was very responsive and I had a good time. I left right after my set to minimize the amount of driving right into the sun I’d have to do to get home. (I have a lot of glare issues, alas, which can make for a headache trigger.)


Decluttering: Decluttering is an on-going process but has to be accelerated a bit when I have company coming. I have not made as much progress as I need to. But I have gotten rid of things like coupons that expired two or more years ago, newsletters from events five or more years ago, and assorted scraps of paper with mysterious notes to myself. Why on earth would I have written the phrase “artisanal (cobalt) mines” on a sheet of paper?


More Storytelling: Thursday night I went to the Auld Sheen for a storytelling show I was not performing in. Andrea Young and Jessica Robinson opened the night, with Andy Offutt Irwin from Georgia as the main attraction. Andy is extremely funny and I love his stories, particularly those about his (fictional) Aunt Marguerite who went to medical school in her 80’s. His work is full of character-based humor with insights into southern culture and is delightful. And, of course, there is no substitute for live entertainment.

By the way, there was also a Voices in the Glen story swap (over zoom) on Saturday night. I particularly liked Tim Livengood’s original story about why dogs howl.


The Mystery of Edwin Drood: Speaking of live entertainment, I went to see The Mystery of Edwin Drood, put on by The Britihs Players, on Friday night. This musical won several Tony awards in 1986, but that was not, frankly, a great year for Broadway musicals. It’s based on an unfinished novel by Charles Dickens, which provides an opportunity for the gimmick of having the audience choose the ending. Several of the performers were difficult to understand and there was little humor, aside from predictable jokes told by the chairman of the music hall. I thought the strongest performance was by Meghan Williams Elkin as Princess Puffer, the proprieties of an opium den in London. Overall, I thought it was too long and I drifted off several times during the first act. (The second act was, mercifully,, shorter.) I’ve enjoyed the Old Time Music Hall performances the British Players put on, but this show just didn’t work for me.


By the way, we had dinner at The Tombs beforehand. That’s a Georgetown University hangout and I thought the food was just so-so. The banh mi I got did have good papaya salad, but the baguette was bordering on stale. So, overall, a disappointing outing.


Party: One of my friends had a party on Sunday. He lives in a condo with an excellent view of National Airport, so the big attraction is hanging out on the balcony watching planes (and trains and boats). There was, of course, lots of travel related conversation. And lots of food. My contribution was white chocolate cheesecake in an oreo crust, which is an easy no-bake dessert. (You blend two packages of cream cheese, a can of sweetened condensed milk, a cup of melted white chocolate chips, and about 1/3 c. of sour cream. Then just pour into the oreo crust and refrigerate overnight.) It was good to see people I hadn’t seen in a while and the weather was lovely for sitting outside.

A Little More About the ACPT: For those who want to know more about the crossword tournament, you could watch the 2006 documentary Wordplay.

Here is a run down of my results from all the years I’ve competed. It may make it clearer why I was disappointed. (But, then, I admit I was out of practice. And there were a lot fewer people participating this year.)

2009 – 265 / 654 (55th percentile)
2012 – 241 / 594 (59th percentile)
2014 – 202 / 580 (65th percentile)
2016 – 171 / 576 (70th percentile)
2017 – 141 / 619 (77th percentile)
2018 – 254 / 674 (62nd percentile)
2019 – 220 / 741 (70th percentile)
2022 - 243 / 474 (49th percentile)

But what’s done is done. I’ll aim to do better at other tournaments. (Next up is probably Lollapuzzoola in New York at the end of August.)

As I mentioned, I took the train from Stamford to New York on Sunday afternoon because I had plans. Here’s what I did.

Ari Shapiro’s Cabaret Show: Back in February, I had seen Ari Shapiro interview Fran Leibowitz at the Kennedy Center. He mentioned he had a cabaret show coming up at Feinstein’s / 54 Below in Manhattan on April 3rd and 4th. I realized that meshed perfectly with the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, which was April 1st through 3rd. There were actually two Sunday night shows, but the later one was just too late for me, so I booked the 7 p.m. show. That gave me plenty of time to settle into my hotel room and relax a little before walking uptown to the club, which is a pretty well known cabaret venue.

I had been a bit apprehensive about going to what is, essentially, a supper club, alone. But they seated me at a table with a very personable gay couple and we had a lovely conversation while we ate. (You are required to spend at least $25 on food and drink. This is not a challenge. I went with the drink and appetizer approach and did succumb to dessert. My gin and tonic, crab cake, and gelato were all quite good.)

As for the show, Ari sang an interesting mix of songs in multiple languages (shades of Pink Martini) and told a few stories which touched on his journalistic experiences. For example, he talked about meeting with Ukrainian refugees in Poland and getting a text from his husband about their dog being sick and the dissonance of that. My favorite part involved a particularly evocative story he told about visiting a Yazidi shrine near the Iraq / Syria border, including a song. He had lines like “all around me was just sand. Sand and the sounds of the cello.” (He actually mentioned the cellist’s name, but I’ve forgotten it.) I enjoyed the show very much and it was worth missing the ACPT finals and some socializing time to see it.


MOMA: I hadn’t really made particular plans for Monday. There were several options, but given that the weather was chilly, I decided that museum going was the best thing to do. I chose the Museum of Modern Art largely because it had been a while since I’d been there. They are members-only on Monday morning, so I slept in a bit and took a leisurely stroll around midtown (mostly up Fifth Avenue), enjoying seeing several of my Manhattan touchstones.

I’ve never known which of the library lions is Patience and which is Fortitude. Whichever this is, he is magnificent.



The Chrysler Building is the most beautiful skyscraper in the world. This is not up for debate.



I was interested to see a new sculpture by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Brugge. It’s called Plantoir, Blue and was erected in 2021.



And it’s good to see that Atlas is still holding up the Earth outside Rockefeller Center.




As for MOMA, they were installing a couple of new exhibits, so some favorites (e.g. Van Gogh’s Starry Night) were not open for viewing. And it was a bit of a maze getting around parts of the building. There was still plenty to look at. For example, I was quite taken by Marta Minujin’s Minucode which consists of films she made of four cocktail parties she hosted at the Center for Inter-American Relations in 1968. It’s an intriguing look at how people interact in an unexpected social environment. (It is also pretty much impossible to photograph.)


Monet’s Waterlilies are more or less obligatory.



I like Matisse, but I don’t plan to take a dip in his swimming pool.



I was intrigued by Double Transparency by Venezuelan artist, Jesus Rafael Soto.



I like to include at least one work by a woman in every set of photos of art. So have The Family by Marisol.



And I might as well throw in this set of lithographs by Julia Wachtel, based on photos of crowds in various cities.



I also was intrigued by some of the pieces in a special exhibit of work by Kahlil Robert Irving, which I thought had some powerful messages abut the commercialization of art.



There was, of course, plenty of other art to look at and I spent pretty much all afternoon at the museum. There are also plenty of other museums in New York (and, for that matter, here in DC), but those will have to wait for another trip.

Funny Girl: A lot of Broadway theaters are dark on Monday nights. Looking for something to do, I was able to snag a ticket for one of the preview performances of the revival of Funny Girl, starring Beanie Feldstein. The show is very much a star turn and I thought Feldstein was competent enough as Fanny Brice. The book had been rewritten and did give a bit more to Nick Ornstein, played excellently by Ramin Karimloo. I should also note the spectacular tap dancing by Jared Grimes as Eddy Ryan.

But, frankly, the show doesn’t hold together very well. The story line is weak (and not particularly accurate, but, then, it was originally produced by Brice’s son-in-law.) It feels like Jule Style was trying to leverage off of the success of Gypsy. which is a much more satisfying show. I found it entertaining enough for an evening, but not worth going out of the way for.

Footnote: I took the train home Tuesday night, so I was able to call into one of my genealogy groups on Tuesday night from home. But I need to get back to New York in the next several weeks, since I very much need to see Hangmen, which is Martin McDonagh’s new play. And I want to go to the Faith Ringold retrospective at the New Museum.

I took a brief trip out of town last week. I took the train up to New York on Monday afternoon. I’d been a bit concerned about the aftermath of their snow storm, but the streets and sidewalks had been mostly cleared. I stayed at the Fairfield Inn on 33rd Street, right across from Moynihan Train Hall, which was convenient and fairly good as hotels in that class go. They even had a hot breakfast buffet. However, they had the tables within the breakfast room closed off, which led to a lot of people gathering around one large table and several clusters of armchairs / coffee tables in the lobby, which seems to me to be less socially distanced than the breakfast room would have been.

Anyway, a lot of things are closed on Tuesdays. Looking at the options, I decided to check out the National Museum of Mathematics. This would be an excellent place to go if I were about 8 years old. But it is definitely geared to elementary school age children and I think I saw only one other adult who was not accompanied by a young child. There are a lot of interactive exhibits - but not a lot of actual explanation of the mathematics behind them. Also, a lot of exhibits were not working. Overall, I didn’t think it was worth the $25 admission. The museum shop does have a lot of interesting math-related toys, however.

Tuesday afternoon, I went down to Tribeca to see a gallery exhibit at Sapar Contemporary. The work, by an Indonesian artist named Mulyana, is called Fragile Ecosystems and consists of knitted coral and felted fish and the like. Having worked on the Smithsonian crochet coral reef (back in 2011) this was obviously right up my alley. It doesn’t take long to see, but was worth the stop.





It was a short walk from there to The Mysterious Bookshop, which was one of the (if not THE) first mystery bookstores in the U.S. and is always a delightful place to browse. I could easily spend quite a lot of money there, but I have way too many books to begin with, so limited myself to buying three thin volumes in their Bibolomysteries series of novellas and a few postcards of pulp covers.


I had a quick dinner, then meandered down to Battery Park to the Museum of Jewish Heritage to see Ricky Ian Gordon’s opera of The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, which was a coproduction of the New York City Opera and the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene. Ricky is from my home town, which was another reason for wanting to see this. I had seen the movie long enough ago that I remembered pretty much nothing about it, beyond it having to do with an Italian family during World War II. There are really two plot lines. One has to do with a love story - young Giorgio’s love for Micol Finzi-Contini, who pretty much thinks he is beneath her. There’s a second (gay) love story that is less developed. The other story, which was more successful for me, had to do with the rising anti-Semitism in Italy and I found that more satisfying musically. In particular, I found the scene in the second act of a Passover seder at Giorgio’s home which becomes confrontational about the future of Italian Jewry to be a dramatic highlight. I should also note the performance of Anthony Ciaramitaro as Giorgio, who has returned to Ferrara in his 40’s and is looking back at the events of his youth. Overall, it was worth seeing.


On Wednesday, I went to the Brooklyn Museum, primarily to see two exhibits. I started with the Andy Warhol exhibit, which was, frankly, weird. When I think of Warhol, I think mostly of things like Campbell’s soup cans and screen prints of Marilyn Monroe and so on. Instead, this exhibit emphasized the influence of the Byzantine Catholic Church on him.




They did point out the conflict between his religion and his sexuality, which didn’t stop them from showing a lot of semi-pornographic film, partly in the context of his shooting by Valerie Solanas. But, even there, they played up how much he went to church after recovering from the shooting. Overall, a very strange take on a well-known artist.

The other exhibit I went there for was about Dior, and that was more satisfying. There was plenty of footage of runway shows, which I could watch for ages. And there were luscious dresses. Of course, many of the accessories are especially beyond the reach of the average person. I don’t know where I could get a couple of elephants to set off any of my little black dresses, for example.




Some other parts of the exhibit felt a bit too much like advertising. That was especially true of the videos of perfume ads. I’d also have liked more material about the place of high-end fashion in our culture. But, overall, I enjoyed the exhibit.


While I was at the museum, I did also go through some of their permanent collection. (Well, okay, I ignored the Egyptian stuff. My mother was an archaeology major in college and, as a result, I was overexposed as a child, leading to a lifelong aversion to ancient Egypt.) The strongest part of their collection is contemporary feminist art. In particular, they host The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago.





In the evening, I went to see an extremely silly show called Space Dogs. This was written and performed by Van Hughes and Nick Blaemire. Blaemire is somewhat notorious in the D.C. area for having written music and lyrics for Glory Days, which was successful at Signature Theatre but closed after one performance on Broadway. Anyway, this show had to do with the Soviet use of dogs to prove humans could survive space and focused on the relationship between “the Chief Designer” and the dog, Laika, who was sent to space, but without a plan to return her to earth. There was some catchy music and clever use of video and puppets, but the show was far longer than it needed to be. And some of the historical inaccuracies drove me nuts, though I am sure nobody else in the audience noticed how badly they mangled info about the Baikonur Cosmodrome. Oh, well, it was a lot cheaper than a Broadway show would have been. But you’d be better off going to Los Angeles and checking out the exhibit about Dogs of the Soviet Space Program at the Museum of Jurassic Technology.


The other purpose of my trip was to see the Philadelphia half of the Jasper Johns retrospective and I did that on Thursday. (I had seen the New York part at the Whitney in November). This was definitely worth seeing. Seeing so many of his works in one place made me appreciate Johns more. I think what is particularly striking about his work is that he kept all of his studies (and signed them). But, mostly, I like how he played with his ideas, repeating the same themes over and over.



Another good example is here , in “5 Postcards.”




I did go an revisit other works at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, too. There is plenty of American art, including Shaker furniture, for example. They have plenty of works by Monet, Van Gogh, and so on. But my absolute favorite piece there is Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase,” largely for the epiphany I had about it many years ago. Namely, that the key word in the title is “descending” and that it is really about the motion. This revolutionized how I look at modern art.






All in all, I had a good trip. I got back on Friday afternoon in time to make this cocktail of the week - a nutty African, which consists of brewed coffee, amarula (a South African liqueur made from the marula fruit), rum, and whipped cream, decorated with chopped pecans. It was delicious.