August 13, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Letters of Note By Sadie Stein Thomas Rowlandson, A Book Auction, 1810-15. In his late twenties, my father was a habitué of the Charles Hamilton Autograph Auctions at New York’s Waldorf Astoria, where he would snap up anything that went unsold at the end of the day; in this way he earned the nickname The Vulture. Charles Hamilton himself was a noted signatures expert who had given testimony in a number of prominent forgery cases. His auctions were known for their quality and their miscellany, and for the personality of their proprietor. ‘‘Unless you have a soul made of solid lead,’’ he purportedly said, ‘‘your pulse quickens and your eyes brighten when you look upon something that a great man actually held and into which he put his personal thoughts.’’ My father, due to his own somewhat indiscriminate buying practices, ended up with a somewhat unfocused collection of bargains. He had some good pieces of ephemera—two tickets to Andrew Johnson’s impeachment, a dinner invitation from Thomas Jefferson—but he also had a single strand of John Keats’s hair. And then there were the ones that got away. There was that time Hamilton auctioned off Harry Truman’s World War I diaries, and the asking price was a bit high, and no one was allowed to inspect them before bidding, “and they might have been incredibly boring,” but still … Read More
August 12, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Here Are Ghosts By Sadie Stein Jose Bautista, Hotel Palace de Madrid, 2007 In the great cities we see so little of the world, we drift into our minority. In the little towns and villages there are no minorities; people are not numerous enough. You must see the world there, perforce. Every man is himself a class; every hour carries its new challenge. When you pass the inn at the end of the village you leave your favorite whimsy behind you; for you will meet no one who can share it. We listen to eloquent speaking, read books and write them, settle all the affairs of the universe. The dumb village multitudes pass on unchanging; the feel of the spade in the hand is no different for all our talk: good seasons and bad follow each other as of old. The dumb multitudes are no more concerned with us than is the old horse peering through the rusty gate of the village pound. The ancient map-makers wrote across unexplored regions, “Here are lions.” Across the villages of fishermen and turners of the earth, so different are these from us, we can write but one line that is certain, “Here are ghosts.”―W. B. Yeats, The Celtic Twilight: Faerie and Folklore In a Boston hotel, I sit waiting for a glass of sherry. The hotel is old and historic, but it is not what I envisioned; a corporate renovation has done away with all but the most stubborn traces of the past. Conference attendees stream through, “Jesse’s Girl” is blasting overhead. The menu has gone dubiously fusion. But then, this is why I can afford it. No matter. I’m a master at ignoring the present. I find the reluctant concessions to history on that menu. I focus on the brass dial above the elevator, and the black-and-white photos in the lobby, and bury my nose in a book. The sherry is warm and sweet and awful, but that’s my fault. Read More
August 11, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Clutter By Sadie Stein Image: 10ch/Flickr Somewhere in the world, there must be people who actually take a moment to unsubscribe from all those e-mails—newsletters and sale alerts and publicity blasts—that clutter their inboxes. Rather, I mean, than simply deleting them every single day. One doesn’t like to calculate the time costs of these things; it’s too depressing. It’s best to avoid the implications. There are the discount offers, of course. Don’t we all get those? Dirt-cheap massages! Flash sales! Exorbitant shoes made merely overpriced! And wait—the sale has been extended! Here’s the Project Runway contestant you started following nine years ago because you were so moved by his tears when he was told to pack his things. And the headache-prevention newsletter you never seem to get around to reading; wouldn’t it hurt that aging hippie’s feelings if you unsubscribed? Surely she’d notice. Remember the one time you attended an adult Christian-education class at that Episcopal Church? They do. You think of the unhappy example of the Yiddish class you dropped out of in 2004. You were on that guy’s mailing list until he died last year. Read More
August 10, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent The Fruit-Basket Routine By Sadie Stein The first-class lounge on a seventies-era American Airlines 747 Luxury Liner. The veneer of civility is always thin on a red-eye. But somehow, at the airport, it seemed that the news playing on the screen overhead—the shootings, the civil unrest, the human tragedy—had forced some perspective on this particular group. Or so I was thinking as we waited to board, stoic, carrying pillows and eyeshades and cranky children. And then a guy sidled up to the kiosk. “I see there’s one first-class seat left,” he said in an undertone to the agent. “Can I go ahead and grab that?” “There’s a waiting list for that seat, sir,” the agent, a man in his fifties, said. “Is there … really?” the passenger said, raising an insinuating eyebrow. Read More
August 7, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Beautiful Image By Sadie Stein From a 1918 ad for Radior, a face cream containing radium. If I hate anything that smacks of “self-care”—and I do—I come by this antipathy honestly. I don’t just mean my mother’s disdain, bordering on pathological, for any sort of pampering. I’ve come to see this trait of hers as equal parts puritanism, ingrained frugality, and self-loathing, and as such have attempted to curb any similar tendencies in myself. When I am not being honest, I tell myself to be like the French: regarding beauty maintenance as a regular, unselfconscious part of a routine, like going to the dentist. Of course, I’m not French, and in any case it’s hard to tell yourself you’re undergoing anything medically essential when you’re listening to a woodwind version of “Bringing in the Sheaves.” I have gotten online coupons for services with relaxing names and cheeky names and traveled by subway to far-away banyas. I have navigated palatial Mitteleuropean bathhouses and stripped in hammam. I’ve been coaxed into taking shuttles to all-day Korean day spas and tromped around in smocks. I hated every moment of it—actively hated it. It’s not a guilty pleasure. It’s just guilty. Read More
August 6, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent The Perils of Self-Care By Sadie Stein From an early twentieth-century ad for St. Moritz. Here is a partial list of things to dread about spa treatments: Read More