August 7, 2014 Our Daily Correspondent Suits By Sadie Stein From What Should I Be? (Was soll ich werden?) (1888), a picture book by Lothar Meggendorfer. Yesterday I went suit shopping with my brother. The suit was to be a birthday gift from my parents; I’d been entrusted with the task of supervising the purchase. We started out in a well-known British chain. “He’s looking for a suit,” I announced. “Are you two getting married?” asked the salesman. “We’re siblings,” we said at the same time. “That would be weird, then,” he said. After this, I was paranoid. “Our parents are giving him a suit for his birthday,” I would announce loudly. Or, apropos of nothing, “I’m his sister.” When, finally, we went to a tailor, I decided to further clarify the situation by being abusive while my brother was measured. “We couldn’t find a suit off the rack,” I informed the tailor, “because he has the build of an undernourished Victorian chimney sweep.” “You’re a perfectly normal size,” said the tailor. “Maybe if you’re used to suiting children and midgets!” I scoffed. No one said anything, so then I excused myself. I’m not particularly proud of this display, but I think a little discomfort in these situations is natural. Indeed, it can take even stranger forms. One friend said he particularly dislikes people assuming he’s on dates with his sister not merely because it’s creepy, but because he hates their thinking he has so little chemistry with his girlfriend. I had always figured those families who all look uncannily alike had it easier in these situations. But I had reckoned without human weirdness. “It must be great that you’ve never once had to worry about someone thinking you and your sister were a couple,” I said to a friend with a nearly identical younger sibling. “Are you kidding?” he said. “I worry that people think I’m such a pathological narcissist that I have to date someone who looks exactly like me!” So, there’s that.
August 6, 2014 Our Daily Correspondent Stuff and Nonsense By Sadie Stein An illustration by H. M. Bateman for the Ministry of Health’s WWII-era “Coughs and Sneezes Spread Diseases“ campaign. Among other things, E. B. White has the distinction of being one of the few writers to really express the misery of seasonal allergies. In “The Summer Catarrh” (1938) he details Daniel Webster’s struggles with hay fever, proclaiming, “there is a fraternity among those who have been tried beyond endurance.” He exaggerates for effect, of course. Part of the misery of allergies is the knowledge that, generally speaking, they’re as toothless as they are persistent. They’re definitionally endurable—albeit at the expense of that elusive thing, “quality of life.” (“Quality of life,” much like the box we’re supposed to think outside of, seems to be a thing that exists primarily in negative space.) Prescriptions, Claritin, neti pots, humidifiers, special pillow covers: they’re all just panaceas. When you have allergies, you have allergies. To the outsider, it must seem somewhere between hypochondria and a cold—unpleasant, certainly, but mostly just annoying. And it is annoying. It is the least romantic thing in the world. Sniffling, snoring, “itchy, watery” eyes and a malaise that feels like nothing so much as a faint and chronic hangover … these do nothing for the soul at all. Read More
August 5, 2014 Our Daily Correspondent Stories We Tell By Sadie Stein It’s a strange coincidence that I should think to look up Ruth Sawyer today. Last night, I mentioned her book Roller Skates to a friend—I thought her nine-year-old daughter might enjoy it—but I had no idea that August 5 was her birthday. Sawyer died in 1970, at the age of ninety. As a young woman, she traveled to Cuba, where she worked in kindergartens established for orphans of the Spanish American War, training their teachers in how to tell stories. Upon returning to New York, Sawyer obtained a scholarship to study storytelling and folklore. She went to work telling stories in the city’s school system, working primarily with immigrant children, and later founded the NYPL’s first storytelling program. Throughout her career, she would travel around the world collecting folktales, and for many years she volunteered as a storyteller at a women’s prison. Her Way of the Storyteller, from 1942, is still regarded as a landmark text—one full of charm and interest for the layman, too. The stories she learned and the people she met inspired several of her many children’s books. But the most famous, Roller Skates, which won the Newbery in 1937, was, frankly, autobiographical: The story of one year in the life of a well-to-do New York ten-year-old. Like her heroine, Lucinda Wyman, Ruth Sawyer also spent 1890 away from her parents, who were traveling. Far from resenting their absence, she found the time living in a boarding house to be one of adventure and discovery. Read More
August 4, 2014 Our Daily Correspondent Poetry in Motion By Sadie Stein The Brooklyn Bridge in 1892. Yesterday, I decided to walk home across the Brooklyn Bridge. With this in mind, I had downloaded a fine recording of “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” before setting off, and planned to commune with Whitman, or whatever, as I marched, marveling at the ceaseless roll of existence and the beauty of the language and, if I felt like it, crying a little. There was absolutely no question in my mind that this was a fantastic idea. FLOOD-TIDE below me! I watch you face to face; Clouds of the west! sun there half an hour high! I see you also face to face. Which was all very well, except that I’d forgotten that in fine weather the pedestrian thruway is so crowded that it’s almost impassable. People like to stop and take pictures—of themselves, or with others, or by others—and you can hardly blame them for it. Not that there’s anything wrong with visiting the Brooklyn Bridge! On the contrary! It’s beautiful, it’s historic, it’s free, and walking the mile-plus span is good exercise! But it gets in the way of the idyll, a little. Undeterred, I put in my earbuds and started walking. Read More
August 1, 2014 Our Daily Correspondent The Thin Red Line By Sadie Stein Wrong. For many years, I had trouble spelling the word Wednesday. I remember writing out the days of the week in third grade and wrestling with the e’s: Wedenesday. Wedneseday. Wendsday. After all, were these spellings any less arbitrary than the correct one? Even those of us who don’t think of ourselves as bad spellers have certain bugbears. Without the damning reminders of spell-check, I would still screw up interlocutor (I misspelled it, twice, while typing this), resistance, and accommodate. I probably shouldn’t beat myself up over the last; it’s number one on OxfordDictionary.com’s list of common misspellings. (Of course, which is on it, too.) My mother strongly recalls an elementary-school spelling test in the late fifties. Committee was one of the words the class was told to spell. “I see three sets of twins on this committee,” hinted the teacher broadly. But my mom remembers the panic the hint induced; what did it mean? She managed to misspell it—but to this day, she remembers the incident and has never made the mistake again. Sometimes it takes trauma for a lesson to sink in. Sometimes—see necessary, one of the few things I retained from middle-school Latin—we need to self-correct, remembering that this is a word that gives us regular trouble, and diligently apply a hard-won mnemonic. What interests me, though, are those words that we always get wrong, no matter how many times we see that red spell-check line, and look up the proper spelling, and castigate ourselves for the error. It’s like a mental block. Or, maybe, an increasing reliance on technology; after all, a part of our brains knows we don’t really need to retain the knowledge. Maybe it’s a subconscious resistance (I just misspelled that, by the way—think of it with a French accent!) to the arbitrary strictures of language, and of Western society generally. (In this scenario, we are all storming a tiny, mental ivory tower—it is sort of like the Académie française, but full of really uptight elves.) Perhaps it’s a necessary means of preserving space in our memory cortex, or whatever. Or maybe we just like the reminder that, like children, we are always still learning. Or not learning, as the case may be. Wedenesday. Wedneseday. Wendsday. Wednesday.
July 31, 2014 Our Daily Correspondent Sound Off By Sadie Stein The Cincinnati Public Library card catalog. Image via Retronaut The other day, a friend sent me a link to a Reddit conversation: What common sounds from a hundred years ago are very rare or just plain don’t exist anymore? This, in turn, led us to the Museum of Endangered Sounds, which I highly recommend to anyone with a pair of headphones and a few hours to kill. Of course, we can’t even document some of them—the early-morning scuttle of coal, for instance, was probably too humble ever to rate a recording. I mean, how many of us have bothered to record the hiss of a radiator—and presumably that won’t be around forever. For that matter, someone ought to memorialize the rattle of a dead, incandescent bulb. I must have had this in mind when I ran across this image on Retronaut. Because the sound of a card catalog—the squeak of the drawer, the slight ruffle of the stiff paper, the sliding noise as a card is pulled from the file—is almost certainly on the endangered list. (To say nothing of everything else in the picture.)