x is a letter like this x you will find

Pardon the delay friends. I took a trip to Paris and London in order to work on my novel, because perhaps I am a parody of myself? At any rate, it was 95°, which was shall we say difficile, but there were times that I was sitting by the Seine, a café glacé in hand, a gentle breeze blowing, and I felt that I was probably in some kind of heaven. Also I got to see this amazing painting by Pierre Bonnard at the Musée D'Orsay.

Grace Lavery wrote a piece for her newsletter right in the midst of my trip, and it struck a very deep chord:

That’s fourteen cities over which I find it difficult not to exert a personal claim, to feel like I am personally welcomed when I land. It’s the arrogance of the rootless cosmopolitan to flatter herself that some good luck finding a lunch spot in 2007, now equates to “local knowledge,” and...I develop these strange nonce claims about these fourteen cities, all of which are somehow illegitimate, and all of which mark me as one kind of interloper or another...

Of course, like all the best essays, it's not just about that, but about how these places, and our time in them, and our past selves, is something we can't come back to, and all of that tied into my feelings about Paris—the sense of ownership I have over the city, despite having lived there for four (maybe three) months when I was 11, how the city has changed irrevocably since then (and maybe never was what I romanticized it to be), and how it is tied so tightly with my mother's memory. I was surprised by this, and as a result, it was a huge portion of what I ended up writing about, despite the purported goal of only writing my novel. As the inimitable Art & Fear says:

If, indeed, for any given time only a certain sort of work resonates with life, then that is the work you need to be doing in that moment. If you try to do some other work, you will miss your moment.

With that, let's dive into the links, shall we?

The Public Domain Review has been one of my favorite recent finds, and their piece on what alphabet books used for X before X-rays is a delight:

Lots on language to unpack, starting with the knowledge that apparently the word lox hasn’t changed meaning in 8,000 years, which is wild to me.

Two pieces on New York-adjacent accents, one on why working-class New Yorkers drop their “Rs” (i.e. “fawth flaw” instead of fourth floor), and I am delighted that the methodology was going to department stores in the 60s and asking for directions, and one diving into the American Jewish accent, which arises from its connection to Yiddish, which marks it as separate but still inter-related to the New York City accent because of the sheer number of Jewish people in New York City.

Los Angeles, on the other hand, has always had an incredible variety of strange pronunciations, what with its mix of Mexican heritage and transplants, and apparently San Pedro (PEE-dro) is in the midst of heated discussions on this, as the name itself becomes a shibboleth of whether or not you’re a transplant or not (which obviously has a lot to unpack!) I love that the historical society is very clear that they have no idea how this pronunciation originated, but they’re very keen on finding out.

I love, love, loved Catherine, Called Birdy as a kid (I still think of her inventing swears like "God's thumbs") so I was delighted to read this piece about the impact it’s had particularly on millennial women.

A lot of conversation recently has been around how it feels like time is passing us quickly by—or in the internet language this article is titled: everything happens so much. It's an insightful piece about our relationship with time, and how we've all become a bit "unmoored"

As the English writer and academic Mark Fisher tells us in Ghosts of My Life, in the 21st century we exist in “a general condition: in which life continues, but time has somehow stopped.” The “general trajectory” of the future has disappeared — and, with it, culture “has lost the ability to grasp and articulate the present.”

Oh, the CATS trailer dropped, and it is truly A Wild Ride (perhaps even more wild than my inaugural viewing of CATS at age 34, where at intermission I leaned over and asked "I'm sorry, what the hell is a Jellicle Cat?"), but fortunately it has left us with great headlines:

I spent time in quite a few museums, and managed to read this newsletter by Danny Ortberg while I was in a museum café eating an egg sandwich so please imagine the look on my face:

Man, I don’t know exactly what it is about the kind of cafe/restaurant that one encounters attached to museums and botanical gardens that brings out the most refined, Edwardian-style lady-of-leisure-who-lunches in me, but I can’t walk past one without being completely overwhelmed by the urge to order an $18 egg sandwich from a cold case, then pick at it for the next two hours at a small, circular table.

Etcetera: Boaty McBoatface makes major climate change discovery on maiden outing. Greta Gerwig has cast Timothée Chalamet as Laurie in the new Little Women and it’s perfect. Gail.com exists, and no she is not interested in selling. This Crab Clones Its Allies by Ripping Them in Half.