Diary of a Bibliophile: My Trip to New York to see the Valmadonna Trust Library

The Valmadonna Trust Library is--without any doubt--the greatest private collection of early printed Hebrew books ever assembled. In size and scope, it also rivals the largest and most famous public collections of Hebrew books such as those of the National Library of Israel (formerly the Jewish National and University Library) in Jerusalem, the Bodleian Library at Oxford, the British Library in London , and the Jewish Theological Seminary Library in New York.

The collection is largely the product of a lifetime of collecting by one man, Jack Lunzer, a now-retired diamond 1merchant born in Antwerp. Mr. Lunzer’s wife’s family had assembled a moderately large collection of Hebrew books printed in Italy and he began to add to the collection starting in the 1950s, expanding the scope of the collection to include Hebrew books (and books in other languages with Hebrew type in them) from every place in Europe, Asia, and Africa that had a Hebrew printing industry.

The collection--now in the range of 13,000 books--has been housed for decades in the Lunzer home in London, available to scholars, but very much a private collection. I have known about the collection for several years from the footnotes of my colleagues and from conversations about books. I met Mr. Lunzer two years ago at a conference and a few weeks later received in the mail a photocopy of the opening pages from the first edition of Judah Halevi’s Book of the Kuzari, a twelfth-century philosophical text whose reception I had been researching.

Until last week, that is about what I knew of the collection. I should say, however, that I didn’t know the size of the collection. If you had asked me, I think I would have guessed that the collection consisted of a few thousand volumes, 3000 or 4000 at the most.

Tuesday February 10

I have an e-mail from David Wachtel, a librarian at the Jewish Theological Seminary and a consultant on Hebrew books to Sothebys, whom I’ve known for years. He wants me to publicize an exhibition of the Valmadonna Trust collection at Sothebys’ New York office on a blog I maintain for Jewish book studies. I open the attachments and am stunned to learn of the size of the collection, that it is being sold as one lot (I breathe a sigh of relief at the wisdom of the family not to break up this collection), and that the entire collection will be on view at Sothebys. How does one display 13,000 books?
I also learn that the asking price is $40 million and that Mr. Lunzer hopes that a major American library (like the Library of Congress) will buy it.
David tells me that it will be a once-in-a-lifetime experience to come see it. But who has time or money to go to New York.

Wednesday February 11

I post the information on the blog (http://studythejewishbook.blogspot.com/2009/02/david-wachtel-writes-valmadonna-trust.html) and continue my daily web-surfing. I come to the New York Times site and find Edward Rothstein’s review of the exhibition. The accompanying photos give me a sense of how the collection is displayed.

Thursday February 12
I’ve had an e-mail exchange with a colleague in Philadelphia over something else and I casually mention that the Valmadonna exhibit looks interesting and ask him whether he plans to go up to New York to see it. He replies that I ought to go--don’t spare any expense--for an absolutely “breathtaking” experience. He likens seeing this collection to seeing the whole of the Jewish people gathered in one place at one time. Hyperbole but I know this scholar well enough to take him seriously.

I broach the subject with my wife who is indulgent: check the frequent flier miles and the flights--maybe you can make a day trip, she says. She is right--we have oodles of USAir miles sitting around. As they cut back in Pittsburgh, what’s the use of hanging on to the miles? Lo and behold, I can go up for day trip on Sunday with direct flights. Last-minute ticketing costs an extra $50 but this is a once-in-a-lifetime experience, right? Plus my wife’s parents are coming to town for the holiday weekend so I’m not leaving her all alone to deal with kids. I’m in.

Friday February 13
Second thoughts: who goes to New York for an afternoon to look at books?
I e-mail my sister and make lunch plans. She agrees I am nuts but she is my little sister and has known this for years. I e-mail a college friend and make plans to see him after the exhibit closes on my way back to the airport. He saw the article in the Times and thought of me, so he’s not entirely surprised. I notice that the Times article was one of the most e-mailed and worry that Sunday afternoon at Sothebys will be crowded. Then I remember that we are talking about a rare book exhibit--how crowded can it be?

Saturday February 14
Just before going to bed, I fill in the little box on Facebook with “Adam is going to New York tomorrow to look at 13,000 books. Really.” By Sunday morning, there is a comment from a friend in Israel asking me if I’m putting in a bid. This is not the first joke I will hear along these lines.

Sunday February 15
The big day. On the plane, I think of some other witty things to say about going to the exhibit and not having $40 million. The best one I come up with is: “I looked through all the couch cushions last night and still couldn’t come up with enough.” Not very good.

I’m on the left-side of the plane and we take a flight path into La Guardia across New Jersey with a sharp turn at Staten Island. It’s a clear day and I can see the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, then Lower Manhattan. After a few minutes, we are flying right over the globe from the 1939 World’s Fair, past the new baseball stadium for the Mets and then into La Guardia. Platitudes about the Jewish books from London coming to the city and country that welcomed the Jewish people fill my head.

We land on-time at La Guardia. I make good time with a bus and then a subway and then a nice walk in the rare February sunshine and I’m on the Upper East Side by late morning. A nice lunch with sister, brother-in-law, and their toddler son. As we leave the restaurant, they decline to bring Max to the exhibit fearing that he will put a rare book in his mouth. I make a joke about then having to buy the whole lot. I make my other joke about the couch cushions.

They hug me, give me looks of pity, and send me on my way down York Avenue to Sothebys. It’s a few minutes after 1 pm and the exhibition hours are 1-5 pm on Sunday.

As I approach Sothebys, I fall in step behind a modern Orthodox family (judging from dress and the type of kippah on the father’s head), a mother, a father, a teenage daughter. A block away I see several other men in kippot heading into the building. I start to wonder about the size of the crowd again.

My coat is checked and I’m upstairs to the 10th floor of Sotheby’s by 1:15. A number of people are milling around. I see David Wachtel at the entrance. We promise to catch up later but for now he is going to give a tour along with the other curator, Sharon Mintz, to begin at 1:30. I decided to make an overview loop before the tour begins. At 1:30 I head David’s booming voice (which became less booming over the course of the afternoon) gathering the tour group and splitting them in half. I am in the first room when the group comes in. In 15 minutes, the crowd has swelled. I estimate 200 people follow David into the room. There is no place to stand. I move quickly to the next room.

The crowd builds over the rest of the afternoon. David and Sharon run tours nearly continously. Later, David will introduce me to the head of the book department at Sothebys, David Redden, who is marvelling at the size of the crowd. Bigger than the crowd for an exhibit of Impressionist paintings he tells me.

The exhibit is brilliantly laid out. The first room is quite large with floor to ceiling bookshelves displaying nearly the entire collection. Every so often, a book is open but the rest sit on the shelves as in a library. Each shelf is labeled with the name of a city and books printed in that city are gathered near the name plate. But the collection’s scope is so large that not all the cities can be mentioned. Venice takes up a quarter of the room; Amsterdam, perhaps an eighth. Next to Amsterdam are cities in the Low Countries, France, and Germany. Across a doorway from Venice is another quarter of the room taken up with the other cities in Italy. The final quadrant are cities in the Middle East and India. There are not many name tags for cities in Eastern Europe leading to rumblings around the room that the collection is weak in those areas. Prague and Cracow are represented however with named shelves and I overhear David telling his tour group that all the cities of Eastern Europe have imprints in the collections. He points to shelves near the ceiling running the length of the room. An oversight of the designer not to have labels with Zhitomir and Vilna, perhaps. One of the few oversights.

To the right is a small alcove with a complete edition of the Bomberg Talmud laid out in display cases. Daniel Bomberg is a name familiar to every lover of the Jewish book. A Christian printer from Antwerp--Lunzer’s hometown--who settled in Venice at the beginning of the sixteenth century, Bomberg was responsible for many crucial Hebrew publishing projects. In 1517, he produced the first Biblia Rabbinica, an edition of the Hebrew Bible with key commentaries printed surrounding the biblical text. This was the launching of the standard format of the Jewish study Bible until today--the so-called “Mikraot Gedolot” [Great Bibles]: text in the middle; commentaries surrounding. His next great project was the printing of the Babylonian Talmud. Gershom Soncino and other pioneers of Hebrew printing had printed individual tractates but Bomberg was the first to produce an edition of the entire work, in several large folio volumes. If one has seen any edition of the Talmud, one can recognize Bomberg’s influence: the standard pagination (still used today), the text with the two main commentaries, Rashi and the “Tosafot” on either side. The Tosafot is really an anthology of comments by a school of rabbis in France and Germany in the 12th and 13th centuries. They were never edited and different versions of comments circulated in manuscripts in the Middle Ages. Bomberg’s editors, a group of Venetian rabbis, selected the “best” comments and created the Tosafot as we have it today. Generations of yeshiva students owe the foundaitons of their curriculum to a publishing project instituted by a Christian printer.

A really good Judaica collection may have a volume or two of this edition, but the earliest printed editions of the Talmud are quite rare, especially Italian editions, many of whose copies were burnt in 1553 under orders from the Pope. The Valmadonna Trust has a complete edition. And what a story behind this acquisition: The Bomberg Talmud in this collection was acquired from Westminster Abbey in 1980. In 1956, Jack Lunzer saw an exhibit at the Victoria and Albert museum that displayed one of the volumes. He quickly learned that Westminster Abbey had a complete Bomberg Talmud edition--shipped from Venice and bound at Oxford for the kings’ collection. The king was Henry VIII and legend has it that the copies were ordered in the midst of his divorce from Catherine of Aragon when (this part we are more sure about) his advisors consulted some rabbis on the Talmudic laws of divorce. By the time the books were bound, however, the marriage had been dissolved and the English Reformation had begun. The books were sent to Westminister Abbey and set, gathering dust, until the 1950s.

Beginning in 1956, Lunzer began a negotiation with Abbey officials to acquire the edition for his library. He knew that the Abbey would not part with such a prize easily and he presented the Abbey with many offers of swaps--the Valmadonna Trust would purchase books and manuscripts related to the Abbey’s collection and offer them in trade. Rebuffed for many years, Lunzer finally had success when the original 900-year-old charter of Westminster Abbey came on the market. The Valmadonna Trust purchased the charter and presented it to Westminster Abbey in exhange for the Talmud edition.

I love the story--and enjoyed hearing Jack Lunzer himself tell the tale on a video presentation playing on the other side of the exhibit when I got over there later in the afternoon.

From the main room, I passed into a smaller room with display cases, housing the incunabula of the collection. “Incunabula”--deriving from the Latin for “cradle”--is the technical term for books printed before 1500, i.e. books from the infancy of printing in the West. There are about 140 known Hebrew incunable editions. That is, extant today in the world’s libraries, are copies of about 140 Hebrew books printed before 1500. The Valmadonna Trust owns about 70. I knew this library had a great incunabula collection, but I did think “wow” when I walked into this room and realized I was seeing half of the known Hebrew incunabula displayed before me.

Some of these earliest Hebrew books were old friends, but I enjoyed seeing them again. One of the first books I see here is The Book of the Honeycomb’s Flow by Judah Messer Leon. This guide to Hebrew rhetoric, applying classical rhetoric to the Hebrew Bible, was printed in Mantua in 1477 and has the distinction of being the first Hebrew book printed in the lifetime of its author. I’ve seen a copy of this at the Rosenbach Museum in Philadelphia, a marvelously quirky library and museum (among other things, it owns the manuscript for Joyce’s Ulysses and the entire contents of the living room from Marianne Moore’s Greenwich Village apartment), but it’s been a while.

I had never seen what may be the first Hebrew printed book ever, a copy of Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed printed in Rome in the late 1560s or early 1570s. Some of the Bible editions printed in Spain before 1492 and in Portugal before 1497 (when Jews there were forcibly converted to Christianity) with commentaries on the side anticipate Bomberg’s later achievements in Venice.

Standing in this room, I hear my name called out. A colleague from Yale is here with his wife and small children. So far as I can tell, his children have not tried to eat any of the books. A few minutes later I see the former librarian of the Jewish Theological Seminary. Later, I will run into scholars from Yeshiva University and the Jewish Theological Seminary. Among the Jewish studies academics milling around, I seem to have come the farthest.

The casual talk is over who will buy the collection: names of prominent universities in the northeastern United States are mentioned (I won’t mention names here). Some think nobody will step up in this economic climate. Others think it’s a relative bargain--when the economy recovers, it may be valued at more than $40 million.

I stand next to two young women who are talking about the expurgation and the marginalia in a commentary on Psalms by David Kimhi. I lean in and take a closer look. I think the marginalia are actually textual emendations--an owner of the book has compared it to a manuscript (or his memory) and filled in missing words and made corrections. I’m a busy-body so I tell the women this. They seem impressed but move away quickly.

There are another few examples of expurgated books throughout the exhibit: expurgation was a form of censorship in late sixteenth-century and seventeenth-century Italy in which a Church official crossed out passages in Hebrew texts that had been deemed offensive to Christianity. Each time I stopped at one, I heard someone remarking on this phenomenon.

Expurgation and blue paper seemed to draw a lot of interest from the crowd. Changes in the process for dying paper and the greater availability of indigo made it easier to start printing on blue paper in the sixteenth century. But it was still relatively rare and something of a luxury item at first. The Valmadonna Trust has an unusually large collection of editions printed on blue paper as well.

When one of the tour groups enters the incunabula room I move to the next room where several manuscripts are on display. Mr. Lunzer and the Valmadonna Trust set as their main goal the collecting of printed books but along the way, they acquired quite a manuscript collection, small but significant. It includes one of the earliest Pentateuchs copied in Europe in the 10th or 11th century. It also includes the only dated Hebrew manuscript still extant from medieval England, another Pentateuch, written in 1189, just about a century before the Jews were expelled from England in 1290.

I move into the fourth room, another large room. The designers of the exhibit have dubbed this the “Reading Room” and it consists of 8 long rows of display cases, displaying hundreds of books. Most are open to title pages, some to internal pages of interest. The riches in this room are also unbelievable.

I find some other old friends--I mean books, of course, like the Riva di Trento edition of Alfasi’s commentary/abridgement of the Talmud with the coat of arms of Cardinal Cristoforo Madruzzo on the title page. Cardinal Madruzzo was the prince-bishop of Trent and therefore the host of the Council of Trent, the Catholic church’s major program of response to the Reformation in the middle of the sixteenth century.

I also find an old friend (a person) who was on the same fellowship in Israel several year ago. He is there with his wife, one of his children, and his father-in-law, a prominent Israeli scholar. We catch up and then we go back to looking at the books. A few minutes later, I see him again and he tells me that he saw Dr. Ruth walk by in the other room.

Some other highlights in this room:
--a copy of Sefer Abudraham published in Fez in 1516, only the very first book ever printed on the African continent and possibly one of two copies extant in the world.
--a series of calendars, diplomas, and broadsides hanging on the wall, including wall calendars from Mantua, 1553, and Venice, 1612, listing Saints Days and other Christian holidays along with Jewish holidays.
--one of the broadsides is “Eleh Divre ha-Brit” from the Hague, 1798, declaring the rights of man after the Napoleonic invasion of the Low Countries.

Every so often I look out at the crowd: heavily Jewish, and heavily Orthodox--mainly modern Orthodox, some haredim, but all ages are there, men and women. I think of that phrase “the people of the book.”

This room also contains a number of books, newsletters, journals, and reports printed by the Jewish communities of India in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It’s remarkable to see a book with text in Hebrew, English, and Marathi on the same page. I only know it’s Marathi because the label tells me so. I think of the movie that my wife and I saw just the night before, “Slumdog Millionaire,” and I have an irreverant vision of the crowd breaking into a Bollywood dance sequence.

I turn and see Jack Lunzer standing and talking, surrounded by dozens of people asking him questions, complimenting him on the collection. I think of going and introducing myself and thanking him again for the photocopies but every time I look over he is surrounded.

I leave this room and find the room with a video of Mr. Lunzer speaking about the collection. If I can’t speak to the man, I’ll listen to him on tape. This room is packed as well; when the video ends and loops around to the beginning, some seats open up. I take one and settle in to hear about the collection. After a few minutes, a diminutive woman with a familiar face walks by me, looking for a seat. It takes me a few minutes to recognize Dr. Ruth.

I’m starting to get tired but I make another pass through the collection to get to some of the corners that I missed when the crowd was at its peak. I decide to go down at 4:45 to avoid the crush at the coat check. As I leave Sothebys just a few minutes before 5, I hear a man behind me in the lobby trying to gather a mincha minyan (a quorum of ten men for the afternoon prayers). I look back and see more than 10 men. I can go meet my college friend and not feel guilty.

As I leave, I realize that indeed, this was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. I enjoyed the books, and I took some notes on things I noticed to follow up on in my own research. I also was grateful to the designers of the exhibit for finding a way to not only see some books but to really see and feel the magnitude of the collection. I also enjoyed seeing--and being in--the crowd. At the beginning of Edward Rothstein’s article in the New York Times he asked whether bibliophilia could be a religious experience. I thought of this as I was leaving and hearing the mincha service starting behind me. And the thought occurred to me: this hadn’t just been a day trip to the big city, but a pilgrimage of sorts.

(The original title was "Diary of a Bibliomaniac" but I changed that after some reflection on the meaning of the terms "Bibliomaniac" and "Bibliophile.")
(I had originally called Bomberg a Calvinist but a sharp-eyed correspondent e-mailed to point out that there is no evidence that Daniel Bomberg was ever a Calvinist--and, of course, he certainly wasn't a Calvinist when he began his printing career in Venice.)

There's an article in the Forward on the malaise in the movement of Conservative Judaism with this telling paragraph:

"Emblematic of the malaise is the rise of something known as transdenominational Judaism. It consists of Jewish religious and cultural activists, mostly under 35, who reject denominational labels, viewing their Judaism as transcending the separate streams. Its best-known expressions are so-called independent minyanim, informal prayer groups that meet in community centers, synagogue basements or even churches, refusing synagogue affiliation. There are said to be at least 80 such groups across the country, with thousands of members. Their primary leaders, most observers say, are young graduates of Conservative schools, summer camps and even seminaries who continue to practice Conservative Judaism but reject the name and the institutions."

Maybe changing the name from the "United Synagogue of America" to "United Synagogue for Conservative Judaism" in the early 1990s wasn't such a good idea after all.

Valmadonna Trust Library on exhibit

Over on one of my official work blogs which is concerned professionally with "old books" I posted this notice about an incredible book exhibit now going on in New York.

Difdafti ha-yom

In the column on the right, I put books I have read. By "read" I mean more or less read through the whole thing although my wife says I read so fast sometimes I'm really skimming.

I do a lot of skimming as well and I also read a lot of journal articles or parts of monographs in the course of doing research. I generally refrain from putting that reading in the right column on the blog.

But there is another kind of handling of books and journals that I do a lot. Israelis call it "le-dafdef"-- "to page through"-- it means something like skimming but more like scanning the chapter headings, the first paragraphs of sections, the table of contents, etc.--something like what your teacher in a high school "study skills" class might have told you about "previewing" a textbook chapter before reading it.

(I think the lack of capital letters makes Hebrew very hard to skim. I either le-dafdef a Hebrew text or I have to really read it.)

Not only do I sometimes go in search of material to le-dafdef on purpose ("keeping up with the literature") sometimes such material comes to me in the mail (journals) and sometimes by e-mail. And I can't walk by the new book shelf in my university library without stopping. Since I walk by it several times a week, I tend to le-dafdef a lot of new books, some in my field, some in related fields, and some in other people's fields. I couldn't possibly list all the works that I difdef, but I'm launching a new feature here to list some of the more interesting finds.

I tend to assume I have no readers so I'm mainly doing this for myself. Giving myself a Google-able way to remember where I've come across something.

So in Hillman Library today, difdafti:

Ronald Ehrenburg and Charlotte Kuh, eds. Doctoral Education and the Faculty of the Future (Oxford UP, 2009) which reports on the Mellon Graduate Education Initiative that was in place at a number of institutions including the Penn History department in the 1990s.... this was a nice piece of serendipity since the other day on the same shelf I came across the latest book on the philosophy of history by Murray Murphy, who taught for many years in that department. I've been reading his Truth and History (SUNY Press, 2009) on the bus.

Howard Schwartz's most recent collection of Jewish folktales is Leaves from the Garden of Eden (Oxford UP, 2009). He includes all the useful scholarly information, like notes on sources, commentary, and indexes at the back. Well, indexes are always at the back but would it be terrible to have the note on sources and the commentary included with each story?

Karen O'Reilly's Key Concepts in Ethnography only occupied me for only a few minutes because I'm not planning to do any ethnography any time soon (I would need a time machine). But a number of the grad students I work with do some ethnography.

Finally, I teach a little about ancient empires in my survey courses as part of the background of Jewish life in antiquity. So Ian Morris and Walter Scheidel, eds. The Dynamics of Early Empires: State Power from Assyria to Byzantium (Oxford UP, 2009) caught my eye.

Looking back on it, I guess a big order from Oxford UP was recently cataloged.

(And yes, I realize that saying "to le-dafdef" makes little sense grammatically but bear with me...)

Books I Read in 2008

December, 2008:
Seymour Epstein, Leah
Israel M. Ta-Shma, Creativity and Tradition
E.M. Forster, Howard's End
Dashiell Hammett, The Thin Man
Josephine Tey, A Shilling for Candles
November, 2008:
Arianna Franklin, Mistress of the Art of Death
October, 2008:
Kate Summerscale, The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher
Faye Kellerman, Milk and Honey
Faye Kellerman, Day of Atonement
September, 2008:
Faye Kellerman, Stone Kiss
Batya Gur, Bethlehem Road Murder
August 2008:
P.D. James, Devices and Desires
Josephine Tey, The Franchise Affair
Faye Kellerman, Jupiter's Bones
Faye Kellerman, Sacred and Profane
Margery Allingham, The Case of the Late Pig
Faye Kellerman, The Ritual Bath
J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
Ayelet Waldman, Death Gets a Time-Out
Geraldine Brooks, People of the Book
July 2008:
Clive James, Cultural Amnesia
Lawrence Raphael, ed. Criminal Kabbalah
Lawrence Raphael, ed. Mystery Midrash
Max Apple, The Jew of Home Depot
A.A. Milne, The Red House Mystery
Chaim Potok, The Promise
Chaim Potok, The Chosen
Woody Allen, Mere Anarchy
Sue Erikson Bloland, In the Shadow of Fame
J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Donna Leon, Through a Glass, Darkly
Edmund Crispin, Glimpses of the Moon
Laurence Roth, Inspecting Jews: American Jewish Detective Stories
Amanda Cross, The Edge of Doom
Amanda Cross, Honest Doubt
June 2008:
n+1 collective, What We Should Have Known
Detection Club, Ask a Policeman
The New Yorker, January-June 2008
Edmund Crispin, Buried for Pleasure
Edmund Crispin, Love Lies Bleeding
Beaumont and Fletcher, Philaster
Amanda Cross, The Theban Mysteries
Amanda Cross, No Word from Winifred
Amanda Cross, A Trap for Fools
Amanda Cross, An Imperfect Spy
Amanda Cross, The Puzzled Heart
Julius Lester, The Autobiography of God
May 2008:
Rachel Elior and Peter Schaefer, eds. Creation and Re-Creation in Jewish Thought
Nicholas Rescher, Interpreting Philosophy
Amanda Cross, Sweet Death, Kind Death
Amanda Cross, The Question of Max
Robert Kahn McGregor and Ethan Lewis, Conundrums for the Long Weekend
Edmund Crispin, Swan Song
Anthony Grafton, Codex in Crisis
Amanda Cross, In the Last Analysis
Amanda Cross, The James Joyce Murder
Amanda Cross, Poetic Justice
Amanda Cross, The Players Come Again
Donna Leon, Death and Judgement
April 2008:
Donna Leon, Death in a Strange Country
Donna Leon, Death at La Fenice
Jill Paton Walsh and Dorothy Sayers, Presumption of Death
Edmund Crispin, The Moving Toyshop
Edmund Crispin, Holy Disorders
Giulio Lucarelli, Carte Blanche
March 2008:
Donna Leon, Dressed for Death
Dara Horn, In the Image
Giulio Leoni, The Mosaic Crimes
February 2008:
Lee Goldberg, Mr. Monk and the Two Assistants
Etienne Balibar, We, The People of Europe?
Moshe Rosman, How Jewish is Jewish History?
Maggie Anton, Rashi's Daughters, Book Two: Miriam
Aaron Hughes, The Art of Dialogue in Jewish Philosophy
Maggie Anton, Rashi's Daughters, Book One: Joheved
Dara Horn, The World to Come
George Steiner, My Unwritten Books
January 2008:
Leslie Howsam, Old Books and New Studies
Mary McCarthy, The Groves of Academe

Books I Read in 2007

December 2007:
Martin Aurand, The Spectator and the Topographical City
Mordecai Richler, Solomon Gursky Was Here
October 2007:
P.D. James, Death in Holy Orders
September 2007:
Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, The Censor, The Editor, and the Text: The Catholic Church and the Shaping of the Jewish Canon in the Sixteenth Century
Zev Gries, The Book in the Jewish World, 1700-1900
C.P. Snow, The Affair
Marcus Moseley, Being for Myself Alone: Origins of Jewish Autobiography
August 2007:
Robert Holub, Crossing Borders: Reception Theory, Poststructuralism, Deconstruction
Edward Crispin, Frequent Hearses
Diana Lobel, A Sufi-Jewish Dialogue: Philosophy and Mysticism in Bahya ibn Pakuda's Duties of the Heart
J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
Michael Stanislawski, A Murder in Lemberg: Politics, Religion, and Violence in Modern Jewish History
J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
July 2007:
William Baring-Gould, Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street
J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Akzaban
J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
Judith Martin, No Vulgar Hotel: The Desire and Pursuit of Venice
Edward Crispin, The Case of the Gilded Fly
Iain Pears, An Instance of the Fingerpost
Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
John Brabazon, Dorothy L. Sayers: A Biography
Dorothy Sayers, Murder Must Advertise
Abraham Socher, The Radical Enlightenment of Solomon Maimon: Judaism, Heresy, and Philosophy
June 2007:
Dorothy Sayers, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club
Robert Alter, Imagined Cities: Urban Experience and the Language of the Novel
Dorothy Sayers, Unnatural Death (The Dawson Pedigree)
Robertson Davies, A Mixture of Frailties
Robertson Davies, Leaven of Malice
Robertson Davies, Tempest Tost
Dorothy Sayers and Robert Eustace, The Documents in the Case
Barbara Pym, An Academic Question
E.C. Bentley, Trent's Last Case
Naomi Seidman, Faithful Renderings: Jewish-Christian Difference and the Politics of Translation
Dorothy Sayers, Five Red Herrings
Richard Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible?
May 2007:
Sherwin Nuland, Maimonides
Dorothy Sayers and Jill Patton Walsh, Thrones, Dominations
Dorothy Sayers, Busmam's Honeymoon
Batya Gur, Murder Duet
Batya Gur, Murder in Jerusalem
Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen's Union
Tom Wolfe, I am Charlotte Simmons
April 2007:
Cora Daniels, Ghettonation
David Lodge, Small World
Dorothy Sayers, Strong Poison
Dorothy Sayers, Clouds of Witness
Dorothy Sayers, Whose Body?
Dorothy Sayers, Gaudy Night
Edith Skom, The Charles Dickens Murders
March 2007:
David Lodge, Changing Places
Israel Zangwill, The Big Bow Mystery
Paul Bass and Douglas Rae, Murder in the Model City
Arthur Asa Berger, Durkheim is Dead
Carole Nelson Douglas, Castle Rouge
Michael Cook, The Koran: A Very Short Introduction
George Dove, The Reader and the Detective Story
Israel Yuval, Two Nations in Your Womb
Caleb Carr, The Italian Secretary
February 2007:
Elizabeth Clark, History, Theory, Text
A.E. Murch, The Development of the Detective Novel
Julia Kristeva, Murder in Byzantium
Jerrold Seigel, The Idea of the Self
Malcolm Turnball, Victims or Villains: Jewish Images in Classic English Detective Fiction
Laurie R. King, The Art of Detection
January 2007:
Abigail Browning, ed. Murder is No Mitzvah
Carole Nelson Douglas, Goodnight Mr. Holmes
Carlo Ginzburg, Wooden Eyes: Nine Reflections on Distance
Carlo Ginzburg, Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches' Sabbath
Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms
Gluckel of Hameln, Memoirs
Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures
Laurie R. King, Night Work

Markers of the Decline of Civilization

The Washington Post is shutting down Book World.

Brandeis University is shutting down its art museum.

"Star Class Photos" for elementary school class photos.

The superintendent of a large-city public school system thinks it appropriate to call a two-hour delay for the morning after the Super Bowl.

Through the pane

I've always like the poem by "Ch.D." included at the beginning of Natalie Zemon Davis' Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford University Press, 1975). Here is the opening stanza:

"Born abroad, she longs for you, compagnons.
She longs to shake your hand, to share your wine.
She longs for home, four hundred years away.
Through the pane she hears you but is not heard.
She deserves your pity but will not have it. "

I immediately thought of this poem last weekend when I came across this passage in Jack Finney's time-travel novel, Time and Again (Simon & Schuster, 1970):

"There--well, there they were, the people of the stiff old woodcuts, only... these moved. The swaying coats and dresses there on the walks and crossing the street before and behind us were of new-dyed cloth--maroon, bottle-green, blue, strong brown, unfaded blacks--and I saw the shimmer of light and shadow in the appearing and disappearing long folds. And the leather and rubber they walked in pressed into and marked the slush of the street crossings; and their breaths puffed out into the winter air, momentarily visible. And through the trembling, rattling glass panes of the bus we heard their living voices, and heard a girl laugh aloud. Looking out at their winter-flushed faces, I felt like shouting for joy." (121)

Historians are not time-travellers, of course, and we are professionalized to poo-poo the "antiquarian." But the desire to hear the dead when they were living-- that desire is there, I think, for almost all of us in some form or another.

Eclecticism of the Year 2008

For my first post after a long absence from blogging here, I would like to award the first annual Tea-Lemon-Old Books Award for Best Statement Regarding Old Books Revealing Eclectic Interests Published in Journalism or Scholarly Outlets for 2008. The winner is:

Leon Wieseltier, The New Republic, December 31, 2008, p.48 of the print edition:

"Among the delicacies in my library alongside Sefer Hasidim, Bologna, 1538, first edition, Salman Schocken's copy, and the Collected Poems of Edward Thomas, London 1920, first edition, foreword by Walter de la Mare, is Bettie Page: The Life of a Pin-up Legend, by Karen Essex and James L. Swanson, Los Angeles, 1996, first edition, inscribed by its subject."

Mr. Wieseltier, stop by to claim your prize (a cup of hot tea with lemon) next time you are in Pittsburgh. (Just bring that copy of Sefer Hasidim with you...).

Small World

Friday was a fun day. A friend from high school was in town to give a talk at Duquesne University and I met him for coffee in the morning. Later in the day, I helped lead a professional development workshop for our graduate students on the topic of book reviewing. In the course of that workshop, I explained to the graduate students the way in which my first published book review, written while still in graduate school, ended up being on a volume of essays on art and Jewish identity in contemporary America that was also the catalog from an exhibit at the Jewish Museum in New York. Later still, I took the bus down to Duquesne to hear my friend's talk, which turned out to be about the forms and functions of literary book reviewing. It was a wonderful talk and he's an accomplished reviewer. (You can see his latest work here.) I got a ride home with my friend's host at Duquesne. While we were driving up Forbes Avenue, I remarked on the coincidence of the two events and mentioned my story of how I ended up as a reviewer of a book on art and identity--and learned that the driver of the car I was in was the daughter of one of the artists featured in that exhibit at the Jewish Museum those many years ago.

(By the way, the title of this post is part of the answer to a trivia challenge from a previous post.)

Paging the Public Editor

I'm not doing a lot of politics on the blog these days--not doing much at all.
But I was in Oakland yesterday and saw the overflow crowd at the Obama rally outside the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial listening to Obama speech on loudspeakers. And I heard from a colleague who got in that the place was packed to the rafters. And I had already heard from someone else that all tickets to the event were gone within hours on Thursday.

So when I opened the New York Times this morning, I was pretty surprised to find a photo on the front page that featured one lonely "O'Bama" supporter across from a solid flank of Hillary supporters. Can't deviate from the reigning media narrative that, as the caption says, " While Hillary Clinton leads in the polls in Pennsylvania, Barack Obama has his supporters, too." Here's the photo and the story and here's the "Today's Paper" page online where you can see an image of the front page of the print edition (at least for a few more hours).

Now if I didn't know the Pittsburgh neighborhood where this photo was taken well and if I didn't happen to be there yesterday or see the front page of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette--so I'm describing 90+% of the readership of the New York Times print edition--I surely would not have known that right behind the photographer were thousands of people gathered to hear Obama speak. Here's the Post-Gazette photo that does a better job capturing what was going on in Pittsburgh yesterday.

We hear a lot about the media treating Obama (and McCain) with kid gloves. But I think this picture in the Times is evidence of the more insidious problem with media coverage of our elections: it's not just that policy issues get pushed aside for "process" stories. Even in the "process" stories, once the press has settled on a narrative, a kind of groupthink seems to take over until some radical change occurs to shift the narrative. A primary can change the narrative--if Obama ends up winning Pennsylvania (even by 20 votes), watch for the stories about how Clinton wasn't as strong here as everyone thought. (If Clinton wins Pennsylvania [even by 20 votes], then the conventional wisdom will nod and point out how Obama can't seem to win the big states.)

If you don't think the groupthink is real and that it has worked on the readership of the major media outlets, take a look at the reader comments on the NYT politics blog about Casey's endorsement of Obama. I was astounded by how many commentators took Casey to task for going against "the will of the people" in Pennsylvania by supporting Obama rather than Clinton. A few of the commentators pointed out that PA has yet to hold its primary and that polling is not the same as voting. But they were like a chorus of the sane drowned out by those who have already put PA in the Clinton column. Now I realize that a lot of this complaint had to do with some convoluted argument that the Obama and Clinton camps are having over whether superdelegates should follow the electorate and which electorate they should follow and that some of the criticism aimed at Casey was really aimed at the Obama folks for supposed hypocrisies of this or that sort. But I just couldn't get over the simple fact that there seem to be a hefty group of people out there for whom Hillary Clinton has already won the PA primary.

Opening Day is coming

and what better way to celebrate than with a 1981 letter by John Rawls, the great political theorist, recounting a conversation about baseball with another scholar. Here it is, published in the Boston Review.

A puzzle for you

"Information is much more portable in the modern world than it used to be. So are people. Ergo, it's no longer necessary to hoard your information in one building, or keep your top scholars corralled in one campus. There are three things which have revolutionized academic life in the last twenty years, though very few people have woken up to the fact: [1] [2] and [3]."

Name the three inventions, the speaker, and the novel in which this appears. (You can use Google to get the answer, but only if you use Google or reference books in doing crossword puzzles; you have to wrestle with your own conscience here. At least try to guess the three inventions before you open the new tab.)

First Robo-Call of the season

When: about 4 pm today
Who: Rendell
Supporting: Clinton
What: rally tomorrow in Pittsburgh

I'll keep a running tally in the sidebar until the PA primary.

Master of the Return

I received an invitation to a brunch at a Pittsburgh Jewish community institution with this description:
"Alan Veingrad: Former Dallas Cowboy, played on the 1992 Super Bowl team speaks about his spiritual journey from being a Super Bowl star to an observant and Hasidic Jew."

And all I could think of was that of course a former member of the Cowboys would have a lot of teshuvah to do.

(Yes, I know he played on the offensive line and not special teams, but I love a good pun in a headline.)

The early tutor gets the afternoon ice cream?

I'm sure any current reader of Groves of Academe, Mary McCarthy's classic novel of academic politics (1951) can point to their favorite examples that demonstrate how very different academic life and campus culture are a half century later.

As my wife and I rush around, trying to balance work, day care, after-school schedules, large amounts of homework for our first grader, we are always feeling rushed in the evenings as we try to eat dinner early enough to get the kids to bed early enough for them to get a good night of sleep and for us to get done all our after-kids-go-to-bed chores.

So this passage just sounds like something from a lost world:

"And yet in the darkening afternoons when he chugged up to the Co-op with Mrs. Mulcahy and the children, leaving the motor running while he hurried them into the counter for an after-school treat, ice-cream cones and Nabs [query: what are these?] all around, he and his wife, their noses white-tipped from the cold, were always brisk and merry." (1952 edition, p.22)

Now I am well aware that Mrs. Mulcahy is a stay-at-home-Mom (or housewife in 1950's parlance) and I do not regret for one moment the advances of feminism in the last 50 years that mean that Mrs. Tea-Lemon-Old Books is Dr. Tea-Lemon-Old Books, MD who works outside the home. My wistfulness about this passage has nothing to do with Mrs. Mulcahy's availability to spend time with her children after school.

On the contrary, it's the time available to Mr. Mulcahy and the kids that make me think about how foreign this passage sounds. These kids don't sound over-programmed. One might think they're rushing because they have to get the kids off to dance lessons or soccer, but one doesn't have that sense. The hurrying seems rather to come from a desire to come in from the cold; the motor running is to keep the car from dying (in the passages leading up to this, we've heard a lot about the Mulcahys' money problems and their old, unreliable car).

Naturally, I focus on Mulcahy: the amazing thing is that Mr. Mulcahy (he's a PhD, but it's a liberal arts college in the '50s, so Mr. fits better) is done with his work such that he can be with his family in the "after-school" hours. One figures he's got to leave the campus by not much after 3 to be driving up to the Co-op with his family for an after-school treat (4ish?) Maybe he only manages this every once in a while ("treat"), but McCarthy's phrasing here ("always brisk and merry") suggests some frequency at least. No afternoon classes? Office hours? Lectures and seminars? Class preparation? Committee meetings?

One clue: earlier in the book, in reference to an unfortunate nick-name he has gotten from the students, we hear about "eight-o'clock tutorials" (p.7). Imagine that.

Stanley Fish Misinterpreted

Stanley Fish has a post in his New York Times blog clarifying his intentions to his readers and complaining about being misinterpreted. One of the early commentators (no. 33) gets the irony. The comments went on and on and I couldn't read them all, but I didn't see the one I was expecting: "Ha! Ha! Signed, E.D. Hirsch."

The Chit-Chat Index and Subway Door Index

I came across this interesting discussion on "City-Data-Forum" about Bostonians. The weight of opinion there seems to be that Bostonians tend to be more aloof than in other places, with some debate over whether aloof and rude go together. (I think not.)

I've blogged before once or twice about how I'm not a big Boston fan, but I do think over-generalization is problematic. Lots of Bostonians are friendly, lots are rude, lots are aloof, lots are cold, and lots overlaps one or more of these non-exclusive categories. And I doubt the proportions are that different from any other major city. Maybe a slightly higher "aloof" score.

But having lived in a number of cities (and spent time visiting the big "City"), I propose the following two indexes.

First, the "Chit Chat Index": How bizarre will a clerk in a chain store think you are if you make small talk about weather while buying an umbrella? And how much will the clerk engage in the small talk?

From lowest to highest, in my experience:

Boston: Clerk's facial expression seems similar to what it might be if you had just suggested that you move into his/her house. Clerk does not speak.
Washington: Clerk registers no facial expression but responds with a conventional pleasantry.
Philadelphia: Clerk chats amiably about rain.
Pittsburgh: Clerk tells you all about rainstorms experienced since 1997 and invites you over for dinner. (Ok that last one is an exaggeration.)

Second, the "Subway Door Index": How easily can you exit a subway car? Will passengers wishing to board the train step aside to let you off? (Here I exclude Pittsburgh--never having ridden the T here--and include New York as a major locus of subway riding.)

From easiest to exit to hardest to exit, in my experience:

Philadelphia: Not enough people trying to get on to make a difference.
Washington: The people will respectfully stand aside, lined up as a "V" on either side of the door. (I am told this is changing due to increasing ridership on the Metro and the increasing partisan rancor of the Bush years.)
New York: A lot of people on the platform, but a narrow path will open.
Boston, most stops: A solid wall of people--each giving a blank stare as you try to figure out between which two people you might escape.
Boston, Park Street, rush hour: A solid wall of people will begin pushing onto the train as soon as the door opens. This is really why Charlie couldn't get off the MTA.

God and Blair at Yale

Sorry, couldn't resist, and I will be surprised if some headline writer doesn't come up with this.

See the article in the Guardian or the Independent.

A dashboard monitor for the car battery?

Has this been invented? And if not, why not?

We have a second car that we drive rarely. When it's this cold, we really should start it more often and let it run. This week we were reminded of this again--the hard way. My wife needed to use this car on Tuesday. It started fine and she drove to our son's preschool--about a 10 minute drive. When she came back out, the car wouldn't start. The AAA guy told her/reminded her that starting the car takes the most charge off the battery, and he suggested starting the car every other day at least and letting it run 15 minutes at least each time.

So this morning while my wife and children were all out, I spent 20 minutes of quality time with the New York Times Book Review and the sounds of Sinatra on 1320 am and sat in the car with it running. But while I sat, I thought, and this is what I thought: the AAA guy has a tester that tests the charge. Why not have something like that always testing the charge with a wire running to a dashboard control that displays how much charge is left or how much time is needed to recharge the battery. That way, if you don't use the car much, you can check out the "battery monitor" when you do get the car started and if it looks low (maybe bars like on the cell phone?), you can bear this in mind if you're making a short trip and make sure to let the car sit and idle for a while. Seems like it would be a useful feature. So why isn't there something like this on car dashboards?

Unless--this is a scary thought--we are part of a very small minority that lives in a cold climate with a (second) car that is used rarely and only for short trips. So maybe there's no market?

Goodbye Cafe La Fortuna

The New York Times is reporting that Cafe La Fortuna on the Upper West Side will close on Sunday. This became one of my favorite cafes when my sister lived a few blocks away for a couple of years in the mid 1990s. She then moved a few blocks even further but I still tried to get over to Cafe La Fortuna whenever I visited. I didn't really care about the Lennon/Ono mystique but I liked the coffee and the desserts and the relatively relaxed atmosphere.

(Mention of the Beatles in two consecutive posts is only a coincidence.)

Israel asks forgiveness from the Beatles

The New York Times reports that the State of Israel has now officially made peace with the Beatles.

Again, a small news item sets off a chain of associations in my head leading to Ben Gurion and Spinoza. (On Ben Gurion's participation in the "nationalist rehabilitation of Spinoza," see Daniel Schwartz, "The Spinoza Image in Jewish Culture, 1656-1956," Ph.D. Thesis, Columbia University, 2007).

(I would also guess that more people in Israel today listen to the Beatles than read Spinoza.)

We can call it "checked baggage"

A few days ago on a flight from Pittsburgh to Charlotte, while watching dozens of people struggling aboard with suitcases and trying to fit them in overhead compartments, I had an idea: wouldn't it be great if the airlines could devise a system whereby people would arrive at the airport and give their suitcases to the airlines who could then deliver those suitcases to the passengers' final destinations?

Mr. Banks, call the office.

Today's Wall Street Journal has an article on troubles at the Bank of England, including the first run on a bank in Britain in a century (which took place last fall). I cannot read a sentence with the words "Britain," "bank run," and "century" without getting Mary Poppins on the brain. What does this say about me?

Things to read this summer?

Geraldine Brook's new novel, People of the Book, which sounds like a kind of novelized reception history of the Sarajevo Haggadah, reviewed last week in the New York Times Book Review and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Max Apple's The Jew of Home Depot, also reviewed this Sunday in the NYT, sounds intriguing. Although I don't usually read short stories, I very slightly know the author, so maybe.

The Newberry Medal winner, Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Voices from a Medieval Village, by Laura Ann Schlitz. (But why does Karen MacPherson describe it as "nonfiction" in her review distributed by Scripps Howard and published in today's Pittsburgh Post-Gazette?)

A post by my friend JSE at Quomodocumque reminds me of a great classic, The Pushcart War.

Some of the new books on Islam featured in the January 6 New York Times Book Review.

The collected works of David Macaulay, the subject of an appreciation by Peter Miller in the January 30 New Republic (a review of an exhibit at the National Building Museum in DC). And Peter Miller makes a good case that these are not children's books. Or that all books are children's books.

And Ruth Franklin in the same issue of The New Republic also gives me a good hint what not to bother with.

Interesting things people do with new technology and historical figures

A group of people have entered Thomas Jefferson's library into "Library Thing." See here for details.

Chaucer has a blog.

I wonder who is on Facebook.

Interesting possibilities here for fun, creative pedagogy, and new kinds of historical research.

"Erev Iyyun" on Sepharad in Ashkenaz

The "Erev Iyyun" [evening of discussion] is one of my favorite parts of Israeli academia (it may be limited to Jewish studies scholarship for all I know). Two or three scholars discuss a recent book--offering comment and criticism--and then the author responds. Almost always, these are for monographs. So I am a bit surprised that a multi-author volume, Sepharad in Ashkenaz: Medieval Knowledge and Eighteenth-Century Enlightened Jewish Discourse, ed. Resianne Fontaine, Andrea Schatz, and Irene Zwiep, will be the subject of such an evening this coming Monday (January 7) at 6 pm in Jerusalem. See here for details. I am also proud because I am the author of 1 of the 16 articles. I am also scared because I am the author of 1 of the 16 articles (the criticism is always polite but can be sharp). Looking at the program, however, it looks more like a mini-conference with three lectures on subjects related to the book, as opposed to three lectures offering a critique of the book (especially since one of the lectures is by one of the contributors to the book).

For more information on the book, see here.

And if anyone is in Jerusalem and goes to this, please send me an e-mail or comment here and let me know what was said.

Update: a minute after I posted this, I found this post at the Michtavim blog which mentions the book.

Pittsburgh: the world's biggest small town...

... or smallest big city? (I'm pretty sure this was tourist slogan for Pittsburgh or somewhere else at some point.)

Either way, one of the things my wife and I love about living here is that Pittsburgh offers pretty much everything a large metropolitan area offers but with such a low housing cost and decent city public schools (at least in our neighborhood) that we can live in close proximity to the major cultural and entertainment venues.

A few years ago we visited Chicago and stayed with friends in Evanston. A trip to the science museum in Hyde Park was an all-day outing with a 45 minute drive in each direction.

A few weeks ago we spent a Sunday taking children to Hebrew school and swim class in our neighborhood, then went downtown to a children's theatre performance, and then went to Oakland to see the renovated dinosaur exhibit at the Carnegie Natural History Museum. We were tired out at the end, but none of the car trips took more than 15 minutes. This was a pretty busy Sunday for us and not typical but we had the tickets for the play and the tickets for the dinosaur preview were issued for a specific time. But a day like that just would not be possible in Chicago or New York.

Another friend, who lives in New York, just e-mailed about her family's visit to a college town in the upper south (trying to keep this anonymous) over the Christmas-New Year's week. She writes: "We had a nice time in ________- it's somewhat of a shock to the system to be in a small town where you can drive anywhere in 10-15 minutes!"

End of Semester Update

Very little blogging for the last couple of months as I finished revisions to a book manuscript. Look for a weighty tome on the reception of Judah Halevi's Book of the Kuzari sometime next year.

I finished the revisions just before the annual meeting of the Association for Jewish Studies but didn't have a chance to print and mail before heading to the conference. So I was in a bit of a quandary when people asked whether the book was done. Saying yes but it still needs to be mailed to the publisher didn't convince anyone, least of all my editor. So it was a relief to get back from Toronto and actually mail it off.

a URL in Yiddish?

Catching up with a stack of Wall Street Journal's, I find an article from Thursday October 11: "What's the Hindi word for Dot-Com?" about a pilot program to create Internet addresses using non-Roman alphabets. The examples given in a box on the front page of the "Marketplace" section: Arabic, Persian, Chinese, Russian, Hindi, Greek, Korean, Yiddish, Japanese, Tamil. One of these is not like the others! Michael Chabon must be pleased.

And yes, I know that this is still available for sale.

More Irrationality from USAirways

USAir just announced a drop in service levels at Pittsburgh International Airport which was once their largest hub. In contrast to the reactions to previous rounds of cut-backs, most Pittsburghers seem to be just shrugging their shoulders and moving on.

I do like that Southwest has come here and that I can fly to Chicago and Philadelphia for very little. I also like that other airlines have ratcheted up service a little.

But I also miss being able to fly direct almost everywhere in the US. It's becoming nearly impossible to fly direct from Pittsburgh to the West Coast. Toronto is also out which I think may be the end of the "International" in Pittsburgh International.

And I still don't understand USAir: I've already mentioned that 9 flights a day from Philadelphia to La Guardia seems absurd. Today I learned that one can fly on USAir from Pittsburgh to White Plains, NY through Charlotte or Philadelphia (although one might not be able to pay utility bills for a few months after paying the fare). Again, this means that USAir flies from Philadelphia to White Plains.... why?

I certainly understand why USAir concentrated on Philadelphia as an international hub. But why all these short routes to other spots in the megalopolis? Why does the federal government allow this when air traffic around New York and Philadelphia is out of control?

And who flies from Philadelphia to New York?

Advice on Escaping the Spanish Inquisition

If you want to escape from the Spanish Inquisition (and you are a fifteenth-century Spanish Jew), here's my advice: don't convert to Christianity. See, this will actually put you under the jurisdiction of the Inquisition.

But today's New York Times reports that apparently some people think that Columbus' "parents converted [from Judaism to Christianity] to escape the Spanish Inquisition." There were lots of reasons to convert to Christianity in fifteenth-century Spain and lots and lots of Jews did so. However, none of those reasons involved escaping the Inquisition.

Clearly nobody at the Times (or at the Post-Gazette which reprinted the article) was reading this blog back in May of 2005 where I thought I made this point pretty clear.
(Actually I'm pretty sure nobody at the Times or the Post-Gazette reads it now.)

(Would it be too pedantic to also point out that Columbus was born circa 1450 and the Inquisition was founded in Spain in the late 1470s? Yes, I thought so. )

Books I read in 2006

removed from the sidebar because it is getting too long:

• December 2006:
• Dorothy Sayers, The Nine Tailors
• Richard Kalmin, Jewish Babylonia between Persia and Roman Palestine
• Laurie R. King, A Grave Talent
• Laurie R. King, To Play the Fool
• Laurie R. King, With Child
• November 2006:
• Laurie R. King, Locked Rooms
• David Mamet, The Wicked Son
• October 2006:
• Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism
• Nils Roemer, Jewish Scholarship and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Germany
• Paul Griffiths, Religious Reading
• September 2006:
• Henry Adams, Mont St. Michel and Chartres
• Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, part 1
• Leslie Fiedler, The Last Jew in America
• August 2006:
• Laurie R. King, The Game
• The New Yorker, May-July 2006
• Daniel Dennet, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon
• Laurie R. King, Justice Hall
• July 2006:
• Brian Leiter, ed., The Future for Philosophy
• George Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture
• Manfred Unger et al., Juden in Leipzig: Eine Dokumentation
• Colm Toibin, The Master
• James Ault, Spirit and Flesh: Life in a Fundamentalist Baptist Church
• Laurie R. King, The Moor
• June 2006:
• Susan Allen Toth, Ivy Days: Making My Way Out East
• P.L. Travers, Mary Poppins
• William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience
• Laurie R. King, O Jerusalem
• Zachary Schrag, The Great Society Subway: A History of the Washington Metro
• May 2006:
• Laurie R. King, A Darker Place
• Myla Goldberg, Bee Season
• Elliott Horowitz, Reckless Rites
• Laurie R. King, A Monstrous Regiment of Women
• Magda Teter, Jews and Heretics in Catholic Poland
• April 2006:
• H. Goldberg, ed. The Life of Judaism
• Carl Knappett, Thinking Through Material Culture
• The New Yorker, September 2005-April 2006
• March 2006:
• I. Hodder, ed. The Meanings of Things
• S. Lubar and W. D. Kingery, eds. History from Things
• February 2006:
• Haym Soloveitchik, Yaynam [Jewish Trade in Gentile Wine in the Middle Ages
• Marvin Lowenthal, The Jews of Germany: A Story of Sixteen Centuries
• January 2006:
• Laurie R. King, A Letter of Mary
• Susan Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees

Books I read in 2005

removed from the sidebar because the page is getting too long:

• 
  
• December 2005:
• Laurie R. King, The Beekeeper's Apprentice
• Michael Sells, Approaching the Quran
• Dorothy Sayers, Gaudy Night
• William Bayer, Pattern Crimes
• November 2005:
• Andrew Sean Greer, The Confessions of Max Tivoli
• M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, trans. The Qur'an
• Batya Gur, The Saturday Morning Murder: A Psychoanalytic Case
• Gigi Anders, Jubana: The Awkwardly True and Dazzling Adventures of a Jewish Cubana Goddess
• October 2005:
• Linda Woodhead, An Introduction to Christianity
• Leon Batista Alberti, The Use and Abuse of Books
• September 2005:
• Mohammed Marmaduke Pickthall, trans. The Meaning of the Glorious Koran
• John Esposito, Islam: The Straight Path
• Michael Kurland, ed. My Sherlock Holmes: Untold Stories of the Great Detective
• Willard Oxtoby, ed. World Religions: Western Traditions
• August 2005:
• Batya Gur, Murder on a Kibbutz: A Communal Case
• Lev Grossman, Codex
• Abraham Melamed, On the Shoulders of Giants: The Debate between Moderns and Ancients in Medieval and Renaissance Jewish Thought
• David Liss, A Spectacle of Corruption
• T.M. Luhrmann, Of Two Minds: The Growing Disorder in American Psychiatry
• Jane Smiley, Moo
• E.B. White, Stuart Little
• The New Yorker, December 2004-August 2006
• July 2005:
• Ronald Schechter, Obstinate Hebrews: Representations of Jews in France, 1715-1815
• Aaron Hughes, The Texture of the Divine
• David Myers, Resisting History
• Robert Eisen, The Book of Job in Medieval Jewish Philosophy
• Batya Gur, Literary Murder: A Critical Case
• Michael Chabon, The Final Solution
• June 2005:
• C. Helmer and C. Landmesser, eds. One Scripture or Many? Canon from Biblical, Theological, and Philosophical Perspectives
• Gershon Hundert, The Jews of Poland-Lithuania in the Eighteenth Century
• James Hynes, The Lecturer's Tale
• May 2005:
• Peter Ochs and Nancy Levene, eds. Textual Reasonings: Jewish Philosophy and Text Study at the End of the Twentieth Century
• David Katz, God's Last Words: Reading the English Bible from the Reformation to Fundamentalism
• Robert Chazan, Fashioning Jewish Identity in Medieval Western Christendom
• Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes. Selected Stories
• E. Benbassa and J-C. Attias, The Jews and the Other
• Ernst Cassirer, The Logic of the Cultural Sciences
• April 2005:
• Jon Stewart, America
• Russell McCutcheon, Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia
• Joseph Rykwert, The Seduction of Place: The History and Future of the City
• March 2005:
• Judith Frishman et al., Religious Identity and the Problem of Historical Foundation
• Reinhart Kosseleck, The Practice of Conceptual History
• Robert Brody, The Geonim of Babylonia and the Shaping of Medieval Jewish Culture
• Edward Shorter, A History of Psychiatry
• Herbert Davidson, Moses Maimonides
• Yvonne Petry, Gender, Kabbalah, and the Reformation
• Jane Leavy, Sandy Kaufax: A Lefty's Legacy
• February 2005:
• Roni Weinstein, Marriage Rituals Italian Style
• Christopher Celenza, The Lost Italian Renaissance
• Matt Goldish, The Sabbatean Prophets
• Ivan Marcus, The Jewish Life Cycle

When is Art Finished? A not so deep question

I passed a bank branch in my neighborhood this morning. The side wall was painted with what could only be described as a kind of abstract expressionist mural. When I went inside to tell the tellers that I thought it was really interesting, they told me it's not finished and that the finished mural will be a kind of tableau of different houses and buildings in the neighborhood.

So is an unfinished mural art if people see and respond to it as art? If it were a text, I can imagine the debate between Wolfgang Iser, Stanley Fish, and E.D. Hirsch, but I don't know enough about art criticism to imagine who the relevant art critics would be.

Unions and Cities

This is really interesting. Quick: before you follow that link, which metro area has a lower rate of unionization in the work force: Pittsburgh or Las Vegas?

You're wrong (unless you guessed where I was going with this and switched to the other answer).

Cities Big and Small

I tend to be interested in things Springfield (Mass), because my in-laws live there, and also in things New Haven, because I went to college there. So I found this article by Mark Oppenheimer, "Medium Town: On Living in A City Smaller than New York" interesting. (I got to it via this post at the Pittsburgh blog, Antirust.)

Oppenheimer basically argues that there are pleasures in living in small cities--like New Haven or Springfield--rather than in New York or other very large cities. Oppenheim writes well even if his arguments are not startlingly original: the quality of life is better; the cost of living is lower; people are more normal and life is more well-balanced, etc. In the second part of the essay, he turns to an argument that not all writers need to live in New York in order to be successful. I suppose this is necessary because he is writing in the New Haven Review of Books (a new journal that he founded; I guess the New Haven Register Literary Supplement just didn't sound right).

Anyway, the thought struck me that the piece is particularly New England-centric. Although he does mention Des Moines, his frame of reference is clearly the industrial (or post-industrial rather) New England small city or big town: New Haven, Springfield, Worcester, Hartford, Providence, etc. Although there are other sorts of places where one can have a nice quality of life outside of the really big metropolitan areas (college towns, medium-sized metro areas--e.g. Pittsburgh) and although there are some metro areas/small cities in other parts of the country that have similar demographics to a New Haven or a Springfield, those cities offer a particular advantage. Due to the short distances in New England from one metro area to the next (indeed, is there any part of southern New England not included in an MSA or a CMSA?), these cities are not free-standing entities in the middle of nowhere. Rather, they are part of a kind megalopolis that stretches from Boston to New York and have close connections--in both a figurative (cultural and economic) and a literal (train lines, highways) to both. So it's a little disengenous to pose New Haven as an alternative to New York when in many ways it functions as a kind of urban exurb in the mega New York.

But the evocations of his neighborhoods, past and present--Forest Park in Springfield and Westville in New Haven--are worth the price of admission.

It's also interesting how one's perspective changes:

When I lived in Philadelphia (the 6th largest metro area in the United States), I got tired of explaining to friends in New York (the largest metro area) that Philadelphia was, in fact, a pretty big city with a lot of culture and big-city amenities (restaurants, public transit, etc.) But I would get irritated with Philadelphia's provincialism and wonder why the residents of the nation's 6th largest metro area weren't more assertive about their big-city-ness.

Now that I live in Pittsburgh (the 22nd largest metro area), I am more willing to accept my status as a provincial, but I still tend to boast to non-Pittsburgh about all the wonderful aspects of Pittsburgh.

But I can now recognize that my civic boosting is actually a form of provincialism. And I can now see that my boasting/pushing Philadelphia was also a form of provincialism. (So in a sense Oppenheimer's piece can be read as a kind of praise for civic modesty--taking pride in one's town or city but with a proper perspective on it.)

In between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, I lived in Boston. Boston is my own counter-example that nonetheless somehow proves the rule. I never liked Boston as much as Bostonians thought I should like it. And when I lived in Boston, I was constantly annoyed by the "Hub of the Universe" and "Athens of America" mentality. Didn't Bostonians realize that Boston is only the 7th largest metro area? (Then I read E. Digby Baltzell's Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia and it all made sense.)

So the constant collective need to see Boston as part of a holy triumvirate of the East Coast (money in NY, politics in DC, and culture and science in Boston) is perhaps the greatest provincialism of all.

More song lyric confusion...

For the last few weeks, our kids have been requesting that we sing "Country Roads" at bedtime.

(The other favorites right now are "Sweet Baby James" and "I'll Walk in the Rain By Your Side." This is the fault of a certain aunt with whom we visited in June and July and the people behind the Rise Up Singing songbook. That's right Pete Seeger: you and your buddies have made our bedtime a rather drawn out affair.)

The first stanza of "Country Roads" drives me crazy, because I can't figure out what the subject of "blowing like a breeze" is:

This site has this for the lyrics of the first stanza:

"Almost heaven, west virginia
Blue ridge mountains, shenandoah river
Life is old there, older than the trees
Younger than the mountains, blowing like a breeze."

I have trouble imagining how mountains can blow like a breeze. But this is how I have always heard it in my head:

"Almost heaven, West Virginia: Blue Ridge mountains, Shenandoah River.
Life is old there, older than the trees; younger than the mountains, blowing in the breeze."

I can almost get my head around mountains blowing in the breeze. Really the trees on top of the mountains would be swaying a bit in the breeze which might give the impression of the mountains moving a bit in the breeze.

So perhaps my mishearing the lyrics was my way of correcting the imagery for myself.

Trees can blow in a breeze (but can they blow like a breeze?) more easily (or more litarally I should say) than mountains. However, I don't see how the last phrase can really modify the trees unless you allow for shifting the phrases to fit the rhyme scheme. I guess this would have sounded awkward:

"Life is old there, older than the trees blowing in the breeze, but younger than the mountains which give off the effect of blowing in the breeze because of the trees on them"

My wife insists that proper parsing is:

"Life is old there. [Life is] older than the trees. [Life is] younger than the mountains. [Life is] blowing like a breeze.

This interpretation has some merit (although I was dubious about it when she first proposed it) especially if we consider an important folk music intertext : if the answer can be blowing in wind, I suppose life can blow like a (or in the) breeze.

(Don't get me started on how little sense "Sweet Baby James" makes. But there is nothing cuter than my three-year-old belting out "There is a young cowboy..." at the top of his lungs.)

How to Drink Coffee in Pittsburgh

(The title is borrowed from a friend who once taught the world “How to eat dinner in Princeton.” The coffee situation in Pittsburgh is much better than the dinner situation in Princeton. Read on.)

I recently discovered this website, run by Ariel Rubenstein of Tel Aviv University, which lists good cafes in university neighborhoods around the world. I then contributed 2 places in Pittsburgh. Following his guidelines, I only sent in places in Oakland, adjacent to Pitt and CMU.

So here is my more detailed list of places that I drink coffee (or tea) in Pittsburgh. It’s idiosyncratic, but I try to explain what I like about each place below:

in Oakland (home to Pitt and CMU):

Kiva Han at Forbes and Craig:
This website says the coffee is bad, but I disagree. It’s not the best in the world, but it’s fine. And the snacks and lunches are good. Except on the very hottest days, it’s a nice place to sit and work. They have some tables outside also, but most summer mornings one of them is occupied by a man smoking a rather awful smelling cigar. Kiva Han has another location down Forbes Ave (in the direction of downtown). I don’t like it as much as the Craig Street location.... it’s usually too hot inside and the tables and chairs aren’t as comfortable.

Crazy Mocha, 207 Oakland Ave:
This is around the corner from the Panera on Forbes. Central location on the Pitt campus. The coffee here is a little better than Kiva Han; the food selection is not as broad. Not many tables here so not a great place to work, but it’s a nice place to meet someone for coffee. And there is almost always a New York Times on the newspaper rack.

[Update 8/31/07: For the first time, I was here in the late afternoon--very hot from the exposure to the sun. So pay attention to the timing if you want to sit here in the afternoon.]

Crazy Mocha in the Carnegie Library:
Another outlet of this local chain. The tables here are nice and it’s fun being inside the library but more limited hours (only open when the library is). Same food and drink selection as the other branch. (There are also branches downtown, in Shadyside, and Bloomfield.)

Here’s another reason I often go to Crazy Mocha: For $30, I got a Donor Plus Carnegie Library card which gives me a 20% discount at all Crazy Mocha locations (not only the one in the library). If you drink coffee a lot, you will make back the $30 quickly and the library gets a donation. This is almost too good of a deal and I am probably ruining it by sharing the news.

You can also find Starbucks and Caribou Coffee in Oakland if you really want. Inside Hillman Library is Cup and Chaucer which is a pleasant place to sit. Like most Pitt campus dining outlets, it serves Starbucks coffee.

If you want to sit outside in Schenley Plaza, you can get coffee at the Bagel Factory kiosk. However, you will most likely wait in a long line and your small coffee will come in a cup bigger than your head. (Ask for ½ decaf unless you have high caffeine tolerance.)

I don’t pay attention to WI-FI at coffee places in Oakland because I have an office there with an internet connection or I use WI-FI in the library. But I think Schenley Plaza has WI-FI also.

in Squirrel Hill, from the top of the hill down:

Coffee Tree Roasters, 5840 Forbes Ave
This is right in the middle of the fancier shopping street and was the favorite of the late Mayor Bob O’Connor if that matters to you. Good coffee plus a free refill on the brewed stuff plus free WI-FI for 2 hours makes this a good place to plant oneself for a while. Limited food choices—mainly sweets. Always a NYT and almost always a Wall Street Journal, plus the local papers, lying around. My only complaints are that there are almost always smokers at the 2 outside tables, one of which is right next to the door and that the place is sometimes over airconditioned.

61C, 1839 Murray Ave (at Bartlett)
Decent coffee (although Coffee Tree is better) and pastries. Lots of tables. This is the place that mid-morning will have almost every table taken up by someone with a laptop. Also the place for Squirrel Hill power coffees. A nice outdoor space around the corner (i.e. off the main street), but again smokers flock to it and you have to go out the main door and walk around to get to it. A bit loud when someone orders a smoothie. They also have a lot of teas but if you are a serious tea-drinker you will keep walking a block to the next place on my list.

Te Cafe, 2000 Murray Ave (at Beacon)
Go here to drink tea. They also serve coffee and take great pride in the fancy glass brewing thing they have but it tastes no better than anywhere else and they charge more. This is a tea place and there’s a very good selection. Also some nice sandwiches. WI-FI and usually a NYT lying around. Not that many tables but enough.

Aroma/Rolladin, 2120 Murray Ave. (below Hobart)
This used to be my favorite place in Squirrel Hill: a great Israeli bakery, a very generous “double” espresso, and a nice atmosphere. The burekas are still good but they have cut way back on the other baked goods (now they are bringing in a lot of packaged stuff from NY) and the challah was kind of strange last time we got it. But you can still get a decent cup of coffee and there are plenty of tables and the staff is friendly. The name changes back and forth but I think they may now be sticking with Aroma.

Tango Coffee, 5806 Forward Ave.
Best Argentinean coffeehouse in Pittsburgh. Not a place to linger for hours but a good place for a cortado and a pastry after a movie. They did just add WI-FI so maybe it will be more of a place to work now.

elsewhere:

I’ve blogged about my visit to Mt. Lebanon and to Aldo Coffee here. And as my update indicates, I am told that Uptown Coffee is better.

If you are in the Strip District and just want coffee, you go to La Prima. If you want to sit somewhere and work for a few hours, leave the Strip District. Downtown is not a great coffee area: the Crazy Mocha in the Allegheny Building is a welcome addition and apparently they have added one in the Gateway complex—this covers the two ends of downtown, I suppose. The Symphony store, Curtain Call, also has a coffee bar. I’m sure there are other places also but I don’t know about them. There is a Crazy Mocha in Shadyside on Ellsworth Ave. In the heart of Walnut Street, there is a place called Jitters. I haven’t been there in five years but I used to stop every morning when I lived in Shadyside for a year.

If you want to tell me about other places, leave a comment.

Upcoming Events in Pittsburgh Jewish community

Two things on the horizon look interesting. I learned about both in the Jewish Chronicle:

Sunday, August 26, the Jewish Cemetery and Burial Association will have a public ceremony for burial of worn-out texts with the name of God in Hebrew and other ritual objects. 11 am at Chesed Shel Emeth Cemetery. The Association holds an annual burial but this year, for the first time, they have decided to hold a communal event. This was reported in last week's issue of the Chronicle. Good luck finding an on-line version.

Sunday November 4, 1 pm: Rodef Shalom will hold a symposium on the history of the congregation as part of its celebration of its 150th anniversary. Jonathan Sarna of Brandeis is scheduled as the keynote speaker. This was reported in today's issue. Rodef Shalom is one of the oldest and most significant congregations in the American Reform movement and was the host for the rabbinical convention that ratified that "Pittsburgh Platform" in 1885, the defining documents of Reform Judaism for about 50 years.

Things I Don't Understand, Cont.

I learn from today's Wall Street Journal that:

"US Airways flies nine trips a day from La Guardia to also-congested Philadelphia International Airport."

In what universe does this make sense?

Two Ironies in Hispanic-less Pittsburgh

Pittsburgh is not without Hispanics, of course, but it does have one of the smallest percentage of Hispanics of any major US metro area and, as Pittsblog and Nullspace have just reminded us, it is one of the few major TV markets without a Univision station.

Two things strike me as ironic given this situation.

1) The Steelers are among the two or three most popular NFL teams among Mexicans and Mexican-Americans. (See here for a discussion.)

2) The University of Pittsburgh is a major center for Latin American studies, through its Center for Latin American Studies, its Department of Hispanic Languages and Literatures, and Hillman Library's Lozano collection. Pitt also hosts the Latin American Studies Association and one of the major scholarly journals in Latin American history, the Hispanic American Historical Review, moved to Pitt last month.

Literary Critics on the Move

According to this New York Times article, James Wood, a long-time literary critic at The New Republic, will now be playing staff writer for The New Yorker. (Although since this comes in August, I guess he won't be eligible for the playoffs.)

It's really only of passing interest to me since I read both magazines, but I can't think of the last time I laughed out loud while reading an article in the NYT Arts section:

"Leon Wieseltier, literary editor at The New Republic, said, 'The New Republic plays many significant roles in American culture, and one of them is to find and to develop writers with whom The New Yorker can eventually staff itself.'"

Back to Deep Creek

We spent our annual weekend in Deep Creek last weekend.

The lake is beautiful, but the real reason I love Deep Creek: 4-newspaper Sundays.

Musical Miscellany

I'm glad to see here that at least one of the two PSO concerts in Western MD sold out and that the one that didn't (Friday night) had a respectable showing. (I wonder if 7:30 is too early for a Friday night concert in the summer--you would have to leave DC, Baltimore, or Pittsburgh by 4 to make it and more like 3 to be comfortable and have time for dinner. Maybe try for 8:30 next time?) And I'm glad to see that talk about a PSO residency at Deep Creek continues.

In other classical music news, I have to admit that I've never heard of the New York Philharmonic's choice of music director. But reading about the decision in this New York Times article makes me think it's an interesting and bold choice. Interesting to appoint Ricardo Muti at the same time as principal guest conductor (or the equivalent). In many ways, I think this is similar to what the PSO has just done: appoint the up-and-comer as the music director (Manfred Honeck) and the veteran who has already been a music director at a major American orchestra as the principal guest conductor (Leonard Slatkin). Curious that the parallel did not occur to the NYT writer.

My wife has always made fun of me for mishearing a line in "Sound of Silence" as "Hear my words that I'm an angry Jew." But this article in today's Post-Gazette tells me that I'm not alone in being unable to decipher the sung word. And a quick Google search for "Simon and Garfunkel" AND "Angry Jew"* turns up this comprehensive site for misheard song lyrics including this very mistake and gives me a comfort that I'm not alone on this one.

*I tend to put in the Boolean operators even though Google has helpfully reminded me many times that they are not needed.

PSO in Deep Creek: The Details

Go here.

And look at these ticket prices! This is a huge bargain:

"EACH CONCERT:
Ticket prices: $25 Adults, $7 Students and
Free for children five years and younger."

(Compare to Tanglewood prices here).

If these concerts are not sold out, there is no hope for classical music in America.

Culture in Deep Creek

Immediately after the last posting, I thought: maybe I'm being unfair to Deep Creek on the culture and entertainment front. So I looked and found "Deep Creek Blog." I'll stick to the view that there's more going on in the Berkshires (in an absolute sense), but next time I'm in Deep Creek I'll pay attention to this site and patronize what looks like a pretty decent arts scene (per capita).

PSO in Deep Creek: Tanglewisp?

Soon after we moved to Pittsburgh, we discovered the Deep Creek Lake area of western Maryland. 2 hours from Pittsburgh, 2 and a half hours from Washington and Baltimore. Since I have family in DC, it's a perfect meeting place for a family vacation.

But there was one thing we noticed right away. We also vacation a lot in the Berkshires, and while Western MD can compete with Western MA on the outdoors stuff, there's not nearly as much going on in the culture department in the former.

So the first time I went there, I said: this is where the Pittsburgh Symphony should make its summer home. Our favorite place in the Berkshires is Tanglewood, the premier summer music festival in the US. While it would be very difficult to replicate Tanglewood (without a few tens of millions of dollars and a resurrected Leonard Bernstein), I have often thought that a good part of Tanglewood's success is that it is close to two major metro areas (NY and Boston). Thus, Deep Creek seemed like a good spot for the PSO to develop a summer home, drawing on not only a Pittsburgh audience but also DC and Baltimore. And just as there are a good number of New Yorkers who donate to the BSO (instead of, or in addition to, the NY Philharmonic), I thought the PSO could gradually build a base of Washingtonian supporters and that this would be a good long-term move for the orchestra.

So I am very glad to see this report that the PSO will play at Wisp Resort at Deep Creek this summer.

The PSO will play indoors at Wisp. But maybe if all goes well and the PSO becomes a regular summer part of the Deep Creek scene, the Bashford Amphitheater at Mountain Lake Park could be rebuilt with a shed (a la Tanglewood) but open to the fresh summer air?

On the other hand, maybe the all-indoor venue is smarter given the problems Tanglewood has been having with the weather in the last few years. Lots of rain last summer and a general trend of declining ticket sales have a lot of people up in the Berkshires asking "whither Tanglewood?" (See this editorial in the Berkshire Eagle.) So of course, the PSO will have to tread carefully financially (as the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review story linked above makes clear).

But I can have my dream, can't I?