Gallimaufry, a word recently introduced to me by a friend, can mean “a hodgepodge” (his intended meaning). But it can also mean “a hash or ragout of liver, heart, kidney, or the like, with edible parts of the head.” Thanks, I’ll have the oysters instead.
1) A Friend Younger Than I, beset by absorbing professional and personal obligations, apologized for not responding at better length to a recent message. My reply to him surprised me more than I expected: “As maddening as it feels, enjoy and celebrate this super-busy time. The comfortable afternoon nap stage will come for you sooner than you think (and while I love it, I accomplish less than I’d like.)” And it’s true!
2) My day started with a jolt, an email (delivered at 12:11 AM this morning) that my Christmas cards had been delivered. They were nowhere to be seen on either front or back porch, which launched an odyssey of automated contact with UPS. I should have gone directly to VistaPrint, as a) UPS ended up handing off my package to the local post office, and b) Arwen, the Actual Person I spoke to was calming and efficient. Long story short (too late!), VistaPrint is reprinting and resending my cards so, like Christina Crawford, “I’ll get the cards out on time, OK?”
3) You are of course interested in what I’m reading now. I’m afraid The Age of Decadence has been put aside again and I am ploughing through two books: Here Let Us Feast, M.F.K. Fisher’s collection of stories of banquets and feasting through literature, and Red Orchestra: The Story of the Berlin Underground and the Circle of Friends Who Resisted Hitler, by Anne Nelson. The former I picked up in September at Montague Book Mill; the latter I bought at Brattle Books sometime during the pandemic and began over a year ago.
3a) I uncovered a stack of books I’d meant to sell or discard. When I shared the titles with a Prominent Used Bookstore, hoping at least for a trade, they courteously responded by email “Thank you but we are not interested in these. We see them all the time and they are hard for us to sell.” Oh well!
3b) And now, like the bombardiers, I should be yelling “Incommmmiiiing!” Wednesday I was given The Crimson Letter: Harvard, Homosexuality, and the Shaping of American Culture, by Douglas Shand-Tucci. I vaguely remembered wanting to read it when it came out (it’s in the same category as Gay New York by George Chauncey, which I also haven’t read yet), but then Shand-Tucci’s Boston Bohemia was so dense I just could not get past Chapter Three — and that was about Ralph Adams Cram, one of MIT’s great architecture professors and the creator of the Masque of Power in 1916, a topic of great interest to me.
3b.i) And Saturday I am being taken back to the Montague Book Mill on a western excursion, so who knows what might come back with me! Like the Collyer brothers, one day I will be crushed to death by all the books waiting for me to read them.