Quite a pair

Beggars Banquet -Bill Clinton and Keith Richards leave the restaurant Craft in New York City after having dinner, June 7. 2011.

Found this picture in Rolling Stone. Left me speechless (and Bubba has a doggie bag).

Van Wyck? Van Week?

Robert A. Van Wyck, mayor of New York City, 1898-1901, is the man for whom the expressway was named.

For most New Yorkers and out-of-town visitors, the Van Wyck Expressway is a notorious traffic hazard that induces high blood pressure among travelers trying to get to and from John F. Kennedy International Airport. For traffic reporters, linguists and some Dutch purists, however, the gridlocked highway also poses a serious phonetic hazard nearly as perilous as its bottlenecks. After decades of pronouncing Van Wyck like “candlestick,” an enlightened few now call it the “Van Wike,” which some Dutch say is the more proper pronunciation.

But even that is in dispute.

Agnes Treuren, an officer in the Dutch Consulate in New York, insisted that both pronunciations were emphatically wrong. “It is ‘Fon Weig,’ with the last syllable pronounced like leg or beg,” she said, before adding: “I have never been on the Fon Weig Expressway. I live on the Upper East Side.” But even that is in dispute.

Really? And how did she get from the airport to the upper east side of Manhattan? Helicopter?

The 9.3-mile highway, which was designed by Robert Moses, built from 1947 to 1963 and connects the Whitestone Expressway with Kennedy Airport, was named after Robert Anderson Van Wyck, who in 1898 became the first mayor of New York as a five-borough city.

Tom Kaminski, managing editor of traffic and transit information at WCBS-AM, said that in the pantheon of mispronounced New York landmarks, Van Wyck was neck-and-neck with the Kosciuszko Bridge, which connects Queens and Brooklyn and was named in the 1940s for Tadeusz Kosciuszko, a Polish-Lithuanian hero of the Revolutionary War. Mr. Kaminski, whose grandparents came to New York from Gdansk in 1908, said “ ‘Kosciuszko’ was routinely botched by traffic reporters who tended to say “Kos-kee-OOS-ko” rather than the more correct Polish pronunciation “Ka-SHOOS-ko.”

I only changed my way of pronouncing that one in recent memory.

Other proponents of the “Van Wike” school of pronunciation like Jack Eichenbaum, the Queens Borough historian, attributed the “wick” aberration to the fact that Dutch names in New York had been Anglicized after the Netherlands ceded Nieuw-Nederland, its 17th-century colonial province, to the British in 1664. He noted that Flushing — undisputedly pronounced today like a “flushing toilet” — had once been called Vlissingen after a town on the Dutch-Belgian border, while Flatbush had been Vlacke bos.

Some in Queens complained that the chronic gaffing was part of a long history in which well-known monuments in the oft-overlooked borough were mispronounced or, worse, called something else altogether. Dan Andrews, a spokesman for the Queens borough president, Helen M. Marshall, said the disagreement over Van Wyck was reminiscent of the Queensboro Bridge, the steel muse of Simon and Garfunkel, which was recently named after former Mayor Edward I. Koch.

It is Queensboro; says so on the Bridge. It connects 59th Street to Queens, so provincial Manhattanites can come out and see the sights, taste the foods, and get a life.
 
 “No one ever said Queensboro Bridge on the radio; they always called it the 59th Street Bridge,” he said, with a hint of annoyance. “Now it’s the Eddie Koch Bridge. Yet the Brooklyn Bridge is called the Brooklyn Bridge. Van Wyck is part of the same story.”


Robert Moses himself may have had the last word on the pronunciation. Legend has it that after someone once questioned him after he had called the expressway Van Wick, he thundered: “I’m Robert Moses. I can call it whatever I damn please!”

Always welcome, and now missed

At 6:30 a.m. on Tuesday, crew members of a fishing charter boat sat in the passenger cabin, waiting for customers who did not come. On other, warmer Tuesdays, they could at least count on the arrival of a group of old-timers, but most of that crowd was away for the winter months. At nearby piers, other fishing boats bobbed idly. As sunlight broke through the windows of the charter boat, the Brooklyn VI, its disappointed crew settled into the passenger booths and talked about loss: of the customers who once filled the fishing boats all year round, of the neighborhood’s vanishing landmarks, of a freedom to drift at sea without tightening government restrictions. But mostly they talked about their friend Julius Geller, a former bomber pilot and an incurable lifetime angler who had died two days earlier, a week before he was to turn 94.

No one called him Julius. He was Chuck or Chuckie or Chuckles, a nickname picked up during a tough, impoverished childhood in East New York. During World War II, Mr. Geller, a second lieutenant, piloted a B-17 bomber on 34 missions. (In his later years, he would talk about his service, but not much. Many of his friends learned about his record on the Internet.)

Transportation man

When Darius McCollum was arrested on Tuesday, the circumstances were all too familiar. Once again, he stood accused of taking a bus or a subway car for a ride. On Wednesday, Mr. McCollum was in another familiar place: a courtroom, to answer to charges related to his 27th arrest — this one for stealing a Trailways bus from a maintenance facility in Hoboken, N.J. Mr. McCollum was first arrested at age 15 after he drove an E train to the World Trade Center in 1981. He was most recently arrested in 2008 for impersonating a subway worker and has served previous stints in prison.

Prison? The companies should hire him as a consultant.

Louis Auchincloss

Came across citation to a work of his, Scarlet Letters, in Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers. Decided to find the cited book, Scarlet Letters. Started to read it; am enjoying it quite much. Googled Auchicloss, and read his Wikipedia biography.

On of the citation therein is a quote from Gore Vidal: "Of all our novelists, Auchincloss is the only one who tells us how our rulers behave in their banks and their boardrooms, their law offices and their clubs.... Not since Dreiser has an American writer had so much to tell us about the role of money in our lives."^[2].

That led me to look at Vidal's OPAC entry: fairly extensive holdings in Peninsula include 2 autobiographies, two history entries, one about the Bush-Cheney junta, and several in literature.

But, back to Auchincloss. His obit in the Times of New York includes:

His detractors complained that Mr. Auchincloss’s writing was glib and superficial, or else that his subject matter was too dated to be of much interest. Writing in The New York Times in 1984, Michiko Kakutani said that while Mr. Auchincloss “is adept enough at portraying the effects of a rarefied milieu on character, his narrative lacks a necessary density and texture.”


“Like the shiny parquet floors of their apartment houses,” she added, “Mr. Auchincloss’s people are just a little too finely polished, a little too tidily assembled.”

His writing does seem elegant to me, and that is not necessarily a compliment in this context. Another commentator has this:
The author Bruce Bawer, writing in The New York Times Book Review, said that Mr. Auchincloss had the bad luck to live “in a time when the protagonists of literary fiction tend to be middle- or lower-class.”


“These days,” he added, “the general public, though fascinated by the superficial trappings of privilege, seems to have little interest in the deeper truths with which Mr. Auchincloss is passionately concerned — with, that is, the beliefs, principles, hypocrisies, prejudices and assorted strengths and defects of character that typify the American WASP civilization that produced what was for a long time the country’s undisputed ruling class.”


His answer? “Class prejudice” was Mr. Auchincloss’s response to his critics. “That business of objecting to the subject material or the people that an author writes about is purely class prejudice,” he said in an interview in 1997, “and you will note that it always disappears with an author’s death. Nobody holds it against Henry James or Edith Wharton or Thackeray or Marcel Proust.”

Perhaps. Very valid point.

The obit continues: Louis was the third of four children of Priscilla Stanton and Joseph Howland Auchincloss, who, like his father, was a Wall Street lawyer; he was also a third cousin of Franklin D. Roosevelt. (Louis was a cousin by marriage to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who worked with him when she was a book editor later in life.)

Interesting connections.

But the novel received favorable reviews and encouraged him to keep writing while also practicing law. “I think my secret is to use bits and fractions of time,” he said in his 1997 interview. “I trained myself to do that. Anybody can do it. I could write sitting in surrogate’s court answering calendar call.” 

In the novel, Ambrose Vollard, father of Vinnie, one of the main characters, referes to himself as Hadrian, and to his son-in-law and heir-apparent as Antinoüs. Hadrian was a Roman emperor. Antoniüs was a member of the entourage of the Roman Emperor Hadrian, to whom he was beloved. Antinous was deified after his death.

Alain LeRoy Locke

Saw biography of him in New York Review of Books; never heard of him, so I've learned something today. The paperback is newly released.


Alain L. Locke : biography of a philosopher. (2008). Leonard Harris & Charles Molesworth. Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2008.

Alain LeRoy Locke (September 13, 1885 – June 9, 1954) was an American writer, philosopher, educator, and patron of the arts. He is best known for his writings on and about the Harlem Renaissance. He is unofficially called the "Father of the Harlem Renaissance". His philosophy served as a strong motivating force in keeping the energy and passion of the Movement at the forefront .

David Blaine

Saw part of a program on the Travel Channel on David Blaine; fascinated. David Blaine: What is Magic? Not the least of my fascination was his racial and ethnic identity: he seemed black skinned, sort of, but I wasn't sure. Turns out: Blaine was born David Blaine White in Brooklyn, New York and is of Puerto Rican descent on his father's side, and Russian Jewish on his mother's.