I love books and movies about boarding school, especially British boarding school. I re-visited George Orwell’s essay “Such, Such Were the Joys” this weekend. The title is ironic and the essay is far from nostalgic— abuse, deprivation, and humiliation characterized Orwell’s boarding school experience. Amid the trauma, though, he recalls a few moments of grace. I thought this passage was particularly nice, and, especially on this cold day, it made me wish for summer.
I have good memories of St Cyprian’s, among a horde of bad ones. Sometimes on summer afternoons there were wonderful expeditions across the Downs to a village called Birling Gap, or to Beachy Head, where one bathed dangerously among the boulders and came home covered with cuts. And there were still more wonderful mid-summer evenings when, as a special treat, we were not driven off to bed as usual but allowed to wander about the grounds in the long twilight, ending up with a plunge into the swimming bathe at about nine o’clock. There was the joy of waking early on summer mornings and getting in an hour’s undisturbed reading (Ian Hay, Thackeray, Kipling and H. G. Wells were the favourite authors of my boyhood) in the sunlit, sleeping dormitory. There was also cricket, which I was no good at but with which I conducted a sort of hopeless love affair up to the age of about eighteen. And there was the pleasure of keeping caterpillars — the silky green and purple puss-moth, the ghostly green poplar-hawk, the privet-hawk, large as one’s third finger, specimens of which could be illicitly purchased for sixpence at a shop in the town — and, when one could escape long enough from the master who was ‘taking the walk’, there was the excitement of dredging the dew-ponds on the Downs for enormous newts with orange-coloured bellies.
I was fortunate enough to happen by the “Sexy Soul Oldies” tent on the east side this weekend. The tent’s proprietor is none other than Mr. Goodstuff (pictured below). Apparently, Mr. Goodstuff spins his mix CDs in street fairs and flea markets all around New York, and on Saturday he was in fine form: blaring groove after groove and busting moves for the (completely into it) crowd (including me) gathered in front of his display. His mixes, ranging in title from the prosaic (“Memories,” “Looking Back”) to the gauche (“Slow Grind”) to the sort of delightful (“Oh No He Didn’t”), are excellent. I know this because I bought two of them, and I also took a handout which outlines the playlists for more than a dozen of his mixtapes (which thrilled me, then slightly concerned me for Mr. Goodstuff: doesn’t he know we’ll all take his playlists and re-create them on Spotify or Grooveshark or whatever?).
(Not my photo! via)
Anyway, here’s a selection from Mix 8: “Chillin’ with a Feelin’.” That’s what I’m talking about.
5/6 of the crew
Newport harbor
Taylor Goldsmith (Dawes/Middle Brother) and M. Ward
At the Festival
Just one of the cottages
[video]
The US in 1920s-30s… in color
Lorrie Moore’s opening paragraphs in her piece on ”Friday Night Lights”
For my cube: this mousepad?
All of Russian Lit Scholar Elif Batuman’s Amazon reviews… including a particularly effusive write-up of a book called “A Semester in the Life of a Garbage Bag”
Word-hoard from “The Shipping News”:
waterweed, crenshaw, ruched, excoriation, saucisson, gyred, unguent, dolman, slovenly, tetter, doddering, atavistic, babushka, papillose, tuckamore, pumiced…
AN ICE CREAM SANDWICH SLIDE SHOW