Max Roach

We’re holding a musical vigil in the library office today in tribute to Max Roach who died yesterday at the age of 83. By any measure, Mr. Roach was one of the greatest musicians of the twentieth century. As others have and will eulogize him more adequately than I can, I’ll only add two things: …

“My Dear Kid”: Or, Why Can’t We Have A Nice Blog Post About a Happy Milestone in a Young Man’s Life Without Some G_ddamn Neo-Nazis Butting In?

Our magisterial current exhibition, Chosen: Philadelphia’s Great Hebraica, closes in a couple of weeks. I recently stumbled across the letter above. In honor of the exhibition, I thought I’d post it here. Click on the image above and read it. It was written by Morris Rosenbach (pictured left) to his younger brother A.S.W. (a.k.a. Kid, …

Spooky

We’re doing some cleaning and reorganizing around here. Somebody left the head of Molly Bloom, wrapped in plastic, outside the basement bathrooms. It’s been sitting there for days. It makes me think of poor Laura Palmer. I keep expecting Bob to show up. It’s creepy. Don’t go down there.

Dakota Lessons

The Dakota language primer shown above contains several woodcut illustrations. Most of them are bucolic, Currier & Ives type jobs — farmers working the fields, bonnetted little girls holding flower baskets in quaint cottage door ways, children sailing on a windy, but not threatening, lake, etc., etc. (Most of them depicting scenes not in the …

Bloomsday Is Nigh Upon Us

Bloomsday is this Saturday, June 16th. See you there. I’m not privy to all of the preparations for the glorious occasion, but I sincerely hope our Bloomsday coordinator, the redoubtable Joyce scholar Janine Utell, has arranged for the above scene to be re-enacted tableau vivant-style at the conclusion of the Proteus chapter readings (around 12:45 …

Harry Houdini: Male Human Characterized By Mysteriousness, or the Enigma Wrapped in a Straightjacket and Chains and Then Stuffed in a Milk Can

A colleague brought this unfortunate news item to my attention last week. It seems one of the world’s largest collections of Harry Houdini material went up in flames last December when a crack-smoking burglar set the collector’s house on fire. The smoker, Mr. Jarrod Frederick, escaped the blazing home of Dr. Randall Wolf even if …