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Category Archives: Jean Zimmerman
Grandly Whispering
A wash of holiday feeling has come over Grand Central Station and over me as well. After a meeting for business (the business of possibly writing a new book) I went home via the train station, stopping en route at I think my favorite place in all of New York, the Oyster Bar, where the same chef has been working his station at the counter for as many years as I’ve been coming.
I did not slurp down the Fanny Bay or French Kiss shellfish or the Peconic Pearls, but I did have the oyster pan roast, a slight digression from my usual oyster stew and deliciously tomatoey.
Even the dregs are delicious.
The other night at the Union League I met one of the authors of a current book about the restoration of Grand Central and the architect in charge of that effort, Grand Central: Gateway to a Million Lives. During the holiday season the place is at its most bustling, with suburbanites coming in to see The Tree — the ones in my car yesterday stoking themselves with booze on ice before strolling Fifth Avenue, and everyone very cheery about it — and Vanderbilt Hall given over to an overpriced bazaar of gift items.
Tucked in a corner by Track 42, an element of the station overlooked by all the tourists: a vintage board detailing the comings and goings of trains, in a giant vitrine high on the wall. My picture doesn’t due it justice, with its gold paint and dusty old chalk.
That’s one vision of Grand Central. Another is on display in the Ticketed Passenger Waiting Room.
This is the all-natural Grand Central Station, made exclusively with organic materials, bark, twigs, stems, fruits, seeds, and other fibers, on loan from the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx, which does a Holiday Train Show every year featuring iconic New York landmarks, such as the original Penn Station, Radio City Music Hall, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, The New York Public Library on 42nd Street, and the Brooklyn Bridge. If you go there you can find out how artists manage to make magnolia leaf roof shingles. This appeals to that part of me that was obsessed with the children’s book The Borrowers. I spent hours crafting furniture out of acorns and pebbles to stash Hobbit-like between the roots of trees. I love the grand houses I have been writing about but the small, slight, mysteriously miniscule appeals to me just as much.
Grand Central is, of course, grand in every way, but retains pockets of intimacy, like the 2,000-square-foot whispering gallery just outside the Oyster Bar, where I saw passersby keenly huddling to hear each other speak from one arch end to another under Guastavino’s ingeniously constructed tile vaulting. A whisper is a powerful thing on a merry afternoon in old Grand Central.
Filed under Cooking, History, Jean Zimmerman, Writers, Writing
Lip Flap
There wasn’t any book flapping at the Union League Club’s Annual Book Fair — even the big-name authors performed their autographing tasks all on their own — but there was plenty of lip flapping. There was something so mystically gratifying about seeing those mega-selling doyennes Mary Higgins Clark and Linda Fairstein gabbing with each other beside their tables, and something so mystifying about the 10-deep crowd that constantly enveloped wraith-like Ann Coulter at hers. Dava Sobel was there, and Jennifer Egan, and a couple dozen other literary luminaries, in this incredibly luxurious setting, a very far cry from the corner Barnes & Noble.
Glass cases line some of the walls, containing all manner of ancient tin soldiers.
About those soldiers. The club dates back to 1863, when it was formed to support the Union, hence the name, and its first president was the grandfather of Edith Minturn, my subject in Love, Fiercely. A person who probably shouldn’t have done so told me I could find Robert Minturn’s portrait up on the 4th floor, in the President’s Room. So up I went, after dinner, brownie-to-go wrapped sloppily in a paper napkin, and followed the winding old narrow hallways to a room with a brass plaque on the door and smoke wisking out the door jamb. Hello? I asked, entering gingerly. I could barely see the people there, the cigar smoke was so thick. They seemed shocked to see me, but not unpleasantly so, and directed me to the portrait in its gilt frame on the near wall. Liberal, altruistic, sensitive eyes — the man that fathered the man that fathered the woman I wrote about. He was known for caring about the disenfranchised.
The man I shared my book-selling table with had a following among the club’s more neanderthal members, who kept on bellyaching about how now with the election past they were ready to move to New Zealand. Neither Robert Minturn nor myself had much patience for this sort of talk. Turns out the author, Herb London, has a daughter who was profiled in The New York Times today — Stacey London of What Not to Wear. Did you ever imagine she’d end up being a style guru? I asked him. He shook his head. She was a philosophy major, he said, baffled.
Filed under Jean Zimmerman, Love, Fiercely, Writers, Writing
The Library
Libraries form the centerpiece of the world for most writers and for everyone who loves to read and dream.
I was talking with the director of the White Plains Library when I spoke there the other day about how jampacked the place was during Sandy as everyone came in to charge their electronics, but also how being there then represented much more than that. Community. The library scheduled movies so people would have a warm, comforting place to hang out during the storm. There was actually a fancy benefit planned at the library and it was not cancelled, even though people had to get swelled up at home in the candlelight and dark beforehand — it was a grand success.
The White Plains Library is a handsome, modern structure on a downtown street, where anyone would want to come to a movie. How about a place like this, the Vilnius University Library in Lithuania? Does it make you want to snuggle into your sleeping bag with a box of popcorn for a showing of Ghostbusters?
Or the crisp, pristine Biblioteca do Palacio e Convento de Mafra I in Portugal.
These libraries and more beauties can be found at this terrific site for bibliofanatics.
I personally hold with the marble-sculpted halls of the New York Public Library at 42nd Street, but that’s probably because I’ve spent inestimable hours there over the years. If you put me in the Rose Reading Room with a scarf tied around my eyes I would recognize it by the aroma.
I. N. Phelps Stokes managed to get his own private study on the second floor — this was just after the place opened in 1911. You can still find the room, which is now littered with someone else’s stuff but is otherwise unchanged. Stokes wanted to be in the NYPL because he’d be that much closer to the invaluable sources he was drawing upon for The Iconography of Manhattan Island. Maps, antiquarian narratives, they were all there. For the touching.
Which is what we all love about the library. We can lay our fingers on the texts, especially the ones slightly yellowed with age, and touch the history of literature.
Filed under Jean Zimmerman, Love, Fiercely, Writers, Writing
Zimmerman talk at the Spotty Dog, Hudson
Upstate alert! Talk/reading Wednesday night 7pm at The Spotty Dog Books & Ale, 440 Warren Street, Hudson NY. Listen with your favorite beverage. Then get your book signed.
Filed under Jean Zimmerman
The Orphanmaster Tour
I was a little embarrassed when an author who was about to embark on a book tour asked me what stop I’d liked best, and I didn’t have a ready answer. It’s partly because I visited so many places – it will be 32 by Christmas, with more to come in the New Year – and also probably because of my intense self-scrutiny when going “on stage” – e.g., Do I have salad dressing on my top?, Will I mangle the names of the central characters in The Orphanmaster? But some of the stores and other places I spoke at are honestly a little blurry.
So many books…
Not so, these:
R.J.Julia Booksellers, Madison, CT, where the sparkplug owner of the shop had me upstairs behind the scenes to chat until just time to start
Book Passage, Corte Madeira, CA, which presented me with initial-engraved stationery as a keepsake as I went out the door
Bryant Park Reading Room, NYC, in the immense shadow of the New York Public Library I love so much
The Hudson Library, Hudson OH, a new, immaculate cathedral of a place that drew hordes of readers to my talk
The University Settlement Society,, where I spoke about Love, Fiercely, and met an outspoken descendant of my subject, I.N. Phelps Stokes
A stint at the continuing care facility where my folks live, with beaming, encouraging faces all through the audience
And finally the Miami Book Fair, a swirling, euphoric chaos of books and authors, where volunteers held the doors open for me when I entered the author hospitality suite and made me feel like a queen.
These are just a few highlights of the tour for which I am so thankful, which made me appreciate anew the affection people have for reading and for books, and even sometimes for authors.
Filed under Jean Zimmerman, Love, Fiercely, Publishing, The Orphanmaster, Writers
Flaps and Clips
Yesterday at the White Plains Library, after I had the excitement of meeting the Mayor, there were about 25 books that the local Barnes & Noble wanted me and the other author, Karen Engelmann, to sign. Then they put a sticker on the cover and apparently that drives business.
Gil was nice enough to flap the books for me. A term that means taking each book in turn and turning to the title page and inserting the left-hand cover flap there, making it easy and faster for the author to grab the book and turn to the right spot and just sign. No fumbling, no muss no fuss. It’s common when you come in to a book store for an event to be introduced to a staff like this: Here’s Bob, he’s going to flap the books for you.
Speaking of which, I learned yesterday about a subset of the Flappers of the ’20s called the Shifters, a group that identified themselves by the paper clips on their lapels and were renowned for a short time petting parties and other indicators of loose morals. They took up terms such as “ankling along” for taking a walk and “tomato” for a girl who likes to dance but has no brains, and some less known today, like the “destroyer,” one who dances on your feet.
Sidebar: When I trolled through the Stokes archives at the New York Public Library to research Love, Fiercely, I found that most of the pages, dating to the beginning of the 20th century, were bound together by straight pins, now somewhat rusty. I assumed that paper clips had yet to be invented, or popularized. Now I discover that paper clips had been invented in the 19th century and were in use by the 1890s — and certainly by the ’20s, the Flapper Era. Perhaps in the ’20s they represented, for the Shifters, the newest, coolest thing going.
Old-fangled Clip
Filed under History, Jean Zimmerman, Love, Fiercely, The Orphanmaster
All Kinds of Good
On a wintry day we drive the back roads to Thompson’s Cider Mill for Geoff Thompson’s last day of the season. We buy gallons of cider to keep on the porch. Arkansas Blacks available, the first I’ve brought home this year, hard as rocks and dark as soot. On the way we pass through Croton Gorge, some surprising old light industry on the left.
I didn’t know the general had his headquarters in Croton.
A handsome hawk swoops up from the gutter of the road, carrying its prey.
A shimmer of ice across the lake at Teatown Nature Preserve.
Those apple muffins from the Cider Mill sure taste good on a cold morning.
Filed under Home, Jean Zimmerman
The Raptor
Vultures devouring corpses deliberately left in a public place to have their bones picked. And that’s a good thing. So I hear in this remarkable story about Mumbai, and how residents are trying to restore a ritual that was lost because the Advil patients got in hospitals before they died was killing off the raptors that were supposedly feeding on them… it’s a bit convoluted, but brings me to a question I’ve had in the last couple of years. Has the number of raptors in our region changed? Specifically, has it increased? We walked out to get the mail yesterday and a big, fat hawk flew low over our heads and perched on a branch, preening. There are always so many hawks and vultures in the sky, along the roads. I don’t remember noting their presence in the past. Or was I just insensate?
Filed under Jean Zimmerman, Nature
Gearing Up for Knit-mas
We’re stepping back from the grid for the holidays. I heard on the news that the most searched-for items on Cyber Monday were Kindle Fires and Uggs. Well, maybe because I already have a Fire and once had some Ugg slippers (since dog-devoured), but I have agreed with Gil and Maud to keep a tight lid on domestic spending this Christmas. I won’t say how low the lid is, it sounds ridiculous, but I will say that there will be quite a few knitted presents emanating from my hearth. Probably some preserves, too.
Who is this for? I won’t say. Maybe Santa.
Something Knitted
Now, this doesn’t mean that anyone else planning a gift for me should necessarily put a lid on their spending…!
Filed under Home, Jean Zimmerman, Knitting
Continuing Care
Today I’ll be speaking at Kendal on Hudson, in Sleepy Hollow, New York. It’s a continuing care retirement community, which means, if my prior experience visiting one is any guide, that it’s filled with older yet peppy people who are fairly avid readers. Like many of us they prefer to check books out from the library rather than go ahead and purchase a copy. Still, I know I will have gracious and intent faces in the crowd at Kendal, and an abundance of questions. I hope that they will appreciate hearing a story so few people know — that of I.N. Phelps Stokes and Edith Minturn, their intellect, eccentricity, altruism and love of beauty, among other traits.
Here they are as young marrieds, a picture in my slide show.
Filed under Jean Zimmerman, Love, Fiercely, Publishing
Wm & H’ry
If you are as fascinated by the Family James — Henry and William and Alice, but also their father Henry Sr., mother Mary, and the two younger brothers Wilkie and Bob — as I am, then you may applaud a website devoted to correspondence between the two eldest brothers. (William as a young Harvard instructor plays an important role in Savage Girl.)A scholar named J.C. Hallman is putting together a book of letters for eventual publication by the University of Iowa Press. Every day he offers raw quotes from the letters. For instance, today he shares a letter from Henry that reports on his activities with William’s wife and daughter, whom he is hosting while William is at a sanatarium being treated for a heart ailment:
“No news to add to-day but the perpetuity of our peace & harmony — a monotony of happy quiet, of walks over acres of grass & miles of meadow, with tea at Boon’s Hill, mainly as a break — to which exquisite windless weather, the last heavy stillness of ripe summer, much contributes. Beautiful sunsets, neat, frugal dinners, evenings as peaceful as the afternoons, complete the charm.”
Check out Wm & H’ry and then I strongly recommend you go back to reread Turn of the Screw and Daisy Miller, two of my faves.
Filed under History, Jean Zimmerman, Savage Girl, Writers
Layin’ on the Bacon
Still feeling stuffed from your Thanksgiving meal? Still eating that same Thanksgiving meal, from stuffing to nuts? You bet. And yet, somehow, something was lacking at Thanksgiving.
Bacon.
You can now wrap yourself in bacon.
A German artist named Nathalie Luder makes undeniably authentic scarves of finest crepe de chine to wrap around your throat when the wind is chill, or just when you’re feeling stylin’. Check out her site, here.
Filed under Art, Jean Zimmerman
Back to Woodstock
Back to Byrdcliffe. The artist’s colony in Woodstock, New York sits on the side of a mountain and consists of arts and craft style cabins in dark wood with no insulation and windows that look out on a quiet wooded landscape.
We came here 25 years ago, newlyweds, to spend a long summer hiatus writing poems and drinking blueberry daiquiris, or was that writing daiquiris and drinking blueberry poems. Now we found our cabin none the worse for the wear.
It always reminded me of a pup tent, it was so small and narrow, only one room wide. And yet the man who founded the colony in 1902, Ralph Radcliffe Whitehead, believed strongly in the healthful properties of bathing, so our little cabin and every other was equipped with an eight-foot porcelain tub whose pipes were fed by mountain stream water.
I made a summer study out of the screened-in front porch, which had sloping loose floorboards, into whose cracks Gil one day lost his new gold wedding band, sending him down on his knees to pry up the wood to find it.
I thought I would be a poet forever.
The village of Woodstock had remained almost the same. This was different, though, a sign by the wayside put up by someone with a sly sense of humor.
Filed under History, Jean Zimmerman, Writing
Jean Zimmerman 