Pigeons, Pen Shop, and the Gush of Progress
Adam here. Newslettering in the Notes app while flying to Charlotte. Dropping in the links while waiting for my connecting flight.
Here are a few things I wrote down in my Field Notes East Fork “Snakes on the Back” notebook:
Ian Frazier wrote what feels like a real old-school New Yorker feature: how pigeons survive NYC on bare feet. I copied down this: Some of the famous homing pigeons in the Smithsonian's collection: Kaiser, a captured German pigeon; Global Girl, who carried messages around the Mediterranean Theatre in the Second World War; and Cher Ami, the one I'd most hoped to find at Fort Monmouth, to whom the French had awarded the Croix de Guerre. Read the piece through to its epic final line — about pigeons.
From the same issue, I sent Ted a list of New Yorker writers’ favorite shops in NYC. He noted that Rachel Syme is also a pen nerd. She recommends the Fountain Pen Hospital, which has been open since 1946. The fountain pen “savant” who runs the store found the perfect pen for her: “a glossy black Parker Lucky 2½ from the 1920s.” Maybe this one or something like it.
Heard a questionable European on a British podcast say that without a sense of smell, you can barely taste the difference between ketchup and mustard. I thought “barely” was doing a lot of work there. I checked in with a fan of the show without a sense of smell. (Can’t share his name because HIPAA.) He said: “That is nonsense, but I’m not sure what I think ketchup tastes like is what you think mustard smells like.”
I went to the Caspar David Friedrich exhibit at the Met after reading Michael Gorra’s review of the show. While standing in front of Monk By the Sea, I listened to a man repeat all of Gorra’s points about the painting to his wife as though they were his own extemporaneous thoughts.
From Joe Stretch’s novel The Adult — this view of the middle-aged from the early 00s is now aspirational at best: “They show almost no interest in upgrades, and it’s mesmerizing, the ease with which they limit the gush of progress to a drip.”