Endnotes 20 September: Fall Foliage, Librarian Sleuths, Haunted Hotels, Grocery Lists & More
Plus bonus PI content and a new episode of The Library of Lost Time
Hello, inquisitive readers! Mel, here…
Dave and I hope you enjoyed listening to our new podcast episode Detective Agency: Discreet Inquiries, Mysteries Solved. Between that show and the nip in the air here in Prague, I feel a bit inspired to don a trench coat and stroll down some shadowy alleys — with a bean shooter in my pocket, keeping an eye out for droppers, and hoping someone will pass me a portrait of Madison. (Sorry, I could not resist the gumshoe slang.)
Insider makes a fun video series that invites experts — chef, pilot, historian, bank robber, fighter pilot, boxer, and more — to assess the realism of how their profession is portrayed on screen. In the installment below, a veteran PI named Andy Kay rates 10 PI scenes for their accuracy. Very entertaining.
(Unrelated but delightful: a pirate historian (!) takes on film and TV pirates.)
Endnotes: 20 September
The photo above was taken on the Charlevoix Crossing (La Traversée de Charlevoix), a long-distance backcountry trail in Québec, Canada. It’s a 65-mile (105km) trail that invites you to hike among the colored leaves. The whole shebang takes about a week, but there’s a more manageable 6-ish-mile (10km) point-to-point hike that’s mostly flat and serves up beautiful views of the St. Lawrence River. For more outdoor fun, here are the best hiking trails in Canada to enjoy fall foliage.
Can’t get to Canada this year? Outside Magazine has the scoop on the 9 most underrated US national parks for fall leaves — and Travel+Leisure has opinions about the 22 best places to see fall foliage in the US. This week-long Hudson River fall foliage cruise looks pretty sweet, too. And in case you’re wondering, the BBC explains why trees lose their leaves.
Very relevant to our interests:Â Cozy mysteries featuring librarian sleuths.
Why, yes, I have wondered… how do archivists package things? ‘Archives in movies and TV often have a certain look: a jumble of odd-sized papers and books (mostly books), crammed on shelves and tables. This stuff looks varied and intriguing… But the archivist’s guilty secret is that most stocked archival shelves look comparatively bland: row on row of identical boxes, filled with identical files, and cryptically labeled.’
Boo! 55 Haunted Hotels Around the World. ‘…from a storied boutique hotel in Manhattan once frequented by Andy Warhol to a permanently docked historic ocean liner haunted by the now-dead crew, to a luxurious Arizona resort occupied by a ghost cowboy. Read on if you dare.’
This statue of Neptune in Spain is a stunner.
I sleep in an eye mask and earplugs every night and have long been halfway obsessed with medieval box beds, which are essentially like sleeping inside a cupboard. So I’m very into the idea of this capsule hotel in Amsterdam that’s all box beds.
Reading books in translation has become one of my favorite reading experiences. And yes! Please, for the love of all that is good, translators’ names belong on the cover alongside the author. This is an interesting essay about the challenges of poetry and translation. ‘While our literary culture remains intent on either dismissing translators as insufficiently masterful or elevating them to something almost author-like — a visibility defined by prizes, awards, and money — mimicry offers a different model of not just authorship but personhood: the mimic is a person infected by the foreign.’
The Ultimate Fall 2024 Reading List — culled from 27 ‘best of’ lists.
These tiny plush cats based on medieval illustrations are so freakin’ cute.
Forget published travel guides, you need to get the password for a Google doc travel guide. ‘The types vary, from Google Maps lists that give a visual perspective into where to find the best spots to a mysterious Microsoft Word Document of Paris recs that’s been passed through so many people, no one knows who first made it.’
I was recently a guest on the Wonders of the World podcast to talk about the synagogues of Prague, my favorite Czech foods, and why I'm still in love with our adopted city.
Whelp, this article from National Geographic made me add Armenia to my must-visit list.
Science! Novel vs. novella vs. novelette vs. short story vs. flash fiction.
The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, has an Impressionist exhibit that looks fantastic. Paris 1874: The Impressionist Moment runs through 19 January 2025. Featuring great works — 130 of them! — by Paul Cézanne, Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, Camille Pissarro, Edouard Manet, and their contemporaries. Plenty of excellent supporting material is on the exhibit website.
Look inside the careful, deliberate design of Julia Child’s kitchen. ‘Her kitchens were distinctive but not glamorous or miraculous. Reflecting principles and skills Julia and Paul Child had developed in earlier careers, these were highly rational spaces, rigorously designed by the couple to support the varied activities and lives that played out there.’
New Episode of The Library of Lost Time
In each mini-podcast episode, we discuss two books at the top of our TBR, then share a fun book- or travel-related distraction. Get all the episodes and books galore here.
World's Best Art Detective and Two New Books
In this episode, we get excited about two books: So Thirsty by Rachel Harrison and The Wildes: A Novel in Five Acts by Louis Bayard. Then Dave shares the exploits of the world’s greatest art detective.
I love all your posts but as spooky season approaches they are even more fantastic!! Your enthusiasm shines through 🙂.
As the year winds down I was wondering if Dave would consider doing a "best graphic novels" or "favorite graphic novels" post. It would be super helpful for shopping purposes and also as an entry point for me! Keep up the fantastic work and enjoy David Tennant on Halloween!! Jealous!!!
While not an archivist (looking back, I probably should have trusted my gut in library school and gone that route), I have had the pleasure of working closely with several of them. I can tell you that processing (ie, the methodical steps involved in taking something from a random piece of mysterious paper found in a box to a precisely filed document which now has meaning and relevance) takes AGES to do. An archivist can spend their entire career and never finish a single collection of donations from a deceased author/artist/scientist/important person. I know a woman who was archiving the Don Bluth archive (You may remember his animated films from the 70s and 80s). After about 9 years, she and her full time assistant were excited when they announced the collection was 11% processed. That means 89% of the contents from his office were still in boxes, completely disorganized and useless until they could get to them. And this was just one collection she was working on. Add in that archives are typically underfunded (Hollinger boxes are insanely expensive and eat up most of the budget), and you're looking at decades of work. But....once completed, or even partially completed, they are a thing of beauty. I have gone from holding a Christmas card from Andy Warhol to holding a receipt for the purchase of a Faberge egg for a shockingly low price (even by 1945 standards!) within seconds. For someone to create a system this research-friendly out of a pile of disorganized papers is incredible. This is the wonder that is a proper archive. Yes the boxes are uniform and boring looking, but they hold magic. The more boring the archives shelves look, the more useful and protected they are. Each box can contain one-of-a-kind ephemera, easily discoverable, housed for generations to come. And it's all done by an archivist, by hand, who creates order from chaos in a way that allows each collection to grow forever, if needed, as new things are discovered. I encourage everyone to visit an archive to see for yourself. They are in every university, every museum (just about), and in many libraries (especially large urban ones). Get a tour. See how it is done. The archivist will probably be happy to answer your questions. Support them with donations and volunteer time. Archives are where civilization is stored forever.