"So, buy books at an estate sale, remove the dust jackets, then organize by color? Fire the podcaster and rehire your book reviewers."

Says a commenter at the WaPo article "The multiuse home space trend is coming for your dining room/A DIY dining library can create the perfect space for reading, crafting, work or dining with friends. Here’s how to get one."

The article is verbiage about putting bookshelves in the dining room. The author is Jolie Kerr. Was she a podcaster? I look it up. Wikipedia says:

Jolie Kerr (born 1976) is an American writer and podcast host. Her book, My Boyfriend Barfed in My Handbag... and Other Things You Can't Ask Martha, was a New York Times best-seller.... Writing for The New York Times, Dwight Garner called My Boyfriend Barfed 'the Lorrie Moore short story, or the Tina Fey memoir, of cleaning tutorials...[a] wise and funny new book.' At NPR Linda Holmes praised Kerr as 'at her most irresistible when she's handling the kinds of awkward questions that do traditionally go unanswered in your women's magazines and your perky home-maintenance shows.... Kerr now hosts a podcast... called Ask A Clean Person.

I can see why WaPo wants a writer like that, but this books-in-the-dining room thing is pretty ridiculous, and it is upsetting that WaPo canned the book review.

"Mr. Clean was first devised in the mid-1950s, when Procter & Gamble commissioned a commercial artist, Richard Black, to create a marketing character..."

"... for a new detergent-based household cleaner. The company envisioned a bald man with a nose ring, a nod to the genie-like powers of a product that cleaned 'like magic.' Mr. Black, who died in 2014, drafted two sketches of a strong, smiling genie: one with a nose ring, and one with an earring. Procter & Gamble chose the second one...."

From "Mr. Clean, the Bald, Broad-Shouldered Cleaning Mascot, Retires The character became the face of a household cleaner in 1958. It’s not clear what the brand plans for its next mascot" (NYT).

At Straight Dope, there's skepticism: "Its a marketing ploy to draw attention to a brand that has been taken for granted. He will come out of retirement"/"Yeah, like when Mr. Peanut 'died' a few years ago."

A retrospective:

 

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"I’ve come to lean on the daily mechanics of the kitchen for much-needed meditation, and on my kitchen meditation — if it can be called that — for the energy to cook...."

"It’s exactly what makes daily cooking so demanding — the volatility of the materials, metal pans that conduct frighteningly high heat, the perishability of vegetables and meat and milk — that shapes it into such good material for noticing.... Find a time when the sun is low and, without self-censure, take an inquisitive inventory of the flotsam beneath your kitchen table. Mine is an elaborate collage. There are two kinds of beans.... There’s a chunk of sourdough bread. There’s a chink off a chestnut, a piece of apple core, some leaves, a coil of thin white thread. Beneath my table is a topographic model of my family’s life, painted in golden light: the beans and leaves and string that we’ve shelled and tracked in and with which we’ve sewed. It looks, suddenly, too sweet to alter, too poignant to sweep up. Who dropped the bread and decided, absorbed in conversation, to leave it there?"

Writes Tamar Adler, in "My Antidote to Early Evening Despair" (NYT), which is adapted from her book "Feast on Your Life: Kitchen Meditations for Every Day" (commission earned).

I liked that romanticizing of detritus. And the notion of kitchen meditation is a good counterbalance to the TikTok trend of de-normalizing cooking:

"In 2011 the museum had problems with a 4-14m installation called Peanut Butter Platform by Wim T Schippers."

"Unsuspecting visitors stepped in the thick layer of peanut butter smeared on the gallery floor at least three times. They were given a clean-up bill."

From "Child damages €50m Rothko in ‘unguarded moment’ at museum/The abstract painting will undergo restoration works after it was scratched at the Boijmans Van Beuningen museum in Rotterdam" (London Times).

If the peanut butter people had to pay for peanut butter "clean-up," does that mean the parents will pay for the restoration needed after this "number of visible scratches in the unvarnished paint layer... caused by a child who scratched the underside of the work in an unguarded moment"?

"Scratched the underside"... I'm trying to picture that. I'm guessing the child did not scratch the front surface or the back of the painting, but the bottom edge of what was an unframed painting.

I ask Grok: "Did Rothko leave paintings unframed and paint the edges (the part 90° from the surface plane)?"

Answer: "Yes, Mark Rothko often left his paintings unframed and painted the edges of the canvas (the sides at 90° from the surface). He typically wrapped the paint around the edges to create a seamless, immersive experience, emphasizing the painting as an object rather than a framed window. This approach complemented his large-scale, abstract works, where the edges were integral to the viewer's encounter with the color fields. However, practices varied slightly depending on the piece and period, with some works later framed for exhibition or preservation purposes."

Perhaps the child was fascinated by the seamless, immersive experience and became a tad too immersed.

AND: Astoundingly, Rothko painted a peanut butter sandwich!

"Women are actually adult human beings with agency and freedom of choice. They could choose, like men..."

"... to spend less time on cleaning and household chores, and more time on exercise. They are free to do that if they want to. They could say 'no' to some, or many, of those other people, including family members, who make demands on their time. They are free adults who can choose what to do. 'Women are oppressed victims of patriarchy' isn't actually the only possible lens with which to view gender issues, although one would never know that from reading the New York Times."

Writes someone in Tribeca named Macaulay, commenting over at the NYT article "Even Exercise Has a Gender Gap/Women have less time to work out than men. And their health pays the price."

The article begins with an anecdote about a woman trying to use her elliptical machine and getting interrupted, first by her husband telling her that their daughter wants her to come say goodnight and then by her son who had the non-problem of needing "help finding something to do." The woman responds to both interruptions by getting off the machine.

"We’re not judging you for the soap that you use. But, collectively, that can add up as billions of people wash their hands or bathe..."

"... hundreds or thousands of times a year. If you’re so inclined, it makes sense to switch to a more eco-friendly product. Just understand that there may be a trade-off between sustainability and comfort. 'The consumer has to decide: Are they serious about where their soap comes from, whether it’s synthetic or natural?...'"

From "Bar soap or body wash: Which is best for your skin and the planet? Depending on its ingredients and packaging, your soap could cut as much as a third of the carbon emissions from your next shower" (WaPo).

So: Don't feel judged, but feel judged. "We’re not judging you"... but you — you conscientious people — need to step up and judge yourself.

That reminds me. I'm reading a book — "Morning After the Revolution" by Nellie Bowles (commission earned) — and here's how the chapter "The Most Important White Woman in the World" begins:

"If you break it down, there’s actually so many steps that are involved with showering...."

"A single shower might include undressing, turning on the water, lathering, hair-washing, shaving, rinsing, drying off and choosing what to wear. For someone without depression... moving through those steps might feel seamless, like watching a flip book animation in which the transitions are nearly invisible. But for someone with depression, the same process may feel like flipping one page at a time, with each additional step making the undertaking seem increasingly daunting.... The subsequent inability to shower can reinforce the belief that you can’t do anything right.... That can cause a feedback loop where poor hygiene actually exacerbates the underlying symptoms that prevented the shower in the first place."

From "Why Is It So Hard to Shower When I’m Depressed? Issues with hygiene are common symptoms of depression. Here’s why, and how to make bathing a little easier" (NYT).

"He stuck his finger in the mouth to see if he might wiggle the piece loose. 'And my finger came back wet,' he said."

"'I thought about it for a half-second longer and said, "Oh my God, my finger is wet,"' he recalled. 'I got my flashlight out and shined it in there, and the thing is completely full of liquid,' he said. He summoned colleagues. They were stunned. Here was 'an out-of-the-box, next level, spectacular find,' said Jason Boroughs, Mount Vernon’s principal archaeologist.... 'There are whole, recognizable cherries,' said Boroughs. 'It actually smelled like cherry blossoms when we got to the bottom.'"

From "Centuries-old bottles of cherries unearthed at George Washington’s home/The two, rare intact bottles, about 250 years old, were discovered by archaeologists working in the Mount Vernon basement" (WaPo).

I would have thought they'd have cleaned out the basement by now. This is a feel-good story on so many levels.

This American streetscape is a mood test.

Photographed from an F-150 at 8:21 yesterday, in Terre Haute, Indiana.

It may express delight or despair. I won't impose the photographer's intent on you.

"Born in 1943 to a New York family of tactile pragmatists (her father helped invent the X-Acto knife), Glück, a preternaturally self-competitive child..."

"... was constantly trying to whittle away at her own perceived shortcomings. When she was a teenager, she developed anorexia — that pulverizing, paradoxical battle with both helplessness and self-control — and dropped to 75 pounds at 16. The disorder prevented her from completing a college degree. Many of the poems Glück wrote in her early 20s flog her own obsessions with, and failures in, control and exactitude. Her narrators are habitués of a kind of limitless wanting; her language, a study in ruthless austerity. (A piano-wire-taut line tucked in her 1968 debut, 'Firstborn': 'Today my meatman turns his trained knife/On veal, your favorite. I pay with my life.') In her late 20s, Glück grew frustrated with writing and was prepared to renounce it entirely...."

From the NYT's annual roundup of short essays about people who died in the past year — "The Lives They Led" — I've chosen a bit of Amy X. Wang's essay on the Nobel Prize-winning poet Louise Glück.

I loved the X-Acto/exactitude theme — the whittling away, the meatman and his trained knife, and the potential to end up with nothing.

ADDED: I wondered if — in 20 years of blogging — I had ever before used the word "exactitude." It's a great word, and I thought, perhaps I'd never used it. But I see I've used it twice, both times in 2018.

"We love what we take care of, and we take care of what we love. Instead of groaning at the task of treating my cast-iron skillet..."

"... I now treat it as a fulfilling act of service; I know that my time seasoning it with salt and oil will affect its life span and the palate of future generations. I scrub away at the hand-me-down dinnerware from my father-in-law, and I’m connected to him. In an unexpected way, pride has seeped into my kitchen work. Cleanliness is a matter of principle.... Carl Jung once said, 'Modern man can’t see god because he doesn’t look low enough.' Will you find God in your kitchen sink?"

Writes Tyler Shane, in "You don’t need to meditate. Just wash your dishes by hand" (WaPo).

A sense of profundity attaches to one of my cast-iron pans — the one that I grew up hearing called the "spider." It is, I believe, older than I am. I use it all the time and can't imagine what one might do to it that would make it need any more seasoning. Is that low enough?

"I solved this very simple with my kids. Clean up or the toys go in jail. I swept everything in a black garbage bag..."

"... taped the top up with masking tap[e], and put a date on it with one week out. If you don't want to lose your toys for a week, clean up your mess kids!"

A comment on the NY Post article, "My husband didn’t do any chores while I worked 10-hour days so I’m getting a divorce."

Coaster found inside 1961 copy of "Tropic of Cancer."

I was just rearranging my bookshelves, mostly planning to trash decrepit mass-market paperbacks, but I'll keep this. It was, undoubtedly, bought by my parents and read — perhaps only up to page 163 — and then migrated to my house after my parents were both [word in the upper right hand corner, above].

Headstone cleaner?!

We're repainting the rooms in the 100-year-old part of our house, and — instead of, once again, painting around the brass hardware on the windows and in the closets — for the first time, these various pieces got removed. Every time the trim had been repainted, the painter had slopped some paint onto the metal, and each painter, it seems, felt as though they were only following the paint-slopping tradition. On the window handles, I myself had recently chosen to close up the gaps and paint the entire surface.

But all those hooks in the coat closet looked like a lot of trouble to paint around, and we got the idea to unscrew everything. Was this going to involve paint stripper? No! I looked it up on the internet, and it turns out what you need is a crockpot. So we did unscrew all the window and closet hardware — 30 items, plus over 100 screws — and cook them overnight in water and Dawn detergent. 

"When you ask Americans how they save energy at home, 'turn off the lights' has been at the top of the list since the 1980s."

"But when it comes to actual savings, it doesn’t even crack the top 10. Like most conventional wisdom about how to reduce household energy and emissions, much of what we believe about our homes and appliances is wrong."

Writes WaPo's climate advice columnist Michael J. Coren, in "We still use appliances like it’s 1970. There’s a better way."

I formed the habit, back in the 1970s, of turning off lights as I exited any room and only keeping lights on in rooms that were occupied. I grew up in the 50s and 60s, when it was the norm to have the lights on all over the house in the evening. We didn't think about the pros and cons of leaving them on, but I imagine that we'd have thought it would deprive us of a feeling of coziness and optimism if the house were not lit up at night. From the outside, our house and our neighbors' houses looked warm and happy and alive.

"If Kondo-ing puts the emphasis on purging, then knolling emphasizes keeping and organizing...."

"[I]t was contemporary artist and provocateur Tom Sachs who popularized Knoll’s last name as a shorthand for the method of 'arrang[ing] like objects in parallel or ninety-degree angles as a method of organization.'... The style boomed in marketing and advertising, known as 'flat-lay' photography.... [Knolling] feels more significant than just organizing tools in a workshop. Think of it as a picturesque and deliberate way of arranging that can be applied to our homes: Curate a vignette of sharply stacked novellas next to like-minded trinkets on your bedside table or hang your ceramic mugs and coffee gadgetry together like it belongs in an art gallery. Perhaps now is the year when knolling and Kondo-ing can meet somewhere in the middle. Get rid of the things you dislike, yes, but otherwise, embrace your tchotchkes and ephemera. Keep them and organize them with newfound order and purpose."

From "The Life-Changing Magic of 'Knolling'/Before purging your belongings to tidy up à la Marie Kondo, consider this organizational tactic championed by two artists with ties to the American furniture manufacturing company" (Dwell).

Curate a vignette of sharply stacked novellas next to like-minded trinkets on your bedside table.... Who would do that? A character in a novella? And what are "like-minded trinkets" — I didn't know trinkets had minds — and wouldn't elaborately stacked and arranged items on a bedside table scream that you're never going to do anything that would knock them over? 

"Along the walls of the little clinic sat disheveled-looking men, their feet in plastic buckets, while nurses bent over them, speaking softly...."

"[Dr. Jim] O’Connell recognized many of these homeless men.... [H]e’d seen them in the Mass General emergency room, sullen, angry, snarling, resisting all treatment. Here they seemed so docile that they might have been drugged, via foot soaking.... You filled a plastic tub halfway up with Betadine and put the patient’s feet in it.... [Y]ou always addressed the patient by his surname and an honorific — 'Mr. Jones.'... [O'Connell] spent three afternoons and evenings there each week, soaking feet and not doing much else for more than a month. Among the regulars was a very large elderly man usually dressed in three layers of coats, with wary eyes and a salt-and-pepper beard and a great wave of white-and-gray hair that seemed to be in flight.... He was classified as a paranoid schizophrenic, and his chart was thick... [and he] had always refused to take medications or to be admitted to the hospital.... [His feet] were so huge and swollen that O’Connell had to prepare a separate tub for each...."

Writes Tracy Kidder, in "'You Have to Learn to Listen': How a Doctor Cares for Boston’s Homeless/Lessons from Dr. Jim O’Connell’s long crusade to treat the city’s 'rough sleepers'" (NYT).

"[O]ne evening, as O’Connell knelt on the floor filling the tubs, he heard the old man say, 'Hey, I thought you were supposed to be a doctor.... So what the hell you doin’ soakin’ feet?'... About a week later, he put his feet in the buckets and said to O’Connell: 'Hey, Doc. Can you give me something to help me sleep?' He never slept for more than an hour, he said. Within about a month, O’Connell had him taking a variety of medicines for his many ailments. Foot-soaking in a homeless shelter — the biblical connotations were obvious. But for O’Connell, what counted most were the practical lessons...."

Are the "biblical connotations" not "practical"?

"The anti-clutter nags conflate two distinct forms of materialism. In behavioral psychology terms, 'terminal materialism' refers to..."

"... acquiring and valuing an object purely for its intrinsic properties — like a fancy new iPhone (that will inevitably become obsolete). The worthless-looking junk we hang on to often exemplifies 'instrumental materialism,' valued for its connection to another person, a place, a time in our lives, a meaningful affiliation. These can take obvious forms — a wedding ring, a crucifix. But they can also be as eccentric and inscrutable as an abundance of paperweights or a ceramic leprechaun."

Writes Rob Walker in "Clutter Is Good for You" (NYT).

Walker quotes a book by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-Halton that asserted: "We began to notice that people who denied meanings to objects also lacked any close network of human relationships."

A disturbing challenge to minimalists!

Recently, I threw some books in the trash... well, the recycling bin... but you know what I mean: I threw books out.

I wanted to tell you to help you. I'm prompted by "We’re drowning in old books. But getting rid of them is heartbreaking. 'They’re more like friends than objects,’ one passionate bookseller says. What are we to do with our flooded shelves?" by Karen Heller (WaPo).

Book lovers are known to practice semi-hoardish and anthropomorphic tendencies. They keep too many books for too long despite dust, dirt, mold, cracked spines, torn dust jackets, warped pages, coffee stains and the daunting reality that most will never be reread. Age rarely enriches a book.

"Strict gender roles have governed domestic life in Japan for generations. Men often retire without ever having held a paring knife..."

"... or washed a dish. Those who lose a spouse often find themselves unable to do the most rudimentary chores. An old Japanese saying — 'Danshi-chubo-ni-hairazu,' or 'men should be ashamed to be found in the kitchen' — has spooked husbands from most any housework. Even those who wanted to help typically lacked the know-how.... Simmering resentments frequently come to a head once a man’s career ends and his wife starts to question the arrangement, Tokukura said. 'The power dynamic changes. The wife asks, "Why do I have to do all the housework if you are no longer bringing in the money?"'"

From "Older Japanese men, lost in the kitchen, turn to housework school" (WaPo).

At housework school, old men meet other other old men: