Your Morning (Henry) Roth
For Tuesday, September 17th, 2024
Week 78 of our regular morning feature here at Friedman of the Plains Worldwide in which we highlight the great words and works of great men and women, as well as those who are insufferable, delusional, and even fictional.
This Week Henry Roth
“His mother called them his gems and often asked him why he liked things that were worn and old. It would have been hard to tell her. But there was something about the way in which the link of a chain was worn or the thread on a bolt or a castor-wheel that gave him a vague feeling of pain when he ran his fingers over them. They were like worn shoe-soles or very thin dimes. You never saw them wear, you only knew they were worn, obscurely aching”― Call It Sleep
In 1978, I was new to New York City. As an aspiring actor, I worked a variety of jobs, including for several months for Sam Swerdloff, an old man who was lobbying for the City, which had recently been told by Gerald Ford to drop dead (according to the Daily News). Sam had been a WPA painter in the 1930's, and I worked together with this ancient man in an ancient-seeming office somewhere on the lower floors of the Helmsley Building at 46th and Park. All gold and glitz on the outside, the interior seemed preserved but degraded from the days of The Front Page.
By the way, I just google'd Sam, and he was more famous than I had thought. Here's a link to one of his works on the National Gallery of Art website. https://www.nga.gov/collection/artist-info.34055.html
Where's the editor? I may be mistaken, but I think it's spelled "caster".