Stateside dispatch
Catholic lino, meeting my publisher, having 'an accent'
Ciao,
I write from Massachusetts, where last evening I spoke to students and faculty in the library of the College of the Holy Cross. I knew fairly little about the college when I got the invite, only that the professor who’d asked me was really cool, but I wound up learning about something I hadn’t considered in detail before: what Catholics did in the US before Protestant institutions would let any meaningful number of them in. ‘Found Holy Cross in 1843’ was one of the answers. I was shocked how familiar the interior of the buildings looked to me: I hadn’t consciously thought of ‘Catholic’ as a decor style, but even the lino on the stairs looked exactly like the ones you see in Irish convent institutions. (And in ones that aren’t officially Catholic-affiliated at all, since it’s still mostly Catholics who made the decor choices.)
Anyway, here are some observations from the past few days here and New York.