Thursday, February 2, 1922. The birth of Checker Cab.

Washington D. C., February 2, 1922.

 

The Checker Cab Manufacturing Company was created on this day Morris Markin, a Russian immigrant, who assembled the company form the failed ruins of several others.  He was only 28 years old.

An incredible figure, he had a gift for business that had demonstrated itself both in Imperial Russia and the United States, with the Russian Jewish immigrant succeeding at nearly everything he touched in spite of the long odds involved.

Checker's were the default American cab for decades, in their final years taking on a 1950s appearance that would last until the last one was produced in 1982.

Checker cab from Wikipedia commons.

The College of Cardinals gathered in Rome to begin the selection process for a new Bishop of Rome and head of the Catholic Church.

This is, I'd note, also the 100th anniversary of the publication of James Joyce's Ulysses, timed for his 40th birthday.

You probably haven't read it.

And if you tried, you probably gave up.

And that's probably because it's crap.

Those are harsh words for a book that's widely heralded, but often people forget why a book makes a splash in the first place.  I suspect that's the case for this book.  A common reaction of people who try to read it is to find that it's "hard going" and they put it down.

This is, I'd note, the same thing that people say about Mein Kampf, which I haven't read, and I'm not going to.  I note that as these two tomes are roughly contemporaneous and lots of copies have been printed that nobody read.  I'm not saying the content is the same.  I am saying that they're both probably crap.

As for Ulysses, it's probably gathering more dust than readers, as it's just not that great.

My exposure to Joyce is from one short story of his I read eons ago while in high school, and frankly it wasn't great.

And while I'm at it, Liam O'Flaherty's short story The Sniper, which we had to read, also isn't great.  M'eh.

Anyhow, Joyce fits in the same category I'd place Hemingway.  He obtained a reputation early on and that made his reputation.  People when they read their books secretly, I think, say "hmmm. . . . not great" as whatever made them "great" in the first place applied only to their time and place, if it even applied to the time and place.  They're preserved today because of that early reputation and because English departments continue to imagine they're great.  But for English departments, they'd be forgotten.  This book, and Finnegan's Wake, are basically not read, based on the commentary you see from honest people who attempted to.