Welcome to OSV Field Notes, a weekly, high-signal curation of things worth your time.
This week: familiar things, fresh eyes. New York through a painter’s camera, 26 years of change in the same Bach, a monster who deserves a hearing, an architecture book that makes you notice the room you’re sitting in, and a TED talk that makes getting lost in Wikipedia feel like time well spent.
1. Early Color : A Photographer’s Eye, a Painter’s Colors
I was hunting books in a Charleston thrift store when I noticed a stack of obscure art and photography books piled in the corner. My spidey-sense kicked in. Buried in the pile was a book whose cover immediately grabbed my attention — a photograph so layered with color and abstraction it looked more like a Rothko painting than a photograph. It was Early Color by Saul Leiter, published by Steidl in 2006. It was a signed first edition. I couldn’t have bought it fast enough.
Until this book was published, almost nobody outside a small circle of gallerists knew that Saul Leiter had been shooting color on the streets of New York since the late 1940s — decades before color photography was taken seriously as art. Leiter was a founding member of the New York School of Photography, a contemporary of Robert Frank and Diane Arbus, but his personal color work sat in boxes for half a century while he made his living shooting fashion for Harper’s Bazaar and Esquire. He was the son of a prominent Pittsburgh rabbi, expected to enter the rabbinate, who left home at 22 and was disowned by his father for choosing art over the Talmud.
His first love was painting — abstract watercolors that caught the attention of the Abstract Expressionists on 10th Street — and that painterly eye defined everything he shot. His photographs see New York through rain-streaked windows, snow-blurred intersections, and fields of solid color that dissolve into form if you slow down long enough to look. He once said he liked “things that are lost in a fuzz or in a mist.” Early Color was his first monograph, published when he was 82 years old. His gallerist said he went from making two or three sales a year to two or three sales a week.
The book was small enough, by Leiter’s own request, to fit on the table beside his bed. That it ended up in a thrift store in Charleston is the kind of thing Leiter, who spent a lifetime finding beauty in places nobody else was looking, would probably have appreciated. [Taylor]
2. Glenn Gould’s Two Goldbergs, 26 Years Apart
Glenn Gould recorded Bach’s Goldberg Variations in 1955, when he was 22, and again in 1981, at 48. I love Bach. He tingles a part of my brain that most other composers don’t reach. While many other performers have recorded great Goldbergs, I find that Gould’s two versions talk to each other in a special way.
If you have five minutes, try listening to the opening Aria from each recording, one after the other. You rarely get to hear 26 years of change in someone quite so directly.
Before going back into the studio in 1981, Gould listened to his old recording for the first time in years. He still recognized his own technical fingerprints, but, as he told Tim Page: “I could not recognize or identify with the spirit of the person who made that recording.”
It’s a bit like the old saying that you can’t step into the same river twice, because it’s neither the same river nor the same person. The notes on the page hadn’t changed. But Gould had. And so have I over the years that I’ve been listening to these. At various times, I’ve preferred the youthful 1955 version or the more reflective 1981 one. [Liberty]
🎵 Goldberg Variations — 1955 recording (Spotify)
🎵 Goldberg Variations — 1981 recording (Spotify)
3. Frankenstein : Read the Creature’s Side of the Story
I read classic novels. A lot. Most of them are worth the read. But if you were to ask me “What books do you think everyone needs to read?” this one is on a very short list.
Film and stage adaptations have done a particular hack-job on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. But no monster story I’ve come across has so much richness to offer.
If you’re picturing a flat-headed, lumbering, green mute with bolts sticking out of his neck, get rid of that image.
Frankenstein is one of the greatest stories of duality I’ve ever read. You have the reckless ambition of Victor, obsessed with being the first to understand how to create life. But the part almost every adaptation leaves out is the story of the monster. A being born into an uncaring world. With the innocence – and emotional control – of a toddler, but in the body of a super-soldier. He only wants acceptance, but because of his appearance no human gives him a chance to prove that he is worthy of love (except the blind De Lacey, who listens and offers help).
His descent into becoming a real monster comes only as a response to being utterly rejected by humanity.
You will not be prepared for the existential depth you get from a character that Hollywood most often treats as a mute or simple-minded abomination. The creature reads Paradise Lost and tries to understand whether he is more like Adam or Satan.
On top of all of that, Victor Frankenstein is a complex character. He is guilty in the sense that he created the monster, but he wrestles with his own guilt far more than any screen adaptation gives him credit for. In fact, the most beautiful aspect of the story, to me, is the conflict between two strong-willed beings, Frankenstein and his monster, whose incompatible goals drive them toward mutual destruction.
The Del Toro movie that came out in 2025 is the closest we’ve gotten to a faithful adaptation, but it still doesn’t come close to the depth that Mary Shelley created at 19 while on a rainy vacation.
I could soap-box on why this book is worth your time for much longer, but in the words of my childhood storytelling hero LeVar Burton, you don’t have to take my word for it. [Jameson]
📕 Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
4. A Pattern Language : Why Some Places Feel Right
Think of a building that you love being in. Of a room you enjoy spending time in.
You can probably picture where you’d sit, how the light comes in, what you’d see through the window. Christopher Alexander and his collaborators spent years paying attention to things like these. Their 1977 book, A Pattern Language, gives you a vocabulary for understanding why a place works. How a lot of small decisions add up to a whole that clicks together.
For example, a memorable pattern is Light on Two Sides of Every Room. If you’re talking to someone with a bright window behind them, their face can disappear into shadow. Bringing daylight in from another direction softens that contrast, making it easier to see the small changes in their expression. As the authors put it: “The light on two sides allows people to understand each other.” It’s the kind of thing that once you know, you always notice. And I do find that the rooms that feel best have great light coming from multiple directions.
The book is about architecture, but that way of thinking transfers to other things. When something works, it’s worth asking what made it possible. Was it luck, or were there specific conditions you could recreate? Giving a pattern a name helps you recognize it elsewhere, share it with others, and use it again. You start building up a vocabulary for your own life. [Liberty]
📙 A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander and collaborators
5. The Life-Long Learner : The Talk I Watch Every January
Every year, usually in January, I watch a video that I’ve seen about a dozen times. It’s a TED talk by the former president of Wofford College, Ben Dunlap. It’s only about 20 minutes long, but it’s left an indelible impression on me, so much so that I return to it annually.
You should just watch the whole thing, because anything I write about it won’t do it justice. It’s one person’s impassioned plea for lifelong learning and curiosity. That can sound obvious, even annoyingly earnest. But Dunlap sells it, and he does it in a way that makes you want to learn everything under the sun.
The talk mixes his personal story with the stories of the other great, passionate learners he’s known throughout his life. Among them is Sandor Teszler, a Hungarian Holocaust survivor who audited classes at Wofford well into his nineties. Dunlap met him there when Teszler was 90.
Dunlap is a master speaker, and he presents his thesis with conviction and pathos and drama and humor. Every time I watch it, I’m reminded of why I enjoy writing books or going down obscure historical rabbit holes. He revives the part of myself that I am too often self-conscious about; he makes me feel like it’s okay to lose myself in Wikipedia entries for a few hours.
It’s rare that one video stays with you this long, but this one has. Check it out, and then tell me you didn’t want to go read something afterward. [Jimmy]
📺 The Life-Long Learner — Bernie Dunlap (2007, 19 minutes)
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