Pete Lit

"Some bad bourbons are more memorable than good ones."

Walker Percy on the aesthetics, though not the connoisseurship, of bourbon.

But what to say? Take a drink, by now from a proper concave hip flask (a long way from the Delta Coke bottle) with a hinged top. Will she have a drink? No, but that's all right. The taste of bourbon (Cream of Kentucky) and the smell of her fuse with the brilliant Carolina fall and the sounds of the crowd and the hit of the linemen in the single synthesis.

My dad was a bourbon drinker, but I still haven't fully developed a taste for it. I'll still keep trying, partly for the connection to him, and also intend to read Percy's acclaimed The Moviegoer.

Boy's gotta have it.

Sweet book, sweet history, sweet design.

"If you want the basket, put the kittens in the brass thing."

Love this: Mark Twain's notice to "the next burglar."

"...the fiery Spirits blaze..."

I quite enjoy this passage from Alexander Pope's "The Rape of the Lock", on coffee:

For lo! the Board with Cups and Spoons is crown’d,
The Berries crackle, and the Mill turns round.
On shining Altars of Japan they raise
The silver Lamp; the fiery Spirits blaze.
From silver Spouts the grateful Liquors glide,
And China’s Earth receives the smoaking Tyde.

If I ever own a coffeehouse, there will definitely be a "Smoaking Tyde" on the menu.

What I'm writing

I don't want to make too much of this, given my chronic inability to transform fiction concepts into finished manuscripts, but I just wanted to mark this event in case my latest idea ever comes to fruition. Last night I started writing a novel, with the working title "Express." I've been kicking the story around in my head since the late nineties, but only lately has it finally begun to coalesce. It involves three main characters who live very different and separate lives, and though I have a pretty good idea of each character's story, the biggest challenge will be drawing the three of them together. I'm not interested in writing three discrete novellas, but instead one cohesive novel. I will be focusing on this one for the next few months, then set it aside to simmer while I resume the next round of edits for Marshland.

It's too early to tell if anything will ever come of this, but at least I'll have something creative to occupy my mind for a while.

Jane Addams, American Opium-Eater

Surprising anecdote here from Jane Addams from her time at Rockford College during the 1870s:

At one time five of us tried to understand De Quincey's marvelous "Dreams" more sympathetically, by drugging ourselves with opium. We solemnly consumed small white powders at intervals during an entire long holiday, but no mental reorientation took place, and the suspense and excitement did not even permit us to grow sleepy. About four o'clock on the weird afternoon, the young teacher whom we had been obliged to take into our confidence, grew alarmed over the whole performance, took away our De Quincey and all the remaining powders, administrated an emetic to each of the five aspirants for sympathetic understanding of all human experience, and sent us to our separate rooms with a stern command to appear at family worship after supper "whether we were able to or not."

"Weird afternoon", indeed. Hard to believe that the aspiring missionary women at Rockford would have easy access to such a libertine work of literature. Addams is coming across as being much less stodgy than I had expected.

So proud

Maddie, 11-year-old blogger.

Month of Letters

I think I'll give this a try: The Month of Letters Challenge.

I have a simple challenge for you.

1. In the month of February, mail at least one item through the post every day it runs. Write a postcard, a letter, send a picture, or a cutting from a newspaper, or a fabric swatch.
2. Write back to everyone who writes to you. This can count as one of your mailed items.

All you are committing to is to mail 24 items.

Care to hear from me via good old-fashioned snail mail? Drop me your address at pete_anderson [AT] comcast [DOT] net. I can't guarantee that whatever I send will be earth-shattering or even enlightening, but I'll do my best. (And now, thanks to this project, Aztec Camera's "We Could Send Letters" will be stuck in my head for the rest of the day.)

(Via Boing Boing.)

Boy's gotta have it.

Drool.

(Via Boing Boing.)

Honor Bright

Demolition of an old building in Highland Park, Michigan, has revealed two beautiful faded ads. How poignant to realize that the ads first appeared during a time of great prosperity, then were covered up and only revealed again after decades of decline.

When the ads for Honor Bright and Black Beauty first appeared, between 1915 and 1925, Highland Park was in glorious ascent. The Ford assembly lines were humming, and the city had become a desirable community whose population had grown tenfold, to 45,000, in a decade...When the ads reappeared, it was to an entirely different city, one of abandonment, decline and the hope for a return to days when children carried schoolbooks and rode bicycles, carefree and smiling.

And it's always nice to see a quote from my friend Frank Jump, who has really become the go-to guy on faded ads.

"It’s a reminder of our own timeline and how quickly things become obsolete," said Frank Jump, a photographer and the author of Fading Ads of New York City, (The History Press, 2011). "One minute people had thriving businesses building buggies, and the next minute Henry Ford is pushing out automobiles on an assembly line and nobody wants horse and buggies anymore."

Frank's book is next on my buy list.

(Photo credit: Nicole Bengiveno, The New York Times)