Pete Lit

"...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)

"...bearing my responsibility as best I could..."

Curious anecdote of Jane Addams from her early childhood, as recounted in her memoir Twenty Years at Hull-House:

That curious sense of responsibility for carrying on the world's affairs which little children often exhibit because "the old man clogs our earliest years," I remember in myself in a very absurd manifestation. I dreamed night after night that every one in the world was dead excepting myself, and that upon me rested the responsibility of making a wagon wheel. The village street remained as usual, the village blacksmith shop was "all there," even a glowing fire upon the forge and the anvil in its customary place near the door, but no human being was within sight. They had all gone around the edge of the hill to the village cemetery, and I alone remained alive in the deserted world. I always stood in the same spot in the blacksmith shop, darkly pondering as to how to begin, and never once did I know how, although I fully realized that the affairs of the world could not be resumed until at least one wheel should be made and something started. Every victim of nightmare is, I imagine, overwhelmed by an excessive sense of responsibility and the consciousness of a fearful handicap in the effort to perform what is required; but perhaps never were the odds more heavily against "a warder of the world" than in these reiterated dreams of mine, doubtless compounded in equal parts of a childish version of Robinson Crusoe and of the end-of-the-world predictions of the Second Adventists, a few of whom were found in the village. The next morning would often find me, a delicate little girl of six, with the further disability of a curved spine, standing in the doorway of the village blacksmith shop, anxiously watching the burly, red-shirted figure at work. I would store my mind with such details of the process of making wheels as I could observe, and sometimes I plucked up courage to ask for more. "Do you always have to sizzle the iron in water?" I would ask, thinking how horrid it would be to do. "Sure!" the good-natured blacksmith would reply, "that makes the iron hard." I would sigh heavily and walk away, bearing my responsibility as best I could, and this of course I confided to no one, for there is something too mysterious in the burden of "the winds that come from the fields of sleep" to be communicated, although it is at the same time too heavy a burden to be borne alone.

It's interesting that she saw nightmares as involving recognition of one's duty and a crippling inability to perform that duty. It's also fascinating that a mere six-year-old could have been so troubled by her presumed duty that she would try to learn how to make wagon wheels herself, in order to meet the responsibility she envisioned in her dreams. This innate sense of responsibility must surely have compelled her toward the great work she achieved as an adult.

A brewery reborn

This is fantastic: Baltimore's American Brewery, which has been vacant since 1973 and decrepit as recently as 2005, has now been totally restored and renovated into the home of Humanim, a non-profit social service agency. The architect even went to great lengths to repurpose the existing brewery infrastructure into new uses - that second photo above is an old wort tank, now a unique workspace. This is exactly the sort of bold, forward thinking needed for Chicago's Michael Brand Brewery, which now faces demolition. I do realize, however, that any renovation of the Brand complex would inevitably be much less spectacular than American Brewery, as the Brand structure is much more utilitarian in design. Still, saving Brand is something that needs to be done, and I hope someone at least takes the Baltimore example as inspiration in what Brand could become.

Ander Monson

Interesting interview with Ander Monson at The Lit Pub.

I think that every artist feels isolated. There’s a reason why most of us who are drawn to making art are outsiders in one way or another. I suspect you have to engage in that kind of retreat from the world in order to see the thing from enough distance to want to talk about or iterate or engage with it in language or image. I find that even the sort of self-imposed isolation of several hours of silence, that is, me not talking, often starts to build up a tension in me that often leads to a burst of writing.

I would love to read more fiction from Monson one of these years. Other Electricities was great, and even nearly compelled me to vacation in Iron Country.