Topical Guide 186
Mark Dorset
Boats: Lean Blue Sloop
They owned three boats: a working boat, a barge really, that they used for carrying freight from the mainland, and, in The Missing Garage, used to transport an entire Esso gas station; a sailboat, a lean blue sloop that Larry was permitted to sail by himself and on which Larry’s sister enjoyed sunning herself; and a speedboat, a mahogany Chris Craft speedboat with a twelve-cylinder engine. On the mainland, they owned a small piece of waterfront property in the town of Murky Bay, where they had a dock, a boathouse for the speedboat, and a garage in which they kept a Jaguar Saloon and a war-surplus Jeep.
Little Follies, “Call Me Larry”
Imagine, please, the lassitude of a summer day along the estuarial stretch of the river. The sun is stuck in place directly overhead and seems to yawn there, dozing. Heat is suspended in the air like fog. The river is lying at slack tide, as relaxed and unhurried as a boy lying on his back and watching the clouds drift by, dreaming. … Across the river, a dark-haired girl about your age, a beauty in a white bathing suit, with eyes that even at this distance make your heart stop for a moment, lies on the deck of a lean blue sloop, stretching her legs out, turning her face to the sun, dozing, dreaming, going nowhere.
Little Follies, “Life on the Bolotomy”
Gadgets: Automotive: Oil Filter
Everything that the Peterses did was of an order different from anything my family or the families of any of my friends did. My father might spend most of a Saturday changing the oil and filter in our aging Commander … , but Mr. Peters was likely to spend a Saturday … rappelling down a rock face in pursuit of some bric-a-brac smugglers …
Little Follies, “Call Me Larry”
Watch “Tool Dude Tony” convert the old-style canister oil filter in a classic V8 Studebaker Silver Hawk to the modern twist-on type:
Art: Objets d’ Art, Knick-Knacks, and Bric-à-Brac
It is perhaps not uninstructive to note that we have no English word to describe the class of household ornaments which French speech has provided with at least three designations, each indicating a delicate and almost imperceptible gradation of quality. In place of bric-à-brac, bibelots, objets d’art, we have only knick-knacks—defined by Stormonth as “articles of small value.” …
Though a room must depend for its main beauty on design and furniture, it is obvious that there are many details of luxurious living not included in these essentials. In what, then, shall the ornamentation of rooms consist? … To arrive at an answer, one must first consider the different kinds of minor embellishment. These may be divided into two classes: the object of art per se, such as the bust, the picture, or the vase; and, on the other hand, those articles, useful in themselves,—lamps, clocks, fire-screens, bookbindings, candelabra,—which art has only to touch to make them the best ornaments any room can contain. … One of the first obligations of art is to make all useful things beautiful: were this neglected principle applied to the manufacture of household accessories, the modern room would have no need of knick-knacks.
Before proceeding further, it is necessary to know what constitutes an object of art. It was said at the outset that, though cheapness and trashiness are not always synonymous, they are apt to be so in the case of the modern knick-knack. To buy, and even to make, it may cost a great deal of money; but artistically it is cheap, if not worthless; and too often its artistic value is in inverse ratio to its price. The one-dollar china pug is less harmful than an expensive onyx lamp-stand with moulded bronze mountings dipped in liquid gilding. It is one of the misfortunes of the present time that the most preposterously bad things often possess the powerful allurement of being expensive. One might think it an advantage that they are not within every one's reach; but, as a matter of fact, it is their very unattainableness which, by making them more desirable, leads to the production of that worst curse of modern civilization—cheap copies of costly horrors.Edith Wharton and Ogden Codman Jr., The Decoration of Houses (1914)
See also: Art, Play TG 5; Cars: Studebakers, Chryslers TG 57
At cocktail time:
Renaissance Reborn, “Single Petal of a Rose” by Duke Ellington
Jeremy Ajani Jordan & Mark Dover, The Classical Theatre of Harlem
[more to come on Wednesday, February 2, 2022]
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