Temptation rides a whiff of ether in Frank Norris's McTeague (1899). The novel relates the romantic adventures of its title character, a San Francisco dentist who falls in love with Trina, a young lower-class woman who visits him for treatment of a carious tooth. (more…) Read More...

Life's a pudding full of plums; Care's a canker that benumbs, Wherefore waste our elocution On impossible solution? Life's a pleasant institution, Let us take it as it comes! From "The Tangled Skein" (ca. 1897) by W.S. Gilbert Read More...

The narrator of Henri Barbusse's 1908 novel Inferno (L'Enfer) spends his days and nights peering through a chink in a boarding room wall. He cannot help himself, he protests; for as a man unmarried, rather short, with no children (and, he adds, with the intent that he "shall have none"), as a man with whom "a line will end which has lasted since the beginning of humanity," he felt himself "submerged in the positive nothingness of every day." (more…) Read More...

"A pause. They all looked at me, shaking their heads, their mouths full of cherry stones."--Katherine Mansfield, In a German Pension (1911).           Read More...

The politics of leftovers smoothed relations between rich and poor for centuries. When it was scrapped, things got crummy. In Chile I once ate a bull's testicle. My family and I were staying in Santiago when our second night there we received a dinner invitation from a colleague of my father's, a stout, mirthful industrial engineer who was reportedly a crony of the dictator, Augusto Pinochet. The meal consisted of quail eggs and arugula for the adults, and for the children a dish that I took to be baked apples dusted with cinnamon. I eagerly popped one in my mouth. What met my bite, however, was tough, cartilaginous, and had a slight metallic tang. I must have grimaced because a maid rushed over, took my hand and led me to a toilet into which I could spit the offending morsel.… Read More...

"After a slow start, things went off like clockwork. At first we went out to dinner and the movies or theater and didn't go to bed. Finally we went to bed. We then had dinner out and went to bed. Then we mostly went to bed, not bothering with dinner at all, and talked of getting engaged. Yes, engaged. We had this horrible compulsion to be Proper."--Sue Kaufman, Diary of a Mad Housewife (1967) Read More...

The life and loves of one Victorian butterfly enthusiast go to show how hard it is for a lepidopterist to change her spots. Men were like butterflies to Margaret Fountaine: They were apt to flit away without warning or leave-taking. Either creature she nevertheless pursued with vigor, and she recorded her experiences in thick leather-bound diaries she took with her everywhere. They contained accounts of her bicycle trip through France and her motorcar excursion across Tenerife, which she made with eight young Spaniards. In Corsica she took up with a gang of bandits before sailing for Cuba and Chile. Her many affairs she characterized as "so many gates leading on, through paths of sorrow, to ultimate disaster and final loss." This sense of disappointment attached only to her wingless loves, however. For the other kind her affection went undiminished. No… Read More...

“You know about innards? The trick they play on tramps in the country? They stuff an old wallet with putrid chicken innards. Well, take it from me, a man is just like that, except that he's fatter and hungrier and can move around, and inside there's a dream.”--Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night (1932) Read More...

Love Laplander-style requires thawing frosty relations--with lots of brandy and boiled meat. The first days of September summon the Lappish hunter to his yearly ritual. He puts on reindeer-skin coat and cap (camouflage that serves to fool his quarry) and searches out a copse of pine trees to use as a place of ambush. Once situated, he bellows lustily. In sight there eventually wanders a reindeer whose curiosity has gotten the better of it.  Arriving to discover the source of the noise so like the one it itself makes, the creature discovers instead that its fate is sealed. The hunter flings his weapon--an arrow, a spear, sometimes a stone--and it strikes fatally home. A similar knack for deception the Lappish man brings to a hunt of another sort. Should a woman turn his head, he shows no overt signs of… Read More...

"Early bird" or "night owl"--most modern individuals consider themselves one or the other. People who lived before the Industrial Age were both. Enviable is the sleeper who sleeps, who sinks into nothingness and remains there for a good seven to ten hours, rising again only with the sun. Enviable and perhaps contemptible. "I hate a man who goes to sleep at once," complains Mark Twain. Provoking his hatred is nothing specific, rather only "a sort of indefinable something" that comes across as "not exactly an insult," but more of "an insolence" that he nonetheless finds "hard to bear." The object of odium--a traveling companion who goes to bed directly after dinner, leaving a wakeful Twain no one to talk with--stands guilty of that typical lack of consideration the sleepy show the sleepless by indulging their sleepiness. (more…) Read More...

“What a typical picture for anyone from out of New York: career girl’s apartment, stockings drying over the shower rod, clothes flung helter-skelter in the rush to get to the office on time, to a date on time, a scrap of cheese and some canned orange juice in the icebox, perhaps a bottle of wine there too, wads of dust lying under the studio couch because you couldn’t clean except on weekends and sometimes not even then, and all those brightly colored matchbooks with names of well-known eating places, so that even if one managed only two good and sufficient meals a week one could still light one’s cigarettes for the rest of the week with a memory.”--Rona Jaffe, The Best of Everything (1958) Read More...

Snugs nooks outfitted with wall-length mirrors and chairs upholstered in red velvet shelter men and women, who chat as they sip from demitasses. A waitress in a white apron wipes her knife before slicing a cake into squares. Patrons pass in and out, quickly and lightly as moths. Business is in full swing at a café in the City of Lights. The cosmopolitan leisure that the Parisian café has come to symbolize belies its humbler origin. The story of its emergence is written in blood and fire, namely, that which was spillled and ignited during the Napoleonic Wars. With the defeat of the Grand Armée at Waterloo in 1815, the French went from victors to vanquished, from occupiers to occupied. A stay-behind force of Russian soldiers made camp in the Place de la Concorde and under the trees shading the… Read More...

"People have even made eating into something else: necessity on the one hand, excess on the other; have muddied the clarity of this need, and all the deep, simple needs in which life renews itself have become just as muddied." --Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet (1929) Read More...

It often happens that, by accident of consanguinity or some other connection, people who don't get along must spend a few after-dinner hours together. This happens mostly at holidays. Once the jellied cranberry and candied yams have been dispatched, these ill-sorted fellows, having swallowed their antipathies like so many antacids, sit in uneasy silence. Feeling it at once too early and too late to leave, they devise ways to beguile those hours. Most times the choice can be as stark as watching  TV or sitting in silence, nursing drinks. The first option is usually exercised, if only so as to avoid the second. Three hours slathered in surround-sound bombast works its magic; guests and hosts are ready to head home or to bed. The next day, the gathering is judged by all involved to have been a success. Reach far… Read More...

"She ate noisily, greedily, a little like a wild beast in a menagerie, and after she had finished each course rubbed the plate with pieces of bread till it was white and shining, as if she did not wish to lose a single drop of gravy. They had Camembert cheese, and it disgusted Philip to see that she ate rind and all of the portion that was given her. She could not have eaten more ravenously if she were starving." --W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage (1915) Read More...

All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely critters--at least as far as Mrs. Midnight's Animal Comedians were concerned. The rage during the 1753 London season, this troupe plied its trade in a small, elaborately decorated theater named the Castle Tavern. The show starred poet Christopher Smart, who appeared in drag as Mrs. Midnight and orchestrated the splendid entertainments his trained dogs and monkeys performed in period dress and powdered periwigs.  (more…) Read More...