Recent pipe sightings literary and gastronomic
Jan 19, 2022 16:59:25 GMT -5
Ronv69, Zach, and 5 more like this
Post by rastewart on Jan 19, 2022 16:59:25 GMT -5
I've recently finished a collection of stories by Joe Taylor, Ghostly Demarcations (I've mentioned it on another thread). The seventeen stories are connected by the narrator and his close friend, who appear in all of them, by their settings in and around Lexington, Kentucky, and as the title suggests, by ghosts. I've been reading ghost stories for most of my life and have written a few. One thing I like about these is that, often, you realize the spectral situation fairly quickly. The narrator is someone who is on kind of familiar terms with the spirit world, and often the interest is as much in his relationship with his spooky visitors and with the people around him, as in the supernatural elements. And one thing I didn't fully realize until I was reading the very last story--another reader might pick it up right away--is that, taken together, the stories are among other things a chronicle of a long friendship, told in retrospect (having been set, all but the last, in the late sixties to early or middle seventies). So, for me, it was only in those last pages that I really felt the book's emotional weight.
A pipe first appears in the eleventh story--a billiard smoked by what I immediately suspected was a ghost. By the next story the narrator himself is smoking one, as is another ghost. Unfortunately this story also dashed my fancy that the author might be a pipe smoker (reasonable given his age, his academic connections, and his magnificent white beard), since the narrator describes the phantom (who is wearing a Holmes-style deerstalker hat) as smoking a "Cavendish" pipe, presumably meaning calabash.
A ghostly hookah figures in a later story, as does Latakia. I'm afraid there is an intimation that the Lat was smoked in the hookah, which has never been my experience, but I'm not going to quibble. I've only seen them smoked in Chicago hookah bars anyway (and not often there), and in college rooms in the sixties which was an altogether different kind of thing.
As it happened, while I was still in the middle of this book, I was driving to work and passed a Don Pablo's delivery truck. I had never heard of this place before (it specializes in Chilean empanadas, and is named for Pablo Neruda), but there on the side of the truck was a drawing of a man much resembling the poet, with the flat cap and pipe with which he is often pictured. (You'll see it if you click the link.)
A pipe first appears in the eleventh story--a billiard smoked by what I immediately suspected was a ghost. By the next story the narrator himself is smoking one, as is another ghost. Unfortunately this story also dashed my fancy that the author might be a pipe smoker (reasonable given his age, his academic connections, and his magnificent white beard), since the narrator describes the phantom (who is wearing a Holmes-style deerstalker hat) as smoking a "Cavendish" pipe, presumably meaning calabash.
A ghostly hookah figures in a later story, as does Latakia. I'm afraid there is an intimation that the Lat was smoked in the hookah, which has never been my experience, but I'm not going to quibble. I've only seen them smoked in Chicago hookah bars anyway (and not often there), and in college rooms in the sixties which was an altogether different kind of thing.
As it happened, while I was still in the middle of this book, I was driving to work and passed a Don Pablo's delivery truck. I had never heard of this place before (it specializes in Chilean empanadas, and is named for Pablo Neruda), but there on the side of the truck was a drawing of a man much resembling the poet, with the flat cap and pipe with which he is often pictured. (You'll see it if you click the link.)
