A few thousand paint chips never hurt anyone
The often entertaining and frequently bizarre David Sedaris has a reflective piece in the latest New Yorker. He writes about the phase in his life when he was obsessed with quasi-antiques and lived in a house in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, run by a woman who shared his passion.
I hadn’t even crossed the threshold when I agreed to take the room. What sold me was the look of the place. Some might have found it shabby – “a dump,” my father would eventually call it – but, unless you ate them, a few thousand paint chips never hurt anyone. The same could be said for the groaning front porch and the occasional missing shingle. It was easy to imagine that the house, set as it was, on the lip of a student parking lot, had dropped from the sky, like Dorothy’s in The Wizard of Oz, but with a second story. Then there was the inside, which was even better. The front door opened into a living room, or, as Rosemary called it, “the parlor.” The word was old-fashioned, but fitting. Velvet curtains framed the windows. The walls were papered in a faint, floral pattern, and doilies were everywhere, laid flat on tabletops and sagging like cobwebs from the backs of overstuffed chairs. My eyes moved from one thing to another, and, like my mother with her dining-room set, Rosemary took note of where they landed. “I see you like my davenport,” she said, and, “You don’t find lamps like that anymore. It’s a genuine Stephanie.”
This Quillblogger doesn’t even know what a Stephanie is.
The issue also features an essay by Nobelist Orhan Pamuk, who meditates on the advent of hot dogs in Turkey. (For hot-dog lovers out there, street meat is a popular topic in Toronto right now, too.)
A Tiffany lamp.