The products speak words of magic. But who are they speaking to? Once, vibe, mood, and energy were watchwords of the counterculture. Among hippies, dropouts, and other assorted voyagers in psychedelia, they were part of a private shorthand for sensations strongly felt but not so easily explained. Today, this vocabulary has diffused beyond any niche group. Yuppies profess to feeling certain energies; New York Times writers divine vibes; venture capitalists do a booming business in moods, pouring money into astrology apps. The occult is for everyone, and so for no one in particular.
Gas stations were important. Gas companies issued their own credit cards, good only for that brand, so if we didn’t find a Standard Oil station, we had to spend our precious cash for gas. The companies issued free road maps showing the locations of their gas stations. They also provided restrooms, but cleanliness varied, so Mom carried paper seat liners and paper towels. Bruce was fairly cooperative about using the bathroom when we stopped, but he was only 3, and occasionally we had to pull over near rural undergrowth while Mom rushed him behind a tree, muttering about the idiot (Dad) who gave children canteens.
Drinking fountains were scarcer than restrooms and there was no bottled water, so Dad filled his own canteen and had bought small ones for Bruce and me. For those not pretending they were pioneers on the way west (Mom and Tom), Mom carried a collapsible folding cup.
Free Love is both a complex tale of personal awakening and a snapshot of a moment in time when the survivors of war were suddenly painted as relics by a new generation determined not to live under their dour and hesitant shadow.
If true crime is an addiction, “Devil House” is a novelist’s cure. It’s a multilayered, fictional story of some horrific murders, their victims and perpetrators, and the man who sets out to tell their tales.
To be a member of the human race is to undergo loss, anguish, bereavement, betrayal, failure, aloneness, and the fear of death, and Michael Ignatieff’s remarkable and moving new book, On Consolation, written out of the dark times of a world pandemic, tells some dramatic stories of the worst that can happen to human beings and the worst they can do to one another. But to be human is also to look for meaning, joy, and consolation.
A new biography of Lamb—the first comprehensive one in more than a century—charts a life that was colored by full-scale tragedy and suffused with routine torments. Yet “Dream-Child: A Life of Charles Lamb” is no catalog of doom and gloom. Eric G. Wilson, a professor of English at Wake Forest University, offsets the dark with more than enough light and shows that while misfortune affected Lamb’s character, the quality of his often remarkable creative output shone through.
it’s been raining all night
and I can’t sleep
half-remembering a poem