I have loved it since before I can remember, with the love only a child can have for the smell of cut grass, and blooming privet, and rose-hips on the dunes, and a freshly opened can of tennis balls.

It was right here that I began to wonder if you were joshing.

Tightly controlled bathos, that's our al.

how so, the joshing? I totally love all those smells. I would not wish to be smelling them all together, all day long--scratch that, I would be so willing, minus the tennis balls. that should be a transitory phenomenon. some people hate blooming privet, and yet live in east hampton. let us take the case of my beloved eldest cousin, who is married to an investment banker whom I used to think a moron, but who is in fact an intelligent person who merely does not merit his pay. for most of the year they live in their apartment in new york city, but in the summer marcie moves out to their house in east hampton full time, where her parents also live, and every relation else in the world who is not my immediate family or in the rump martha's vineyard faction. she hates privet. what's to hate, it's so...green smelling. well, I see her point that whatever it is in semen that smells like grass is also in privet, and thus it transitively smells like semen. she feels as though everything is covered with hedge cum until july. still and all, minus the tennis balls, and taking into account that I would desire variation, very satisfactory. there are associated smells such as dusty blackberry brambles, pine needles, the mildew of guest-rooms with itchy blankets on the too-narrow twin beds, wood fires, cigarette smoke, wet dogs. not all good things but good taken together in moderate doses. it's not like I can afford to live there or anything.

I read the post title as "NMM to Lily Potter" and I was like, "Well, duh..."

some people hate blooming privet

I've never seen a privet bloom. I've also never noticed them to have a particular smell. Maybe the midwest and Pittsburgh don't have privets in a way you'd understand or maybe we have crappy landscaping people.

the flowers aren't very noticeable or exciting looking, so it's easy to miss. you know there's that period in spring when they begin to surge upward in an unruly fashion? just before a young man from mexico ascends a ladder and prunes them flat. or, amusingly, runs out of ladder or hedge clippers, leaving them architecturally flat up to about 12 feet above which they do their thing like the bush on a 1974 penthouse centerfold. all the time that they are putting our new green growth they are blooming. to the extent you think privet smells like anything, it's the flowers. which, themselves, are meagre greenish-white sprigs.

It finally felt like spring here yesterday. This post feels perfectly timed.

I've never seen a privet bloom.
But from my tidy private room,
I can tell you, precious one,
That underneath East Hampton's sun,
The smell of privet cum means doom.

you can't even put them in a vase or float them in a bowl. I mean, it's a rare flower that's as pitiful as all that. tree flowers, I guess. my great-aunt's in southampton were just ridiculously tall,like, as tall as a tree, and all around her property. driving in really felt like entering a compound that had been fortified by means of 50-year-old hedges. she let them grow inward at the top; there was not quite a gothic arch, but she was working on it.

I've also never seen a privet that would require a ladder to prune. They're just little things that people plant because the de-icing salt kills nice things.

I had never heard of Lily Pulitzer until yesterday.

Also..
It was made from kitchen curtain material and people went crazy," Ms. Pulitzer said. "They took off like Zingo."

Zingo???

I think I may have stumbled into an alternate universe.

An alternative universe with nice hedges.

Holy crap men's Lilly Pulitzer pants are terrifying. Something parody display something. I wonder why we've never seen Mr. Burns wear them (with his Yale* sweater) on The Simpsons.

* Which sucks.

That is some hideous stuff there at the link. The obituary says it was "really wearable only by the few who were so rich that they could afford to have bad taste" which reminds me of Orwell's rant about the goose-step: "Its ugliness is part of its essence, for what it is saying is 'Yes, I am ugly, and you daren't laugh at me', like the bully who makes faces at his victim. "

http://www.sazzvintage.com/product/k8543.html

Wow!

14: If the Nazis did the goose-step in floral pants, they probably would have won on account of sheer terror.

15: "Did I mention these are VELVET?"

No, no, you did not.

16: as you know, of course, by the time Orwell wrote that piece the Nazis had stopped goose-stepping. The Wehrmacht dropped it in 1940.

17: I was thinking you probably needed those, Flippanter!

Those trousers actually form part of the dress uniform of US Customs and Herbaceous Border Protection officers.

whatever it is in semen that smells like grass is also in privet, and thus it transitively smells like semen

Just last night, a friend commented to me that the semen smell hanging in the air was due to the nearby Bradford pear tree. I suppose it's an appropriate smell, since they're currently engaged in the tree equivalent of bumping uglies.

21: It occurs to me that Harry Potter's wicked guardians reside on Privet Drive.

My most successful ebay purchase was...well the suitcase model Brunswick phonograph was a steal and is awfully nice but something's fucked with the tone arm so I haven't used it in years. The Komfort rosewood coffee table was not at all a bargain, maybe the most I've ever spent on a piece of furniture, but I delight in it. So maybe that.

I... just bought Jane a Lilly Pulitzer dress from ebay. It has hippopotamuses on it! I could not help myself.

The Bradford pears are indeed the trees that do that.

18: People say the invasion of Russia was what did them in, but actually it was regular marching.

she feels as though everything is covered with hedge cum

I thought that's what happens after finding hedge porn.

Privet hedge, heh. Howdy, hedge!

Wait, what? Bradford pears don't make that smell; it's ailanthus that does it. At least, it doesn't smell like all of Cambridge is having sex with the windows open when the pears bloom, but lord knows it does in ailanthus season.

29: Bradford pears - otherwise known as fruitless pears - also make that smell. It's quite strong. Ailanthus is Tree of Heaven, right? In the place I'm thinking of where the pears stink (not Cambridge), there are some Tree of Heaven but far more Bradford pears.

Eww, Bradford pears!

I guess this is the thread where I can brag that I'm finishing my shirt to wear in DC, a version of this with beading and contrasting trim around the neck and sleeves, but none of those spirals. I'm no Lilly Pulitzer, but at least I won't be topless, or not out of necessity. The tunic's not quite long enough to really count as less-than-bottomless, but close.

21 to 4! (Harumph.)

Further to 31, because I'm paranoid, I spent $3 on XXL men's t-shirts to make the shirt, not what it would have cost to buy a kit. But someday when I have spare money just lying around, I'd love to buy one of those kits where someone else will have done the hard work of cutting and measuring and preparing lovely fabric (presumably even competently, unlike my own cutting skills on display here and in the skirt I'm also making) so all I'll have to do is sew and sew and sew and be happy!

Weird. My old commute was lined by Bradford pears and I loved them, but never noticed a smell. Whereas I went out of my way to avoid ailanthus. Maybe there's some heterogeneity in Bradford lines? I think Cambridge has now ripped all the pears out, so we can't even appeal to Blume's pregnancy nose for a conclusive answer.

I only learned today that fruitless pears are also called Bradford pears; my immediate response was, what? Bartlett pears don't stink! Then I actually read the word.

at least I won't be topless, or not out of necessity at the start of the evening.

Does privet have thorns? If so, our house had a horrible privet on the alley side when we moved in. Not having access to Mexicans, it was damn near 15' tall by the time we borrowed a chain saw and dump truck to clear the damn thing out.

Never noticed any smell, but we hardly ventured into the back yard those first few years.

Mmmm, Thorn, I have one of Chanin's books and some nice cloth and some T-shirts for a muslin. I was thinking of the pattern with a whole lot of vertical seams, but it turns out to take even more cloth to cut than the simpler ones, because of the grainlines.

Anyway! I need to get on the muslin so I can so one close to her designs because there are some Vionnet designs that I think might translate. Possibly in this lifetime.

clew, you can just sort of disregard the grainlines and also accidentally leave chunks missing when you're cutting two pieces at once and then frankenstein them together like I did! And yet it still doesn't look awful, which is pretty cool. These are muslin versions with just one layer of cloth. The skirt I did is this one but with minimal embroidery and I think I'll have to pick out the one big bit of embroidery I did do on it and I also have to take off the waistband elastic and redo it so it actually fits at my waist rather than my hips. But in theory I'll then know enough about my measurements to buy a bunch of cotton and make a whole dress.

Hmm. I did pick the style because it doesn't require perfection, so I might finish more than a dress every year. (Less, for historical stuff.) Scissors! Whacking! Sewing with stitches more than four threads long!

31: Gorgeous pattern!

I'll be forever sad until Alameida writes a novel. She has so much interesting shit to write about. I realize that I'm being selfish about this.

sorry, john. if it makes you feel any better, I feel like a totally inadequate failure for the same reason. it's as though I'm performing your own guilt-tripping on myself, from afar.

24: yay!!! now just get one for yourself. vintage! it doesn't have to be too loud! A-line dresses like that are easy to wear. frankly, those jack rogers navajo sandals are the shit, too. however, only in the following colors: white; nude; white with navy whipstitch trim...um, navy with white whipstitch, maybe? I'm all out of options here, but I know from personal experience than the store in new york has way more colors, so. back in the day people had to bring them back to east hampton for you from palm beach, because the world contains only about 5 locations.

the world contains only about 5 locations.

Only about seven character types, too.

that comment was unclear. I meant, that only certain colors of jack rogers sandals were acceptable (although now that we've all seen the pants my uncles were wearing in the bahamas in 1978, our aesthetic diktats may seem baseless.) further, I meant that it appeared there were only 5 locations in the world for people generally ever to go to, not places where they had jack rogers sandals outlets. because that was only palm beach until shockingly recently? rather that there existed, lemme see, new york city, east hampton (shit, southampton whatever) palm beach, bermuda, other caribbean locales like the bahamas, maine (I don't know where; you're supposed to be on a boat I think so it doesn't matter? that was all I ever saw of maine on my one trip), washington d.c. (attendance under political duress), cap ferrat etc., paris, london, capri, not rome for some reason--full of swarthy italians?, now I know my hippie parents went to portugal and barcelona but I think this is because they were crazy hippies...thus also marrakesh. surely the west coast existed even then. ok, there was san francisco (but I never heard anything about it), LA (deprecated), and palm springs. people went to nevada to get divorced. and to las vegas, but sparingly and without talking about it. oh fuck, boston duh, martha's vineyard, cape cod, greenwich, connecticut and similar. um. seems like I'm leaving out some continents and stuff. nah, that's it.

ah, I see our keen nosflow ken my meaning.

I didn't look at the slideshow. my pants of nannie's are in the print seen in slide 4!

Everyone inherited their mom's shift dresses in turn, cycle of life, etc. Actually if you go to the Maidstone club now it looks pretty much the same. Though people are wearing Diamonds During the Day, and It Just Goes to Show.

I wish you would write a novel, Alameida. You could do, say, 'contemporary southern Gothic, with a taste of the Hamptons.' A specialized niche audience? Perhaps. But you could seriously own that demographic, while appealing more broadly to the 'authentic Americana' wannabes.

Or perhaps one of those "American foodways" cookbooks that are currently so much in vogue? A few authentic family heirloom recipes, interspersed with interesting, regionally-based anecdotes? Though perhaps some of your family anecdotes are a bit, er, raw for general consumption?

But a novel, though. You were made to write one, you know that you were.