—Tellurian Edition—
—Tellurian Edition—
Mushrooms in America Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and back to Florida
It was a perfectly delightful hotel in Beaumont Texas, with a charmingly impressive stairwell. We were up bright and early to do a little shopping and attempt to find somewhere to post a note or two to the dear old Club. This is harder than you might think in America. In Europe one can pop onto an ordinator in most hotel lobbies, but in America it seems to be expected that one will have a portable Nautila, preferably with wireless antennae, and as it happened we hadn't, as we thought it would be easier just to use the hotel lobbies!
So one ended up in an electronics shop where a kindly assistant let one use a display model, and one stood up in the middle of the shop typing shroomy nonsense to the Club. After that, those of us who were steak-eaters sampled the steak for which Texas is famous and proclaimed it very justly so.
And then we headed east and crossed the Sabine River into
Louisiana. It was 300 miles or so from Beaumont to Houma, Louisiana in the
heart of the swamplands and once again we arrived at eventide, this time with
a sickly mushroom whose coldy-infection was reaching its height and who also
had a rather nasty headache. The shroom had refused to let ill-health detract
from her fungal bounciness until this point, but now she fell into her bed
rather gratefully.
The next day, however, saw us up and boinging, albeit a shade cautiously. I was giddy from feverishness as well as from medications, including some extremely potent cough medicine (what do they put in that stuff?). We had a light brekker in a diner full of policemen and then proceeded to the swamp.
At the insistence of a tearaway young brunette named Em, we toured the Bayou Gauche (which is a swamp) in a very fast airboat which glided (or glid) over shallow water and reed banks with elegance, grace and extreme whizziness. There were in fact two airboats available: a large slowish one (by airboat standards) and a small one that seated only a few people and went like the wind. This, naturally, was the one Em insisted upon.
While
awaiting our trip, we saw a cute little raccoon. The airboats carry bags of
dog food to tempt the catfish (catfish will not eat cat food apparently) and
the raccoon had discovered the bag on our boat and decided to raid it. We also
saw a large alligator, of which I failed to get a picture.
Then the zoom began. Blondes had to wear tight headscarves to prevent hairdo ruination. Em held an alligator and posed for a grotophaph and then persuaded me to do the same. And I really did! Em said I was a weed because I did not remove my white gloves, but I explained that a lady never removes her gloves to hold an alligator. Consult any etiquette book.
At one point our captain was about to step off the boat onto a reed-bank when he thought better of it because a cottonmouth was lurking in the reeds below. Nature in the raw, eh what? We'll be rivalling the Expeditious Tiggrs before long.
By eventide we had discovered a perfectly delightful hotel
in the French Quarter of New Orleans. We had nothing booked in advance at any
point in our trip, travelling, as we were, pretty much at will, albeit with
a general itinerary in mind. We had not expected to be in Carolina, and we
did rather wonder about Oklahoma, but the trip took its final form as it progressed.
The French Quarter of New Orleans is lovely in a slightly run-down (rather French) sort of way. Our hotel had a lovely courtyard (several of them actually, but being lazy mendicants we mostly used the one nearest our room) with a fountain in the middle into which stone frogs squirted water.
The
streets were charming with overhanging upper stories and horse-head iron hitching-posts
at regular intervals. Our room was directly on the ??? Street, so that opening
the louvre-shuttered window one found oneself practically staring a horse-head
in the face.
The picture to the right was taken with the object of conveying the appearance of the French Quarter. It is not selected for being quaint. The entire area is very much like this.
We strolled by the Mississippi again that evening, several hundred miles downstream from where we crossed it from Tennessee into Arkansas. We also ate alligator in a balcony restaurant with Dixieland Jazz floating up from a nearby eatery (we chose this one because much of the music is so over-amplified that it is pleasanter to listen to from a neighbouring establishment).
The French Quarter also appears to house a rather large number of type-threes and some of them were running a shop of a highly dubious nature in one of the delightful streets near our hotel. Outside it lounged a pierced sort of fellow with what one can only call an aboriginal haircut. Li brunette declared her intention of looking into said shop to see if they stocked any of the Wildfire books, while the self declared her intention of not looking into it with a ten-foot lorgnette.
It
appeared that they did not stock the books, nor did they carry canes (they
did not look like the sort of gentlemen who carry canes). But when Li brunette,
dressed in her smart hound's-tooth tweed suit (and being looked at in the dubious
manner normally reserved by these people for police spies), asked whether they
had heard of the Wildfire Club or of Miss Martindale, the two pierced ones
apparently ceased lounging against the counter and stood bolt upright.
In the meantime, I had discovered a much more interesting shop.
This one was simply filled with adorable Quirrie kitsch; and if it had not entirely dispensed with the risqué atmosphere that permeated much of this Quarter, it certainly did it in a manner that was unlikely to offend a Quirrie blonde.
This shop, being rather more respectable than the other establishment, was closed at this hour of the evening, so, for the time being one had to content oneself with gazing wistfully into the window.
One
thing that particularly caught the eye was a selection of cigarette cases decorated
with Quirrie pulp-magazine illustrations (see two in the bottom right of the
picture to the right). These — it transpired
on later investigation — were really rather expensive (there are actually
rather good cases), but one simply had
to have one notwithstanding the fact that the poor 'shroom had been forbidden
to smoke its two or three exquisite cigarettes a month after Miss Drusilla
and her own bone-sister Lindie combined in Atlanta to make representations
to her guardian about the wrongness of a fifteen-year-old smoking at all. One's
own sister. Et too brutal as that old Roman wallah so poignantly put
it.
A somewhat amusing thing was that the proprietress refused to acknowledge these cigarette cases as cigarette cases. She called them "personal cases" and said that people use them for keeping all sorts of things. She even pointed out the little spring-loaded oojamawhat that all cigarette cases have for holding the vanilla-scented Turkish in place and said how useful it was for holding banknotes (or bills, as I believe she called them). Not once were cigarettes mentioned, even as a possibility. Li brunette suggested that this might have something to do with type-three-ism.
We
stayed three days in New Orleans and had a perfectly marvelous time. We sailed
in the steamboat Natchez (or should I say we stome in her?), one of the last
of the great steamers to ply the mighty Mississippi. Actually there seem to
be many of them, but apparently most do not really run on steam any more. The Natchez does,
although the water is no longer cooked with solid fuel, but with diesel, so
there is no smoke from the smoke-stack. At least not unless something has gone
wrong. Not that this matters much to a blonde, but Em quickly found her way
to the engine room and was fascinated to examine all the pistons and whatnot.
The Natchez also had a rather wonderful band aboard called the Steamboat Stompers, who played proper, traditional Dixieland Jazz - not the rather messed-about-with stuff that one can encounter in New Orleans.
We
also had Margarita cocktails on the boat, and delightful New Orleans beignets which
are described as French doughnuts — which is not a bad description if
you bear in mind that they are square, not round, light, not heavy, are of
a completely different texture, are not fried and have no jam in. Apart from
that, they are identical to doughnuts except that they are much nicer. We sampled
them on several occasions to make sure of that fact. After all, one could have
been mistaken the first time, or the second or... Well, you get the point.
We are great believers in thoroughness in the Experimental Method.
We admired the brilliant-golden statue of Joan of Arc — the Maid of Old Orleans — both by daylight and by floodlight. We visited the Aquarium and saw all the wonders of the sea. Well, quite a lot of them. Including some perfectly darling little sea-horses.
We ate in the burger-bar of the Hilton and at a splendid French restaurant called Irene's (American food is awfully jolly, but after several days of it one does begin to crave French food).
New
Orleans was playing host to a neurosurgeons' conference that day, and it seems
neurosurgeons are keen on their French Cuisine. Well it is awfully
good for the old brain. So there was a waiting time of over an hour. Li brunette
was averse to hanging about for that long, but — as blondes sometimes
are — I
was mother to a mighty brainwave. Since Irene's was only about three doors
up from our hotel, why not spend the hour, rather than milling about a crowdy
old restaurant, in partaking of a glass of the old vintage in the frog-befountained
courtyard of the hotel. To this idea the party readily assented, and the
courtyard merriment became the starting point for an utterly delightful evening.
It was not without regret that we left New Orleans, leaving the mighty Mississippi several hundred miles downstream from where we had crossed her from Tennessee into Arkansas and soon getting ourselves rather lost among the various great waters of the area. Finally we crossed lake Pontchartrain and were leaving the State of Louisiana too, bound for Mississippi
We had a look at another swamp in Mississippi. This time we were able to walk about an area of swampland on a raised boardwalk and examine some of the plants and trees at close quarters. We were anxious, though, to see the Gulf of Mexico, so we then headed to Gulfport, Mississippi.
We checked into a hotel (one "checks" rather than "books" in America) and then went off to play Adventure Golf. We really liked the idea of playing golf at the Gulf in Gulfport — especially as the first hole was entitled "Mushrooms"!
Our game took rather a long time, so the sudden, sub-tropical
night was already falling as we took our post-game photographs, but, as you
see, some of the holes looked rather impressive in the fast-failing light.
We particularly liked the Dragon Hole at this hour.
We had a light snack in our room that night, feeling rather tired (we do tire occasionally), but we were up bright and boingy the next morning and drove on to Biloxi, where Li brunette acquired a sun hat and Em acquired a kite. Miss Serelique bought her a stunt kite for her birthday, but with unerring precision, every time we prepare to fly it the wind drops to a breeze that could not move the diaphanous fabric of an Estrenne veil. So with hopes of better luck on the Gulf Coast, she bought a very cheap kite.
And on the white sands of the blue coast, the wind blew. The white sands stung our legs. The kite went up quite beautifully and few for several minutes before being torn to pieces; for it was a very strong wind. And a very cheap kite.
And so we proceeded Eastward, across the state line into Alabama, and it was toward evening that we discovered the Gift Horse Restaurant at Foley, Alabama. You may never have heard of Foley, Alabama. The name is not one to conjure with. It probably wouldn't run even to a small card-trick.But there is one thing that makes Foley, Alabama worth a stop if you happen to be passing through, and that is the Gift Horse Restaurant.
It is a perfectly charming place, built in 1812 and converted into a restaurant, lighted by magnificent chandeliers and a long stained-glass window. A huge Southern buffet is served, including such delights as cheese apple and sweet-potato pecan praline. In fact this would seem a good moment to review some of the Southern delicacies we enjoyed, so I shall reprint my reply to a girl at the Club :
I have eaten jambalaya (more Louisiana, I think, than general Dixie food) as well as gumbo. I have had biscuits and sausage gravy, which were excellent, as well as cheesy biscuits and even (in Foley, Alabama) fried biscuits. For English (and perhaps even Yankee) readers, I should explain that these biscuits are not what we mean by biscuits at all, but something a little more akin to scones. Imagine scones with a whiteish sausage-impregnated sauce and you will have some idea of biscuits and sausage gravy.
I have eaten alligator in New Orleans. This is by no means an act of desperation. It is very palatable. It tastes somewhat fishy, I am told, but has a firmish texture. I say "I am told" because my coldy-infection was so bad by then that I could hardly taste it. However the rest of my party gave alligator the thumbs-up and I certainly liked it insofar as I was able to appreciate it.
Cheese grits are, in my view excellent. I ate them in good health on Tybee Island and elsewhere. They are best combined with bacon, pancakes, maple syrup and - well, why not a biscuit with some sausage gravy?
Sweeet-potato pie? Not quite, but I have had sweet-potato pecan praline, which passes for a vegetable side-dish in Dixie but anywhere else would be considered a sweetmeat. The same may be said of cheesey baked apple, which is sprinkled with brown sugar and baked to a sort of brulée.
Fried fish I have had, and (I blush to admit) with beer. Hush-puppies and pineapple sandwiches, regrettably, are outside my experience.
Rattlesnake I have not eaten, though we did come uncomfortably close to a live cottonmouth in the Mississipi swamplands.
Catfish is another Southern speciality. We ate catfish on a hot roof in Memphis, Tennessee. It wasn't tin though.
Possum is definitely a food for po'folks. We did have a po'boy in New Orleans, but that is quite another thing. A sort of baguette, really.
We did at one point see a dead opossum on the road, but we did not eat it.
At least, I suppose it was dead. Apparently they can be quite deceptive in these matters.
Following
a weather-intuition on the part of li brunette (of which more later) it was
now necessary to get under way with some speed, so that night we travelled
the equivalent of London to Edinburgh: into Florida, all along the Florida
Panhandle and across the State to Orlando. Right back where we started frum
(how else can you make it rhyme with "come"). Not that we were about
to fly back just yet. Oh, no. We had something rather important to attend to
first.
We had a very late night, not only becaue of the long journey, but also because we became lost for ages in the dreadfully confusing traffic system of night-time Orlando. But the next morning we were up and out, for we were to spend the day at the Magic Kingdom. We had breakfast in Orlando and then began our journey.
I never quite made it into Disneyland in Paris. I went there once with my former brunette, but it was late and hardly worth buying a day-ticket, so we just moseyed about the outer attractions and went on the pedallos.
I have often wondered about Disney World. Could the magic
of Disney be conveyed in flesh and off the screen? And would it not be ruined
by the hordes in their Pit-pyjamas?
Well, at other places one manages to ignore Johnny Bongo. One simply de-registers
him. After all it is the great axiom when playing in the Pit: the boor ye
have always with you .
But yes. The extent to which the Magic Kingdom was able to deploy its beautiful
phenomena was, to my rather susceptible mind, beyond belief; and I found myself
continually moved to tears of joy and laughter.
It calls itself "The Happiest Celebration on Earth". The nice Florida lady who
talked to us about tickets said "It is the last innocent place on earth". It
is also the world's greatest tourist attraction. One would have thought Johnny
Bongo might have learned something from that. But that would be too much to hope
for.
One is astonished by the beauty, the magic, the charm and the wonder. And one
is compelled to ask oneself why the hordes who flock to see these lovely things
dress themselves like rejects from the laundry-bag. Why this dichotomy between
their inner aspirations and their outer baggy drabness? Perhaps we may have time
to consider that anon.
Mr. Disney has added something
to the image-sphere of the 20th century. So much was lost in that century, but
the magical vision of Mr. Disney - unlike anything the world had seen before
- was one of the positive and beautiful additions to the image-sphere and influences
each one of us daily. This vision is captured, against all the odds, among the
throngs at Walt Disney World.
We spent twelve hours there, visiting Minnie Mouse's house, Cinderella's Golden Carousel and even (at the insistence of Em) riding the hair-raising pitch-dark roller-coaster in the Space-Mountain. We saw the Cinderellabration at which Cinderella was crowned Princess (just after the film ends). My little sister Wendy went to the Fairy-Tale Garden, where Belle read her a story and Em, while walking from one place to anothet, minding her own business, was accosted by the White Rabbit, who asked her the time.
Dominating all is Cinderella's Castle (where her coronation took place), towering high into the sky and surrounded by a great moat. The photograph above is not an idealised publicity shot, but (like all the pictures in these essays) a simple snap taken by the self, exactly as we saw it, from the side, across the moat. It really looks as glorious and magical as that.
The most impressive thing was certainly Mickey's PhilharMagic, a kinematic presentation that takes the silver screen to extraordinary new levels. It uses the largest seamless kinema screen in the world, which curves into the sides of the auditorium. The audience is supplied with 3d specs — not the old red-green things you may have used to see The Creature from the Black Lagoon, but a much more sophisticated kind which allow for the most remarkable full-color 3d. The show begins with Donald conducting an orchestra. He becomes angry and throws his baton, and every member of the audience ducks, because it seems to come right at one's head. Then the room is filled with stars, fairies, magic carpets, music and magic. It is not only the small children who reach out to touch the images that seem to be all about them. The illusion is unbelievable. The cartoon characters bake cakes and one can suddenly smell the cooking. The bucket-carrying brooms from Fantasia throw water out at the audience. Some members of the audience are now too wise to duck, and they get a faceful of real water!
At
10 p.m. we have been at Disney for ten hours and the climax is still to come.
We have dined and we go out into Main Street. All the golden lights of the
enchanted street are dimmed. The great castle up ahead that dominates everything
is bathed in changing-coloured lights. The firework display is about to begin.
The display is entitled Wishes, and unlike other firework
displays, it has a story and a soundtrack. Music surrounds us from a thousand
speakers all over the Kingdom. The central theme is the song When You Wish
Upon a Star.
The voices of the various Disney characters are heard making
each her heart's wish. Peter Pan wishes never to grow up; Pinocchio wishes
to be a real child; Show White wishes that her Brunette Princess will come.
The fireworks — an
absolutely magnificent display — are co-ordinated with absolute precision
to fit the narrative and the music. The whole is a fabulous paean to hope and
wish-fulfillment.
Even after this we do not leave. The mushroom is chilled to the bone and (most unusually) has not brought a jacket, the day being so warm. But the Spectro-Magic parade is to take place at midnight. The Shroom finds herself in a deserted kinema playing a Silly Symphony, and then the first Mickey Mouse film ever made in colour. She sits alone in the empty auditorium until li Brunette comes to join her, and they watch together until the magic hour draws nigh.
Then back to the bright, golden-lighted Main Street where once again the lights are suddenly extinguished and all is darkness. Into that darkness comes music from a thousand speakers. And then butterfly-girls come fluttering into view, completely invisible but for the thousands of coloured lights that cover their wings and outline their bodies. They dance and weave among each other.
Then come the carriages. All black and outlined in literally millions of lights. Sometimes a face is lighted. We see the proud, disdainful, evil face of the beautiful witch-queen from Snow White. We see Cinderella's pumpkin coach, and the face of the Princess emerges from the shadows.
The sound is a masterpiece, for members of the audience, lining
the long processional route, see different parts of the parade at different
times, so while a beautiful background is created by the Kingdom's thousand
speakers, each major spectacle has its own sound system, and the two (at any
given time) blend perfectly into an overwhelming sound-sensation.
If all this has sounded like an extended advertisement for walt Disney World, I apologise. The business of deploying beautiful, imaginative phenomena effectively and wonderfully, using every technical means at one's disposal, is something close to the heart of Aristasia. Therefore, to see how Disney goes about this was a matter of great interest to us. The means are vast. While one may deplore the enormous crowds, nothing else could supply the money necessary to make possible the vast expenditure that is daily spent on these massive spectacles. Our resources are rather smaller, but as various technics become more affordable, and as our pool of talent grows, we too shall be deploying more and more beautiful things upon the world.
In a century that abandoned romanticism and progressively destroyed beauty, Disney brought a new vison into the world, and a new art. It might be called the democratic art par excellence. If democracy is capable of producing anything beautiful and uplifting, on a par with the aristocratic art of earlier times, or the bourgeois art of the 19th century, Disney then Disney has created it. Disney gave the world a new romanticism, even while the intellectual elite, the degenerate decesendants of the old bourgeois artists, were doing all they could to destroy romanticism.
Disney is a far more important phenomenon than most people are wont to realise. The phenomenon is both trivialised and taken for granted; but without Disney and his vision, how much darker and bleaker would be the world-image of the current popular mind?
As the ambassadresses of another Magical Queendom in a new
century, we Aristasians have much to learn from Disney.
We went to bed tired but happy, and with much to think about.
The next day was spent exploring and shopping in Orlando, which is an extraordinary place where the sight of a giant mermaid completely dwarfing the shop she represents is by no means unusual and at times one hardly feels one has left Disney World.
We did some last-minute investigations of the property market, and I tried to get a copy of Pac-Pix, a remarkable new version of Miss Pacman from that other great deployer of imaginative phenomena, whom we often liken to Disney: Nintendo. In this game one actually draws the dot-chomper with a magic pencil (an actual pencil that one holds in one's actual hand) and she comes to life and starts eating ghosts. One can also draw arrows that whizz off in the direction they are pointing and bombs that — oh come now. You can guess what the bombs do. The game was due out on that day, but no shops had it, all saying tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. We did however have wonderful fun in Orlando and dined that evening in a splendid seafood restaurant, watching the rain create a noisy, all-enclosing curtain about the world.
This was to have been the day we went to Disney, but li brunette had a feeling about the weather, and she was right. It was hot and humid all day, and in the evening came a tropical rainstorm that lasted for hours. There would certainly have been no fireworks that night, and no midnight SpectroMagic parade. How glad we were that we had made that long overnight dash from Alabama to Orlando, to get there a day earlier than originally planned.
The next day, as I am sure you will all be relieved to know, we succeeded in getting Pac-Pix. We celebrated with a Butterfinger Blizzard and I sent a Princess postcard to cousin Isabel from a rather nice hotel (not the one we were staying in), and then we had to go to the airport and back to the Cockney Raj.
We have had a wonderful time and learnt a great deal, both in practical terms (for America is high on the agenda for Aristasian outreach) and in subtler ways. Our impression was confirmed that America, while very deeply affected by the degeneration of the Pit, is not (at least in the South) as profoundly decayed as England (Americans who object to this cannot quite understand what has actually happened to England in the last decade or so).
We left with high hopes of a more serious return.
