As a small, long-eared desert hedgehog, I do remember little towns all through the Deepest South: little towns along small rivers, little towns cut off from the outside world, little towns filled with steep-gabled clapboard houses with bulls-eye windows and shadowy porches. I can remember a time when Sunday afternoons were for driving out along backroads with my family, seeing lost little towns and wondering what life was like there.

The vur' lovely ginny_mccoo writes about a kind of self-consciously nostalgic vision of American towns in New England and the upper Midwest, about the vision of small-town America in magazine stories from the past:

I spent many lazy girl-summers reading. To this day I have a soft spot for the girl-fiction short stories that appeared in Seventeen. I've noticed that they now omit these short stories, but they used to be staples. I've tried to express the pleasure I had in reading these stories but people don't understand. To me it was all so very American in an exotic way - there would be stories about Jewish girls and attending cotillions. There would be 4th of July picnics where the disgruntled and sour teenager found love just when she was starting to feel claustrophobic about her relatives. It's no wonder that "Lolita" appealed to me so much: it was that Americana-- the porches in Connecticut. I want to see Wong Kar Wai's latest film, "My Blueberry Nights". I like outsiders' perspectives on America. I like their costume-y visions of neon signs and lonely highways.

I did see Old Greenwich and Westport before they were flooded with new money and McMansions. And I remember Litchfield and western Connecticut, the part of the state no one ever sees. I can remember seeing white porches and faded old Federal-era homes. Ginny at ginny_mccoo writes about standing sixteen and barefoot in a thin, soft sundress on one of those porches, hair still wet from swimming naked in a cold, clear stream behind one of those houses... It's a lovely vision. Ginny does have a dreamy sense of nostalgia and that lovely literary sense of the world: Form is just as important as content and the formal qualities that I appreciate are: Polaroids, blurriness, fade, soft-focus, heat-wavy. Nostagia creates a blur and all my love of details center around nostalgia.

There's that vision of the world in J. Peterman catalogs I've always liked: watercoloured, soft, hazy, suffused with late-summer light and literary references. I'll never get over that kind of vision. It's been twenty years since I've been on a picnic, but I do love the idea of a wicker hamper with a full 1920s set of picnic plates, of blankets set out with trays of sandwiches and Pimms No. 1 and lemonade. One of the things I envied Jilly at coco__ was that she's gone punting on the Cam and done the Cambridge-undergraduate picnic thing.

Kelsey at clush is in Korea this summer--- "being trans-pacific", she calls it. I envy her the chance to be overseas, though my own taste would be for a summer on Hokkaido. Kelsey recommended a bottle of vodka in the freezer as a way to get past insomnia on spring nights. I took her advice and bought a bottle of Skyy for my freezer this afternoon. I'll have to open it up later. I want to stay up late tonight and watch Peter Greenaway's "The Falls". I'll save "Lust, Caution" for later.

There are people at my apartment complex out in the pool tonight. In a better world, I might go out there myself and drink and swim laps by night. In the best of all possible worlds, the bikini girl in Nr. 109 would swim naked through the pool at three in the morning.

I will be up late tonight. I still need to be up early tomorrow to go sit at the coffeeshop and read and drink chocolate cappucino. I do wonder if steeping has a favourite coffee of tea, if she's a girl who reads in cafes...

This afternoon I finished re-reading both "This Side of Paradise" and "Sex and Rage". I want to re-do Murakami's "After Dark" tonight late. Tomorrow morning at the coffeeshop I'll bring...what? "Lost Girls and Love Hotels"? Or shall I bring "Garden of Eden" and think of Mediterranean sunlight? steeping is reading Cormac McCarthy this summer. Maybe I do need to finally read "The Road" or re-read "Suttree".

I will have to ask ginny_mccoo what she's reading. And ask both Kelsey at clush and Deserie at eyelines the same thing. What are the books that take them into summertimes full of hazy dreams? I'll ask that of any lovely clever literary reader or correspondent out there on the aether: what are the books that offer up nostalgia and dreams on summer mornings for you?