Tremulous With Longing

Powell's Books' Review-a-Day is so often so very, very good that it's a scandal that it doesn't have an RSS feed. Instead, I wait for Arts & Letters Daily to graciously reprise the best bits -- and feel momentarily distressed, both that I may have missed out on something even better and like I can't even farm my own goods myself.

Exhibit A: Terry Castle's Atlantic Monthly write-up of Elsie de Wolfe's classic book on interior decoration The House in Good Taste. (Since the Atlantic Monthly has gone offline, Powell's often functions as a surrogate for that source as well.) It may start as a review of the book, but it turns into a witty, literary meditation on the appeal of all guides, new and old, to decoration; the auto-erotic and anti-maternal pleasures of glossy catalogues and "shelter mags"; and the author's own charming Anglophilic lesbianism. This whole thing may not necessarily be your bag -- speaking for myself, I'm an avowed consumer of "furniture porn" -- but you'll find something in here that I think you'll like.