Ours, increasingly, is the age of pseudo-connoisseurship, the means by which we seek fatuously to distinguish ourselves from the main of mediocrity. To sit around a bottle of rancid grape juice, speaking of delicate hints of black currant, oaken smoke, truffle, or whatever other dainty nonsense with which nature is fancied to have enlaced its taste, is to be a cafone of the first order.
Confessions of an Opium-seeker: an excellently-written article on the author’s search for an opium-den. His motivation and style of writing, both of which border on egotistical self-assurance, are quite amazing. It drops in the history of opium as well, which in itself is rather amazing.
The word “hip,” whose currency was common enough for it to have appeared in print by 1904—around the time, coincidentally, that the first opium song, “Willie the Weeper,” seems to have originated—may have derived from the classic, age-old, pelvic-centered, side-lying opium-smoking position, and may have been used originally as a sign of mutual recognition and reference by those who were in the know about the big sweet smoke.
Discovered via the always-excellent Give me Something To Read, who need an Android application so badly I may need to volunteer to make it.
