Soda fountains and what I've been reading

[mrissa]

Someone on my friendslist posted something about a soda fountain in a locked post, and it reminded me of when we used to go down to the soda fountain. It was on Dodge St. in Omaha, somewhere between 52nd and 48th (can't swear to the exact cross-street), and it was in the back of a drugstore just like they're supposed to be. And it was next door to a used bookstore -- to one of the used bookstores where they knew us so well that when I came in after the tornado, the owner said, "Thank goodness! I wondered if you'd been up at college when that hit!" (The tornado was six hours from Omaha, up here in Minnesota, so it's not like it was big news.)

Anyway, the soda fountain: we would go buy our books and then sit down on the red vinyl stools at the soda fountain counter and look at what books the other people bought. We would order chocolate malts, and there was always some leftover in the metal thing, and they also had these little pointy paper cups that had their own metal stands, and we would drink water and our malts. It is hot, and I have birthday book money, and so I wish I could do that today. But I suppose scottjames and greykev have to work, and anyway the three of us live in different cities now, and it's a bit of a commute to the Cris-Rexall soda fountain counter.

This was all in the mid-'90s, by the way, so soda fountains did not entirely disappear in the spring of 1964, never to return.

Anyway. Reading.

Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn. Sorry, guys, I liked Tamsin better. Or alternately, you were right, guys, I liked Tamsin better.

Jim Butcher, Grave Peril. Third in the series. Still good fun. This was definitely a mid-series book of a series with large plot arc, though: all kinds of things are coming down on the main character's head as the book closes. I find I'm fine with that. I'm quite grateful that rysmiel bothered to recommend these, though, because the marketing might as well hang out a big ol' sign reading, "Not of interest to mrissas. Please move along." "Fans of Laurel K. Hamilton will love this!" is just not the way to win my heart or my book-buying dollar.

Mark Holloway, Utopian Communities in America, 1680-1880. He left out many of the bits I found most interesting, I'm afraid, but it was well enough as a starting point for this batch of research. It's also a fairly old book -- mid-60s copyright -- so it's missing a lot of perspective on communal living experiments recently. On the one hand, this is good, because it's not trying to make Fourierists exactly analogous to hippies. On the other hand, it's bad, because it makes it far too easy to treat communal living experiments as things people used to do.

Herta Laipaik, Wind Chimes. This was a birthday gift from aet, a memoir written by a young Estonian woman who was finishing her medical training and working as a writer when the Russians came. The translation wasn't bad in that I think the meaning got across pretty well and smoothly, but I think aet's idiomatic English is better -- the sense of when phrases are inverted in English compared to their Estonian equivalents, for example. Anyway, it was a fascinating and valuable addition to my library of all things Finno-Ugric, and I'm pretty sure I'll reread it at least once when I'm writing Winter Wars or whatever the silly thing ends up being named when I get to it, may that day not come soon.

Rex Stout, Black Orchids, Over My Dead Body, The Second Confession, and Where There's a Will. I got in a groove of sorts, and dd_b had lent me a whole stack, so I just read through the whole stack. I'm out now. Time to make more pitiful faces, I guess. This bunch was definitely better than the first two I read in this series.

Charlie Stross (autopope), The Clan Corporate. Not enough economics, too much stuff that the main character found inconceivable and I found perfectly easy to conceive of. Also this is another mid-series book with a larger plot arc, so plenty of stuff is starting to crash down on their heads as the book is ending. I am more interested in that crashing than I was in this particular book. This is the peril of long series with large plot arcs, and I'm perfectly willing to deal with books like that if I like the series as a whole, if the prose isn't jarring, etc.

Elizabeth Wein (eegatland), The Sunbird. This, on the other hand, was the third book in a series with larger arcs -- character arcs in this case, rather than plot -- that resolved issues pretty significantly and to my satisfaction. The down side of this is that it makes it look pretty likely that Wein is done with these people. But she can do other things, too, I feel sure, and sometimes it's good to do other things, so we'll just wait and hope.

Jane Yolen and Adam Stemple, Pay the Piper. I don't think that having heard people read should make me like a book more or less, but this did: having heard Jane Yolen read, I do not screech when her characters don't know what words mean and have to look them up, because she reads it like it's character rather than Educational. Does that make sense? Often when a character has to look words up, it's because the author is going to sneak vocabulary words in while those dear little angels think they're reading a fairy story, but really they're learning! they'll never notice! oh, the wholesome deviousness! bleh, gag, hurl. But Jane Yolen isn't like that. Not even a little bit. She tells stories to people, and some of those people are bigger than others, and that's okay.

Not that the whole book was characters poring over a dictionary. I don't mean to make it sound like that. Just that that's one of my pet peeves in children's/YA, and it actually didn't peeve me this time, and that's notable. What I wouldn't have given for a high school full of kids who thought folk-rock was cool, when I was that age. But never mind that part. I really liked what they did with the fairy tale middle child as the main character (and also the other major character's resonance with that). I will go look at whatever else they do together -- Troll Bridge is out, Amazon says. We'll see.

Oh, Dragonsept adults: I will gladly lend this one to K. and B. I think they'd like it -- K. in particular, is my guess. We can arrange this when we arrange for ice cream, yes?

And now I'm reading Joanna Kavenna's The Ice Museum, which is about all the different places that have been called Thule or Ultima Thule. I will note that I hardly ever get the urge to read about warm places for the sake of reading about warm places, even when it never gets above zero for the whole week in January. But this just looked cool and refreshing. The observant might draw conclusions from this.

Comments

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

I can vouch that there's still a soda fountain in Truckee, CA, because I was there a month or so ago. But it's not a great ne, because when I asked for a chocolate soda she was very confused and I had to explain carefully that I didn't want a chocolate Coke, just chocolate syrup and soda water.

Not being on either the East Coast or in Las Vegas, I didn't bother asking for a chocolate egg cream. She'd probably have put eggs in it.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

We have the term "egg cream" here, too, to the best of my knowledge. I don't drink most carbonated beverages, though, so I'm not the world's expert.

Our college friend Marty-boy worked for a Truckee brewery awhile ago. I wonder if he still is. (We had Marte-girl as well. Written down, the distinction is clear, but by now his name is Marty-boy to me.)

[wilfulcait.livejournal.com]

"Not that the whole book was characters poring over a dictionary. I don't mean to make it sound like that. Just that that's one of my pet peeves in children's/YA, and it actually didn't peeve me this time, and that's notable."

When I was a kid, it was common that we'd be out in the car, and someone would encounter a word that we didn't know the meaning of, and when we hit the house there would be a race to get to the encyclopedia to see who could look the word up fastest and read it out to everyone. Complete with dancing around the den trying to look up word with one hand and fend off mother and sibling with the other.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Exactly: you can do it so it's part of the characters and their interactions. But some authors just throw it in for Educational Purposes, and that drives me up a wall.

[athenais.livejournal.com]

Wait, I thought Clan Corporate was the third of three. You mean it's not? Please don't tell me it's now three of seven. I'm so over seven-book series. I mean, I adore Charlie's work, but eesh.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

From my perspective, it is the third of N, N > 3. Some people may have a better idea of N than I have. But definitely N > 3.

Sorry to be the bearer of sequel news.

[athenais.livejournal.com]

I ought not to complain as I like the series, and obviously the author does, too (and the author's agent and the author's publisher). I'm glad I found out before I started the book, all the same.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Oh yes. Glancing at the amount of book you have left and thinking, "How on earth is he going to do all that in this number of pages?" or, "Golly, this series is ending miserably considering how well it began," is not a good thing.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Iwill note that I hardly ever get the urge to read about warm places for the sake of reading about warm places, even when it never gets above zero for the whole week in January. But this just looked cool and refreshing.

For much the same reason, I am listening to the audiobook of Antarctica on a Plate, a memoir of a woman who went to Antarctica to be a cook for the air strip Blue 1. Unfortunately, she's been in Chile and South Africa provisioning for the trip for way too long and the heat is still oppressive and the present tense is getting on my nerves. I don't know why I don't like present tense.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I don't mind the present tense, but I don't like it when people attempt to use it in lieu of dramatic tension or narrative flow. Also, in personal nonfiction it's more than a little annoying, because she is looking back on the situation with perspective -- no question about it. If she writes, "I have no idea what's going to happen to me," we know it's not true.

That may be entirely unrelated to why you don't like it. I'm just sayin'.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

That might be it. The only thing I can use to describe it is "pretentious," but I've read present-tense narratives that don't do that to me, so perhaps it's the idea that the tension is artificial.

And it's not like there isn't tension (in the short term, at least) anyway - the food order screwed up, so when they got to Capetown before flying to Antartica, they discovered there was no food and they had to run around like mad buying it. Then she couldn't find an oven that fit her specs, so has to delegate that to a company member in Capetown and hope it's on the December flight, and at the point I was in the car this morning, she's just landed on the ice and been given the information that they found her a backup oven on site, buried with the rest of the gear that they bury every season when the air strip personnel leave, but that someone managed to put an ice axe through the door as theyw ere digging it out. So she's going to have to figure out how to feed up to 70 people on the ice with no oven.

At this point I'm not liking her very much, but the fascination of life on the ice is drawing me on. I read the memoir by the doctor who developed breast cancer while on base, and she was unlikable too, but the logistics of living and coping on an Antarctic base were fascinating. Blue 1 is more primitive - it's a seasonal airstrip, so there's no permanent buildings, just tents - and I'm interested to find out how people live and work there.

(And I'm sitting up at the Ref desk on a really boring morning, so nattering on and on in various LJs.)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Nattering Welcome Here.

I hate it when I don't click with first-person narration of a topic that interests me. I had that problem with The Ice Museum, actually -- although that was worse, that was that I didn't really click with the first-person narration and that I thought she was wrong about a lot of stuff that matters to me -- sometimes grandly wrong, and sometimes subtly wrong, but still, wrong. Sigh.

[ksumnersmith.livejournal.com]

All of a sudden, you've made me think of root beer floats. I'd only get these occasionally when I was a kid, but oh ...

And now I'm sitting here thinking about the feel the of the strangely tingly/creamy bubbles that always frothed to the top of the cheap plastic tumblers, and the way the ice cream would slowly dissolve in cloudy streamers, and the long spoons I'd always get in my favourite restaurant. Not to mention the way that I was always shivering and covered in goosebumps by the end, and enjoying every minute of it.

And it makes me sigh, because any part of a root beer float would now make me curl up in a painful ball for the better part of two days, but in memory ... delicous. And don't even get me started on milkshakes.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I would far rather watch than drink a root beer float. Fluid dynamics are our friends!

[hobbitblue.livejournal.com]

Can I be horribly foreign and please have you explain to me exactly what a soda fountain is. I'm aware of them from films and books, shiny places with lots of metal where you get.. sodas.. but I'm a bit cloudy on the details!

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

In the back of a drugstore (pharmacy with other conveniences available within it, in case terminology varies -- often a sort of all-purpose non-grocery store), they would have a long counter with stools in front of it and some machinery behind it. The person behind the counter could make all kinds of concoctions of ice cream, carbonated water, syrups, and other flavorings. Usually the focus was not on different flavors of ice cream inherently, but on different things done with a limited number of basic flavors of ice cream and fizzy non-alcoholic drinks. You could, for example, get an apricot Coke at a soda fountain (my friend Ed's favorite), or a banana split, or a lime soda with ice cream floating in it, or other things like that.

Mostly what we got was chocolate malted milkshakes.

[hobbitblue.livejournal.com]

Ah, thankyou.. I never could work out what was being mixed up to make stuff, much clearer now!

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Glad to be of service!

Three

[scottjames.livejournal.com]

There was a soda shop in town when I lived in Iowa (age 4-5). The person (the soda jerk?) was named Candi. She was a friend of the family--I was friends with her kids, and my folks and Candi and her husband whatshisname would play cards. My dad had to teach her how to make an egg cream. But he was really into it.

I've debated telling you this, but I think I shall: the soda shop (on 50th street, I believe) is no more. The drug store now has an expanded area for medical devices (canes, walkers, etc). And yes, I do have to work, anyway.

And I'm completely with you in regards to a root beer float. I want someone else to order one so I can watch it, but I don't want to eat/drink one.

Re: Three

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Sigh. Poor sad lack of soda fountain.

I knew I could count on you for the fluid dynamics, though.