Status Updates From Imagine Kissing Pete

Finished the first installment, The Girl on the Baggage Truck. I love his writing! Will start and finish the second one by tonight or tomorrow. I should have brought it with me on this weekend as I would already be half way done with it by now.

That's a damned nice fortieth-birthday present, Pete.

(cont'd from last update)
a tea dance at the club & a girl in a long black satin dress & my furious jealousy of a fellow who wore a yellow foulard tie. I wanted none of it ever again, but all I had I wanted to keep.

It was not nostalgia, which only means homesickness, nor was it a wish to be living that excitement again. It was a splendid contentment with the knowledge that once I had felt {love & excitement & music & laughter} so deeply & well that the throbbing urging of {the time's slow dance hit} could evoke the original sensation & the pictures that went with it:
(cont'd next update)

A drunken night of dancing ends in a fist-fight that's got to be the most absurd, half-hearted thing I've ever read; it's all down to the End of Innocence for a group of bright young things whose world was upended by the 1929 market crash & the onrushing train to Ennui that is Adulthood's vehicle. Lots of palaver about unpleasant sex and rape. The novella was published in 1960, so that was still Shocking.

I'm reading a library-binding edition of "Imagine Kissing Pete" as a separate entity. My library system only has this volume of the three surviving, and no system notes to tell me that this is the case.