2005-10-07T17:40:00.000-04:00

According to A catalogue descriptive of the various curiosities to be seen at Don Saltero’s coffee-house and tavern, in Chelsea (London, [1795]), the owner displayed roughly 800 "curiosities." Among the items you could see there were a piece of Queen Catharine's skin, a handkerchief "made of the asbestos rock, which fire cannot consume," mouse skeletons, Turkish dice, a piece of an unidentified saint's bone, "a piece of rotten wood, not to be consumed by fire," consecrated wafers, "the tarantula, or spider from Tarantum in Italy, the bite whereof occasions madness and death, and is curable only by music," Chinese playing cards, a tiger's tusk, "a large piece of a child's skin," a white sparrow, a "Chinese rocket," "Manna, from Canaan," "the head of an Egyptian," a pincushion that belonged to Mary Queen of Scots, her watch, "A surprising large moth from Constantinople," a "curious small starved mouse," a whale embryo, a beaver's head, another tarantula, "An Indian pipe of peace, called by the natives the calumet," a Chinese compass, an antelope embryo, a "curious lock of a China man's hair," a bat skeleton, "brain stones," "petrified rain," a "cinder from the burning mountain Vesuvius," porcupine quills, a "very small starved frog," a petrified lamb, "A Scotch pebble from Arthur's seat, near Edinburgh, cut for the top of a snuff box," a "Chinese lady's wedding shoe," hickory nuts, "the pope's candle, with which he curses heretics," a "Book of philosophy, in the Chinese language, called the book of knowledge," a "pair of drawers of a Chinese lady," ostrich legs, a "dried cat," a "Spanish apparatus, or belt, to prevent cuckoldom, commonly called a Spanish padlock," a mail shirt worn by a Knight Templar, a pair of snow shoes, a flamingo's head and legs, a "String of Romanish beads," a "Ball of hair taken out of the maw of an ox," a bear's paw, an elephant ear, William III's coronation shoes, a "Tartar lady's shoe," a "Pair of Turkish woman's shoes," sundry other shoes, Queen Elizabeth's stirrup, her "work basket," her chambermaid's hat, the "king of Morocco's sword of state," the "flaming sword of William and Conqueror," "Two ancient broad arrows of Robin Hood," a Turkish pistol, a monkey fetus, a snake fetus, an armadillo fetus, and an "Indian canoe." The catalogue also provided a "complete LIST of the BENEFACTORS to DON SALTERO'S Coffee-Room of Rarities." though it doesn't say who gave what. I wonder whether Don Saltero ever turned down a gift or declined to exhibit it.

Don Saltero's collection reminds one of the fictional Chinese encyclopedia in Jorge Luis Borges's short story, "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins," a tale made famous by Michel Foucault, in which the encyclopedia entry for animals includes "'(a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies.'" Foucault comments, "In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that." (Foucault, xv)

But is our surprise in reviewing the objects collected by Don Saltero, or the seemingly random categories of "Chinese" thought in Borges and Foucault, so different from the frisson experienced by a gawking patron of the Chelsea coffeehouse? And are we so different in our own collections of stuff? When we bring back "souvenirs" from vacation, or just crap from Target that we never get around to using, are we so different from Don Saltero? If you or I made a catalogue of the objects in our garage or attic or basement or bottom dresser drawer, how rational would it look? What exactly are we doing when we collect stuff? Don Saltero's curiosities displayed his sophistication, his worldliness, but above all his ability to acquire things.

2005-09-08T20:25:00.000-04:00

I'm writing from The Daily Grind, the cafe on the campus of the College of William and Mary. When I say "cafe," I don't mean a place to go to drink coffee. There's plenty of tasty fair trade coffee here, and exceptional bagels, and luxuriant smoothies, but the fare isn't the reason I come to "the Grind." I come here because the Daily Grind is the closest approximation on earth to the Platonic Idea of the Coffeehouse. A coffeehouse is a place where you meet other people and talk about ideas with them. A good coffeehouse is a place where the conversation is plentiful and rewarding, where friends, acquaintances, colleagues and sociable strangers are at ease with meandering, unpredictable conversation, where expertise and precision give way to speculation, fancy, pained confession, hilarity, unsubstantiated claims and half-baked theories, gallows humor and unwise proposals. I cannot explain how a good coffeehouse comes into being. One might think it's the people who make the coffeehouse. As long as they're friendly and intelligent, as long as they have experiences and thoughts worth sharing, the rest should take care of itself, right? But the patrons, if necessary, are not sufficient to make the proper coffeehouse atmosphere. The same people transplanted to a place outside the good coffeehouse would not say the same things. In a cafeteria line they would be impatient and irritable. By the water cooler they would be small and catty. And in a bad coffeehouse their conversation would be shallow and perfunctory, if it existed at all. The good coffeehouse has an alchemical quality about it. Its ingredients, their proportions and mode of combination are known only to a select guild whose trade secrets date back to the eighteenth century. The good coffeehouse combines space, furnishings, music, the sound of the grinder, height of the windows, the personality of the proprietor and employees, in such a way that would be unrecordable even if they were betrayed to the uninitiated. The Daily Grind is a Good Coffeehouse.

Contrary to popular misconceptions, the coffeehouse is not a good place to read. A newspaper, yes, your email, yes, but nothing heavier. Libraries, offices and homes are for reading. The coffeehouse is for talking about what you've been reading. You can't live here, but you can't stay away for too long.

There's an eighteenth-century print of a coffeehouse; the caption reads, "The new philosophy: our cradle was a cafe." That claim seems farfetched, but a few visits to the Daily Grind make it plausible. It's easy to romanticize the coffeehouse, to think of it as the place where philosophes met to invent the Enlightenment; where revolutionaries plotted the overthrow of the Ancien Regime; where Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre held court, chain-smoking and existentializing. But if philosophy is an attitude, a "love of wisdom" rather than a mere discipline, it requires something more than tightly-woven theories. It requires conversation. Writing is constrained, cautious and painful; it works with carefully selected ideas and cuts out the extraneous. Conversation is relaxed and breeds so many ideas that not all of them can be good. Some of them are inane. But some of them aren't.

The blog is a very big coffeehouse. It's a space of virtual conversation. It doesn't matter that I'm writing. It isn't the medium that makes the conversation. It's the recklessness of it.

Coffeehouse Notes