Boat show earlier in the month. Car show in Houston this past weekend. Not just any cars - Corvettes and Camaros - all gussied up and on display. Climbing into a hot car is like buckling on a pistol. It is the great equalizer - Henry Gregor Felsen.
The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere, giant finned cars - nose forward like fish:
a savage servility
slides by on grease - Robert Lowell
Everywhere in life is somewhere else, and you get there in a car - E.B. White. So true, and yet somehow life's better in a fast sleek vehicle.
The car has become an article of dress without which we feel uncertain, unclad, and incomplete in the urban compound - Marshall McLuhan
What is the purpose of life? The purpose of life is to produce and consume automobiles - Jane Jacobs (The Death and Life of Great American Cities - 1961)If I don't put a boat chase in a novel, I shall definitely have a car chase. Squealing tires, gunning engines, revving motors. We DVR episodes of Top Gear (BBC version) - so hot cars and the need for speed thrives in this household. I have lots of research material, and I live with a Corvette driver. No sputter or putter allowed. It's foot to the floorboard and zoom, zoom. I'm collecting speed adjectives for that chapter - adrenaline enhanced and turbo-charged writing. Come along for the ride.
