"When Simone de Beauvoir, the French existentialist, first tried to smoke marijuana, she, like Bill Clinton, did not inhale. It was May 3, 1947, and she was as new to New York City as she was to the drug.
"Friends taught her how to breathe in the smoke, but she was immune to its effects. “I feel guilty,” she wrote, glumly, in her diary. “No angel bothers to lift me from earth.” She added, “I turn toward the bottle of bourbon.”
Beauvoir’s unrequited love for marijuana is among the highlights of “New York Diaries: 1609-2009,” which is the most convivial and unorthodox history of New York City one is likely to come across. This book’s editor, Teresa Carpenter, a longtime Village Voice writer, has had the ingenious idea to comb through hundreds of diaries, written by the famous, the infamous and the unknown in New York, and to liberate these chronicles of their crunchiest and most humane bits.
She has good knife skills. She lays this material out in calendar rather than chronological format — the book moves from January to December — thus providing strange and satisfying juxtapositions. Thus the entries for Jan. 18 include George Washington, in 1790, suffering with sore gums and, in 1943, Tennessee Williams rattled by crab lice. Williams, quoting a friend, calls this plague his “occupational disease.”"
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/20/books/new-york-diaries-1609-to-2000-review.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha28
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