Refrigerator Art

Because I didn't post a picture last time, this week you get two. It's Art (note the capital!). Refrigerator Art, to be precise, because that is its locus. No, not its focus - what that is, I leave you to decide for yourself; just the locus - the place where it's at. Or where it was when I created it - Art is transient; it's all been moved around since then. Art is also in the eye of the Beholder. That's called Reader Response Criticism, or something. Probably something.

So here you are: one Poem, entitled "Midsummer Night's Ball":

Midsummer Night's Ball

And then, there's a Sculpture (note capital!). No, not a Sculpture really - an Arrangement? Oh, I know: it's a Visual Poem (note: TWO capitals!). It's entitled - ummm... how about "Untitled"? That means you can pick whatever title suits you. Go for it. (Incidentally, they're little bendable magnetic guys which I picked up at the San Francisco airport, in the SFMOMA gift shop. Aren't they cute?)

Untitled

Life, the Universe, and Refrigerator Art. Magnetising, ain't it.

Rabbit Trails and Dust Bunnies

Things I learned about today: the meaning of "heuristic"; Burma; Richard Wellesley, 1st Marquess Wellesley (no, not the Duke of Wellington. This guy was his brother.); Singapore; Stamford Raffles; the fact that Queen Victoria at age 44 looked about 60, and that John Brown was a couple of years younger than her; where Jaipur and Udaipur are on a map of India; that Wellington was the Queen's great-great-great-something-uncle; that the Queen Mum grew up in Glamis Castle (you know, as in Macbeth? Thane of Glamis? Except her dad was the real deal, and didn't murder any kings, either.) and that she rejected her husband's marriage proposal twice because she didn't want to be a member of the Royal Family (never mind queen)... oh, and probably a few other things that I'll remember at some opportune moment. And all of that while I was supposed to be reading a chapter in Alastair Pennycook's The Cultural Politics of English as an International Language.

You see, I get off on rabbit trails. Wikipedia is really bad for that. You look up Wellesley because he's mentioned in the book, and it says on the wiki that he was the Queen's great-great-great-etc-grandfather, so you click on the link about the Queen, and then on one about the Queen Mum, and so on and so forth... And then you finally wrench yourself back to the textbook, and read about Malay, and you realize you have no clue what exactly they're talking about, so back to Google you go. Half an hour and several dozen rabbit trails later you emerge, and drag yourself back to your book, only to be confronted with the name Stamford Raffles, as if this was somebody your mother went to Kindergarten with and you'd heard about him all your life. So of course you have to look him up; information is important, isn't it? Lippity-lop down the rabbit trail...

And you know what's at the end of the rabbit trails? Dust bunnies, that's what. You see, the more rabbit trails you follow in the course of your day, the less time you have to get out your trusty ostrich-feather duster, or your not-quite-so-trusty cordless rechargeable dust buster, and go after the fluffy little critters in the corners of you living room and under the couches. So they multiply, growing by leaps and bounds. Which is probably why they're called dust bunnies, those leaps and bounds. Lippity-lop... A house with dust bunnies is a sure sign that its inhabitants are prone to following rabbit trails.

Incidentally, I wonder if Stamford Raffles had anything to do with raffle tickets? Maybe he was the original fundraiser, selling draw tickets for early-nineteenth-century arts and crafts to support his trip to Asia, and that activity was called "raffling" after him. Eh? I'm going to have to look it up.

Life, the Universe, and Rabbit Trails. Beware the dust bunnies at the end of them.

Fabulatherapy

A couple of days ago, one of my friends posted this link on Facebook: "You don't need pills for depression - you need books, says British agency". To save you the hassle of reading the article, it says - well, it says just what's in the title. Apparently this organization in the UK called "The Reading Agency" is working on getting books prescribed to patients with depression; and what's really cool about it is that they have the backing of the Department of Health and a few other high-up official bodies with clout. They've compiled a list of "mood-boosting" books, and it will be made into a pamphlet and handed out by doctors to their depressed patients. Whoot! I wish I lived in the UK - bibliotherapy, that's my kind of antidepressant prescription.

Now, of course, I've been self-medicating with bibliotherapy all my life. Okay, all my life since I was six and first picked up Der kleine Lord (aka Little Lord Fauntleroy), and puzzled out the first line, "Cedric himself knew nothing whatever about it". I haven't looked back since. But, really, even before that epic moment, I lived in stories. Stories that were read to me, stories that were told to me. (None that I watched, at that point, because we didn't have a TV, let alone go to the movies - we were kind of old-fashioned that way.) In fact, quite likely the reason I picked up Little Lord Fauntleroy and taught myself to read was that there were never enough people around who were willing to read to me, so I had to become self-sufficient (on the same principle, I got my driver's license as soon as I possibly could, because I was tired of being dependent on other people to drive me around).

In case you missed my point, I love books. I adore books. I - well, no, I wouldn't go so far as to say I worship books. One does not worship the air one breathes, or the food one lives on. Truly, I don't think I could live without books. Then again - it's not actually the books I love. Yes, I do love the physical objects, too - I enjoy handling them, fixing them, sorting them, looking at them nicely arranged on the shelves; I could be quite happy working in a book bindery or the processing department of a library (where they put the call number stickers on the spine, and the clear sticky foil around the dust covers). But what I really love is what's in books. I love Story; I live in Story.

And Story comes in many forms. Books are just one of them. See, I'm fully aware that book nerds like myself aren't actually terribly common. Oh, there's plenty of us, alright - you should see the crowds I have to elbow my way through to get to the book tables at the annual library discard sale. But compared to the crowds at, say, a ballgame, or the opening of the latest blockbuster movie, well...

But that's just it: the latest blockbuster movie. Movies are Story. TV shows are Story. Most computer games are Story. Even ballgames, or the Olympics, are Story - "...and Schlipfengrimmler passed the ball to Schustermeier, and he hit the most amazing strike of his career, and - GOOOAAAL!!" It gets told, and re-told, over and over. Blockbuster movies are blockbusters because so many people love them. In fact, I don't know anyone, not one single person, who does not like Story in one form or another.

Now, much as I love and thoroughly, wholeheartedly, approve of the bibliotherapy the Brits are prescribing to their depressed patients, I would love even more to see that idea expanded. Not everyone loves reading, and (though this might sound sacrilegious to my fellow book nerds, librarians and literacy teachers) I don't think everyone needs to, either. But I think much, much more could be done with Story. Everyone needs Story. I believe everyone enjoys Story, so everyone could benefit from Story.

I'm not sure what to call it - Storyotherapy? Narratotherapy? Oh, I know - the Latin word for story is fabula. Fabulatherapy. Fabulous!

Now wouldn't it be great if, next time you go to the doctor because you're feeling lousy, the doc would pull out his prescription pad, and started asking: "Now, what's your favourite form of stories? You like movies? Hmm, let's see, where is my list of the most uplifting, serotonin-boosting films of all times? Ah, here we are. Take two, and call me in the morning!" I'm sure that studies would prove that there are zero side effects, and that Fabulatherapy is the most cost-effective and best-tolerated treatment they could prescribe.

But until that happy day arrives, we can always continue to self-medicate. Story is all around - pick your favourite kind, and get lost in another world. It works.

Life, the Universe, and Fabulatherapy. Fabulous, isn't it?

The Deep Meaning of a Dream

I had a dream this morning, just before I woke up. With my backpack on, I was walking through the Bavarian mountain village where I went to high school, looking for the book store at the centre of town. But it turned out it wasn't there any more. Then I was talking to a lady from the tourist information bureau, which happened to be in this little cottagey place next to where the bookstore was supposed to be, and I asked her when the next bus would leave so I could get back to the train station - but the buses, she said, were no longer running, either; they hadn't been for quite some time. Of course I hadn't been to the village in over twenty years, so I didn't know that. I think there was some other weird stuff in the dream, but I can't remember it; I just woke up.

Those of you who are into dream interpretation are probably salivating right now: what does it all mean? Deep, psychological, Freudian, spiritual and all that - or what? What. I'm afraid that the meaning of my dreams - and I have lots, all the time - is simply that the stuff I dream about is something I've thought about during the preceding day.

In this case, it had to do with the fact that yesterday I was at the local drug store, and they're changing ownership and are therefore clearing all their shelves and rearranging everything in the store. They've changed hands before, but usually all that happened was that the sign over the door had the name of a different drug store chain on it. This time, they're getting rid of most of their stock, presumably to start stocking the new chain's house brand, and they're no longer carrying the herbal iron tonic I went there to buy (the shelf it used to be on was full of dozens of jars of a food substitute weight loss product. I was offended.). And when I left the drug store, I saw a big sign on the video rental place next door: "Store Closing". It was one of the last holdouts of video rentals; all the big chains in town closed a few years ago. Alas, now we won't have this one any more, either; we'll be dependent on Youtube or the library for our entertainment. So there you have the reason why in my dream everything was closed or gone or cancelled.

As for why I was looking for that book store in the first place, just before going to sleep I was reading Goethe's "Sorrows of Young Werther". I haven't read it in thirty years, since grade 10, and my little yellow-covered paperback copy (published by Reclam, as all German required school readings are) came from that book store. It's got my teenaged scribblings in the margins ("S u D!" it says beside the passage where Werther first meets Lotte and is so smitten he can't even produce a coherent paragraph when he's trying to describe the experience to his friend Wilhelm. It is, of course, the perfect example of Sturm und Drang, the original emo culture.).

So there you have it: the deep meaning of my dream is to be found in bedtime reading and errands run in the afternoon. Oh, and once I got up, while I was consuming my breakfast toast, I booted up Google and did some research: the bookstore in that village is still in existence, and so is the bus line that runs to and from the train station. So the dream wasn't even prophetic, not in the slightest bit. I'm glad.

Life, the Universe, and Deep Meanings of Dreams. What have you dreamt recently?

Handwriting

I've been amusing myself by writing with a dip pen lately. I was in the art supplies shop yesterday, and picked up a new pen holder for the nibs my friend gave me to go with my walnut ink. So I wrote her a letter, on paper, with pen and ink, and quite enjoyed myself doing it. The walnut ink is perfect for that; I can get almost four lines of writing out of one dip. If I use the Pelikan fountain pen ink, I have to dip for every other word, and it drips and splatters like crazy. Fountain pen ink is much more watery, so that it won't clog the mechanism of the pen. The walnut stuff is more like India ink; it has an almost lacquer-like quality to it and leaves a raised line when it's dry. Best keep that one out of my grandfather's fountain pen!

But writing that letter had me thinking again - about handwriting, this time. In the age of the telephone (i.e. last century), people were bemoaning the loss of letter-writing skills. Now, we're picking up those skills again in profusion, by writing emails or sending texts rather than phoning (I wonder if a generation down the line, grandmothers are going to bemoan the loss of telephoning skills?).

Charles Dodgson, Lewis Carroll, apparently wrote enormous numbers of letters, on the order of a couple thousand a year ("One third of my life seems to go in receiving letters, the other two-thirds in answering them", Cohen quotes him as having said). Well, I just checked my email program, and my "sent mail" folder has quite a few messages in it, too - maybe not quite on Carroll's magnitude, but it might well be approaching a kilo over the last year. I've been known to spend all morning on email, and that not terribly infrequently, either. I write lots of letters, and receive lots of them back, but they're written with QWERTY, not the quill. In the days of pen-and-paper mail, I usually had no need to look at the "sender" section of an envelope - all I had to do was to look at the address, and I knew it was from my mother, my aunt, my friend - I knew them by their handwriting, just as quickly as (if not more quickly than) I recognized their voices on the telephone.

Handwriting is extremely distinctive, very recognizable. And we're losing it. I've made quite a few new friends over the last fifteen years, since we got our first internet connection and I discovered the wonders of email. I write far more letters now than I ever did with pen and paper, and communicate with my friends more often than I did via the telephone. With those of my friends whom I met in person before we began email or social media correspondence, I at least know their voice - but with many of them, I have never seen their handwriting, nor they mine. And that's too bad.

Handwriting carries so much of the person in it. It's a form of body language, really, the personality in miniature on a sheet of paper. Handwriting analysis is a serious branch of psychology (granted, it's also a silly branch of quackery in some cases, but not always). It's akin to the handshake: a limp-rag-handshaker will also, likely, have a wimpy pen stroke, whereas the bone-crusher is probably also a paper-puncturer whose writing is engraved on the next four sheets of the writing pad. Or like the gesture: the overly-friendly person who leans forward to get in your face might have a slant to their handwriting that tips so far to the right it almost falls over, while the writing of a reticent, reserved individual might lean away from you to the left margin of the page. Some folks have writing that sprawls clear across the page, whereas scientists, I've noticed, tend to write in tiny script or print. Alas, I probably will not be able to follow up that line of research with more observations. Nobody writes by hand any more.

I did hear somewhere that the American military is working on a keystroke recognition program which can tell who's typing just by how they hit the letters on the keyboard (in my case, that would include overuse of the backspace key - "ah, this person backspaced to correct a typo a dozen times in the last sentence, it must be her"). Perhaps, when they perfect that program, someone can integrate it with a personalised font system, so that my computer knows it's me doing the typing, and automatically puts the font on screen in my own handwriting (which I've scanned and fed into the computer previously, of course). Wouldn't that be cool?

But I'm not holding my breath on it. Meanwhile, I'll go on qwertying the bulk of my letters, and then writing the occasional letter in old-fashioned pen and ink. Dip pen, and walnut ink, no less. Sometimes. And just so you can't say you've never seen my writing, I've attached a picture of it. Now you know.

Life, the Universe, and Writing by Hand. Try it sometime, so you don't forget.

A Sun and a Beam

I was packing my son's school lunch this morning. He really likes fruit; in fact, I call him the Fruit Ninja: he comes into the kitchen, he leaves the kitchen, and mysteriously, fruit has disappeared from the fruit bowl. So, of course, I was putting fruit into his lunch, two lovely, big pieces of it, one - but wait. I'll tell you what they were in a minute. You see, those two pieces of fruit reminded me of a story a teacher of mine told us one day.

It was the end of the war, 1945, in Germany. My teacher was, he said, about three years old at the time, and living with his mother in a small Northern Bavarian town. The war was over, the area occupied by American forces. One day the little boy was standing outside their house by the garden fence, when suddenly there appeared in front of him a man - an American in uniform, a tall man, a black man! Wide-eyed, the little boy looked up at the dark face - he had never seen someone like that before in his life! And this stranger held out two objects to the boy, two things the boy had never seen before either, and, I presume, the man smiled a wide white smile in the black face. The little boy took the two things (perhaps he was too shy to say "Danke") and ran into the house. "Mama, Mama," he called, "Mama, I got a sun and a beam!"
My teacher said that to this day, the smell of an orange peel brings back the image of that black face, of the kindness of a soldier who gave a small German boy his first orange and banana.

Life, the Universe, a Sun and a Beam. I hope the Fruit Ninja enjoys his today.

"Food"

I don't usually re-blog other people's postings, but this one, which came to me via Jim from Up-From-the-Mud, is worth sharing. It's an extremely thought-provoking little video about a young man, Jesse Hunter, who gets all his food for free - from garbage bins. Not because he has to (he isn't homeless or anything), but because he can, because there's so much food thrown away all the time.

Now, I know this is going to give some of you the willies, big-time - what about hygiene? This is disgusting, what's he putting into his body? Eeewww! But, think about it - people smoke, they suck tar into their bodies... people get plastic surgery, they have silicone injected into them... and people consume artificially-coloured-flavoured-and-textured substances, they ingest chemicals that were never meant for human consumption... what's a few human germs compared to all that? (And, no, I don't go for smoking or plastic surgery, but the plastic-and-tar foods - well, guilty as charged...)

I particularly like the conclusion to this piece - Jesse doesn't suggest that we all start scavenging in university food courts. (Well, if we did, there wouldn't be anything left for him, would there?) Instead, he turns it all around - start thinking about your food, he says. Don't throw away perfectly good food. Learn about where food comes from, so you get to appreciating it. And finally - grow a carrot.

So here it is: "Food".



Life, the Universe, and Something Controversial For a Change. I hope it is for a change.