Frilly Unicorn?
September 30th, 2006
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Categories: Quotidian
Archive
Archive for September, 2006
Almost Too Tired Even For Random Bullets of Crap
September 26th, 2006
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Back from visiting relatives. Oddly exhausting and much of the trip was a lot less fun than a sweaty concert.
Happy highlights of the visit included
- a trip to Frenchy’s where I scored a couple of t-shirts and a couple of wonderfully ugly work shirts with embroidered logos. (Frenchy’s made the New Yorker last week. Calvin Trillin loves it.) I think Douglas will look quite fetching in Paul’s Plumbing snap front shirt. I’m holding onto the minor hockey tournament t-shirt for myself I think; he can have the Take-One-Down-Hand-It-Around t-shirt
- a dash into Stanfield’s outlet shop where my search for long underwear was wildly successful. He now has all the wooly undershirts he could possibly need. And as an added bonus–even though they were seconds, the arms and legs are the right length. Genuine 100% itchy grey wool Windsor Wear remains elusive.
- a jaunt out Tatamagouche way to the Lismore Sheep Farm yielded some beautiful wooden needles, a drop spindle, and wool that should make up into some good working mittens. My guess is that it’d also make a good gansey.
Heather
Categories: Quotidian, Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time, Travel
The Underside
September 17th, 2006
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It was a slow week for reading around here and several books went back to the library unfinished. From the portion I read, I’d say Mary Gaitskill’s Two Girls Fat and Thin covers similar ground as Veronica in its exploration of two unlikely friends. The reworking of similar characters was part of why I wanted to read it. I may borrow it again when I’m in the mood to put up with the Ayn Rand character that drives the early parts of the plot.
The most interesting thing I did finish was Gather Beneath the Banner, a catalogue from a 1999 Textile Museum. The catalog is strong on the images; high-level on the Women’s Christian Temperance Union; and oddly light on the details of the construction of the banners. Not a single photo of the back of a banner. (Why, yes, I have made security guards nervous by trying to peep around at the backings of tapestries. Looking very closely is not touching.)
While my great-grandmother belonged to a temperance society (somewhere around here I have her pledge card), it’s unlikely that I’d ever pass muster. Even so, I’m curious about the contradictions at the heart of the nineteenth-century WCTU: I’d like to better understand how its members sustained the contradiction between arguments for equality when it came to female suffrage and arguments of difference with when it came to race and eugenics.
(Note to self: some research possibilities identified here.)
(Another note to self: wonder if there’s a text out there somewhere that talks about the way politics and textiles intersect in public spaces (banners, expedition flags, badges). Must be. )
Domestic Translations
September 16th, 2006
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Every fall Christie’s holds an Exploration and Travel auction. The prices are always always out of reach but some years I buy the catalog so I can moon over glass slides, books, and impedimenta. No catalog this year but some highlights.
Raft of Amundsen gear this year: suitcase, mug, bayonet, sunglasses, and a useful looking matchbox holder. The matchbox holder would set me back about four months worth of groceries. A less useful looking box or the property taxes? Hard to decide.
I see they’re also auctioning off Cherry-Gerrard’s blankie and several lots of his books, the Kiplings being the most tempting. Books or heat this winter? 
This year I find myself longing for these blackwork maps–exploration rendered in domestic needlework by an anonymous woman who carefully read the exploration accounts. If only we could forgo food for three years.
Categories: Textile
Today’s Gem
September 7th, 2006
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The teenagers were out in force this afternoon as I was on a library run. The mood was set by the two boys who got tangled up in each other bikes as they tried to keep up with (in oh so many ways) the gaggle of six girls on the other side of the street.
Best teenager statement today was collected at the grocery store: “Dude, there aren’t any trees in Lebanon.”
Heather
Categories: Neighbourhood
A Lot of Talk and Not Enough Maps
September 5th, 2006
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Rose Macaulay isn’t much read these days. Shame really. Her volume of short essays–Personal Pleasures–always sends me to the dictionary looking for an intriguing word she’s used that I don’t recognize. While her comic novels deal with social situations that have, for the most part, disappeared, they always make me laugh or wish I had a bit a notepaper nearby.
I’m very slowly making my way through her canon and most recently finished Crewe Train, the tale of Denham Dobie’s induction into talkative London society when she’d much rather be messing about in a boat.
Talking is one of the creative arts, for by it you build up things that have, until talked about, no existence, such as scandals, secrets, quarrels, literary and artistic standards, all kinds of points of view about persons and things. Let us talk, we say, meaning, let us see what we can create, or in what way we can transmute the facts that are into facts that are not yet. It is one of the magic arts. The trouble about it is that, even more than the other arts, it is practised by the stupid, who create nothing worth creating.
Denham’s ideal is “a life in which one took practically no trouble at all,” a life with a “warm climate and few clothes and all the food off the same plate, if a plate at all.” The clever talkers, though, have their way and Denham ends up as all properly married, middle-class women of 1926 end up: in a house full of furniture, servants, and family.
Heather
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