Archive for the ‘Cabinet of Curiosities’ Category
May 25th
In her 1952 spiritual autobiography, The Long Loneliness, Dorothy Day (1897-1980) described her early habit of keeping a diary:Â “When I was a child, my sister and I kept notebooks; recording happiness made it last longer, we felt, and recording sorrow dramatized it and took away its bitterness; and often we settled some problem which beset us, even while we wrote about.” Day maintained this habit, though somewhat irregularly, throughout her life.
Somes her reflections were prompted by happiness, sometimes by sorrow, but mostly her diary entries were an expression of her intense interest in life and her responses to what was happening around her.
The Duty of Delight: The Diaries of Dorothy Day, edited by Robert Ellsberg, has just been issued by Marquette University Press.
May 3rd
How many life-changing events are unplanned, but come from chance discoveries?
The Red Leather Diary - Reclaiming a Life Through the Pages of a Lost Journal by journalist Lily Koppel, is the story of such a discovery.
Like something out of a novel, a chance find in an Upper West Side dumpster turned into Koppel’s look at a young woman coming of age in New York City in the 1930s. Koppel stumbled across the diary inside a steamer trunk near her apartment. And thanks to a hired sleuth, she found the owner of that diary. Florence Wolfson, the young writer, was still around at 92.
In her diary, which Koppel augments with interviews with Florence, we can see a young woman with an artistic, literary aesthetic trying to take advantage of all New York City offers and find herself in the process.
Though written at a time when sex was a a subject discussed discreetly at best, the diary is studded with brief but graphic details about relationships with both men and women.
How, Florence was asked, did the diary end up in dumpster? She is not sure, but she suspects the journal was inadvertently abandoned in storage when she and her husband left 98 Riverside Drive in 1989.
The move from New York City to an affluent Connecticut suburb seemed to write a final entry to the chronicle of the eager, searching girl she had been. “Where did all of that creativity go?” Wolfson wondered aloud to Koppel as she pondered the newly rediscovered story of her youth. “If I was true to myself, would I have ended up in Wesport?”
May 1st
A German artist took photographs of 100 different products—mostly food and candy—and compared the pictures on their packages with what was actually inside. Of course we all know there’s bound to be some exaggeration in an advertising photo, but the comparisons are still quite surprising. I’ve reproduced one of the most unappetizing examples above; you can check out the whole series here.
Guten Appetit, as they say!
March 31st
Clairefontaine is a French company that makes paper for all Quo Vadis planners. As Karen explained last year, many people believe that the company was named after a real person, “Claire Fontaine,” but in fact the name simply comes from the site where their paper mill is located—the town of Etival-Clairefontaine.
As it turns out, there is a person named “Claire Fontaine,” or at least someone who uses that name: a French ready-made artist who re-purposes found objects and works in neon, video, sculpture, painting and text. She just took part in an exhibit at New York’s New Museum (closed yesterday, unfortunately), and according to her website, she’s currently preparing a book about the concepts of ready-made artistry and her own notion of “human strike.”
March 24th
Until it was mentioned in yesterday’s Times, I never realized that Good Friday marks the official birthday of the peace sign. Gerald Holtom, a designer from West London, came up with the now-famous symbol by combining letters from the semaphore, or flag-signalling, alphabet. An N stands for “nuclear”; a D for “disarmament”; and the circle around the two is meant to symbolize Earth.
The peace sign had its first official outing 50 years ago at a Good Friday demonstration in England that was organized by the Direct Action Committee Against Nuclear War and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.
March 22nd
The 39th Annual Cow Chip Throwing Contest will be held in Beaver, Oklahoma on April 19, 2008. It is the grand finale of a week-long festival sponsored by the Beaver Chamber of Commerce.
The festival commemorates the rugged self-reliance and individualism of the region’s pioneer settlers. In a land with few trees and no coal or peat, they desperately needed fuel to cook and heat their homes. Buffalo hunters found buffalo chips could be used to burn with adequate results. Since all the buffalo had been hunted to near extinction by the time the settlers showed up, they used cow chips instead.
Every fall settlers would take their wagons out to pastures and load up on cow chips for the winter. With the whole family along, it became a sport to see who could throw the chips into the wagon with the most accuracy.
In the 1970s, in a search for an identity, the town fathers decided to make a sport of throwing cow chips. The Cimarron Territory Celebration is held in Beaver in remembrance of these early pioneers. Only now, instead of throwing chips into wagons, competitions are held to see who can throw them farthest from the wagon. Competitions are divided into Mens, Ladies, and VIPs.Â
Only local chips can be used. Judges have stopped competitors from Texas trying to sneak in Texas-sized chips.
The record heave is a 182′3″ toss by Leland Searcy in 1979.
March 21st
Suuuper interesting piece about maps in In These Times last month… “For some, mapping has become a vibrant new language—a way to interpret the world, find like-minded folks and make fresh, sometimes radical, perspectives visible,” writes the author, Jessica Clark. “For others, maps portend threats to privacy and freedom of movement.”
Coolest new map application: We Feel Fine, a map that culls people’s emotions from blogs and organizes them geographically.
Most sobering: Worldmapper, where maps are distorted to represent “often preventable deaths” (Africa and India are puffed up and swollen and the U.S. and Europe reed-slim) and “deaths from non-communicable illnesses” (Asia and India dominate the image).
March 18th
The Encyclopedia of Life is a collaborative online encyclopedia whose goal is to document all of the 1.8 million known species on earth. Each species has been given its own ever-expanding web page, to which scientists and non-scientists can contribute. The EOL went live on February 26 with 30,000 articles, and after a brief outage the next day due to overwhelming traffic, it’s once more up and running.
The 25 scientifically authenticated exemplar pages give a tantalizing glimpse into the EOL’s full potential; they have images, maps, and detailed information about the biology, ecology, and evolution of each species… It will be interesting to keep track of how the site itself evolves.
March 14th
When was the last time you wrote with an actual pencil—the wood-and-graphite variety, not mechanical—the kind you have to sharpen? If you’re anything like me, it’s been a while, perhaps since middle school, even. (I don’t even use mechanical pencils very much anymore, for that matter.)
Well, Karen sent me a couple of Rhodia pencils the other day, and it’s more fun than you might imagine, all thick lines and nostalgia. The bright orange exterior and black wood (it’s dyed linden) were pleasingly distinctive, and the softly triangular shape fit perfectly in my hands.
Unsurprisingly, there are pockets of pencil enthusiasts on the Internet—at the excellent blog Pencil Revolution, for example, Pencil Talk, or at Pencil Pages, a website run by pencil collector Doug Martin.
March 10th
Have you heard that incredible story about the severed, sneaker-clad feet that’ve recently begun to wash up on west coast beaches?
It’s an ominous tale, to be sure, but Canada’s Globe and Mail took the opportunity to write a light-hearted article about some devoted flotsam collectors and the strange things they’ve found over the years. Brian Gisborne, a former fisherman, says he’s found whale harpoons, aircraft wreckage, and a “25-year-old message in a bottle that was tossed by an 83-year-old cruise ship passenger.” In one particular region of the Pacific Ocean just north of Hawaii (known as the “garbage patch”), beachcombers have found hockey gloves, rubber duckies, and running shoes (without feet), many of which have fallen off shipping vessels.
There’s also a fascinating timeline of noteworthy beachcomber discoveries… Read the rest of this entry »
