Friday Ephemera #49

The most awesome business card ever. Alchemy Goods makes things out of recycled materials, and not only are their products made out of inner tubes, their business cards are as well. This thing is so tactile a photo almost doesn't capture it.

Review: A Room with a View

I was not expecting to be so drawn in to A Room with a View. E.M. Forster has never particularly drawn my attention. I half-watched the 2007 tv version of A Room with a View, and at some point half-watched Where Angels Fear to Tread, but nothing ever pressed me to read these. So I can't say why I picked it up. I started reading it through DailyLit, but I don't really remember choosing it. After a while I started to realize it deserved more attention than my DailyLit books generally get, and I ordered it from the library. Whatever random chance led me to choose A Room with a View, I'm so glad it did.

This is a beautiful book, but I have to qualify that. It is beautiful in a youthful way, with freckles and sunburnt cheeks and grass stains. Despite discussions of passion, corporeal love, and gender roles, the beauty is in the violets and the wet grass at the end of the pond, moments where the characters stop overthinking their lives, and adopt a childlike manner of simple unquestioning action and reaction.

Lucy Honeychurch goes to Italy with her cousin Charlotte, who takes on a sort of maiden aunt chaperone role. At the Pension Bertolini in Florence, they are disappointed in their hopes of a room with a view. This room with a view becomes the frame for the whole book--whether it is important, whether to take it when it is offered. Lucy discovers that living feels different in Italy--feels more, perhaps. "Italy worked some marvel in her. It gave her light, and--which he held more precious--it gave her shadow" (pg. 102). She goes home to England and becomes engaged to Cecil Vyse, but she finds that the people and events of her Italian travels keep creeping back into her life.

This book is subtle in interesting ways. Major events are shown less through people than through settings. People are described by settings--a room with a view, the out of doors, a drawing room with no view, a field of violets, and the emotions behind their actions are both described and influenced by their surroundings. This effect is used in such a way that events crucial to the plot seem brief and small, but the descriptions make it subtly apparent that these events are beautiful, and therefore important.

My main impression of this book is of the different expressions of beauty, its necessity and meaning, but I also loved the way independence was explored. The freedom to form one's own opinions of what is good or right or proper, and again, freedom from and in places. Independence is also, in an interesting way, contrasted with love. These two things certainly interact, but it's sometimes hard to tell how. In many ways it's hard to explain this book or my reaction to it. I have the somewhat odd feeling that it's just so intelligent, in a way that's not entirely textual, that I only understand it on an emotional level, and can't explain it. But it's been a while since I felt like that about a book, and it's interesting.

I loved A Room with a View. I can only suppose it was the hand of some guiding cosmic librarian that urged me to read it, since I'm not sure chance accounts for it. And there's something extra satisfying in loving a book one has always heard about.

P.S.: Happy Anniversary!

[Suffragette parade, April 5th, 1917, from the Library of Congress.]

Today is 90 years since the 19th amendment to the U.S. Constitution, prohibiting the government from denying women the right to vote. Any Seattleites should check out the little mini-exhibit about women's suffrage currently on display at the University of Washington, in the Allen library. It's thoroughly fascinating.

Having read Jane Robinson's Bluestockings, about women's fight for education in England, I suspect my next bit of reading on this subject ought to be about women's suffrage. Does anyone have any suggestions for some good nonfiction on the matter?

Fashion from LIFE, 1946

Last March I bought a copy of LIFE magazine from April, 1946, which I posted an article from at the time. There's a lot of other fun stuff in there, though, so now I've finally got around to uploading images of their fashion article, which is what's advertised on the cover. "DOUBLE-BREASTED COAT from Monte-Sano is made of soft wool in a light sepia color. Shoulder is round; sleeves are full but pulled in at the wrist. FINGER-TIP COAT from Anthony Blotta is so called because it is as long as the wearer's extended arm. This is made of a gray-beige 'pussy-willow' gabardine. Hood is detachable.""Light spring shades range from pastels to copper. Suits above are from Maurice Rentner (left), Samuel Chapman (center) and Fox-Brownie."I want this suit so bad."FOR CHURCH ON SUNDAYS when little girls are on their best behavior and want most to act and look like their mothers, Sally Victor has designed identical bonnets of plaid gingham. It takes special skill not to make mother look childish or the child adult. The picture was taken in St Thomas Episcopal Church in Hollywood."

I have a few more, but I'll leave you with these for now.

Sewing and design

Purses are one of those things I'm never fully satisfied with. I've been on the quest for the perfect purse for years, and I've been trying to get around to making such a purse nearly as long. This is made in canvas, the green stripe is also canvas, the binding is a pack of ordinary yellow bias binding from JoAnn's. I wanted a purse that was the perfect size for a book, and that I could display my pin collection on (I have more pins than that). I'm not sure it's the perfect purse, but I like it pretty well and it'll serve for the moment.Possible typefaces for a poster project I'm contemplating. Sorry about the vague shadows from the next page, that was me playing with the stitching design on the purse and obsessing about Turkish tile.

Review: The End of Mr. Y

I came to read this book in a rather unusual way. I was on the bus one day, and saw a woman reading The End of Mr. Y, by Scarlett Thomas. The cover looked interesting, so I took note of the title and looked it up when I got home, and sure enough it sounded like just the kind of thing I'd like to read.

Booklist calls this "chick lit for nerds," which in a way is really pretty accurate. Reading it doesn't feel much like reading chick lit, but it does have similar qualities--a heroine whose love life is rather unsatisfactory, mostly. But there is definitely more to it than that. Ariel Manto is a PhD student studying "thought experiments", the stories used to explain or test scientific theories without referring to math or science. One of the authors she studies is Thomas E. Lumas, whose last book, The End of Mr. Y, written at the end of the 19th century, is purportedly cursed. Everyone connected with its publishing died soon after--writer, editor, publisher, printer. And now, Ariel's supervisor has disappeared. Only one copy is known to still exist, but when Ariel finds the book in a second-hand bookstore, she begins to realize why it is cursed. The book, framed as a novel, contains instructions for getting into the Troposphere, an alternate dimension in which it is possible to look into other people's minds.

The book is fascinatingly contrasting. Nobody quite corresponds to my vision of what they should be within their setting. Ariel is an academic, but she has absolutely no money (even less than most students), she is a self-described sexual deviant, and she's not studying the kind of thing most people in English departments study. The book plays with theoretical physics, Samuel Butler, Derrida, creation theories, religion, sex, and it mixes all these together in fascinating ways. This book is in some ways the perfect presentation of these things--it stretches your brain in wonderful ways, makes you think about perception and consciousness and what things are and how we know what they are, but it does this without hitting you over the head with anything. It's an easy to read book, and it breaks up the brain-stretching stuff with normal life stuff. It's an adventure both of the mind and of road trips and men with guns.

I did think the end was a bit of a cop-out. It was too clean in a shallow way, leaving ends untied while appearing to be inevitable. It would have been much more interesting if the revelations that Ariel undergoes throughout the book were actually dealt with in the real world. So this book has definite issues in its storytelling, both in the ending and in its tendency to get sidetracked (the laboratory mice bit was kind of sidetracky, though for the most part it worked). Like Lumas's End of Mr. Y, Scarlett Thomas's End of Mr. Y was a thought experiment in the form of a novel. In some ways the whole book was arguing with itself over being a story or being a thought experiment, which distracted from its being either one. If it had given itself up to being a thought experiment, I think it would have been a better novel, and vice versa.

That said, this book was really fascinating, and, often a marker of a good book, it made me want to read the writers it talks about. If not consistent, it was at least consistently so. Despite its problems it was thoroughly intriguing.

Links

A Man, a Plan, and a Sharpie. Two guys travel across the country correcting the spelling and grammar of signs, and then they write a book about it, which is called The Great Typo Hunt. Might be an interesting book. This is just the kind of thing my grammar-loving self would want to do.

Absolutely incredible pencil lead sculptures by Dalton Ghetti. There's a whole world in your pencil you never knew was possible. Link via Say Yes to Hoboken.

Pea plant grows inside man's lung. This is everything your parents ever told you would happen if you ate watermelon seeds.

Last weekend in California was Costume College, a convention of people who make historical costumes and dress up in them. I'd love to go to this some day. Photos can be found at flickr here, here, and here.

I happened to encounter two fabulous Seattle-based milliners/haberdashers last week. Bad Dog Hats does hats for people and their dogs, especially top hats. Tuzzie Muzzie makes lovely party hats and masks.

Here is a list of 260 websites that offer free, legal e-books. My opinions on books and the internet being what they are, I'm glad to see there are so many such sites.

Clean and Shiny

It's been my (slow-moving) project this summer to thoroughly clean my room. Except for summers while I'm still in college I may never live here full time again, but I don't know how soon I'm going to have to think about really moving out, so I figure I should start sorting out 19 years' detritus while I have the time. I have a lot of things I don't need. My main goal of cleaning is to get rid of paper (I have homework from fourth grade on my floor), books I don't want, clothes I don't wear, and Weird Stuff. Weird Stuff is a whole category on its own, full of the totally random inexplicable stuff I, in my infinite pack-rattery, have kept. My mother and I entertained brief notions of starting a blog where we post photos of the Weird Stuff we find in our house. Like the bizarre goo in a tub that came from some French magazine (the label on the goo is in French), which is sitting on the bookshelf by my chair. Some of it's pretty interesting, though, like this giant eraser.Part of the problem with being someone who crafts is that everything has potential. You look at an empty paper towel roll and think, that has potential, I could make something out of that. And then at some point, six years later, you have to admit that you're never going to do anything with it.
My theory of cleaning is that the mess accumulated in layers, so it's okay to clean it in layers as well. I get to the most recent paper first, and recycle what I don't want, and then the stuff I'm keeping winds up in a new stack on the floor. And the next time I clean I go through the same stack again, and decide half the things I thought I might need are totally unnecessary. Yesterday I organized my ribbons and jewellery-making supplies, which I've been needing to do for ages. And I'm already planning to go through it all again, and do my second layer of organization. It feels good to be a little more organized.

Friday Ephemera #48

By shanaymachine. I love this. Happy Friday the 13th! I also love this collection of porch furniture on the flickr blog.

Colour and comfort

This pool ball is part of a bench on the street.

Tatted necklace I'm still busy adding to.

Banana bread!

Funny little hive thing.

Tea, thread, scissors, fabric, bookmarks, JoAnn's shopping list, books. Necessities, you see.

This whole street had these. I've no idea why. Maybe I'll have to go see on Friday night.

It was very grey all weekend, so I've been looking for, and making, colourful and cosy things.