still pondering those photos from the crimean war

no. 1

no. 2

i went on a frenzy today and switched around our living room (read: room where we watch television) with our dining room (read: room where we never sat to eat dinner because we were too busy watching television). in the process, i messed up my thumb in a badly-installed door (grr to those people we bought the house from - i'm still bitter towards them) and dropped the extremely heavy and two-meter long unwieldy dining table on my foot (hello giant bruise). but after several hours of swearing, vacuuming and sweating more than i'd like to admit, the result was that we ate our cheese soufflé and simple salad at the actual dining table and then stayed there for and hour and a half, as a family, talking and drawing and laughing. wow, what a difference it made!

during our discussion i showed husband the two roger fenton photos from the crimean war. and interestingly, husband had an entirely new perspective on them, one not mentioned in the errol morris book (which i love even more now after chapter 4 - about the FSA photos taken by walker evans and others during the depression...more about that soon). and one definitely not mentioned by susan sontag in her take on the photos.

husband looked at them as a soldier and an officer. i told him there was controversy over the sequence of the photos. it was known that that were taken on the same day during the same shoot, but that the interpretations of the meaning of them were different depending on which one you thought was taken first.  you also recall that i didn't tell you what morris' conclusion was (i still think you must get the book - via your library, i'm not advocating consumerism (tho' i want to own this book now)).

husband's take is that no. 2 is first, because it represents a "before" shot - tho' after a barrage of shelling by the russians. before in the sense of before the road was cleared for the soldiers to pass with their wagons and horses and continue the war. no. 1 comes after it was cleared.

what do you think?

husband's theories, evolutionary psychology and feminism

over morning tea, husband remarked that he felt that intuition was a realm that women had appropriated as their exclusive domain. his theory is that this is quite unfair from an evolutionary standpoint. if women were home in the camp, minding the hearth and keeping things organized, that required greater organizational skills - they became adept at packing and arranging and moving and setting up and unpacking and well, generally being organized. men, on the other hand, were hunters - ranging far out on the savannas, tracking animals and using their intuition to help guide them to when and where the best hunt might be. men should have honed their intuition skills to a much greater degree than women did.

i didn't have much argument for this because this morning, i woke up wrong. not on the wrong side of the bed, just wrong - do you know what i mean? the alarm went off at the wrong point in my sleep cycle and i was jarred awake at the wrong point, leaving me feeling heavy and a bit dull. so i just thought, "whoa, good argument, husband, but hey, SCORE for women to finally appropriate something that rightfully belongs to men."

then i had a great craic with judith about it (yay for gmail video chat) and she brought up the very interesting point that women actually did a lot of small game hunting around the camp and therefore had quite a developed sense of intuition - also as related to plants and what to eat and what not to eat. we concluded that the main problem was a tendency of evolutionary psychology (i never had a name for it before, but many of husband's theories are of this school of thought) to try to tidily chalk our behavior all up to biology, but that ultimately intuition and emotions are really quite thin in the archeological record, so it was pretty much impossible to guess at the intentionality of many things. most of all human behaviors. if it were up to the archeologists, everything would be chalked up to some kind of primitive ritual, when in actuality, maybe there have been a lot of people through the ages who just woke up wrong.

ok, i'm aware that got a little weird there at the end. but honestly, when you wake up wrong, it sets the tone for the whole day.

happy monday one and all.

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p.s. i managed to get rid of that stupid new difficult captcha word verification thingie on the comments, but the new blogger interface doesn't make it easy. in fact, it's impossible in the new blogger interface - you have to revert to the old one to get rid of it. now that's a pain in the ass, wouldn't you say? (what were you thinking blogger?) but it should make it easier to comment again now. 

would what the world be like...

"what would the world be like if women weren't forever in the pursuit of pretty things?" asked husband this afternoon as i showed him the exciting package i got this afternoon from spudballoo.  she sent me some of those beautiful pins like hers that i had coveted on flickr a few weeks ago (note to self: publicly coveting things very effective). and on the outside of the package was the coolest tape that has pretty pictures and says, "and i thought and i thought and i walked and i walked." how cool is that? and she wrote a sweet note on a pretty postcard (what? not moo? then who?) of one of her pictures. there's also a very helpful crochet unravelled book in there which just may help me crack the granny square dilemma (which is a dilemma in that one wonders if a retarded monkey is at all capable of crocheting a granny square). it was all as a thank you for the last blog camp, which she most certainly did not need to do, but i will admit that it did lift my spirits considerably after how weaving went south at the end last evening.

husband disapprovingly reminded me of our year of not buying things and frowned a little bit and muttered something about "taking coal to newcastle" and "don't we have tape and pins in this country?" and like phrases uttered by a man who simply doesn't understand the beauty of the blogosphere.

one of husband's many theories is that of continentus tipicus. in this theory, the island of sjælland, on which we live, is slowly sinking on the copenhagen side. it all started when the english bombarded copenhagen in the early nineteenth century. all of those lead cannon balls are heavy and so copenhagen began to tip towards øresund. eventually, the sheer weight of all of the stuff will cause the island to flip, or so says the theory of continentus tipicus. and i think in his grudge-book worthy mutterings today, he was actually worrying that all of the gifts that come into our mailbox from my bloggy friends around the world are definitely contributing to the coming tip.

but, back to his original question...what would the world be like if women weren't forever in the pursuit of pretty things? i pointed out to him that there would be lots less shops. and that furniture and homes would be pretty boring, as would towels and bedding. and clothes. and most everything else. and he pointed out that china would have less power and people would care more about the stuff they have if they weren't forever replacing it with new and shinier stuff. hmm...

although i'm trying my best to consume less or to buy things second hand if at all possible (see recent loom acquisition), i still love pretty things. and i still feel pretty delighted by some bright pins and a really cool roll of tape. so thank you, spud, for brightening my day today.

the comfort of collecting

once again this weekend, i sought and found comfort in my craft stash. hours were spent making things by nearly all family members. sabin and her big sister spent several hours making monocules© on friday evening. on saturday, big sister raided the fabric stash to make a table runner for her mother and a pillow for her grandmother for christmas. i continued work on some snuggle quilts for my nephews. and it was all possible because we had all of the stuff right here, at hand - fabrics, clay, yarn, embroidery thread. when inspiration struck, we could immediately get down to work. and i felt justified in my pack rat ways.

and i looked around the house and realized that it's filled with collections of things. of course, i knew this, but i'm not sure i've thought that much about how much comfort and contentment those collections bring to me on a daily basis. from baskets of smooth stones to books to a collection of old (and new) cameras to the books that fill our bedroom and our dining room to the well-stocked perfume shelves in the upstairs bathroom. we're surrounded by our collections of things.

husband and i got to talking about the collections and what they mean. and why we have the drive to collect. husband has a tendency to explain everything through evolution. and he thinks collecting is the modern manifestation of the hunter-gatherer instinct. we don't need to hunt for our food these days, so that instinct manifests in other ways.  i know that i am constantly on the lookout (hunting, if you will) for interesting old locks and counting machines when i'm in the flea markets. and i gather interesting fabrics even when i don't necessarily know what i'm going to make of them - because i might need them for something or other one day. we indulge our hunter-gatherer instincts all the time.

collecting and acquiring is something we've discussed a lot as we try to decide how to approach our year of not buying things. one of the things we're thinking about is that we will only buy second hand (except socks and underwear, i'm sorry, but those have to be new) for the next year - at least for ourselves. sabin, on the other hand, will have to have new shoes and clothes, as fast as she's growing. but me, i can easily go a year without adding to my shoe collection and it won't hurt a thing. we don't have a fully-formed plan as of yet, but we're getting there. and we will undoubtedly find ways to indulge our inner hunter-gatherer and keep our collections dynamic. because the fact is that they also make us happy.

what do you love to collect?

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i wanted to thank you all for your great insight on the photo of the last post. i'm really happy to see new people coming out of the woodwork. on friday, i'll let you know who has "won" the entirely subjective competition for the best thoughts on the meaning of that photo.

i'm in love

despite the fact that he cut off our internet cable at its source, with a wire clippers, two weeks ago, which momentarily left us calling him the husband formerly known as a keeper, husband is securely back at keeper status. because today, when he finally took that trash that we've been hauling around in the trunk of our car for two weeks to the dump, he came back with this beauty, which someone callously left sitting right there beside the "metal trash" container (our dump is VERY organized - one day i will go there with a camera and show you...we take recycling very seriously here)...anyway, here's the beauty he rescued:

i love this, i don't know whether it's the shop that sold it, or the person who owned it. i've got to do some research into that. i'm glad it's threaded, so i can see how that's done. i'm going to see if it still works. and i'll betcha anything it does.

we talked over dinner about such beautiful, classic pieces of machinery. beautiful and ingenius in their simultaneous simplicity and complexity. imagine how much easier they made things when they were invented. husband thinks that the sewing machine and the bicycle are two examples of perfect simple genius. and when i see this beautiful old classic sewing machine, i'm inclined to agree.

p.s. i apologize for the crap pictures, it was a really cloudy, grey, dark day today and i refuse to use flash...or drag out my tripod.