Crazy Stable

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"I'm going to give away all the cats and cancel my magazine subscriptions, and then I'm going to paint ten pickets a day!"

 Yes, it's time for CrazyStable New Year's Resolutions! This seminal work by George Booth, that master of CrazyStable iconography, just about sums them up.  [Go here for a great selection of Boothabilia, but so far I haven't found the cartoon above.] They are more or less the same every year:

* Spend one hour a day doing some small renovation task.

* (By February) Okay, spend one hour a week doing some small renovation task.

* (By April) Okay, once a month. Or, like, one day once a month where we just get the little stuff under control.

* (By May) House? What house? I'm in the garden, leave me alone.

* (By July) Spend just one hour a day in the garden--just long enough to keep the plants alive, okay?

There are others:

* Make a schedule of seasonal maintenance chores, and put them on the calendar. [Sound of hilarious demented laughter.]

* Get the "tool room" cleaned out and organized.

* Get the Child's baby, toddler, and early childhood wardrobe and furnishings out of the "Blue Room" and into the hands of some needy recipients.

* Strip the rest of the paint off the stained-glass front windows. (Spend 19th year wondering why anyone would paint stained-glass window lights with white housepaint...on both sides.)

* Get out the little pad sander you bought at Sears and see if it will take the paint off the banister.

* Get out your late father's Dremel tool set and see if it will get the rest of the paint out of the little curvy bits of the banister.

* Wonder for 19th year why previous owner painted everything ox-blood red. (Chinese culture ascribes luck to the color red, but surely not that particular shade.)

* Do 50 sit-ups a day so as to be strong enough to break up cement pad in back yard and plant stuff there.

* Fix doorknobs that fall off, undeterred by fact that we have already fixed them and they still fall off.

* Make curtains and Roman blinds for four different bedrooms, using huge bolt of fabric bought on street for a song. Where is that bolt of fabric, anyway?

* But do not do this until curtains and duvet cover are made for Goddaughter and skirt is altered for Best Friend.

* Ooh, put this first: Oil sewing machine. Check it for rust.

And then there are the post-9/11 resolutions I never fulfilled:

* Bake bread every week.

* Learn to tap-dance. (The connection to imminent annihilation by Al Qaeda may be obscure to some, but it works for me--in theory, anyway.)

And of course:

* Lose 15 pounds. Do this by strenous daily exercise in the course of renovations ... (see top of list).

Happy New Year...time for a final round of cookie-baking before the Great Leap Forward!

 

The frantic race to the Christmas finish-line has redoubled after the mad stumble of our transit strike. (Spouse rather enjoyed taking the party boat “Skyline Princess” from the Brooklyn Army Terminal to Wall Street and the “Sea Streak” from there to 34^th Street—once.) As we go from crazed interruption to crazed resumption, I'd like to share a personal treasure: the contents of a meticulously typeset note and its enclosure, a faded newspaper clipping, sent to friends and relations by my aunt, Beatrice Warde, 71 years and one week ago from London, her beloved adopted home. Beatrice, my letterpress Guardian Angel, became (although a New Yorker born) the sort of jolly, cerebral Catholic that the English soil produces like a rare but vigorous species of wildflower. But judging from this virtuosic flight of fancy, she'd have made a pretty good Druid, too. Enjoy; and to those of you who have sampled our story here, many warm wishes from the inhabitants of the CrazyStable.

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This folder is only a Solstice Card, but I think the picture which it encloses could rank as a Useful Gift.

I cut it out of The Times picture page a fortnight ago. It represents “a hedgehog which is about to close up for the winter hibernation, photographed at Bibury, Gloucestershire”. I stuck it up by the inkstand on my desk, and it proved too useful to be thrown away. For I find it an infallible corrective to the effects of artificial light. Not on the eyesight: on the insight.

The great thing about daylight is that we cannot control it. When I prepare to leave my office, of an April evening, I am still mentally jabbering about my own concerns. Then I notice that the sun’s attention is wandering: soon the frank yawn of sunset will change the subject. Artificial light can be switched on and kept on like a sycophant’s smile; no wonder that in mid-winter, when so much of the day is bulb-lit, our workaday affairs seem so terribly important.

Important they are, and perhaps in the strict sense of terribly. Deep in our minds lives the Earliest Scientist, the first man who watched to see if the year would turn. His sort built Stonehenge, not as a monument to a conviction, but as a delicate astronomical instrument to test a theory. Language is not as old as his earliest note-books, with the formulae of propitiation that sufficed last year, and might work this time. Being a scientist, he dare not argue from memory, let alone from another man’s book; he must deduce from the current phenomena, and they all indicate that a Disaster is steadily approaching, one minute sooner each day…He urges us to build bonfires or dynamos, to seal the harvest in arns or libraries or banks or museums; he has invented many ways of enduring (for a while) that possible Night. The Winter Solstice brings him the real relief that succeeds any danger that seemed real. In that moment’s reaction he mocks his own devices for Keeping Things Going. One of his earliest devices was slavery. The Roman slaves were probably as overworked as our dynamos by mid-winter minds, but they were freemen during the Saturnalia.

When the whoop of that First Free Breath has gone out, however, the artificer and his artifices are more needed than ever. The sun, in his slow and languid convalescence, must be left alone, and his free gift replaced by earned light and warmth, which, because it can be controlled, must not be wasted. Here in the northern latitudes, where the trustful community-life called civilization is a relatively new thing, we recall how our ancestors withdrew to their scattered houses, thriftily fed the fire, and by its governable light sat counting and valuing their own goods and deeds. No wonder that Protestantism or Private Judgment, Thrift, and Home-made Mysticism, flourish so well in northern lands.

I think my own thoughts by artificial light, secure from interruption so long as I can earn (at the world’s price) enough fuel for the bonfire... My eager, controllable, Synthetic Sunray Lamp can be focused upon books or “Art”. It would look very silly trying to illuminate a ten-acre field of corn, but the fields now are bare. Until March, nous n’irons plus aux bois…

The only trouble is that nobody ever need break off early. There are only subjective reasons, like fatigue, for stopping. There’s the light, and it’s paid for: come on! Only free light can be wasted. The indoor life calls for Creative Living to the Full—unlike the farmer’s life of letting things grow or breed. The opera manuum hominum are often made of precious metals; the Psalmist noticed that, but he was so concerned about the silliness of worshipping a solid silver idol that he never noticed that it is a sinful waste to pay for such an idol and then neglect to worship it. Waste of material things, whether paintings or coals, is a sin to the mid-winter mind. “Are you Wasting your Life?” is what every neon sign could say, whether it recommended lipstick to young nursemaids or the Literature of Art to elderly brewers.

Now if there is nothing objective, nothing outside to evince independent boredom, why then fatigue cannot be intercepted. If, having found a way of sitting up all Night, we feel bound to do it, then we come up against the fact that subjective reasons-for-stopping (like fatigue or poverty) are always the most painful, humiliating reasons.

That is why, in default of a good deliberate sunset, I use this picture of a December Hedgehog. The faint rebuke in those grave little eyes is not the rebuke that I expect nowadays—for wasting artificial light, or Time, or Chances to Get the Most out of Life. Oh dear no. I am simply told that if I’d only put out that artificial light I’d see that it was time to hibernate; at least I might let sensible people curl up in peace. The gentle but deliberate Change of Subject is a great refresher. Use it now: from all this spate of words (Copywriter’s Holiday), turn to my whiskered friend from the West, and see if the Gift does not make up for the Greeting—which I have been scribbling since dinner-time (1:30 a.m.) by the all-too-dependable courtesy of the Westminster Electric Supply Corporation, Ltd.

 

Pimlico Wharf, London

December 17, 1934

Even as we all await potentially ghastly news about a transit strike, we have had unsettling news about the nest-within-a-nest here, our downstairs Apartment.  Our precious perfect mother-daughter tenants of 6 years are moving out.  It's understandable; they need more room, and the Apartment, a sort of spacious two-room studio, is more appropriate for just one.   

So, change will come again to the high-ceilinged double parlor that served as our first beachhead in the dark, foul wilderness that was the CrazyStable in those early days of 1986. Although in many ways it is the only potentially 'grand' space in the house, it has never been really ours, and it remains sharply etched in stress (and, later, anguish) as the space we set aside and renovated first. This was  so that my just-widowed mother could occupy it sooner rather than later, while we camped out upstairs. We gutted and remade her alcove kitchen, and turned two dank washrooms (one of which contained a shower stall full of General Chang's fishing tackle) into a single pretty pink bathroom with cream-colored fixtures.  We built closets (which it utterly lacked, except for a shack-like structure made entirely of old doors) and carpeted the sloping floor. No way we could fix the massive broken pocket doors, slumped in their recesses, but we used a wooden folding screen as a room divider, painted it all a pleasant pink-and-mauve scheme, and moved in Mater just a year after we moved in ourselves. Things went downhill rapidly, but that is a story for another dark and rainy night; the past six years, with Perfect Tenants, have done much to ease the bad karma of what followed.

It was only that first year, before Mater, that the Apartment was in any sense 'ours.'  After several wretched months without a working kitchen, we cooked our first meal in the alcove kitchenette (a converted tiny porch) on the cheapest oven/range we could buy. That meal was Stouffer's mac & cheese, and we ate it together late one night off flimsy tray tables in the big empty rooms, as primordially satisfied as cave dwellers who had just roasted their first beast over their first campfire. (And then we made coffee, in our own home!) Spouse and I tiled the bathroom ourselves, an epic struggle (all the floor tiles floated off in a thin film of water from a leaking toilet valve one night, and we cried together as we scraped the mastic off the back of every one); Spouse installed the toilet on our first Christmas Eve here, just in time for our 'open house' the next day. (Were we insane? The house had just been re-wired--by idiots--and was lit by a few bare bulbs and a brave Christmas tree; I seem to recall a horde of shell-shocked friends and relations wandering around, gazing with frozen faces at the battered walls, broken windows barred with rusted gates, hanging swags of BX cable, and plank-as-front steps, while we nattered in manic glee about our renovation plans.)

During its last change of occupant, after Mater's departure for a nursing home, I spent as little time 'down there' (an unfortunate parlance we've come to use for the Apartment) as possible, seeing everywhere the ruins of our dream of Happy Motherland. There was a certain healing full-circleness in the fact that one of Mater's countless home health aides--the one sent on loan from God, as it happened--was willing and able to be her successor there, and that her own daughter, after heartbreaking years of delay, was able to come to this country and join her. But now that the Apartment will be briefly empty (a time for much-needed paint and repairs), I find myself curiously eager to reclaim it, to roll around and rub my scent on it and proclaim it ours ours ours!  As desperately as we need the rent, I harbor feverish fantasies of turning the Stable into a single-family dwelling of monstrous size and complexity. Which kitchen shall we cook in tonight? Shall we roller-skate around the first floor? Install a hot tub and sauna? A neighbor in the landmark district with a house this size has a home theater that seats about 20.  Or there's the Child's idea:  a small in-home restaurant, just 10 or so tables for discerning neighbors to savor my home-style cuisine.

Then I calm down. The Apartment is ours, but not ours.  For a while we will come and go freely in this curious foreign embassy under our own roof, alone again in our first settlement.  Maybe we'll prepare and eat a meal down there, just for old times' sake. The oven still works fine; perhaps we'll heat up some Stouffer's macaroni and cheese, and put on a pot of coffee, and tell the Child stories of that first Christmas, long ago, when the winter air poured in through the broken windows, and Grandma helped us trim the tree in what would soon be her new home, and three cats--none of them in today's trio--wandered around sniffing the perimeter. Once in a while, one needs to sniff the perimeter of one's range.

This is the December morning sun on the wee Kelsey platen press that sits in my studio under the roof of the CrazyStable. Locked up in the chase is my name, in 14 pt. Baskerville; now I just have to get up the nerve to pull a proof. Printing wonderful words via letterpress is one of the dreams I have for Tenth Leper Press, my long-gestating graphic arts enterprise; next year, God willing, you'll be able to click through to its brand-new website (domain name bought and paid for).

It was only after I was bitten by the letterpress bug that I realized a mystical connection to my aunt, Beatrice Warde, a doyenne of 20th-Century type design. I met Beatrice only once when I was a toddler; she lived in London, and since she was my father's half-sister by a much earlier marriage, their relationship, while warmly cordial, was never close. But I have inherited a trove of her magnificent wartime letters (all in crisp calligraphy) and later missives, on Catholicism (she was quite the Oxford Movement type) and other matters, and have come to realize that she is undoubtedly delighted at my choice of midlife avocation. I think she would also have been pleased that I made it to the Small Press Book Fair last weekend, selling some of Tenth Leper's first (digitally typeset) offerings. I also had the opportunity to pay homage to Malachi McCormick of the Stone Street Press, my inspiration for the craft of hand book-making as a way to resurrect and glorify forgotten texts of spirit and beauty.

Did I mention that the Kelsey press was a gift from cousin Derek and his wife Rena, and that my grandfather--and Derek's great-grandfather--was Beatrice Warde's father? (I don't know what name to give that shared branch of family tree, but it just proves that the whole thing is beyond serendipitous.)

So it was that I finally felt (just barely) within my rights to nail to my studio door my Aunt Beatrice's most famous words, an invocation much beloved by printshops for many decades:

 

THIS IS
A PRINTING OFFICE

 

CROSSROADS OF CIVILISATION
REFUGE OF ALL THE ARTS
AGAINST THE RAVAGES OF TIME
ARMOURY OF FEARLESS TRUTH
AGAINST WHISPERING RUMOUR
INCESSANT TRUMPET OF TRADE

 

FROM THIS PLACE WORDS MAY FLY ABROAD
NOT TO PERISH ON WAVES OF SOUND
NOT TO VARY WITH THE WRITER'S HAND
BUT FIXED IN TIME HAVING BEEN VERIFIED IN PROOF
FRIEND YOU STAND ON SACRED GROUND
THIS IS A PRINTING OFFICE

 

Absolutely exclusive content is what we aim to provide here, and you won't see this magnficat on CatsinSinks.com (below). This is Kong of Park Slope, a gregarious fellow of unusual intelligence--which is why he looks so peeved at once again being hypnotized by Mr. Tail Cobra in the bathroom sink. His dad's dabbling in the black arts of sleight-of-hand is no doubt responsible for this sad state of affairs. Thanks, Unfathomable One!