FROM: Middlemarch

As Casaubon courts Dorothea:
"Hence he determined to abandon himself to the stream of feeling, and perhaps was surprised to find what an exceedingly shallow rill it was."

Busts

Tobacco cards- dozens more at the NY Public Library site

Ivy Compton-Burnett

The prototypical Ivy Compton-Burnett line, from Brothers and Sisters:
"No, don't dream of troubling Peter", said Sophia, as Peter ceased to dream of it.

FROM: Memories of Montparnasse by John Glassco

Gertrude Stein projected a remarkable power, possibly due to the atmosphere of adulation that surrounded her. A rhomboidal woman dressed in a floor-length gown apparently made of some kind of burlap, she gave the impression of absolute irrefragability: her ankles, almost concealed by the hieratic folds of her dress were like the pillars of a temple: it was impossible to conceive of her lying down. Her fine, close-cropped head was in the style of late Roman Empire but unfortunately it merged into broad peasant shoulders without the aesthetic assistance of a neck; her eyes were large and much too piercing. i had a peculiar sense of mingled attraction and repulsion towards her.

How I started Part 3

My sleeping arrangement quickly moved from the peaty bog sofa to Tim's obsessively tidy bed. If the house was chaos, the bed was strict order. Tim was a bedding afficianado. He spoke of thread count like an alchemist. He valued it more highly than pattern or color. I don't believe he ever fixed on an optimal number. Who's going to say how many angels should be allowed on a pin's head? There could not be too many threads in a sheet. After a long day of being tortured by by demonic furnishings we would kick free and convene at the bed. There Tim would tuck and smooth each layer of the bedding, the corners perfectly folded, the head turned back neatly. I would just stand and watch as each immaculate layer was made to be perfectly flat and I always looked forward to collating myself in. Nothing felt quite so good as a receptive bed, an unwrinkled, undefiant, uncomplicated bed. In my own bed I'd be forced to disentangle a knot of blankets with my feet every night, unsure whether the blankets were on lengthwise or had gotten turned to cross perpendicularly. If more than half the bedclothes had been tugged to favor one quadrant, I would always seem to sense it, subconsciously and only at an inconvenient level of awareness. There's something about an unbalanced bed that troubles sleep. My bed would always be a tangle of its elements, only 75% or less of which fit- if 3 fitted corners gripped the mattress, the 4th would always pop free. During the night my bed boils and heaves like the primeval earth. I have no idea what can be happening but the next day it looks like it was ransacked by foul-tempered dwarves.
Watching Tim make his bed was like watching a impeccable kind of origami being made by someone in a painting by Hieronymous Bosch.
Though they lived just across the street, Tim's family never visited Hulga's house. Hulga only came by once. She was dressed in a heavily embellished sweater, greens and purples, a satin jacket, her voluminous wig and a sort of Peter Pan hat on top. She was cheery and seemed to be untroubled by the incomprehensible number of unusable pieces of furniture piled everywhere. She was something of a pack-rat herself, though it was hard to imagine her in the clothes that she stored in the house- the high-heeled go-go boots and mod print mini-skirts. It was easier to reconcile the gemutlich little woman with all the beer garden paraphrenaila that lay festooning the cartons of clothing, including two sets of plastic Clydesdales pulling a beer van.
When I visited Tim in Sedro we would work on several projects simultaneously- some in the enormous garage, some on the back porch, some in the driveway and many in the house. Tim tried to guide me as I refinished wood furniture but it was hopeless. I was afraid of acetone which he used liberally and my pieces were always clogged with the residues of the original finish or were freckled with numerous spots of paint in minute divots. The finishes I applied were never as well-done as his. When Tim did not like the way a piece was turning out, he would strip the piece again and start over. I could never bring myself to do that. If they weren't turning perfectly, I would just begin to resent the hypothetical shopper who would expect perfection.
Despite my own misgivings I would, nevertheless, take on things far beyond my competence. I refinished an entire Heywood-Wakefield dining set with 6 chairs. Hey-Wake was a brand notorious for the difficulty of reproducing its amber blond finish. Every mark, every misstep showed in blond furniture. I was much more comfortable with metals and metals were slightly more forgiving. I would blithely begin projects that would require days of power sanding and days of hand sanding, vented lockers being a particularly odious example. We would also reupholster chairs or padded benches with a staple gun. And when it was very sunny and dry we would steam clean sofas and upholstered chairs. What was key was drying time. If one contiguous surface dried unevenly the poor result was instantly apparent.
For the most part we enjoyed working on things together. Tim could make me laugh nearly constantly, though the hilarity soon was broken up by more and more bickering. I think our nerves would start to fray earlier and earlier each trip. Our sleep was disarranged which was certainly responsible for part of it. I found, as soon as I had moved into the big bed that as soon as he drifted off Tim began to babble in the night like a mountain stream or a decorative fountain. It gathered volume from an initial split-splat, becoming eventually a sort of moist Flight of the Bumblebee. This gave it the effect of always approaching, like a furtive waterfall. I would push him as far as I could to his edge of the bed.
I think his self-awareness kept him awake nights which allowed him to discover -with what seemed like no small amount of glee- that I sobbed disconsolately in my sleep. It was not working out. I couldn't sleep because it sounded like kittens lapping up a spill behind me; he couldn't sleep because of the hysterical weeping. It eventually occurred to me in the middle of one sleepless night to switch my direction. When Tim woke up and saw feet on the pillow next to him, he was badly startled.

How I started in the business Part 2

My visits to Sedro were always productive, even if they might have been unhealthy. I would skip the gym the 4 or 5 days I was up there and would cleave fairly closely to Tim's all starch diet. In the mornings we would clear away what we had worked on the day before and make a space to grill egg-sandwiches- Tim's unvarying breakfast. The potato bread made them doughy, the butter and American cheese made them unctuous. Bacon on the side. I'd make coffee, but Tim drank local Soda. He actually preferred generic brands to name brands and poor cuts of meat to better. He'd prepare chicken thighs in oily Thai peanut sauce mounded on a plateful of white rice. Dinner was seldom before 11 at night when we would watch the old Kilgallen/Cerf "What's My Line" with a plate on each of our laps. Sometimes we'd eat spaghetti drenched in Alfredo sauce.
The kitchen was also where new purchases were cleaned. Small parts, scrubbed, scraped and buffed. Next to the loaf of potato bread and the pizza rotisserie there would be several open cans of Howard's Restor-a-finish, which was extraordinarily noxious. Occasionally Watco oil too, as we could never seem to predict what would be effective. There was nearly always a can of Brasso as we polished plastics and removed adhesives with it. There were open squeeze bottles of lighter fluid which was a quick label-remover. Gunk-off. Goo-gone. Some of these removers would melt through fiberglass or plastic. Brasso was the safest. There were always lots of soaking brushes and hardware soaking. Lots of tacky finishes. When it was winter the final finishes had to be applied in the house or they would never dry. In summer our final coats were applied in the driveway. The tiny brackets that were scattered on pieces we finished in summer were the legs of adventurous and unlucky bugs.
We started refinishing metal barrister bookcases for the owner of the store where we consigned. He paid well but the work was not easy. Barrister bookcases were manufactured by several firms, most notably Globe-Wernicke who made both the traditional oak stacking units and industrial metal units. The metal ones went through several design changes, and each change brought us a new puzzle in disassembly. It wasn't just Globe-Wernicke cases. Each company had their own proprietary method, and each had their own irreplaceable pieces. The glass was held in place by rubber strips in some, metal flanges in others, thick rubber bumpers in most. the bumpers were particular and a bumper from one side of a pane of glass could not be swapped with one from the other side. The inner sides of the cases had to be pried away in one model, and then slid back after the refinishing without scarring the bottom surfaces.
Some of the units we would brush with sandpaper after we had stripped them and then coat them with oil and poly. They could not be touched after the original paint had been removed, so we would move them with towels. The oil on our fingers would have left ineradicable prints that would soon rust. Other units we would paint with appliance epoxy. It came in white and black only and had peculiar requirements. It could not be touched up. A second coat would begin to dissolve the first. Tim had such a steady hand that he was able to make an initial pass to get the surface tacky and then finish with the exact same amount of paint distributed evenly. We could only do this when the sun was hot enough to bake the paint on in a mirror-like finish. It is nearly impossible to resist shortening the passes with the spray can, and if you were to double back the result would be a glossy, fluid switchback distinct from the rest of the surface. I didn't have the patience to do it well. After a few sets we decided that i would disassemble them and strip them and he would paint them and assemble them.
When we weren't working on these commissioned projects, we'd spend most of each day shopping for our inventory. There were 5 or 6 second-hand stores and thrift shops that Tim would visit daily. He had an eagle eye. He could see things sitting in a undifferentiated mass in front of us that were invisible to me. Even as he pointed them out, they would generally look worthless to me and only as he began to work on them did they appear naturally to possess great quality and value. It was very nearly wizardry: seeing the prince in the frog.

Snow day!

Is it Xmas yet?

Innards

Something is awry inside me. It feels like French farce. Seductors in towels running room to room, doors slamming. It has been going on for a month at least.
Nothing particularly odd is coming out of me. But something odd is going on inside. My intestines feel like a habitrail. My ribs like cat-splayed mini-blinds. Sometimes it is like a stitch in the side. My smoking is nearly imperceptible, my cardio routine is down to the lake with Buddy on sunny days, twice a week. I found an old sample of Prevacid and have begun that. Claire, who lives next door now, is ceding the remainder of her ulcer medicine to me. That should get me through Xmas. If I die I know it will be just when I get my hair just like I like it.
My hebdomadal binges on Friday nights do not seem to affect it.

FROM Memories of Montparnasse by John Glassco

I liked the Bal de Chiffoniers. These pale weedy youths in shabby tight fitting suits, these heavy men with the muscles of coal heavers, these quiet white-haired elders with quavering hand and heads and the unwinking stare of the obsessed- all conveyed the message of an indomitable vitality- a quenchless psychic urge. Never had I felt the force of human desire projected with such vigor as by these single-minded devotees of the male

Walter Scott's Personality Parade

As the Sunday paper is here and is partly responsible for my terrific fire, I thought it would be relevant, as I feed it with the advertising supplements, the real estate section, travel, sports, the comics, and Parade magazine in that order to quote my very favorite question to Walter Scott's Personality Parade, a feature which has appeared on the 1st inside page of Parade magazine for as long as I can recall. I have saved the clipping from the late seventies or early eighties.
Q: I am 82 years old and have poor vision and have believed that June Havoc, sister of the late Gypsy Rose Lee, is married to Fred MacMurray. Am I wrong? I hope my memory is not playing tricks on me. -Mary Louise Covington, Lexington, Ky.
A: You are mistaking June Havoc for June Haver who is Mrs. Fred MacMurray.

The typist

I have begun to mentally piece together a new story. I had a nasty setback when I inadvertently heard short fiction being read on public radio last night. That awful combination of earnestness and nonchalance, the predictable tricks of observation, introspection, supposition and specification are lethal to my ambitions. The attenuated lives of inexpressive people. Of course, fiction should never be read aloud. Performance is an entirely separate skill whose merits are judged independent of the text and in preference to it, like color before form. Unless the thing is in some arcane argot, like Joyce's dialect in Ulysses- where essential clues to the meaning can be revealed by the informed speaker- I prefer to create my own internal reader.
What a strange mechanism it is- to silently reproduce the words one reads as though they are being heard!
Actual recitation is so tethered to the page that you become intensely aware of the ad hoc manner in which the cadences are formed- some by the difficulty of layering multiple clauses so as to leave open room for each of them, or some cadences by the intricacy of the language, alliteration or perverse antiphony. You can sense the ardent beginning and the flattening of the voice as it approaches an elegiac end in the reader's voice. You are always startled at the level to which the dialogue will be embodied and you wonder at the decision that leads to that particular level of commitment.
I still make the notes that will lead to writing another piece, but I am waiting for the circumstance, and the period details that will ignite the scene. To inspire me I have begun reading Katherine Anne Porter's essays, John Barth's essays and Mary McCarthy's essays. My friend David pointed out the general area where Mary McCarthy grew up which is just down the road from me and not very far from where Kurt Cobain killed himself, and my dear friend Rick's ashes were splooged into Lake Washington after his terrifyingly sudden, characteristically tidy death.
The story crucially involves a lady typist. Hazel, who types what the narrator cannot. I thought it might also involve numismatics and picked up a copy of History and its Images by Francis Haskell, which has quite inadvertently hypnotized me with its brilliance.
I might take the Christmas money my parents have sent and get Word installed on my Mac. Because to type the damned thing on a manual would be awful.

How I started in the business Part 1

Across the street from Tim's childhood home, where his mother and brother still live, is a rundown split-level rambler owned by a flamboyant elderly German woman. Her name is Hulga but could possibly be Helga, Ulga or Elka. I'm sure Tim knows but he is famously imprecise about names. She wears blond Eva Gabor wigs that add a foot to her lower five and she fondly recalls Hitler, when pressed even a little. She answers the phone, "That is Hulga". She does not attempt to keep up any of her properties, nor is she particularly attentive to whom she rents. One tenant of hers was later found to have filled the garage with hundreds of liter bottles of urine. Tim rented this house across from his childhood home with the condition that Hulga's piles of Beer Hall kitsch would remain stored in a couple of the several bedrooms.
Having just endured the bird/window crash of a relationship, we agreed that it would be therapeutic for me to drive up from Seattle and stay with Tim for a week. We'd shop and work on furniture together, then load the finished projects into Tim's enormous truck bed with the razor-edged canopy, and drive them down.
My first sight of the house was not promising. Ivy and pestilential vines shouldered up against the roof line. The shiny green leaves were dusted with particles of sanded paint or blurred by cobwebs that had caught billows of sawdust. The ivy crept through doorways and exterior walls and flowed over the discarded tabletops leaning six deep against the house. Around back the ground vanished beneath this sea. Saarinen bases and Eames chair frames that were left outside had become topiaries.
The inside of the house was once beautiful. There were stone floors, a masonry fireplace, handsome walnut panelling concealing built in cupboards and receding to form low window seats. But the house was damp even in summer. In the long wet winter it was freezing and the carpets moldered. It was difficult to keep warm because of the size of the main room with its enormously high ceiling. I suppose that the frugal Ulka had fitted the fireplace with a pellet stove. 50 pound bags of pellets lay nearby, but to warm one evening might take 20 pounds.
Tim had a formal dining table piled with smalls and decrystalled chandeliers with showers of mismatched crystals scattered around them. Two ten foot bank doors leaned against the paneled walls. Stacks of books and magazines were everywhere. Beneath piles of Tim's thrift store buys, most still in their plastic bags was Tim's horsehair stuffed sofa. This was supposed to be my bed, but it was like sleeping on a stiff haystack as it slowly sank into a peaty bog. It was like being gripped by the cold grave.
Tim actively worked on dozens of pieces at the same time, but there were hundreds of projects that were dissassembled, waiting for parts or inspiration. The main room held the latest inductees. Three-quarter framed prints, plugless lamps, knobless nightstands. The bigger things, like wheeled industrial racks were on the back patio. The bedrooms had famously rare Deske and Eames pieces, covered with panoramic photos, stacks of loose numbers and letters. 1 large closet was filled with light fixtures that needed work. The worst cases were in the basement. Things that had outlived their resurgence. Late Deco. You could hardly resist edging between the perilous piles. There were hundreds of pieces- some balanced on their tops if one of their legs was missing. Stray chair arms reached up. Curved ribs of table bases, flayed sofas, skeletal lampshade frames. Lit with a bare, swinging bulb, it was like furniture Guernica.
Tim was always on the search for new substances to surface irreparably scarred tables with. Once he pulled up the carpet in the bedrooms and found that the padding beneath was cork darkened with age and years of lax housekeeping. He began to peel up the cork and use it on table tops. He was amazingly inventive and would cannibalize half a dozen pieces to make one brilliant amalgam. The process looked as inscrutably mad as Doctor Frankenstein's, but the pieces would always turn out gloriously. I remember hours spent piecing together the reclaimed floor from a grocery store for a new table.
He used lethal stripper called, inexplicably, 'Aircraft Remover'. It boiled human skin with a pinpoint splatter and sent both of us running screaming to a sink many times, but it would cut through the plastic-coated metal when nothing short of a grinding tool would. The wood-patterned plastic would boil up and with a spatula we'd scoop and flip it like a fried egg and it would eat through another layer. It seemed endlessly reusable. Tim would scrape the dreck which had become thick like yoghurt from the melted paint into a coffee can, and somehow the exposed concentrated sullied mess would work even better when dumped out on something later. The fumes were unforgiving, dense, heady and toxic and would inspire us to smoke a cigarette.
We are both at the point of giving up smoking now- after many years- maybe 20 for each of us. I am also trying to give up furniture stripper.