All trades, their gear and tackle and trim
And some unexpected news
In the past several weeks I have spent almost eighteen hours on an old Poly-Metric learning meetpoint faceting on a cube of dichroic mirror glass; sixteen hours learning to use nail headers, a cutting hardy, twist wrenches and vises, punches, fullers, drifts, the horn of the anvil, and enormous wooden mallets straight out of old Saturday morning cartoons; and four hours with various borrowed chisels carving a block of poplar. You get to know the character of materials: mild steel is agreeable and bows easily into curlicues, while tool steel is stiff and resistant to blows. Poplar is friendly up until the moment it blows out.
If you grip the hammer too tightly for the first eight hours, you also get to know an occupational hand therapist.1
The next several paid essays will touch on what I am learning, including how a slight C3 spiral threw me into a spiral of escalating errors, and the heft and weight of metaphors from earlier ages, when craft was physical and often spilled into the street. (The next two free posts will concern data quality, I believe, though this depends on a schedule I don’t control.)
“Today it is again apparent,” George Kubler wrote in 1962, “that the artist is an artisan, that he belongs to a distinct human grouping known as homo faber, whose calling is to evoke a perpetual renewal of form in matter, and that scientists and artists are more like one another as artisans than they are like anyone else.”2
It turns out that one small remedy for depression over the decline in arts institutions is to learn for myself how to speak in metal, molten glass, and wood. (Another was writing Break, Blow, Burn, and Make.) Developing a sudden desire for very expensive Pfeil chisels3 is also a nice distraction.
Not sure what to do about the decline in the sciences, of which more shortly.
News
Jewel Box is a finalist for the World Fantasy Award for best collection.
Rev. Timothy Jones very kindly interviewed me for
about Break, Blow, Burn, and Make.
I have another thirty-five hours of hammering scheduled for this month.
George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (New Haven: Yale UP, 1962) 10. Much later, this brilliant and astonishing passage (109):
“Intermittent inside the same culture are such arts as enameled jewelry, which lapsed after the Renaissance, excepting for infrequent resumptions such as the jewelry of the Fabergé family in nineteenth-century Russia, or the work of John Paul Miller in Cleveland, who has resumed the gold granulation technique commonly used by Etruscan goldsmiths. Tempera painting was long disused because of the ascendancy of oil painting in the fifteenth century, until a variety of nineteenth- and twentieth-century conditions led to its revival, as in the academy of tempera painting that flourished at Yale until 1947, based upon the fourteenth-century text by Cennino Cennini as edited by D. V. Thompson, and taught by Lewis York, in order to prepare students for the mural-painting commissions that the public works program of the 1930’s had made possible.”
I had the twentieth-century rediscovery of Etruscan granulation methods in mind when I wrote “The Bonfire of the Words,” but did not know until Kubler that John Paul Miller was the specific artisan who figured out the technique. Some examples here.
Flexcut is more realistic but still costly.