Posts tagged culture
KIT FOR UPTIGHT WHITE PEOPLE
ARTIFICAT # 6 - SOCIAL LURBRICANT
Upon coming to Australia in 2000 after attending a few work functions, Slava, a Moldovan friend, was shocked to discover how much alcohol Australians drink in social situations. “I don’t understand why they take wine, beer, and champagne, never with food!” he would say in his wonderful eastern european accent. He was also quick tonote the behavioural change in his workmates after they had taken a few drinks. Normally quiet and shy personalities became oddly friendly, affectionate and talkative. Then on Monday, the usual coldness and unfriendliness would return. This hot and cold behaviour was most unsettling to Slava.
what to do about it?
For those who are Socially Uptight
The Daggy music experiment.
Go to I-tunes, or a music store. Buy some yodelling music. Now, play it as loudly as possible, singing along with great gusto and attempting to dance. (This part is best done in company). Try to do this as badly as you can. How do you feel? After five minutes, you will start to feel every care and worry in the world escape you. With this sense of lightness will come a greater sense of confidence, and perspective. You will find that you care less about social rejection. “It’s obvious that the mirth filled man, the cheerful soul, the childish adult is the one who has least to fear from life.” Tom Hodgkinson The Freedom Manifesto.
This is object number 6 of 9 from the book I wrote called “The What the Hell Is Your Problem?” Kit. A Kit For Uptight White People. The Kit was my final masters project in Cross Disciplinary Design at COFA UNSW.
You can view it here: http://issuu.com/veronicagrow/docs/kitforuptightwhitepeople
If you live in Melbourne, it is stocked at Metropolis Books, Brunswick Bound and Brunswick Street Books for $16.
You can also purchase it here on Blurb http://www.blurb.com/my/book/detail/2597718
or email me.
Why do you think we seem to need alcohol to help us to be more open friendly and inclusive?
SPEAKING OF SILLY
Oh no! I am ashamed to say that I think that I have become one of those weird dog owners. But what is the tell tale sign you ask? The answer is that I have gone and purchased a slightly ridiculous coat for my little schnauzer Gertie.
Really, the coat is more suited to a White Parisian Poodle, as it has just the appropriate suggestion of nineteen fifties french chic. Hardly sensible and germanic for a Schnauzer. Nevertheless, I could not resist. Ridicule me if you must, but I just love it so much. It’s gorgeous and completely impractical. Happy Xmas Gertrude.
Am I mad?
DO YOU DESERVE A MEDALLION?
Do you remember last week’s kit theme, the strand of conversation? Which led me to think about medallions for “white conversational legends”?
I spent yesterday making them. Then, as if that was not enough, I saw some beautiful medallions done in brown paper (on the web I should site the reference I know I am bad but I need to go eat dinner).
So I went ahead and made this huge brown one. I shouldn’t let myself go off on these tangents of fancy, but then isn’t that what being creative is all about. I will give the smaller ones away as promotional items to strategic broadcasters of the kit!
If you haven’ checked out the kit project yet, you should! :
WHAT THE HELL IS YOUR PROBLEM KIT, A KIT FOR UPTIGHT WHITE PEOPLE
If you are interested in finding out more, have a look at the book I wrote. This was my final masters project in cross disciplinary design at UNSW
THE WARM AND WELCOMING GESTURE
Some people make you feel welcome, others not so. Some of us seem so independent that we couldn’t care less. What do you think? I am not ashamed to say that to me, it is really important to make others feel welcome. That is why I included a welcome mat in the “KIT FOR UPTIGHT WHITE PEOPLE”.
For me, to make someone feel unwelcome is rude, and cold. It demonstrates your lack of care or interest in having some sort of meaningful relationship with them, and in that, your disregard for what it essentially is to be a human. Many people I know from other cultures note that it is really anglo/australian thing to do. It rarely happens in other cultures.
The photo that I have included with this post is taken when I worked in Kuwait, and we were guests of some bedouns (stateless people with no citizenship papers) who lived on the outskirts of Kuwait. They were not rich, but they knew how to make us feel welcome. One of the customs of all Arabs, whether stateless or not, mega wealthy, or poor, is to make guests feel welcome by way of “hospitality”. I have noted that this custom extends right through to other southern Mediterranean cultures too. The Italians I have known call it “ospiti”. Literally meaning to you I give hospitality.
The Italians and Arabs, and northern Indian people I know complain about being force-fed. Mangia, or “eat” you are instructed. If you don’t, they ask “perche tu non mangia?” Or “why aren’t you eating Veronica?” As an Anglo, it seems rude at first to say no. So you leave feeling really overfed. It’s considered rude to refuse, but my friend Jasmine taught me the trick, in obliging the welcoming signals of your host. You have to say, yes, then take the food, and eat it slowly. Leaving half of the food uneaten on your plate is seen as being better than refusing in the first place! (I know that this might make you feel uncomfortable if you are “Anglo”, but you do get used to it, trust me)
So guests are made to feel welcome by always offering something to eat, or drink. Anything at all. Even my Indian mechanic in Kuwait gave me a can of cold coca cola. I like this.
I cannot tell you how many Anglo households I have been in whereby I have been outright ignored, as though I was not there. The classic example was my brother in law in the nineteen eighties, who would watch the cricket, and drink beer in front of us when we visited, totally ignoring us as if we were invisible! This is pretty normal for us Anglos I am ashamed to say.
Last time when I was in the Middle East I visited an ex student in Oman, and noted that the family house had a special room for receiving visitors. Her father (even though he was honestly not particularly interested in my visit) made the effort to come into the room and make 15 minutes of conversation with me. I was made to feel welcome.
Welcoming people makes for social cohesiveness.
Some people have welcoming faces. My neighbor Lucia, has a very open friendly face, and most people always find themselves talking to her. Sometimes I wonder whether it is the same for me, as so many people approach me in the street and ask me questions, probably because I have a welcoming face. Sometimes I wonder whether a face can be too welcoming, when my neighbor Betty tells me some shocking stories about her life and family, that she shouldn’t. (Too much information goes the adage).
WHAT THE HELL IS YOUR PROBLEM KIT, A KIT FOR UPTIGHT WHITE PEOPLE
If you are interested in finding out more, have a look at the book I wrote. This was my final masters project in cross disciplinary design at UNSW
THIS CHICKEN IS HAVING A SEIZURE
“Why?” you ask. “Why IS she drawing a poor chicken having a seizure?”. By the way, before I do tell you why, I just have to ask you if you have ANY IDEA at all how hard it is to depict a chicken having a seizure? This one looks nothing like the real one by the way.
This picture relates to the idea of Minding Your Own Business, from item number 3 in my What the Hell is Your Problem Kit, the Definitive Kit for Uptight White People.
The other day, I was talking to my dear sweet chicken loving friend (A), and she told me that her husband (Mr G) was already not feeling well, and to make matters worse, he had looked out of the window, and seen one of their chickens who are like family to them having a seizure.
“Why was he feeling unwell?” asked I concernedly. (Should I have minded my own business?). “He has been in hospital”. Said A. “Oh, What was wrong with him” I asked. Thinking to myself, maybe I am going to far. “He had an operation” She said. Maybe I should have stopped right there, was I imagining a boundary that I should not go past. “What sort of operation?”, I asked. “In a private area” She said. “OK I thought, time to back off”. I decided the best tactic was to just make light of it, and evoke lots of sympathy. “Oh dear, that’s no good! Down in his nether regions” I said, please send him my love, and I hope he feels better”. All the same, I couldn’t help chuckling to myself at the odd nature of our conversation. Life is like that.
So the moral of the tale is that sometimes, of course we need to mind our own business! But at other times, it can make you appear cold and distant to mind your own business. It’s never easy to find the right balance. In my opinion, you are better taking the risk of actually being a bit of a nosy parker, than being cold and stuck up. Just ask gently and softly and try to demonstrate some sensitivity, never loudly. I believe too that your physicality can impact the situation. If you are physically big and loud, you will come across as being more pushy. White people cannot cope with perceived pushiness.
I WISH YOU WOULD MIND YOUR OWN DAMN BUSINESS!
Check out the “Mind Your Own Business T Shirt which is object three from the “What the Hell is Your Problem Kit? A Kit for Uptight White People”. I think that in general, we anglos are terribly shy, and that is why we are so busy minding our own business so that terrible things happen! Bombs get planted, but no one notices the odd person who planted the bomb, because we are so busy not sticking our nose where it is not wanted. People die, old and lonely in their houses, and no one even notices till a terrible smell comes from the house. We are too busy “minding our own business”, and oh yes, these the other notions we have which seem strange to people from other cultures. “Respecting each other’s privacy”, and “Not getting involved”. Not getting involved is a favourite one in my family, and I am constantly getting in trouble for actually getting chatting with strangers. Listening to their stories, discussing what they have growing in their garden doesn’t seem problematic to me. In fact, it seems to gain me many favours, such as gifts of fresh vegetables from gardens, interesting stories, and invitations to nice parties. You only live once.
When I was a young kid, my Aunty Joyce often told me off and found me annoying for asking about things. “You are just trying to be smart” She would say. No wonder I have found it a bit challenging to shake my “uptightness” despite my determination to do so. Oh yes, and the best one of all was when I worked at a well known University here in Melbourne, with a staffroom full of incredibly stuffy white people (they still all work there by the way). They all believed in “Minding Their Own Business”, and a few of them didn’t even tell the rest of the staff when they got married. Of course, I was always in trouble for “not respecting people’s sense of space”. You could have laid dead in that staff room for 2 weeks and no one would have blinked:)
If you are interested in finding out more, have a look at the book I wrote. This was my final masters project in cross disciplinary design at UNSW.
Item Number 3. The Mind Your Own Business T Shirt.
Is this you? How many people do you know that might as well be wearing one of these anyway? Indicated just by their effectiveness in keeping you at a distance.
This is Item 3 from the What the Hell is Your Problem Kit a Kit for Uptight White People, a multicultural book which was my masters project in cross disciplinary design at UNSW.
If you are interested in finding out more, have a look at the book I wrote.
http://issuu.com/veronicagrow/docs/kitforuptightwhitepeople
COMPETITION REMINDER (help me to continue the strand of conversation all you uptight white people!)
closes 31 November midnight EST (FYI thats australian time midnight in sydney)
very easy to win, all you have to do is find the following post and retumble it, as in repost on your tumblr. or even reblog it on your own blog (if you are not with tumblr why should we exclude you). just email me and let me know, so that you are in the draw.
I will post up the list of rebloggers in 1st week of december, and post out the winner of a free copy of the kit to the winner of the draw (from a hat). of rebloggers.
http://veronicagrow.tumblr.com/post/12025183398/did-you-know-from-numerous-migrant
#2 STRAND OF CONVERSATION
What the Hell is Your Problem? A Kit for Uptight White People.
Are You White? and a Conversational Retard? Or like Penelope, in my last post, A “Conversational Legend” amongst White People? Thanks Penelope!
View it here: http://issuu.com/veronicagrow/docs/kitforuptightwhitepeople
Purchase it here for $7.95 plus postage (note it is printed in full colour, it just previews in B & W!)
“Dress You Up in My Love”:
Honoring the Spacetime-Consciousness Conjunction through Style
by Jasmine Melvin-Koushki
Roots
Getting dressed is one of my favorite ways to be in communion with my environment and talk beauty with my fellow sentient beings. When I get dressed in the morning, part of what I try to communicate, and thereby honor, is my story. This story is in some ways the cosmic story of a girl growing up in the universe – wild, and inscribed into culture, a female body in a timespace of buildings and black holes and shoes and rosebushes and memory. And in important ways it is a historically-conditioned story: of being the culturally hybrid daughter of East-meets-West academic nomads, and of how our journey was both facilitated and hamstrung by the geopolitical networks and tensions of the Oil Age. I would not exist as I am but for the Shah’s scholarship that brought my father from Iran to NYU in 1968, the tribal ties and swinging, neocolonial Mideast economy that brought him (with my adventurous, beautiful, Bostonian mother) back to Iran, the revolution that brought a halt to their glamorous early married life in Tehran – but which ushered in a deep experience and love of the rest of the world, and the 1980s oil boom that drew us, along with millions other educators and academics, engineers and infrastructure consultants, migrant workers, business people, tastemakers, and their families, to the cities of the Arabian Peninsula and the Gulf.
Growing up between cultures, in a highly conservative yet hugely cosmopolitan, international context, self-presentation was an essential – and sometimes sensitive – part of communicating who you were to the outside world. Beyond this, it was creatively a very rewarding part of my day. Perhaps too rewarding! Thank God we had uniforms in our all-girls, Islamic grade school, because according to a reliable source, I once spent two and a half hours getting dressed for kindergarten. (This was when we still lived in a small university town in upstate New York; apparently, after a saucy tantrum, which had ensued when my mother tried to intervene in my outfit creation, I proudly walked into my classroom of fellow 4-year olds wearing a dramatic deconstruction of my entire wardrobe – think John Galliano meets Raggedy Ann.) I like to think I’ve learned a thing or two about editing since then, though to look at my closet today – chromatically coded and orderly but bursting with bright color and stuffed to the gills – one would be forgiven for branding me still a shameless maximalist.
Color
How do you use clothing to communicate with and honor your world? Half my philosophy of dressing, as you may have been able to gather, revolves around my fascination with color. Color cooks on all my creative burners all the time, and it’s all the reason I need to put an outfit together. Grey clouds in they sky? Answer: tomato red sweater, royal blue wool skirt, tall mahogany equestrian boots, topaz and amethyst ring. Crisp and sunny out? Answer: Spring green cotton shift with lightly embroidered gold neckline, champagne slip-on heels, diamond earrings, toffee lipstick. Out dancing of a fall evening? Navy blue v-neck dress over ballerina-length, fluorescent salmon skirt, gold tango shoes, warm turquoise pendant. Color is the first order of my day and the sine qua non of my inspiration. Along with the languages of proportion and silhouette and, less so, print and texture, color allows me to articulate a creative as well as a logistical response to the weather, to sieze the day – or merely shake hands with it; to embrace the season – or slap it in the face; to uphold the status quo – or push the envelope. All in all, color and clothing make up the verse-and-stanza transcript of the daily call and response I have with my environment.
Impromptu Fashion Shoots
When I’m feeling extra ambitious, I like to take this honoring business one step further by creating a picture as well as an outfit. I call this sartorial-spiritual habit an “impromptu fashion shoot.” Though there are times when the meeting of outfit, light, and perfect spot is planned over the span of a few hours or days, and times when the elements of an outfit find each other months before the photograph is taken, most of these shoots truly are spur-of-the-moment endeavors. They necessarily involve a collaborator, which can be half the fun – I’ve had the honor of having my mother, husband, and best friends as partner-in-crime photographers. And I’ve also enjoyed the assistance of perfect strangers, from taxi drivers to street vendors to fellow students or tourists, some of whom really get into it! Sometimes I will feature something I’ve designed, and rarely, I will feature off-the-rack retail items, but for the most part I stick with what what I do best, which is to find things that already exist – things outside the sphere of commercial fashion and its cult of the new, bring them artfully together on my person, reunite them with – or début them to – their architectural or art historical soulmates, and snap!: new life for all. Rescued gems from East coast Salvation Armies, one-of-a-kind vintage and antique treasures, singularly wacked out Bedouin fashion, and hand-me-downs from my mother’s killer closet – I like my fashion to come with, and be capable of telling, a story.
The Eternal City
Often, a place will cause me to “discover” a new color or family of colors – colors whose beauty and personality were as yet in part unknown to me. Damascus caused me to deepen my already fervent worship of green. On a short jaunt through Rome last September, I instantly became obsessed with: marigold-spiced butterscotch. In fact, I was smitten by this rich and (seemingly) distinctively Roman color before we even touched down at Fiumicino; as the plane made its descent, mustards and ochers lively and wise colored the stucco villas on the outskirts of the city. Once in the city, I saw it everywhere – on buildings, men’s belts, women’s handbags, marble panelling, coats, cars. I theorized about local soil content and native Italian clays and the effect of climate on collective palette. I mentally noted a high fashion, visual merchandising Renaissance of camel and scotch and amber. The clincher in all this, and the true star of my first impromptu fashion shoot in la città eterna – was a recently rediscovered vintage skirt the perfect buttery shade of mandarin to honor my new chromatic friends. (Happily, in the process of paring down the stuff in storage at my grandmother’s last summer, I’d had the instinct to reclaim the remarkably colored skirt from the basement box where it had been beaming in darkness for the better part of a decade, and pack it.) And so, on the morning of my second day in Rome, in collaboration with the Romanian receptionist at my hostel (out for her cigarette break), I shot “Sogno di mandarino” (Italian for “Dream of Mandarin”), a dreamy ode to the colors of Rome – and a nod to the Hollywood image of the stylish mid-century American traveler in Europe.
Fashion and Architecture
The aesthetic dialogue between clothing and architecture can be particularly rich and fun. To honor my visit to the Piazza del Popolo, I posed in the busy square in front of the Basilica of St. Peter’s wearing a painstakingly refined piece of 1957 American custom couture. I wanted to juxtapose the strong sense of classicism and structure that unite the two, the aesthetic idealism and technical mastery represented by St. Peter’s – that emblem of classical Renaissance architecture, and the well-contained sex and precise tailoring of the cocktail dress – a high classic of American fashion in navy blue crepe wool. With its demurely suggestive boat neckline, perfectly fitted mermaid-style sheath, and rhinestone buckle at the knee, it’s the kind of dress Kim Novak would have worn to confession – and then out to drinks. This called for my gold Manolo Blahniks. I channeled the packaging of 1950s Vogue and Butterick patterns – alternate universe of high-heeled, perfectly angled feet – and tilted my head to the 10am Roman sun. At the last minute, the kiosk vendor taking the picture reached over to his wares, selected a fan, and suggested I hold it.
Chance
As much as the pictures honor specific works of art or architecture, color, or dress, they are also, then, a kind of homage to chance. Allow me to illustrate this further. On a warm dusty evening last spring, my mother, her friend, Lydia, and I found ourselves approaching “Fast Times,” a popular shisha café along the sidewalk of a busy metropolitan street in Kuwait, for dinner. Glory be, how could I not honor this moment, this meeting of my and the restaurant’s red-and-black themed souls? I swiped a box of the restaurant’s branded, red/black Kleenex boxes for a clutch, propositioned an Egyptian waiter to commit impromptu fashion shoot with me, and positioned my red and white polka dot pumps on the staircase. Only later did I see that my Betty Boop shoes reified, like fantastical punctuation marks, the picture’s tongue-in-cheek humor. Everything could have turned out differently. Impromptu fashion shoots, far from being a simple record of what I happen to be wearing, allow me to both interpret my environment and celebrate my relationship to it. They allow me to showcase material, conceptual, and chromatic harmonies. They allow me to honor my status as a witness and a member of this great experiment called existing. And they allow me to weave together in artful ways the diverse strands of culture, experience, and visual memory that affect how I see and experience the world.
Persona
Finally, impromptu fashion shoots are about performance, persona, and fantasy. This is where the posing comes in! It was Veronica who made this clear to me when she directed my attention to the theatrical dancer Ruth St. Denis (1879-1968), who created hundreds of incredible personas in her dance work and in photographs, and the Italian fashion writer and avant garde style icon Anna Piaggi (1931-), well into her 80s now and still dressing to the nines. Giving yourself the freedom to act out your imagination honors your inner child as well as your inner archive – think of all the literary figures, film stills, religious images, magazine pages and paintings that are integrated into your sense of emotion, your ideals of beauty, your notions of what it means to be female. Gesture can bring a welcome layer of narrative and symbolism to the images. In “The Rose of Beiteddine Palace”, for instance, I was a princess on the cusp of the late medieval and early modern worlds, one especially enamored of roses. I thought of Persian book paintings, with their adoration of detail, and of heroines of Persian poetry, who represent life’s plenitude and intoxication. I recalled the women in Waterhouse, Rosetti, and other Pre-Raphaelite and symbolist paintings of the Victorian era, and lit a candle to the Dove girl – that barefoot virgin of early 20th century American soap advertisements. I gave myself over to innocence, to wonder at nature’s abundance and mystery.
Persona references range from important icons of cinematic, art, literary and cultural history to mere concepts and imaginary types. At Fast Times, I fancied myself a kind of Arabized Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, a restless, buxom heroine in a girlish but sexy dress, magic red shoes journeying her down a mysterious road the color of red apples and carob, lipstick and crude oil. When I later contemplated the picture, my dress — and the haughty posture — took me into Queen of Hearts territory (that walking ego in a red-and-black dress from the animated Disney film Alice in Wonderland; as Alice discovers to her great disturbance, the Queen loves the color red so much that she has all the white roses in her dominions painted it!). And at the anonymous and imaginary end of the spectrum, I could also see myself as some diplomat’s wife in the 80’s, arriving just a tad over-fluffed to a night-time garden party in British Bombay and being photographed for the country club’s quarterly newsletter. The caption might have read something like this: “The colorful print on Mrs. Svetlana Richardson’s dress reminds one of mandhalas and the circus; these, along with her polka dot pumps, lend just the right hint of Moulin Rouge burlesque to her ensemble.” (Given that I was in a public place in Kuwait, it’s a very good thing that this particular association wasn’t strong enough to make me launch into the cancan.)
The Aesthetic Garden (In Which You Are One of the Flowers)
By cultivating an elevated relationship between clothing and material culture, I try to communicate fresh combinations of historical reference, contemporary environment, and individual style. Call it an impromptu fashion shoot, call it putting your clothing where your consciousness is. It means that any moment can be an aesthetic garden, a noble puzzle of time, space, color, form, soul, light, and gaze, just waiting to be honored by artistic intention. The only downside to this talent for piecing together existential jigsaws from the quotidian? Well, as the 4-year old Jasmine might have put it the day she flamboyantly deconstructed her wardrobe, “When you’re an artist whose medium includes your own person, it can take a while to get out the door in the morning.”
THIS POST IS FOR YOU, A PRESENT FROM AN ESTEEMED FRIEND
To continue with the theme of Honour from T”he Kit for Uptight White People”, This post about honour, I dedicate to you, (yes YOU) in way of my honouring you. I take this idea from the inscription which you can read in the accompanying images, which is an original inscription to my great grandmother Nellie Sutton, inscribed in a gift of a book for Nellie from her friend Walter Davis, back around 1860 ish.
It says: To Nellie Sutton, A present from the affectionate friend Walter W Davis.
I chose this because of the use of language, which we never hear today of course. I mean to say, to which of your friends do you refer to yourself as “an affectionate friend” to? Probably, if you spoke like that to a friend, they would feel really embaressed, and tell you to shut up. Of course we still do things for our friends. Just this morning, my neighbour Zoe was busy weeding the front garden of our other heavily pregnant neighbour Erika, which is a sign of affection, and honour. So its not as if the whole idea is forgotten, and we are completely bereft. I think that we just feel that it is wholly uncool to express it in such a flowery way as long ago.
Speaking of which, the accompanying birthday book, was my grandmother’s back around 1910. The Floral Birthday Book. Again it bears a beautiful front piece which is a bit difficult to read. It says:
To Mrs Fitzbardinge Berkeley Portman, This little work (an endeavour to entwine flowers and their emblems around the poetry of great minds), is inscribed with sincere esteem and regard, by the compilers.
Note the use of language, denoting the humility of the author of the book, when the creator describes it at as “a little work”. So to serve and to honour, by describing oneself as small, in order to make the other feel more important, and well, yes honoured!! It is pretty, and charming I think.
Note too, the care, precision and time that went into making beautifully crafted handwriting, seen in my grandmother’s signature of Gladys Curnow. It seems that though there are alot of “craftsers” around today, they do lack the patience, care and precision in making stuff that my grandfather, grandmother, and evenmy mother demonstrated (I will never forget all that complicated fair isle knitting that my mother did, who can do THAT these days!) In our family, we have copies of maps that my grandfather made when he was eight years old. I really do not know how he made them. They are so neat and delicately done with ink.
I also have a copy of some lettering that I created, dear reader, 30 years ago (see the etching image). I doubt that I would have the patience and care to be able to do it again. I look at it and wonder what happened.
While discussing the use of language, and words to connotate the idea of honour for a fellow human, and how we do (in my opinion) find it cringeworthy. It is interesting to not that the Arabs that I mixed with and taught in Kuwait, did not find it cringeworthy at all. Phrases and sentences, I noticed, were pretty long and flowery so that no one ever had to lose face. One particular manager (who was actually not so nice!), had a way of making even the worse orders sound humble! (he wanted us to use a finger print device to clock in to work, and “asked us if we could please kindly do so every morning and every evening when we returned home”.
Nevertheless, this sugar coating did make way for less stressful discourse and discussion than to which I am accostomed to in Australia, which can be too harsh and direct at times.
In relation to this, I am not sure whether my friend Jasmine (who is half persian after all, and grew up in a culture of “honour” and is therefore possibly prone to floweriness) was honourably telling me that she could not post, thus saving her face and mine, or that maybe she would. I think her correspondence is a great example of the notion of honour anyway!
This is what she said:
V dearest!
I am so “honoured” by your invitation! Let me put my thinking cap on about this. My initial response is to tell you that I am at an incredibly fragile and transitional point at the moment and should probably not take on any extra projects, no matter how small or simple or interesting. A quick update: I landed in the US 3 days ago to rescue my husband from his academic, emotional, and spiritual demons. My 14-hour flight from Amman to New York was followed by a shuttle from the airport to the railroad, a train to the subway, a subway ride to the bus station, and a 5-hour bus to Boston. All this with a 20-kg suitcase, a 10-kg carry on, a robustly stuffed purse, and a winter coat on my arm. The universe sent me amazing angels at each obstacle point along the way and I was able to rely on the kindness of strangers to get me through the hairier elements of such a logistical marathon. (I am finding that, as this country becomes composed more and more of individuals from immigrant cultures — cultures which usually have long legacies and strong concepts of “honour” — life in the land of uptight white people is less and less dominated by their rules of engagement. Hence my unexpectedly positive Manhattan experience!). All this to get to my grandmother’s so I could pick up my mum’s car.
I thought about things and decided that, whatever may be our eventual fate as a couple, as a fellow human being and a friend I would come to his side to do whatever I could to help him with this behemoth dissertation, because he has clearly been driven witless by it. He has been under inhuman pressure trying to finish it in under 6 months in order to meet the terms of his new job at Oxford. I am mentally preparing myself for all scenarios. I feel strong and accepting of everything the universe and other people throw my way, but aware also of my own role in shaping the universe and other people. :)
Of course, after the marathon I collapsed with the flu. My friend Victoria, who picked me up from the bus station in Boston and gave me the guest room in her house, and THEN drove me to my grandmother’s the next day, was the biggest angel of all and helped me to get well quick. After a day of rest at Nana’s I finally drove in to New Haven last night and am staying with a Turkish girlfriend named Rezzan. I will be approaching Matt today. Wish me luck!!
Anyway about the blog entry — would love to do it … have plenty to say on the subject … might even derive inspiration from my experience with strangers on the subway, etc
Well maybe she will, and maybe she wont? Let’s watch this space..
THE WHAT THE HELL IS YOUR PROBLEM KIT - HONOUR
Yesterday’s post introduced the #1 The Roll of DisHonour.
With the next few postings I will continue the theme of “Honour and Dishonour”, by talking about the musings and wonderful design of Marian Bantjes.
In the Roll of Dishonour, the Kit talks about Marian Bantjes ideas on Honour, so I have posted an image of her amazingly constructed lettering constructed from Macaroni, that accompanies her text, in her book titled “I Wonder”.
It is nice to hear Bantjes various musings on the idea of “honour”. She talks about the modernist ideal of honouring text, by not obfuscating it with superfluous decoration. She then continues by talking about honouring special information, by placing space around it, or placing it in a frame, and the way in which Victorians honoured their loved ones by placing a piece of their hair in a locket.
She finishes her essay by saying that life is short, and time is scarce, so we must spend it wisely by honouring with effort and time and care, that which is valuable.
Here is her Website: http://www.bantjes.com/
I Wonder is on Amazon here: http://www.amazon.com/I-Wonder-Marian-Bantjes/dp/1580932967/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1320294505&sr=8-1
Along similar vein to Bantjes obsession with decoration, Alice Rawsthorn, a prominent Design critic has recently written a fascinating article which talks about the current resurgence of ornamentation. She says that historically, ornament was used to signify one’s power, but this was killed with the Industrial Revolution, and the rise of Modernism’s detestation for ornament. This has changed, she says, with decorative crafts no longer seen as silly and sentimental, and then sites the work of a myriad of contemporary designers whose work is highly ornamental.
But why? “the idiosyncrasies, fragility and sensuality of craftsmanship have a new appeal, not only for designers, but also for the public” because “These days industrialization is more likely to be seen as bland and soulless, especially as the deepening environmental crisis makes it impossible to ignore its dangers.”
So, best, that we bump up the Honour!
You can preview the Kit here: http://issuu.com/veronicagrow/docs/kitforuptightwhitepeopl And buy it here: http://www.blurb.com/books/2597718 (note although displayed in B&W it is printed in colour as per issuez)
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