An old man lies in a hospital bed, dying of nothing. His son sits in a chair fit for a lobby and waits. The snow slants down outside the window. It’s collected in the corners, where the brick meets the sash, and formed a kind of porthole into a world gone beneath a winding sheet.
Some sort of machine wheezes and sighs. Every voice is a murmur like a pew near a confessional. The son wonders if there’s any noise of life in this place. No tinkle of a fork on a plate. No hammering of seconds on a clock. Music has never entered the building, and never will. The memory of the jarring blast of metal bells on the old man’s phone in his walkup parlor would sound like a calliope here. Everything that passes sounds like a black mariah, the horses with burlap on their hooves.
The old man says nothing, just looks at his son, and begins to cry. His son can’t help it, he begins to cry, too. They cry for the same reason. The son doesn’t want to be left alone in this world. The father is afraid to leave his son alone in the world he’s made for him.
Haven’t written much lately. Mi dispiace. I’ve been working day and night for weeks on end.
There’s a picture of a batch of Evangeline Tables that went out this week. Some had gone out earlier, and some customers have asked me to hold others until later dates for one reason or another. It was fun to see a half-dozen of them lined up at a time. Thanks to everyone that bought one. I hope you like them. It was gratifying making them. I’d make more, but I used all the flame birch material I had. Not sure when I’ll be able to get more like that. I admit that I was a little befuddled that I was able to make tables that look like those. I didn’t think I was capable of such a thing.
They do not look like a machine made them. You can tell that they are made by a person. That’s a double-edged sword. Some people might think that objects that look like a person made them would be a kind of defect. Our machine age brooks no competition from the apes. But no one that reads my blog thinks that the evidence of the hand of the person that made a thing detracts from the item itself — just the opposite, I imagine. It’s interesting to make 32 turned legs at a time, and try to make them all the same. Exactly the same kind of different, is more like it.
This winter has been beastly. Really cold weather started really early in the year, and never let up. Snowed a lot, too. My wife and son and I had to shovel for two days straight last week, after a blizzard, just to get a truck in and accept the cardboard I use to package furniture. Everything is uphill both ways this time of year.
I’m also making a big table for Julie and her family, who reads and comments here. It’s taking too long to finish it. It’s been too cold in my shop to finish a table that big properly. The small ones you just bring by the woodstove and there’s no problem, or bring them upstairs into the house. There is an old saying about commerce: I am your friend, but my business doesn’t know you. I am Julie’s friend but my business hasn’t known her properly. The winter’s back is broken now, and the table won’t be long now. I will not sleep properly until it goes, and until the one I’m making for my friend Arlan is done, too. Unfinished business keeps a man up at night.
I have all sorts of odds and ends that have collected since last fall in an alcove outside my children’s bedrooms. It’s a neat little spot, a dormer with a window built entirely to bring light into what would be a very dark hallway otherwise. Whenever something gets made that doesn’t have a home right away, it goes there. It’s the best furnished room in my house, and it isn’t a room, and no one goes there. It’s time to empty it out and use the proceeds to buy food, or fritter it away on other silly things like that.
Here’s an experimental Console Table. It’s two inches less wide than my regular size. It’s 14 x 32 by 28 inches high. Honey Pot. My wife is starting to look at it funny — the same look she gave the stray cat that’s lived with us for over a decade after the look. Time to get it out of here. $399 includes free shipping:
Honey Pot Console:
SOLD! Thanks, Emily in Virginia
Here’s another of the experimental sized Console Tables. This one is dyed cinnamon. 14 x32 x 28 inches high. $399 includes free shipping.
Cinnamon Cottage Console:
SOLD! to old friend Ruth Anne down Carolina way. Many thanks!
I’ve got two splay-legged tiger maple Kipling Tables. They’re very strikingly grained. The snapshot camera I’ve got doesn’t do them justice. They’re both stained cinnamon. $199 each, includes free shipping.
Kipling Table 1 in cinnamon stain:
SOLD! Off to the the Pacific Northwest
Kipling Table 2 in cinnamon stain:
Here’s a solid quartersawn white oak Shamrock Table. The top is very wildly grained, but the lighting isn’t too good for the photo. 15x15x28 inches high. $249 includes free shipping
White oak Shamrock Table in cinnamon stain:
SOLD! Thanks, Julie in Florida
I used to make an item called an owl house. They featured it in Cottages and Bunglaows magazine, IIRC. I made three simplified versions of the old design. No steeple. It’s entirely made of clear pine, with a cedar roof. It’s painted with exterior paint. The interior is left raw, like birds like it, and there’s a “ladder” that goes from the floor to the hole for fledglings to climb to get out to learn to fly. You can pull two pins on the sides and the bottom swings open to clean out a nest. It’s really rather large: 14x11x21 inches high, with a 3 inch hole. The box and hole is sized for small owls and larger birds. In Maine, we have saw-whet owls, which are dreadfully cute. $99 each, includes free shipping.
Owl House in bog red:
Owl House in green:
Owl House in Verdigris:
SOLD! to Kevin in Philly. Many thanks.
I have really nice neighbors here in Maine. I gave some birdhouses last year to some ladies that live downa street. They know all about birds, and they got bluebirds to nest in the houses. Marvelous. Bluebirds are hard to attract, but they tend to stay where they like it, and attract others. You can put bluebird houses in a row, like along a fencerow, for instance, and they move in. I tried doubling down on my luck. Here’s a bluebird house with three compartments. Each compartment is entirely separate from the others, and they’re all exactly the size of the bluebird-approved houses I made. Birds, except martins, don’t really like to live together, but the two end houses face away from one another, and the one in the middle faces forward. Bluebirds will live back-to-back with other birds. There are no perches; bluebirds like diving straight into the holes. The back roof unscrews to clean it out. The back has false windows, too. It’s made from pine. The inside isn’t painted. Birds hate paint inside their houses. It’s 8 x 16 x 9 inches tall, with three 1-3/8 inch holes. $49 includes free shipping.
Bluebird house in white:
SOLD! Thanks, Linda in Tejas
Well, that’s the lot. If you like anything, hit the buttons. If you like more than one thing, you’ll have to buy each separately, because there’s no “Shopping Cart” for these Buy Now buttons. If the button disappears, that means someone else beat you to it. But don’t worry about my family and me if you don’t see anything to your liking. Whatever doesn’t sell I’ll burn for firewood. Hey, a BTU’s a BTU.
The likely lads are back with a new Arctic Monkeys song, Bigger Boys and Stolen Sweethearts. Not much chance of anyone prying any girls away from these two, but they have to sing something. And I can assure you it’s plenty arctic in the room they’re playing in. Got no heat.
Many, many thanks to everyone that has supported the boys in their musical endeavors. When they’re famous, you can add “impresario” to your business card. According to Google, they’re already more famous than the actual Unorganized Hancock, which is a real place. Well, I guess it’s real. No one’s ever returned from a trip there, but I like to look on the bright side of things. Perhaps they were eaten by bears. The alternative — that they decided to stay there — is too depressing to contemplate.
[Update: Many Thanks, Kathleen M, for your generous support! And Dave R’s continuing support is a wonder. Good advice, too. Many thanks!]
I come not to bury Jacques Jodoins, nor to praise him. He doesn’t require anything from me, anyway. He is a watch with the hands and the stem on the inside, and the gears facing out. But he is interesting to me.
His workshop is perfect for the Intertunnel, isn’t it? The Intertunnel is just a big Jumbotron for us to act outrageous on, on the off chance we can get the camera to linger on us during a time-out. Indecent exposure or marriage proposal, doesn’t really matter what you do, you’ll have your moment on YouTube eventually.
But Jacques did not produce that midden of moil for our amusement. He wasn’t trying to get in Guinness or astound Ripley or even catch the woodworking world’s eye in the form of that video. He was amusing himself, first, last, and always.
And what’s wrong with that? Honesty is what you do when no one’s looking. He’s truly honest. He’s not going to take all that stuff down now that he’s been on the Jumbotron and start building the world’s largest train set in its place to take another bite of the attention apple. He was what he was, is what he is, and will remain whatever that makes him. He’ll die down there, and I imagine he’ll die happy.
I know what everything in that basement is. Every last thing. I don’t have 1/2 a percent of it, and if offered, I’d turn down the gift of most of it. And I make furniture every day, for a living.
Unlike most of the world, I am not allowed to have the Process be the Product. At the end of the day there has to be something tangibly different with the world or we don’t eat. Sometimes we don’t eat anyway. Most of the world we inhabit now is all Process and no Product. What is Twitter, or Tumblr, or Facebook, or a million other things you could name that consist solely of: This is how I go, when I go like this.
The federal government thinks the process is the entire product. The public school system can produce only public school teachers. The EPA is now supposed to protect the air from humans. The Department of Energy doesn’t make any, and would prefer you didn’t as well –or else. Cities like Detroit are trying to exist with no population now. Search your mind. You’ll have to search hard to find exceptions, not examples.
I have a tendency to notice things that others overlook. It’s not my fault I notice things; don’t be hard on me. There is no furniture of any kind, not even a component of a piece of furniture –there isn’t even any sawdust– anywhere in Jacques workshop.
He is happy there. Let us praise him. He is our God.
(Thanks to old StumbleUpon friend Maxismax for sending that one along. StumbleUpon. Heh.The process is the product.)
Woodworking in Japan is a revered tradition. America has a weird version of the same thing — or maybe we’re normal and the Japanese are weird; you decide. But humans of any kind, in any walk of life can make a contest out of anything.
Every once in a while, people want to see where I work. Some expect a very elaborate place full of highly refined and complex tools. Others expect a kind of lutherie shop, filled with arcane and rustic tools and jigs and so forth. They’re all surprised that there’s next to nothing in my shop other than the things I make. I’d have the same set of tools if I was framing a house, or making a kitchen cabinet, or a fence. You need to store it, handle it, measure it, rip and crosscut it, smooth it, fasten it, and finish it, no matter what it is. The rest is a kind of judgment, or discernment. Judgment is ninety percent of it.
Schools teach anti-discernment now. You’ll have to find it somewhere else.
Month: February 2013
sippicancottage
A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.
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