Winter Sun
The shortest day of the year has a solid blue sky and strong sun: my favourite kind of winter day. Almost all the leaves have fallen from the oak tree outside my window, so the light streams in across my desk and across my hands as I write this. It’s Saturday, writing day. I’ve been working on a new I am a Camera, issue number 25, in between the marking that has filled the last three weeks. The sunny afternoon stretches ahead, and I am fortunate to have clear skies above me, to be safe.
I was interviewed on the radio last night, talking about zines and what they have meant to me over my almost 30 years of making them, and the connections between my zine making and Calendar. When the presenter asked me what kinds of objects I had written about in the book, I found myself quickly checking the postcard of the cover, as whenever people ask me this, I can only ever call to mind the weirdest ones. I should have said the zine-related objects, to keep on theme: a typewriter, a photocopier (‘Something is wrong in the sticky heart of the photocopier’ is one of the lines from the book that is imprinted on my memory), and a long-arm stapler, which is almost all you need.
Other than marking and writing I’ve been reading Rock Flight by Hasib Hourani, Under the Bed by Stephanie Radok, and A Body of Water by Beverley Farmer (again - I’m presenting on it at a conference soon), thinking about the power of personal writing, in all the ways that it extends. I am drawn to writing that draws in the details of the writing moment, the energy of it. Reading it can feel like going close up to a painting to see the brushstrokes, being inside the making of it as well as seeing the result.
Object of the Month: (in which I expand on some of the objects I write about in Calendar)
Hot Water Bottle
My favourite part of working as a museum guide was taking people on tours, and my favourite part of the tour was the guessing game we would play with the hot water bottles. They were 19th century ceramic hot water bottles, sturdy earthenware flasks, and required some imagination to connect with what we know of as a hot water bottle today. I would pick up one of these ceramic flasks and ask the group to guess what it was. Often, someone would venture that it was some kind of bedpan. ‘It’s a hot water bottle,’ I would say, ‘which people called the hot pig, because of its piggy expression.’ Here I would draw attention to the end of the flask, where the stopper formed a kind of snout that, once you have the idea of it in mind, resembles a pig.
Although I have an ordinary rubber hot water bottle, I have a fondness for them as you might for something creaturely, and they are a cold-weather fixture for me. A cosy winter object, but reading about them and their history, as with so many objects in our everyday lives, is to read how their development is entwined with exploitation: in this case, with the colonial rubber industry. The tea I drink, the sugar in this biscuit, the shirt I wear, are all legacies of this history.
Hot water bottles as we know them haven’t changed much over the last century, although I find articles from the early twentieth century introducing hot water bottles in the shape of dolls, and also stories of hot water bottles being filled with whiskey as a trick to get around Prohibition laws. My own is housed in a cover with a life-size, photoerealistic image of a black cat on it, and it is in daily use at this time of the year: I sit at my desk with it on my lap like it is indeed a cat.
Object Project
In the radio interview I talked a little about discovering zines in the 1990s, and the American zines that were some of the first I came across, like Murder Can Be Fun, Ben is Dead, Mystery Date, and Rollerderby. Of all of them, Thrift Score by Al Hoff was a particular favourite. A zine about thrifting was close to my heart even then. Thrift Score recorded stories of thrifted objects and thrift store experiences. It was so popular that, in the late 90s, a Thrift Score book was published. The blurb on the back ran:
Forget about tightwadding! Finally a book about spending too much money on too cool stuff in thrift stores! This book is about the GLORY OF THRIFTING- the METHOD, the MADNESS, and the SCORE!
Even the language seemed part of a secret world. Tightwadding? (Looking that up now and I’m given results for ‘tight wedding. People Also Ask: What is a tight wedding dress called? Are tights appropriate for a wedding?’)
It’s an inimitable, funny book, and wise about the joys of thrifting. Much of it I took to heart then, and much of it still resonates.
As our culture changes, bits and pieces of forgotten fads, fashions, and ways of life can now be retrieved from the secondhand realm….Museums may preserve the ‘important’ stuff, but it’s the thrifts that hold the secrets of past everyday lives. Every object in the thrift store has already ‘lived’ somewhere before.
Opening it at any page and there’s something funny or useful: I enjoyed re-reading the tips for trying on clothes when there’s no changeroom (loose skirts are convenient here), and descriptions of ‘literals’ - a 70s houseware trend to ‘label the obvious’ by emblazoning an object with its name. ‘While most people only had one or two literals in their home, I really like the idea of a room stocked only with them.’
Elsewhere This Month
I wrote an article about zines for the Winter edition of Openbook, as part of their ‘Making’ themed issue. It’s an overview of the current zine scene and some of its literary connections. I’ll be talking more about zine culture at a library event in October, which I’ll post details of in a future Calendrical.
The other thing that’s happening in October, is the big news, the very reason for this newsletter - that’s when Calendar will be published. If you’d like to pre-order it, you can do so here upswellpublishing.com/product/calendar
Openbook also featured some of the illustrations in the magazine, so it is starting to quietly make its way out into the world.
Elsewhere in the Past
Digging around in my papers recently, I unearthed this article about op shopping from 2008, which pictures me in my sharehouse room of the time. I still have most of the things in the photo, and at least one is featured in Calendar (which one? Hint: background item).
I will leave you with this puzzle: until next month,
Vanessa.