The Museum of Accidental Images

 

Dear Chance,

I don't know about you, but I love these blurry images I get as a bonus with every package that is delivered by my good pals in the brown and gold, the UPS people.  This one, well this one is so good that it inspires me to open a museum to accidental images.  Now, no; it cannot be ALL accidental images, it has to be curated; only the best accidental images will do for the museum!

Three things to do.

 

Dear Yarn,

Hey, did you know about this place?  It's a roadside museum of crochet!  Here are three actionable items to takeaway from this post:

1.  Crochet something, anything.  I made a crocheted fried egg once, and it was mighty satisfying!

2.  Visit this very charming pequeño museo.

3.  Open a roadside museum of your own.  For inspiration, see The Moffat Museum.

barbed wire

Dear Observer,

The museum in my town has this beautiful collection of fence wire.  The museum, like all museums, might be considered boring: all these collections, all this saved rusty, dusty stuff that may have no meaning anymore.  Certainly, the meaning has changed.

I love this collection of wire because of its formal beauty- the lyrical lines, the punctuation of the bends and barbs.  It was on a painted plywood the last time I visited the museum, and of course, what did I want from my museum but frozen time.  I wanted to visit it and photograph the wire the way it had been formerly presented on the painted plywood, black marker detailing each wire segment.  But, the collection has been updated, and is now on some kind of plasticky board and these oversized tongue depressors hold the specifics.  The change has kept me from giving you these beautiful wires, but I am ready, now, after 2 years, to accept and embrace this change.

What we save, how we save it, and where and when we present it are all such fascinating things to ponder on a grey December day, in a collection of musings, in a virtual, visual format that is organized chronologically.

autre temps, autre moeurs

 

Dear Others,

I went hogwild this year on Zoom book clubs: three!  It was a bit manic, yes.  In one of The Groups (which I will call the English Professors & Librarians Group) we talk about 'othering,' meaning the process of talking, writing, and defining different (as in not your) groups as The Other.  Which has been specially verbed for this particular use.  Here is the rub:  Othering is bad, yep, no denying it.  But it is so pretty a word, so useful, so broad in what it can mean, which is anything.  Go get the other one.  Bring another one.  I like the other one better.  It's like the words 'stuff' and 'things.'  I can't live, if living is without them.  So now a sort of kind of (more words I must have!) short poem like (there's another one!) elegy to the word other:   

Other times

other manners

other ways.

Other other other.

And now on to another thing, that I know you will like: The The Guatelli Museum, which comes to these pages via a friend and colleague.