Dovetailed Hello World

Box. Pine, 3×3.5×3 inches.

I made this box as a woodworking version of writing the ‘hello world’ program when first learning a programming language  — a simple, but complete, thing done to grasp some basic concepts. Using hand tools requires an understanding of not only how to use the tool but equally, how the tool wants to be used.  A saw bucks in the cut if drawn outside of a preferred pitch, planes become as obstinate as a perfectionist compelled to accept the merely adequate if the blade is extended the smidgen too far, and an unsharpened chisel will tear out end grain  like a landslide through mountainside forest. Tools are upfront about saying what is not to their liking. When their voice changes from a grumble and growl to a crisp, eager, confiding  is when the pleasure in work prevails

A handful of wood shavings

On a weekend camping among trees with blue sky in the day and a fire at night, I feed it with a box of off cuts I’ve saved for this exact purpose. “They’re called Mu Hua”, she explains as I cast a handful of wood shavings into the flames. My rudimentary Chinese availed far enough to a translation; wood flower.

The simple beauty of the paper thin spiral has an easy appeal that could understandably inspire the Chinese, who are prone to poetic nouns, to compare a curled up sliver of wood fibres to an opening spring bud. Though in truth wood shavings are an undesired part, sliced off and discarded in the process of making a rough slab of timber into a flat, square and exactly sized piece of wood.

Each plane stroke creates a long ribbon that instantly coils and bunches in the plane’s mouth so that you must intermittently stop to pull them free. In the motion of the task at hand they are slung to the floor without regard, where they collect around the workbench in soft mounds like autumn leaves, always more abundant than the result of the days work would suggest. The wood flowers earn their name right to the end.

I put another handful of shavings in, the flames grab on and bulge momentarily as the delicate flowers wither into embers and throw up sparks that dart into the stars above.

Literary Crimes

I once stole 1984 from the English department storeroom. It wasn’t the only book I acquired that way, but the Orwell is the one I remember. Petty thievery might have been the only subject I excelled at in high school, so over years I built a small library of books marked with due date stamps and resource numbers. Though my reading habits weren’t without risk, the teachers indifference provided enough cover to slip into the E block unquestioned. The storeroom, more an oversized closet than a true room, was lined with ceiling high shelves storing swollen boxes of required reading. Some boxes were labelled with the title and author it held while others had just the book name handwritten in fading marker. Many though, were enticingly blank.

At first I stuck to the boxes of writers I knew until I’d exhausted that somewhat limited list and was forced onto the unknowns. There was plenty to sift through and, as the chances of being caught increased the longer stayed, I developed a method to find the worthy. I’d pull out a book and read everything on the back cover. If the publishers blurb held up, I’d flip to a random page and start reading from the first line of dialogue and if I was still with it by the bottom of the page, I’d consider it a keeper. The 1984 would have passed through the method and added to my library, where it probably stayed unopened for months, possibly several months, while my laborious reading rate caught up with my far more efficient pilfering.

The 1984 was a paperback with an entirely black cover except for the all in caps title and a high contrast image of the loud end of a bright red megaphone concealing the face of the person yelling into it. I should have taken that as a warning. The book was weary with the mishandling of students who placed no value on what was forced on them and it wore the injuries of being pushed to the bottom of school bags or tossed on under beds. Its corners were creased, dogeared, torn and the broken spine disintegrated steadily as I read, dropping yellowed pages like it had decided to give up. Somehow this added something to what I read. Reading it was difficult, sometimes disorienting and always fragile without any certainly of it lasting out the day.

I learnt later, years after it had been discarded and new copies bought, lent, lost, and rebought, that particular copy was published by Penguin, denoted by their orange encircled bird perched, somehow ridiculously defiant, smack centre in the O of the authors surname. That logo would come to mean something for me, a waymarker along a vein of ideas that loosened the questions that school failed to unravel. The first thread was drawn out by that 1984.

Niagara Dam

Few sights in the Goldfieds typifies the unbridled ambition of the Goldrush era than Niagra Dam. Prospectors drawn to the desert by their thirst for gold were all too often defeated by a thirst for water. The importance of a permanent water source, to quench the rapidly growing population as much as the equally demanding steam trains that brought them in, was great enough to inspire an engineering feat that, looking at it today, is difficult to believe was accomplished in 1897.

Construction materials were transported overland from Coolgardie by Afghan camel trains. This arduous trek was shortened later when the rail line extended to Menzies. A namesake town was established soon after construction began, intending to service the planned Leonora-Coolgardie rail line and surrounding goldmines, but by the time of completion the gold had run out and town was in abrupt decline. After the dams completion in May 1897, the discovery of abundant underground water at Koolkynie made Niagara Dam all but irrelevant. With the decline of Niagara township and the dams less impressive than expected capacity, the dam was ultimately never utilised and it quickly faded to a historical oddity.

Today it’s popular camping spot and welcome chance to get wet in a region where salt lakes predominate.

Joinery on the road

Wood does many things. One thing it does, is move. It swells and twists and bends over time. Most woodworkers consider wood movement a bad thing. Something else  I’ve learnt about wood is that it talks. Wood can tell stories and teach lessons. Sometimes it does both those things, move and talk, at the same time, as did the Buddhist text storage chests I saw in Chiang Rai, Northern Thailand.

Every temple has at least one, sometimes several, of varying design, decoration and state of decay. For me the most dilapidated chests were the most interesting. The chests are usually painted with thick layer of lacquer that smothers and softens every edge, corner and surface, hiding any clue that under the shiny surface is a wooden box.

As the climate and time thumps away, the chest’s wood moves, breaks through the surface and it starts talking. The chest tells how it was constructed with dovetail joints, some more than a decent hand span wide and often nailed through the tail.

Uncommon words 2

Uxorious — excessively fond of or submissive to one’s wife.
Nidify — to make or build a nest.
Louche — dubious, shady or disreputable.
Plangent — resonant and mournful in sound.
Abjure — Swear off something, renounce.

Strange Fruit

Harvested 16/10/2011

It was always considered mine. It had even been given a name — the ugly one. By the time it had grown barely rounder than a fingernail it was resolutely off course, flourishing in folds and tangled on itself. As the season roused into abundance other misshapen exceptions appeared, though none equalled the resplendent appearance of my impudent tomato. When the glut dwindled to the last middling and depleted few we returned grudgingly to supermarket tomatoes. The curiously uniform store tomatoes, without the slightest wayward step in its controlled growth, had nothing on the ugly one.

Bukowski on the Economy

The depression is here although the govt. prefers to call it a “recession.” Which reminds me of the old one: a recession is when your friends are out of jobs, a depression is when you’re out of one. It’s at times like this that I’m glad that I trained myself throughout a lifetime to detest a job of any sort. All these poor automobile workers sitting around glassy-eyed with homes half-paid for and cheating wives. They trusted that a hard day’s work for a good day’s pay would get them through.

Now as the govt. tries to pump blood into the corpse they sit around and work crossword puzzles and look at daytime TV shows programmed to the female…the only thing that will cure this is the same thing that has cured every capitalistic depression since 1940 – another war; a big war, a little war, a hot war, a cold war, but war war war, and so we arm the Arabs and we arm the Jews and we send scout planes out once again to Vietnam, and I write my poems and drink my beer and try to get through the last 4 scenes in Factotum[.]

Charles Bukowski
Feb 19, 1975

Reading list 2010

These are all the books I read during 2010. I felt that I’d been reading too many translated classics and decided to focus on books originally written in English. I also favoured 20th century writers as my reading fixation tended to be works penned (literally) no less than 150 years ago. The exception was Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure which might be the single most depressing book I’ve ever read. I enjoyed it thoroughly. Nonetheless, the old Russians appeared a couple of times — but who can refuse a good Russian?

The Voyage Out – Virginia Wolf
Out of Africa – Isak Dinesen
Angelas Ashes – Frank McCourt
The Complete Stories – Truman Capote
Devils – Fyodor Dostoevsky
How Proust Can Change Your Life – Alain De Botton
White Fang – Jack London
Selected Stories – Anton Chekhov
1984 – George Orwell
The Art of Travel – Alain De Botton
Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
On the road – Jack Kerouac
Metamorphosis – Franz Kafka
The Death of Ivan Ilyich – Leo Tolstoy

Uncommon words 1

Temerity — Reckless boldness, rashness, foolhardiness
Otiose — Ineffectual or futile. Superfluous. Idle.
Quondam — At one time. Formerly.
Perforce — Of necessity.
Perlieu — A persons haunt or retreat. Outskirts. Environs.