The Arrogant Emu

So, inspired by Julia and then by Libby, I am here offering, to anyone who wishes, a Thing. Specifically, a knitted thing.  If you would like a knitted thing, post your preferences (socks, hat, gloves, scarf, etc) in the comments.  You can even specify a color if you’d like, though there’s no guarantee that I have it.  If you are of the knitterly persuasion and have a particular pattern you’d like me to try my hand at, by all means!

Are there any restrictions on what you can ask for?  Not really!  I mean, if you ask for an afghan you will get it much much later than the person who asks for a scarf, but I hope to finish all projects of reasonable size within about three months.

It’s cold now; the roads were covered with ice on my way home, and besides, I want another knit-challenge to keep myself occupied with while working through my great-great-grandmother’s lace.   It won’t be so bitterly cold by the time you get your knit thing (so we can hope?) but you can keep it around for next winter.

Sorry about that, readers.  (The extended hiatus, I mean.)  I was going to and fro in the world, and walking up and down in it, and in the course of my perambulations I came into possession of a rather remarkable set of documents: knitting and crochet patterns, mostly for lace, from publications ranging in date from 1900 to 1925.  They are in fact my great-great-grandmother’s (I think that’s the right number of greats?) and I am going to make a project out of them, knitting each of these patterns and documenting the results.  In order to do this properly, though, I need to obtain a camera, but until such time, you may find interest in the other side of the faded pages of Ladies Home Journals and Woman’s Worlds from more than a century ago.

Consider this advertisement for soap, circa 1920.  Read out loud for best effect:

“It is well known that most women dislike to shampoo their own hair.  With ordinary soaps it is such a task to work up a lather, while it is even harder to rinse the sticky, greasy, undissolved soap from the hair.  And the free caustics in many cheap soaps and shampoo powders bite into the scalp and injure the hair.

But a shampoo with JAP ROSE* - the golden transparent soap - is ease and luxury itself.  Just moisten the hair and scalp and dip the pure, golden, transparent cake in the water.  Then just a very little rubbing, and almost instantly, thousands of pure, pearly bubbles cleanse hygienically every strand of the hair - every pore of the skin.  The oil and dust and dirt are cut out and removed as if by magic, without the slightest injury to the hair or scalp.  After that, a dash or two of water, and the hair is left perfectly clean, and healthy and fluffy.

For even in cold, hard water JAP ROSE is quickly and absolutely solube.  There being no sediment, the bubbles are easily and completely washed away.

Made of pure oils of the finest grade and chemically pure glycerine, all scientifically blended by experts, JAP ROSE soap is not only pleasant and easy to use, but also healing and beneficial to the hair and skin.

Try a shampoo with JAP ROSE soap Today

Roses in the cheeks, fluffiness in the hair, fragrant
cleanliness everywhere - that’s JAP ROSE
You’ll like it!

An unusual value
at two cakes for a quarter.”

I haven’t included the equally enthusiastic copy at the top of the ad, but it’s much in the same vein. Just look at the second paragraph!  Have you ever read anything that sounds so exactly the way a shampoo commercial looks? And just try imagine a similar product being sold today through force of words rather than through images!

I suppose verbose commercials, in the form of faux-articles in special advertising sections, are making something of a comeback, but that’s verbiage wearing an entirely different outfit, that’s verbiage borrowing the trappings of respectability rather than of - well, what is this trying to be, anyway?  Is it poetry?  What else can it be? Invoking images of beauty and pleasure, with an undercurrent of hoping to persuade a lovely woman to bestow her favor upon you?  Erato, who charms the sight, is this monstrous birth yours?

The next question.  There have been great love-poems adapted to pretty much all manifestations of eros, but has there ever been a great advertisement?**  So long lives this, and this gives life to thee, but as soon as Jap Rose died, died the ads withal. Ads are the opposite of art.

I thought about calling them the opposite of truth, understanding truth to be something of a value and relevance than endures even when removed from its original context, but I think that definition fits art just as well, and there is no ready opposite of art.

*Yes, that name is exactly as ill-advised as it sounds.

**In fact, I think I might eventually argue that there are great advertisements, but the ones I can think of are almost entirely visual.

When I mentioned my interest in wall painting, my interlocutor asked whether I’d been to see the exhibit at the National Gallery.  “The Pompeii one?” I said.  “I thought that was sculpture.”  A headless torso had been the advertising image for it on the metro, after all.  No, on the contrary, the exhibit was arranged, thematically and structurally, as a Roman villa, and that meant, in addition to the various other objets d’art there would be wall paintings.

The entrance to the exhibit has a virtual tour of three villas playing on loop.  Computer reconstruction seems to me to still be rather underutilized in art-archaeological exhibits, for it gives an idea the way little else can of how the elements that we see scattered actually fit together. An idea dependent on our time as well as theirs, to be sure - the House of the Faun looked strangely modern, with Ikea-ish blocks of color on its walls.  As you walk into the exhibit, you tread on a reproduction of the charming “beware of dog” mosaic from the House of the Tragic Poet and find yourself in a near life-sized cross section of the House of the Centenary from a drawing of Jules-Léon Chifflot.  It looks awfully American to me, like something out of the 1800s, but I can’t make up my mind as to the beginning or the end of that century.

There was something strangely bitter about seeing those sweeping images, blithely recalling the elaborate structures of the villas of wealthy, cultured Romans grasping at an idea of peace and cultivatation.  What an amount of work must have gone into those - the wearisome human labor of placing stone on stone, the conception of the building, the education of the architect, the cultivation of the taste of the patron, the unknown toil - his or others - by which he rose to wealth.  All this encapsulated in the villa.  Not a monument, but a vacation home.  I looked at the memories of these great edifices, and my heart said “Why bother?”

Oh well.  I had come for fresco, and I was not disappointed.  Sometimes outdoor scenes, sometimes genre scenes (Apollo and the muses adorning the walls of a reconstructed triclinium),  sometimes, in a recursion as amusing as it was disturbing, scenes of buildings.  (I can’t find a picture of that last one, it’s probably not generally considered as much worth looking at.)

Though I had bypassed it originally, the statuary was well worth looking at. There was a telling series of imperial busts in the first room, ranging from the lean movie-star handsomeness of Julius to the thick-pated brutish-looking Nero.  The famous headless torso had a great crater where the head should have been, and only the direction of the draperies to show the motion of the arms.  It shouted of futility where the rest of the exhibit only murmured, and I turned quickly and unhappily from it to this, a young patrician girl, pretty, with a sturdy body and a sweet face.  She didn’t always stand there, all sphinx incompris, and one thing I should have liked to have seen them do with their digital reconstruction is to display an image of the statue as it once was, painted with lively colors.

There was a little series of lares, household gods, which looked like nothing so much as action figures.   The Alexander_Mosaic picturing a vivid battle scene, must have been as much fun to design as an action movie to direct.  It’s almost as much fun to watch, and perhaps served much the same purpose.  Perspective, expression, foreshortening -vivid special effects all, and I can certainly imagine young Roman lads exclaiming over how cool the horse spurting blood all over the place is. And speaking of special effects, the exhibitors had digitally reconstructed the missing parts of the image, which made the whole thing much more immediate. The smaller-scale mosaic of Plato’s academy was a more contemplative piece, with the tessererae as small as beads, as small as pixels.

So they went, the Romans.  They painted gardens if they didn’t have the space to build them, and hung them with painted masks.  They had an immense appetite for anything Greek, and bought real Greek statues, fake Greek statues, and Genuine Imitation Greek statues with equal appetite. The gods were home decor, and Apollo made an excellent floor lamp.

Now, viewers have been thinking as they peruse these halls - “A wealthy, workaholic people in search of pleasure, leisure, and luxury, more concerned with the outward signs of cultureness than with culture itself, decking itself in the detritus of lost civilisations in the effort to lend itself some cachet - what does this remind me of?” In its last, somewhat jarring section, the exhibit comes right out and says it - it looks at our fascination with Pompeii. Images of the violent end of the world stand side by side with interested recreations of what it might have looked like, fanciful storytelling, and modern attempts to incorporate its motifs into home decor.

In conclusion, the New York Times does what I’m trying to do only better.