This is Not a Message

Not a message, just sharing some amazing lyrics off Paul Simon's "Surprise" album. I took it out from the library, and I may have to buy it.

Another Galaxy (by Paul Simon)

On the morning of her wedding day, when no one was awake, she drove across the border. Leaving all the yellow roses on her wedding cake. Her mother's tears, her breakfast order.
She's gone, gone, gone.
There is a moment, a chip in time, when leaving home is the lesser crime.
When your eyes are blind with tears, but your heart can see: another life, another galaxy.

That night her dreams are storm-tossed as a willow. She hears the clouds, she sees the eye of a hurricane, as it sweeps across her island pillow.
But she's gone, gone, gone.
There is a moment, a chip in time, when leaving home is the lesser crime.
When your eyes are blind with tears, but your heart can see:
Another life, another galaxy.

Low Tech Home Ec

If you liked the Mabel Hyde Kittredge blog post
from March 10th, you will love this online library from Cornell University called HEARTH! It stands for Home Economics Archive: Research, Tradition, History.

These amazing home economics texts from 1800 to 1999 can teach your children to sew or help you discover if your cocoa contains arsenic. They might also remind you how good you have it.

(Or when it comes to adulterated food, maybe not.)



Image from The home and its management: a handbook in homemaking, with three hundred inexpensive cooking receipts by Mabel Hyde Kittredge

I Love What You've Done with Your Tenement Flat

I have no idea why this 1911 book, Housekeeping Notes: How to Furnish and Keep House in a Tenement Flat, is in print, but I'm so glad it is! It reminds me of my visit to the Lower East Side Tenement Museum.

It seems to be an instructional book for teachers in Housekeeping Centers who were to teach young women from the tenements (I'm assuming they were women), how to keep house. It lists what one needs to set up a home in a tenement, how much it would cost, and how to maintain everything. It is also full of things to be grateful for (i.e. that I don't need to keep coal for a stove, etc). It also defaults to a family of five, and addresses both units with or without shared bathrooms.


I like the frank approach the book takes:

Shelves for china in the dining-room are better than a sideboard, the latter being too large for an ordinary tenement room. Cheap sideboards are also very ugly.

Book shelves are a necessity in the living-room…

These courses dealt with the reality of living in the tenements. Tenements were notoriously crowded, poorly maintained, and were built with the absolute minimum regard for human comfort and safety. They were such unhygienic fire-traps that they essentially spurred lawmakers to create building code laws. Tenement landlords were eventually forced by law to upgrade all their buildings to have indoor plumbing, and they argued at the time that it was too costly and not worthwhile.

After the first Tenement House Act, landlords tried to get legislation passed to undermine it. Check out this New York Times article from 1896. (Viewing the full article is free.)

There are probably lots of current books regarding public policy on low-income housing, and plenty of material on organizing social activism, but I can't imagine anyone publishing something like this now. It would be like publishing "Your Home in the Projects: How to Keep It Clean and Gorgeous". There are plenty of websites to tell you how to live frugally, or make furniture from Fed-Ex boxes, but I'm not sure if it's quite in the same spirit.

These types of courses were what eventually became public school Home Economics courses (I think). They were gone by the time I got to junior high. Unfortunately, I really needed this kind of training - I'm a pretty lousy housekeeper! I wish Home Ec and Auto Mechanics had been mandatory. However, with tuberculosis and bedbugs on the rise in T.O., perhaps we may as well look to 1911 for help.

Photos of 97 Orchard Street, Lower East Side, NY, from Tenement.org

Strength, Thrift, Domesticity

Specchio is having their once-per-season 80% off sale.

This means that shoes like L'Autre Chose and Dries Van Noten and XOXO are reduced from upwards of $500 to approximately $150 (CAD!) a pair. Peanuts! These are leather, made in Italy, shoes you want to hug and kiss, shoes that are supple and sexy, shoes that love your feet, that spirals off into paroxyms of joy...

I went in yesterday. I held off for weeks. Fortunately, the holding off meant most of the shoes my size were gone - that was the plan. But there were a few in my size. That's what took strength. I had to tell myself that not only did I not need any shoes, but since the moths and the cat pee have wiped out a good portion of my closet, I'd have nothing to wear them with anyways.

But do you want to know where I really got my strength from? How I managed to walk out of there and to the library?

I will tell you the new source of my lust/frugality. I am over my Roomba coveting. I want a Dyson. I want a vacuum cleaner that costs $700. I want to see it suck up years of embedded cat hair that my darling inefficient Dirt Devil can't pick up. Oh, the Dyson - it's like the Mac of vacuums, isn't it? When I manage to save, that is what I am saving for.

I even took Biting the Dust: The Joys of Housework out from the library. Not a how-to, but a book on the history of it. Those who know me know I'm a slob. Combine it with the fact that I've been sleeping at night and waking up in the morning... what does it all mean?

Oh dear. I have written a blog post where shoes and vacuum cleaners face each other in a feminine-stereotype battle. I have to go make coffee and examine my gender issues now.

L'Autre Chose boots photo stolen from Shopstyle/My-Wardrobe.com and vacuum photo nicked from Dyson.ca

April Snow Brings... What Exactly?

My friend's last day in Vancouver looked like this:





Words do not suffice.

*
Now I'm back in Toronto. Again. Looking towards L.A. - again. Toronto is cold and windy and snowy and rainy. Not very nice, but still home. It has an energy, a pace, that will always feel comfortable.

*
Since my last post, I read The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold. Well worth the read.

More pics and reporting soon.