How Comics Should Look

Recently, I took it on myself to write to the editors at Fantagraphics, who among other things translate French and Belgian comic books, and ask them why, oh why they haven't translated more of one of my favorite bandes dessinées series, the Spiffy Adventures of McConey, by Lewis Trondheim? The Hoodoodad* and Harum Scarum are great, and I'd like to read the other eight.

The answer, it turns out, is that Americans (and other English speakers, apparently) don't seem to like those big "album" style books. Fantagraphics' Kim Thomson very kindly wrote me back:

"Alas, the two books, especially the second, didn't do at all well for us, and then NBM went ahead and translated two more of the McConey albums in their ODDBALLZ comic book series. (But you'll notice they discontinued the series and never released the McConey work in album format themselves either.)

I think part of the problem with our series was using the French album format which American retailers and most
fans seem to resist. I'm toying with the idea of someday repackaging the McCONEY material in the smaller and
thicker (2 or 3 French albums to one album) format, but alas again, I'm so backed up with my foreign-comics commitments that it doesn't look likely to be soon... Keep your fingers crossed..."

Curiously, when I asked my children whether they preferred the big (French-style) album format for Asterix and Tintin or the smaller format that both series seem to be released in nowadays, their response was a resounding "The big one!" And I remember discovering Tintin long ago, in the Berkeley Co-op (which would tell you how long, if you're in the know) and being fascinated and impressed with the large, beautiful, brightly-colored format. Particularly, I loved the hardcover books, and how with the large format it felt I was opening a magic book to another universe. I was so taken with them that within a year I had all of them, out of my own pocket-money, despite the fact that they were so intensely expensive compared to the cheap American comics at the local store. And unlike the cheap comics on newsprint, the Tintins held up to years of re-reading, looking neither smudged nor murky at the end of it all (though a little soft around the edges).

So why don't grownups like the Big Ones? Do they take up too much shelf space? Too much space on the table next to your bed, or the space next to your bowl of cereal? What, exactly, is there to dislike? Perhaps, and I hope this is not true, people like things that are familiar, and these aren't a familiar size.

For a number of years now, I have gone to France as often as I and my family can afford, and each time we make a pilgrimage to a particular store in St. Michel that sells literally thousands of these kinds of comic books, along with videos, manga, and other things. Imagine going into a shop that rises up on several levels, with at least two of them literally solid with the spines of comic book albums. Every book on the shelves is large format, beautifully printed, and relatively reasonably priced (considering you can get ten or twenty years out of them; the terrible bindings I've been finding on modern American softcover graphic novels only last a few months in the hands of enthusiastic readers before they start giving up their pages like moulting birds). We always choose two or three books to buy. They have to be readable in our lame high-school French, and at least one of them has to be readable to my daughters, because we can only fit a couple in our luggage. But they're worth it.

Sigh.


I've discovered any number of gems this way, over the years, beginning in the 1980's (pre-children, of course) with The Adventures of Adele Blanc-Sec (above), and by extension, Jacques Tardi (the author), who has created any number of interesting and memorable characters over the years. Several have been translated into English, though not, alas, for any great length of time (Adele Blanc-Sec in English costs, used, up to $45 now and is not all that easy to find).



On the lighter side, I discovered Lewis Trondheim this way, too. Or, rather, I saw his stuff there, and then was able to find some of them at home. I gobbled down any of his stuff I could find in English: the high-school French simply doesn't cut it, though, as his dialogue is witty and full of colloquialisms. Except, of course, for the hilarious Mr. O, and The Fly (La Mouche), neither of whom need any dialogue at all to be funny.


And Melusine, who we all adore, is not likely to be found this side of the Atlantic anytime soon, more's the pity.

So what I want to know is, what's wrong with the album format? I'm not a huge comic person, despite enjoying the above folk, as well as Pogo (who I had a crush on as a child), Los Bros Hernandez, old Donald Duck, Maus, Sandman, and various other newer bits and bobs. I'm not one of the True Believers, who can cite names and dates and so on by heart. But I will always remember that shining moment of discovering the Tintins under the stairs at the Co-op. And I wish, with all my heart, that somewhere, sometime, perhaps when I'm old and creaky, there will be a comic book store -in English! - that rivals Boulinier on Boulevard St Michel.




Links (etc.):

More, and even more, about Lewis Trondheim.


Rowrbazzle

*Don't be discouraged by Amazon; they have a terrible description of the Hoodoodad, making it sound annoying in the extreme.

American Roadside Attraction Map

From Ms. Bonanza's Flickr pix of the Johnston Stables in Las Vegas, NV

Quickie-quick, before the generator runs out:

Mr. Kimberly, of Neon Poisoning, has sent me this awesome-looking Google map of Roadside Attractions, American Car Culture, Eccentric Museums and More. Quick perusal tells me it's worth checking out.

Onward with the power outage!

The Places We Make For Ourselves

Last time I was in France I tried desperately to get to the Palais Idéal du Facteur Cheval, but was unable to make the 5-hour trip from where I was staying - and have regretted it since. My parents have been several times, and brought back pictures and posters which I stare at every time I use their bathroom; but the actual experience, which by all accounts is surprisingly intimate and mysteriously private, is not mine to claim.

A Facteur is a postman, used like an honorific, and this "Ideal Palace" was built by one Ferdinand Cheval, starting when he was forty-three years old and finishing thirty-three years later. The inspiration for the building of this dream was an odd one:

"He tripped on a bizarre and beautiful stone in the road along his mail route and bent to pick it up. Looking about, he was surprised to see that such marvelous stones were scattered all around him, and he pocketed them to find a use for them at home. "From that moment," he says in a letter from 1897, "I did not sleep day or night." He continued his search on his daily 32 kilometer route (adding 10 km to search for more stones), first putting his treasures in his pockets, then in a wheelbarrow. He scoured the countryside for days and nights at a time on his mail route, sleeping in farmhouses and under the stars. He stock-piled the stones he brought back in his yard, which convinced his neighbors that he had gone mad, but he was determined to build the castle and grottoes that had populated his dreams 15 years earlier -- dreams he never told a soul about, fearing people would ridicule him. Cheval was a mailman by day and an architect by night, building his palace of stones and intricately carved concrete with little available light and no assistance from anyone." [from Kristin Fiore's fine website about same]

The Palais Idéal was put together from wire, lime, and cement, working by the light of an oil lamp. When they found out he wanted to be buried there with his wife, the local government protested and insisted he be buried in the consecrated cemetery; so at the age of seventy-six he began work on a mausoleum that took eight years to build; he died a year after he had finished it.

What is it that drives people to build these things, to express their creativity by building? Outsider art is a big thing these days, but for many, many years it was simply the expression of one person's eccentricity, often at the expense of their social credibility. Raw Vision, a journal of outsider art and folk art, had an article recently about the visionary environments found in the rare, vintage postcard collections of two collectors. Among others, there are postcards of the Palais Idéal, the Hotel of Old Plates in Seine Maritime, France, and Agnes Jones' Boneyard (see below). There are photos of the Shell Fence in Florida, The Living, Speaking Church of Mesnil-Gondouin, and the Mont-Cindre Hermitage in Rhone, France. A lot of the images in the article have a similar look: a complex, pebbly, "grown" look, like the dribble sand-castles we used to make when I was a child. They bear a remarkable resemblance to Gaudi's Cathedral in Barcelona.


The article begins this way:

"The rapid spread of photography from the late nineteenth century onwards meant that for the first time ordinary people could commission a visual record of themselves and their family in the same way as only the wealthy had been able to do before. The combination of this with the introduction of universal postal services and widespread railway travel resulted in photographs of every day scenes, popular figures, important events and local curiosities being printed and widely distributed as picture postcards. These postcards were produced in their millions but were some of the the earliest records of what are now termed as Outsider Art or Visionary Environments. Many of them have survived over the years and portray a variety of long lost creations with others that still exist to this day."


And so these eccentric creations get caught in time.

How long have people been driven to build such intimately bizarre masterpieces? Has this been a product of the modern world, or is it part of the human condition, that a certain number of the population must express themselves this way? America is sprinkled with the oddities that have sprung from the wild imaginings of a nation of frontierists, people insisting on being themselves because that's what "being American" is all about (traditionally): going your own way and having the freedom to express yourself, dammit! But I was impressed with the number of French visionary places, never mind that one of the collectors appears to be French, and it made me wonder.

And then, on looking into it, I find there are people like Nek Chand, who was a (surprise, surprise) a "humble transport official in the north Indian city of Chandigarh", who felt driven to clear a piece of jungle to make himself a garden, and then couldn't stop, going on to build several acres of courtyards with sculptures and walkways:

"After his normal working day Chand worked at night, in total secrecy for fear of being discovered by the authorities.When they did discover Chand's garden, local government officials were thrown into turmoil. The creation was completely illegal - a development in a forbidden area which by rights should be demolished. The outcome, however, was the enlightened decision to give Nek Chand a salary so that he could concentrate full-time on his work, plus a workforce of fifty labourers. Nek Chand's great work received immediate recognition and was inaugurated as The Rock Garden of Chandigarh."

Or, in Los Angeles, my favorite attraction - Watts Towers, the creation of Simon Rodia, about which the excellent film I Build The Tower was made. The towers are made of steel pipes and rods, around which wire mesh has been wrapped and coated with mortar, and decorated with mosaics made from broken bits of glass and pottery, as well as many found objects such as bed frames and seashells.


In 1959, "...the city of Los Angeles condemned the structure and ordered it razed. An actor, Nicholas King, and a film editor, William Cartwright, visited the site...[they] saw the neglect, and decided to buy the property for $3,000 in order to preserve it. When the city found out about the transfer, it decided to perform the demolition before the transfer went through. The towers had already become famous and there was opposition from around the world. King, Cartwright, and a curator of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, along with area architects, artists, and community activists formed the Committee for Simon Rodia's Towers in Watts. The Committee negotiated with the city to allow for an engineering test to establish the safety of the structures.


For the test, steel cable was attached to each tower and a crane was used to exert lateral force. The crane was unable to topple or even shift the towers, and the test was concluded when the crane experienced mechanical failure." [wiki]

Agnes Jones, an ex-slave known as "Aunt Aggie", built a garden in Florida with fences, arches, and trellises made from bones wired together in fanciful ways:

"Bones bordered the white-sand walkways and formed an arcade between the front gate and the Joneses' house". There was also an informal natural history museum inside, which contained snakes preserved in jars and alligator skeletons, as well as a human skeleton hung in the hallway. No human bones were ever used in the structures, however, as Aggies was quick to explain to her visitors. Visitors are said to have loved the mixture of lush flora and sepulchral structures; "they wrote their names and addresses on the bones; children gazed on the strange beauty of the place with awe and admiration. You could buy flowers and good things to eat, have your fortune told, and hear a good story or be reminded of Aggie's favorite Bible verses".


Unlike Watts' Towers, the Boneyard was torn down in 1918 to build a high school.

And did I mention bottle houses? Or tin can houses, which are being proposed as a cheap building material (not to mention their artistic qualities)? Or how about Loy Allen Bowlin, the Rhinestone Cowboy, who made incredible interiors, exteriors, and clothes? The list goes on and on of people getting creative with their environments.

One of The Rhinestone Cowboy's interiors

I find myself thinking, reading about these fanciful places and the great sculptures, structures, doohickeys, and environments people create, and wondering how many things like this have been created - and lost - throughout history? How many of our historic and archeological discoveries are really just some eccentric's creation, lost in the sands of time? Or is it only in modern times, as the need for survival began to retreat and people had a little more leisure time, more access to materials, that people began to experiment like this?

Is it a product of mass culture, of mass-built housing and mechanized production? Or is it simply that before modernity people built what they built, and lived in it, be it eccentric or not?

Makes me want to go out and build something. There's some great rocks out back...


other links:

- Roadside America's links to Florida oddities
- Anna's Bottle House, a funky and interesting inn near Tucson, Arizona - built of bottles

Places That Are Lost

Yesterday I took a hike with my family to a waterfall that exists near where I live. Throughout my life, this place has been one of my most sacred places; even as a six- or seven-year-old I used to simply sit and admire it and the cool green pool at its base. I imagined fairies living in the mossy grottos of its rocky cliff; I saw a whole underwater world in the moving depths of the pool, where crayfish roamed under the shadows of the great rocks, and the sandy patches twinkled with fools' gold. The water fell with a sort of awesome finality down a hundred feet or so, and we would crane our necks looking at it and the trees clinging to the canyon all around.

Yesterday was the first time I had been there in nearly twenty years. There's been a flood since then, which pushed some of the great logs and large rocks around. The waterfall has worn deeper into its niche, and the shape of it has changed ever so slightly. But it's still the same canyon, the same deep pool (crayfish and fools' gold intact), the same sound and feel. The sun still slants through the trees and lights up the depths with magical fingers. It is, simply and finally, as sacred as it ever was.

There was an unnamed and unexpected comfort I gained by my visit, though, which had nothing to do with sacredness. On reflection, I think it had to do with the fact that, of all the meaningful places that existed for me in childhood, this is one of the few that still exists. There are so many, many places I have loved and lived with that are simply gone, torn down or washed away or unfindable. The barn, for example, on the ranch where I grew up: the floor and walls full of holes that we could climb in and out of; creeping around in the open space underneath its great structure; the owl pellets strewn on the floor with tiny mouse-bones and skulls in them; the wide, hand-sawn boards; the things that were stored inside.

This barn was at least a hundred feet long and thirty feet wide down the middle (not including hip roofs). It was built on two-foot-square redwood beams, sided with eighteen-inch-wide planks. It was amazing. But when the roof blew off in a freak windstorm, our landlords decided they couldn't afford to fix it. They took the whole thing down. Poof: no barn. As we used to say when my children were young (with hands held out helplessly), "All gone!"

Sometimes I wonder if I simply made up my childhood. No one seems able to corroborate it completely. There are a few photos of the barn, though.

Curiously, as these things always happen, I was already thinking about something similar before the waterfall. I had been reading BLDGBLOG, which I sometimes do, and he had a post about Gunkanjima Island, a coal-mining island off the coast of Japan that was essentially built on its own slag heap. The island had a whole town on it, of workers and their families, complete with shops and bath-houses; and the photos, taken by Japanese artist Saiga Yuji, are simply unbelievable:






I was so taken with these photos that I followed the link back to the source, Mr. Saiga's own website. Mr. Saiga, luckily, has whole portions of his site duplicated in English. I found more pictures, all beautiful and eloquent, but then I looked further - and found that Mr. Saiga had actually been there in the 1970's just before the people were due to be moved off the island, and he had taken pictures.

It is these pictures which truly caught my imagination, especially when compared with the later ones. The place is already in a state of decay, as if it was already forgotten and the people living in it were strange, living ghosts. And yet people continued to live, going to school and the bath-house, working and gossiping, running through what would soon be ruins, even while they chose what to pack for their departure. I found myself asking: how did they feel, knowing their home was already a ghost-town? What was it like, knowing they would soon leave for parts unknown, their old home crumbling to ruins behind them?


Both series are extraordinary, especially if seen backwards, with the later, abandoned images first. The photographs of hasty departure, long decayed, linger in your mind as you look at the images of people occupying the very same decay. It gives me the oddest feeling in the pit of my stomach to see the people laughing, the children playing, in what seems already to be a graveyard. It is fascinating and full of pathos.


Mr. Saiga speaks of coming to the island in the knowledge that it would soon be empty, and having one of those rare experiences with one's art where one is possessed, and must capture everything. He says:

"It was just since the previous year that I had decided to pursue photography seriously and started taking photographs. The crudeness of this series is obvious. Sentimentalism also lurks from behind. When I see the pictures now, I feel, before everything, embarrassment. But however unskillful the pictures might have been, I honestly feel that my desire to take photographs then was stronger than it is now.
I saw, at close range, islanders in pain for leaving, while I was, myself, at a loss because of the difficulty in taking photographs. I plunged myself into photography, while asking the meaning of life. In those days, photography was everything for me."


I can see why he was captivated. Places that have been lost but aren't gone have a peculiar attraction, perhaps, in my case, because of my own experience with loss of place. Pompeii, for example, or Bodie; Petra and Palmyra and Angkor Wat. Places that are both lost and gone, though, are even more mysterious, more terrible, because they live on only in the minds of the people who saw them or heard about them - or in obscure photographs which make no sense without someone to decipher them. Think of Dresden, of Ur. Memory is the only place they truly exist; memory and legend. But most lost places only leave a hole in the world for some people, and when those people are gone (an all-too simple and easy thing with our flimsy little bodies), their places will dip below the surface of history without a ripple.


It must be odd growing into an old person, watching one's world become more holes than not. I think of my rapidly-growing sense of a slipping existence, a past which exists only in my mind, and it seems like a form of insanity. I clearly see, clearly know about things and places which are patently not real. Sometimes no one else even remembers them: so are they real? Were they ever real?

I was always one of those weird people who were conscious of things going away, I don't know why. I liked to listen to old peoples' stories, because they were stories, and described things to me in ways that left traces against the things which were there for me, enriching them and informing them. But now many of those people are gone, themselves, leaving yet more holes. And their stories? I wonder sometimes if for some of them I was the only person who ever did listen.


Which is why, perhaps, I work so hard to keep my Cabinet. Like the people in Gunkanjima, I know there is not much time before I am asked to leave, so I will pack as much as I can while I wait. And save what I can of others' stuff, too.

Palimpsests As Metaphor

Photo courtesy of Lou

I recently came across a reference to an "architectural palimpsest", and was fascinated, not only because the term is so interesting and apt but because the way it was used could apply to so many different ideas. What a mental find! My mind went crazy with the different possibilities for a few days. What about the marks that pictures make in the places where they used to be on the walls? What about the dry spot on the ground where a car was parked during the rain?



Historically, palimpsests are parchments made of animal hide which have been scraped "clean" again so that new works can be written on them. Generally, a ghost of the original(s) remain behind the new writing, leaving traces of what once was. Sometimes, the deliberately destroyed work (parchment being more valuable than writings, at times) is the only remaining copy of an old document, and many otherwise lost works have been recovered this way.

So an architectural palimpsest is the ghostly remains of other buildings or parts of buildings that are still apparent on existing buildings. And, it turns out, there are tons of other kinds of extended uses of the term. The art and philosophy worlds are, of course chockablock with them. Archeologists extend the idea of architectural palimpsest into their own study of layered structures, to mean "accumulated iterations of a design or a site, whether in literal layers of archaeological remains, or by the figurative accumulation and reinforcement of design ideas over time." It is a good word for structures or traces which have obviously morphed over time but which defy specific dating.

Photo link

The term is also used by forensic scientists to describe how objects at a site are layered on top of one another, showing the order of events. That in itself is fascinating. Forensic science can be incredibly dull, but in its basic form - the study of the laying-out of objects to see what happened to make them fall that way - it reeks not only of Sherlock Holmes, but of Miss Haversham, that perfect example of creepy time-stoppage.

In more theoretical discourse, palimpsests appear in relation to psychology, culture, and even mythology. Baudriard, that inimical but required author we had to slog through in graduate school, discusses the way modern culture is simply a layered miasma of images of images of images - a totally mediated experience - until we no longer know where or what the original once was. Myths and rituals get worked over by time and human creativity until the originals show through only in glimmers; fairy tales gain and lose characters, nastiness, and motif depending on the era in which we live. Our whole existence could be seen as a long progression of palimpsestic reality, where the old cultures, the old ways, are stripped away but continue to shine through in the ways we do things: our superstitions, our celebrations.

Photo courtesy of Lou

Historians are, in fact, beginning to use the word more and more, not only to describe revisionist histories and how they never work, but to describe history as a whole, in the way people experience time. We all, in fact, wake up every morning with the memory of yesterday all ready-scraped for us to write the new day on. Our whole experience of the world could be said to be like a palimpsest. I could go on and on - it is a lovely metaphor.

And what about technology? My friend Gwyan is interested in virtual ruins, the remains of old websites that linger around the internet, out-of-date and unused. They are archeological artifacts, echos of earlier information which have not yet faded. To some extent hypertext itself is a bit like a renewable palimpsest...or hard drives! Now that's what I call a palimpsest. And, in a cyberpunk future of endlessly re-used technological junk, can't you see old circuitry being re-fitted and re-programmed for new uses by junk-diving scavengers? Talk about re-use. You never know, I might be talking about reality for us all, in the future. The gods we know now and in the known past could be replaced by scraped-over versions at any time.

Sometimes, I get a fleeting glimpse of an idea, and long to make it real. I wonder, in fiction writing, if it might be worth literally creating a type of palimpsest for world-building. What if a writer wrote stories about other stories about other stories, and then used that as a jumping-off point for the real story? Wouldn't the end result be deeply enriched? Wouldn't that writer's built world then take on the patina of a real, true place with actual thickness, rather than that of a stage set or a newly-built suburb? This does happen, to some extent, with fan fiction and with writers who write about the same world throughout their lives. But I'd like to try it as a really disciplined experiment, a rigorous exercise, a buildup of reality for the history of my world.

Ah, well, maybe in that other lifetime I keep saying I'll live. If only we could write over ourselves and live many, many times, with the old self showing through...oh, sorry, I forgot: they do that in India, don't they?

Snug as a Bug in a Beautiful Box

When I was a kid I always wanted a gypsy wagon. I didn't know anything about what might be inside, but I could imagine it: everything in cupboards and shelves, pots and pans and maybe bundles of herbs hanging from the ceiling, beds in bunks like a ship. And that painting! All the beautiful painting!

I imagined heading off along the roads, the horse clop-clopping, the wagon swaying a little as I went. For some reason, at this part I imagined the morning sun coming down, and mist rising from the fields. Ah! The open road, the tiny house.

There are a lot of people nowadays showing interest in Gypsy vardos, as the traditional wagons are called. You can buy plans for them and find detailed descriptions of how to build them and decorate them all over the place online (see below); the Society for Creative Anachronism, among others, has sparked a movement to build vardos, including ones that you can hitch to your car. Britain is full of restorers of old vardos and even places you can rent them (horse-drawn, no less) as holiday accomodation, complete with traditional bed-cupboard, tiny stove, and hayrack on the back for the horse. But back then, I only had my imagination - and books.

The Adventures of Perrine, last published in 1941, is a story about a girl whose parents die and she has to travel to a distant city to find her uncle, with hardly any money. As a kid I read over and over the part where she spends a few weeks in a tiny hunting-hut, on an island in the marsh, with a little plank-bridge you can pull up so people don't show up unexpectedly. (She even ends up making her own shoes out of marsh-grass and ribbon).

I suppose I've had a lifelong obsession with tiny houses, despite living with people who like to sprawl. Ship cabins, or even better, the tiny cabins of boats, appeal to me: everything is in its place, there are shelves and cupboards for everything, the beds are built into the walls, and it's all so...snug. The part in The Golden Compass (aka Northern Lights), when she takes up with the boat people? I really liked that. There was some dumb Doctor Doolittle spinoff I read when I was a kid, I think it was called Dr. Doolittle and the Pirates, which completely captivated me because they sail away in the pirates' ship - and you get to see the cabin belowdecks, with rich rugs, treasure, and piles of fruit (and of course the requisite bunks).

Maxfield Parrish's Ali Baba: the light is reminiscent of the light in my dream house, below.

For much of my childhood I had this recurring dream that there was this really tiny house behind the storage shed at my school. The house was so tiny (no more than 3 feet wide and 4 feet tall) that no one but me noticed it. I would go inside and it would be full of the most marvelous treasure - chests of jewels and yards upon yards of shining, brilliantly-colored silks; feathers, ornately embroidered ribbons, diamonds. It was so tiny I had to crawl in, and once in I could barely turn around, it was so stuffed full of wonderful things: but that was much of the magic of the thing.

The treasure cave in Pirates of the Caribbean, while beautifully done, didn't ultimately make me drool. Why? Possibly because of size. The treasure in my tiny house, and in the silly book, were all so near at hand, it felt completely personal - completely mine. When I used to read Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, I never imagined the cave to be vast. It was large enough to hold a lot of treasure, sure, but only if the treasure was piled up against the walls, taller than me. In my mind that treasure had to be all around to be really magical. If it simply lay all over the floor in discrete mounds, why then it wasn't nearly as impressive.

Jay Shafer, an architect and certified "claustrophile", has been building tiny houses for years now (in fact, he's now been on Oprah, so I won't talk about him too much). His Tumbleweed Tiny House Company makes plans and kits for houses that are sometimes less than 100 square feet, yet with all the comforts of home. The designing that goes into fitting it all in together, the storage planning, and the end result - with its sense of airiness and comfort - is impressive. It appeals to that shipboard part of me, the one that likes the shelves and cupboards. The fact that he actually lives in one of them (100 square feet) is a tribute to his interest in the thing.


His little houses remind me of some of the tiny traditional buildings I saw in Norway, with a narrow footprint and the sides bumped out higher up. I think one of the reasons, besides ecology, that Mr. Shafer's houses have been taking off is that people find tiny spaces comforting. Remember the "Child Caves" I described from A Pattern Language? It seems that we never really grow out of that urge.

The wonderful bathroom from Bony Legs, which is a retelling of Baba Yaga with great illustrations (especially the cover).

Back when people still read to me, someone read me a Baba Yaga tale, complete with the iron teeth and the fence made of bones, the only thing I could think of was how absolutely cool it was to live in a little hut on chicken legs! And I don't think I'm alone, because that Baba Yaga thing simply doesn't go away. Joan Aiken, in her marvelous book A Necklace of Raindrops, tells a story about some traveling musician brothers whose car breaks down and they go looking for a place to stay for the night. After a number of unpleasant adventures, they meet a woman who lives in a chicken-legged hut, who tells them that if they can find the egg her house has laid (she wants it for supper), she'll give them a bed. But by the time they get the egg and bring it back, it's cracked. It breaks in half and a little house jumps out - and they go live in that, traveling around and playing music.

Now I ask you, is there any possible way it could get better than hatching your hut out of an egg?

Later, I read Ursula LeGuin's "Darkness Box" (from The Wind's Twelve Quarters), which is a memorable story anyway, but the initial character, a child, lives with his mother in a Baba Yaga-type hut (complete with herbs from the rafters and all that). That did it - my mind was made up: I wanted one.

But I was bound to disappointment.

But there are other possibilities, always more, just beyond the horizon. What about a cave? A nice, dry cave with little alcoves in the walls for you to put your stuff. Think of Mr. Tumnus in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe - wouldn't you like to go stay with him for awhile? Here's an excerpt, in case you don't remember, or didn't read it:

"It was a little, dry, clean cave of reddish stone with a carpet on the floor and two little chairs ("one for me and one for a friend," said Mr. Tumnus) and a little table and a dresser and a mantelpiece over the fire and above that a picture of an old Faun with a grey beard. In one corner there was a door which Lucy thought must lead to Mr. Tumnus' bedroom, and on one wall was a shelf full of books."

They go on to have a very snug-sounding tea (which I have to include because it compliments the scenery so well):

"There was a nice brown egg, lightly boiled, for each of them, and then sardines on toast, and then buttered toast, and then toast with honey, and then a sugar-topped cake." ..And, of course, nice hot cups of tea, and a fire.

And all this appears again in the Beavers' house, so snug and full of Wellington boots and nets and things. I sigh, just thinking of it.


Now that I've grown, I know better than to believe I can fit myself and all my stuff into that kind of a tiny place, which is probably a shame. But I still have my foibles. Take, for example, the concept of the bed-cupboard. I don't know where I first got this idea, but think of having a bedroom where your bed, that messy thing with all the lumpy bits, is built into the wall. With little doors you can close if you want to be really snug (there's a thin line between claustrophilia and claustrophobia, though). In any case, then the rest of the room is free to be comfortable, right? Not just four walls around a large piece of messy furniture. Also, with a cupboard the bed itself becomes this really secret, snuggly place.

Perhaps I'm someone who particularly likes boxes, places to store things and hide things; decorative compartments. Perhaps there's some Freudian connection I'm not getting here, but I think, I think it might simply be a human desire: to have a secret place, to hide.

This desire to be in a cave or a box seems often to be associated, for adults, with our beds. I once lived, for a couple of years, in an apartment in San Francisco which had a Murphy bed, which, although it was the height of cool (my friends couldn't believe it), was just not the same. The problem with a Murphy bed was, the bed got to hide away, not me. So ultimately, though I liked the Murphy bed, it didn't fulfill the need (though it did have this cool closet behind it that you could go into when the bed was down).

Now, a Chinese marriage bed...that could really be a place to hide, the best kind of decorative box...to store yourself, when you're deactivated.


It's been documented, this urge to be contained (aside from the obvious Freudian interpretations, of course). Temple Grandin, an autistic veterinarian who is famous both for being the subject of Oliver Sacks' Anthropologist on Mars and for leading the movement to eliminate cruelty in the meat industry, invented a machine which is now used in all kinds of autism facilities to calm people when they are suffering from tension. She calls it the Squeeze Machine. You lie inside it and it essentially delivers pressure like a hug, but without the difficulties of being touched by a human being, and according to Oliver Sacks it is surprisingly satisfying. Perhaps living in a tiny house could deliver some of the same satisfaction?



I often wonder, now that I'm a boring adult, if I had found the perfect little house, how long the love affair would have lasted. Would I have become one of those people who live the sort of spick and span lifestyle that the space demands? Perhaps I could end up like the little old lady who lived in a pumpkin, or a peach-pit, or something. And what about my collections? I could be like those souls who have a tiny house - and then a storage unit for all the other stuff.

Perhaps that's why I started the Cabinet, so I could collect all these amazing things without having to put them in my house. The Dream House - no, Palace, now - that is my Cabinet is beginning to grow beyond the bounds of houses, to include ideas, geographic locations, whole armies of saints.

Ah, well, it's getting late, and I'm starting to natter on. Perhaps I'll just go climb into my Cabinet, shut the door, and admire the treasures contained within. Thank you, once again, for joining me here.


Other Links:

Further reading about the Rom

UK dealer selling original caravans

Lots and lots about gypsy wagons.

A list of links for information on learning about(mostly new) caravans being built and restored.

Horse-drawn gypsy caravan holidays in New Forest, UK

Jan Yoors left home at the age of twelve to join the gypsies, and stayed with them, on and off, for ten years. His deep penetration of such a closed society he describes in his books The Gypsies and Crossing, which talks about the Rom experience during World War II.

The Achitecture of Fear

The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, dir. Robert Wiene, 1919
There is something about certain architecture which inspires fear. Modernist housing, for example, with its brutalist angles and sheer blank walls, make us feel small and helpless; the superclean, cold spaces inside leave no place for us to snuggle in. Everything is hidden away; there are no cubbies, no hiding spaces, no comfortable clutter. Ceilings soar; everything is bright; there are few walls. Furniture looks dwarfed and lonely.

On the other hand, a place with too many cubbies, too many hiding places, or too much darkness, can be pretty frightening too. Think of the consummate haunted house, with its secret doors and dark corners. Cellars. Attics. The imaginative child spends a lot of time thinking about what might be hanging out in those places. My father, for example, had to walk to the back of the cellar in his house to shovel coal into the furnace. The stairs had no kick-plates on them, so they were open to whatever was below them (whatever it was could easily reach through and grab his ankles). The wall next to the stairs was connected to a disused root-cellar, fenced off by planks with large gaps full of darkness between them. He used to run down the stairs, shovel fast, and run up again.

Original sketch for a scene in The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, dir. Robert Wiene, 1919 from Lotte Eisner - The Haunted Screen

As for me, I was one of those kids who spend a lot of time scared. Did you ever see that movie Sixth Sense? That kid was me: though I didn't see dead people, I know exactly the kind of terror that kid felt. Did you ever see the first Poltergeist? Remember the scary/friendly clown? I was afraid of my dolls sometimes in that same way. All the stuff in Stephen King's It, with the drains and the sewers and stuff? That was me - I was terrified of toilets. I thought a disembodied hand would come up out of the toilet (never imagined what would happen next, of course).


Mostly I was scared in my house (though the roaring toilets at school, in the prison-like bathroom, were pretty bad). I grew up rurally, on a lonely road, in a ranch house. By this I don't mean ranch-style, as in modern suburbs, but really a ranch-house, built in 1901, with people having died in it and all. The house was porous in all the ways that made my dad's trip to the cellar awful: it had creepy closets and dark corners and was three stories tall, with long, long dim shotgun hallways and tall stairs. It was always creaking, because we lived in a windy place on a ridge above the ocean.

Curiously, I had (and still have, occasionally) dreams about being on high walkways with no railings, or traversing rooftops, or terrible pathways between frighteningly blue swimming pools. Despite the waking fears of hiding places, my dream-fears were of soulless places with no containment. The lack of warmth, of walls, of hiding places was naked, vulnerable, awful.

So, given that it's pretty hard to avoid scary structures, what is it that we want from a structure, other than shelter from the weather and a place to keep our stuff? I'd say a place to nest. A place where we can curl up and feel safe. All the other stuff, running water and dinner party capability, those are all extras. The most important thing, especially for children, is a sense of safety. And the biggest hurdles to that feeling are vulnerability, that sense that your self is available, even on display, for bad things that are watching, and porosity, the failing of walls, when the structure which offers you safety does, in fact, have too many holes in it (read: gaps, doors, windows, open grilles, even drains and plumbing).

My fear of toilets, for example, was really a fear of that hole in the bottom of the bowl. Where did it go? It was bottomless, constantly sucking things down. It was a porous place between the everyday world and...somewhere else, a place I never even tried to imagine. Neil Gaiman captured this sense of porosity to Another Place beautifully in Coraline, and managed in the process to capture the horrible vulnerability, too, when Coraline gets to the other side.


Any good horror movie maker knows both these concepts as well. Think about the shower scene in Psycho. Why is that so terrifying? My main guess is: the shower curtain. It makes you feel there's a wall there without actually offering any protection. There you are, naked and vulnerable, and there's that shape standing outside the curtain! That curtain which is really only a porous membrane, an obscuring, a nothing. There are oodles of horror movies where the hero(ine) is walking around in front of windows or through a forest while we watch, from the point of view of the monster/slasher/bad guy, and the implicit understanding is that it's horrible because s/he's so vulnerable to be seen. And my friend Gwyan points out that the scariest part of Night of the Living Dead is the part where the zombies are sticking their arms through the boarded-up windows (which were supposed to keep them out, right?). Shades of my father's cellar! And, oldest of all: the minotaur, down there in his creepy Labyrinth, waiting to catch you and eat you.

On the other hand, there is a flip side to all of this, where the secret can become magical. How many stories are there of cool attics full of wonderous stuff? Or haunted houses full of treasure? Think about Baba Yaga's house, on its chicken feet, waiting for you in the depths of the forest. Or a witch's house, full of hanging herbs and smelly smoke? Or the famous Magic Shop? All of these things are totally fascinating: even though they might be dangerous, they don't feel so vulnerable, perhaps because they're so full of stuff. And the porosity to otherwhere can also have its flip side: think of the wardrobe in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe! Or the trap-door in The Twelve Dancing Princesses! Or that wonderful idea of turning a conceptual corner in your room at night to get to other worlds, as in the fabulous Diana Wynne Jones' The Lives of Christopher Chant.


Which brings me to one of my favorite books. One of the most interesting tomes I know about human living space, A Pattern Language actually talks about what kinds of things make a building more psychologically comfortable - more human, if you will. Their theory is that houses traditionally have been a conglomeration of added-on spaces, arising organically from need (however if you read the book, please discount most of what they say about the larger landscape, it's pretty outdated and ecologically uneducated, though well-meaning).

What I like best about this book is that it talks about architecture in terms of conceptual spaces and details. It doesn't use high-flying jargon, it only talks in terms of the people-ness of a place, what makes places work, towards beauty and comfort. The book breaks down into 253 different ideas about comfortable space, some of them only a page long, and the pictures make you drool. The best bits are about houses themselves. You can read about "Common Areas at the Heart", for example, or "Corner Doors". "Windows Overlooking Life" discusses how to avoid creating rooms that are prison-like. Some of my favorites are "Thick Walls", "Open Shelves", "Built-In Seats", and of course "Child Caves". In #204: "Secret Place", they summarize something essential that I never thought of until I read it:

"Make a place in the house, perhaps only a few feet square, which is kept locked and secret; a place which is virtually impossible to discover - until you have been shown where it is; a place where the archives of the house, or other more potent secrets, might be kept."


The book endorses the use of bed alcoves (who could be scared in one of those?!), with a view out into a larger space. They like ceilings that come down low enough to touch (at least one place in a house), low windowsills, thick walls, and places to sit that feel safe. While it doesn't address the idea of fearfulness per se, it does identify and speak about issues of what makes architecture work better for people and their deeper needs, as in the passage, below:

"Modern architecture and building have deliberately tried to make windows less like windows and more as though there was nothing between you and the outdoors. Yet this entirely contradicts the nature of windows. It is the function of windows to offer a view and provide a relationship to the outside, true. But this does not mean that they should not at the same time, like the walls and roof, give you a sense of protection and shelter from the outside. It is uncomfortable to feel that there is nothing between you and the outside, when in fact you are inside a building. It is the nature of windows to give you a relationship to the outside and at the same time give a sense of enclosure."

One of the safest-feeling and best places I have ever stayed was in a yurt - you know, those circular tents favored by nomads in the steppes? There are a lot of modern versions nowadays that you can buy made of up-to-date, durable materials, but based in structure on the traditional ones. Instead of a smoke-hole in the top, there is a bubble skylight (where you can watch the clouds and the stars), and the walls, including where the windows are, are made from a wooden lattice-work covered with thick fabric. I always thought it was the lack of corners that made the place so incredibly comforting, but perhaps it was the way the lattice-work covers the windows as well.

I suppose not all people are sensitive to the space they live in. I remember an argument between two friends of mine, one an interior architect/designer and the other an extremely pragmatic engineer, about the word "home": the designer said that a house and a home are different things, and the engineer claimed there was no difference at all. If I had been more than passingly there for the argument I would have said that a home is safe and has a certain kind of domestic magic.

Ultimately, A Pattern Language manages to touch on what can make a house a magical place, and we all need that.

(PS. For a wonderful synopsis of the movie The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, try here.)

Automat for the People

Think of it: a Cabinet of wonderful food.

I know, I know, it's a weird idea, that an automat might be considered a kind of wunderkammer. The idea has such strong identifications, depending on your generation. For younger people, who never went to one of the old automats, it's kind of cool. So much so that a new company called BAMN! is starting a trend (?) by bringing automats back - in, of course, a more modern, hip way.


For those of the middle generations, that is to say, people born 40 to 60 years ago, the memories of automats are likely to be ones of bad food, glaring lights and chillingly impersonal decor.

However, this was probably due to the things being on the wane: the food was less fresh, there being less turnover, and it being the 1950's and 1960's, brutal modernism was all the rage. Not, unfortunately, designed to make you want to stick around.

Those people who are elders now, people born early enough to recall the Depression and World War II, will have a different impression entirely. To those people, the Horn & Hardart chain, which at its height served 800,000 people a day, was a place to go to get in out of the cold, a place where coffee was good and cheap and you could get hot, fresh, handmade food for literally pennies, without having to deal with a waiter.

...Perhaps people in the early part of last century were less picky and more hungry than they were later on. Or perhaps labor was cheaper and behind those banks of little doors were real cooks making real food (as opposed to corporate employees paid minimum wage to churn out prepackaged dross). It's hard to say.

I have to admit to a fascination with automats. I went to one once, when I was a little kid, and I never forgot it. There was something weird and magical about these little compartments of food, food that replaced itself. You could see the people behind there, but they were this vague shape, and it was like a separate little world back there. As far as I was concerned, the glimpses of people I saw lurking back there were simply the inhabitants of that world. The little compartments worked by themselves, replacing food like the tables in a Harry Potter feast.

You can see why Americans were so taken with the concept: peek in the little windows, put in your nickel, open the door and it's yours. All they needed were little Surprise Drawers down at the bottom which furnished you with an unknown treat, or secret "free" compartments, in which you could have the contents if you could find the hidden door, to complete the experience of foraging in some kind of crazy Museum of Food (both these images, by the way, were some of the many that came into my dreams for years after my visit to the automat).

The Smithsonian has a 35-foot section of the original 1902 Horn & Hardart automat in Philadelphia, which is " beautifully ornate with its mirrors, marble and marquetry" and I'm sure is about as close to a Cabinet of Curious Food as you can get.

The question is, will the BAMN automats have what it takes? Or will they be simply updated vending machines? I'd like to see an automat with paneling, plush chairs and a secretive atmosphere. I don't mind the peculiar adventure of rummaging in little boxes and cubbies and drawers for my food, as long as it's good and fresh. In fact, I think I'd kind of like it - especially if they came on plates, with cutlery, and the long banks of compartments were beautifully made.