Nina MacLaughlin's Blog, page 21

What of the word skeleton? From the Greek, skeletos, it meant...

What of the word skeleton? From the Greek, skeletos, it meant dried up, like a mummy. Modern Latin’s sceleton was the bony framework of the body, circa 1570. I like the word. In part for that gentle L which dominates and lengthens it. In part because the letters, those tall stalks in K, E, L, T, imitate bones themselves. Strong in form, soft in sound. Skeleton.

Bones appeal. I like November when the bones start to show, when the landscape sheds its dress. I like framing walls, to create the skeleton of a room, the bones off which will hang the flesh of walls, which in turn will keep you warm, keep you safe, keep private things private. We’ve been framing a bathroom in a dim cold basement which feels dimmer and colder when we head outside for lunch and the forsythia glows yellow on the side yard, and the azalea looks the color of the flesh of some tropical fruit, and the grass, after months under snow, blazes green. The trees are growing into their summer clothes.

Seeing the skeleton calms: below the flesh we find something to understand. Leaves fall, a wall is framed, and it feels like a truth is revealed, or maybe, more so, that certain secrets aren’t being kept.

I fret about the secrets the body keeps. I fret about the mysteries we can’t see taking place below the skin. Bones break, but even that feels orderly and fixable. It’s the softer stuff, wetter and darker, where the unknowns and non-understanderables accumulate, and the word organ has that wetness to it, a dark wetness, livery, slick, and not like skeleton at all.

[Leonard Baskin, Beatitude, wood engraving, 1954.]

Clouds and sun did battle in the sky yesterday, spring blue...

Clouds and sun did battle in the sky yesterday, spring blue versus heavy, sweeping, lowdown grey. On a beach on the North Shore, no wind blew, and low tide’s lapping waves licked the edge of shore. The sand called for attention, as it always does. Eyes scoured for good luck rocks, pretty shells, dead crabs, beach glass. The sky demanded it, too, the drama unfolding above, light dark cold warm rain shine. On the walk back, I found I’d drifted up to where beach met rising earth, a scramble of low brush and storm-scarred trees. There, eyes out not for shells or stones or crab limbs, but for driftwood, for branch fragments, smoothed and bleached and dedensified by salt water, friction, and wind. The carpentry work infiltrates and alters in unexpected ways. It used to be I’d come home from the beach with a pocketfull of shells. Now, wood. What luck to find a piece that looks like a rippled potato chip. They look like stones and bones, almost weightless in the palm.

Hear ye, folks in New York, hello! Come to Brooklyn tonight, to...

Hear ye, folks in New York, hello! Come to Brooklyn tonight, to Pete’s Candy Store, for the Pete’s Reading Series spring edition where I’ll be on stage talking tools and words and other HAMMER HEAD miscellany. I’ve met so many fantastic Tumblr folks at these readings, and would love to meet some more. Come, come, come!

Thursday, April 23, 7:30 pm, Pete’s Candy Store, 709 Lorimer Street, Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Hooray!

Books will be on sale care of the best folks at WORD. Can’t make it tonight? You can buy a book here.

What does a sixty-pound sack of cement feel like in the arms?...

What does a sixty-pound sack of cement feel like in the arms? Imagine carrying seven gallons of milk. Or four bowling balls. Or a sleeping six-year-old. It’s not an unreasonable weight. Not light, but pick-up-able if you’ve got some muscle. Today, for a floor we’re pouring, we loaded and unloaded 60 bags of cement, each weighing 60 pounds. That’s thirty-six hundred pounds, not too far off two tons. There were three of us – M.’s daughter is on school vacation and lent her time to lug – so that’s about twelve-hundred pounds each, sack by sack, up a dozen stairs and into a room that will eventually be a bathroom. Once unloaded, mix and pour, mix and pour, shovels, water, sand and rocks, dust to primordial ooze, a depthless soup. My body now, my biceps, a band across my lower back, feels the work. I woke up this morning looking forward to it, the simple physicality of it, the start and finish, the test of strength. I wanted to come home hungry, and I did.

Soon, so soon, I’ll start writing here again about the carpentry...

Soon, so soon, I’ll start writing here again about the carpentry work, about framing new walls and rivers below floors and filling holes with fire-stopping goop. But for now, again, I want to alert you guys to another HAMMER HEAD reading. Some of you live in Maine, I know you do. And maybe some of you are in the mid-coast realm. Tomorrow morning, Saturday, at 11 am, I’ll be at the Maine Coast Book Shop in Damariscotta. Come. Come and chat and maybe laugh and drink a coffee and introduce yourself and eat some oysters afterwards. Find all the details here. And if you’re in Michigan, say, or Arizona, or anywhere not mid-coast Maine, buy the book here.

Live Free or Die-ers, Granite State-ians, New Hampshire dwellers...

Live Free or Die-ers, Granite State-ians, New Hampshire dwellers of all stripes, TONIGHT, Thursday, at 7 pm, I’ll be at the Water Street Bookstore in Exeter, New Hampshire as the HAMMER HEAD tour continues. Spread the word, stop by, say hello. I’d love to see some Tumblr faces. Find all the relevant details here. And buy the book here or here or here.

Hi there everyone, but particularly those of you who live in and...

Hi there everyone, but particularly those of you who live in and around Cambridge. Tonight’s the last of the local HAMMER HEAD readings. Come to Porter Square Books TONIGHT at 7 pm for jokes and tools and who knows what else. I’ll sign your book like I’m doing in the photo above, and probably write a small message therein. You won’t be sorry, mostly because I’ve got really good handwriting. Come, come, come!

(And if you can’t, alas, but you can still buy the book.)

Porter Square Books, 25 White Street, Cambridge, 7 pm.

[Photo credit: Yvonne Brooks]

lachrimaestro:Oh, and I finished carpentrix ‘s book the other...

lachrimaestro:

Oh, and I finished carpentrix ‘s book the other night.  It’s full of insights regarding the nature of craft, and labor, and learning.  It garners the Lachrimaestro seal of approval for truth in woodworking. :)

Extraordinary work, Nina!

An amazing endorsement! It’s worth following this blog for musings on work and life, good drawings, original thought and sentence-making.

All those of you at this year’s AWP Conference in Minneapolis,...

All those of you at this year’s AWP Conference in Minneapolis, stop by the W.W. Norton table (#814) and pick up copies of Philip Connors’s devestating, funny, and intimate book about the suicide of his brother called ALL THE WRONG PLACES, New Yorker copy editor Mary Norris’s charming look at language, BETWEEN YOU AND ME, and, while you’re at it, HAMMER HEAD.

Many people ask me what the atmosphere is like working as a woman in carpentry. The assumption is...

Many people ask me what the atmosphere is like working as a woman in carpentry. The assumption is it’s hostile. The assumption is the men condescend, discredit, disrespect. The assumption is it’s all burping and sex jokes. I’m glad to be able to tell people that’s not been the case for us. Maybe we’re lucky, maybe we work with the right guys, maybe it’s just different
than people think. With a couple exceptions, the men we encounter through work
are respectful and friendly. If they’re skeptical, they hide it well. So when
people ask I try to put to rest this idea of an unwelcoming, condescending
environment.

But last week I had an encounter that embodied all that
people suspect, and it’s lingered in my mind. An ugly exception.

At an event unrelated to the book, I fell into conversation
with a man about my age drinking a martini. He asked the standard question:
what do you do. I answered. Carpenter, writer. “I’m a restaurant owner and a
furniture maker,” he told me. And this was promising, some common ground, some
shared pursuit to talk about. He immediately brought out his phone to share pictures of some
of what he’d made and explained that he’d gone to the North Bennet Street School,
a respected, expensive school in Boston for fine craftsmanship and traditional
trades.

From the photographs, I will say, the things he built – a
hutch, a credenza –
did look well-made, impressive. He talked and talked. “If you want to actually
learn the trade,” he said, “you should be working with my buddy out of
Burlington. He’d teach you everything you need to know.”

If you want to
actually learn the trade. He had asked me nothing about how long I’d
worked, who I worked for, what sort of work I do. I started paying less
attention. He continued.

“What sort of table saw do you have? If you don’t have a
Delta you need to find a new boss.”

“Delta?” I said, because I did not know this brand.

“Ha, yeah, your boss has no idea what he’s doing.”

I did not correct him. I did not tell him that A) my boss is
a woman and B) she very much knows what she’s doing. I looked over my
shoulder for a way to exit the conversation. And I looked back at him with the
blankest most disinterested face I could summon, took all the light out of my
eyes, tried to make him know without words and with everything in me, you are boring.

Perhaps this was a failure of courage on my part. Perhaps
there was a way to make him know some things. Perhaps I should’ve said
something to set him straight. He got the message though, I think.

“This martini sucks,” he said, and he went on about
molecules and his philosophy as a bartender. “If I hadn’t already had four of
them,” he said, “I wouldn’t even be talking to you.”