Sometimes it isn’t quite as easy as I’d like.
Imagine that your car has a pair of tusks about 13 feet long, sticking out the front. Now imagine that when you turn the steering wheel, the front wheels do nothing, and it’s the back ones that steer the car.
Well, okay, so it isn’t quite that large, and if you stay in first gear it doesn’t go very fast. Fortunately.
I have now driven this device, and it behaved about as I’d expect such a thing to behave, which is to say somewhat squirrelly. Fun, though, when there isn’t a four-foot by eight-foot optical table with a few odd boxes stacked on it sitting on the tines...
Various herb seeds have sprouted, and I note one pepper up. It’s a ‘Peru Yellow’ or ‘Yellow Peru’ (I’m not quite sure which is the right name for the variety). I have my fingers crossed on some of the others, several of which are nonhot habaneros and a few of which are peculiar varieties of Capsicum baccatum or C. frutescens.
...Is that I now have analyses of the ash and the two
brick clays. This is a joyous thing. I don’t have much
time right now, but I can at least put up the results
for Embassy Slip that I’ve run through an 80-mesh
sieve. I’ll discuss this later, for those who care.
“Embassy Slip 80” and Albany Slip
| Silica | 71.42 | 69.41 | |
| Alumina | 11.29 | 14.76 | |
| Na2O | 1.12 | 1.83 | |
| K2O | 3.39 | 3.29 | |
| CaO | 1.11 | 5.86 | |
| MgO | 1.21 | 2.65 | |
| Fe2O3 | 5.24 | 4.76 | |
| TiO2 | 0.87 | 0. | |
| MnO (or MnO2) | 0.08 | 0. | |
| P2O5 | 0.12 | 0. | |
| Loss On Ignition (LOI) | 3.68 | 5.70 | |
| Total | 99.53 | 102.47 |
My apologies for the wretched formatting. I’m on the road and slightly rushed. The Albany Slip analysis, btw, comes from one of the topics on the Clayart Archive.
As I said above, I’m on the road at the moment, and in particular I’m in New York. In specific particular, Brooklyn. Tonight I shall be attending the annual James Arthur Memorial Lecture on the Evolution of the Human Brain. These lectures are very fine, but I haven’t been able to go to one in a very long time. I turned Lise and a few other people on to them around 1975, when my father passed his invitation along to me, and Lise has now returned the favor by inviting me to this year’s.
...But that’s not enough. On Saturday, Lise asked me if I would be willing to accompany her to Sahadi, on Atlantic Avenue, for a wee bit of shopping. She has admitted ulterior motive: says she wanted to watch me have a total fit, which in fact I did. I hadn’t been to Sahadi in well over a decade, possibly two, and it was, if possible, even better than my memories of it. I managed (albeit with some difficulty) to restrain myself and spend less than a thousand dollars. Ahem. (Well, I really did restrain myself. I actually spent less than twenty. I could easily have blown a huge amount, though.) I acquired some impossibly excellent Lebanese green olives, which taste of apples; I acquired some pitted Moroccan oil-cured olives; I acquired some red-pickled eggplants, some fried cauliflower...
Atlantic Avenue is a large street. It is capacious. It contains multitudes. After Sahadi we went to a wonderful bakery where I bought some Zaatar bread (Zaatar is a spice mixture that is primarily thyme but has other things in it, those things depending upon who is making it) and two cookies: a mamoul, which is stuffed with walnut powder, and something else, almost the same but stuffed with date paste, the name of which I forget. Then we went to a place I don’t remember seeing before, Hanshali. It smelled amazing, like some sort of mythic incense mixed with spices that were impossible to name. (For those of you who don’t know me or who don’t know Lise, both of us are pretty good noses. We can usually put names to aromas and even sort out some mixtures. This was beyond both of us.)
At the end of it all I was in a complete daze. Lise went off to her evening’s entertainment with a big grin on her face, and I went off to dinner with Sandy Stone, Bob and Daphne Stern, and Daphne’s brother and sister-in-law (or was that sister and brother-in-law? I’m a bit hazy). The Zaatar bread failed to survive the encounter. [Those of you who are used to email may feel encouraged to insert a winkyface here.] I sharpened two of their kitchen knives (I am, as usual, travelling with a Japanese waterstone, a wonderful implement that I discuss elsewhere). A jolly time was had by all except the tomato, which also failed to survive the festivities, having been used as a knife test.
Sorry this is so terse -- as I say above, things are a wee bit rushed at the moment. In fact, I must now disappear, to continue this at a later date. Tomorrow I am off to the annual conference of the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts, which I'll probably report on at some point.
I keep thinking of odd little things; many of them are conflations, in which I drag two items together, let them collide, and pick up whatever remains afterward. I do this a lot with food, too. Examples are, ...gee, I dunno, how about "Aum SinnFeinrikyo"? Well, so okay, that's kinda wretched. What about "Mt. Arrowroot", which I'm sure any number of people have thought of? (That's where the ark with the animal crackers landed.) This morning, for some reason, up popped "Quetzalkuanyin", clearly the feathered goddess of mercy...
For a long time, I have been using the expression "Antlers Optional" as an indication of extremeness or intensity. I knew I'd gotten it from friends in Minneapolis, but I never knew the exact derivation until last night, when I was having dinner with Jim Young at Udupi Palace, just off the corner of 193 and 650, a little outside of Washington, DC. (I should probably clarify this by noting that I went to Denver, had a truly amazing time but only got to see three friends outside of the conference, and returned; as of Steaming Brown Liquids, it is April 10th.)
When Jim was at the University of Minnesota, he walked into a classroom one day and looked at the blackboard. (Yes, kids, we are old enough that we remember when mammoths thundered across the earth and people wrote with chalk. Ahem.) On the board were many erasures; it was clear that someone had given some sort of talk. Beyond that, however, all was mystery, and the only remaining legible words were "antlers optional", which Jim promptly adopted. He uses them as the situation demands, perhaps a bit more flexibly than I do. Dinner last night, for example, was strictly antlers optional in my book. (Yes, that's a strong recommendation of Udupi Palace, a place where the dosa reigns supreme and scatters night away. Hoo-wee!)
...And no snotty remarks about Carthage from the peanut gallery!
It is given unto us that we must fly hence and retrieve our automobile from The Western Fastnesses. That being the case, I probably won't get a chance to add anything to this page until about the beginning of May. I find that tiresome in the extreme, but I've been so busy lately that I went several weeks between additions in any case; I don't know that there's any cure for it. You (the few people who actually read this) have my apologies for the sparseness -- it was not my intention. In fact, I now have a digital camera, and my intention was to pepper this page with photos of my cohort, the people I work with, the places, and the things I've been doing. Argh.
Here, at least, are just a few things to start it off:
I live at Harmony House.
Dave Mann (I'll get back to Dave when I get a chance) owns a bird named Arno. (There are lots of birds around here.)
Here's one of the four (count 'em, four) pieces of pottery I've managed to finish since I got here. (This will change, once I get a kiln built, but there is a lot going on, so it may not change quite as much as I'd like. We Shall See.)
Here are two tests I made in the process of attempting to re-engineer my red tenmoku glaze. As you can see, I'm not there yet. The one on the left has too much silica in it, and not enough iron. The one on the right came a step later, and has not enough clay and not enough iron. The next one is in the kiln now, and has more of both, but I probably won't know what it did until I get back from Seattle. The "no wash" comment refers to the fact that I tested some rutile washes on the other side.
All of these, though cropped (and the thumbnails resized), are otherwise straight out of the camera, as I did not have time to make any other adjustments to them. Not too shabby, all things considered. I'm greatly impressed, in fact. (It's a Nikon Coolpix 900s.)
Think that's all I have time for right now. Sigh...
Pseudo-mailto: jon [at] bazilians [put it here] org
Last modified: Mon Jan 29 20:11:51 PST 2001