handmade
A craft is a kingdom!
1001 Yiddish Proverbs, by Fred Kogos (Secaucus, NJ: Castle Books, 1970), 19.
Because carvers revere the god of unseen effort, of hidden work, of the back of things. The god of assiduousness, reigning over obsessives and perfectionists. Writers who delete whole chapters in the slender hope that what’s gone will shine through what’s left. Computer scientists who write beautiful code, programs that are more elegant than necessity demands. Why stop there? The cleaner who does more than an employer will ever notice, the night nurse who holds the hand of the unconscious stranger. If you’re looking for glamour, you’ve come to the wrong place, but it’s where you’ll find two old carvers whose serenity seemed to flower out of a lifetime of scrupulous work. Maybe it explains their venerable age, too. Somewhere I read of a study that identified not optimism or happiness or serenity or sociability as the psychological trait most predictive of longevity, but a more homespun one: conscientiousness.
The Lost Carving: A Journey to the Heart of Making (New York: Viking, 2012), 111.
I would like to make solid wood clocks if the opportunity came up. I like glue, and I like to cut with saws.
“Bob Dylan in Conversation with John Elderfield,” Spring 2011.
Making something to hold out of a very hard material that feels so soft is a slow and rather good tactile pun.
The Hare with Amber Eyes (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), [prologue] 13.
I have made many, many thousands of pots. I am very bad at names, I mumble and fudge, but I am good on pots. I can remember the weight and the balance of a pot, and how its surface works with its volume. I can read how an edge creates tension or loses it. I can feel if it has been made at speed or with diligence. If it has warmth.
The Hare with Amber Eyes (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), [prologue] 16.
When I was a little kid, there were still blacksmiths around, and I’ve never forgotten the ring of a real hammer on a real anvil.
Written in a letter to Philip Roth, letting him know his stories are the “real thing,” dated December 12, 1969, in Saul Bellow: Letters (New York: Viking, 2010), 290.
The most interesting thing about wood for me is that it has a grain, as people do. That is, each piece of wood has a personality and, as we know from our relationships with people—trying to work with them, live with them—personality could almost be defined by the way resistance (to what I want) is expressed in it. In wood the recalcitrance of the grain, little whorls and eddies like cowlicks that won’t be combed down, the fixed expressions of its accustomed shape, give each piece of wood its own face. Resistance is only resistance, however, in reaction to a force brought to bear on it—there would be no resistance if I weren’t there chopping away with chisel and mallet. Everyone is easy to get along with if you let him have his own way, but there is no relationship without difficulties. In like manner the wood resists me, it resists my plans for it, and it does so in a way that is particular to it, so that the relationship is always personal.
Carla Needleman, The Work of Craft (London: Arkana, 1986), 87.