the hwargonaut

A Suite of Appearances, Part I (by Mark Strand)

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 13:29:38 GMT

Out of what dark or lack has he come to wait
At the edge of your gaze for the moment when you
Would look up and see through the trembling leaves

His shadow suddenly there? Out of what place has he come
To enter the light that remains, and say in the weightless
Cadence of those who arrive from a distance that the crossing

Was hard with only a gleam to follow over the Sea of Something,
Which opens and closes, breaks and flashes, spreading its cold,
Watery foliage wherever it can to catch you and carry you

And leave you where you have never been, that he has escaped
To tell you with all that is left of his voice that this is his
Story, which continues wherever the end is happening?

paper doll time

Fri, 02 Mar 2007 00:58:39 GMT

Dollikin Magic Paper Doll
32 Piece Magic Stay-on Wardrobe
9 1/2 Inch Doll with Plastic Stand
Plastic Scissors Included

c 1971 Uneeda Doll Co., Inc

happy hallowe'en (a little bit early)

Mon, 30 Oct 2006 17:27:14 GMT

Happy Hallowe'en from Betsy, courtesy of an October 1968 McCall's Magazine.

give the waiter something to smile about

Wed, 01 Feb 2006 10:48:10 GMT

Some instructions for living from A Brand New You, 1963.

what's for lunch, charley?

Tue, 22 Nov 2005 05:28:59 GMT

These images all came out of the 1961 children's book What's for Lunch, Charley? by Margaret Hodges. The illustrations are by Aliki who has done lots of other amazing work. (For those wondering, yes these images are copyrighted by the illustrator and Scholastic Book Services.) I picked up this copy of the book on eBay, but I also had a copy as a child that was my mom's when she was little. I have really strong memories of the illustrations...they are some of my favorite. I'm sorry to bombard you with so many, but I can't choose between them.

lilli loves bacon

Sat, 05 Nov 2005 22:32:32 GMT

I took the Lilli brothers with us to breakfast this morning.

Mr. Lilli is happy to have orange juice. Lilli Brother protests!

Orange juice is a tool of the oppressor!

Mmmm, coffee.

NO COFFEE NO!

Don't do it, Mr. Lilli!!!

Mr. Lilli is King of the World.

Bacon is the devil!

Mr. Lilli thinks hell looks warm and toasty.

I won't let you do it, big brother!

I can't believe you are wasting all this food! Put it in your human mouth!

Nathalie

Thu, 21 Jul 2005 22:10:22 GMT

These images are from the cards inside the Re-Ment set "Nathalie's French Goods". I thought they were exceptionally cute illustrations, even by Re-Ment standards. Since my camera is out of juice (the power cord is in a box somewhere) and I can't take pictures of the sets themselves, you get scans.

I do not hold the copyright to these images, so please don't distribute them without permission from the Re-Ment Corp or use them for anything except personal enjoyment.

what do space princesses and robots wear?

Fri, 10 Jun 2005 01:59:51 GMT

This is a 1979 paperdoll ripoff of Star Wars. Star Princess (Princess Leia) and Pluta (female C3PO)!

The images are a bit cropped because the book is too large for my scanner. If you want one of the outfits in full let me know and I'll rescan just that portion of the page.

monster

Wed, 25 May 2005 04:36:44 GMT

From The Monster Den by John Ciardi. Illustration by Edward Gorey, of course. Both copyright 1966.

The Lesson For Tonight

which is: When you do things, do them right.
Above all, try to be polite.

When you are at the table
And you need to kick your brother,
Be as sweet as you are able
To your Dad and Mother.

Thank them for the lovely food
In a pleasant voice, and --quick!--
While you're being very good,
That's the time to kick!

When your brother starts to cry
Always say--and do not grin
As you say it-- "My, oh my!
Did I bump your little shin?"

Dad and Mother, you will find,
Will say you did just right,
And tell your brother he should mind
His manners and be more polite.

Now what's the lesson for tonight?
Right! Don't let your badness show!
Above the table be polite.
Be yourself below.

bluebeard

Wed, 18 May 2005 13:46:34 GMT

From one of my favorite fairy tales, Bluebeard. This illustration is by Kanako Tanabe and shows the moment when Bluebeard's (last) wife is pleading with him not to kill her.

You can read an annotated Charles Perrault telling of the Bluebeard story at SurLaLune.

betsy calendar

Mon, 09 May 2005 16:43:18 GMT

If you actually want to print this calendar, here's a high-res version (5+ MB).

bambi

Sun, 08 May 2005 03:57:15 GMT

girls and food, 1968

Thu, 31 Mar 2005 18:39:02 GMT

calico cat 1966

Mon, 14 Mar 2005 23:27:48 GMT

the best time to catch them

Sun, 13 Mar 2005 09:51:24 GMT

From a children's book called The Little White Bird by J.M. Barrie, illustration by Jean Winslow. This story was one of the precursors to the Peter Pan story.

When you were a bird you knew the fairies pretty well, and you remember a good deal about them in your babyhood, which it is a great pity you can't write down, for gradually you forget, and I have heard of children who declared that they had never once seen a fairy. Very likely if they said this in the Kensington Gardens, they were standing looking at a fairy all the time. The reason they were cheated was that she pretended to be someting else. This is one of their best tricks. They usually pretend to be flowers, because the court sits in the Fairies' Basin and there are so many flowers there, and all along the Baby Walk, that a flower is the thing least likely to attract attention. They dress exactly like flowers, and change with the seasons, putting on white when lilies are in and blue for blue-bells, and so on. They like crocus and hyacinth time best of all, as they are partial to a bit of color, but tulips (except white ones, which are the fairy cradles) they consider garish, and they sometimes put off dressing liike tulips for days, so that the beginning of the tulip weeks is almost the best time to catch them.

friday fashion

Fri, 11 Mar 2005 16:52:28 GMT

more 1966 scans

Thu, 10 Mar 2005 05:04:30 GMT

I was really entranced by these illustrations from some cooking instructions...for some reason they remind me of the Re-Ment baking set. I believe the recipe was for pots de creme.

1966 Betsy McCall

Thu, 10 Mar 2005 04:51:19 GMT

Continuous Cities 1

Fri, 25 Feb 2005 22:24:47 GMT

From Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, 1972 (translated by William Weaver, who taught my translation course at Bard)

The city of Leonia refashions itself every day: every morning the people wake between fresh sheets, wash with just-unwrapped cakes of soap, wear brand-new clothing, take from the latest model refrigerator still unopened tins, listening to the last-minute jingles from the most up-to-date radio.

On the sidewalks, encased in spotless plastic bags, the remains of yesterday's Leonia await the garbage truck. Not only squeezed rubes of toothpaste, blown-out light bulbes, newspapers, containers, wrappings, but also boilers, encyclopedias, pianos, porcelain dinner services. It is not so much by the things that each day are manufactured, sold, bought that you can measure Leonia's opulence, but rather by the things that each day are thrown out to make room for the new. So you begin to wonder if Leonia's true passion is really, as they say, the enjoyment of new and different things, and not, instead, the joy of expelling, discarding, cleansing itself of a recurrent impurity. The fact is that street cleaners are welcomed like angels, and their task of removing the residue of yesterday's existence is surrounded by a respectful silence, like a ritual that inspires devotion, perhaps only because once things have been cast off nobody wants to have to think about them further.

Nobody wonders where, each day, they carry their load of refuse. Outside the city, surely; but each year the city expands, and the street cleaners have to fall farther back. The bulk of the outflow increases and the piles rise higher, become stratified, extend over a wider perimeter. Besides, the more Leonia's talent for making new materials excels, the more the rubbish improves in quality, resists time, the elements, fermentations, combustions. A fortress of indestructible leftovers surrounds Leonia, dominating it on every side, like a chain of mountains.

This is the result: the more Leonia expels goods, the more it accumulates them; the scales of its past are soldered into a cuirass that cannot be removed. As the city is renewed each day, it preserves all of itself in its only definitive form: yesterday's sweepings piled up on the sweepings of the day before yesterday and of all its days and years and decades.

Leonia's rubbish little by little would invade the world, if, from beyond the final crest of its boundless rubbish heap, the street cleaners of other cities were not pressing, also pushing mountains of refuse in front of themselves. Perhaps the whole world, beyond Leonia's boundaries, is covered by craters of rubbish, each surrounding a metropolis in constant eruption. The boundaries between the alien, hostile cities are infected ramparts where the detritus of both support each other, overlap, mingle.

The greater its height grows, the more the danger of a landslide looms: a tin can, an old tire, an unraveled wine flask, if it rolls toward Leonia, is enough to bring with it an avalanche of unmated shoes, calendars of bygone years, withered flowers, submerging the city in its own past, which it had tried in vain to reject, mingling with the past of the neighboring cities, finally clean. A cataclysm will flatten the sordid mountain range, canceling every trace of the metropolis always dressed in new clothes. In the nearby cities they are all ready, waiting with bulldozers to flatten the terrain, to push into the new territory, expand, and drive the new street cleaners still farther out.

-------

I think I live there.

a piece of the dark that might have been yours

Mon, 21 Feb 2005 07:40:59 GMT

The Continuous Life

What of the neighborhood homes awash
In a silver light, of children crouched in the bushes,
Watching the grown-ups for signs of surrender,
Signs that the irregular pleasures of moving
From day to day, of being adrift on the swell of duty,
Have run their course? Oh parents, confess
To your little ones the night is a long way off
And your taste for the mundane grows; tell them
Your worship of household chores has barely begun;
Describe the beauty of shovels and rakes, brooms and mops;
Say there will always be cooking and cleaning to do,
That one thing leads to another, which leads to another;
Explain that you live between two great darks, the first
With an ending, the second without one, that the luckiest
Thing is having been born, that you live in a blur
Of hours and days, months and years, and believe
It has meaning, despite the occasional fear
You are slipping away with nothing completed, nothing
To prove you existed. Tell the children to come inside,
That your search goes on for something you lost -- a name,
A family album that fell from its own small matter
Into another, a piece of the dark that might have been yours,
You don't really know. Say that each of you tries
To keep busy, learning to lean down close and hear
The careless breathing of the earth and feel its available
Languor come over you, wave after wave, sending
Small tremors of love through your brief,
Undeniable selves, into your days, and beyond.

[by Mark Strand]

Another era, another love.

Mon, 14 Feb 2005 15:18:29 GMT

Some 50's images of love:

What shall love's keepsake be?

Mon, 14 Feb 2005 15:11:22 GMT

These Valentines were given to my great grandmother Edna Evenson ca. 1905-1910, when she was a child.

pixies!

Thu, 10 Feb 2005 03:38:06 GMT

I dreamed I was the queen of hearts...

Tue, 08 Feb 2005 16:27:43 GMT

...in my Maidenform bra.

1953 fabric advertisement

Fri, 04 Feb 2005 17:49:36 GMT