The Hot Shop

After a hard spring term and no break before a hectic start to summer, I've been feeling like it's important for the "likes fun" part of myself to perform a little coup d'etat against the "feels guilty if not working" part, which has been getting awfully comfortable in power. So while I did do some work this weekend, I also did a lot of things that were not productive in terms of meeting any immediate goal but that turned out to be an important reminder that there's more to life than grading the next set of papers.

Including: walking a dog, sailing a boat, receiving a free burrito, chatting at a bar with the wryly reticent son of a famous author and his talkative wife, going to see Shakespeare in the park with a big group of gay Mormons, and, today, going to the totally awesome Museum of Glass in Tacoma where we spent a long time watching a bunch of guys working with blowtorches and a 2000 degree oven on what, after a lot of rolling, wrestling, cradling in a frying pan filled with water, caressing with a wet newspaper, and direct application of flames turned into what looked like a mad chemist's super-vial. We also saw a talk by the awesomely-named Preston Singletary, who makes versions of traditional Northwest native art out of glass. They are conceptually interesting as well as gorgeous (based on the slides--we got distracted by the "hot shop" and the museum closed before we got to the exhibit).



The whole experience made me remember what I think is hard for writers to really feel, the "it's just cool" aspect of art. Glassblowing, though I often don't like the results aesthetically, is, from a craft standpoint, obviously and inarguably cool. Some of what I found interesting: a lot of the artistry is clearly motivated by technical challenges (both the limitations they impose and the imperative to transcend them). The process is inherently collaborative and literally can't be done alone. We watched the hot shop guys try to put a little topknot on their vial three different ways before one finally stuck and was not too uneven, and my friend who is a glassblower said that "you always have to have a Plan B."

There's a lesson there I'm going to think about. In the hot shop I also got an idea for a poem, and I'm also going to think about trying to remember what that was.