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Things I Have Made By Hand, 1
Aug. 9th, 2002 08:03 amI’m going to be cribbing writing exercises and meditations from various sources. I’ve forgotten where I got this one from, though.
Things I Have Made By Hand, 1
Small pottery cup, variegated blue glaze, which now holds pencils on my desk.
My high school best friend, Red, had a working mother and was on her own a lot, and she had the strangest variety of friends. One summer she took me to hang out in the studio of a guy who taught pottery classes at one of the local colleges.
John was like Dickens' Ghost of Christmas Present: a big, jolly guy with a cascade of honey-colored curls and a bushy red-blond beard and a loud, infectious laugh. (Also, incidentally, the only person I've ever met who had gout.)
He did pottery in a sort of hut on the college grounds. It had one small room with a kiln surrounded by shelves of finished pottery, and one slightly larger room with the wet-clay and glazing supplies and the potter's wheel. In the back was a bathroom more disreputable than those in most bars.
The wet-clay room's walls were lined with shallow shelves full of science-fiction paperbacks, spines all spattered with droplets from the wheel. On one visit, John pressed upon me a clay-dusted copy of Samuel Delany's Empire Star, making me a lifelong Delany fan and incidentally setting the stage for my later slash enthusiasm by sending me off in search of Dhalgren.
Red was a reasonably competent potter. I never developed the knack. Everything I made was bulbous and lopsided, except this one small cup, and the only reason this one turned out usable was that John stood behind me and guided my hands. He smelled like clay and sweat. Pottery is hard work.
To this day, if I see a piece of North Carolina pottery with a characteristic warm-sea-blue glaze, I have a compulsion to flip it over and look for John's spiky signature on the bottom.
Things I Have Made By Hand, 1
Small pottery cup, variegated blue glaze, which now holds pencils on my desk.
My high school best friend, Red, had a working mother and was on her own a lot, and she had the strangest variety of friends. One summer she took me to hang out in the studio of a guy who taught pottery classes at one of the local colleges.
John was like Dickens' Ghost of Christmas Present: a big, jolly guy with a cascade of honey-colored curls and a bushy red-blond beard and a loud, infectious laugh. (Also, incidentally, the only person I've ever met who had gout.)
He did pottery in a sort of hut on the college grounds. It had one small room with a kiln surrounded by shelves of finished pottery, and one slightly larger room with the wet-clay and glazing supplies and the potter's wheel. In the back was a bathroom more disreputable than those in most bars.
The wet-clay room's walls were lined with shallow shelves full of science-fiction paperbacks, spines all spattered with droplets from the wheel. On one visit, John pressed upon me a clay-dusted copy of Samuel Delany's Empire Star, making me a lifelong Delany fan and incidentally setting the stage for my later slash enthusiasm by sending me off in search of Dhalgren.
Red was a reasonably competent potter. I never developed the knack. Everything I made was bulbous and lopsided, except this one small cup, and the only reason this one turned out usable was that John stood behind me and guided my hands. He smelled like clay and sweat. Pottery is hard work.
To this day, if I see a piece of North Carolina pottery with a characteristic warm-sea-blue glaze, I have a compulsion to flip it over and look for John's spiky signature on the bottom.