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OKAY, BACK UP, WE CAN’T LET THIS PASS. YOU LIVED IN A TREE HOUSE?

The tree house is a structure on a friend’s property in North Carolina. When I left my very first job, I retreated to said tree house for several months. Then I went and worked for some friends of mine who are weavers in Italy for several months for the winter. When I came back in the Spring, the friend and I decided we wanted to make the tree house bigger. So I drafted plans for an additional part and we hired a carpenter. For about four months, I worked on building the second part of this tree house, which I then lived in for several years after.

YOU’RE DRAWN TO THE MAKING OF PHYSICAL THINGS.

I’m a builder.

OF BOOKS, OF TREE HOUSES, AND ALSO OF SHOES, RIGHT?

Oh gosh, shoes, yes! As I started getting more and more involved in bookmaking and my work began to be collected, I would see my books go into special collection libraries, put behind glass boxes in exhibitions, and stowed away deep inside buildings, never to be handled again. … Making shoes is a way to take the tools, materials, and processes I know and understand as a bookmaker, and using them in service of making a utilitarian object.

- from an interview with Jennifer Brook, who I nominate to succeed the Dos Equis “Most Interesting Man In The World” guy.
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The wood smells like cinnamon, molasses, a little bit like chocolate. Usually I try not to breathe in the wood smells, suspicious always about chemicals and carcinogens. Today I breathed it all. I smelled it as I chopped piece after piece, in all the sawdust plumes. And I smelled it on my left forearm, because the breeze was blowing west and the sawdust stuck to my sweating, sun-tan lotioned arm.

- Nina MacLaughlin on building a stoop with Brazilian walnut.

The whole post is worth quoting. I probably picked these five sentences because I’m still turning over that advice from Flannery O’Connor: “it takes at least three activated sensuous strokes to make an object real; … this is connected with our having five senses. If you’re deprived of any of them, you’re in a bad way, but if you’re deprived of more than two at once, you almost aren’t present.”

In these words about Brazilian walnut, we’ve got smell, touch, sight.

At least.

My eyes and my taste buds share the job of reading ”cinnamon, molasses, a little bit like chocolate.” Reading “chopped piece after piece,” I hear metal strike wood.

(this post was reblogged from carpentrix)
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Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry.

Gabriel García Márquez (via theparisreview)

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Ladies and gentlemen, put your hands together for Nina “Carpentrix” MacLaughlin …

Garcia Marquez admits that he’d never done any carpentry himself. If he had, he’d know that the a piece of wood is not the same as words. A wall is real. A piece of baseboard that hides the gap between wall and floor, that’s real, too. Words, they’re ghosty and shiftable, and there are just so goddamn many of them. They make me stumble. Cutting a piece of trim, I don’t have to worry about how to explain what’s making me feel sad. I don’t have to translate emotion, sensation, impression, observation into language. A measurement, a cut, sawdust in my lungs. And the piece of wood slides in to fit tight after a few taps with a hammer. It’s a stripping away of bullshit, a stripping away of anything abstract or confusing. The actions are prescribed: measure, measure, cut, nail in.

Visit the Grub Street Daily to read the rest of Nina’s “The flesh of the world: carpentry and writing.” 

- David Quigg, 4/8/2011

(this post was reblogged from theparisreview)