While reading Vladimir Nabokov’s 1953 humorous novel Pnin about the teaching life of a Russian émigré in a fictitious small New England college town, this line stood out among the many noteworthy passages:
“With the help of the janitor, he (Pnin) screwed on the side of a desk (in his new office) a pencil sharpener – that highly satisfying, highly philosophical implement that goes ticonderoga-ticonderoga, feeding on the yellow finish and sweet wood, and ends up in a kind of a soundlessly spinning ethereal void as we all must.”
This reference to the Ticonderoga pencils and those old pencil sharpeners brought back memories of the classrooms of my high school (built in 1912) that mounted similar sharpeners in the back of each room near the “cloudy blackboards.” Also, my father had a similar one mounted in our garage where I could grind a pencil to the finest point of procrastination before tackling my Algebra homework.
Museum Trips
Nabokov’s evocative prose provided additional respite, as I visited the online Made-in-Chicago Museum of Manufacturing to look for pictures of pencil sharpeners. (Thanks to the curator Andrew Clayman for granting me the permission to use the photo of the Giant sharpener made by the Automatic Pencil Sharpener Company.)
The MICM took me back to a trip I made last year to Berlin, where my older daughter Cynthia took my longtime partner Denise and me to the Museum of Things (Werkbundarchiv – Museum der Dinge), which is dedicated to 20th and 21st century product culture. We spent considerable time there on chilly wet day, soaking in the archive of the German industrial design association Deutscher Werkbund, founded in 1907. Items ranged from tape recorders and furniture to toy soldiers.
Book Shopping Novelty
While at the Museum of Things I purchased the miniature book The Shadow on the Wall (Schottenspiele) (2014), which has illustrations of how to make shadow animals, which is a new game I like to play with my three-year old grandson Myrick.
Moreover, it is skill I can practice in the spinning ethereal void of 2020.
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