jterriynn, the steampunk fashion stuff definitely has a sexual edginess. As for the steampunk decorating stuff, I've decided that it's not for me. ____ I really did try to take up this challenge but I've given up. Just thought I'd record a little of my journey and why I am going to quit. Surely a better thinker than I am will conjure a fabulous kitchen from the ashes of my fabulous ideas. First, I looked hard at the Metropole subway entrance and tried to channel it into a design. Didn't get anywhere. Without a grand high ceiling and skylight, this aesthetic is tough. Sure, I could have invented a high-ceilinged room with amazing glass and spidery separations between glass, but that's an architectural feature of the house or apartment that would be the impetus, not the muse itself. So then I got to thinking about Madame Curie and her cohort--now there were visionary scientists of the period! I asked my DH what he can recall of the huge science classroom that he worked in for roughly 30 years, in a c. 1900 building. He says "Hard maple floors. Oak cabinets--a whole wall of them. Long lab tables with a few sinks and bunsen burners. Tall curved faucets. Tall windows and window shades (the latter were removed when they got tacky looking. Not sure when this equipment was installed." I started working on a Marie Curie's lab theme for the kitchen olioboard--canisters lettered in that art nouveau Metropolitan typeface (see photo above) with "radium" and "pitchblende" stenciled on them and gaslight fixtures in ceiling and a steam radiator painted in an outlandish color but decided the whole thing was not worth my time. This was reinforced when I located a photo of Curie's lab, which made me recall that she had been allocated space in a "shed" outside of the physics dept, a silly woman working outside the mainstream. How's this for a setting for real-life science fiction? To quote her: "Its glass roof did not afford complete shelter against rain; the heat was suffocating in summer, and the bitter cold of winter was only a little lessened by the iron stove, except in its immediate vicinity. There was no question of obtaining the needed proper apparatus in common use by chemists. We simply had some old pine-wood tables with furnaces and gas burners. We had to use the adjoining yard for those of our chemical operations that involved producing irritating gases; even then the gas often filled our shed. With this equipment we entered on our exhausting work." All this just made me mad on behalf of Curie and did nothing for my peaceful kitchen. Besides, she was working with radium so the radioactivity might be hard on the family life and the cuisine. Here's another Curie laboratory image, I would assume for her later work== perhaps inspiring for another GW'er? a 40 x 30 print of this can be had for $200 Gotta admit: Science and cooking aren't in the same department. In fact, people make fun of modern "operating room" white kitchens--they are antimatter for a relaxing, gentle room. Then I tried to work up wallpaper based on Steiglitz's photo of a train yard...plenty of steam there! But I couldn't find a source of a blown-up version of the photo and I became afraid that the photo would be taken as being about trains--not a peaceful kitchen for me either! Then there's Joe Stella, a painter of 1920s who did numerous Brooklyn Bridge stylized paintings. I messed with his arches and colors. But this got me nowhere either. The truth: TNT explosiveness and edgy are not me and decorating with a steampunk science muse doesn't connect me to any worthwhile kitchen design. Sorry to be cranky, but I'm done here I think. I know it's fun but not the fun I can really enjoy. I look forward to somebody else's fun stuff on the postings Steampunk thread. Have fun stormin' the castle, visionaries! Here is a link that might be useful: Marie Curie lab poster from All Posters

Years ago when The Far Pavillions first came out, it was very popular and was hard to get from the library. I finally found it on the shelf (and I worked at that library too!) and took it home. It went back unread at the end of the borrowing period. This happened a few times; for some reason, I just couldn't sit down to read it. Finally, my sister in law gave me a paperback copy as a birthday present and it again sat on my shelf unread for quite a while. One day, bored, I picked it up and started reading it. Hours later, my eyes closing despite my efforts to stay awake, I put down the book with only 60 or so pages to go and fell asleep. I finished it the next morning and couldn't understand what took me so long to get into it. For those who think Tolkein is too wordy, Rosefolly explained it much better than I could. She said he wrote as if the books were being presented orally. (Rosefolly, you explained it more clearly in a much earlier post.)In other words, his works are meant to be read aloud. If you listen to an audio presentation of LoTR, you will hear this.

This has turned out to be a much more interesting discussion than I dreamed! What fascinating stories you all tell … family histories are so often rife with astonishing tales, aren’t they? I’m glad that so many of you understand what I was getting at in my OP. I find that particularly as I age, I long to know more about those who came before me. I have done some genealogical work, as did my grandmother many years ago, and at least we know where our forebears on both sides came from (for the most part). It has long been rumored that there is Native American ancestry in my family, but we have been unable to pinpoint that exactly, and I’d love to know for sure. Anyway, this discussion prompted me to take out the very old photo album that was in my aunt’s possession before she passed away. It contains photos of my ancestors going back to the Spanish-American War, and is something I desperately need to preserve. (Right now, it’s in an album that is falling apart at the seams.) Part of the trouble that so many young people seem to have is in envisioning the old people in their lives as young people themselves. My maternal grandmother was always “old” to me … even when she was in her 50s, she seemed quite old. Shortly before she died, I learned that she had been on a girls’ basketball team when she was a teenager. Imagine! My “old” grandmother, who was overweight and crippled with arthritis, a basketball player! I also came into possession of some photos of her as a girl that I had never seen before, and it truly put her in a whole new light. She was once young. She was once vibrant with quite likely very similar hopes and dreams to those that I had. If it’s so “easy” to relegate those that we KNOW to the time and place in which we know them, then it’s all the easier to do so when it comes to historical figures (or even just everyday people from the past) that we do not. I’m really going to make an effort to try to think of those “bygone folks” as wholly human and not merely characters – or worse, caricatures. The book I’m reading on Billy the Kid delves into the difficulties of frontier life in the 1800s, and talks of how devastating tuberculosis was at the time. On our recent trip to New Mexico, we visited a national monument near Las Cruces where the ruins of an old sanitarium stood. We also saw a house in Lincoln that had been set up as a sort of makeshift ward for “consumptive” patients. It’s mind-boggling to think of how many died from that terrible disease, and the lengths that those who survived went to in order to overcome. I too wonder if the difficulties of just making it to a ripe old age impacted how people thought and talked and otherwise conducted themselves on a day-to-day basis. I have to think they probably had a much stronger grasp of “not sweating the small stuff” than we do in our modern, technologically-advanced era.

I've been flitting between books for a couple weeks now: reading a few pages of one, then setting it down and picking up another. I did manage to finish a couple, one of which was a delightful supposed-diary of a 18th century girl on the Grand Tour: The Diary of a Young Lady of Fashion in the Year 1764-1765 by Cleone Knox, by Magdalen King-Hall. I picked it up (you can find an e-book facsimile version on Amazon for just a couple dollars) based on Washington Post book critic Michael Dirda's comment: “Any devotee of the great Georgette Heyer is bound to enjoy “The Diary of a Young Lady of Fashion in the Year 1764-1765” by Cleone Knox. Once regarded as the genuine 18th-century journal of a sassy upper-class Irish miss, it’s actually a jeu d’esprit written in 1924 by the 20-year-old Magdalen King-Hall." Since finishing the Cleone Knox 'diary,' I've been flipping between a book by Gordon Childe on European prehistory, John Garth's "The Worlds of J.R.R.Tolkien: the places that inspired Middle-Earth" (recommended by the Post's garden columnist), and my Christmas present, David Sibley's What It's Like to Be a Bird.