Category: Environment

This one’s for my sister

Wrapping paper made from reclaimed maps
For several years now my sister has been using old magazines, calendars, and the like as wrapping paper, which certainly made it easier to spot her presents under the tree. It’s a really cool idea which I’ve been emulating, including using scratch paper for calligraphy projects for wrapping.

Someone else obviously had a similar thought, and figured out how to commercialize it. The folks at forestsaver.com will sell you wrapping paper that is (apparently) cast off or unused NYC subway maps or US topo maps. I like the idea (it certainly makes more sense than printing patterns on newly manufactured paper just for wrapping), although I have to wonder at the need to actually buy this sort of thing. Most people I know are up to their ears in paper they don’t need. Lord knows I don’t need to be ordering paper like this from someone else…

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I remember snow, more than I remember snowing

Holding back the snow
This week’s Brainwashed podcast (#96, featuring releases from Giorno Poetry System), contains an excerpt from “More I Remember More”, a long, rambling set of reminiscences from Joe Brainard from an album entitled Disconnected from 1974. It included this line:

It only snowed about twice a year in Tulsa and, as I remember now, usually during the night. So, I remember snow, more than I remember snowing.

I grew up in Wichita Falls, Texas, not far south of Tulsa, and I think that was my experience of snow as well, although I’d never really thought of it that way until I heard him say those lines.

I suspect that’s why I was often thoroughly amazed in our early years in Minnesota by the sheer volume that would be falling. And we actually live in a quite dry part of the state, and so don’t really get that much snow. Still, it would be coming down in big waves, and I would stand there staring out the window instead of lecturing, much to the amusement of my students (most of whom grew up in the frozen north).

Brainard goes on to talk about not understanding why they had to shovel the snow, because it would melt so fast anyway. In Wichita Falls, we didn’t even bother, for exactly that reason. The whole town would just shut down and wait the 24 or 48 hours needed for winter to pay its respects and move along.

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