Giornale Adriatico-Mediterraneo VIII: The Writing on the Wall

photograph: Hallie Cohen

Francesco Proietti is amongst other things a paper maker in the town of Bevagna, in Umbria. He also makes bells which take three months to be produced if you are thinking of hanging one from the minaret of your house in order to call the kids home to dinner. He also raises peacocks. Proietti is a bear of a man with a big white beard whose lonely advocacy of a dying craft is further emphasized by a rough hewn appearance that includes a pair of missing front teeth. Paper first came to Amalfi and Sicily by way China and the Arab world in the year l000. The town of Fabriano, near Bologna, is still a center for the production of fine papers used by many artists. Just as St. Francis helped to usher in the Renaissance in the fifteen century, the advent of papermaking had an equivalently revolutionary impact four centuries earlier. Sure you had cuneiform writing on stone, but paper facilitated writing and hence the kind of ideas without which there might not have been a St. Francis in the first place. Yet how is paper actually made? Even back in medieval times it was sold by the ream as it today. The ream of paper you buy in Staples is produced in a slightly more automated process (to say the least) than the age old tradition which Proietti prosecutes in his studio. Cotton and linen rags are first collected and then mixed in with water and lye which helps to disinfect, loosen the fibers and remove the color. Then they are brought over to a water wheel which powers a wooden cam shaft, where they're pounded, immersed in another solution, removed in a mold and then into a press which yields deckle edge sheets that are then pressed again. Proietti is one of the attractions in Bevagna’s annual medieval festival, Il Circuito Culturale dei Mestieri Medievali, which occurs annually. And when you see all the care that goes into making one sheet of his paper, you begin to see the writing on the wall.

The Oxymoronic Home Depot

Bed Bath and Beyond. Let’s analyze the name for a second. You wash up and go to bed. In order to implement these two tasks you need certain devices: a bed, a sink, a toilet, sheets, pillowcases and towels. Then there are the three S’s, shave, shit and shower. But what about the “Beyond” element. Is there an implication that these life processes will take us to the Great Beyond, in which case the store should definitely have an afterlife life section, with things like coffins, caskets and headstones—items which are not normally sold at Bed, Bath and Beyond. Or let’s take Home Depot. What is a depot? A place in which one stores things or from which one arrives or departs. We go to the bus depot to find the Greyhound. Home Depot is an oxymoron when you look closely at it. Home is the ultimate point of arrival, the place that travellers return to. Odysseus ended his odyssey by returning home unrecognized, except by his trusty dog Argos. Why would I want to go to a warehouse or a point of departure when I am trying to surround myself with things that make me feel at home? And then there is Staples, a store specializing in objects used in the work place or in school—notebooks, computers, pencils, erasers. You probably won’t find much carbon paper in today’s Staples since only a few eccentrics and dyed- in-the-wool old school writers use Royals. But why Staples, why not Desk, Book and Beyond, or Clips, or Hard Drives? Is it because the kind of things one purchases in Staples are the staples of life? Does it have to do with the staple, an invention which once helped people to bind things together and that is also becoming an anachronism in our drive towards paperless files. Bed, Bath and Beyond, Home Depot and Staples have replaced the mattress stores, hardware stores and stationary stores of the past, but if you take the names seriously they are all selling something which they don’t carry, which doesn't exist or doesn’t make sense.