Santa Claus

A seasonal fragment from "Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone" by Eduardo Galeano:

"The first rendering of Santa Claus, published in 1863 in Harpers of New York, showed a heft little gnome entering a chimney. He issued from the hand of the artist Thomas Nast, vaguely inspired by the legend of Saint Nicholas.

Christmas of 1930 saw Santa Claus working for Coca-Cola. Before then he did not wear a suit and generally preferred to wear blue or green. The artist Haddon Sundblom dressed him in the company colors, bright red with white piping, and gave him the features familiar to us all. Every child's friend has a white beard, laughs all the time, travels by sleigh, and is so plump that no one can figure out how he gets down the world's chimneys loaded with presents and carrying a Coke in each hand.

Neither can anyone figure out what he has to do with Christ."

House Museum

In the house museum, objects that remain [or may have remained] from the life of one “important” man are immobilized and placed on display. But Pushkin’s quill is only important, magical, and full of culture because in the years since he used it [or might have used it], we have canonized him—literally made him holy, mythic, spiritual. To really feel something in the house museum, you have to forget that history, time, and your own mind are the things that have given the objects their meanings—not “reality,” and certainly not “the things in themselves.”

The same kind of forgetting is at work in social mythologies about history. When we visit ruins, museums, foreign countries, antique shops, archives, etc. for the sake of recapturing the “past”—we often forget the role we ourselves have played [and the role played by time] in giving that past its meaning. Give objects a break. They have no meaning without us.

-Storm

In lieu of Personal Introductions

The German literary movement of Sturm und Drang was relatively short-lived, lasting just around twenty years, and it was ultimately undermined by its own proponents (e.g. Goethe), who dismissed it as youthful folly and turned to other styles. But for that brevity of its movement-form, Sturm und Drang as a concept is omnipresent. We love storms! Rage! Fire! Exclamation points! It was a dark and stormy night...

And so, to christen this blog, and to explain the title image, I quote two authors who have nothing to do with the German movement of Sturm und Drang but everything to do with the concepts of Storm und Drunk.

Midway in the journey of our life
I came to myself in a dark wood,
for the strait way was lost.

-Dante Alighieri, The Inferno, trans. by Robert and Jean Hollander

Receive thy new possessor: One who brings
A mind not to be chang'd by Place or Time.
The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n.

John Milton, Paradise Lost, available online via Dartmouth's Milton Reading Room.

<3
-Drunk