Google Voyage

From arborsculpture to footbinding

This morning a link on Metafiler sent me off on a very nearly round trip google voyage. My iternerary was as follows: Set sail from How To Grow A Chair, about arborsculpture (1, 2, 3, 4, 5.) which docked at Dan Ladd’s Molded gourds. Evidently his gourds are modern equivalents of Paoqi traditional chinese artifacts created mostly to hold crickets. So next up were cricket cages (1, 2, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12.) and cricket boxes. From here my ship docked at the beautiful and rich port of Chinese cricket culture, located in the land of cultural etymology. Seems insects in Chinese culture are quite important. Crickets for example did more than just sing. Which brought me to cricket fighting (1, 2.) From there it was only a short trip to China the beautiful which lead directly into the port of oracle bone script (12.) Interesting trip so far. The next stop featured 300 Tang Poems. This in turn lead me somehow to Confucius, specifically his Analects, The Great Learning, and The Doctrine of Man. From there I jaunted over to portraits of Chinese emperors and portraits of Chinese physicians... and without even realizing it my trip was on its last leg. Chinese medicine inevitably brought me to the ancient practice of footbinding (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.) which if you think about it, is really almost exactly the same thing as arborsculpture, only practiced on the human foot rather than a tree. I had come very nearly full circle. My voyage was over.

07.29. filed under: link dump.


I’m reminded of the recent 100th anniversary of the San Francisco earthquake; an old Chinese-American woman was on teevee reminiscing about it. She and her baby brother were home, the parents unable to reach them, and like many survivors they had to walk out of the city. They were in the care of a neighbor, a lady with bound feet, who was humiliated by her difficulty walking out of a wrecked city.

The bound foot wasn’t considered beautiful by itself, but in these wee pointy shoes which would be left on, even during sex. Like those little chef hats that go on a lamb rack. Which is very very wee-ahd, as Carl the landlord would say.

posted on 08.04 at 02:38 AM.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

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