Topical Guide 367
Mark Dorset
Simulacra, Miniature; Scale Models
Projects, Practical and Impractical
Work versus Play
Art: Literature: Responding to: Sharing the Experience
HERB BUILT ME A MODEL of Speedy’s Reliable Service. It was wonderfully complete. There were wooden cars, gas pumps with little rubber hoses, an air pump with a thinner red hose, cans of oil and antifreeze on the shelves inside, a grease rack, tires, tools, a trash heap of engine parts and old tires in the back, and best of all, miniatures of Mr. Nuts and Miss Gumball. Tiny pebbles that Lorna had collected at the beach, each selected for its nutlike shape, filled Mr. Nuts’s head, and BB’s, painted in gumball colors, filled Miss Gumball’s.
At about the time that I began work on “The Static of the Spheres,” Albertine brought home two large cartons of wood from which she planned to build a miniature of Small’s Hotel. She had in mind a true miniature, not just a representation of the exterior. She would build with miniature framing, tiny nails, sheathing, and clapboards. Best of all, she had bought a set of tiny, precise tools: a square, a plane, saws with teensy teeth, a mitre box, and so on. She was at work on her small hotel throughout my work on this, and I suppose that the rhythms of her miniature construction—the tap-tap-tap of her little hammer, the back-and-forth whisper of her little saw—underlie some passages.
The following comes from the Model Junkyard (“Scratch Built Dreams”).
Art: Literature: Responding to: Sharing the Experience
Food: Kartoffelklösse
THE FIVE OF US ate, I calculate, two hundred fifty Sunday dinners at the dining room table, making allowances for Sundays when we were on vacation and Sunday dinners we ate as guests in other people’s houses. Of these, about eighty were pot roast with string beans and Lorna’s warm German potato salad, seventy were fricasseed chicken and dumplings, sixty were sauerbraten with red cabbage and potato dumplings (Kartoffelklösse), ten (Thanksgivings and Christmases) were turkey, and the remaining forty were a miscellany.
See also: Toys: Models: Ship Models TG 36; Literature and Art: Responding to, Engaging with, Interpreting TG 101
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