a corresponding piece of paper
October 5th, 2008
I’m reading SOME INSTRUCTIONS by Stanley Crawford for a class. I had never heard of this book before. It doesn’t look like Crawford has a Wikipedia page. Last month, Bookslut put up this interview and Deb Olin Unferth interviewed him for Powell’s. Crawford and his wife run a garlic farm in New Mexico. The full title of the book is Some Instructions: Concerning the Upkeep of the House and Marriage and to My Son and Daughter Concerning the Conduct of Their Childhood. Dalkey put it out in 1996. Here are some passages:
From “The Weather”
“And here, in these changes, is an ideal topic of conversation between Husband and Wife, for the weather is something that can often be both vague and precise, certain and uncertain, pleasant and unpleasant, useful and useless, and thus is a subject that can never be truly exhausted and about which never enough can be said. No doubt you have noticed my preference for it above all other subjects. What drama lies in the air around us!”
From “The Goats”
“And as it is with the goats of the barnyard, so it is with those of the Marriage, by which I mean the genitalia, which the Husband and Wife must keep confined or penned up most of the time while also taking care to feed them well with daily rations of fodder of the appropriate kind so that they yeild up and produce the protein-rich products which they manufacture out of mere grasses and dried leaves — milk and manure…
…thus the animals of the barnyard, like those of the marriage, must remain in confinement except at such regularly scheduled times when they are led out of their pens to be milked or groomed or fed, and put back into their pens when such tasks are complete, and not allowed to roam freely about the yard. As you and I have our goats, so will other Marriages have their cattle or rabbits or pigeons or doves or even bees. Nonetheless, despite apparent differences, the principles remain essentially the same.”
From “Putting Toys Away”
“Toys are to be played with (imagine what is small and insignificant to be large and powerful, for example) and not to be employed as implements or weapons or anything else; thus a toy left carelessly about, blocking a hallway or a threshold, is likely to seem something else, that is, an irritation or an obstacle or a barrier.”
From “Reading and Writing”
“In the meantime, it would be of help to you to keep in mind this useful rule, which is that for every object in existence there should exist a corresponding piece of paper — no matter how how small, if even just a scrap.”