note for an essay on frances stark
When I was very young, and needed something to occupy me on long visits to my grandparents’ house, I used to make scrapbooks of pictures of flowers. I wasn’t really into flowers on any strong scientific or aesthetic level so I don’t really know why I had this rather insipid hobby - and it could have been pictures of birds or fruit - but I have a strong and pointless acquisitive urge (later I was going to get into sticker collecting with a vengeance) and it seems like flowers are the sort of image you can find one or two of in any given magazine or brochure no matter what it’s about. And after all, they are pretty. Once the colour supplement had been done with on a Sunday it was handed to me and, scissors in hand, I savoured the infinitesimal but apparently sufficient pleasure of hunting through for flowers.
The end of the hobby came when my indulgent grandparents began saving their seedling catalogues for me. Those things were simply grids and grids of images of flowers with their prices, printed in gaudy offset. My cup really did run over then: industriously I set to, snipping out each and every picture and leaving behind thin lattices of paper to dangle out from between the covers of the catalogue like a slip peeking far too rudely out from underneath a dress.
The pleasure went on the afternoon I realised I was merely making a reproduction of a seedling catalogue, and not even a particularly nice one, because when in full scrapbook production mode I was not the neatest person with a pritt stick.
The end of the hobby came when my indulgent grandparents began saving their seedling catalogues for me. Those things were simply grids and grids of images of flowers with their prices, printed in gaudy offset. My cup really did run over then: industriously I set to, snipping out each and every picture and leaving behind thin lattices of paper to dangle out from between the covers of the catalogue like a slip peeking far too rudely out from underneath a dress.
The pleasure went on the afternoon I realised I was merely making a reproduction of a seedling catalogue, and not even a particularly nice one, because when in full scrapbook production mode I was not the neatest person with a pritt stick.