I saw this cool old house in Deerfield, Massachusetts, this past weekend. How did such a house come to pass? Did the future owner say to the builder "I'd like to have a circle of snowflakes around the entire house. Can you do that?" (Pan to builder rolling his eyes.) Or maybe this was one of four homes in some early version of a planned development (Quail Hollow Estates? Running Brook Farms?) and the other three seasons burned down---maybe robin, flower, and leaf? It would certainly be a perfect house for Snowflake Bentley. The colors are lovely, especially the red sashes, and the front bay window must look wonderful from the inside.
And speaking of snow, there was a nice essay posted the other day about the evolution of Morris's socialist philosophy by a blogger named "Snowball". The blog's subtitle is "Historical materialism is the theory of the proletarian revolution," a quote by Georg Lukacs, the founder of western Marxism. Now I can't say I understand this quote at all, or even know what western Marxism is --- in fact, historical materialism sounds more like the life philosophy of a certain class of serial renovators, people possibly also obsessed with "bungalow style". Snowball, in his post, quotes Fiona MacCarthy: "Early in 1883 Morris crossed the "river of fire" and became a revolutionary socialist........This final transformation of the cosseted son of the capitalist classes, whose family fortunes derived from copper mining in the valley of the Tamar, was described by EP Thompson, the historian of the English working classes, as "among the great conversions of the world"."
William Morris was so frigging great at everything he did!
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