Sunday 10 June 2012

Wooden Boy: Now We Are Beginning


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File:Peanut-Butter-Jelly-Sandwich.jpg

A peanut butter and jelly sandwich, made with Skippy peanut butter and Welch's grape jelly on white bread: photo by Evan-Amos, 11 November 2010



I'm watching a man chewing a sandwich vigourously outside the window. He closes his eyes as he eats. What is happening inside his head? Is this what pleasure looks like?

He is a large man with much roundness to him.



Image, Source: digital file from intermediary roll film

Workman munching a sandwich while operating a drilling machine, Fort Loudon Dam, Tennessee Valley Authority: photo by Jack Delano, August 1942 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)

Image, Source: intermediary roll film

Ship repairers at Surrey Docks, England, making sandwiches for their lunch from American canned meat: photographer unknown: official British photo, between 1940 and 1946  (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)

Image, Source: intermediary roll film

Production. Milling machines and machine castings. Not everybody eats in the company restaurants. These big, slabby Dagwood sandwiches taste just as good at the plant as they do in the kitchen. Location: a large Midwest machine tool factory: photo by Alfred T. Palmer, January 1942 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)

Image, Source: intermediary roll film

Fiberglass manufacture, Owens-Corning, Toledo, Ohio. Two maintenance men relax for sandwiches and coffee during their lunch hours at a plant of the Owens-Corning Fiberglass Corporation: photo by Alfred T. Palmer, February 1942 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)


Wooden Boy: Now We Are Beginning, from The Little Wooden Boy, 28 April 2011

14 comments:

  1. To me the self-satisfied eater of peanut butter and jelly sandwich is no more hideous than the boor who makes a public display of his ass when he bends over. Every decent civilized person ought to recoil in horror at it

    The great Trudeau once called a Quebec premier "un mangeur de hot dogs"...how he hated that man

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  2. Hungry to know the answer. Hungry to know more than the machines, the boring work, future aches in body and mind. It is all in the sandwich. Man as sandwich, eating himself, a cannibal between machine and nature. It tastes so good. Of course we know how it tastes, want to be there, too, a momentary animal, belegtes Brot, living the simple, good life of a vanishing species. More sandwiches makes it so.

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  3. Excellent, and oddly reassuring.

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  4. Hello there, my name is Humanity. Though I have few teeth, I am eating a sandwich.

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  5. This is really funny. Now I'm going to make a sandwich.

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  6. This bit of field research is proving either that the eating of sandwiches is a common and universal thing, or that it is contagious at this blog. Possibly both.

    Of course in the West Midlands where Wooden Boy comes from, Skippy and Welch's are unknown delights.

    Still I could not bring myself to picture closely the more high-toned sorts of sandwiches, nor the kinds of sandwiches which contained things that once breathed and possessed self-locomotion.

    The most harrowing moment in the research came in the consideration of rubber sandwiches. Actually they were not meant to be et. "Baltimore, Maryland. Rubber sandwiches which form a cushion between the thread and the axle of PCC trolley wheels. These are hard to get now," expained the photographer, Marjory Collins, in her caption for the picture, which she took in April of 1943.

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  7. We are hearing

    these days
    in our civilised world
    reports about people
    eating peoples’ flesh

    sounds about right

    Oh and the vicarious
    pleasure to be found in it . . .



    The Brits certainly look like the ragged runts in the litter!

    My hat off to the Earl of Sandwich and whoever invented toast and thick-cut marmalade

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  8. Tom, I have had my share of rubber sandwiches from machines when i worked long hours in tv

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  9. Oh, it's too close to dinner ...
    you got me thinking about Zen and eating and somehow, pouf, Edward Lear appeared:

    There was an old man of Dumbree,
    Who taught little owls to drink tea;
    For he said, 'To eat mice,
    Is not proper or nice'
    That amiable man of Dumbree.

    ~ Edward Lear

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  10. "The Brits certainly look like the ragged runts in the litter"

    Steady on, Mr. Millar. If this is in reference to the lads from Surrey, I'll have you know what you're looking at there is lean British beef!

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  11. My apologies to all Brits including myself (Scottish is pushing it somewhat)- all 5ft 10in and 135 lbs of me.

    Just an observation that they look in contrast to their American counterparts rather undernourished
    and less dapper in their attire

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  12. Only an observation that they look less nourished and more ragged than their US counterparts No slight intended I am rather on the lean side myself

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  13. As a disinterested observer... but are Irish ever really a disinterested observer?

    I will say there seems an equity of skeletal frame amongst us though I suspect Wooden Boy and know Colin to be more robust. Not that it would take much. But I expect that at the Communal Table in Paradise we would the three be able to sit down together and eat some sort of sandwich not containing a thing which once breathed and had locomotion, nor a body part of the great Trudeau.

    For this is a civilised continent despite what Dickens thought.

    And speaking of which -- Don, thanks for pointing the way to me. As so many times before.

    Taking up your pertinent Zen apparition here on Tuesday next...Insh'Allah.

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  14. Ahh .. This sounds great. Bread is for people who dont have anything else to eat, I always believed it until sometime back. Of course the sandwiches taste great but we try not to eat them.

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