![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Feb. 18th, 2010 01:53 pmLast night I was presented with a red fabric toilet seat cover by Kaaron Warren. You know how friends, when they travel, bring you back something special? Well, this was my present from Fiji.
I passed it round the table (since Kaaron was guest speaker at the regular CSFG meeting last night - and I know I am supposed to have spent the evening quietly, but she was bringing her new book and I just had to be there) and most people refused to handle it, even though it was inside a plastic bag. It was pristine and unused, straight from the shop. It could have been a lampshade cover as much as a toilet seat cover, given the basic structure, but the thought of a fabric toilet seat cover was just too much for some folks to handle.
One day I'm going to try an experiment in one of my classes. I'm going to assign random histories to various innocuous objects. For instance, I might give a paperknife a murderous past and describe a perfume in a way that suggests foul odour. And of course, I have the toilet seat cover. It would be interesting to see how students respond, I think, and to find out if their responses change either their understanding of the world around them, or their writing.
I have four litres of bouillon to deal with right now. It smells rather nice. It has, however, an evil past. A chicken and several vegetables were murdered to make it. The chicken was old and a boiler and lived a long and happy life. It's the onions who suffered untimely deaths, as they were young and charming and a bit sweet. If you feel impelled to mourn for those sad onions, you have my permission.
I passed it round the table (since Kaaron was guest speaker at the regular CSFG meeting last night - and I know I am supposed to have spent the evening quietly, but she was bringing her new book and I just had to be there) and most people refused to handle it, even though it was inside a plastic bag. It was pristine and unused, straight from the shop. It could have been a lampshade cover as much as a toilet seat cover, given the basic structure, but the thought of a fabric toilet seat cover was just too much for some folks to handle.
One day I'm going to try an experiment in one of my classes. I'm going to assign random histories to various innocuous objects. For instance, I might give a paperknife a murderous past and describe a perfume in a way that suggests foul odour. And of course, I have the toilet seat cover. It would be interesting to see how students respond, I think, and to find out if their responses change either their understanding of the world around them, or their writing.
I have four litres of bouillon to deal with right now. It smells rather nice. It has, however, an evil past. A chicken and several vegetables were murdered to make it. The chicken was old and a boiler and lived a long and happy life. It's the onions who suffered untimely deaths, as they were young and charming and a bit sweet. If you feel impelled to mourn for those sad onions, you have my permission.