S. Worthen | Weblog

Be careful in choosing your major research projects. My PhD dissertation dealt with windmills, sandglasses, and mechanical clocks, and friends and family have been giving me instances of all of them ever since. (It dealt with eyeglasses too; strangely, no one has given me any of those.) I realized long ago that - whether or not I even wanted to - I should never, ever publish a book on the history of garden gnomes. It would doom me to receive them as gifts for the rest of my life. If you had somehow missed the ubiquity of these objects in my life - not garden gnomes, the others - then it might not be clear what was part of the inspiration for what happened a week ago.

A week ago, easterbunny challenged nineteen of us volunteers to collect specific things over the course of one week. My assignment was this: "Tell me about every London (or Paris) windmill - old, new-fangled, pub name, streetname, unexpected presence in a painting or photo - that you see in the next week."

I've liberally applied my instructions to all kinds of mills, wind-powered or not.

( The London Collection... )

( The Paris Collection... )