There you go, time-posting again, Teresa.

Posted November 10, 2007 5:09 PM by Michael Roberts

That's what I get for scribbling notes on the backs of old posts.

Posted November 10, 2007 5:16 PM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

Oh darn, now my comment doesn't make any sense. Well, it probably didn't anyway. But I now know (and am duly impressed by) your secret.

Posted November 10, 2007 5:21 PM by Michael Roberts

[*]

Posted November 10, 2007 5:25 PM by abi

The spinning wheel? Straw into gold, duh.

(No, I'm not back. I just felt the mention of yarn.)

Posted November 10, 2007 5:27 PM by TexAnne

Those are magnificent! I'm almost afraid to look at too many of them.

Teresa, your line about "Tesla coils make everything better" reminds me to ask: did the Tor offices ever get their van de Graaf generator?

Posted November 10, 2007 5:27 PM by Xopher

TexAnne @5:
The spinning wheel? Straw into gold, duh.

Perhaps, or perhaps it's just for pricking fingers. Imagine Sleeping Beauty's blood on that, adding just a touch of the Gothic to the otherwise pristine purity of the form...

Posted November 10, 2007 5:36 PM by abi

You don't really need a Van de Graaff generator; a Wimshurst machine is a nice steampunk equivalent.

Posted November 10, 2007 6:11 PM by theophylact

Some of the captions imply these are available for purchase, but no prices are mentioned, nor am I finding any ordering information. That probably means it's completely outside my price range and they can't survive being shipped any way, but does anybody know for sure?

Posted November 10, 2007 6:26 PM by Todd Larason

True, abi. Very few people know the story of what happened to the spindle, or indeed the entire wheel, after Sleeping Beauty pricked her finger. The tale is told in The Red Wheel, which is difficult to find these days. Some excerpts follow:

When the spinning wheel realized how she'd been tricked into harming Beauty, she herself turned as red as the blood on her spindle, and so she remained until the end of her days; from that day forward she was known as the Red Wheel.

She fled the palace in shame, so quickly that not even the rapidly-growing brambles could stop her. She vowed revenge upon the Wicked Fairy, but how could she, a humble spinning wheel, hope to get it?

The bloodstains from the Wicked Fairy's horrific demise did not show on the Red Wheel at all, and when she brought the thread to the Weaver no questions were asked. In fact the Weaver praised the thread as the best gut thread she'd ever worked. She rapidly fulfilled the Red Wheel's commission.

Having fulfilled her oath, and placed the promised garters on Princess Beauty, the Red Wheel retired to her accustomed place in the corner of the room, where she had lived contented until the King's decree. Even when the foolish young prince assumed that it was his kiss which awakened Beauty, and not the expiration of the curse, she was content.

Posted November 10, 2007 6:33 PM by Xopher

Wow. Nice tesla coil.

I almost expected to find a working vacuum tube AM radio or something. Hm. Functioning vacuum tube art. That could be cool.

Posted November 10, 2007 6:36 PM by Greg London

Wow. This reminds me of a clock a friend of mine built... entirely out of wood. Yes, he designed the clockwork mechanisms, carved the gears etc., then fit it together. It also kept the correct time.

Posted November 10, 2007 6:49 PM by John Chu

How cruel of you, Xopher, to tease us with a few choice excerpts. At least tell us who the author is.

Posted November 10, 2007 7:29 PM by Sajia Kabir

How cruel of you, Xopher, to tease us with a few choice excerpts. At least tell us who the author is.

Posted November 10, 2007 7:29 PM by Sajia Kabir

Has Tim Powers seen these? They could likely turn into a novel or two in his hands.

(I'm just reading Expiration Date this weekend; thanks to Tor for republishing it.)

Posted November 10, 2007 8:07 PM by Clifton Royston

They seem like artifacts from another timeline, another earth, magically transported into ours. Not just the artifacts of alchemy, but of arts magical created by beings not quite like us.

Posted November 10, 2007 8:18 PM by Fragano Ledgister

Those pieces of art are lovely. I wonder how long it takes to produce something like that seismograph?

Posted November 10, 2007 8:25 PM by Steve C.

Ever since I learned to spin, Cinderella's story has bothered me. Most spinning wheels don't have spindles. Or any sharp parts at all. To get something sharp to prick yourself on, you either need a charka (wrong continent), or a distaff.

Posted November 10, 2007 8:42 PM by Cynthia Wood

I couldn't help it. I can't afford a teaspoon right now, but I had to e-mail him to ask about an orrery. Doesn't it just seem right and proper that there should be one? Articulated, moving, each heavenly body a glass globe holding something different, something right.

I don't need to own it - though if I got it, I know who I'd give it to - I just want it to exist somewhere.

Posted November 10, 2007 9:18 PM by Calluna V.

Fragano 16: Yes, exactly my feeling. Nonhuman artwork. Jaw-droppingly brilliant.

Cynthia 18: I wondered about that. I suppose there was a goof somewhere...and the old deaf woman in the tale was spinning with a distaff, and someone who only knew spinning by reputation mistranslated or misinterpreted it.

Posted November 10, 2007 9:26 PM by Xopher

Sajia 13: The author of the complete work is not known.

Posted November 10, 2007 9:28 PM by Xopher

#9

Apparently at least one of the items is available through Neiman Marcus in Dallas.

Posted November 10, 2007 9:38 PM by James D. Macdonald

If the artist information on the site is still accurate, his work can be seen at Seaview Art Glass in Cazadero, CA. that's about 130 miles north of where I live and 20 - 30 miles from the "heart of the Sonoma wine country", Santa Rosa. Sounds like a wonderful weekend get away idea - see his work and visit some wineries, too. Hey, Medievalist - you reading this? *hint*

Posted November 10, 2007 9:48 PM by Dawno

(views bio)
Nice picture. And the glass things are quite beautiful, too ;)
Seriously, though, wasn't there another West Coast glass artist who made similarly beautiful lamps and ceiling glass objects, whose wares were bought by famous Hollywood stars? I remember a CNN news segment in the late 90s featuring this artist. Are they the same artist? They could have been teacher and pupil, on the other hand.

Posted November 10, 2007 10:09 PM by Sajia Kabir

Calluna V, you have just... brain. With the melting. There are so many things you could do with it, alchemically, astronomically, symbolically, oh, and it would *move*....
My brain is not sitting to attention, but only because it is slumping over to the floor to have its belly rubbed with that idea.

Posted November 10, 2007 10:11 PM by Diatryma

See, this is why we need an immediate socialist revolution, so that artistically talented people from all over the world will be able to escape toil and create gorgeous art that will have the sole and virtuous function of moving people.
Overworked editors may smile wryly, but I have seen beautiful art produced by people recovering from mental illnesses and the associated distress. And not sappy 'granola' art, either. It won't make them money, but it should give them self-worth.

Posted November 10, 2007 10:20 PM by Sajia Kabir

Cynthia @13 and Xopher @20: The http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/perrault01.html
Perrault version has the old woman using a distaff. I also remember seeing an old russian illustration that showed a Baba Yaga type holding a distaff...

Posted November 10, 2007 11:11 PM by Emma

Crud. Link didn't work. Let's see:
Perrault version

Posted November 10, 2007 11:12 PM by Emma

What kind of beast is vulnerable to a glass caltrop? Alien visitors to Earth, investigating the cause of atmospheric changes, per Hal Clement's The Nitrogen Fix.

Posted November 10, 2007 11:14 PM by Joel Polowin

Saija Kabir, I think you mean Dale Chihuly.

Posted November 10, 2007 11:36 PM by Marilee

Thanks for the link, Marilee! Mr Chihuly's work is as stunning as I remembered. Must ... resist... urge ... to call him Good Ctulhu...

Posted November 10, 2007 11:54 PM by Sajia Kabir

Sajia @ 24. Are you maybe thinking of Dale Chihuly?
He did a series of works and displays for the 1998 Festival of Sydney, including a 'chandelier' for one foyer of the Sydney Opera House and outdoor installations in the Royal Botanic Garden's ponds & thereabouts. There was a bunch of publicity about him at the time that seemed to say he was quite a big name and had been for some years.

Posted November 10, 2007 11:58 PM by Epacris

Greg London screv:

Functioning vacuum tube art. That could be cool.

Would you settle for a Nixie tube clock?

You can buy Nixie tubes here.

Posted November 11, 2007 12:00 AM by joel hanes

Gurk! Took too long trying to find a picture of one of his Sydney pieces, and didn't check on updating of thread. Sorry.

Posted November 11, 2007 12:01 AM by Epacris

Emma 28: So my wild (if mildly educated guess) about the distaff was right? Hot diggety. Now if only we could find out who first mistakenly put a spinning wheel in there.

It had to be before The Red Wheel was written, but then most things did happen before that.

Hmm...no way to convert the story into The Red Distaff, I'm afraid. The Wicked Fairy is broken on the wheel before having her intestines drawn out and spun into thread. Somehow a distaff...nah, never work.

Posted November 11, 2007 12:11 AM by Xopher

Speaking of Cthulhu, oh god my eyes.

Posted November 11, 2007 12:33 AM by Julie L.

What kind of beast is vulnerable to a glass caltrop? What are you administering with a glass syringe that’s five and a half feet long? What fiber, what yarn, requires a fully functional glass spinning wheel?

What good is a glass dagger?

Posted November 11, 2007 2:04 AM by Zarquon

Julie L. @ 36

Wait, that's not hentai ...

Posted November 11, 2007 2:59 AM by Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers)

The Chihuly Bridge of Glass is in Tacoma, WA, just south of Seattle, at the Museum of Glass. If you're in the area, and love glass work, it's worth a few hours stop. There are installations and exhibits from a number of artists, and several of them are, well fabulous may be overused, but it works in this context. It's probably even bigger and more interesting now than when I was there last, which was four years ago or so.

Chihuly likes large installations of very curved abstract forms, not at all like Palko's work, except in the sense of appearing alien to our normal world. Palko's pieces are amazingly precise and of truly impressive craftsmanship. I've known scientific instrument machinists who would have been proud to do that level of work in any medium. let alone in glass.

Posted November 11, 2007 3:13 AM by Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers)

Maybe clockpunk?

Posted November 11, 2007 3:32 AM by individualfrog

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. There's no accounting for tastes.

It's the only explanation I have, and also the only defense.

Posted November 11, 2007 5:27 AM by Dave Luckett

Emma @28, Xopher @35, a quick glance at the links off the wikipedia page and some googling has found me a version from 1919 where it's a spinning wheel. There's a 1910 version which mentions spinning wheels, but it's a distaff that actually puts her to sleep. Interestingly the 1910 one names the Princess as Aurora, the name Disney used.

(While looking I found an article on Alexander Solzhenitsyn's The Red Wheel; sadly it doesn't look to be as much fun as the one Xopher refers to.)

Posted November 11, 2007 7:33 AM by Neil Willcox

#36: Uh, they couldn't get a dinosaur?

Posted November 11, 2007 9:55 AM by Jon Meltzer

Chilhuly did a couple of installations here at Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden. Some of my pictures for those of you who have never seen the garden installations. They are magnificent:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/emmacuesta/sets/72157594518004228/

Sorry for the no link. Every time I try to preview the entry it deletes the link?

Posted November 11, 2007 10:22 AM by Emma

Re: Sleeping beauty: There's also the walking wheel (also known as a great wheel). Predates the flyer mechanism on what now gets thought of as a "traditional wheel", has a great pointy thing that I'd undoubtedly stick myself with if I had one.

Posted November 11, 2007 12:58 PM by TChem

Utterly cool! I'm a big fan of Chihuly, and these works are quite different but just as jaw-droppingly wonderful. (And yes, the artist is cute too.) I've now saved the website with my favorites for arts and crafts.

Posted November 11, 2007 1:06 PM by Faren Miller

Hey, TexAnne (5). For someone who's not here, you seem awfully present. And you're right; straw into gold it must be. Or possibly really good long-fiber undyed silk top; it has the right surreal angelic feel to it.

*Abi, I'd posted a particle, but it was taking forever to finish posting, so I typed the second particle I had waiting into the entry box for Making Light. When the first particle finished posting, I summoned up a new entry form in particles, and copied the second particle to it.

Meanwhile, that entry form sat there in Making Light. When I went to post about the glassware, I selected and deleted the draft text of the second particle and wrote my new post for Making Light. I remembered to adjust the posting timestamp for the length of time it took me to write it, but I forgot that that ML entry form had been hanging around since yesterday.

Thus, when I posted it, it showed up with a false early date, and three other posts in front of it. Michael Roberts saw it that way before we fixed it.

Xopher (6), we never did get our well-deserved Van de Graaf generator. It's very sad.

Theophylact (8), the Wimshurst Machine is very nice and all, but when you've got your heart set on a Van de Graaf generator, it's just not the same.

John Chu (12), you used to be able to buy a book whose pages you could cut up and assemble into a working paper clock that by all accounts kept very good time. I went looking to see whether someone had put it online. I didn't find it, but I did find a nifty project for kids: a working clock you can make out of paper, paper clips, and a compact disk.

(If that design (and waster CDs) had been around at the time, small Jim Macdonald would inevitably have built one.)

Clockmaking is a fetish activity for woodworkers. It isn't high tech -- the Black Forest was exporting vernacular cuckoo clocks as of the 18th C. -- but it does take precision, and has lots of fiddly bits to play with.

Some specimens: relatively simple peg-gear clocks.

Wooden-Gear-Clocks.com, which sells make-it-from-scratch plans, just-assemble-it kits, and finished clocks for wimps; but proudly displays a page of mutant clocks their customers have made from them.

Here we cross an invisible line, passing out of conventional woodworking, and into the territory of CNC and non-CNC machinists. What they teach us is that the future need not be full of technologically deracinated software-users; also, that the super-clean streamlined unornamented future was a delusion. Humans like oddity, ornamentation, complication for its own sake, and personally meaningful environments. When you give them control of the means of prototyping and production, that's what they make.

But I digress.

Gary's Wooden Clocks is a fabulous site, full of useful bits. It also has a well-photographed gallery of noteworthy clocks in which each photo leads to more information on that clock, and in many cases to the clockmaker's own site.

The gallery and its links are a trove of daft marvels. For instance, it leads to J. R. Beall's site. He makes excellent wooden-geared clocks, but he also makes madly complicated kaleidoscopes. (Note: kaleidoscopes are also a maker-fetish.) Lest you think I loosely throw around terms like madly complicated, consider this one. That's a wooden chain drive on the side.

Alternate destinations: Dale Mathis (gallery). Ungehobelte Präzisionsmaschinen und andere Statuen von Ludvik Cejp / aus Holz, Primitivismus und noch anderen Ingredienzen. The website of Rob Pirtle, a.k.a. Rabbit's Clocks, which is subdivided into clocks, not clocks (yes, there's a kaleidoscope, with a wooden chain drive), and miscellaneous/under construction. I think it took me an extra step to get to Clayton Boyer's Clocks, but I don't remember how I did it. He shows off some of them on YouTube. Demetris Papakyriacou turns out to be the guy who made the most striking mutant clock out of Wooden-Gear-Clocks.com's designs. He has a robust imagination.

...Does it qualify as a digression when it's that big?

Posted November 11, 2007 2:09 PM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

I'm afraid to inquire about prices for anything on that site (I really want the lube rack. Or the caltrop. Or anything with bones.) for fear that I will barely be able to afford it.

Posted November 11, 2007 2:45 PM by debcha

Fans of this type of thing all know Kaden's Eccentric Genius site, right?

He leans more to alt-history 1800s-1920s flavor: brass, cast aluminum, miniature working ballistas, Gysin dream machines, hypnodisks, etc. If I were rich, I'd definitely be ordering a few custom pieces from him.

Posted November 11, 2007 3:13 PM by Clifton Royston

Teresa @ 47: Serendipitously, I have a copy of "The All Paper Clock / L'Horloge Tout Papier", by Wrebbit, that's spent the last 10 years in my stack of projects to get around to someday. (This eBay auction shows a photo of the box.) I don't think I'm ever going to get to it, and I've been trying to decide what to do with it — it's too neat and too specialized a thing for me to want to just leave it on the freecycling table in our building's laundry room.

If you or someone else here would like it and would build it, I'd love to know that it was actually being used as it ought to be.

Posted November 11, 2007 3:19 PM by Lexica

Clifton (15), Tim Powers, yes. Or possibly Gregory Keyes.

Fragano (16), alternate reality, yes; but I think it's still within the known range of human mind and hand.

Calluna (19): I love orreries. I've always wanted one with brass gears, and semiprecious stone planets, and everything labeled in Eighteenth Century cursive. It might be sufficient to know that one exists somewhere.

Posted November 11, 2007 6:28 PM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

TNH #51: You're right.

Posted November 11, 2007 7:27 PM by Fragano Ledgister

Teresa: I haven't read any Greg Keyes other than The Briar King, and haven't yet got to the rest of that series. I just looked up his bibliography and discovered the Newton's Cannon series. I guess I'll have to put that on my list to get to?

The other writer I initially thought of on seeing them is Teresa Edgerton, and her lovely sciento-magical books like The Gnome's Engine, but I forgot about her while posting my reply.

Now this theme of surreal or alchemical technological instruments is bringing back another odd book to my mind, which I can't quite place. Does anybody recall a book about interstellar spaceships which travel by musically harmonizing to the music of the spheres, according to a kind of alchemical technology? As I recall the main character was a young woman fighting prejudice to be accepted as a pilot/musician/navigator. I believe it was a series, but I never read beyond the first book.

Posted November 11, 2007 8:08 PM by Clifton Royston

Possibly Celestial Matters, by Richard Garfinkle? It's a sort of SF novel set in a world in which the ancient Greek and Chinese theories of how the universe works are actually true, and those principles are used to launch a space ship.

Posted November 11, 2007 8:21 PM by Joel Polowin

I was looking at the gorgeous, sophisticated pictures, including the ones from the wildly expensive magazine layouts, and naturally imagining an artist working in New York. Nope! His studio is in Vancouver, Washington, right across the river from my home in Portland. He's had several shows in galleries here in Portland, which I tragically missed.

The Pacific NW is a hotbed of glass. Around here one is expected to look down on Dale Chihuly a bit, but I like his putti all the same. The Museum of Glass in Tacoma is well worth a visit. They don't have a big permanent collection, so you're taking potluck on what artists are currently being exhibited. They always have an artist in residence, and you can watch the work in progress, which is very cool. The last time I was there, one of the exhibitors was William Morris. I was loving his stuff, when I turned a corner and said "Holy shit!". Do you suppose that's the reaction most artists are going for? What I came upon was an installation called "Cache". I've found pictures of it online, but they don't begin to do justice to seeing it in person. He does a lot of things that don't look like glass -- funerary urns, bones -- yet they have this subtle translucence that is luscious.

Posted November 11, 2007 8:27 PM by Janet

Once I learned to spin, I assumed the reason for the spindle in Sleeping Beauty is that the story predates the flyer wheel. Walking wheels and similarly pointy contraptions have coexisted with flyer wheels for a long while, but I was under the impression that they came first by a significant margin.

Now, what I *really* want to know is, what the heck fiber was Arachne spinning, to get it so fine?

Posted November 11, 2007 9:54 PM by Nona

Calluna@19:

The kind of orrery you describe exists in literature, in John Crowley's "Little, Big." So big and detailed, you can sit in it and watch the planets move.

Posted November 11, 2007 10:06 PM by cherish

Clifton Royston@53: That's Melissa Scott's "Silence Leigh" trilogy, Five-Twelfths of Heaven, Silence in Solitude, and The Empress of Earth. (I originally typed The Empress of Solitude, an interesting conflation, and couldn't remember a third; got the right titles by googling, of course.)

Posted November 12, 2007 5:30 AM by David Goldfarb

Nona (#56): Now, what I *really* want to know is, what the heck fiber was Arachne spinning, to get it so fine? Her own spider silk, I'd guess.

Posted November 12, 2007 9:08 AM by Faren Miller

Ticking away in a clock shop just a few miles from here is a rare wooden clock (the fourth of only four made) which lacks a normal gear train. The escapement is a series of wooden flip-flops which step the motion down by a factor of 32; this moves a 60 tooth ratchet gear to move the minute hand, and a mechanism which I don't understand to reduce this by 12 to move the hour hand.

Posted November 12, 2007 12:05 PM by C. Wingate

TNH @47--unlurking momentarily to say that if you haven't found the book of the paper clock you can assemble yourself, I've got it somewhere in a pile of "nifty things picked up at garage sales" at my parents' place. My sister and I, as children, could never bring ourselves to cut it up, so it's still whole. If people would like, I can look for it when I head home for the holidays and at least post the ISBN for easier locating.

Posted November 12, 2007 4:32 PM by vee

David @ #58: Thank you, thank you! That's the one, all right. I had been trying to mentally dredge up the first title and kept coming up with "Seven Degrees of Heaven", which was in the right general direction but of course got me nowhere with Google. Those first two titles definitely ring a bell (or perhaps a glass harmonica, in this case.) I'll have to go hunt that up too now.

Posted November 13, 2007 2:52 AM by Clifton Royston

Paiko website's ... in limbo

Posted November 15, 2007 6:47 PM by Hank Roberts

He forgot to renew his domain.

Posted November 16, 2007 12:32 AM by Marilee