"Home is where you hang your hat." Or, if you're like me, where you nail up rose-head nails and other relics. A brick from Sweet Springs, marble from the Rotunda, and coal from the Titanic might take pride of place but two of my most favorite mementos are bubble pipes.
They're completely unassuming, silly even, and I love that about my copies of William Faulkner's iconic smoking pipes. As part of my internship with Cultural Heritage Informatics, I had the very special opportunity to produce them for an exhibition at the Albert & Shirley Smalls Special Collections. Faulkner: Life and Works explored various aspects of the novelist's personae and his literary universe of Yoknapatawpha County, MS, through personal effects, manuscripts, and letters bequeathed to the University of Virginia. Although mine are just plastic, the original pipes themselves were not made of anything particularly remarkable. Like any other curiosities in my collection, they're completely ordinary objects made extraordinary simply by the memories attached to them.
If you like this blog post, you might enjoy this previous update.
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