William Morris wallpaper icons, part 1

Proto-fantasy novelist and pre-Raphaelite William Morris is the father of the Arts & Crafts movement (my favorite architectural and decorative style), and his textiles and wallpapers were wildly popular in Victorian homes and today are ubiquitous in yuppie remodels and with set dressers creating interiors of the period (partly because they are probably the best-known designs of the period and are widely available because his company, Morris & Co, is still printing his designs from the original wooden blocks. They were not nearly as widespread as you'd think from tv and movies of recent years though, nor have they ever been affordable enough to be).

Icons are free to good homes. Modify if you wish. Credit appreciated.








*titles at bottom


Obviously they are decades earlier than the Bauhaus paintings I've been making icons of lately, but actually, both Arts & Crafts and Bauhaus were strongly political and philosophical movements. Morris was a socialist, and the driving principle behind his work was the democratization of art - the elimination of classist distinctions between the fine arts and the work of craftsmen, and the availability of beautiful objects for everyone. His ideas on this subject were one of the strongest influences on the Bauhaus, which sought to democratize the arts by teaching fine arts, skilled crafts, and architecture simultaneously; and also to make their designs reasonably affordable to manufacture, focusing much of their work on institutional design.

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Actually my dad does have pneumonia after all

My dad was originally taken to the hospital for a wet cough and diagnosed with pneumonia, then further investigated and sent home when they determined it was actually influenza.

But a few days later he was back in the hospital from low blood oxygen, and they've x-rayed his chest a few times and now he does have pneumonia. He's been there almost a week now and my mom has been coming home only when my sister goes to the hospital a few hours to give her a break. He's been given oxygen a lot, and this helped several times, but because of the fluid accumulating in his lungs and the fact that he can't cough unassisted, this keeps leading back to low blood oxygen. The hospital is crowded and the staff is stretched thin, so nurses and doctors are slow to respond to pages, which has created a harrowing time for my mom - so much so that she forgot to tell us that he had developed pneumonia at all and my sister found out from a facebook post a few days ago (also an intermittent/impulsive occurrence: my mom is extremely ADHD), even though she's been there in person daily.

A few years ago I could have trusted my dad to remember that unless he was feeling really sick, but possibly he has been getting more absent-minded as time goes on. It must be more alarming being in a hospital right now than many of the times he has been in the past though, and it's possible his dislike for the discomfort of the oxygen mask is distracting enough to put any non-immediate concerns from his mind.

Strangely, hearing he's developed pneumonia after all didn't cause the same flood of adrenaline as initially hearing he had it before. He's in and out of the hospital so often that I'm afraid the whole process has become pretty routine for our family, and so has the level of anxiety and hecticness associated. That probably contributes to my parents' forgetting to pass things on. Being stuck there in the hospital room, anxious and never fully informed of exactly what's going on, and never confident how quickly you can get expert attention or how severe the whole thing actually is... it must sort of blur out into a surreal nightmarish Waiting for Godot sort of hell for them. And as we know, not only can humans grow somewhat accustomed to anything, any situation you put them in has the tendency to grow routine. The more times you walk across a street without getting hit by a car, the safer your subconscious thinks it is to be in the street, which is why the more times you go out in public and potentially expose yourself to covid but without getting sick the less scary it gets (even though the risk is independent and more or less equal each time - or rather dependent on how many enclosed spaces and other humans you encounter).