{"id":2101,"date":"2010-04-09T23:47:09","date_gmt":"2010-04-10T06:47:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/?p=2101"},"modified":"2010-04-09T23:48:55","modified_gmt":"2010-04-10T06:48:55","slug":"the-case-for-a-brave-new-pillow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/2010\/04\/09\/the-case-for-a-brave-new-pillow\/","title":{"rendered":"The case for a brave new pillow"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>With Aldous Huxley&#8217;s satire in the back of my mind, sniggering, I stole 10 minutes this afternoon to alter and repair two pillowcases. A pair of king-sized cases, their corners had frayed because I let  the pillow protector&#8217;s zipper-pull worry the same corners over and  over, with predictable results.<\/p>\n<p>The plan (since last Monday) was to throw them out. I thought of my intention (to clear the clutter, remove old junk, get rid of broken things), but instead I weakened, &#8230;and fixed them.<\/p>\n<p>O <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Brave_New_World\">Brave New World<\/a>, it seems you&#8217;re not for me after all?<\/p>\n<p>In case the reader has forgotten, Huxley&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.huxley.net\/\">Brave New World<\/a> among other things required the erasure of history and sentiment, and therefore forbade darning or repairing any consumer item &#8211; especially socks. In the brave new world, people don&#8217;t fix things, they buy new ones.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft\" style=\"border: 10px solid white\" title=\"pillowcase\" src=\"http:\/\/lh4.ggpht.com\/_Rg-tSGYurlI\/S8AVMFLDr3I\/AAAAAAAAA6U\/jxyRdBtbb3g\/s640\/CIMG0618.JPG\" alt=\"\" width=\"358\" height=\"269\" \/>Except that sometimes it&#8217;s really hard to find good pillowcases that manage to combine something you like to look at with something you like to feel. I&#8217;m fond of the barest hint of <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Chinoiserie\">chinoiserie<\/a> in the pattern, and pleased by the fabric&#8217;s cottony softness.<\/p>\n<p>(The solution: turn the king-sized cases into standard-sized cases by sewing a new straight seam across the top and cutting off the excess fabric.)<\/p>\n<p>If only the rest of my de-cluttering and ridding myself of broken junk were going to be as easy as fixing pillowcases.<\/p>\n<p>Oh well, at least I can sleep on my plans to conquer the world through better house-keeping, familiar case that it is.<\/p>\n<p>Brave new world indeed&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>With Aldous Huxley&#8217;s satire in the back of my mind, sniggering, I stole 10 minutes this afternoon to alter and repair two pillowcases. A pair of king-sized cases, their corners had frayed because I let the pillow protector&#8217;s zipper-pull worry the same corners over and over, with predictable results. The plan (since last Monday) was [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":311,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1242],"tags":[15181],"class_list":["post-2101","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-just_so","tag-pillows"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2101","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/311"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2101"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2101\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2107,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2101\/revisions\/2107"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2101"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2101"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2101"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}