dunce caps

1906 staged example of a dunce cap

Was this ever real? or was it seen in a cartoon and taken for fact.  Whatever, it is appropriate for a week spent not being able to get things off ftp sites, not being able to understand pieces of impenetrable text wanting to be articles for the next issue of On Site.  There is something about academic writing: when you are doing it, and I certainly have done my fair share of it, the mind is so full of theory, concepts and ideas that this strange kind of prose siimply unravels of the end of the pen, with its own syntax, vocabulary and density.  A year later and you yourself cannot even understand it. 

I always wondered if foolscap, that archaic size of paper we used in school when I was in the little grades, was the kind of paper used to make fool's caps, but evidently not.  Totally different etymology and something to do with a jester's cap watermark on the original paper.

Odd how the head is the place where so many signifiers are placed.  Perhaps not so odd, we are our visage, and hats and haircuts top off that visage, telling everyone you are not just a pretty face, but a rich pretty face, or a silly pretty face, or a rich not-so-pretty face.   god, life is exhausting.