Hamburger Stack

Hamburger Stack. Actually, I'd never call it that! The word is from an Apple Online Help representative--a young woman who knew a great deal more about iPads than I ever will. But she assisted me greatly, by telephone, when my old one expired. Hamburger button--that was her word for the stack of three short horizontal lines found at the top of certain webpages, as a navigational tool--hyperlink--click on them and you can go somewhere. Except that I never knew the name... Which made sense, but in all the wrong ways--for the word focused on the layers-as-symbol--a hamburger diagram--but left out all the hamburgerness...

And what would the hamburgerness in this photo be? I'm tempted to invoke Pisa (Leaning Tower)-- but probably accretion would be better. How things just end up. It's been this way for a few years now--wasn't always so--and I miss the plain work surface of my old masonite desk. Will have to clear things away and get back to it in any case. But there's a key element here--something gone missing for a long time, I had no idea where--and I found it in this picture! The Kodak carousel box--a Carousel Transview 80 slide tray--which at one point was the kind of thing I used every day of class, choosing a new set of slides on the glass top of my light table (in the office, farther to the right) and popping them into the waiting slots of a freshly emptied slide tray. Ready for another lecture in ED11A.

But there were always a few trays that stayed complete and intact, and it's the small word, Poland, in my own writing that's the give away. Slides I made in Warsaw, in 1968-69, the year I lived there. The city still showed traces of the war--the destruction--blasted back-street walls, shored up with heavy timbers, and a certain grayness  characteristic of the East Block (Warsaw without the glitz and distraction of Western advertising). The slides came from a brown file box like the one you see just below--nicely made, in sheet metal, with compartments for each group of slides and a secure metal latch.

Those slides are precious to me--as if cut from my own being. (Maybe I sensed this at the time I made them?) And it was only rarely that I'd show them in class. Had to be important. I remember doing so one morning, in ED11A, maybe the early 1980s, when a hand shot up at the back of the room. Adamant voice. Why are you showing us these pictures? The right question, but the tone so unexpected--when it all seemed so clear to me. I was sharing a part of myself...

A girl from Greece, studying architecture in California--but maybe (I realized later) she came from a place where one knew that pictures like this were from a world all too close...?
_____

There's something else in the photo, overall, and it does have to do with the stack. Makes me want to say cultural geology. My own, perhaps...

.