—Did you know Josef Hofmann, the pianist, invented a house that would be mounted on an "electrically driven turntable" so that it would turn with the seasons to face the sun in winter and the shade in summer? In October it was probably tilted towards the rain or turned upwise to the moon. All of Hofmann’s other inventions were boring, like windshield wipers, or tragic, like a mechanism to record volume onto player piano rolls, which by the time he had done it nobody wanted player pianos anymore; but the twirling house that follows the sun is, like Henry Irving’s left leg, a poem. Somehow in his busy life of being the greatest pianist of both the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries and inventing houses that were metaphors for sadness running away from itself, he also found the time to be a vigorous and self-destructive alcoholic. People used to get more done in a lifetime.
In the night, in the howling storm
In the night, in the howling storm
In the night, in the howling storm
—Did you know Josef Hofmann, the pianist, invented a house that would be mounted on an "electrically driven turntable" so that it would turn with the seasons to face the sun in winter and the shade in summer? In October it was probably tilted towards the rain or turned upwise to the moon. All of Hofmann’s other inventions were boring, like windshield wipers, or tragic, like a mechanism to record volume onto player piano rolls, which by the time he had done it nobody wanted player pianos anymore; but the twirling house that follows the sun is, like Henry Irving’s left leg, a poem. Somehow in his busy life of being the greatest pianist of both the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries and inventing houses that were metaphors for sadness running away from itself, he also found the time to be a vigorous and self-destructive alcoholic. People used to get more done in a lifetime.