Heretofore Believed Impossible...

Ugh. I never thought it could happen but it did: I had a Bad Yarn Store experience. I've recently moved to a small suburb southwest of Boston and haven't been yarn-shopping here yet; usually I visit a store first, just to browse, familairize myself with the options, and--most impotantly--to see if its the kind of place I feel comfortable giving my money too. But I really needed sock yarn for Xmas presents, so I thought "what the hell" and went for it.

My first impression? Small. Small and messy. Now, small is not necessarily a problem--in high-population areas space is at a premium, and I've been to some yarn stores where small=cozy [Halifax, NS]. As for messy, people who live in glass houses should learn to live with stangers looking at their underwear. Or something. So I begin my meander--quick past the novelty yarns I have no interest in, slow past natural fibers (ok, that takes care of two of the three walls)--and soon find myself in front of the sock yarn, negotiating a little for space with a woman, her stroller, and a cute little girl who is obviously not a knitter, and impatient. There is a lot of sock yarn. Good! Half the skeins don't have ball bands. Bad! It's ok, I'm looking for 100g balls of Regia self-striping wool/nylon, which is not too hard to spot.

My first real twinge comes with the huffing of two older women waiting at the register. They're not getting service, not yelling "dude, I need service" (dirty!), and not happy about it. Clearly there needs to be a bell. They eventually tear a woman I assume is the shop-owner away from the knitting group table. Oh? I didn't mention that half the space in the store was filled by a big table and assorted knitters? It was. The ladies make their purchases while I finish comparing colors and grab a set of DPNs (my other set is in some other socks) and get in line behind another customer, who is buying Patons yarn.

I wait. And wait some more because the only thing computerized at the "register" is the credit card swiper (and I'm sure that if Visa would allow it, that would be gone too). The "register" is a calculater and a pad of paper. Still, I am thinking good thoughts because I know it is very hard for old people to get help with the technology. It might have helped if the counter hadn't been buried in miscellaneous papers, books, and lotion displays--at the very least it would have prevented the woman's yarn from rolling onto the floor every five seconds. I make chitchat with the "register" lady and the customer about my sock yarn, which I am making up for my grandmother. Isn't that nice?

Then I discover the power of becoming invisible.

During the ten minutes it has taken for the purchase of four skeins of Patons wool/acrylic, Woman-with-stroller-and-child (WWSAC) has made her decision and come into the line. The "register" lady has asked WWSAC about her sister, and when she finishes sending the Patons into the world, asks WWSAC, "Are you in a hurry?" Why yes, yes she is; the little girl is starting to yell and she has to meet someone... Well then, "register" lady will just ring her up quick.

Neither of them look at me, standing with my Regia and needles. They chat about a difficult pattern WWSAC has been knitting. I want to throw the yarn on the ground and walk off, but I can't--too polite, or too scared.

Suddenly, all those little negatives I noticed before and brushed off come roaring back, ten times their original size. I didn't mind waiting; I had no place to be; I absolutely want to keep small children from having tantrums in small stores--but I was shocked and hurt by the breach of what I consider common courtesy. Acknowledgement is the very least we owe other people; I felt like a non-entity. Later, I tried to decide: Was it because I was a newcomer? The other women had obviously known each other a while. Maybe because my purchase was small: socks are not sweaters. But I think it was because I am young and I said the yarn was a gift. They saw me and didn't hear "gift I am making"--they heard "not a knitter." As everyone knows from the newspaper, young knitters buy novelty yarns to make fashion scarves. Except that I don't have to: my grandmother has knit over 80 of those this year, which frees up my time for knitting lace shawls, cabled sweaters. And socks.

I hope WWSAC calmed her daughter down and made it to her appointment on time--I won't know, though, because I'm never going near that yarn store again.

Gainful Employment

After much too long a time of sitting on my ass, singing "What Do You Do With a B.A. In English/It Sucks to Be Me", I have entered into employment with a big corporate bookstore. Hooray for paychecks!

Aren't we all just a little bit Foucault?

You are Michel Foucault! You wrote groundbreaking
histories of prisons, hospitals, asylums, and
sex. Interestingly, you thought basically the
same thing about all of them. Your historical
accuracy is a bit dodgy, but that was never
really the point. You were very obsessed with
power roles - so obsessed that you frequented
gay S&M clubs, and died of AIDS in 1984.


What 20th Century Theorist are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

Sue Monk Kidd's Mermaids

I confess, I never finished The Secret Life of Bees. I got up to the part where the girl met the bee ladies and then was distracted by something else and never got around to it again. But I liked what I did read okay, so when my aunt gave me The Mermaid Chair, saying she had liked it better than the other, I was totally on board. The result? Meh. I liked it much better at the beginning than at the end; it was better plus mystery than after the mystery was solved. I like thinking of it as a modern gothic, sans creepy castles and thinly veiled classism, adding more intimate touches and thinly veiled Freudianism.

But of all things I didn't like the way the mystery was "resolved." And I've actually read the unabridged Mysteries of Udolpho, so I know from unsatisfying gothic endings (and that's a totally different story). First of all, I wanted more emotion from Jessie when she learns the truth about her fahter's death. Ok, she falls weeping into her mother's lap, but c'mon--she's just learned that all the people she's looked up to for guidance across the years, all the people who've raised her have been lying to her and letting her believe that she was responsible for her father's death--give me some accusations of betrayal, some yelling, some recriminations, hell, even some passive-aggressive sniping. Like, real human reaction to stupendous news, not freakishly Zen acceptance. That's totally the last of the five stages, not the first. (And, no, I will not buy that she's been working towards acceptance throughout the book in some unconscious way. Also, I have no need for a bridge in Brooklyn.)

I think, in part, this is a failure inherent in the first person narrative. Although in theory we get closer to the narrator that way, in fact we can only know what they know, or--in cases where the story is being told in retrospect, as this one is--what the narrator wants us to know. Even the most introspecitve of us can't entirely penetrate the id/ego split. Freud couldn't and he invented it. So maybe we've got Jessie censoring her story in some way. But this doesn't entirely explain why no-one (including the 3rd person omniscient narrator who hovers over the shoulders of Jessie's men and who abandons the novel at the end) seems to realize that there is no psychological resolution for Jessie as a result of the events covered by the novel. This is my WTF? issue--it feels like a waste of time when a character arc is not so much an arc and more like a dot. (Very post-modern, though.)

Although she seems to think that her time on Egret Island has changed her life, what really has changed? She has let go of her guilt over her father's death, perhaps--but she's also replaced it with guilt over her affair. She's based the shape of her life around being culpable, being able to sink ships--her father's and that of her marriage. In this sense we can draw a parallell between Jessie & St. Senora, but where the saint is a mermaid trapped on land, Jessie is a human who has the chance to be a mermaid, but refuses it. Which is not to say that she made the wrong decision; right and wrong are not entirely the point, besides which, I think I would have disliked it equally if she'd run away with Whit. It's the proposition that this interlude has re-vivified her, brought back her painting, reawakened her to love--but I don't really believe it will last. Not while she's waiting desperately for "forgiveness meted out in precious sips"--the bizarre submissive language in which she describes her return to her husband. Meladramatic "covenant with the self" moments are very cinematic, true, but they don't really have anything to do with the bravery needed to make happiness, day-to-day.

Skiffy Theory

"Stories are the original virtual reality device; their internal rules spread out into reality around us like a bite-transmitted virus, slowly but inexorably consuming its flesh. They don’t just stand around “being metaphors” whose sole purpose is to represent things in the real world; they eat the real world."

scott westerfeld

The moral of the story being: Zombies are kind of awesome.

Post-Mod Sux!

So--I'm not post-modernism's biggest fan. But I don't totally buy into the Stuckists. Some of their assertions I totally agree with:

"Post Modernism, in its adolescent attempt to ape the clever and witty in modern art, has shown itself to be lost in a cul-de-sac of idiocy. What was once a searching and provocative process (as Dadaism) has given way to trite cleverness for commercial exploitation."

but they have a really (un?)educated naivete which I find disturbing. The first point on their manifesto:

"Stuckism is the quest for authenticity. By removing the mask of cleverness and admitting where we are, the Stuckist allows him/herself uncensored expression."

Maybe I've been reading literary theory for too long--this makes me all, "Althusser, mofos, 1970, you can't escape interpellation into an ideology." Writing a manifesto about 20th C theories of aesthetics without a basic reading of 20th C theory? Makes you look foolish. Also the name. Also this:

"It is the Stuckist’s duty to explore his/her neurosis and innocence through the making of paintings and displaying them in public, thereby enriching society by giving shared form to individual experience and an individual form to shared experience."

Also, it makes me look foolish by turning me into an old lady sighing about how people don't read anymore. Stupid post-modernism, this is all your fault!

Woodworking

I was given a whole heaping load of old Spin-Offs recently by the very generous lady who taught me to spin; I've started working my way through them (almost done with the 2000s!), but it's taking me rather a long time, not only because I like to read each magazine deliberately, cover-to-cover, but also because they keep inspiring me to go off and make things. Mostly it's yarn--I've been dying hand-combed rovings with food-coloring, spices, and other natural dyes as described in various articles:

(clockwise from top left: food coloring, food coloring and turmeric, black tea and coffee, marigolds)

But I have also been inspired to make for myself a few of the little tools I've been missing. Now, I could have bought both of these at the yarn store, but I am both poor and cheap thrifty and so I decided to make a WPI gauge:

and a nostepinne:

Ok, yes, I used a little creative liscence on the nostepinne: it's really just a tapered dowel that I found in the junk pile of the barn, cut to 10", and sanded (plus the notch in the end). I've never seen one in real life, but I think mine is a lot bigger than nostepinnes usually are--I wrapped some singles off on it, but made more of a center-pull tube than a center-pull ball. It was like plying from a catepillar. Worked well on the chunky handspun you see in the picture though.

The WPI (wraps per inch) gauge is more interesting. I've been wanting one ever since I watched a Mabel Ross video that explained how to actually use it. I also got the wood for this from barn scraps, but it took me a lot longer to actually come up with something I liked. I only have handtools, no power (except a drill): a hacksaw, a pocket knife, and sandpaper. I made about four prototypes of the gauge before I settled on the one above. The first wood I used was too soft and kept flaking. The second was a little better, but also would split when carved. The third I used a piece of leftover moulding, which was easy to carve, but was too big around to be effective for thin yarn--took way too much yardage to get enough wraps. The fourth time I fixed the wood problem, with the reddish-hardwood I ended up with, but I initially tried to put the cut-out along the cut edge of the wood, perpendicular to the grain. Impossible. Then, kind of frustrated, I whipped out the hacksaw and sliced a 3x2 inch piece out of the original 2x4, then cut that in half, ending with a 1x3x2 inch piece of wood. After that it was kind of a breeze to carve out the middle inch and whittle and sand the piece square (or, rectangular). I used a 11/64" drill bit for the hole, finished it up with a couple of coats of Johnson's paste wax (the finish I use for all my wood spinning supplies), and a length of handspun (dog hair from my German Shepherd). Ta-da!

I'm really happy with the way it turned out. It's not 100% even, but I kind-of like that it has a rustic quality. Like they say on Antiques Roadshow: you can see the tool-marks, proves it's original. Also, I feel super crafty. Being a knitter and handspinner I should totally be blase about making stuff, but every time I'm surprised by how wonderful it is to make things with one's own hands.

The Opinionated Knitter

I've been a fan of Elizabeth Zimmerman since I was astounded by the usefulness and charm of Knitter's Almanac--a book I bought less because of name recognition (although I did--you don't poke around in the knitting world for long without hearing her name) than because it was the cheapest knitting book I could find that got me free shipping on my Amazon order. Imagine my surprise when a little paperback comes out of the box with that wonderful cover and my utter delight at what a wonderful read it was, above and beyond the practical, beautiful patterns. Well, it was enough to put me on EZ's multitudinous fan list, and though I haven't bought any of her other books (rarely do I make such impulsive purchases as the aforesaid, in part because they rarely turn out this well) I watch eagerly for when they show up in my local library.

I had heard about The Opinionated Knitter, which collects EZ's newsletters from 1958-1968, somewhere on the knitting internet (the knitternet?), so when I saw it on the library shelf I snatched it up with great enthusiasm. That enthusiasm was rewarded. Not only has Meg Swanson collected the newsletters themselves, she has interspersed them with pictures of the projects (some of which were published at the time in mainstream knitting magazines, but with the somewhat incoherent, flat-construction directions which prompted EZ to begin the newsletter in the first place), her own comments and clarifications and annotations on the patterns, and excerpts from EZ's writing in other places (e.g. her journals). The patterns themselves, because they are photographic copies of the original hand-typed newsletters, are somewhat hard to read. If I wanted to knit one, I might choose to re-type (or enlarge on photocopy) the pattern with clearer spacing. On the other hand, EZ's patterns tend to be simple (not in concept, but in language--she writes her patterns not in bullet-points, but in prose, so that a direction for an aran cap, say, will contain a line such as, "You will find that Things Happen every 6th rnd; in between you can relax," which is about as accurate a description of the cabling process as I've ever heard) and moreover her design process (Elizabeth's Percentage System, or EPS, in its various stages) invites--and on occasion demands--the knitter to stray from the pattern and become a designer as well, so perhaps the "improvement" wouldn't be necessary after all.

So I was going along, taking my time and enjoying the view (knitting books are better consumed slowly) when my mother, who doesn't knit, picked up the book and flipped through it. She stopped on a page with a picture of EZ's journal (and the typed transcription of same) from a camping trip she and "Gaffer" (and their cat) took while she was working on Knitter's Almanac. Mom laughed an scoffed and read aloud this passage:

"KLINE [the cat] and I have abandoned the campfire to its
spitting and hissing fate, along with a pot of coffee-water, hopefully suspended over it, and have retired to the tent. He kneads himself a bed on my heavy camp sweater, which he prefers to all the Hudson's Bay blankets and down jackets offered to him. I don't blame him; it is made of beautiful old dark Oatmeal Sheepsdown with a natty Tyrolese border of Loden green and black. Over the years it has lengthened to a 3/4 coat and it is the sweater which had it's pockets removed and re-inserted much higher up. Blah, blah, blah, who cares?"

The last part, clearly is my mother's contributory comment.

I, with my usual cutting wit, looked at her in shock, mouth agape, then said, "Well...knitters!" Unexpectedly, I knew I'd hit on something--it made me think about the way EZ's influence has worked on the knitting world. Even though she grew up and learned to knit pre-WWII, in a time when handknitting was still mostly necessity, her writing never treats knitting as anything less than a marvel, an artisanal craft, and a passion. The audience for EZ's work is never "people who knit", or "housewives", or "consumers", but always Knitters as a category of human beings with their own needs and lives and creative will.

You'll often hear comments about EZ's books (particularly Knitting Without Tears) that go along the lines of "Elizabeth...gave me a sense of being able to believe that most things in knitting--and life too--happen in ways that are open to an inquiring brain. Perhaps that sounds too dramatic, but I know that what I learned from her changed me for the better in every way I can understand it." This quote, which I took from the end of the book, is one of many excerpted from letters sent to the Zimmermans after EZ's death in 1999. Her work touched people in a very personal way; we are interested in her writing, like the above passage than failed to thrill my mother and the discussion of the overrated evils of pilling that follows it, because it feels like she would be interested in us. Not because her experiences are novel and thrilling (although some of them were), but because she talks to the knitter-reader as a peer, a person with a shared love of knitting and shared experience.

(As I type this, I have a cat who has eschewed two beds, several armchairs, a couch, and a sun-lit carpet in favor of sleeping on a half-finished afghan with a circ needle and a crochet hook sticking out of it.)

The Opinionated Knitter is record of the history of modern knitting--love it or loathe it, it wouldn't have been nearly as much fun without Elizabeth Zimmerman.

on "the Great Stories"

"It didn't matter that the story had begun, because kathakali had discovered long ago that the secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don't deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don't surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover's skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don't. In the way that although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won't. In the Great Stories, you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn't. And yet you want to know again.

That is their mystery and their magic."

Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

The Corrections

I picked up John Franzen's The Corrections at my aunt's house, after throwing (metaphorically, of course) her copy of Sparks' The Notebook across the room in disgust (Note to Mr. Sparks: There are sentence structures in English other than S-V-O; please use some.) . I didn't know anything about the book except that it (or rather, he) had cause the Great Oprah Book Club Kerfuffle a couple of years ago--this information was sufficient to catch my interest. The shiny gold seal on the cover informed me that the book had won the National Book Award; this, however, was not enough to turn me away from the fascinating allure of the Book that Killed Oprah's Book Club. But I was expecting something rather more self-indulgent than what I found. Oprah, though I think she has generally good taste in literature, has a streak toward the overly-sentimental, while judges of literature awards tend toward the overly-pretentious: the approval of both these arbiters of American culture means either very high quality writing or absolutely nauseating shit. Being a practical optimist, I hoped for the former, but expected the latter. I had only read a bit of the beginning (to where Chip begins to think that an affair with his student is a good idea) before the trip to my Aunt's was over, so I took the book home and set it on my shelf for about a month while I was doing other things. When I picked it up again, I read the rest through in two days.

I was wonderfully surprised by Corrections--I'm not much for modern* lit and I certainly wouldn't have picked it blind off a bookstore shelf. But there is something very strong about the book--a steel core that supports the carousel of characters and viewpoints and the occasional digressions of style as they rotate through the novel. Structurally speaking, I suppose that the core is the father, Al. He is the character we ride inside the least, almost always seeing him through the lens of his family; it is his decline into the mental and physical ravages of Parkinsons that drives the plot. This organization closely resembles that of Faulkner's As I Lay Dying--it is the death and dying (separate processes in both books) of a parent that allows movement within a family. (Note, though, that unlike AILD, which relies on a single pivot point of Aggie's voice, Corrections has at least two. Is this a function of the greater length of Corrections, or is Franzen consciously making an oval, rather than a circle?)

Actually, I find this a really productive comparison (she said, modestly): emotionally, Corrections, is also about a family trying struggling to bury a parent, to bury, to resolve, to heal from the wounds of growing up. I say "growing up" rather than "an emotionally stunted, borderline abusive father" because for the purposes of the novel it doesn't matter whether the wounds were inflicted from the outside, taken up like a cross, or entirely imagined (hi Chip!). Each character identifies his scars in various ways, and though there are moments where it seems as though some universal truth or understanding will come through, like real people the characters are stuck within the prejudices of their perceptions (or perhaps, the perception of their prejudices).

My grandmother, when she talks about this book, always says, "And at the end she [Enid] still thought that her life only needed a 'few corrections'," in a tone of dismay and with the rueful headshake of someone who knows better. Maybe my gran is right and Enid is doomed to remain in her rut (though I rather think that Alfred's death removed the major obstacle in her life), but the novel doesn't care whether Enid is right or wrong. Everyone thinks they are right--and someone must be wrong. In order to live your life you have to believe in corrections; we must be able to move--even if it isn't in a direction that resembles forward. Stagnancy (Alfred in his recliner in the basement, peeing into old cans) is death, or close enough for government work. At the end of the novel, even though maybe Enid hasn't changed, all the same, everything has changed.

I don't, however, know quite what to make of the Aslan/lion motif. We first see it, I think, when Gary's youngest son is reading the Chronicles of Narnia; it then resurfaces as the name of a designer drug that Enid picks up while on a cruise (international waters). Though we never know exactly what the drug does, per see, there is a strong suggestion in the way the ship doctor describes it that it is somehow related to the "miracle cure" Correctall--the drug which looks like distopian behavior modification therapy and which makes use of a chemical process invented by Alfred. Aslan's effects are like that of anti-depressive medication, only much stronger, and--apparently--create good feeling in the patient by removing the sense of shame or embarrassment. Is this a play on Narnia's allegorical aspect, Aslan-as-Christ, from "religion is the opiate of the masses" to "opiates are the religion of the masses"? In a sense, a drug that removes shame is killing religion: many social systems use shame as a tool to enforce obedience to the rules (it's incredibly effective). But the death of shame as an ideological weapon is a blow to the fabric of society (certainly American society, probably others) in general. Yet...I have a train of thought here that doesn't seem to go anywhere, except deep into doomsaying pedagogy--a terminus I want to avoid. I really hate running into This-Is-Meaningful territory in novels; it's all mire and bog, ugly, sticky, hard to get out of, and taints the rest of the landscape in connection with it.

*say, newer than Mrs. Woolf

talk sexy to me, wystan hugh

". . . that always rare and now almost extinct creature, the Intellectual Dandy. The generic name is paradoxical for, by definition, no dandy is like another; what they have in common is their unlikeness to anybody else. The Dandy is neaither a conformist nor a rebel, for both those terms imply a concern for Public Opinion and the Dandy has none: on one occasion his views may coincide with those of the majority, on another with those of the minority, but in both cases the coincidence is accidental. The same is true of his interests. One of the ways in which an Intellectual Dandy can be recognized is by the unpredictability of his work; no knowledge of his previous books offers any clue as to what he will write next. . . . By definition, a Dandy can have no followers: the only influence he can have on others is as an example of what it means to be oneself."

W. H. Auden, in "On Edmund Wilson's Apologies to the Iroquois"