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"