Last night I finished my very last paper as an undergraduate, and in a week I will, baring natural disaster be the proud recipient of a double major B.A. These last two papers weren’t the most inspiring bits of prose that I’ve ever written, but one of them begins to outline the project that I want to pursue in graduate school, so it was a very useful exercise. I am excited to be done and quite looking forward to the next stage. This morning, for the first time in far too long, I slept past 8:40 without waking. I rolled over at 9:30 realized I had nothing particularly important to do, and slept for another half-an-hour. It was glorious.

After no small amount of sloth, though, I posted the following to twitter:

This is the first day of the rest of my life, literally. guess I need to write something. heh

And that’s what I’m doing today. By now, I’ve completely run out of stashed TealArt entries for your pleasure. I wrote a huge mess of these entries, and even more outlines during my spring break, and though I continued to write during the semester, having a stash was incredibly helpful for making sure that I could fit in writing for fun whilst I was working on school projects. I generally have enough time to write for TealArt, it’s just always hard to predict when in the week I’m going to have that time, and having some padding was helpful. Unfortunately, the end of the semester was too much for the system and here I am without anything in the pile. So you get blathering instead.

You might have guessed that I’m something of an obsessive with regards to my file/digital organization. I moved all of my working files into the “archive” folder this morning, and I have to say that this felt incredibly satisfying. It means that I have more visual space (it’s weird, don’t ask) to concentrate on other projects this summer. In addition to finding employment this summer, and writing Station Keeping, the new series, and knitting a bit, I want to do some academic reading and writing as part of gearing up for a new application cycle to grad schools. It’ll be a busy summer, and it will also be the longest period of time that I’ve ever spent in my home town since I left, so that will be good.

In Station Keeping news--because although its late, it’s still Monday--there isn’t much to report. I’m going to use this week to write/draft a bunch of things including, hopefully, some SK material. We’re getting closer and closer to when I was hoping to start to get this thing off the ground. I’m not quite sure how this is going to work, but I think that it probably will. I also have to make up some new characters, or at least insert space for a few new characters so that other folks can do that.

Tomorrow I’ll have a review of the things that I’ve knitted this summer, which is getting to be an end of the semester tradition.

Best, tycho

Hello Friends.

I’m feeling a bit more chatty and less polemical, which means that you get real journal writing and less ranting. I had my last class on Wednesday, and I designated Thursday as a “do nothing day,” which is good, because I haven’t had a day like that in forever. So this was a good thing. Unfortunately I’m still feeling incredibly behind in terms of TealArt writing, but I suspect this will change soon. I only have 15 more pages to write as an undergraduate total, so my plate is pretty clear. I’m looking forward to spending some quality time figuring things out this summer before I start school again in the fall.

Anyway, I have an interesting snip-it from an early draft of the introduction to a portfolio that I wrote earlier this week.

Earlier this semester when discussing a paper that I had written for a class on cognitive psychotherapy about existential psychodynamics, I noted to one of my Women’s Studies classmates, that my revisions were mostly minor, except for a paragraph that I needed to write connecting existential approaches to cognitive therapy and theories. In response she expressed relief at the realization that my apparent reluctance to engage “women,” in my Women’s and Gender Studies coursework was not born out of some sort of backward political project, but rather a more global tendency toward contrarianism.

While I think that I’ll probably submit a more clear delineation of my goals for the summer later on I have already started thinking about the things that I’d like to accomplish this summer. For your amusement, then…

• I want to get Station Keeping underway.
• I want to start the new TealArt series.
• I want to make a couple of sweaters.
• I want to read a bunch of articles and perhaps begin to have a more coherent idea of what I want my grad school project to be on.

One of the things I’ve (re)realized this semester is that I have to write. I think that I’ve had a happier and more fulfilling semester because I’ve found a method and a habit for writing not just my school work, but also for myself¹. I remember when I was writing Circle Games, I said things like “I need to write,” and “writing makes me happy,” and then school and life happened and I stopped really writing things and I think I suffered for a long time because of it. Similarly, when I started knitting, I found that I tended to spend my breaks from school knitting feverishly, and with school being what it is, and all together I feel like this has put me out of the game for too long. But I think and hope that I’m back, and I hope that I can remember this. I may not be a perfect writer, but any trip through the archives of this site will show that I’ve gotten better, and the only way to get better is to keep up. And I will.

I’ll post tomorrow’s hyper/digital text article a bit later in the day, so stay tuned.

cheers, tycho

Hi folks, This is the last polemical knitting piece that I have backlogged. I’ve actually been writing a lot about knitting in the form of patterns and project reviews, and I think that the Tuesday’s are for Knitting posts will address some of these concerns. I’m sorry for not posting this more promptly this morning, I might have slept in a bit more, and had to run out in a rush. I have two more classes as an undergraduate, and I’m seriously contemplating cutting one of them (we’re watching a movie, that I haven’t seen, but have a copy of,) I have a little more work, but yeah, I’m done. Scary. I’ll be in touch, and there’ll be more content later in the week. --cheers, ty

I have a confession to make: I’m a frugal person. Ok, maybe you knew that and maybe it wasn’t such a surprise. For this reason, I sometimes find it hard to justify spending money on yarn. Well, the fact that I’m a (perpetual) student with an uncertain employment future doesn’t help this, but I think the frugality serves me well and contributes to this problem. It’s really easy for me, and I suspect others as well (but as always ignore me at whim), to say “if I can get it for cheeper, why spend money on nice yarn.” But as most of us learn pretty quick: all yarn is not created equally, and I’m here to argue for a slight relaxation of frugality concerning yarn buying habits. I’m not saying, go forth and stash everything you like, or that you should only knit with quivet, but that it’s possible to to knit with high quality yarns without breaking the bank, and that college students (like me) can still knit with good yarn. This is in part an argument with myself, so I hope you find it interesting.

My first principal is to avoid stashing. This doesn’t mean that I only have enough yarn for my current project and the next one, but I’m pretty close. I have the yarn for the projects I’m currently working on, the yarn for the next sweater, I have some lace weight left over from the last lace kick, assorted leftovers from past projects, and that’s about it; and frankly I think I have too much yarn, and am knitting through what I have as much as possible.

Secondly, if you’re worried about money, knit with finer yarns. Generally yarns are sold by weigh not yardage, so 1000 yards of super bulky costs considerably more than a like yardage of sport or fingering weight. This means that finer yarns are cheeper in relation to the amount of time they take to knit. As an added benefit finer yarns also tend to be more flattering to everyone’s peoples bodies, and though it takes longer (a good thing) you’re less likely to look like you’re wearing a or wrapped in a duvet cover.

The third principal that I use is to avoid as much variation in yarn types as possible. While it’s nice to knit different kinds of things, having a few quality, basic kinds of yarns that are good in a number of different situations is really key. This makes it easy to use leftovers, reliably order online, and plan projects without having yarn. Also, this makes it easy to avoid swatching, because you already know how you knit with your basic yarns. It doesn’t matter what yarns you choose, but look for high quality (no pilling, washing/wearing well, no knots, colorfast) a good color selection, usability (don’t go for a yarn that comes in hanks if don’t have a swift and hate winding yarns), and something that’s widely available. This isn’t to say that one must knit exclusively from the same kind of yarn, but to have for instance sport, fingering, and worsted weight yarns that you keep returning to project after project. In your case it might be sock yarn, worsted weight and aran-weight yarn, the kinds of yarn aren’t crucial.

In aid of this, It’s possible to recognize that there are only a couple of mills that make “blank yarns” for art yarn dyers. By my eye, I think that Henry’s Attic, and Louet supply about 60% of the yarn for hand dyers, and there are only a few others. If you’re sensitive to these similarities, the variety of yarns you use can grow without adding new “types.” Look at yardage/weight/content relationships to find the connections.

Now if you stash yarn as a collecting hobby aside from your knitting hobby thats a whole new issue beyond my scope (not bad, of course, if that’s what you’re aiming for), but with luck, the working cue-stash can be kept under control,[^socks] and in this sort of situation you and I only have to buy yarn every few months. I also tend to think of knitting as part of an entertainment budget. I spend sixty or eighty dollars on yarn that can provide knitting enjoyment for months. Of course, the door can swing the other way too, as I’ve often said (and heard) “its fun, and it doesn’t matter what I knit with,” so it might be helpful to also engender a heathy enjoyment of quality garments. But also, I’d challenge the notion that enjoyment should turn a blind eye towards quality: it’s more fun to knit with nice yarns, and nicer yarns produce nicer finished objects which make me want to knit more: its a good cycle.

You can, and should, knit with nice materials, and it’s my hope that between what I suggest here, and some good smart shopping you’ll be able to knit with the best yarn you can, you’ll be glad you did!

Ok, enough of a missive for today. I hope it’s helpful. We’ll move to more interesting and less polemical things in the future, I promise.

cheers, tycho

It’s another week, again. It’s funny how these things happen. I once again don’t have a great deal of Station Keeping news to relate to you. Last week was somewhat frightful in terms of school. I’m graduating in about two weeks, my final grades are due in a week and a half, and the vast majority of my work will be completed by the middle of this week. Because last week was so intense (on top of the sinus infection episode) there isn’t a lot of work left, but I have more than enough on my plate to keep me busy, so while I will have entries for your consumption and edification this week, I can’t make a lot of big promises about overall productivity this week. But I have some things to talk about now, and that’s all that matters, right?

News of TealArt

I have two more essays for the hypertext series after this week’s piece, but I do feel as if it’s wrapping up, and similarly the knitting series, I think will see a bit of a summer transformation as I have basically completed what I set out to do. I think we’ll see more content concerning what I’m actually working on, and some of the things that I’ve already made, and of course coverage of knitting camp. I’m playing around with the idea of starting a slightly more academic series to follow up the hypertext, that might be a fun summer project to work on in addition to all of the other summer things that I have planned.

Thoughts on Station Keeping

One of my intentions with SK is to provide an outlet for short form (science) fiction. I think there’s a lot of focus and prestige given to The Novel, in the genre, and it’s certainly earned. The Novel allows authors to write extensive stories that make it possible to put the reader into another world/perspective. But there’s another sense that shorter form fiction allows writers to pose specific questions, handle language very precisely, and practically distribute his/her work easily¹. SK is also not exactly short fiction as it has serial elements, plot arcs, and an ensemble of regular and recurring characters, but I think from a writing perspective, there will be stylistic and structural similarities between short fiction and SK installments. In the group setting, this makes particular sense: we can all create desecrate individual stories, participate in the planning of a larger story without anyone person needing to feel obligated to maintaining an entire project solely on their own. I think there are possibilities.

Anyway, stay tuned, it looks like it’s going to be a pretty interesting week around here.

best, tycho

I think wiki’s are really awesome. I just wanted to get it out there ahead of time. The wiki is a really nifty concept, and I think that the wiki is an example, of an “digital” textual form, like the one that I’m trying to think about. Having said that I think there are are some constraints to this form that are worth discussing as part of this project on digital text.

What are Wiki’s?

I could provide a lengthy and informative history of the development of the wiki concept, but I’ll spare you. It’s an interesting history if you’re into that kind of thing. In any case, most people know wikis via Wikipdeia, and this is a good example of what a wiki is, but I think because of this influence many people tend to associate wiki projects with encyclopedias, which is interesting, because wikis are by no means limited to such encyclopedic projects[^encyclopedia criticism].

Basically a wiki is a collaborative editing environment, that creates a non-linear hypertext document, generally in a situation where new “pages” are easily created and edited (but not necessarily). The key in my mind is the non-linear aspect in combination with the (potential) shortened distance between the reader and the editor. Because of the organization of the Wikipedia and the wiki’s that have been inspired by that site, I think a lot of people tend to think that wiki means “open editing,” I think group editing is more apt description.

The Strengths:

Wikis are great for distributing editing responsibility amongst a group of people, and for exploring and cataloging information that can be organized as an interconnecting “network,” rather than a branching tree. The software used for wikis also remove a lot of the burden associated with site maintenance, and in a lot of ways I’m tempted to suggest that while wiki software, is a really great tool for website management, particularly when you want to create a collaboratively constructed document. There are a number of typically wiki based features that have contributed to the kind of publishing model that Kathleen Fitzpatrick and the MediaCommons folks have adopted: history functions being the most obvious. That allow us to understand documents as changing

The Weaknesses:

The problem is that wiki’s aren’t good for all sorts of projects. They seem to work best when there is a limited linearity, and great deal of interconnectedness. When you don’t have this kind of document, or when you have a contributor pool that is too small and/or not organized enough, wiki’s seem to stop being unique, and while they may contain valuable material, the format seems to just stop working. Or it the hyper/digital element seems to imposed and detrimental to the feel of the document as a whole.

For instance, Wikimedia, the folks behind Wikipedia, have a project called wikibooks, and while I think that this idea is really nifty, I’m not sure how well it works in creating “good” books, in the way that wikipedia can really be brilliant. At the same time, I’m not sure that one of the “wikibooks” are particularly unique documents as a result of their beginnings as wiki.

Just some thoughts on the forms. I don’t want to come off as a perpetual critic, I think that what I seem to be trumpeting: new forms, new ideas, and new models of reading/writing/publishing are being used and deployed, we just haven’t explored and questioned them enough. I think we’ll let this edition run a little short this week, but I’ll be back next week on monday with a post on Station Keeping.

Enjoy you’re weekend, and reading! tycho

[^encyclopedia criticism]: There are a lot of criticism of Wikipedia that I find incredibly interesting, because it’s as if the main criticism of the “wiki” is that it is encyclopedic. Encyclopedias are fascinating and interesting texts, but they are flawed. Neutrality is impossible, of course, nor is maximum coverage. I have yet to hear someone analyze wikipedia in the same context that

I intended to post this yesterday, but I fear I was hit by a time warp and somehow my day disappeared. Enjoy this piece, it is one of my favorites. --ty

As some of you may know, this (particular) series of missives and polemics about the knitting craft are part of a project that I’m currently working on as part of my last semester as an undergraduate. Another aspect of this project (which I’m using to address an interest in a larger sense of a knitting community) is a weekly knitting group that I’ve been responsible for on campus. We meet on mondays and we’ve had tons of people come in. I bill it as a knitting workshop, rather than an SnB, or a group, and people come in to knit, to ask questions, or learn from scratch.

In the beginning, I thought that what I really wanted to do was work on helping people move on to more complicated shapes, because I take the opinion, that once you know how to knit and purl, the only difference between making a scarf and making a simple sweater (or a hat) is dedication and commitment, and it’s my sense that that many knitters are reticent to make that leap. While I still think this is mostly true, knitters are surprisingly aware of this. Interestingly, what I think has been the most helpful lesson that I’ve been able impart, deal with some of the most fundamental parts of knitting, the very minute details of how stitches are supposed to look and feel on the needle. I’ve taken to thinking of this as string theory, but I try and keep that to myself.

What I think I’m teaching is something that many knitters figure out eventually, but that people tend to refer to in a number of different ways. I’m pretty sure that I’ve heard it called “knitting in your head,” also “watching your knitting,” or being able to “eyeball patterns,” and so forth but the core of all these skills is pretty much the same. You want to be able to observe your knitting and be able to understand how the stitches are formed and interact, basically, what causes a stitch to twist and what causes a knit stitch to become a purl stitch. This sounds like a really uninteresting skill, and perhaps it is, but I’ve realized that many people receive lessons to knit in a really structured way so that they’ll be able to follow patterns easily. Teachers start out with something, say knitting, or casting on, and they say, “this is casting on, here’s what you do.” People can pick this up, but it’s difficult, because the name is largely irrelevant: learning how to knit is more about learning how to make your hands and fingers do something that they’re not used to.

As a result, I’ve taken to doing a few things that might be a little atypical. (Or they might be normal and I’m just slow.) For instance, I teach casting on after a person has gotten how to knit (using a sample:) casting on is difficult, and it doesn’t really make sense outside of the context of knitting. Similarly the “difficulty” of purling seems to be an artifact of how we learn to knit: I’ve had some measure of success teaching people “one way of knitting” (knitting), and “another way of knitting” (purling) when I tell/explain the distinction after it looks like their fingers “know” how to form the stitches. Once all the basics are under control its really easy to move on to other spheres and projects. How to learn to knit shapes, garments, or whatever else the new knitter wants to knit. And that’s about it.

The last time(s) that I tried to teach knitting, I found that it was hard, and that I wasn’t incredibly adept at explaining this aspect of knitting, and was much more interested in teaching particular ways of knitting. This time around, I have people that have learned to knit from me who are knitting continental, combined, english style, you name it. Someone even took to knitting a garter stitch garment by purling every row (atypical at best,) and allowing learners to have this kind of freedom is both easier from my perspective because as long as they’re making fabric that works, and they’re enjoying it, it doesn’t matter how they tension the yarn; and once their fingers know how to form the stitches, teaching them the names of what they’re doing, is relatively simple. And then people know what to knit: what they do after this point is really out of your control as a knitting teacher until they come back to learn how to make specific things, but laying the foundation is definitely important.

I’d be interested in hearing your perspective on teaching methods, if you’ve ever taught someone how to knit. I’ll be back in a week with an article about yarn choice and knitting economy.

‘til next time, tycho

I’m not sure that I have a great deal of news regarding Station Keeping to report to you this fine morning. It warmed significantly in the last few days in Wisconsin, and it doesn’t look like there’s going to be any more snow. Which means we’ve moved quickly from “frozen season” to “allergy season.” As a result I spent the end of the week and the weekend in a stupor. I think I hit the peak early/midday on Sunday, and I’m starting to feel better. The project that seemed to take the largest hit was SK, alas. In this stupor I did watch a great deal of television that I’d been saving up for a while, and I got some knitting done as well.

We have 3 confirmed contributors to this project, and had I been more cogent this weekend I think that I might have been able to gather a few more. I also have the first 6 weeks laid out, and I think that perhaps later in the week I’ll start writing the first of those episodes. In some ways the episode summaries that I wrote were to provide an example of what I thought an episode could “do,” not to mention inspire a stuck writer, but I’ve also thought that these were the kind of episodes that I might write, so unless people volunteer, I’ll start with some of the writing. I also had a discussion with one of the aforementioned writers regarding the longer-term plot developments that I’ve archived for the purpose of shedding some light on my thoughts regarding the longer term vision of this project.

Because I don’t have enough Station Keeping content to fill an entire entry, I think that this is about to turn into a general catchall blog post. Sooo….

In other news, I’ve spent a good deal of time these past few days working on the layout of a book that is going a children’s book. I look forward to being done with this (and also having another something for a graphic design portfolio, should I ever need to do that). I have realized as part of this, that if I want to do graphics work (which I really do pretty irregularly) I totally would need a better computer, because the ever reliable zoe was totally not up to the task. I think the postponement of the release of Leopard to October means that I’m unlikely to begin to seriously hurting for a new computer until at least then. I think that I’m particularly sensitive to this because I put in the order for Zoe almost exactly 2 years ago. I think that I’ll have to work on some sort of retrospective to honor the occasion.

I’m an/the outgoing leader, of my campus' queer group. Since a number of us are leaving/graduating at the end of the year, we started on updating the groups constitution¹, as a way of enhancing the continuity, and recording the unspoken assumptions that have guided the leaders of the group for several years. This has incited an unprecedented level of attention from some folks with heretofore limited involvement in the operations or activities of the club. And, some decisively undemocratic tactics, which rob attention that I would like to put towards other projects including TealArt, knitting-related, and research related. I think though, to tie this back into something on topic, there’s totally going to be a SK episode where Eli or Talia will grind a council of nebbishen politicians into a very fine powder. Sigh. Take any angry twitters with a grain of salt concerning the above.

While I would like to avoid being self congratulatory, I have to say that I’m very much enjoying the progress that we’ve been able to maintain at tealart. It’s been a nice compliment to my school work, and it’s nice to have other projects to think about and consider. I think my misery during my allergies was due in part to the fact that by thursday I was really caught up with my blog writing, and didn’t have much left to do. So here’s to being able to keep it up for a while. I have some nifty essays planned and prepped for this week. I just got a rather nifty idea for another series (to follow up the hypertext series), so I think I’ll be sketching that out in the next few days. Anyway, if you’re interested in writing a wednesday essay, talk to me. In the mean time, stay tuned this week, and I hope that I have something more meaningful to share with you all about Station Keeping in a week.

see you around, tycho

The last time I spent any great deal of time writing and thinking about e-books, it seemed like they were the thing of the future, and that with a little bit of practice, adjustment, and technological development, the digital text would be able to replace the printed one. This was to be a great thing: with production costs greatly reduced, more people could publish their work, with less overhead, and books could be sold for substantially cheeper while still increasing profit margins. Besides all of the technological benefits (searching, indexing, tranclusion), e-books had (have?) the potential to re/democratise publishing writing and reading. While we may yet see a system that will revolutionize the digital “book,” it seems pretty safe to call the ebook a failure. Perhaps its the fault of the DRM efforts to overprotect text which limited accessibility, and perhaps it’s the fault of the hardware developers to produce an affordable, open device. In any case, we’re not there.

A few friends of mine, scoff predictably at any mention of the ebook because they “fail to understand how people read,” and while this is part of the puzzle, it also seems to me that they fail to understand how we write--if you’re reading this, I do indeed know that the distinction isn’t that large. I don’t think it’s productive to retort to the argument that people’s attention span flies out the window when they’re in-front of a screen, because I think we have a similar attention span problem with paper, the ritual of turning pages (literally) lets us “reset,” as do the blank pages and space around chapter/part breaks. It’s significantly easier to “chunk” and “chart progress” a book than it is a column of text. Writers (and editors), on some level, are aware of this, and can organize books destined for print in a way that uses these breaks to help the way that a book is consumed. Even though in the loosest sense a book is just a collection of words, the materiality of books contributes/constructs our experience of the words, and when you try and take the words of the book, and put them in a different format: it doesn’t work (as well). E-books fail because we keep trying to simply republish p-books electronically, and keep failing because they’re not structured or written in a form that would be productive.

The truth is, I think, that no one really has a clue how write the digital equivalent of a book yet, because they aren’t really books as we know them. We, both specifically at TealArt and the internet in general, tend toward shorter serializations, I think in large part because of the blog, but also because it’s hard to expect (or want) the kind of devotion to blogs that people often have for books. We read books one at a time, sometimes we’ll have our fingers in two or three, but rarely more than that; whereas we read dozens or even hundreds of websites concurrently. Digital writers need to be able to address the way that we approach digital reading, and while there’s a lot of this that has to happen on the publication end, and though I don’t have any empirical justification¹ for this it seems that there are stylistic concerns on the level of the paragraph that need to be addressed for electronic literature to “work.”

At the same time, I think there is a place for another electronic writing form that isn’t just a translation of a book into a digital format, or a sort of print-lite text, but allows authors to engage with a subject or story in a substantive and sustained way that has more depth than the short forms that have already succeeded on the web. I’m not sure what the format would be both from a technological and rhetorical perspective, but I can see some sort of easily serializable xml formating that allows for easy paragraphical numbering, and shorter paragraphs, perhaps we’ll call it the dbook. You heard it here first.

As a corollary, I suppose, this is why I’m so interested and supportive of the PDF format: its basically universal, and it allows writers and creators to reliably control the way that a text is presented. I think if we’re going to see viable electronic editions of print books, they’ll have to be in PDF² format. This isn’t the wave of the future in terms of “new media” and “new writing” but its something that needs to happen as part of a transition.

Thanks for reading, and I’d love to hear some of your thoughts on what kind of stylistic concerns long form digital writing might entail, or your thoughts on the reading/writing experience of electronic books and literature. I’ll be back in a week with something else entirely, I’m sure.

cheers, tycho