I have begun scheming for a new sweater. I have a number of sweaters in the cue to finish/start knitting, so this one is a ways off, but I was thinking through the sweater and I realized how similar the creative process for knitting a sweater was to writing a book.

There’s an extensive outlining/desiging stage, where you (or I) have to visualize the entire sweater and process, like doing character sketches, world building, and plot outlining/creation.

Then there’s writing the draft, like knitting the body of the sweater, a stage only describable as “a long slog.” This stage has it’s joys (seeing the pattern emerge) and the seemingly quick progress of the beginning. It also has downsides: the “black hole” of trunk section (comparable to writing acts two and three of a story in five acts), and the knowledge that even when you complete the sweater, you still have a long way to go before you have a “finished product.”

Finally, you have to knit sleeves, and the color, and do whatever finishing you need to. Of course akin to the editing a story into a presentable format.

Now admittedly I knit sweaters in a particular sort of way designed to eliminate seaming and end weaving in. Some people knit sleeves before their done with the body or block before they seam for instance. So your milage with this metaphor may vary.

So this new sweater, that I want to design. I want to knit a jacket, sort of like a frock coat. Subtle fair isle pattern in dark earth tones. Wool. Probably with worsted or heavy worsted weight yarn. The bottom would be hemmed, so the pattern would start at the bottom edge. The body would be 30-35 inches or so long (It would have the longest knitting black hole in the world), and some sort of nifty collar, and several clasps to hold the thing together.

And as I see the sweater come together, I feel just the same way that I do when I figure out the next little bit of the plot. Completely satisfying.

Before I get there, though, I have a sweater under way; I’m almost up to the underarm gusset, so I’m making progress for sure. I feel like I’m almost out of the black hole, so that’s a great deal of fun. It’s going to be a great sweater.

Also in the cue, is a remake of the first fair isle sweater I attempted, because the pattern was so much fun, and I can’t wear the first sweater, because it’s awkwardly sized. And I accidentally got the perfect yarn, when I was getting the yarn for the current sweater. I also have the final sleeve of a sweater from last semester to finish when the yarn comes in, and another sport weight grey-heather sweater, possibly a cardigan, for myself.

There’s also the great sweater trade, which I haven’t thought much about recently, but that’s in there as well.

In other news, I didn’t record this morning, but I finished the edit on the story last night, which was incredibly satisfying. The “spider-men” line and ungendered aspects of the story remained, but the narrative voice comes through stronger, and I took out a lot of the hackneyed god/fate/destney crap. So I’m happy.

Best, Sam

The title of this post, comes from an online writer’s listserv that I belonged to, from about 6 years ago to almost three years ago, if memory serves. While like so many institutions in cyberspace, “SoWrite” came and went, but I liked the idea: There were a lot of writer’s forms where people just sat around and blathered incoherently without producing much content, SoWrite’s philosophy was simply, “You want to be a writer, do you? So write.” It was a nice reminder.

As I think about the past few days, and perhaps even the past few weeks, writing these TealArt related entries has been one of the more fun things I’ve accomplished. So I’m going to write more of them. I hope you don’t mind. When I’m in school, or at least school for the past three years, I’ve had so much academic writing that I get burnt out, and can’t possibly envision myself committing another phoneme to the page. So maybe I’ll develop a habit this summer and you’ll see a TealArt revival, or not, but I’m hoping and you know it’s good for right now.

In addition to the knitting projects that I’ve been working on this summer (ones that seem to be coming out of the “black hole stage of the first 10 or so inches, where they won’t grow no matter how long you knit on them), I’ve been doing a lot of reading. A lot of philosophy, in various forms. While I get called a social scientist a lot, and it’s true, I’m in an area which suits me in a lot of ways in terms of subject and method, the theories and analytical insights of my discipline (in particular) seem ungrounded somehow. While I really do enjoy this reading, and very much want to continue with this reading, it is not as inspiring or as invigorating as I initially hoped it would. Such is life.

Another thing I’ve been working on is revising a fiction story that I last edited in 2003. Its a fairly substantial rewrite, but it’s going quickly. I’m much more nimble with words than I was then. This isn’t to say that I’ve reached the top of the hill, as I’m sure the quality of the writing on TealArt demonstrates, but I’ve grown.

I had a professor last semester who assigned what I’ve taken to calling “exercise” papers: papers where the object of the writing was to synthesize as many “concepts” presented in the text/class as possible in a given page count. There was minimal research, and the experience was something like an “in-class” essay with more stress. Except he ripped apart the writing like a bitter creative writing MFA teaching 5 sections of freshman comp a term. Which was incredibly demoralizing and I’m not sure how much I’ve actually recovered from it.

In the past, I’ve typically done fairly detailed outlines of a story before I sit down to draft it. I find this particularly important in long form fiction as I fear it would be too easy to write yourself into a tree, and I think that’s important to avoid. So I haven’t started the--admittedly arduous--process of outlining the re-imagined Circle Games (working: Square Pegs). I think it needs to stew some more. The Circle Games story, is one that I don’t think I’m done with, and I like the idea of telling it again, and I really like the idea of playing with the characters more. They’re good people.

So in an effort to establish accountability, my goal is to finish editing this story, so I can do lay down the recording for the first Circle Games pod-cast tomorrow. I also want to go to the contra dance here because I think that would do me good. With luck I hope that means that I’ll be able to do the editing, and have the pod-cast up by the middle of next week.

Stay well everyone.

Cheers, sam

It’s come to my attention (thank you, mother dearest) that the TealArt commenting software is not working as it should. As I get ready to start pod-casting, this is going to the top of my list of things to work on.

I have recently, augmented Wordpress (my delightful back-end software package), in order too accept the pod-cast more graciously. I also cleaned off the web-space a little so I should be able to get underway before I run out of space completely. I’ve also drawn up notes for the test episode, that would of course be (Episode 0).

I want to have a little segment that I can read, I’m thinking one of the short stories I wrote before/durring the circle games draft. Not the horror one (g-d, what was I thinking?), but the protest-y one. It has a line that refers to a few people as “would-be spider-men,” which I was always particularly fond of. And while, it’s not Circle Games proper, it could be. So much of the world/‘verse, is sort of temporally non-descript, which is why I like it, and why I hope others will too.

Anyway, I want most of my discussion of CG to be in the pod-cast, so there won’t be a lot of chatter regarding it here. One of the things I’m working on for the proper first episode is a creative commons license for circle games, likely of the attribution-share-alike variety, but I need to think through how that will work.

And that’s about all I have for now. I’ll keep in touch, but now I have to fix the commenting. And find a blasted pair of headphones which work.

Cheers, sam

So I was (mostly) minding my own business when, I saw the following quote, in this article:

Trauma becomes neurobiologically etched and may be transmitted across generations.

Ok For starters, no. Wrong. Try again.

Sure expereince (traumatic or otherwise) affects memory, and though we don’t really have a clue (well, I for sure don’t, someone might, I suppose) how the material realitieis of how memory is stored in the brain, the term neurobiologically etched might represent this process, whatever it may be.

Ok, that said: Memories aren’t genetic. You can’t transmit this across generations.

Well you can. It’s called telling stories, and it’s a social, not a biological process.

So there.

This from the new Yarn Harlot Book. You know Stephanie, of the Yarn Harlot. You can google just as quick as I can link.

“When a sweater goes wrong, it’s much more spectacular than a wayward scarf. You can laugh about a hat that came out weird for maybe 10 minutes, but an unexpectedly “unique” sweater never stops being funny (once you work through the period of grief and shock)” (187).

Oh that’s so the truth. I have my “star trek” sweater, my flairing cuff hem sweater that was too small, the bulky cotton sweater attempt that turned out to be a shawl the size of Nebraska, the 2 fair isle sweaters with forearms that were too tight, the blue cardigan with the droopy fronts and the two small.

Sigh.

For Some Practical Anthropology.

“Since I got here in Okondjato I am wondering how they all became poor. I say ‚ “became‚” because one day their forefathers maybe were not so different than they are now, always around their fires, all drunk, dancing and singing songs, but they were not poor, they were traditional.”

(Via AnthroBoundaries.)

Shakespeare used “they” with singular antecedents. So there! > “Because when a construction is clearly present several times in Shakespeare’s rightly admired plays and poems, and occurs in the carefully prepared published work of just about all major writers down the centuries, and is systematically present in the unreflecting conversational usage of just about everyone including Sean Lennon, then the claim that it is ungrammatical begins to look utterly unsustainable to us here at Language Log Plaza. This use of they isn’t ungrammatical, it isn’t a mistake, it’s a feature of ordinary English syntax that for some reason attracts the ire of particularly puristic pusillanimous pontificators, and we don’t buy what they’re selling.”

(Via Language Log.)

The matrilineal ancestry of Ashkenazi Jews

“close to one-half of Ashkenazi Jews, estimated at 8,000,000 people, can be traced back to only 4 women carrying distinct mtDNAs that are virtually absent in other populations,”

(Via Dienekes' Anthropology Blog.)