Topic: Posts

My project for the week (and saying it in this way legitimizes a week where I read fiction for fiction’s sake, and knitted for knitting’s sake) was re-reading Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game books, which I really enjoyed. It was hard having read the book before (and even the books that follow it in Card’s sequence), it was like watching old friends walk into a trap. Particularly, in this case, because the trap was traumatic for the characters.

As an aside here, I’d like to state that the vernacular would have used the term “psychological,” which is in my mind inaccurate and inpercise at best. Everything is psychological, particularly material reality. But no one asked me.

I didn’t record the pod-cast today. Perhaps late tonight, because of the intense reading, my sleep schedule of the past two nights has become particularly skewed. So it goes.

During my reading, I made note of a few things that really got me interested. I was reading on an old Pocket PC that could make voice recordings, so I made use of the feature and recorded two notes. The first was a note about story telling, and I had a sudden realization about how to play a development in my own project.

The second point, made a note about an academic interest. There’s a part about two-thirds of the way through the book where a character is reflecting on the implications of a fabricated identity. And there it was. The creation of identities (on a personal and community level) is a recurring interest, and there was a passage which really brought together a lot of really good points. So that was good.

Anyway, I’m not feeling particularly articulate right now. Perhaps in a bit.

Be Well, Sam

I made a mitten today. By request. It’s rather spiffy. I’ve never made a mitten before, and I think it came off rather well. I tried a couple of shaping techniques that I don’t use very often, and was reminded why I don’t use them. I have the other mitten to knit along with a brief re-knitting of the thumb, but all in all I’m pleased. I also have a lot of time to finish, seeing that it’s summer at the present. It was good.

I went to the farmer’s market here today. It was rather nifty. I got a lot of cool eggplants. I foresee grilled/broiled japanese eggplant, and Baba Ganouj in our future.

In a culinary related note, I’ve discovered, much to my amusement, that I’m a somewhat adventurous eater. (I have historically been somewhat of a picky eater.)

I don’t think that my palate has really changed much, but there are things that I think of as common place that aren’t. Like greek food. I was standing in line at a greek stand at the aforementioned farmer’s market (unfortunately for me, we entered from the wrong end of the line, which meant we didn’t eat.) I said, oh I think I’ll have the falafel, and the woman next to me who had just ordered a jeer-ro sandwich said “what’s falfel?” So I explained, rather awkwardly that it was sort of like baked or fried hummus patties, only without the tahini (sesame paste, I think) and it’s courser. So really, not very much like humus at all. Garbonzo bean base at the least.

The other anecdote, of note, is that I introduced this household to pinjur, a bulgarian dip with eggplant, roasted red pepper, garlic, maybe onion, and seasoned with hot peppers, vinegar, and a bit of sugar. So it’s a tangy/zingy vegtable dip, that’s smooth and almost a little creamy (the eggplant I think). Delightful. Didn’t everyone grow up with a jar of it in the fridge?

In other knitting news, I have reached the gussets of the sweater. Three more inches until the “armholes start” from there, it’s only two-two and a half inches till the first part of the neck starts (I’m doing an open neck) and that’s really cool: the second part of the neck starts five inches later.

Other people might think, “the body of the sweater, not to mention the sleeves, is 26 or 27 inches long, and seeing that I’ve only knit 13 inches, I still have a hell of a way left to go.)

“Bah!” I say. From here on out, I’m no more than a day or two between interesting features. The five inches of the neck is something of a stretch, but it’s nothing compared to the 10 inches of pattern that I just endured.

I’ve already planned the next seater. A black and white one that I knit last summer. Faroe. I think I’ve written about it here. I want to reknit it, in a version that I’m more likely to wear.

What I knit after that depends on where I am. If I’m still in Nashville or St. Louis, I might start on a lace weight merino pullover. If I’m in Wisconsin, I might start a grey sport weight sweater. Or, I’ll start the browncoat, which needs some more thinking.

If anyone knows of a good source for nice (but still reasonably cheep) worsted weight wool in a number of good subtle brown tones, that would be particularly splendid. I’m thinking about Bartlett yarns’ worsted yarn. It’s nice, and I think I could do a coat for a pretty reasonable amount (40-50 bucks or so). That’s generally what I consider generally a fairly reasonable price point for knitting a sweater that will take six to eight weeks of good knitting. If you have thoughts, send or comment them on in.

I’ve had this strange desire to watch the Star Trek movies again. I have fond memories, and even though all of the new generation of sci-fi shows (Babylon 5, Firefly, Battlestar, and Stargate to a slightly lesser extent) like to hate on Trek for being fantastic, overproduced, and overly technical I think that the show was wildly influential, and much of the material was at the very least passably good.

I’ve seen most of the original series and while I like it, I’ve not been that fond of it. I watched the New Voyages that have been released, and was particularly astounded by their quality. They even managed to get Walter Koenig and D.C. Fontana on board. It’s good stuff. Really good stuff.

Having said that, I think the Wrath of Kahn/Search for Spock/Voyage Home trilogy is among the best Trek around, with the possible exception of some of the 4-5 season DS9 (the ones where the Dominon captured DS9 and the BDH* are stuck fighting on the Defiant). But I really liked a lot of what happened in DS9, and that might have less to do with the quality of the show, and more to do with the similarities to Babylon 5 and where I was in my life when I was watching it. Generations was cool too.

I recognize using the term “Big Damn Heros” to refer to Trek and not Firefly characters is perhaps a faux pas of Biblical proportions, I’m ok with it.

So I started out this post, with the notion that it would be shorter and include a segment on bad writing, and it did neither. So it goes.

Hope you’ve enjoyed.

Happy July.

Cheers, Sam

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.)