Sepia Salax

Unexpectedly, having a blog where I cross-post everything - all my knitting content, as well as my lit reviews - has been making me feel kind of schizophrenic. I originally thought that less separation would make for a more natural feeling, but I've since realized that I blog better if each blog has a specific reason for being. So, in a piece of very exciting news, my book content will be posted over at my brand-new, GORGEOUS blog,

Evening All Afternoon.

I think it's incredibly beautiful. I described to David how I wanted it to look, and he transmuted my ideas into an even more stunning version of Exactly What I Wanted. There's a new review up over there, and all of my book reviews and comments from this blog have been moved over as well. It's like a new house that's already pre-warmed!

Meanwhile, knitting content will continue to go up over at the Family Trunk Project blog. Also beautiful, and also designed by David. Do you sense a theme?

Change your bookmarks accordingly, and I look forward to seeing you at one home or the other! I have greatly enjoyed my period of subletting here at Sepia Salax, and I'm looking forward to the next step. Au revoir!

(My first novel for the main Orbis Terrarum challenge)

I am strangely and strongly drawn to stories of quarantine. Any novel involving a small group of people forcibly detained in each others' company due to mysterious or shocking circumstances unfailingly engages my interest. From Albert Camus' The Plague to Agatha Christie's Poirot mysteries to William Sleator's House of Stairs, something in me can't resist examinations of what happens to a small group of people when they are sealed away from the rest of society, left alone to establish their own order and parse the mysteries of their segregation. Needless to say, therefore, I was drawn to the premise of José Saramago's Blindness: an inexplicable epidemic of highly contagious blindness sweeps over a modern European city, and the authorities quarantine the newly blind in a decommissioned mental hospital. The blind are left to more or less fend for themselves, and their descent into degradation is witnessed and ameliorated by the one person who inexplicably keeps her eyesight: an intrepid woman known only as "the doctor's wife." Meanwhile, as the internees struggle to hold onto their humanity under adverse conditions, the entire city around them is also going blind, and the central band of characters must eventually confront the deepening chaos outside the asylum's walls.

Blindess turns out to be one of the more masterful, and definitely one of the most disturbing, portraits of quarantine I've read. In the tradition of Lord of the Flies, its vision of humans in a state of nature shows them - some of them, at least - devolving into cruel and tyrannical beasts, exercising brute strength to exploit those around them. It also, though, explores the complex struggle to maintain and simultaneously revise one's moral code in the face of inexplicable catastrophe. Interestingly, it may be the single sighted character who most alters her ideas of morality, recognizing that after what she has witnessed, the old rules no longer apply. I admired Saramago's subtlety on this front: recognizing that the rules have changed did not mean, for the central characters, abandoning all morality, sense of obligation, or definition of right and wrong. Rather, it was an acknowledgement that such a cataclysmic change as sudden blindness changes the person, and even more the society, to which it happens. Even the clichéd proverbs in the characters' mouths morph throughout the novel to reflect their new condition, and their thought processes even more so. At one point, another main character asks the doctor's wife if she loves her husband:

Do you love your husband, Yes, as I love myself, but should I turn blind, if after turning blind I should no longer be the person I was, how would I then be able to go on loving him, and with what love, Before, when we could still see, there were also blind people, Few in comparison, the feelings in use were those of someone who could see, therefore blind people felt with the feelings of others, not as the blind people they were, now, certainly, what is emerging are the real feelings of the blind, and we're still only at the beginning, for the moment we still live on the memory of what we felt...

This passage gives a sense of Saramago's quirky narration style, which took a bit of getting used to, but in the end I found quite effective at communicating the suddenly-blurred boundaries that characterize the lives of the newly-blind. It also showcases the novel's preoccupation with "the person [one] was" versus the person one has become, and the process whereby the transformation occurs. One of the things I liked about Blindness was the way in which the epidemic mutated, but did not erase, the personalities and values that existed in the sighted world.

One thing potential readers should know is that Blindness deals explicitly and lengthily with brutal rape. I'm pretty skeptical of the contemporary penchant for including rape scenes in fiction where they seem unnecessary or - god forbid - masturbatory, as many do, so I was on the alert during this darkest, middle section of Blindness. I have to say, though, the rape scenes here needed to exist. They are the logical conclusion of the blind bullies' descent into brutality, and Saramago gives us enough of a moment-by-moment account that we truly understand the terror and anguish they perpetrate. In their inhumanity, they are oblivious to the humanity of others, which is just one of the levels on which the "blindness" allegory functions in the novel. So too, witnessing and being subjected to the rapes is a turning-point for the main character; it forms the final breaking-point for her between the old rules and the new. Afterwards, her outlook has shifted, and she is capable of doing what she must do to survive, and to help those around her do the same. The scenes, therefore, performed several symbolic and plot-furthering purposes, and I finished the book feeling that they were integral to Saramago's larger vision. Nonetheless, those with their own sexual trauma might want to approach the novel with caution.

Several sound-byte reviews claim this novel as an allegory of "the events of the century"; I assume they are referring primarily to the Holocaust and the AIDS epidemic. And it is certainly relevant to both of those catastrophes, or to any set of events, this century or earlier, in which a sudden sickness or disaster has swept over and radically changed a society. But it's also enjoyable as a story in its own right, or as a parable of our everyday condition. In the middle of the novel one of the main characters, an old man with an eyepatch (half-blind, therefore, even before the epidemic's onset) encourages a group of inmates to share the circumstances under which they went blind. There is an intriguing hint that the state of blindness - or obliviousness - is caused by the thought or fear of blindness, as in the cases of the pharmacist's assistant, who goes blind upon hearing of the epidemic and fearing for himself, the museum patron whose last vision is of a painting of a horse with bulging, fearful eyes, the car thief who rightly imagines that his victim's blindness will infect him, and the old man himself, who goes blind in the act of lifting up his eye patch to look at his missing eye. Such a causality is appealing: all we have to fear, as the man said, is fear itself, and so on. By obsessing on ourselves and our own vision, we become blind. Yet there are enough counter-examples to throw this theory into doubt: the girl who went blind at the moment of orgasm, thinking of nothing but her own pleasure; the woman who goes blind while pressing the button of an elevator; and, of course, the first victim of the epidemic, who goes blind while stopped at a traffic light and would have had no reason to be thinking about sight or blindness at the time. Here we have the human search for causality, juxtaposed with the ever-present possibility that all these events are random, impersonal. Then there is the even more disturbing idea that, as the doctor's wife theorizes at the end of the novel, this social blindness has been an integral part of the human condition all along:

Do you want me to tell you what I think, Yes, do, I don't think we did go blind, I think we are blind, Blind but seeing, Blind people who can see, but do not see.

My my my, where does the time go? Since my last knitting post I have had a surpassingly terrible week, followed by a week where I scrambled around to mend the carnage, followed by a whirlwind trip to Washington, DC to see the senior recital of David's cousin Charlie, who is about to graduate from American University. We were only on the east coast for three nights, and I had my doubts about how fun a 60-hour trip sandwiched between two full days of flying could really be, but you know what? It was thoroughly enjoyable. We spent a day cherry-picking Smithsonian exhibits, beginning with a fantastic and highly entertaining insider tour of the Written in Bone exhibit at the Natural History Museum, courtesy of Elspeth over at Wry Punster. It was fascinating, and also hilarious to hear her stories of conservation challenges and mishaps. Thanks, Elspeth! Also on the menu were a pilgrimage to Julia Child's kitchen (David has a deep, abiding love of her and her show) and a lovely meander through the Louise Bourgeois exhibit at the Hirschhorn. I am a huge fan of Bourgeois's work, and it was really exciting to see some of the huge-scale "cell" installations in person. The recital itself, and the family time spent together on Sunday, were also fantastic. All in all, a successful trip. And what with all the plane time, I made some serious progress on my next Family Trunk pattern.

In three weeks, David and my parents and I are traveling to the island of Oahu, where my mom grew up like her father before her. The person who made the decision to move from the mainland to Hawai'i was my great-grandfather, Charles Victor Morine, and this garment will be my tribute to him. Hopefully, I can get it done in time to take it with me, and photograph it in the pineapple fields where his inventions helped bring in the harvest.

This design is outside my comfort zone: a drapey, asian-influenced tunic with kimono-style sleeves that are knitted in one piece with the back and front body pieces. It's a much different look than anything I've come up with before, and knitting the sleeves in a single piece with the body presents certain design challenges. They have to be the right length from the beginning, for example, or one is forced to rip out the entire piece back to the underarm. I've also incorporated a bit of short-row shaping across the shoulders, to accommodate the body's curves. Luckily for everyone else, though, once I've sorted this stuff out, knitting the thing from the pattern should be clear sailing.

The yarn is Louet MerLin, a delightful linen/merino sport-weight with great drape, that softens beautifully upon washing. The two linen plies are separate from the single merino one, so the finished work has a lot of subtle textural interest. I'm especially loving this effect in the basket-stitch sections that border the bottom and cuffs; the finished fabric really brings to mind the early- to mid-century island wear that helped to inspire this tunic.

These photos are of the finished back; the front will be asymmetrical, and has a few surprises up its drapey and capacious sleeves.

William Vollman's Europe Central was, for me, a very slow burn. I spent the first two hundred pages of this sprawling, kaleidescopic epic on the emotional sidelines, wryly observant, interested but not overly engaged. Vollman's characters, I thought, were intriguing, but also annoying. His prose was full of vivid detail, but a bit overblown. It was the kind of thing, I found myself thinking, that I would have enjoyed better in high school, when drama needed to be proclaimed from on high with cannon fire in order to get my attention. Do we really need, I wondered, another novel about World War II?

And then I realized that I had begun thinking almost constantly about the moral dilemmas presented in the novel. Vollman has devoted years to thinking about the "moral calculus" utilized by human beings in situations of extremity, about the ways in which people make decisions in crisis, and how that plays out in a larger pattern of violence and history. All that thinking really pays off as he draws his fictionalized portraits of historical figures from mid-century Russia and Germany; these are people placed in crucial but impossible situations, people to whom dilemmas are posed with no answer remotely "right," and Vollman traces their moral and emotional arcs with great care. I think Europe Central would make a perfect fiction companion to Rising Up and Rising Down, the same author's nonfiction examination of violence and its ramifications. Here, even more than in the factual case studies of Rising Up, the reader observes at close hand - from inside the subject's head, in fact - the protracted struggle to balance necessity and morality, to make sense of the insane circumstances in which he finds himself, to create and apply some version of a moral code. Since the novel spans decades - late 1930's to mid-1970's - the reader has time, too, to witness the effects of the passage of time, the slow (or, sometimes, lightning-quick) revisions that the characters must make to their moral codes under the weight of events, emotions, or simply old age.

Europe Central features a wide swath of characters, from artists and poets (most prominently the Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich) to generals and spies. Although I'm generally not a fan of military fiction, this book surprised me: for my money, the most compelling episodes were two long pieces devoted to generals (the Russian Vlasov and the German Paulus) who each defected to the opposite side. Vollman's portrait of two giant powers, both irrationally fixed on the idea of Total War - no retreat under any circumstances - communicates the claustrophobic plight of military professionals trained to practice battle-craft as a strategic art. The chain of command dictates that both Vlasov and Paulus must follow orders, and their leaders' commitment to Total War means that the orders will never permit retreat, even for strategic purposes. Even when their respective armies are starved, surrounded, frozen and out of fuel and ammunition, they are ordered to succeed, and punished for disobeying orders. What's more, the cult of personality surrounding Hitler means that Vollman's Paulus must never doubt the ultimate wisdom of his Führer's orders, or his entire moral universe will crumble. It's fascinating to watch this tension between Paulus's false faith and his professional's knowledge of the battlefield play out in test after test. Will he defy orders when he knows the battle is unwinnable? When he realizes that successful escape is impossible? When he understands that all his men will likely die pointless deaths? In each of these scenarios Paulus remains ferociously loyal; it is only when he witnesses the casualness with which Hitler expects him to take his own life that his internal walls begin to crumble. His ultimate decision, to allow himself to be taken alive by the Soviets, is one that would never occur to me as a betrayal, especially after the grueling fighting he led. But by his own moral lights, he has betrayed his Führer and his former self, and must conceptualize himself anew as a Russian collaborator. All of his assumptions are suddenly up for reconsideration. His bitterness at being treated so unreasonably combines with his more objective misgivings - and, of course, the pressure of the Soviet propaganda machine - and he becomes a vocal critic of the government he'd almost died to defend.

All of the characters in Europe Central are deeply flawed, if not downright unlikeable. After all, many of them are working to strengthen two of the most oppressive nation-states in living memory: Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Soviet Russia. Many of the episodes are narrated by semi-faceless mid-level functionaries in the Nazi or Communist parties, men who have been completely indoctrinated in the nonsensical bigotry of the party line. Even those characters who don't support their country's favored brand of totalitarian oppression are endowed by Vollman with irritating mannerisms and/or infuriating qualities; there are no kind, easy, socially enlightened resistance-fighter heroes for whom the reader can cheer. Yet, with a few exceptions, even the most unlikeable people in the book evoke, at times, a spark of sympathy in the reader. And although eight hundred pages of unlikeable people is an understandably hard sell, I honestly believe the characters' deep complexity is what makes the novel so compelling.

World War II is often viewed, especially by Americans, as "the good war," a clear-cut battle of the Light of freedom and tolerance (in which we see ourselves) battling the Dark of oppression and bigotry (Hitler's Germany). Vollman strips away this simplistic vision by the simple act of looking at the war's eastern front: between two oppressive, power-mad totalitarian regimes, between two all-seeing surveillance and propaganda machines, between two starved wastelands across which humans are transported to secret locations and subjected to atrocities, the choice is much less clear. Caught between two such choices, it takes remarkable strength of vision to imagine, let alone fight for, a third option, even when that third option is a dire necessity. As he paints these characters' struggles of loyalty - between Hitler and Stalin, between the collective and the self, between the party line and their own integrity - Vollman blurs all lines that separate one side from the other. A spy who uses his racial privilege to join the SS and expose their crimes, yet who fails to obtain international cooperation - are his hands clean? A composer living under seige, whose children are starving, and who wants to believe that music can actually help turn the tide of the war, writes a program symphony that tows the party line - to what extent has he compromised his integrity? A Soviet general, soured on Stalin's machinations, who allows himself to be convinced that collaboration with Germany will enable him to fight for the liberation of Russia, and who tells himself that rumors of concentration camps are another example of Soviet slander - where does he fall on the moral spectrum? And how can my own sympathy as a reader be more with a German general than a conflicted Soviet artist? In observing the progress of each of these characters through their personal decision-making processes, and the vast moral gray areas involved, one begins to question one's own black-and-white view of the Second World War. Indeed, Vollman ends the book with a meditation on black, white, and shades of gray.

I've noticed that many people recommend this novel for World War II history aficionados, but I think that's slightly beside the point. Vollman is writing fiction; he creates full emotional lives and narrative voices for his characters such that the final products could only be suggested by, not true to, the historical record. History buffs who cringe at factual liberties and poetic license would be well-advised to stay away. No, as I see it, the people who ought to read this novel are those intrigued by the human psyche in times of great crisis, or fascinated by the cycle of violence on a grand historic scale as well as a personal, internal one. The truly thoughtful reader will also learn from observing the shifting sands of her own sympathies as she reads.

On David and my annual trips to his family's property in rural New Hampshire, we drive by a road sign directing tourists to an old Shaker village. Long abandoned, it's apparently been preserved as a museum, and although we have never stopped to see it, my brain has tended to pause a moment upon seeing the sign to pass over my paltry knowledge of the Shaker movement. The sum total of this knowledge consisted of: "Aren't they sort of like Quakers, except they didn't have any sex? And didn't they also make furniture?" I imagined a peaceful yet dour people, whose worship, like the one Quaker meeting I have attended, would probably take place in stillness and near-silence. But I knew none of this for sure. So when I came across Clara Endicott Sears's aptly-named 1916 volume Gleanings from Old Shaker Journals, I decided to find out more about the Shakers from their own pens.

As it happens, almost all my assumptions about them were wildly wrong. Far from sitting still and maintaining near-silence in meetings, for example, Shaker worship revolved around loud singing and shouting, and wild, erratic dancing (including the "shaking" that earned them their common name) punctuated by bouts of speaking in tongues. Meeting sessions in the early years often lasted until the early hours of the morning, and sometimes the entire night. Not unexpectedly, this method of worship earned the Society of Believers (as they called themselves) the distrust and animosity, first of the authorities in England, and then of the townspeople in the New England villages where they settled. They were persecuted by the police in England and by mobs in Massachusetts, for everything from witchcraft to political subversion.

This animosity was so strong, in fact, that the English authorities arrested Ann Lee, soon to become the leader of the Believers, and essentially left her to die in solitary isolation. Kept alive covertly by her adopted son, Lee had a vision of angelic beauty, which could only be attained on earth if she and her followers renounced sex and all earthly things. Upon her release from prison, Lee was hailed by the other Believers as the second coming of Christ, which they had already been expecting in female form in the near future. (Their rationale: since the Holy Spirit is all-gendered, and has already appeared on Earth once as a man, it stands to reason that its second appearance would take a female form.)

From a modern perspective, it's almost impossible not to read Ann Lee's life in psychoanalytic, pathologizing terms. The illiterate daughter of an authoritarian father and a zealously religious mother, the young Ann as Sears describes her was "a strange child, subject to extraordinary spiritual experiences - visions and prophetic dreams were her constant companions, and her mind dwelt continuously on the wickedness of human nature...She would frequently cry herself to sleep, or lie awake shivering with the fear of God's wrath." After her mother's early death, Ann was married off by her father, strongly against her will, and had several still-born children. "Sometimes," records a follower of an older Ann, she "would be taken under great sufferings, so that it would seem as though her life must go from her. --at other times she was filled with unspeakable joy and triumph, and would say, 'I feel as terrible as an army with banners'." These dramatic vacillations between jubilation and despair continued throughout Lee's life, as did her visions, and although I dislike the tendency to reduce historical figures to a bundle of symptoms and a diagnosis, it's difficult to avoid thinking of disorders like schizophrenia and manic depression when I read her story. And how psychologically understandable, given her history of being essentially sold into marriage, raped, and made to suffer the grief of stillborn babies, that she should perceive a life without sex to be a blessing! Likewise, given her factory background, it's not hard to understand her teaching that "good spirits will not live where there is dirt. There is no dirt in heaven."

In any case, the followers of Ann Lee (now called Mother Ann) soon emigrated to the American colonies, arriving on the eve of the Revolutionary War and immediately aroused suspicion for their refusal to fight (they were, like the Quakers, opposed to violence). Interestingly, though, and in a connection I was in no way expecting, what they founded at Harvard Village, Niskayuna and elsewhere were the first communistic societies in the United States, and ones which, unlikely as it seems, prefigured in several ways the counterculture movements of the 1960's.

True, the sexual attitudes of the two movements were almost diametrically opposed. Whereas the social philosophers of the 1960's opined that lifting sexual repression was the key to human progress, the Shakers saw the total renunciation of sex as the key to spiritual enlightenment. However, in other particulars the two movements bear an eerie resemblance to one another. The Shakers lived communally, with all property held in common. All residents were fed and cared for during the duration of their time with the Shakers, through their old age. Until they were too old or sick, all residents also worked to support the community at large, and their list of occupations stops just short of hammock-making in its resemblance to a hippie commune: they gathered herbs and roots for medicinal purposes, dyed cloth from plants gathered in the nearby wilderness, tended and sold fruit trees, grew vegetable gardens to feed themselves and sell at market, ran livestock, hand-crafted wooden items (broom-handles, spools, knives, furniture, wooden boxes) for sale in the greater community, caned chairs, carved gravestones, and had an entire facility devoted to binding books. Not only that, but their relationship with the natural world at times seems strangely modern. Each community of Shakers, called a "Family," had a holy hill near their residences, where they would go to worship on special occasions. The dancing and singing would be freer and more exuberant in direct contact with the natural world. In 1848 they began the custom

to sow the seeds of Love, Hope, Charity, and all the virtues, in the fields before the planting began. Groups of the brethren could be seen sowing imaginary handfuls of seed the length and breadth of one field, while an equal number of sisters would be doing likewise in another. In this manner every field belonging to the Shakers was sown with the spiritual seed of all the cardinal virtues before any material seed was planted, in order that a special blessing should rest upon the growing crops.

At several points in the journals, different Believers told anecdotes involving Native American reactions to Mother Ann, which also brought to mind the modern white counter-cultural romancing of Native people. In one incident, for example, a Believer writes that "a number of Indian natives were at the ferry, and on discovering Mother they cried out 'The Good Woman is come! The Good Woman is come!' and manifested great joy and satisfaction on seeing her and the Elders." The Natives in this vignette are used as a kind of barometer of legitimacy for Mother Ann: they operate as a repository of mystical-instinctual wisdom, so their recognition affirms her status as a spiritual leader. As clichéd as this Noble Savage trope has become, it was fairly unusual for white folks in the New England of the 1780's. The general populace were more likely to view Native Americans as lazy, sub-human inconveniences who should be wiped from the land as quickly and completely as possible, so it's interesting that the Shakers took such a different view. Even their defense of the wild singing and dancing of their worship has a 1960's ring to it; one believer wrote "Why should the tongue, which is the most unruly member of the body, be the only chosen instrument of worship? God has also created the hands and feet, and enabled them to perform their functions in the service of the body."

All of this was fascinating to me, and I enjoyed reading the spare, eighteenth-century cadences of the journal fragments. Sears's book as a whole feels somewhere between a primary and secondary source. The author/editor does connect the dots for the reader, filling in the Shakers' back-story and placing the journal fragments in context, but her writing itself is very much of her time, or an even earlier one: flowery, novelistic, and drenched in Romanticism. Although she herself is not a Shaker, she seems to feel near-reverence for both their initial incarnation and the fading remnants of their community still available to her in 1916. On the other hand, her embarrassment and even slight contempt for their spiritualistic incarnation of the 1840's makes itself equally plain. Her commitment to communicating the Shakers' story in their own words as much as possible, while admirable, is also sometimes frustrating. The primary concerns of the diarists are not necessarily mine, as in this journal fragment from the late 1700's about the Elder Father James, written by Sister Jemima Blanchard:

The last time but one that Father James was here I lived at Jeremiah Willard's; I was (with others) under trials at that time, in consequence of some singular gifts, but we had kept it to ourselves, remembering the advice of our blessed Mother, to wait with patience for a suitable time to make known our trials...Father stepped into the kitchen and spoke to me of the labor I had in cooking for so many, and said God would reward me...When I found that he was gone I burst into a flood of tears; and having retired to a bedroom I threw myself flat on the floor, thinking I would certainly cry myself to death. I had been in this position but a short time, when I was raised by Father James. he said to me: 'I saw you before me as I was riding away--just as you are now.'

Sister Jemima's priority in telling this story is the miraculous vision of Father James, which caused him to return to comfort her. My priority, on the other hand, that of a nosy reader: what were these "singular gifts" that caused Jemima to labor under trials? Who were the "others" involved? Why did Father James's departure cause Jemima such agony? None of that is recorded, and the book is rife with other such tantalizing accounts. Nevertheless, the fragments paint a vivid picture of the atmosphere in the village, and the reader can imagine herself into the long-ago lives of these strange and remarkable people.

The Ethel Mildred Ferguson pattern, sized for busts from 30 to 58 inches and test-knit by multiple patient and talented people, is available for sale. Go get her!

And, as always, my ruminations about the person Ethel, along with photo illustrations, go up alongside the pattern. I had a great time sorting through old photos and swapping stories with my aunt the other day, and this essay is much richer for it. Check it out over here, and be sure to click on all the links and photos. You get much more detail in the larger-sized versions, and there are a few cool bits of ephemera hidden in the text.

Enjoy Ethel!

Thanks so much for the nice comments on Maxine! She's off to the test-knitters, so hopefully I'll receive some solid feedback and get the pattern to you in a timely fashion. Ethel, by the way is about this close to release. The test-knitters on that project were amazing, and I want to give a special shout-out to Maria. She was so generous with her time and energy, even taking out the graph paper herself when necessary to see where a problem was hiding, and winningly enthusiastic from start to finish. Maria, you rock. And the rest of the test-knitters: you rock, too.

So, on to business. I apologize in advance for the long, photo-less post today, but I'm really curious about your opinions on something. So here goes.

I've known about things like National Novel Writing Month and its many takeoffs for some time, and, while they're definitely not for me, they seem like a fun thing for people who have a hard time motivating themselves actually to sit down and write (and who thrive in an atmosphere of community and adrenalin). Spend a month frantically writing a novel, and decide at the end of the month whether what you've produced is worth refining, or whether it was a fun exercise that constituted its own reward. But lately I've been noticing some things that seem at once sillier and more culturally worrisome. Well, maybe by "culturally worrisome" I really mean "personally annoying." I'm having a hard time telling the difference right now, which is where you come in.

First up is Write or Die, which describes itself as "a web application that encourages writing by punishing the tendency to avoid writing. Start typing in the box. As long as you keep typing, you're fine, but once you stop typing, you have a grace period of a certain number of seconds and then there are consequences." Said "consequences" range from a little flashing box that reminds you to keep writing, to "kamikaze mode," in which your prose actually begins un-writing itself when the grace period elapses.

I know that Write or Die is mostly a joke, and if it's a useful tool for some people, who am I to complain? I also agree with the basic assumption that doing a lot of something - just practicing, without worrying about perfection as you practice - is a great way to improve. But I guess I'm seeing so much focus on the initial stage of creative production - the vomiting-it-out stage, so to speak - that the latter stages of editing, refining, ripping-out-and-re-knitting, are being neglected. One hardly ever hears, for example, about communities of people getting together for editing parties.

I actually think the knitting community is ahead of the game in this regard, because the luminaries of our field tend to stress the importance both of swatching beforehand, and ripping back when we've made a mistake that's going to bug us, or when a project just isn't living up to our expectations. There is also a lot of talk about putting things away for a while; I can't count the number of times in a Ravelry forum where a knitter has just discovered a heartbreaking mistake in a piece of knitting, and his compatriots advise taking a break, putting it away and letting it marinate for a while, giving the frustration and disappointment time to dissipate. This strikes me as incredibly wise, despite my own tendency to just rip out immediately and fix the problem (but I've had a lot of practice at detachment). Write or Die, on the other hand, doesn't give the writer time to stop and breathe, to re-read what she's written and make a change here or there, to recapture the flow of the narrative or just take stock of her direction. It's adrenalin/punishment-based, and while that's fine for a crazy weekend-long productivity-party, or even a month of novel-writing, it strikes me as a totally unsustainable way to live one's life in the long term.

In the same vein, Boing Boing today linked to Bre Pettis and Kio Stark's Cult of Done Manifesto, which goes thusly:

1. There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.
2. Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.
3. There is no editing stage.
4. Pretending you know what you're doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you're doing even if you don't and do it.
5. Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.
6. The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.
7. Once you're done you can throw it away.
8. Laugh at perfection. It's boring and keeps you from being done.
9. People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.
10. Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.
11. Destruction is a variant of done.
12. If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done.
13. Done is the engine of more.

There are certain items on this list with which I strongly agree, even if I dislike their phrasing. "Laugh at perfection," for example, I find a very useful thing to keep in mind in any creative process. "Accept that everything is a draft" and "Failure counts as done. So do mistakes" both point to a process-based approach that I definitely appreciate. But "There is no editing stage"? "Once you're done you can throw it away"? And, most especially, "If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it"? To me, this list paints a picture of a frantic race to get something - anything - finished, without pausing to conceptualize, plan, or savor the process. Slapping something together because you want to get as much "done" as possible, viewing the germination process as nothing other than procrastination - it smacks of the desire for instant gratification. It's probably obvious by this point in my entry that this vision is not attractive to me. In its attempt to motivate people into accomplishing something, it veers wildly to an extreme, and fails to consider elements like careful craftsmanship, reflection, or pride in doing a job well, rather than simply doing it to have it done.

Perfectionistic procrastination versus slapdash, shoddy construction: it's truly a hard line to walk. And I suspect that to a certain extent, this is all a matter of semantics. Some people find the initial motivation and raw-material-production to be the most difficult part of the artistic process, so they want to stress the idea of just sitting down and getting something done. Other people find themselves drowning in piles of raw product, so they tend to stress the importance of the editing and refining process, separating the wheat from the chaff. But both groups, I think, should attempt to acknowledge the reasons for stressing what they do. Otherwise, the readers of lists like the above get a radically skewed picture of the process.

Sure, it's counter-productive to obsess on the same story/garment/project forever, removing and replacing a single semicolon all afternoon, or erasing and re-drawing a neckline until you wear a hole through your sketch paper. There's a point at which one should just dive in and give something a try. But I don't see why that means that we need to discount the other parts of the creative process. There is a time for spewing forth unedited product, and there is a time for going through that product in search of gems (or, if you prefer, a time for just casting on, and a time for finessing those decreases to transition seamlessly into the twisted-stitch motif). I would even argue that there is also a time for dreaming about projects of the future, and accumulating ideas to put in the mental warehouse for later. Seriously, if I had abandoned every project idea that didn't materialize within a WEEK? There would be very slim pickin's on this site. What am I saying? There would be no site.

Here's the thing: I got good at knitting through lots of practice, through LOTS of ripping out and re-knitting, making mistakes and fixing them, experimenting and tweaking. But I do all that knitting because it's something I love. Because at the end of the day, I really enjoy sitting down with needles and yarn, and figuring out a design problem or watching a stitch pattern emerge. I love working with fiber; I love the various properties of different yarns. I genuinely enjoy seeking out and learning new techniques. And even if I can't honestly claim to enjoy ripping out an entire sweater front after it's already seamed or cutting off a felted waistband and grafting a new one in its place, it's immensely satisfying to end up with a garment that lives up to my initial vision. I don't always feel like doing the sizing on a pattern's set-in sleeves, or tracking down a math error in my spreadsheet. But when I think about the wider context of the project, I never have too much trouble motivating myself, and when I do those things I'm working out of love, not out of fear or adrenalin-panic. Moreover, doing this stuff is part and parcel of my daily routine. I'm just USED to working on art. I've done it every day, so I do it every day.

I know that my experience is not universal nor my process for everyone, and I don't mean to sound smug or self-congratulatory. I don't intend to claim that everyone should work like I work. But I have to wonder why so many people seem drawn to these extreme motivational methods and outlooks. Have we as a culture lost the ability to think contextually, and do the less exciting things for the sake of the more exciting? Can we not institute a daily routine of writing or art-creation without going to extremes? Is there some reason we no longer want to set reasonable, sustainable goals, but are drawn instead to adrenalin-pumping mad dashes to meet a seemingly impossible quota? And why is this lack of motivation so prevalent? Are we in love with the idea of art creation instead of the reality, enamored of "being a writer" rather than the texture of words and phrases? Is there nothing we love well enough to do it well, for its own sake? Or am I just wildly overreacting to what are essentially two jokes on the internet?

I welcome your thoughts on any of these pressing questions. The next entry will return to your regularly scheduled Family Trunk programming.

You got 'em.

We seized a few minutes - literally - of gorgeous sunny weather to snap these modeled shots of Maxine.*

Although it was frustrating to have the light fade just as we were warming to our task, I think the twilit quality of the scene created some fantastic moody shadows. We don't have the lighting equipment (or fee-money!) to shoot inside in an atmospheric speakeasy-type bar, but this kind of light is the next best thing.

For me, knitting Maxine was a joy from start to finish; I hope the test-knitters and purchasers feel the same! I held the fingering-weight yarn doubled, which gave me a DK-weight gauge. Combine that with the lack of sleeves, and it was a surprisingly quick knit. The beads and the bias-panels broke up the monotony of stockinette stitch, but the pattern is incredibly easy to intuit. No charts; no graphs! I think it's probably my most accessible sweater pattern to date. It's even sans waist shaping, which was a little nerve-wracking for me, but I love the end result. The fabric is drapey, and there are a few inches of negative ease at the bust and hips, so it still looks fitted while also being true-to-period.

The trickiest part of this design is the seaming. The sides are just long, straight seams, with no increases or decreases to be found, so you would think they wouldn't require that much attention. You would be wrong. Not that they're deadly difficult or anything, but it surprised me how easily those beaded diagonals could get off-kilter if I let my mind wander, and they really are so pleasing when they meet each other exactly at the seam. I ended up putting a pin at every point of intersection, which meant that the seaming took longer and was slightly fussier than usual, but the end result is, without doubt, the most beautiful seam I've ever executed.

The curved hems were actually a surprise, but I just love them. I love them from the front/back, and I love them from the sides; they add another layer of Deco-style, architectural sensibility to the piece as a whole.

I'm proud of Maxine because I think it's one of the best articulations of a specific period that I've designed. I feel like I'm getting better at identifying signature details of particular eras, and also at thinking about how to communicate the zeitgeist (or at least, my rosy-spectacled conception of the zeitgeist) in a piece of clothing. Maxine Elliott was a living example of the carefree/careworn, youthful spirit of the 1920's, and I think her garment lives up to her story.

*Note for those who care: that little fur piece is real, but I inherited it from David's grandmother; I wouldn't buy new fur, even if I could afford it!

In James Wilson's prologue to his excellent history of Native America, The Earth Shall Weep, he discusses the idea of the "Vanishing American," still disturbingly prevalent in white American culture. This myth consists of

the central belief that 'the Indian' belongs essentially to the past rather than to the present. He (or she) is an exotic relic of some earlier age that we have already passed through: either - depending on your point of view - a kind of primitive anarchy that we have overcome (in nature, in ourselves) or an innocent Golden Age that we have forfeited through greed and destructiveness.

...Its key argument is that, because native and non-native inhabit essentially different realities, they cannot be expected to co-exist: by definition, yesterday must always give way to tomorrow....While they testify to our [white folks'] ability to develop and progress, Native American societies are incapable of change themselves...they cannot adapt when confronted by a more advanced and virile civilization, but are doomed to melt away...If they fail to vanish, if they change and adapt instead, then, by definition, they are not really Native Americans.

I thought about this idea frequently while perusing Willa Cather's 1927 novel Death Comes for the Archbishop. For most of the book, I considered it an excellent example of Wilson's point. Here Cather presents us with a white French bishop, sent as a missionary to the newly-Americanized Santa Fé diocese, who, when confronted with the Native mesa-dwelling Ácoma people, perceives them as some kind of petrified relic of the past:

Through all the centuries that his own part of the world had been changing like the sky at daybreak, this people had been fixed, increasing neither in numbers nor desires, rock-turtles on their rock. Something reptilian he felt here, something that had endured by immobility, a kind of life out or reach, like the crustaceans in their armour.

For Father Latour, the Ácoma seem so "antediluvian" and unchanging that he finds it difficult even to see them as human. He interprets their lack of receptivity to his mass as evidence of their own sequestration and prehistoric level of development, rather than as a result of his own decision to insert himself uninvited into their lives:

He felt as if he were celebrating Mass at the bottom of the sea, for antediluvian creatures; for types of life so old, so hardened, so shut within their shells, that the sacrifice on Calvary could hardly reach back so far. Those shell-like backs behind him might be saved by baptism and divine grace, as undeveloped infants are, but hardly through any experience of their own, he thought. When he blessed them and sent them away, it was with a sense of inadequacy and spiritual defeat.

Of course, the perceptions of a character shouldn't be confused with those of his author, but Cather seems, in this scene, to be in sympathy with Latour. Certainly, all her stories and descriptions of the Ácoma way of life imply an ancient, unchanging aspect similar to the priest's assessment (if slightly less dehumanizing). Not only that, but other Native settlements are also described as declining; the Bishop's Indian guide Jacinto lives in a house

at one end of the living pueblo; behind it were long rock ridges of dead pueblo,--empty houses ruined by weather and now scarcely more than piles of earth and stone. The population of the living streets was less than one hundred adults. This was all that was left of the rich and populous Cicuyè of Coronado's expedition.

To a certain extent, this is simply accurate reporting on the devastation brought to Native communities by European diseases. But it's more than that: the melancholy mood, combined with Jacinto's refusal to let Father Latour assist his ailing infant, paint the same picture of the unchanging, unchangeable Indian, destined to melt away under the onslaught of White Progress. Jacinto is portrayed as in touch with "ancient" powers invisible to Latour (or at least, Latour imagines him to be), but he is also a member of an America in the midst of an inevitable vanishing.

This echoed, for me, the portion of Cather's earlier novel The Professor's House set in the southwest, in which two white men come across the ruins of an ancient Native cliff-dwelling civilization, now extinct for many years. The discovery is a revelation to the fledgling archaeology students, and one in particular, Tom, forges a deep spiritual connection with the place. Tom makes the long journey to Washington, attempting to interest the Smithsonian in the site's artifacts, while in the meantime his friend betrays him by selling everything to a souvenir-hawker. The reader is sympathetic with Tom's desire to preserve the marvel he has found, but at the same time the actual Native presence in the place - the significance the site held to its original inhabitants and makers - is eclipsed by a set of meanings created by the white discoverers. Even the most positive possible outcome - that the site would be purchased and curated by an institution like the Smithsonian - is constructed entirely from white value systems and white institutions. The Native voice has long been silenced, a relic of ancient history. And although the Indians of Death Comes for the Archbishop are technically still alive, much in their portrayals implies that they are rapidly heading the same way.

And then, with only a few pages remaning, Cather surprised me. Latour, now lying on his death-bed, recalls his friend Eusabio, a Navajo leader who had asked him, many years before, to intercede with the United States government during the events later known as the Long Walk of the 1860's, when the Navajo were being forcibly relocated away from their sacred lands. Although he refuses the request (he doesn't believe his intercession would hold any weight with the Protestant legislators), he is sympathetic to the Navajo battle, and rejoices when the government reverses its decision and allows the people to return to their ancestral home. The Navajo, in this part of the book, are portrayed as much more active makers of their own destinies than either the Ácoma or the Cicuyè; forced into hiding in the canyons and crevices of their native lands, the few remaining freedom fighters must drastically alter their mode of life in order to elude the US troops. Not only that, but they are making their decisions in full possession of the facts, and of their faculties; the resistance leader Manuelito tells the Bishop:

"You are the friend of Christóbal, who hunts my people and drives them over the mountains to the Bosque Redondo. Tell your friend that he can come and kill me when he pleases...my mother and my gods are in the West, and I will never cross the Rio Grande."

This kind of free decision-making and articulate defiance, while still tinged with the notion of the Noble Savage holding out hopelessly against Progress, is leagues away from Cather's depictions of the doomed Ácoma or the extinct cliffside civilization in The Professor's House. Manuelito and Eusabio are admirable humans who make their own decisions, and are capable of change. Significantly, Manuelito's story ends, not with his death at the hands of the US cavalry, but with the return of his people to the land he has defended. And, equally significantly, the very last words out of the dying Latour's mouth are these: "I do not believe, as I once did, that the Indian will perish. I believe that God will preserve him."

Death Comes for the Archbishop definitely reflects the casual racism of its time; I haven't even touched on the depictions of Mexicans in the novel. But I also think it reflects an interesting moment in American history, when white culture was beginning, perhaps, to fumble towards a recognition of the shared complexity and humanity of Native Americans - toward an acknowledgment that these are living, dynamic people, not merely signposts on the road to the past.

I burned through Haruki Murakami's latest novel, After Dark, in about three sittings. Sometimes described as a distillation of the author's standard oeuvre, I found it to be more like an overture: quick and light in its movement, it suggests Murakami's standard themes without exploring them in much depth. Were I putting together a Murakami syllabus, I might put After Dark at the beginning, to start a conversation that would deepen and expand with novels like The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, A Wild Sheep Chase and Kafka on the Shore. As such, it would work well, introducing Murakami's preoccupations with the quester who wanders aimlessly, with the tendency of music to form unexpected alliances between people, and with the lost, escaped or misplaced woman (a sister in this case, although often a romantic partner) who must negotiate dreamlike landscapes of unspecified violence. It would also introduce the typically ambiguous Murakami climax and ending, although in the case of After Dark the resolution seems not so much ambiguous as nonexistent.

Murakami's language in After Dark suggests explicitly a screenplay. Perspectives are described in terms of camera angles, panning and zooming, and the dialogue among characters is sometimes conveyed in script form. In many places the narrator explains in so many words "our" role as a disembodied point of view devoid of ability to alter the course of events. My guess would be that Murakami is commenting, here, on the passiveness of traditional media consumption; one of the main characters, who spends nearly the entire novel in an existentially-motivated hibernation, is a beautiful young model named Eri Asai. One gets the sense that she has been observed, admired and consumed from without until her interior sense of self has completely deteriorated. Now "we" are one more external point of view, observing her but unable to help her. She is forced to negotiate alone the un-world of her deep sleep, and the strange dislocation (literal and metaphorical) at the heart of it. Again and again, in different ways, Murakami brings up the idea of a permeable or impermeable divide - between point of view and subject, between the respectable citizen and the criminal, between public and private, and, of course, between night and day. So in that sense, the semi-screenplay form is quite fitting.

For me, though, it also makes the novel less pleasant to read than other Murakami work. The prose is jerkier, more like a set of stage directions than a flowing narrative, and the dialogue seems insufficiently ingegrated into the prose. It also has that certain flatness of a play read silently; the lines rely on the creative interpretation that actors would give, and without it they seem lacking. In fact, throughout After Dark it kept striking me that this is one novel better-suited to life as a film - preferably directed by Jim Jarmusch or David Lynch. While all the stage directions are clunky to read, the actual images involved are intriguing and effective; to me, telling this story in film form would feel like cutting out the middleman. And Lynch would have to do very little adaptation to fit After Dark into his established oeuvre; as it ends, much like Mulholland Drive or the Twin Peaks pilot, we are unsure if Eri has met with triumph or defeat in her ordeal, or indeed whether the crisis was brought to any kind of breaking point at all. There is a scene where she attempts to communicate her plight to the outside world, and a point at which "we," as her disembodied audience, attempt to warn her of an impending danger. In both cases, the attempts seem completely unsuccessful, yet they form the only semblance of a climax available to the reader, and seem to represent some kind of corner turned. I generally adore this kind of ambiguity, yet Eri's story left me somehow unsatisfied; I wanted greater access to her, more meaty characterization - which, come to think of it, is just what her sister, the other protagonist of the novel, wants as well.

Despite my complaints, After Dark was an enjoyable way to spend a few days of reading, and there were some trademark sparkles of Murakami descriptive prowess. I particularly liked the phrase, in his opening paragraph, that describes Tokyo at night as "sending out new contradictions and collecting the old." As a précis, a Murakami primer or appetizer, it's quite effective, and whets my appetite for more.