December 2006 Archives

by Emily

I originally learned to knit alongside my mom and a gaggle of middle-aged ladies, in a class at the local community center. It was usually sunny out and dusky inside, and all the middle-aged ladies left early the day that Murphy Brown was going to give birth on TV. During those knitting classes I got really frustrated that my stitches were all too tight, and bored by the middle-aged ladies' gossip, and I didn't end up getting very far with knitting - not until years later, when I picked up a book and re-taught myself the basics, like any happy auto-didact would.

But I originally learned to sew from my mom. In fact, most of the pearls of enlightenment I've gleaned from her over the years (perhaps all except "trust your gut" and the seemingly out-of-character "an orgasm is Nature telling you you're alive") are sewing-related in one way or another. She taught me that in order to create anything good you have to make a mess. And that if I'm going to go to all the work of sewing a custom garment, I should start with good-quality fabric. And to be as precise and careful as possible, because I'll know a flaw is there even if no one else notices it. And that only I can decide if a flaw will bother me or not, or whether it's important enough to correct. And that I shouldn't regard seam-ripping as a setback, but as just another constructive part of the process. All of these are amazing pieces of wisdom that I have really taken to heart in my sewing projects, and which I try every day to apply to my life in wider-reaching ways.

So I wanted my mom's scarf to somehow represent the circle of skills and gifting that has taken place between us over the years. This is what I came up with:

The raspberry mohair is something that my mom had originally intended to use to make a sweater for me. She bought the yarn, didn't knit it for a while, and then, because I was in high school, my style changed and I decided on a different pattern for my sweater, necessitating a different yarn. Years later, when my mom's knitting had tapered off and I was the one clicking my needles together at a furious pace, she gave me all of her old yarn, including this. So I thought it would be a good symbolic move to give it back to her, transformed into a garment.

The pattern is nothing mind-blowing, but I do think the staggered, intertwining cables, large in the middle and skinny on the outer edges, help to underline the theme of a constant exchange and betterment between two people. Plus, intertwining is sort of like a hug, and I always like a hug from my mom.

Here is my cute mom wearing her new Christmas scarf, to which she gave a glowing review:

I hope she wears her little allegorical garment often. I know she will wear it well.

by Emily

During the months before Christmas, and many months preceding them, I was very short on cash. A longish period of unemployment after I quit my soul-crushing job at Wells Fargo meant worrying about money, racking up debt - you know the drill. Reducing and reducing my regular consumption of goods has been a beneficial exercise; I think it's good to identify what the luxuries are in my life, and not confuse them with necessities. But constantly stressing out about finances started to wear on me after a while, as it has on better folks than I. Right at the moment, due to a combination of Christmas- and work-related factors, I actually have a tiny bit of monetary breathing room for the first time in quite a while, and today when I went to the grocery store it was so lovely to just buy nourishing, beautiful food for myself without worrying about whether I can afford yogurt this month. What a luxurious feeling.

Having that experience made me think of my grandmothers, who both raised four kids on not a lot of money. My dad's mom used to keep asking the cashier for her running total as s/he rang her up, and would usually have to put things back when the bill exceeded her ready cash. Both of my parents say that, while they never went hungry, there were never any extra "treats" at the grocery store, like gum or cereal, not to mention anything approaching the organic, not-from-concentrate grapefruit juice I bought today. My mom's dad only got paid once a month, and my Tutu (my grandmother) used to fill two carts on her monthly shopping trip, with all the food that would sustain her husband, herself, my mom, and my mom's three giant brothers for a month. I can't fathom only going food shopping once a month, but that was the way of it. By the time my grandmother was my age she had twin four-year-old boys, a three-year-old girl, and probably another one on the way, and at the end of the month she was feeding them all on Spam and potato starch - and, I imagine, whatever pineapples that those little monkey-brothers could scrounge up from the corners of Oahu. And she dreads cooking just as much as I do.

So in honor of my grandmother's strong character and creative thriftiness, I thought I would post first about the scarf that I scrounged up for her out of the leftovers from previous yarn-feasts of mine.

It was actually the last project I finished. I was knitting furiously on it Christmas Eve, watching old 1950's Christmas specials on YouTube, stitching Frosty and Rudolph into the geometric fabric. I was blocking it out on my mom's ironing board as she called from the hall that we had better leave for Midnight Mass. For a flash-finish, the result was quite satisfying.

My Tutu wears a lot of jewel-tones, so this cranberry, navy and emerald combination (the leftover bits from knitted flowers on a light-blue cardigan of mine) were just the thing. I had never done any entrelac before, but I was curious about how it's done, so I decided to teach myself. And I wasn't disappointed; it is a very ingenious system of picking up, slipping and knitting together stitches to form a fabric of diagonal rectangles that nonetheless has right-angled corners. I often sit and marvel at what an elegant yet versatile system knitting is, and this was no exception.

More important, my Tutu liked her scarf, and wore it for a large part of Christmas evening.

I hope she gets a lot of use out of it. Maybe my little period of scrounging can translate to a bit of luxury for her, like her years of scrimping helped me to a much easier life. Thanks for everything, Tutu.

Provisional Is
Beautiful 2006
next year I will nest

By David

by Emily

The Half Brother by Lars Saabye Christensen

Once, when I was in fourth grade, our teacher was reading us Roald Dahl's Matilda. Everyone was getting absorbed in the story, and then she stopped, and said, in a very ominous voice, "There's something wrong here. Do you know what it is?" A delicious chill went down my spine. There was something mysteriously wrong in the story! What could it be? Dark family scandals? Characters with unsuspected yet fatal flaws kept absolutely secret for many years, until they explode in a terrible climax? Witches? Disfigurements? Secret portals to alternate universes? That sense of something really mysterious and intriguing, something I'd undoubtedly never encountered before, something so strange and convoluted that I couldn't even conceive of it, was intoxicating. The vague sense of mystery and unease was probably more thrilling than any answers could have been, but I still hoped the answers would be really good.

Disappointingly, it turned out that the only thing mysteriously "wrong" in Matilda is that the daughter is more principled than the parents, an obvious plot point that was actually no mystery at all. There are other works, though, that do still give me the spine-tickling "something is wrong here" feeling, and Christensen's family saga The Half Brother is one of them. So many of its cold, Scandinavian characters are wounded and secretive in some way, and the reader is never totally sure exactly what is "wrong" and how it came to be that way. What is lurking in the depths of Arnold Nilsen, the protagonist's father who starts out life as a disabled joker in a land of straight-faced fisherpeople, and ended up as a maimed, progressively shady con man? Is he better, or much worse, than he seems? Why exactly is the titular half-brother so angry, and where does he go on those long absences from home? What happens in the darkened house of the main character's friend Vivian, whose mother was disfigured in a car accident and never shows her face? Why does the kindest character, the one who seems balanced and sane, suddenly commit suicide? Can we trust the narrator and protagonist, Barnum, given that he tells us he is a liar and a drunk?

Throughout the novel, the reader catches glimpses, and we are unsure whether that could have been someone we know. Was it him? Could it have been her? Or was it just a stranger? Were two events unconnected, or was the connection between them all-important? Perhaps most hauntingly, one is never sure how much any individual character knows about any other character - and it is therefore nearly impossible to interpret anyone's behavior. Something is most definitely "wrong" with the Nilsen family, in the most intriguing and delicious sense, and the mystery lingers on after the book is over, since many of these threads are never truly tied up.

One of the prominent themes in the novel is silence - a silence its characters retreat to after traumatic and often inscrutable events. Finishing the novel, for me, was almost like entering a Nilsen-like silence myself, a place away from Barnum's narrating voice, where I would sit with all the contradictions and mysteries of the story, and either attempt to understand them, or just let them be. It was like skating on a sheet of Christensen's beautiful, crystallized language into my own conclusions. In my Half Brother trance, I almost slid toward Norway to dig meditatively at some of these mysteries with my own hands. Fortunately, or unfortunately, I stopped myself just in time.

by Emily

I have to admit that it's been irking me horribly not to be able to post about all (and I do mean ALL) of the Christmas presents I've been knitting these last six weeks. Life has been a fevered flurry of fiber over here at Melcliff Court, and I'm authorized to release the information that five scarves and two hats will be leaving the apartment on or shortly after the 25th, adorned with small, holiday-themed cards explaining why the given present is perfect for its recipient (I'm hoping the recipients will understand even before reading the cards, but that might not be totally realistic). Of course, much to my chagrin, I can't post about these projects just yet, because everyone who's getting one, with the possible exception of my grandma (are you out there, Tutu?) reads this blog. I have even shown certain people all the projects except one, so they would know exactly what they were getting. Ho hum, nothing to do but wait.

However, I wanted to give knitting aficionadas a little glimpse at the pile I had six weeks ago; I'm very short on cash this Christmas, which is what motivated me to hand-knit all my presents in the first place, so I was combining yarns in my stash to make garments:

That is most of the yarn I had to work with. Actually, I have ended up buying about five more skeins and finding about two more skeins than that, but there you have the basic idea. How would YOU put it together?

Despite really disliking having to worry about not having enough yarn to finish a given project, I've definitely enjoyed crafting each garment to fit the intended recipient's personality and my relationship with that person. I designed all of the projects except one, and they all have specific ties to the person who's getting them, in one way or another. Also, in order to keep things interesting (scarves aren't the most fascinating things to knit) I tried to use the little Christmas projects to teach myself new skills--so I've learned a new lace stitch, how to knit entrelac (where you make diagonally-oriented rectangles of knitting that build on one another) and how to do Scandinavian two-end knitting, which creates a thick, brocade-like fabric and with which I have fallen deeply in love. There is some interesting combining of colors, and also a few projects that are entirely textural in nature. Some are flamboyant, some are subdued; some are complex and others are simple. Some look plain but were actually challenging, where as others look somewhat impressive but were, in fact, not much of a challenge to complete. Some of them rolled right off the needles, making me feel very productive and on top of things, whereas others have necessitated numerous froggings and re-calculations, making me feel panicky and a little ill. Now, though, I am nearing the finish-line, and soon after Christmas I will start showing off my chops a little. I am definitely looking forward to post-Christmas knitting, as I have several projects planned for Me Me Me.

Today is different
I had it all planned out but
now I'm not so sure

By David

by Emily

The other day my mom was showing off the pop-up paper art version of a Victorian dollhouse that is the newest Christmas adornment over at my childhood home, and I got to thinking how it's funny that the entire Victorian era somehow seems "Christmasy," due almost entirely (I have to assume) to Dicken's A Christmas Carol. This is especially striking since Dickens wrote so many other famous books as well; I mean, he had Great Expectations, Oliver Twist AND David Copperfield to associate Victorians with orphaned urchins, but A Christmas Carol is only one novel. Very impressive, Charles. Very impressive.

Anyway, this got me thinking about favorite Christmas stories of mine. As much as I like Dickens, his holiday opus is not among them. Actually, I couldn't think of that many cherished holiday tales, which made me a little sad. Granted, I'm not at all religious, and cherish Christmas in a wholely personal, secular way that involves having a leisurely morning sharing hand-crafted and/or lovingly selected gifts with my family, then eating a delicious breakfast involving the kind of sugary pastries in which I normally don't indulge myself. Even so, it seems like there should be some Christmas tale I hold particularly dear. "A Christmas Memory" by Truman Capote is devastating, and almost makes it into the "cherished" category, but, for some reason, falls just short. It's so, so sad; I can't often summon up the moral fortitude to read it. Then there's that famous part of Little Women that makes everyone think of the book as a Christmas story even though it's really not - the one where Jo cuts her hair and Amy exclaims "Oh Jo! Your one beauty!" But as hilarious as this line is, the scene as a whole is, I have to admit, a little bit saccharine for me.

Which is strange, because, like so many people, I can't get enough of Jimmy Stewart in It's A Wonderful Life. Equally compelling, though very different, was Paul Auster's Christmas story at the end of the film Smoke, the one the Harvey Keitel character tells so mischeivously to the William Hurt character, and you're not sure if he's made the whole thing up or not. Two extremely memorable Christmas stories on film - so why couldn't I think of any truly astounding Christmas stories in books?

Then I remembered: the prolonged Christmas season section in John Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany is definitely my favorite holiday sequence of all time. I empathize so much with serious little Owen, offended at all the petty breaches of orthodoxy in the church pageant. I love his protestations that "NO ONE KNOWS WHAT THE TURTLEDOVES ARE SUPPOSED TO BE" and his indignant response to the persistant casting of the prettiest little girl to play the Virgin: "WHAT DOES PRETTY HAVE TO DO WITH IT? WHO SAYS MARY WAS PRETTY?" I love his audacity in taking control of the entire production through sheer force of personality, and casting himself as the Baby Jesus. I love the sense that Owen was meant for more interpretation of more serious texts and parts in more serious prophecies, but what he gets is the line "The cattle are lowing, the baby awakes," and he insists on lowing cattle because that's what the song says. I love that Mr. Fish, the aficionado of amateur theatricals, is so impressed with Owen's other performance, as the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come in the Christmas Carol, that he comes to see Owen play the Baby Jesus even though Fish has never been to a pageant before, and he has to be told that it won't include the crucifixion: "THEY DIDN'T NAIL HIM TO THE CROSS WHEN HE WAS A BABY!"

And then there is all the completely Irving-esque sexual tension between the lumpy girl playing Mary and Owen, and the tyrannical ex-stewardess organizer Barb Wiggin and Owen, and his heartbreaking expulsion of his parents from Christ Church, and Dan's satisfying telling-off of controlling Barb Wiggin after she leaves the poor announcing angel hanging in the rafters, having thrown up on himself. And Mr. Fish's enthusiasm for all of the "barbaric" and "primitive" aspects of the pageant, which everyone else views as disastrous mistakes but which he, with typical English-major acuity, thinks are fascinating interpretations of the story of Christ's birth. The whole thing is just the right mix of hilarious, political and heart-breaking, which is, now that I come to think of it, usually what hooks me on Irving's books in the first place.

'"I'm just not sure when to genuflect, and all that nonsense!" Mr. Fish said, chuckling.
"NOT ALL EPISCOPALIANS GENUFLECT," Owen announced.
"I don't," I said.
"I DO," said Owen Meany.
"Sometimes I do and sometimes I don't," Dan said. "When I'm in church, I watch the other people - I do what they do."
Thus did our eclectic foursome arrive at Christ Church."

By David

If you can't view the video content, try this version on Vimeo.

By David

The neighbor blows his
nose so loudly, like he wants
us to make contact

By David

by Emily

U.S.A. Trilogy (The 42nd Parallel, 1918, and The Big Money)
by John Dos Passos

Not many things make me feel patriotic about the United States. Anyone who knows me will tell you that I am about as far from flag-waving as a person can be; not only do I deplore current policies and past atrocities in this country, but I usually don't feel very connected to the huge entity that is "The United States." I feel very connected to Portland, and even Oregon, since I have lived here my whole life and feel I am a product, for better or worse, of this culture. Even the whole West Coast can sometimes conjure up feelings of fondness or belonging in me. But the entirety of this huge, unwieldly nation? Not a chance. There are so many distinct subcultures here with which I have never even had any contact: I have never been to the Deep South, or Appalachia, or the Midwest, or Texas. Even if I had been to one or the other, I would be as much of a tourist there as if I were visiting a totally different country. And yet, John Dos Passos' USA trilogy somehow accesses a deeply - but DEEPLY - buried patriotism in me, and I think for a moment that it's kind of appealing to imagine myself part of a long national narrative, even if most of said narrative is something I wish I could rewrite from beginning to end.

It's almost as if USA is specifically structured to get under my skin, making use of the modernist experimentalism I'm such a sucker for in other works, and using it to express a uniquely American perspective. Dos Passos's trilogy features many different types of narratives: third-person stories about regular American men and women, told in a succinct, newspaper-influenced voice; long, prose-like poems about the larger-than-life Americans of the time, from Rockefeller and Eugene Debs in the early years to Isadora Duncan and Henry Ford in the later; snippets of newspaper headlines and popular songs cobbled together into looser, "newsreel" poems; and the Camera Eye sections, told in a stream-of-consciousness style, from Dos Passos's own perspective. Together this variety of the large and small, journalistic objectivity and intensely subjective snapshots, regular people and giants of art and industry, lets me relate to America-as-vast-experiential-panorama, in a way I usually can't. And the way that the ridiculousness of newspaper headlines and semi-articulateness of a poignant song lyric interact with the complicated and compromised lives of real people rings true almost a century later.

USA also offers a leftist slice of history in a way that's very personal: witnessing a brutal anti-labor attack in rural Washington state in the 1910's, or the ins and outs of a strike in Goldfield, Nevada in 1905, really makes the history of those familiar places come alive for me, and become part of the larger patterns of pro- and anti-labor movements happening all over the country. (Unfortunately, the activists who undermine themselves through in-fighting and excessive drinking are eerily familiar as well.) There is a Kerouac-like love of the small towns and big cities of America, but Dos Passos writes about people who are actually invested in them one way or another, rather than people who are just passing through - an approach I find much more emotionally rewarding. For me personally, writing about the wide spectrum of American experience using a wide spectrum of (American) voices is very powerful, and I've never really seen it done as effectively as Dos Passos does it here. If there are any other lovers of experimental prose out there trying to connect with their American roots (or not), I highly recommend USA.

By David

Blakeslee Manchester, SWA Enterprises Internet Group (/we')

by Emily

I don't know whether it's the Harry Potter novels to which I've been listening (yet again) while knitting Christmas presents, or the Icelanders sagas I revisited in my last post, but recently I've been thinking a lot about apartment trolls. Mostly I just chuckle about them--I mean, sure, they're irascible and inconvenient, but somehow imagining their exploits never fails to amuse.

Of course, I've never actually seen the trolls. I first deduced their existence through a number of strange phenomena in the apartment. Why, I wondered, was it totally impossible to get hot water at certain times of day? And I'm talking unpopular shower times, like 4am. Also mysterious was the way in which the hot and cold water taps are reversed, with the cold on the left and the hot on the right. So too, that strange creaking noise coming from the air shaft, as if a couple were having The World's Most Boring Sex for six and seven hours at a stretch, every day. But the real clincher is the left-most kitchen drawer, where David and I keep the silverware, spatulas and assorted cooking utensils. Whenever we open it, there is a gust of freezing cold air that smells of stale cigarette smoke. I can see no other explanation: I have to assume that the gusts emanate from frigid caverns deep in the bowels of the apartment building, where the trolls are crouched grumpily next to boiling-hot lakes, chain-smoking discount cigarettes and playing their traditional bedspring music, all the while dreaming up new ways to inconvenience the surface-dwellers.

Unlike JK Rowling's trolls, of course, these are small and craftily malevolent rather than huge and stupidly violent. More along the lines of the trolls that lurked under bridges in German fairy stories, waiting for a chance to devour whoever tried to cross. In my case, however, they have to take a more urban approach, wreaking havoc with peoples' ability to take a quiet bath and heat their kitchens rather than actually endagering their lives. Just like with the wolves and the mountain lions, we have, I suppose, encroached upon their natural habitats, and now everybody is paying the price. As sad as it is to think about a once-mighty species reduced to petty pratfalls and a prohibitively expensive addiction to nicotine, I can't quite cure myself of the urge to pinch their shrivelled little cheeks like somebody's horrible Aunt Doris. Somehow their grumbled curses and black looks only make me feel fonder of them. Funny little critters.

I guess we'll see who gets the last laugh, though. I'm off to take a shower right now.

I love looking down
on the street at night. The street
lights are very still.

By David

by Emily

I LOVE the Icelanders sagas. For a long time I was drawn to the attractively-bound paperback tome in Powell's, but I kept arguing with myself: would I actually read it? Did I really need a huge book of medieval Icelandic literature taking up shelf space? Wouldn't it just sit around on my to-be-read shelf and gather dust? Finally, I caved and bought it, and immediately devoured the entire thing in a voracious style usually reserved for Nancy Drew mysteries.

Most of the medieval or ancient literature I've read features very large-scale action, adventure of epic proportions. You've got Achilles and Odysseus enlisting the gods to help them battle their larger-than-life adversaries, Beowulf trudging out of the blood-spattered hall to slay great monsters and their mothers, or impossibly pure-hearted knights wooing sickeningly pure maidens. The Icelandic sagas have adventure too, and a good deal of trudging, and a fair amount of bloodshed, but there's something intriguingly domestic about them as well. They are about settlers to a forbidding new place, hardy men and women who claim homesteads and raise families in a climate even harsher than the one they left behind in Norway. Although much of the stories are devoted to feuds between clans, which usually end up being settled by multiple murders, just as much space is taken up with the everyday lives of families, how hard-as-nails farmers gradually increased their wealth and made lives for themselves, showing proper hospitality with presents and feasts when neighbors or family members came to visit, how these farmers' equally tough wives bore them children and how these children gradually came of age as Icelanders. I love the contrast between the outlandish scenes of bloody battle, in which men with berserker blood shift into fierce monster-animals, and the proto-novelistic tales of everyday life. The Sagas portray the birth of a nation as the merging of these two contrasting elements, which is a profound view of history that seems surprisingly contemporary.

The characters, in some cases, are more dynamic than any other medieval literature I've read, starting out as Norwegians who claim they would never emigrate to "that god-forsaken fishing hole," but ending up as Icelanders with lives and roots on the island. Whatever they are, it is never near-divine heroes or rose-scented virgins, just strong, flawed people doing their best given the circumstances. Gender roles are also surprising at times, some of the fiercest and most warlike characters being women. In addition, whether it's because of my Norwegian ancestry or my kinship to the novelistic form and the history of the everyday, these stories seemed oddly familiar to me, despite the gap of 800 years and as many miles separating me from their composition.

And, of course, there is the fact that nearly all the men in these stories have "Thor" somewhere in their names, which should win points for them if nothing else does. Who wouldn't want to read about Thorstein's travels with his brother Thorgrim and son-in-laws Thorarin and Thorkel? I ask you.

By David

We apologize for the delay, and, without further ado,

PRESENT THE FILM WITH SOUND.

Thank you for watching.

Celebrating the birthday(s) of our friends Ariel and Devon at the Fifth Quadrant, we were treated to a surprise performance by a troupe of white-clad dancers in animal masks, who waited 'til the last minute to whip out pom-poms. As Devon asked Ariel when they started "Under Pressure" blasting from their car stereo and marched into the bar in chorus line, "How did you know this was what I wanted for my birthday?"

Posted by David & Emily