forgetgutenberg

No pictures. Again. Eh, that’s what happens when I’m not doing anything visual.

(Which is not strictly true, but it’s close enough for blogging. I am working on that sweater, and a book, and … right.)

But what I’m here to say tonight is:

So I was poking at GoogleMaps, trying to do some location research. For some reason, I wanted to know how big Texas is (enormous) and, oh hey, there’s satellite pictures. Well, would you look at that? (Go ahead, check out the zooming feature, a little west of Amarillo.) That looks like a quilt that I should make. Dude. Check out the circles and squares and crazy little meandering bits of water …

I think that’ll be my next huge freakin’ project. If I start collecting scrap, and learn how to weave (isn’t that funny?), maybe I can get something out of that.

A bit. I am fond of strange philosophers, although mostly because I think they’re funny.

I’m making progress on my (first) sweater. It’s at the “just four more rows” stage. I keep doing four more rows and it’s not long enough. So I do another four. I’m going to try it on again and hope this time’s the charm. Really, all it needs is the very bottom and the button bands. I think it’ll be done soon enough to be useful. (Then I’m going to want another one; it’s gotten chilly.)

I’ve got a sock nearly done, but it’s the first sock in a pair. They’ll be good socks.

The idea of weaving is still floating around in the back of my head. It has some advantages: it uses up yarn (I’ve got a lot of that, and a habit which creates more). It produces something I might actually use. It’s got some disadvantages, mostly related to the learning curve. (All right, and space. Looms take up space, and that’s getting to be kind of cramped in my house.)

And I’ve got Free Range Knitter, the newest Yarn Harlot book. What an interesting person. I think I’ll try to work up the energy for a real review of it, but that has to wait until I’ve dealt with two other books. I’ve got two days to read them. Which isn’t impossible, but is going to require some concentration.

Well, for certain values of perfect. The beginning and end of my day were brilliantly planned – no, really, I did it on purpose – for stunning contrast. If today was a photograph … right. Never mind.

It started with dropping coffee. That part was accidental, and sad. I didn’t let it stop me from driving through Sullivan Square, which is no fun to navigate at the best of times, and even worse when you’ve dropped your coffee instead of drinking it. Whatever. Navigation by faith does work around here, which I think is beyond weird but I can’t explain the lack of getting lost in any other way. The potholes did try to eat the van, but it was so nasty they spat it right back out.

I arrived at my appointment, and … well. Talk about entering a different world. Rich people’s stuff has this whole set of connotations that even middle class stuff doesn’t have. Well, actually. That might not be true. It’s the difference between having stuff because it’s worth a lot and having stuff because you like it or you need it, and I can’t get a good grip on it.

My reward was getting to go to the Slavoj Zizek talk after work. (Hooray for the awesomeness of getting on the guest list at the last minute.) It was sold out, and then some. I got myself a nice comfy seat in the back and knitted a couple of rows on my current sock (sock club yarn must get used up before I do anything else) until the interesting bits started.

My notes are less than coherent, for which I apologize.

He started with a lovely statement on Starbucks and their manipulative charity: every overpriced cappucino you buy saves an African child. (Aside: every book you buy saves a bookseller. I thought about standing up an waving, actually.) And he talked about Walter Benjamin, who I find deeply entertaining. No, I don’t remember what he said … But he went into the violence inherent in language, which is an idea I clearly need to do a spot of reading on.

I am fairly sure that his relationship with Hegel is unnatural.

There were a couple of fragments I had to write down: “the most elementary torture of language is poetry” (something to do with Jelinek’s (I think) torturing language to tell truth) and “disgusting opportunisms of wisdom” (on proverbs). Then he got into “obscene divinity” and carnival – and freedom being the opportunity to carry guns and kill people.

There was a really good bit on the most recent Batman movie and Kung Fu Panda. (Batman’s subtext is kind of like Stalin’s subtext: some reading between the lines that says, something like “we know you’re not a … british spy or whatever, but the fiction is necessary.” I knew Batman was a fascist, but man.) The Kung Fu Panda was on belief, and how nobody actually believes in anything, except we pretend to in order to make things work … He said Life is Beautiful would’ve been a much more complex movie if it had turned out that the kid only believed in order to make things easier on his father … I don’t remember Life is Beautiful all that well, actually, but the Santa Claus comparison was pretty apt. In the sense of kids saying “No, I don’t believe in Santa Claus. Do you think I’m an idiot? But I pretend so my parents will be happy.)

Let’s see. John Carpenter’s ideological sunglasses. And the Eastern European poetical-military complex. Clearly, I need to read more.

Two more things I found particularly nice: the comment on blackmail charity (see again the one overpriced cappucino will pay for this – insert starving third-world child here – child’s food for a month. Or whatever.) that encourages us to just throw money at a problem without ever thinking about it. And the way attitudes towards certain things – global warming, specifically – have changed really abruptly without any particular acknowlegement that they have. At the very end, when he was carrying on well past time (there were some people getting antsy up front), he made this comment on how we’ve taken to actually debating things like the U.S. participating in torture: well, how would you feel about living in a society where it was actually a serious debate on whether or not women should be raped. That would be absolutely absurd. And apalling.

He took that more or less where I’d take it: these people, with their debates on these issues, shouldn’t be taken seriously because it’s not debatable. Not in any culture any of us want to live in, anyway. (I’ve been saying for quite some time that we should start a movement to just laugh these “issues” out of the, um, political world.)

And I’m starting to understand the impulse to go from philosophy to cooking. I think I need to start making intensely practical things. Too bad I don’t know how to build houses. It’s time for me to learn how to weave, though. At least that way I’ll be warm when the world ends.

In any case. That was definitely an evening well-spent, and I have some books to track down and read. (Like my list wasn’t already a mile and a half long.)

One of the places I’ve been thinking about: the Texas Panhandle. There was an article in the NYT travel section a week or so ago, and I’m not sure how I feel about it. Mostly Amarillo, with some Canyon for good measure. (Oddly enough, they didn’t mention Groom.)

I can’t imagine why. (There are other things in Groom, but they’re rather overshadowed.)

Maybe it’s the time of year, but I feel like I should be traveling. Actually, it might be me wanting to avoid hard work. I knew writing was hard, but writing is hard. Keeping track of plot and character and getting the details in while avoiding info-dump … it gives me the headache. I mean, it’s fun and all, but oh boy is it work, too. The more I try to write, the less I think I know. Maybe that’s the way it’s supposed to work.

*photographs probably by S. Schroeder, possibly H. Schroeder. Credit where credit is due, and all that. (The title of the post is a paraphrase or maybe a quote from the brilliant musical Chippy.)

Anyway. I keep thinking, well, maybe I should take the risk. I need to do something new.

What? That’s the question I keep coming back to.

There’s all kinds of things I could do, right, but as it stands I’m kind of trying to do everything and not getting anything done in a way that satisfies me. I kinda wish I could, you know, take a couple of months off and do some revisions. Then again, I’m terrified that the novel in question is a little too far-fetched to even sell. Which isn’t my most rational fear, I gotta say, ’cause I’ve read a whole bunch of extraordinarily weird stuff in the last year or so.

Realistically, I can’t take time off. Given that, what on earth do I do? Good grief, being a grownup is a problem. There’s bills and laundry and remembering to feed yourself. Where do you get time to work a day job, do your art, and sell it, without living in a horrible pit of disgustingness and eating nothing but cold canned soup? I’m sure people have managed, but my time management skills fail.

If I want to keep myself from getting completely cynical and bitter, I’ve got to get a different day job. Or, better, hit some kind of windfall and have the time for the things I actually want to be doing with my life. You know, there are plenty of ways to do this, but what the heck are they?

I keep reading bits and pieces of those career guides that claim to tell you how to quit your horrid life and do whatever it is that you’re really into. It’s foolish, I know, but it’s fascinating. They, mostly, miss one key point: you’ve got to have money. The point, for me, is not having to worry about money. It’s irritating, obsessing about an imaginary thing that doesn’t have any inherent meaning. I don’t have money. Who does?

So, all right, if what I want is a not-quite full time, not 9-5 job, that I care about even a little, that pays the bills and crap: am I asking for too much?

Probably.

Is that going to stop me from asking? Nope.

But until something awesome falls out of the sky in front of me, I keep muddling on. Making socks, writing novels, you know. What we all do, really, trying to keep from losing our souls to somebody else’s profit margin.

(Also, I sat down with my spinning wheel for the first time in far too long, and had a great deal of fun. It was like spinning with a wheel that had a positive outlook on its role in life. I didn’t want to push it, so I’m still not done with the bobbin, but it’s close.)