Happy
I think I can make it now, the pain is gone / All of the bad feelings have disappeared / Here is the rainbow I’ve been prayin’ for / It’s gonna be a bright (bright), bright (bright) sunshiney day.
If you’re seeing this in a reader or in email and can’t see the video, click through because I promise your spirits will be lifted (higher, if they’re already lifted):
Here is that rainbow I’ve been praying for… Isn’t that a great song? Sitting at my desk this morning, I looked out the window at the very bright sun and the post title came into my head, so I had to track down the video. I really hope it’s a bright sunshiney day where you are, as it is here. I want to go outside and turn my face to the sun, as the singer in the video does, and dance just like he does.
My head is not cotton-foggy today (yay!!) so I’ve got to make hay while the sun shines and get some work done, but I wanted to share a few interesting things here:
- ScoutieGirl has a nice post today about growth — it’s not all grace and epiphany. Good to remember when you’re in the slog of change.
- BrainPickings has a wonderful post (the only kind she makes, I think) about psychology, to-do lists, and free will. The author of the book (Roy Baumeister) is a friend of mine; I signed him to write a lot of books at OUP, including one controversial book he titled Is There Anything Good About Men? (which prompted the largely-female staff to say, um, no?). The post is very interesting, especially if you keep (or aspire to keep) to-do lists. Paging #1 Daughter on this one!
- Sh!t New Yorkers Write — a fun little post about the history of New Yorkers’ diary entries. The book is organized by day, so an entry by an old Dutch guy is right next to one by Andy Warhol, 187 years later. It’s kinda cool.
- I was reading this piece about hypothyroidism because my husband is currently dealing with it and was struck by the wording of point #4: Prioritize restoration. I think that’s a great to-do list item, one I want to post above my desk. If every single day I gave priority to my own restoration, I doubt it would take too long and I’d bet my day would be the better for it.
- Have you ever heard of Penelope Mortimer? Me neither! Now I want to read her.
- I saw a wordle this morning of Gary Shteyngart’s blurbs and it reminded me: oh yeah! Wordle! Here’s one of my blog, which gives suspicious weight to the word buttons, which I certainly never mention except in one post, from yesterday. HMMM wordle, I don’t think I trust you.
- And finally, I saw this video yesterday and it’s surprisingly not corny, even though it gives every indication it’s going to be corny. I didn’t make it all the way to the end (it’s more than 6 minutes in length), but it was much more moving than I’d expected it to be.
my most frequently-viewed spots
I spend a lot of time at my desk, and on my computer — most of my waking hours. Even when I’m not online, I’m often at my computer, reading or writing. Here: welcome to my world:
my desk -- the bright orange glass of water that always lifts my spirits, the white mug filled with green tea, a book I'm reading to write a review, a pair of earrings, my cabling needles, my orange handknit scarf on the back of the chair, filtered sunlight through white curtains.
my computer desktop -- clear of clutter (always) and a beautiful bit of scenery.
I sit by a window that looks out onto the street, so I’ve come to know the regulars and their activities. I watch the trash dudes do their work, and wonder about their lives. I watch the supers stand on the sidewalk and chatter in Spanish (I think….they’re from the Dominican Republic so it may be a particular inflection). I watch the sun move across the sky and when it hits the spot between the buildings I have to close the blinds for 5 minutes because the glare is so intense, and then it keeps moving and I can re-open them. I know the weather because of what people are wearing: ah, clutching their collars close to their neck this morning, must be bitter. Jackets unzipped, it’s nicer today. I watch the regular rhythm particular to New York City of moving the car for the street sweepers. I hear people fighting, I hear people laughing, talking (and sometimes not listening) to each other, I hear the crazy religious schizophrenic who is just trying to save our souls.
Here’s my old office, when I was an acquiring editor at Oxford University Press:
it was a lovely office, 8 floors above Madison Avenue. HA! I see the same orange water glass and white mug. That's so funny.
What’s it like where you work?
a little catching-up post of the quotidian kind.
FUN: My husband loves to play disc jockey; he used to pull up iTunes and select one song after another from some theme he had in his mind. It was fun, because I never knew what song he’d find next, and it was fun trying to guess the theme. Now he does it on YouTube, so there’s the added pleasure of seeing the performers….especially because the music he plays tends to be from the 60s. We did that last night and I think the theme was “upbeat happy music that makes Lori smile.” One video was of The Lovin Spoonful, singing live on some old tv show; John Sebastian’s pink and orange striped shirt made me at least as happy as the music. The Association, Cyrkle, Herman’s Hermits (I had such a crush on the main guy whose name is certainly not Herman when I was little), it was all such great music, giving us both the body-state memories of that period in our lives. I was very little then, early elementary school, and he was in high school, so our memories were quite different, but they were intense for us both. At some point I took over the selection and the music shifted to (devolved to, from his perspective no doubt) banjo music, Lyle Lovett, Jerry Jeff Walker. We stayed up way too late, but it sure was fun.
BLOG: For some weird reason, my blog has suddenly become a destination for people from all over the world, I have no idea what that’s about:
visitors in the last 24 hours
The searches that bring people to my blog are varied; ~50% are about knitting, and the rest are about such a mish-mash I wonder what the searchers think when they get to my blog and see that perhaps I used one word in their search somewhere in my whole site. Anyway, it’s new, this global deal. I have a reliable cluster of visitors from the UK and from Paris, and then usually just a random one here and there. Late last week I had a flurry from Africa, which was particularly startling because I never have African visitors and I’ve wondered why.
KNITTING: I finally finished the body of Marnie’s sweater and have started a sleeve, which is going pretty quickly:
whee! starting sleeve #1
I think today I’m going to go ahead and soak and block the body of the sweater, so I can seam the shoulders and do the turtleneck. I worry about hitting a slump with the second sleeve, so I want to have something else to do, and I also want to see it so close to finished that it pulls me forward. It’s been such a mild winter I really hope she gets to wear it.
READING: If you’re the same kind of nerd as me, you might like the book I read yesterday (Stylized: A Slightly Obsessive History of Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style, by Mark Garvey). It’s a loving look at The Elements of Style, at E. B. White and Harold Ross and The New Yorker, and the world of people who are passionate about this little book including a host of famous writers who talk about their relationship with the little book. It’s a quick read (about as quick as The Elements of Style, for that matter), and you may — like me — read it with a silly grin on your face. Since I didn’t go online yesterday, I read that book, I read this week’s issue of The New York Review of Books, I pulled everything off my bookshelves and reorganized (and found of bunch of surprises, wowie), I cleaned the bathroom top to bottom, I did some shopping, and I spent a lot of time keeping my husband company. We watched Thirteen Days, that 2000 movie about the Cuban missile crisis — much more his kind of movie than mine, and I was only 3 when it happened. But when the spy planes flew low over the Cuban stockpiles, my heart raced and that surprised me.
HELP: A friend here in Manhattan is heading up a project called Legal Aid Society Trafficking Victims Legal Defense & Advocacy Project (she’s a lawyer for Legal Aid). Victims of sex trafficking are removed from their circumstances and hidden away in safety; she has organized a number of small knitting groups for them and is seeking donations of yarn and needles. Many of these women are from other countries, but some are US citizens. Their larger needs are more urgent, of course, but the knitting efforts are designed to help their spirits, and we know how well this works. The women have nothing and the woman at Legal Aid who is organizing this for them has no specific wish list. Just think about what any new knitter might need/want — yarn, needles/hooks, a nice project bag maybe, notions, anything at all. Others are organizing clothing and coat drives for the women, so we’re the lucky ones who get to give them this kind of joy. If you have any interest in helping, just let me know and I’ll give you the mailing address for the woman at Legal Aid. I posted a note in a couple of Ravelry forums and several knitters are sending boxes, but [unfortunately] there’s a steady stream of women so the need doesn’t stop.
Have a wonderful Sunday, whatever you’re up to! I’m looking forward to spending a few hours with a certain humpbacked wicked king.
having stuff to look forward to helps so much!
I hate dates. I enjoy prunes, but hate dates. So there.
But that’s not what I meant to write about, that’s not the meaning of “dates” that brought me here; I get so distracted by words I dare not dip into the dictionary to look up a word, because one leads to the next and then a good hour is gone. Ditto encyclopedias, or what passes for them now.
Good grief, digressions! DATES, Lori, what were you going to say about dates? Oh, right. So I didn’t get to go on my date with Will a couple of days ago because I was felled by a mighty migraine. I get them irregularly, and they’re usually handled quite easily with a sumatriptan inhaler (god bless you, GlaxoSmithKline, makers of Imitrex). Back in the 1980s, when the only delivery method was an Imitrex injection, I took those but they inevitably left me with a different kind of crushing headache. The inhalers were an improvement in many ways — no need to inject yourself (a biggie), no crushing chest pain as the medication moved up the body, and no injection headache. The worst thing about the inhalers is the extremely nasty taste as the remnants of the spray drip down the back of your throat. Still, now and then I get a migraine that requires two inhalers and that does leave me with a very bad rebound headache, and that’s what happened this go-round. I completely lost yesterday to the weird strangeness of the post-migraine / post-too-much-migraine-medicine fog.
I’m hoping Will and I can recreate our date this coming Thursday; that’s our plan, if he isn’t scheduled to work. But tonight I have a dinner date with my friend Temma, at a Thai restaurant she introduced me to in our neighborhood. That’ll be fun, and I know I’ll leave feeling much better. Sunday I’m going to see Richard III at BAM, and the following Friday my husband and I are going to see the Cloud Gate 2 performance. Lots of great dates coming up in my immediate future — also, youngest daughter’s 21st birthday, the anniversary of getting engaged to my husband, Valentine’s Day, and lots of other shows and performances in my calendar. It’s been a kind of hard slog the last couple of weeks, so having these wonderful dates to look forward to really helps.
Today I made an official declaration (to myself) that the pity party is now over! Enough already. It’s so easy to indulge self-pity — at least it is for me — but that just keeps it going rather than exhausting the well. So I open the blinds (figuratively), let in the sun, make a big cup of tea, and turn my eyes outward. The view is much sunnier, even in winter. 
listen / do you want to know a secret / do you promise not to tell ~ The Beatles (and me, but I’m not telling)
There’s a lot of stuff going on chez Thrums that I don’t write about — of course. I feel relatively free to write about myself, somewhat free to write about my kids, and not at all free to write about other people I know. There are some people I never write about because their privacy is important to preserve for one reason or another, and others I mention in a glancing way because unlike me, they didn’t sign up for this public airing of thoughts business. Still, there is a lot of stuff going on in my life that isn’t getting discussed here, and it leaves me feeling strange about what I do write about, because without the unspoken stuff, what I present here seems like a sham in some way. [this reminds me of that terrible joke: So, Mrs. Kennedy, except for that one day in Dallas, how was your trip to Texas? terrible joke] So I’m finding it a little harder to make regular posts about my life, since the big middle of it is private.
Remember how I had to frog Marnie’s Moby sweater? I frogged it completely and just started over, and I’m finally back at the point I was in the first edition (I’ve decided to refer to them as editions, like books). So here I am:
Ambergris, by Ann Weaver (2nd edition)
I do note with satisfaction that the cable ropes are all done correctly in this edition; there was one error in the first version that would’ve bugged me forever, so you know, you take what comfort you can from a situation like this. I’ve already divided at the sleeves, so now I’m doing the front up to the neck, and then I’ll do the back. Then two sleeves, each with cable ropes up the center, assembly, and a turtleneck. I hope I can finish this while Marnie still has time to wear it this winter; since she lives in Chicago, the odds are pretty good.
Tonight I’m having a date with Will, which I’m really looking forward to. We’re going to a cool little independent bookstore on Prince St. (McNally Jackson) and then over to an Indian food restaurant he loves, for dosas. It’s been such a warm and dry winter, it doesn’t feel like January at all — but I’m not complaining, especially for this evening, as we tramp around that great little neighborhood. One truly wonderful thing about all three of my kids is that we share a love of words and books. It manifests itself differently in the three of them, but I do share something special with each one of them around books, and that makes me happier than you can imagine. I like to think it’s my gift to them.
* * *
Here’s the next writing prompt — a 600-word story (a narrative describing a shared experience) told from the “we” perspective. No first person pronouns allowed! My first thought was to put the couple in therapy and have them telling competing narratives about something, but I got this idea and ran with it instead. It’s a piece of fiction, again, but again it uses bits of real experience for texture. My husband and I did go to Luang Prabang, which means the details of place are true, but the rest is entirely made up:
We woke up very early that morning because we wanted to witness the monks’ morning alms ritual; since we were staying at a hotel on the other side of the Mekong River, we had to get up early enough to walk across that long scary bridge – remember, honey? – and it made us nervous because of the traffic, especially in the dark. We felt so exhausted when the alarm went off, but we both knew how much you wanted to see it so off we went.
Right – it really wasn’t the kind of thing you like to do sugar plum, you’d rather visit the markets and the food stalls, but you were such a good sport about it. We just had no idea how it was going to turn out, did we? We thought we’d go to the main street, kneel at the curb, and watch the Lao women putting little clumps of rice in each of the monks’ baskets, and then get some breakfast on the way back to our hotel – remember how much we loved the breakfast at that one place? But it didn’t turn out like that at all. And you’re usually such a quiet guy, avoiding trouble. Sure, you’ll speak up if you feel you’re getting ripped off, but you never get involved in violence. You just never do that.
So there we were, walking across that bridge, in the dark. Remember how there weren’t any lights of any kind? Not even headlights, since cars weren’t allowed on the bridge? And remember how tiny the walkway was for pedestrians, with broken boards and loose nails? And how quiet the morning was – we heard the river, the cyclists passing on the bridge, the early morning fishermen, and the birds? You were commenting on the birds just as we left the bridge and crossed onto the sidewalk. We had to stop because your long skirt got caught in the clasp of your sandal, and you were kneeling down to untangle it. We were both a little bit on edge – do you remember why, now? It’s hard to imagine why we felt so unsettled, in Luang Prabang. We’d had such a great time, and felt safer there than anywhere else we’d been in Southeast Asia. Maybe it was just the very early hour, combined with the darkness that we’re not used to, since we’re from Manhattan where it’s never dark. Maybe we were just kind of punchy from exhaustion.
Well sugar, you say “we” were punchy, but “we” weren’t really punchy – you were. Remember?
You’re right – you were singing and laughing and commenting on how beautiful the river was in the dark, and how many stars you saw. OK, “we” weren’t punchy, point taken. But we were both a little anxious in the utter darkness, that’s definitely true. And neither of us expected someone to grab you – you have to agree with that!
No, we certainly never expected something like that to happen, that’s true. Did you see him coming?
No, remember how we were both bending over – you were squatting – trying to get your skirt free? The guy just came out of nowhere, it seemed, and leaned over you, saying something we couldn’t understand.
You did overreact just a little bit honey, you have to admit. If it hadn’t been so dark we might’ve noticed that he was wearing orange robes, and had shaved his head. You didn’t have to punch the poor guy, he was just offering to help us! Granted, it was dark and you were trying to protect me, but come on. You punched a monk.
Let the rain kiss you / Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops / Let the rain sing you a lullaby / The rain makes still pools on the sidewalk / The rain makes running pools in the gutter / The rain plays a little sleep song on our roof at night / And I love the rain. ~ Langston Hughes
It is an utterly beautiful day to be working at home, one of those that makes me grateful to be a freelancer, grateful to be sitting at my desk in the window, watching the drenching rains, seeing the wind blowing the drops across standing puddles, seeing the lights turn on in apartments across the street as the skies darken. I met a favorite client this morning at my corner Starbucks and proceeded to dump my giant cappuccino all over the table, on our papers, and in my lap. She was kind and gracious as she grabbed napkins and helped me clean up, assuring me with a gentle lie that this happens to her all the time. I came home during one of the brief breaks in the rain, peeled off my coffee-drenched jeans, and pulled on flannel pajamas. Made a big mug of green tea and lightly toasted a sesame bagel. Pulled out my chair, opened my laptop, and took a deep breath. Selected the perfect music: Berliner Messe, by Arvo Pärt, performed by the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir and the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra.
After weeks of not sleeping, I took a pill last night that made me sleep deeply, all night long. It’s not something I can do regularly — the drug is not addictive, but it has dreadful side-effects like weight gain and the potential for tardive dyskinesia — but getting one good night of sleep is enough, for now. Happy Friday, y’all. I hope it’s as peaceful and lovely where you are as it is at my desk.
Here’s a different piece by Arvo Pärt, also perfect for a rainy day:
filling the void with LIFE!
My experiment in going off-line is fascinating; instead of feeling like a hardship, it seems to be taking on a life of its own, bleeding out into the rest of my life, unwilling to stay corralled on Saturdays. For the second or third Saturday in a row — can’t remember now — I did not go on the internet yesterday except for pointed and specific reasons. I opened an email from Marnie, who sent me images of her most recent page spreads, and I responded. That’s just fine, I’m not against using it for specific reasons like that. The difference is that I go on, get/do the thing, and get off. I don’t just check facebook first. I get off.
I spent yesterday, snowy cold yesterday, sitting in my sunny window writing. Writing requires research, so I used the internet for that specific purpose: what was the population of Sinton, TX in 1946? How many banks were there downtown, and how were they arranged? What do sorghum fields look like, exactly? Also, I made deviled eggs for my husband, I watched a movie with him, I knitted. The day was leisurely, long, and satisfying. My mind feels more focused, even though my sleep is currently so screwed up I’m exhausted. (Last night was typical: asleep at midnight, up at 1, trying to go back to sleep until 2, up in the living room until 3:30, back to bed trying to get to sleep until 5:30, up at 6:30.) Exhausted scatterbrainyness aside, my mind is less cluttered.
And so I extend this experiment another day — an internet-free weekend. It didn’t really take that long to break the craving, the checking-Google-reader craving, the running-through-facebook craving. Meh. Everyone’s still there, doing what they do. The makers are making and blogging about it. The foodies are cooking or eating and blogging about it. The critics are critiquing, the writers are writing, the funny are being funny. They’ll still be doing it tomorrow, I’m sure. For today, I have things of my own to do. I think I’ll make a big French press pot of coffee and get back to my desk in the sunny window. There’s little snow left on the ground, but it’s a bright sunny day, reflecting off the snow remnants. Happy Sunday y’all, whatever you plan to do today.
happiness / how’d you get to be happiness / how’d you get to find love, real love / love, love, love.
#1 — It’s been a dry winter so far, and an unseasonably warm one, so I’m not complaining when I say bitterly that it’s cold. (Ha, a Tom Swiftie for ya!) But it is cold; we have the oven going and the oven door open, and two of the stove burners going, trying to get warm. We’re both wearing lots of layers, and layers of socks, and blankets are at the ready. Good thing there’s a knitta in the house.
#2 — So yeah. I had to frog Marnie’s sweater. But the good news is that those two little goofs I’d made in the cables, at the bottom, no longer exist! I am so familiar with the sweater now, it’s going smoothly and error-free. I’ve just finished the first pattern repeat, so I’m getting there. Slowly. I thought about knitting something else — a little amuse-bouche, an aperitif, a taste-bud-changer thing — to cleanse my palate of the frogging tragedy, but then I decided the only way to deal with my sorrow was to cast on and get going.
#3 — Do you know about Read It Later? It’s an app that works in browsers and on every platform, I think. Basically, it sits in my browser toolbar as a little bookmarklet, so when I hit something long that warrants more time and attention than I have at the moment, I click to “read it later.” Then, on my Droid, there’s the little Read It Later icon, filled with all those fascinating pieces I wanted to read. Since the few sites I reliably look at in my Google Reader (when I’m in a rush) collect long-form pieces, I tend to have a little collection. They’re the perfect size for short subway trips, standing in lines, doctor’s waiting rooms, etc., so finding this Read It Later deal has been a boon.
#4 — I had a little facebook messenger chat with Will (my son) this morning. We arranged to meet mid-afternoon Thursday for a late lunch; Thursday night I’m going to the opera with my friends to see Faust, and it occurred to me that he might want to go (since he said something like “jealous!” when I told him). So I went ahead and invited him, and he said, “I could, but Faust is so 2011, and I’ve made a pact with myself to keep looking forward.” He just cracks me up like no one else can. Then he posted this Goldfrapp song on my facebook wall: SO ME. I feel like this so often.
#5 — isn’t the 21st century cool? Just look back at this post — reading things from the internet on my phone and having virtual chats with my son who lives a few blocks away, who then publicly shares a video of a song that reminds him of me. That’s all pretty wild, if you remember to notice.
#6 — good news (very good news) behind the scenes chez Thrums. I’m very happy and filled with exuberant hope, which is a nice kind of hope to have. The other kind, the grim little feathery one you clutch when things are dark, that’s a good one to have too. Of course. But I’ve got the sunny exuberant one, and I’m enjoying it.
step away from the computer, it’s good for you (after you read this, of course)
visit rightbrainterrain.com to learn about this symbol
I often laugh at myself over the concept of fear — oh, the things I will be afraid of. Heights, I don’t laugh at myself for that one, it has evolutionary origins and is designed to keep me alive, even if I overextend it. But reading Moby Dick? REALLY? I was “afraid” to read Moby Dick, which is just silly. And I was “afraid” of spending a day in my normal life without going online. Of course I’ve spent days in my adult life without going online: there was the day I spent on Machu Picchu; the days I spent floating through the Mekong Delta; the days in Enkhuisen, The Netherlands; a day on a small island off the coast of Croatia. The obvious deal there is that I couldn’t get online, and I was on vacation.
So yesterday was my second normal day spent without going online. My original plans had been to ban the Internet and knitting. I decided to allow knitting, but only after I’d done a bunch of other stuff, only in the evening after dinner.
The goal of this exercise wasn’t to wield a Draconian whip — “Thou must NOT!” — but rather to help me move away from compulsive rut-dwelling and out into the other things I really long to do. So particular exceptions were allowed, to focus on the spirit of the exercise. I needed to share some good news with friends and family, so I opened Outlook, wrote that email, and logged off.
This progress report has two parts: the feelings of it, and what I did. I was worried that I’d feel like a junkie in need of a fix, only able to think about getting online. Consumed by wondering who was saying what on facebook. Consumed with certainty that great stuff was flying through my Google Reader. Curious whether my statcounter would reveal another visit from my assumed stalker. But that’s not what I felt, at all. Those kinds of thoughts would intrude now and then, especially when I was doing something quiet, like reading; it felt like an ADD brain, trying to make me jump from this thing! to that thing! what about the other! But it was easy enough to quiet by returning my attention to what I was doing. One thing the experience helped me see is that my constant multitasking is not my friend. It’s good to be able to do it when you need to, but I do too much of it, and nearly all the time. I’ll knit and watch a movie and read a book on my Kindle and answer emails and texts on my phone, all at the same time. No wonder I feel like I’m drowning in noise. So if nothing else, yesterday’s digital break helped me learn that lesson that I can implement every single day. The bottom line: It wasn’t a horrible feeling, willfully staying offline all day.
The ‘what did I do’ answer is satisfying. I had an unexpected early breakfast with a friend while my husband slept, then a nice conversation on the phone with Marnie (we talk every Saturday, a highlight of my week). My husband got some news that absorbed us for a couple of hours. I read — cover to cover — the current edition of The New York Review of Books. Made a cup of masala chai, pulled back my hair, put on my fleece jacket and wrapped my legs in a handknit blanket (it’s very cold here this weekend), sat at the table with the huge magazine spread out in front of me, and read every word (including a personal ad at the back from a woman who’s looking to date a man 75-80 who is ambulatory. Maybe she should set her sights a little higher?)
I did a writing exercise from my favorite prompt book, The 3am Epiphany. I worked on it for about an hour and a half and am pleased with it; I started making notes for the next chapter of the book I’m writing, trying to work out something I’m not sure about yet.
At this point my husband was making our dinner — chili — and it smelled so good, and made our apartment so warm and cozy, so I felt like watching a movie and knitting. After I recommended The Guard (a wonderful movie, y’all! watch it!), Marnie recommended The Trip, a Steve Coogan movie about two guys on a road trip through beautiful northern England, eating at foodie restaurants (it’s available streaming on Netflix). So I settled in with Steve Coogan and Marnie’s sweater (which — by the way — I had to frog completely, and start all over. Don’t ask, it’s too painful. OK: I had the side seam off on one side, by a lot.), and a cup of green tea. It’s a hilarious movie, and worth watching if only for their competing Michael Caine impressions.
I definitely got more done yesterday — and did a wider variety of things — than I usually do, when I’m plugged into my computer all day. I’m going to keep doing this, taking Saturday internet breaks, and sprinkle in smaller breaks throughout the week. Just like reading Moby Dick, it’s not really as hard as I’d imagined it to be. If you feel similarly scatterbrained and info-overloaded, it’s worth a try! [edit: i just found this BBC article on the ways in which "Internet addiction" rewires your brain....this is a topic I could rant on, the too-easy naming of things as "addiction," but it's an interesting and pertinent read!]
Stay warm y’all -
L
sharing the reading love, plus a dash of yarn
Meta-reading, reading about reading, obviously. This will support my recent posts about feeling overloaded by incoming information: I subscribe to 598 websites and blogs, which I have organized in Google Reader into 14 topics, including art, knitting, personal, fashion and fitness, food, creativity, design, entertainment, NYC, and reading.
Over the years, my subscribing habits have reflected ongoing passions. A few years ago, when I was a very-involved food blogger, I rabidly consumed other food blogs; now, if I don’t have much time, I just mark everything as read in the food blog folder and don’t bother. Now, if I don’t have much time, I limit my reading to the personal blogs, followed by the knitting blogs, followed by the reading blogs. Actually, it depends on my mood, the specific order, but I generally try to make time to at least scan through those categories.
Today I thought I’d share the reading sites with you, in case you find something of interest. In some cases the site offers criticism, in other cases it provides longform reading. At any rate, these are sites I really love for one reason or another, and share them gladly:
A.V. Club — this site is run by the people behind The Onion, but there’s nothing fake or jokey about it. I particularly love the tv and film criticism (here’s a post about the penultimate episode of Breaking Bad), which is always thoughtful, even if I don’t always [necessarily] agree.
Big Think — this site focuses on a range of topics including arts and culture, belief, ethics, history, identity, life and death, and a bunch of others. It’s not my favorite site in the list, but there are gems now and then, like this interview with Joy Hirsch, a neuroscientist who talks about the mysteries of her own brain, and making it as a lady scientist (my words, not hers!).
Brain Pickings — I mentioned this site at the end of last year as my favorite (new to me) website. The posts are always interesting, and the blogger seems to have an endless supply of ideas and topics to explore. I’m very eager to read this post recommending 9 books on reading and writing. In addition to great information, I love the site design, which is fresh and clean.
Gangrey — the site’s subtitle is “prolonging the slow death of newspapers,” which makes me smile. Each post presents a newspaper article the blogger appreciates for one reason or another; s/he provides the link and a small bit of context, so it’s really a curated set of links but I often really enjoy the pieces and might not have found them, otherwise. For instance, this piece titled Salt is “a tale of Texas justice and mysterious salt poisoning.” Well, I want to read that one!
McNalley Jackson Bookmongers — this is a book shop’s tumblr, so the posts are very brief….often just a literary quote, or a link to a post from another site, but I enjoy it often enough to keep it in my list.
Melville House — the Moby Lives site, if you know it by that name. I can’t wait to check out the books on the Man Asia Prize shortlist. The site offers literary criticism, insider-publishing posts, interviews with authors, everything you might expect from a smart publisher.
Pageviews — the books blog on the NY Daily News website. The Daily News isn’t a hotbed of intellectual rigor, but this blog is consistently thoughtful and takes on interesting books and writers.
This Recording — very new to me, so I don’t know much about the site except that I tend to love it. You can just follow the posts on books if you like, but the posts on tv and film have been quite good, so I just follow the whole site.
The New York Review of Ideas – a digital magazine of NYU’s graduate ‘Journalism of Ideas’ class of 2011. Another new-to-me site, but I’ve enjoyed it so far.
To Be Shelved – with the subtitle “judging books by their covers since 2010″, this blog is written by a woman who really loves books, and who works in news design. I bookmarked this post she wrote last November about John Updike, and just haven’t had a chance to read it yet.
Longreads — along with Brain Pickings, my favorite site in this collection. With word counts greater than 1,500 words, these are the articles you want to read when you have a bit of time. It’s another curated collection of writing found around the web, and I count on this site to collect stuff I want to read. They never let me down.
Obit Magazine — bear with me on this one. It’s about death, yeah, so it’s really about life, of course. There are book reviews and a blog, and I consistently enjoy the pieces that grab my attention.
If I’m in a rush, I just focus my attention on Brain Pickings and Longreads and let the rest go, but they’re all worth a look!
***
Just a couple more things to share and then I’ve got to get busy; this Gandhi manuscript isn’t going to edit itself!
it snowed our last night in Atlantic City, making the sad, worn-out place seem even sadder and worner-outer.
the lobby of Caesar's -- a little something for everyone! Fake Roman ruins, a Chinese New Year tree of lanterns, and a giant snowflake hanging just off to the left. They're taking no chances.
for Veera Välimäki's new shawl, Color Affection, I just received these three skeins from The Plucky Knitter (MC Fingering -- top to bottom: elegant elephant, Sammy Samerson, and flannel). Too much knitting, too little time, man!
And on that note, I say ta-ta! (for now, of course)
have you ever been to atlantic city? i’ll show you what you’re missing:
Internet Sabbatical
Well, perhaps I didn’t give it a real try, because I spent most of the day working on a couple of manuscripts I needed to finish before our mini-trip. I woke up and started editing, and worked straight through until 5pm, without stop. When I finished that, I had a bunch of chores to do, in preparation for leaving: laundry, shopping, baking [brownies and cookies for my husband], house cleaning, etc. Even if we’re just gone for a couple of days, I know how wonderful it is to come home to a spotless place, so I always leave clean sheets on the bed, the bathroom shining, the kitchen cleaned, the trash taken out, the floors swept. So I had all that to get done, which meant I was so busy all day it didn’t really feel like a digital sabbatical. Did I go online? Once, to send the completed manuscripts to my two authors. I didn’t do anything else, didn’t “just check facebook,” didn’t “just take a run through my Google reader,” didn’t “glance at Ravelry.” Nothing. But I didn’t feel tempted, either. I’m going to do it again next Saturday. We drove yesterday and got to Atlantic City, and in the way these things go, expensive hotels charge a lot for the internet and cheaper ones give it away for free; even though our room is not expensive, the hotel is so the charge is outrageous for the Internet, which means I didn’t go online all day yesterday, either. So two days offline. It feels good, it feels less noisy in my head. I’m curious.
Sham
So, Atlantic City. It’s a very strange place, and sad — probably a little sadder-seeming than usual since it’s winter, and so many places are closed. The summery places — saltwater taffy shops, ice cream parlors, miniature golf — they’re all closed and what’s left are half-empty casinos, psychics, and malls. Each hotel is a large complex comprising casinos, showrooms, shopping malls, and restaurants, and they all merge together. Just behind the boardwalk are rundown-looking tattoo parlors, check cashing stores, pawnshops, and shuttered businesses.
When I was first married, when I was 21, my then-husband was working for CBS News doing election research. We traveled to 20 states, and in the states he worked, he had to gather data at every county seat. One of our states was Nevada, and we got stuck in Las Vegas for more than a week because their records were so poor (surprise!). It was my first time encountering gambling, and I learned that I should not do it. I spent my little bit of cash and found myself glitter-eyed staring at my wedding ring, wondering what I could get for it. I walked away having learned something about myself. So I came to Atlantic City knowing that I didn’t want to gamble, but I don’t even want to. Now I look at the casinos and see them as oh so sad. Sad people sitting in front of tables or machines, giving their money away, and being blitzed by flashing lights and ringing bells, to keep them doing it. Or to disguise what’s really going on. They feed their money, they keep reaching into pockets and bags and handing over more and more. For the most part they’re older and I don’t know if that’s a difference between Atlantic City and Las Vegas, or if it has to do with this time of year. Or something else. Anyway, I haven’t been tempted.
We went into one place which was set up with an old west theme. Inside there were fake oak trees with tables underneath, and saloons and taverns along the outer edge, complete with swinging doors. All kinds of ‘buildings.’ And then, if you happen to look up, you see the ceiling tiles painted black, and you see so clearly the constructedness of it, and you realize it’s a giant warehouse that could be stripped of the old west theme and turned into anything else. It’s such a strange place. People love to be fooled.
We ate dinner last night at a hamburger place, and it felt as sad as the rest. It had a 50s theme, and the other customers seemed tired and worn down. It was someone’s birthday, so the lights dimmed and a waiter shouted that it’s always a special day, but today is most special because it’s Annie’s birthday, let’s sing! The entire restaurant joined the song, which very quickly drifted into a minor key and stayed there. I swear it was the most forlorn version of that song I’ve ever heard, and it fit the vibe. Minor and sad.
Because we’re here Sunday and Monday nights, the room rates are quite low; ~$70/night as opposed to $300+ for Friday and Saturday. We’re on the 41st floor with an ocean view, and the view really is beautiful. I love the ocean. We’re so used to New York, though, that last night the utter quietness was disturbing. There was absolutely no sound, at all. Bizarre! So we’re here tonight and tomorrow we’ll head home, back to the other world.
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- guess where we’re staying?
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- our view, from the 41st floor. it’s really a gorgeous view of the ocean.
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- the boardwalk — made of boards.
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- there’s also a beautiful beach here
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- late afternoon on the beach, my favorite time
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- i love a place with seagulls
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- blah blah blah Atlantic City blah blah blah industrial achievements. This is on the convention center, where the Miss America pageants are held
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- where else but here can you walk from old rome to the old west. weird weird place.
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- full moon and electric lights over the boardwalk
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- a full, brilliant moon over Atlantic City
a beautiful horizon and the passage of time….
I don’t know why I love time lapse photography so very much, but I do; I love seeing time, and I love remembering that we’re really just tiny bits of life on a large planet, whirling around in a larger galaxy, in a larger-still universe. Instead of making me feel small, it makes me feel large, and infinite.
Behind me, 2011 — in front of me, 2012! And happiness on either side.
This post has one foot in last night and one in this morning, straddling the 2011/2012 divide. Which is, of course, silly, because I’m writing it in 2012, but the conceit struck me so I’m sticking with it. Happy new year, y’all!
Last night we went to the Concert for Peace at St John the Divine. The primary reason I wanted to go was that Judy Collins was on the program, and I’ve loved her beautiful voice since I first encountered it back in 1978. She’s had quite a difficult life, losing her son to drug addiction and suicide, and anyone whose child commits suicide awes me with their strength and courage to go on. When we walked the block and a half to the cathedral, I was struck anew by how dazzling it is that I live so close to such a place; imagine if I lived a block away from Notre Dame de Paris, or the stunning cathedral at Chartres. If I lived so close, and could walk over there on a whim….but I do live so close to a similarly-magnificent place, even if it doesn’t have the same kind of history.
the always-gorgeous St John the Divine
It was beautifully decorated, and packed with people. The concert started at 7 and we left our apartment at 6:30 for the 5-minute walk; by the time we arrived, the only empty seats were in the very back rows. I took the shot above relatively close to the front, in the paid section — $60/ticket. We were there for the free seats, and from where we sat in the very back, we couldn’t see anything at all but there were giant speakers placed in our back section so we’d be able to hear. And THEN this woman standing in the aisle next to us asked if we’d like to take two extra ticketed seats she had, because her friends didn’t show up. Why yes please, we’d love to do that. So we sat in the 5th row from the performers. Unbelievable. Unfortunately, our seats were in the middle of the row, so if we wanted to leave we really couldn’t — and I’d have wanted to leave. Ah well.
Judy Collins and Jessye Norman, a couple of feet from me. Judy was performing, Jessye was just there like the rest of us lucky schlubs, to listen.
After opening remarks by the Dean of the Cathedral, Harry Smith spoke briefly, and then introduced Judy Collins. She talked for a bit, sang a bit of a song she’d written after attending Duke Ellington’s funeral there at the cathedral, and then launched into an a capella version of Both Sides Now. She sounded absolutely amazing, but she started wandering around with the lyrics; in the second stanza, she was just pulling lines randomly from different stanzas and I saw this fleeting expression on her face where she realized she was off, but she plowed forward anyway. That stanza didn’t make sense and it didn’t rhyme, but it didn’t matter. She sang the rest perfectly, and I cried, a lot. Her sweet quavery voice, lifting and breaking so high, reaching the notes….the lyrics themselves….it was just lovely.
there she stood, singing clear-voiced and beautifully
We came home and had a beautiful meal my husband made, tandoori chicken, and chicken with green curry. Broccoli in curry and ginger. Rice. It was mouthwatering, mouth-stinging, and oh-so-good. Just before midnight we walked down to Riverside Drive, which is always surprisingly empty at midnight on New Year’s Eve, and stood in the middle of the street and kissed each other. Here’s to a new and improved year, with hope for something especially good to happen to my husband.
If you’re from the south, I know you’re eating something with blackeyed peas today, for good luck. I made sure that the first thing I put in my mouth this morning was sweet, so sweet things would come out of my mouth this year. And I’ve paid attention to what I’ve been doing today, because whatever you do on New Year’s Day is what you’ll do a lot of in the coming year. So I cooked and knitted:
two blueberry cobblers ready to pop into the oven, for my husband -- Pioneer Woman's blackberry cobbler recipe, quite luscious and simple!
eaten with tortilla chips, Texas Caviar so good it'll make you slap your mama
getting going! got marnie's measurements, so i'm knitting away; 8 more rows to the waist shaping!
button bands and icord edging done -- one sleeve underway!
I imagine we’ll take a walk on this beautiful sunny day — it’s 51 degrees, very unwinter-like! I hope the first day of your new year is as happy and lovely as mine, filled with great food and enjoyable activities, and someone to love. What else do you need.
ghosts of Christmas past
I hope you had a wonderful Christmas weekend, if you celebrate. Mine was very nice — as nice as it could possibly be, without having my kids with me. [But did you hear the awful, awful news from Connecticut, about a house that burned down early Christmas morning, and the owner survived but her three young daughters, all under 10, and her parents were all killed? God...could anything be worse, that poor, poor woman.]
This seems like a non sequitur, but I promise it isn’t. Have you ever read A Fine Balance, by Rohinton Mistry? (I feel compelled to tell you I read it before Oprah picked it for her book club….) It’s a beautiful, horrible, sad, tragic story of people trying to survive during The Emergency, in India. It’s so tragic, there were times I had to put it down because I simply couldn’t keep bearing it. Passages I had to read out of the sides of my eyes because I couldn’t tolerate them head-on. One of the characters, Ishvar, just endures more misery than should be possible, but he always says “life is long.” Although the longer his life goes on, the more misery he endures, that’s not what he seems to mean. It’s that life is long, whatever is happening now isn’t necessarily what will always be happening. There is room in the future for other things — better things, perhaps. Whatever is happening now isn’t the only thing that ever will happen.
Plenty of people suffer during the holidays, and feel excruciating pain and loneliness. Christmas Eve is more painful a time to be alone than Christmas, for me, but maybe that’s because of my Christmas Eve in 1970. Late that afternoon, when I was 12, my mother gathered me and my sister and brother and told us she was divorcing our dad. She walked us into their bedroom, where he sat, on his knees on the floor, and told us to tell him goodbye. He pulled us into his arms, sobbing, and told us how much he loved us. We told him goodbye, and walked out the door. Mother drove us to a motel — The Downtowner — where she had already secured adjoining rooms, and where my soon-to-be step-father was waiting for her. She and he were in one room, and my sister and brother and I sat on the ends of the beds in the next room, staring at the tv. We watched A Charlie Brown Christmas…..our eyes took it in, but I doubt any of us were really watching it. Could there be sadder Christmas music than that soundtrack? I don’t know of it, if there is.
So that’s my sad little holiday tale o’ woe…..we all have them, of one kind or another. I’ve come such a long way, and life has indeed been long. I’ve had joyful Christmas Eves, sad ones, lonely ones, endless ones, happy ones, hilarious ones, new baby ones, warm ones and cold ones, and next year’s celebration will be of another form, I’m sure. Life is long. If your holidays were lonely, I’m so sorry; it’s a particular pain, feeling lonely when the whole world seems to be connected and warm and joyful and spending time with loved ones. You aren’t the only one, and those of us who had a lovely time this year aren’t guaranteed those types of celebrations in the years to come. It’s life, and life is long, and you get to experience nearly everything if you live long enough.
oh what a beautiful morning, oh what a beautiful day — i have a wonderful feeling, everything’s going my way [today, anyway!]
Merry Christmas, if you celebrate! I had an absolutely lovely day, beginning with gifts and a sumptuous breakfast, then a videochat with all but one of my kids, who is on her way home from Israel today. So me plus 5 on the videochat, so very wonderful. I’ve spent the rest of the day knitting and watching movies, and I baked a batch of snickerdoodles and two loaves of cranberry-orange nutbread. It’s been a happy, good-smelling, good-eating, good-moments day. Here is a variety of images from the day:
TEXANS: SIT DOWN. Pecans for $18/pound. I KNOW. That's insane. They're supposed to be free, on the ground in your backyard. I never dreamed I'd pay $18/lb, but I did today, for the cranberry-orange nutbread. And it was good.
beautiful yarn from Katie, my knitter daughter. 50% alpaca, 50% wool. Aran weight, three skeins. What to make?
The tree outside my window; how are those two branches still green, on an otherwise barren tree?
along with other gifts, my husband surprised me with a bowl filled with my favorite fruits -- strawberries, cherries, red grapes, and clementines. LOVE (him and the fruit).
the shetland lace bib on my audrey sweater -- hauling butt now!
So that was my lovely day. I have a new external hard drive to fix up, several new prints courtesy of Marnie to get framed, a bunch of great food to eat, and all while wearing my new waiting-for-Santa flannel pajama pants from Katie. I have another post I’ll write tomorrow about traveling a long way from one Christmas Eve to another, but that’ll wait. Tonight’s dinner is shrimp crusted with buttery garlicky breadcrumbs and a giant gorgeous salad. Me happy, and me hope you happy too.
xo
Lori
this video was posted by the embarrassed big sister of the singer. the baby jesus slept through everything.
I think that’s the lyric — anyway, this little singer gave me a big smile and I hope she does you, too. Give this a chance; once all the little singers assemble and the song gets underway, you’ll see what I mean.
Merry Christmas Eve, y’all!
the poets speak and I just set them up:
[reprinted with my permission, from last year's solstice!] This post is published exactly at the solstice – 12:30am NY time, December 22. The shortest day, the longest night, ripe for metaphor. With our modern minds, we cast back and try to imagine what it was like for our ancestors who hadn’t yet come to understand celestial machinations, we imagine that they thought the world was ending (as we imagine they thought darkness ate the sun during an eclipse) — but those are our modern imaginings, only.
We’ve all seen our own planet from a vantage point beyond it…. startling, if you remember to think about that and how new and weird it is. We understand celestial mechanics, things going around things, planet tilts and seasons, orbit patterns. We are so sophisticated, we’re beyond fear that the night will never end. Right?
Anselm Kiefer, Gescheiterte Hoffnung (C.D. Friedrich), 2010, Charcoal on photographic paper. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery, New York. Text on the work is translated as follows: "Wreck of Hope."
[a cranky note from the winter of my feeble little mind: why does it seem like winter doesn't really begin, and the world really gets bleak, after the solstice! i'm ready for it to start lightening up, man.]
BUT: in honor of the world turning, light returning, and all that amazing jazz, I have a handful of beautiful winter / solstice poems here, after the jump.
CLICK to continue reading the longest night *always* ends (so far!)... Continue reading »
” Perhaps my best years are gone. When there was a chance of happiness. But I wouldn’t want them back. Not with the fire in me now. No, I wouldn’t want them back.” Beckett, “Krapp’s Last Tape
There’s a brilliant resource in Rochester, NY, called Writers & Books — in a gorgeous old building, they offer writing classes, reading seminars, and readings. I took a class there on Beckett, led by a philosophy professor; we read and discussed many plays and stories, but the one that struck me hardest was “Krapp’s Last Tape.” I tend to get frustrated and bored with Beckett — he’s best taken in small bites, not in concentrated chunks because it starts feeling like this one’s hopelessness in a black landscape; ah, this one’s hopelessness in a white landscape; oh wait, this one’s hopelessness in a gray landscape; wow! this one’s hopelessness with a lobster. Hopeless, I get it. Next.
But Krapp, Krapp was different. Krapp was about a man, a real life, about looking back on a real life, and trying to understand it all. If you’re unfamiliar with this short play, Krapp is a 69-year old man who has made a tape recording each year on his birthday, kind of summarizing his year (an early blogger?); on this 69th birthday, before making the new recording he listens to one he made 30 years earlier. Part of the older tape is him pontificating on things he’s learned — kind of separating himself from his life with a big-vocabulary verbal distancing. But part of it is spent recalling a moment with a woman, in a boat. Now listening to it 30 years later, Krapp embraces the tape player as if it’s a person — that woman, perhaps. [here's the play, if you want to read it -- it's short.]
One striking thing is Krapp’s ongoing contempt for himself; on the 30-year-old tape, he’d listened to an earlier tape and expressed great contempt for himself, then. And at 69, he expresses contempt for the 39-year-old who was expressing contempt for his earlier life. Contempt is such a cowardly emotion, and contempt for contempt is staggering. Contempt for life, for one’s life, is the biggest waste of all.
This passage, the piece Krapp listens to again and again, and the piece that ends the play, is beautiful and heartbreaking. They were in a small boat:
I said again I thought it was hopeless and no good going on, and she agreed, without opening her eyes. (Pause.) I asked her to look at me and after a few moments–(pause)–after a few moments she did, but the eyes just slits, because of the glare. I bent over her to get them in the shadow and they opened. (Pause. Low.) Let me in. (Pause.) We drifted in among the flags and stuck. The way they went down, sighing, before the stem! (Pause.) I lay down across her with my face in her breasts and my hand on her. We lay there without moving. But under us all moved, and moved us, gently, up and down, and from side to side.
The “Let me in” line is deeply moving; let me in. Please, let me in. Do we let people in, do we have the courage to ask to be let in? I often don’t have that courage.
i had seats in the nosebleed section
I attended the final performance of this play at BAM — Brooklyn Academy of Music — with John Hurt. It’s a one act play, one actor, only 55 minutes, more or less. Minimalist setting: just a desk and chair, an overhead lamp, and the tape player and tapes. Plus a couple bananas. He was brilliant, and looked like Beckett himself with his thin body and white thatch of hair.
that's the whole set -- a desk, chair, and overhead light.
There wasn’t an empty seat in the house; as the lights went down, I understood that we were all there to do this together. All of us in the audience were there to create this performance with John Hurt. The lights came up and he was there, at the desk. He held the stage for several minutes in absolute silence, and I could feel us all there, together, in the room, bringing Krapp into being again. It was wonderful.
really brilliant -- John Hurt
Before the performance started, these two women in my row caught my attention. They were older than me, two old Jewish ladies in furs with loud voices. It was hard not to hear them, but their conversation was kind of funny so I dragged out my little notebook to record it. One said — oh so loudly — “It’s a secret, don’t tell anyone. I can’t stand her, she’s a skinny little pinch-faced bitch. She only brought bruschetta and a white bean dip to the party.” Surely she hated the woman for reasons beyond what she did and didn’t bring to the party.
And thus ends my long week o’culture. It was just wonderful, a memorable week of moving experiences. Next week is quiet, at home, and I look forward to that, too. Time to knit and read, time to write, time to pull inward and generate rather than consume. I wish you all a lovely Sunday night….
I should’ve titled this post The Unbearable Whiteness of Ballet
Last night I met my friend Temma for dinner (Indian food, so delicious) before we saw The Nutcracker at Lincoln Center. [and thank you again, Temma, for inviting me!] Let me start by describing what the performance meant to me, before I get to my primary point. When I was a little girl in the sticks of Texas, I used to watch the nutcracker on television each Christmas — Baryshnikov, as I recall. Remember how they used to put “culture” on tv, back in the old days? Anyway, I’d watch the ballet on tv and it couldn’t have been more remote from me and my life. I imagined it taking place in some other universe, not the one in which I lived, or the one to which I could even aspire. It was Fancy. Cultured, sophisticated, rich with meaning and tradition and beauty. Not my life. Not even remotely like my life. So getting to go — and to Lincoln Center, no less — was the realization of that little girl’s dream she couldn’t even dream to dream.
We were surprised there weren’t more children in attendance; Temma was looking forward to seeing little girls with ribbons in their hair, and I don’t think we saw a single girl like that. Our seats were on the 4th ring, right in the center, so we had an outstanding view of the stage and the orchestra. As a long-time flutist and piccolo player, I’ve played that music and could hear every piccolo solo, every note from the flute section. This production is the George Balanchine version of The Nutcracker, and it’s extremely traditional. The children who danced were quite good, and Temma and I kept wondering what it must be like to be the main little girl, what a thing for her. (But then, where do you go from there, when you’ve done that at age ~9, on the stage at Lincoln Center)?
The main thing that surprised me, though, was the supreme whiteness of everything. The dancers were all white — whiter than me, even — as was the audience. There may have been people of color somewhere in the audience, it’s not like I could see every single person, but if there were, there weren’t many. But what struck me and eventually made me kind of sick was that there were only really, really white people on stage. I find it hard to imagine that in all of New York there isn’t a single brown person worthy to dance in this performance.
all white, all the time
Coming immediately on the heels of the brilliant and hot performance by The Forces of Nature Dance Theater, I realize the contrast made this experience stronger than it might have been, otherwise, but it left a bad taste in my mouth.
So it was a mixed bag, for me: deep pleasure at spending that time with my dear friend, deep pleasure over the dinner, deep pleasure for getting to do this thing I’d been too poor a child to dream about — all those, great things — and deep disgust over the pure whiteness of it. Temma and I are going to see more dance performances in the future, but I’ll be more interested in modern dance and a greater mix of people, as will she.
This afternoon: Krapp’s Last Tape, with John Hurt! Another fantastic day for me. Happy Sunday, y’all.
an odd year-in-review post
It’s almost 2012. Boggling. Even more boggling is that I’m 53, I have a daughter who’ll be 30 next year, another who’ll be 27, a son who’ll be 25, and a daughter who’ll graduate college and be 22. WHAT?! Also, 32 years ago today, as a matter of fact, I got married to my former husband, who saved me in a very real way. How am I old enough to have done anything important 32 years ago?!
I’ve seen this on a few blogs and really liked it, so here’s my version. 2011 in review — the first line of the first post each month, with my favorite photo from that month. The photo doesn’t necessarily (usually doesn’t) come from the same post. Here we go:
an urban snowman, with baby beets for buttons, and that's probably an organic carrot. this IS the upper west side, after all.
Ah, New Year’s Eves I have known. One little night, fraught with such imperative – must have fun! Must be memorable! AAAAGH!!
will and katie, 4 years ago
I’m looking at gray skies, gray buildings, brown-gray-black-filthy snow everywhere, and ice-coated trees that look like glass.
giant moon over NYC
Moody. The dreadful and misleading-sounding labile. All over the place (which sounds like it could be at least partially good, doesn’t it?).
sib play
I finished Katie’s socks — the pattern is Angee, by Cookie A, and the yarn is the ultrasoft and super washable KnitPicks Felici (colorway: green vegetables, in the most obviously-named color ever).
I was here just a few days ago! This was shot behind the Greco-Roman amphitheater at Myra, in Kale, Turkey
Turkey was wonderful — in almost every way, it was a perfect vacation.
all done by hand. Every tiny leaf. The hatching on every tiny leaf. Thousands of tiny bunnies. Really. Marnie is a genius.
Remember that old Steve Martin bit about how to be a millionaire and never pay taxes? Basically, it was: first, get a million dollars.
lovely gorgeous NYC
I hope it’s been a good summer for everyone — it’s been a good summer for me! Thank you to everyone who said something here, or on facebook, or via email, about my seeming disappearance from good old Thrums.
i love this color so very much
Aside from fire ants, I don’t mind ants — regular old in-the-house ants. I know some people are freaked out by them, but I don’t mind them. I try to get rid of them, but I don’t mind them.
picture swiped from Marnie's facebook wall, so it's a copy of a copy of a copy. But that's me in Chicago, holding a Bitter Woman Ale and smiling at Marnie and Tom before digging into a giant sandwich. And being 52 the whole time.
This is the whole point with this daily gratitude thing, I guess. Sometimes you have to make a hard effort to find something to be grateful for, and that’s the very time it means the most.
my last evening in the Mekong Delta
We got home around midnight from our wonderful trip to Vietnam and Malaysia. It was just amazing; if you are interested, here’s a link to the flickr set.
central park, so artistic
So there we were last night, handing out candy to trick-or-treaters, waiting for our wonderful dinner, listening to scary music, talking with a friend who came over to spend the evening with us. We munched on Katie’s roasted pumpkin seeds, Trey tended to the smoking pork, it was lovely.
such great texture in that front panel
Are you in a book club? I really want to know — if you are, tell me about it, and if you aren’t, tell me why! I’m in a book club and I love it so much. Although the true number of members is much larger, there are 6-10 people who reliably show up. There’s no reason we don’t have men in our group, we just don’t.
* * *
So what I’ve learned is that my first post each month is usually quite banal; I need to take more photographs, since I included few of my own across the year and many more scrounged off the Internet; it was a rollercoaster year, with some real highs and some extraordinary lows. But it ain’t over yet, the fat lady sings in 14 days and 14 hours!
she’s a w-o-m-a-n, say it again.
Have you seen this huge print H&M ad?
Jerry Hall and her daughter, Georgia May Jagger
What catches your eye in this ad? I’ll tell you what catches mine, and it’s not the hottie daughter. I think she’s meant to catch your eye (and she does catch mine, secondarily, making me note her daddy Mick’s thick lips, and the pout that’s surely meant to exude sexiness), but it’s Jerry Hall — 55-year-old Jerry Hall — who catches mine. When I look at her face, she’s saying to me, “That’s right, I made this gorgeous girl, she’s mine, I did that. Me.” For my money, she completely trumps her daughter, who appears unformed and like a pupae. Maybe that’s just 53-year old me gravitating to my own, but I don’t think so. I think Jerry Hall is one of those Big Women, the kind that exudes herself, the kind whose confidence is a thing unto itself, the kind of woman who feels like a Professional Woman, while I feel like I’m still in amateur standing, wondering when I’m going to feel like a grown-up, and wondering when I’ll feel comfortable with the word woman for myself.
And she’s a Texan, too, that Jerry Hall. Born in Gonzales, a dusty little town in the south of Texas, she grew up in Mesquite, a suburb of Dallas-Ft. Worth, which explains her particular twangy accent, and her big blond hair. I really love this ad, and love what I see in her face.
Me, I’m sporting quite a huge blister from my Sunday night boiling soup on my hand episode.
and it's worse than it looks
Here’s my public service announcement message just for you: Never pour boiling tomato soup on your hand. It will hurt you, a lot.
From their website: “Spellbinding short stories by established and emerging writers take on a new life when they are performed by stars of the stage and screen. Whether we present stories around a lively theme, the favorite works of a guest author or a special collaboration with a museum or publication, each Selected Shorts event is a unique night of literature in performance. Hosted by Isaiah Sheffer.” LISTEN!!
If you love stories, you may already listen to Selected Shorts — either at Symphony Space, if you live in (or visit) New York, or on the radio (or streaming online), as I did for many, many years. There’s something so special about listening to someone read or tell a story, and I never outgrew the pleasure of it. One of my favorite memories is from the summer I had a new spinning wheel and I’d spin while Marnie read aloud to me — Grendel, John Gardner’s wrenching version of the Beowulf story, from the point of view of the monster. So a couple years ago, still relatively new to Manhattan and constantly dazzled by it, I bought an annual subscription to the Selected Shorts season, and loved going to all the performances. Now I pick and choose, and last night I went to the show called NOLA: Jazzy Tales from the Big Easy. I adore New Orleans, and have been there more times than I can shake a stick at. Here’s the program:
what a lovely menu!
Michael Cerveris
Of course the best part is sitting in the dark listening to the stories, and that’s worth the price of admission. But it’s also just fascinating watching the performers, some of whom perform. Some act the hell of out the piece. Some read it. Some are overly precise in their diction, some are loose and jangly. Michael Cerveris threw himself into reading the chapter from A Confederacy of Dunces, giving Ignatius a deep, slow booming voice, and the other characters quite different voices. He has a lot of familiarity with New Orleans (real being-there familiarity) and got the accents just right. There’s more than one accent there, and he nailed them, which gave me a lot of pleasure.
Patricia Clarkson, so luscious
Patricia Clarkson’s mother “runs New Orleans,” she said, and she grew up there. She’s got that deep, lush, drawly accent, you know, so I figured her readings would be great. She’s one who acted the hell out of it. Before she started, she suddenly took a wide, firm stance as if facing the microphone for a fight. When she started to read the Bukowski, she shifted her stance entirely. She was quite dramatic (big surprise there), raising and lowering the volume of her voice quite a bit, and her facial expressions were fluid and exaggerated. Sometimes I liked it, sometimes it felt a bit much, but I was definitely engaged. I just love hearing her accent, no matter what.
Clarke Peters -- loved him in The Wire, and also in Treme
Clarke Peters was gorgeous, elegant, and with such a deep beautiful voice it was a joy listening to him. I thought he was the best of the night. He really just stood there and told the story of the man trying to teach New Orleans kids how to play jazz, acting out what was necessary, singing the singing bits. He wasn’t flamboyant but he was in it. He also really nailed the accents, and I could close my eyes and listen to him and feel like I was back there. I could hear things that he wasn’t putting into the story, because what he did put into the story was so full. I wish he’d been the last reader of the night, it would’ve been such a lovely place to end. Unfortunately, he wasn’t.
Amy Ryan, loved her in everything she's ever done
Still and all, it was a wonderful evening of intense story. Listening required great effort; it’s not at all a passive experience, even though it seems so. With each performer, the listener has to make a shift and learn how to hear. And listening to stories being read takes more effort, there’s a period of adjustment at the beginning where it doesn’t make sense — true of just reading short stories, too, sometimes.
And thus ends the first of my fantastic NY nights. Next up: Friday night’s Winter Solstice Concert at St John the Divine. It’s so delicious having such great things to look forward to.
Ava Gardner was the most beautiful woman in the world, and it’s wonderful that she didn’t cut up her face. She addressed aging by picking up her chin and receiving the light in a better way. And she looked like a woman. She never tried to look like a girl. ~Sharon Stone
Somewhat unusually, I’m editing an academic paper for a peer-reviewed journal, in a discipline that’s outside my own. This means the jargon sounds very dumb to me. And I quickly race to acknowledge that the jargon in my own discipline likely sounds dumb to people in other areas. This one is about cathected objects for Latin American identitarian thinking. I have to keep reading it over and over just to get it. I know you can add -ism to the end of anything, but Latin Americanism just doesn’t make sense to me, no matter how many times I read it.
And so I am here, avoiding work. It’ll bite me in the butt later this week, my procrastination, but whatever. How’s about a couple beautiful women?
beautiful 62-year old Mary Louise Streep
Where even to begin with this gorgeous photograph. The thing about Meryl Streep is her gaze, always, and it’s arresting in this photograph. But what grabs me and keeps me coming back to stare at her face is the softness, the creases, the tissue-ey luxury of her skin. And I love the way her lipstick has bled into the feathery lines around her mouth. I love this photograph, and I love these two things she said recently:
[2009] My daughters had helped me to stop worrying about my appearance over the years. I wasted so many years thinking I wasn’t pretty enough and why didn’t I have Jessica Lange’s body or someone else’s legs? What a waste of time.
[commenting recently on what she'd like people to take away from her newest movie Iron Lady about M. Thatcher] I would like to think that everybody that got on a subway and saw some old lady sitting across from them, that they would imagine that a whole huge life lay behind all those wrinkles, and that seemingly nondescript, forgettable [face]. I mean, there is almost nothing less interesting in our consumerist society than an old lady. Um … dismissed. We don’t make movies for her. We don’t give a damn. You can’t sell her anything, she doesn’t buy anything. But just the idea that everything — the whole panoply of human experience, births, deaths, struggles, joy — everything’s in there. And just to imagine that. That’s what I would hope.
It’s so funny the way our daughters help us grow; my daughter also helped me stop worrying about my appearance. Thank you again for that, Marnie.
And then here’s another true beauty. I confess to a secret about this one; you may be surprised by this (I always am) but I’ve been told my whole life that I look like Diane Keaton. Actually, I think it’s just that we both have big smiles and similar cheekbones, and I think we share a similar Golly, gee! sensibility. And I can’t tell you how similar my husband and I are to Annie Hall and Alvy Singer, but that’s a whole different thing.
gorgeous almost-66-year-old Diane Hall
Look at those gorgeous faces! I know they’re celebrities, with lives very different from mine, but there’s something that feels authentic about them and I love that they both put their beautiful 60+-year-old faces out for close-ups. I love that their faces show their ages, and I love that they both seem to recognize their own beauty.
I’m usually very surprised by the kinds of searches that bring people to my blog (someone in the Bronx always searches me by name, and I’d love to know who you are!). “Crazy Train” is a very common search — I used that in a post about a nutty subway trip — as is “woman with big feet” which takes people to a post I wrote about funny proverbs. And then there are the ones that freak me out a little bit, of a creepy sexual nature. I don’t want to type them here and increase the possibility that someone making that search could land here. Curiously, 95% of those searches originate from Saudi Arabia or Pakistan. I counted. Over the last five days, you’ve arrived from these places:
such far-flung visitors! Hi, y'all!
No one from Australia in the last 5 days, and never anyone from Africa.
And finally, coming on the heels of my little corneal abrasion day o’misery: I have a second-degree burn on my left thumb. Sunday night I was in a happy frenzy of assembling all the goodies for a box to send to Austin, filled with Christmas gifts. I was making tomato soup in the kitchen and wasn’t paying close enough attention; I heard it furiously boiling over, so I ran into the kitchen and grabbed it off the stove. I’d placed my giant soup mug in the sink and I grabbed the handle and poured the boiling soup into the mug but somehow missed, and poured it all over my thumb. The whole thumb immediately turned a bright red, and the burn went down onto my hand. All night long I was in a lot of pain, and kept a baggie filled with ice on it. It blistered, and there are blisters underneath the blisters. It’s awful-looking, and it’s probably going to peel and who knows what will happen. At this point, as long as I don’t accidentally scratch it, it actually has no feeling at all. I can lightly stroke the thumb and I just can’t feel anything at all. The worst of it is on the knuckle, which will be nasty when it starts healing after the skin opens up. OY. It made me feel so old, having two painful accidents in three days.
The yarn came for Marnie’s Moby sweater today, and I finished Anna’s socks, so one of these evenings I’ll do the swatches. Not tonight — poetry group. Not tomorrow night — Selected Shorts at Symphony Space. Maybe Thursday.
Have a nice evening, y’all.
oh what a week / mid-December, in 2011 / what a very special time for me / I’ll remember, what a week. (apologies to Leo Sayer)
Before I moved here, I had all these ideas about what I’d do as a New Yorker, and they entailed going to the theater, seeing live performances at Lincoln Center, walking in Central Park every day, and attending readings and lectures. And I do all those things (though not as much as I’d imagined…..), and feel lucky to live in a place with so many opportunities. Some are quite expensive, but there are so many inexpensive and free things to do, you can still have a culturally rich life even if you aren’t in the 1%. As I certainly am not.
But this is definitely going to be one of those weeks, and I cannot wait! Here’s what’s up on deck for lucky old me:
- Tuesday — poetry group. Oh how I love this, as any regular blog reader knows. Very smart people talking about poetry; it’s Temma’s Poetry Salon, as I like to think of it so I can feel even fancier.
- Wednesday — at Symphony Space, a Selected Shorts performance called NOLA stories, featuring Clarke Peters (from The Wire and Treme), Patricia Clarkson, Michael Cerveris, Amy Ryan, Roy Blount, Jr., and a performance by New Orleans piano legend Henry Butler. People reading stories out loud, while we listen in the dark, sheer heaven.
- Friday — the annual Winter Solstice Concert at St John the Divine. Remember I went last year, and was prone to fits of joy and awe? The same dance group is performing this year (The Force of Nature Dance Theater), along with old and new musicians. I know it’ll be magical again.
- Saturday — I’m going to see the NYC Ballet dance The Nutcracker at Lincoln Center! In all these years of life, I’ve never seen a live performance. My dear friend Temma invited me, and we’re going to dinner before the show. She wants to see little girls in the audience wearing satin ribbons and bows, and I’m sure they’ll be there in abundance.
- Sunday — I’m going to the final performance of Krapp’s Last Tape, my favorite Beckett play, at BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music), performed by John Hurt. If you haven’t read Krapp, this is essentially the point: A tragedy in one act for a lone actor, this dramatization of the messy truths of memory and time illuminates the predicament we face when we become strangers to our former selves. Doesn’t that sound like something I’d love?! I have so many former selves, so many lives I’ve lived, this play really speaks to me more than any of Beckett’s plays and stories.
So yeah, it’s going to be an amazing, amazing week. Today I’m making panettone, finishing up my Ho-Ho-Ho-ing and getting everything wrapped and ready to ship to Austin tomorrow, and doing some house-straightening.
last year's panettone, with apricots and cranberries and lots of dried fruit yummies
Department of Random:
- Why do computer manufacturers use different keyboards??? It’s always tiny little small differences, like the placement of the Control and Alt keys. On my last keyboard, the arrangement on the lower left was Fn, Ctrl, then Alt. On my new one it’s Ctrl, Fn, Alt. It’s driving me crazy! I use keystroke combinations constantly, and my little finger expects the Ctrl key to be in a certain place. It’s really goofing me up, man.
- Here are the year’s 26 best films, according to The New Yorker. I haven’t seen most of them, yikes!
- And here are the most criminally overlooked books of the year, according to Flavorwire. I feel so guilty, because I’ve also overlooked them. All.
- When I was a very little [precocious] girl, around 5 years old as I recall, I wanted to be a paleontologist and discover dinosaur eggs in the Gobi Desert. That’s all I wanted to be when I grew up, and I remember feeling it quite desperately. It pissed off my mother, for some reason. Marnie sent me a link to this article about a recent discovery of a nest of gorgeous dinosaur eggs in the Gobi Desert. See?? That could’ve been mine!
- Watch and enjoy this interview with a one-year-old. “On Fridays she hits the turtles.”
- And one more: remember how much I loved Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, a poet’s gorgeous memoir of his difficult father? It’s going to be a movie called Being Flynn, and the casting looks perfect. The trailer suggests the movie will capture the mood and feeling. I am SO excited, and can’t wait to see it. Here’s the trailer:
Happy Sunday y’all!
ooh baby i love your way (every day)….want to be with you night and day ~peter frampton
Last year, before we left for Laos and Cambodia, I had my little laptop perched [precariously, as it turned out] on the footstool. I got up off the couch and stepped over/around the stool but caught my foot in the cord, and we both went flying. All my attention was on protecting my own bones and teeth so the computer just flew through the air, uninterrupted, and landed hard on its top left corner. I was mostly ok, bruised and shaken, but my tough little thinkpad took a hard blow; the casing on that corner broke, and the screen never closed well after that. It was torqued at a weird little angle, and I had to hold my mouth just right to get the latch to click when I closed it.
But it worked! It was tough, it traveled many a mile — around southeast Asia twice, around Turkey, around Chicago and Texas and upstate New York. Everywhere I go, it goes. We bought it because it was very small and light, easy to slip in my traveling backpack. Of course, that meant it wasn’t so great for spending very long days typing on it, which is how I use it more often than not. I’d get some carpal tunnel pain now and then, and vow to get (and use) a full-size keyboard, but I never did. I knew I wouldn’t. I mostly sit on the couch, with it on my lap, from 7am until I go to bed. That extra keyboard just wasn’t going to work. I wasn’t fooling anyone.
A couple months ago, though, I noticed that the cracked casing was getting much worse. That hinge was nearly broken off. It was a matter of time until one day it simply broke. Since all my work takes place on my laptop, that could’ve been bad. (Well…..only partly. There are just the two of us in the house, and we have 5 computers. I know.) So we decided we should bite the bullet and replace the laptop before the end of the year, and it arrived yesterday. It’s the polar opposite of my little thinkpad, with a 17.6″ screen and a giant keyboard. And it’s fast, man. And gorgeous. Really, really gorgeous. Want to see? Sure you do.
look at that! it's so bright and crisp. on my old computer, this same view of my rav project page only fit 3 projects per row.
it's beautifully textured...look ma, no fingerprints
and here's my humble thinkpad. it was a good soldier. but i must say that i won't miss that stupid red button mouse thingy. i always hated it.
Even though the new one is so big, it still balances lightly on my lap on the couch. The screen is so large I can easily have open a Word document with the manuscript I’m reading, and a second Word document to its right, for writing my notes and comments.
We’ll obviously keep the thinkpad and continue to take it on trips as long as it lasts. I feel so fond of it, it logged so many miles and so many wonderful photos of our journeys. It’s kind of funny how important my computers are, since I spend so much time with them. My husband did the hard drive partitioning and setting up the program installations, and I’ve already done all the file-moving and customizations so the new one is ready to go. And so am I………..zoom!
sisters, sisters / there were never such devoted sisters ~ irving berlin, ‘white christmas’ (1954)
I grew up with a sister, though I haven’t really seen her all that much (or known her, for that matter) since I was in high school, and I graduated in 1977. Once every several years she’ll reappear with a bang, we’ll speak for a couple weeks, and it’ll be all over again. When we were very very little, we were quite close, as is often the case in a troubled household. She was my refuge when I had nightmares, which was often; even though she’s 2 years younger than me, I’d run to her room and climb in bed with her for comfort. I was born in 1958, and she was born in 1960, so this movie was part of our childhood and we sang this song over and over, with our arms around each other, singing to each other.
From the movie White Christmas, of course. For two tiny little girls from scrubby old Texas, the idea of snow and Christmas and holiday cheer was as far away as the moon; farther, maybe, because we could see the moon out our bedroom windows.
here we are, sitting on VERY hot rocks in our front yard -- junior girl scout (me) and brownie (her). sisters, sisters, devoted sisters at that time, anyway
Memory lane. A nice place to visit now and then. And now….I’m sure the bathroom floor is dry, so I can resume my housecleaning. Yay?
and with this, I bid you adieu for the day! enjoy your saturday, y’all -
I decided to knit for a little while and do some reading for fun, so I gathered my stuff together, made a little snack, and sat down to knit. Then it struck me, what a funny thing it is to knit in 2011:
it amused me, anyway.
An Arab proverb says, “If you have much, give of your wealth; If you have little, give of your heart.” I add, “If you have a bit, give of your yarn!”
Thank heavens for the random number generator, that’s all I have to say. If it’d been up to me, I’d have been thoroughly paralyzed, because I had a reason I wanted each one of you to win that skein of purple cashmere. I’d have picked one of you, then I’d have seen the next name and thought no, I want her to win, then the next name would’ve prompted oh wait, I want her to win, then but wait, it has to be her. And you see I never could’ve gotten anywhere.
Instead, I just plug 1 and 15 into the little website and I get this:
Kristie! Kristieinbc posted the first comment.
I already contacted Kristie, but in case my email went into her spam folder and Kristie, you see this, just let me know your shipping address and it’ll go out on Monday. I secretly wanted everyone to win, which makes little sense but there you go.
I finished Laurayana’s second sleeve last night (whee!) and cast on Audrey in Silt, so things are popping in my sweater wardrobe. This morning I’ll sew in the first sleeve and stitch up that side seam while the second sleeve is blocking.
In everyone’s life, at some time, our inner fire goes out. It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being. We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit. ~Albert Schweitzer
Are you in a book club? I really want to know — if you are, tell me about it, and if you aren’t, tell me why!
I’m in a book club and I love it so much. Although the true number of members is much larger, there are 6-10 people who reliably show up. There’s no reason we don’t have men in our group, we just don’t. The women are mostly young; if I’m not the oldest, I’m second oldest, and there’s one woman a bit younger than me. Otherwise, they’re mostly in their late 20s, early 30s. They’re smart and accomplished — lawyers, writers, media producers, they work in publishing, big pharma, all with fancy careers. (And then there’s me, sitting on my couch freelancing in my jammies.)
We meet once a month, on a weeknight, at a member’s apartment; hosting duties rotate among us, though some of us can’t host for one reason or another. The host usually provides food, which ranges from chips and veggies to all-out sumptuous spreads. Then we each bring a bottle of wine. The host gets to select the book we read, and we all try to finish the book but usually only a few of us actually finish. In months past, it didn’t matter if anyone finished, because we talked about the book for a total of 2-3 minutes, and that was my real disappointment because I wanted to talk about the book. But the women are so great, and I really enjoy their company, so it was ok.
Last night we talked about the book the entire meeting, after we talked about our book swap/holiday party we’re having next week. I LOVED IT. We read The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides. I didn’t like it; I haven’t been captured by any of Eugenides’ books yet, and this was no exception. I won’t go into it, since I’m not intending this post to be a book review. Some members liked it a lot, some asked questions none of us had thought about, some had insights, some just expressed their opinions, or asked questions, but all together it was a fun conversation.
Being with everyone definitely lifted me out of my blah, and made me realize anew just how important our connections are. I think in addition to feeling bad about not seeing my kids for Christmas, I was also feeling disconnected from friends, cast aside (not really) in some way (not really, but that kind of feeling), unimportant to anyone, etc. Sitting among those women last night, I got to feel the connections between us all, even though I don’t know them all to the same degree, a few I’m marginally comfortable with and others I adore.
I have so little time to read for fun, and I’m not always happy with the selected book, but I try to read it anyway. It’s usually the only book I read for fun, so the power of our monthly meeting is the real draw. I read an interesting story in the NYTimes this morning about a literary salon set up by a bunch of young literary kids — writers and editors and recent graduates – and thought I’d love to be part of that too, but not at the expense of my monthly get-together with those great women. I almost always feel kind of high on my way home, and that’s something special.
IT’S DECEMBER, Y’ALL. It looks like this in my neighborhood now:
buying trees in Manhattan
trees decorated on the Columbia campus
How did this happen! Where did the year go……… Happy December! (And tell me about your book club, don’t forget. Also, p.s., don’t forget the giveaway in progress — see this post for details, and leave a comment there.)
leave me a comment! it’s giveaway time.
I think it’s time for a little giveaway: this is post 601, I have received 3030 comments, it’s almost December, I have a bunch of subscribers, and I really like you. I really, really like you. Friday morning (Dec 2) I’ll announce the winner, so just leave a comment by Thursday at midnight and you’ll be entered. It’s easy.
Here’s the giveaway prize: a skein of Artyarns Cashmere 5, which is worsted weight, 100% cashmere.
I'll ship it anywhere, so don't worry if you live outside the US
I know at least one person who loves purple (hi Kty!), but even if you don’t, it’s a beautiful shade. Good luck!
p.s. — I’m not responding to comments, so as to keep my own grubby mitts out of the comment list, but yeah, I’m sure…..I had two skeins and made a gift with one, so I know just how gorgeous the yarn is, but I’m ready to let this one go. And if I gave away something I hated, that wouldn’t seem much of a giveaway!
lots of making in my household lately. and making = happy.
Really, I’m like you (if you’re a knitter): I get the urge to cast on all the time, I like to have multiple projects going for the inevitable boring slogs that hit each project, I have queue overload and new project lust. See? Just like you. But for some weird reason, I’ve recently been unwilling to work on more than one project at a time. I want to finish my Laurayana sweater before I cast on Audrey in Silt, thinking I’d rather finish one and wear it than have two going and not get to wear either one for much longer. Weird. Of course, I did pause for a bit to knock out the little hat, but that was because I needed a hat.
But I’m spotting a trend here, hatched with my Ozma’s Delight sweater: the contrasting hem.
that's my berry red hat with the blue/purple hem facing, and my blue/purple sweater with the cherry red hem facing!
I didn’t set out to do this! It just kind of happened. It’s too warm to wear the hat yet, but I’m ready when the chill comes. And as for my Laurayana sweater, the front and back are finished, one sleeve is finished, and the 2nd sleeve is half done. Then I just have to sew the shoulders together, pick up and knit a very few rows to finish the neck (stockinette, so they do a little tight curl), and then sew in the sleeves and sew up the sides. Sewing pieces together is always a bit of magic, and I really kind of like doing it. It’s careful work, close handwork, just my kind of thing.
So the soup-making spree is a memory now, and we have quarts and quarts (and gallons and gallons) of amazing soup in the freezer, ready for the winter. In addition to all that, my husband also made a beautiful batch of gravlax, which we’ve been enjoying.
that's 18 quarts of homemade cabbage soup. I KNOW! 18 QUARTS! and we also have french onion, probably 8 quarts.
here's the cabbage soup, for a close-up. it's thick with yummy cabbage, and shreds of brisket, and chunks of tomato. and the broth is a lovely sweet-sour flavor, deepened (of course) by the complexity of his homemade beef stock.
it's hard to really appreciate this, since it just looks like a piece of salmon; he scraped/rinsed off the salt/sugar/fresh dill blanket that it cured in for a couple days. sliced paper-thin, and either eaten plain (my way) or on pumpernickel bread (his way), it's so fresh and delicious. tastes like the sea, kind of. the delicious salmon sea.
So yeah, it’s been a knitty-foodie several days around here, punctuated by long walks in the park, marathon Breaking Bad watching, and naps and cups of tea and writing. Doesn’t that sound heavenly……..
The falling leaves / Drift by the window / The autumn leaves / All red and gold
I see your lips / The summer kisses / The sunburned hands / I used to hold.
Since you went away / The days grow long… / And soon I’ll hear / Old winter songs
But I miss you most of all / My darling, when autumn leaves start to fall…
The show-off part of autumn is winding down and now we’re in the workman part of the season. Everywhere I look, I see we’re starting to seriously get ready for the brace of winter. Trees are getting bare, the Christmas tree stands are open on the corners, the air has that brisk edge to it that makes you go wait a minute….maybe I need my coat. And we will soon be having lots of soup, courtesy of my husband’s luscious homemade beef stock.
40 lbs. marrow bones post-roasting, pre-simmering. current status: STOCK!
Today he’ll be caramelizing 10 pounds of onions for the french onion soup, and chopping god knows how many pounds of cabbage (20, I learned!) for the cabbage soup. I don’t know if you can tell how giant that stock pot is, on the left, but we have three pots about that size now, filled with a very light, rich beef stock. YUM. One thing is for sure, my house is going to smell great this afternoon.
In addition to relaxing and eating a really luscious meal yesterday, I got some knitting done. I don’t have a good hat, and my ears get very cold very quickly, and then I get a terrible earache. Kelly gifted me a hat pattern for my birthday, so I cast on yesterday and nearly finished — will do so today. It’s A Hat for Eudora, but I call it Berry Welty.
Berry Welty -- my birthday hat! That's a peek of madelinetosh DK in iris, for the hem. Sometimes you just need a hat, you know?
Yesterday we also took a nice walk — where else, Riverside Park. I noticed something kind of weird, but it’s just the schizo aspect of this part of autumn:
leaves ahead of me.....
no leaves behind me.
So happy fragmented Friday to you; I hope you are enjoying this late autumn day, whatever you’re doing. Here’s a Thanksgiving poem that’s really not about Thanksgiving:
Home For Thanksgiving
The gathering family
throws shadows around us,
it is the late afternoon
Of the family.
There is still enough light
to see all the way back,
but at the windows
that light is wasting away.
Soon we will be nothing
but silhouettes: the sons’
as harsh
as the fathers’.
Soon the daughters
will take off their aprons
as trees take off their leaves
for winter.
Let us eat quickly—
let us fill ourselves up.
the covers of the album are closing
behind us.
imagine: writing, so warmly, while sipping my motherfucking coffee. Hell yeah.
Well, a couple new things coming in (which means a couple old things need to go out — it’s the too-little-space game, kids!), but I think with this my birthday extravaganza winds to a close. And a fine extravaganza it was.
This wasn’t really a birthday present, but coming when it did, I get to lump it in that category. It’s also — and primarily — an encouraging present, a thoughtful gift. Knowing of my writing pursuits, Marnie sent me this adorable mug, which is now my This Is The Only Mug I Need mug.
I'm trying! (courtesy of Marnie, via Rumpus.net). As a grammarian and language nazi, I especially appreciate the period at the end of that sentence.
And then last night, in addition to being treated to a very lovely dinner (fancy bistro food, ooh la la! souffle au fromage pour moi, et vin blanc), my friend Temma gave me a high tech shirt, which I happen to be [warmly] wearing as I write:
from the Uniqlo store....does anyone know how to pronounce that? Uniklo?. Anyway, mine is white, and will be great under all my sweaters!
So thus endeth the celebration of birthday #53. Fifteen long, lovely days it dragged out — one more than a fortnight! Thanks to Marnie and Temma, you delight me with your sweet thoughtfulness.
xoxoxo
p.s. This makes me giggle like a schoolboy:
i think the answer is yes.
And Roseanne Barr has some wonderful, fabulous things to say about menopause, including the fact that you only get old if you’re lucky. I hope I’m lucky in that way. So far so good!
in which I recount my history as a sweater knitter
Somehow I have become a sweater girl, knitting them almost exclusively. I’m thoroughly surprised by this, but think it’s primarily due to a couple things: (1) my friend Kelly, who inspires me with her sweaters, and (2) a few successes. Here is my sweaterography:
- Peasy – successful on all counts (though now it’s big, since I’ve lost weight, and it’s not the most flattering style on me, I now know.) Love the yarn (Rowan Felted Tweed) and would definitely use it again.
- Dark & Stormy — successfully knitted but unsuccessfully sized. Will be frogging. Love the yarn (madelinetosh vintage) and didn’t have huge problems with varying colors, but the FO is heavy. Very, very heavy. And that’s probably one reason it grew a couple sizes in blocking (and yes, I swatched and blocked.)
- Mondo Cable Cardi — successfully knitted but the yarn sucked, to be frank. Madelinetosh merino let me down in every way possible. The colors were so variable between skeins it was shocking; the yarn base itself varied wildly from skein to skein; and it turned into a giant pill within minutes of finishing it. Fail, but not because of my knitting. This one really put me off madelinetosh yarns.
- Featherweight Cardi — ding ding ding! We have a winner. This one was a win in every possible way, and I wear it a lot. I enjoyed the yarn a lot (Spirit Trails Fiberworks, clotho) and would use it again.
- Wintry Mix — ding ding ding!! A second big winner! I wear this a lot. Berroco Blackstone Tweed is a luscious yarn, and so far it’s holding up well.
- Vodka Gimlet — ding ding ding DING! The biggest winner of them all, I struggle every day to decide whether to wear this, or my Wintry Mix. The yarn is amazing (Plucky Knitter Primo Worsted) but trying to get it is an exercise in such frustration that I probably won’t use it again, to my endless disappointment.
Laurayana, sweater front
ready to roll -- madelinetosh pashmina, in siltwash
Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower. ~Camus
Fragment #1: We sleep with our windows wide open, and last night the temperatures hovered just above freezing. That’s such heavenly sleeping, when it’s cold outside the blankets and you’re huddled underneath in a bubble of warmth. Cold head, warm body, great sleep. Even I slept last night; my nights are normally like this: fall asleep wake up…is it late enough yet that I can reasonably get up? 1am, nope, try to go back to sleep. wake up…is it late enough yet that I can reasonably get up? 1:45, nope, try again. wake up…is it late enough yet that I can reasonably get up? 2:10, nope, try again. wake up…is it late enough yet that I can reasonably get up? 3:20, nope, try again. I try to at least make it until 4am, but if I can wait until 5 to get up, that’s a late night of sleep.
Last night I slept straight through, from 11pm to 7am this morning. Those of you who sleep like I do, give me a hallelujah! And amen, sisters.
When I was getting out of bed, my husband shouted from the living room — something like “oh, you’ll want to take a picture of this!” So I scurried in and grabbed my camera in an effort to capture the brilliant morning sun on the tree outside my window.
it's like the tree was the light source
Really so much more breathtaking than the photo reveals. Cameras are great for some things, but they miss so much.
Fragment #2: I eat very well, and mindfully. I’m trying to eat for my bones, eat for my muscles, eat to minimize inflammation, eat for general health. I don’t eat white flour (at all, really) or sugar (much), I don’t eat processed stuff. I eat a lot of vegetables and fruit, which is easy because I love it. We have so much wonderful food available in our neighborhood, with fresh markets on the corners and fruit vendors on the street. And a bite of very dark chocolate every day — it’s for my health! REALLY! (No, really.) But now and then life also is enriched by a treat…..made into a ‘treat’ because it’s special and unusual and rare. This morning I had to go to the Post Office to pick up a package (restraining myself from going off on a rant here), and I passed the new Crumbs Bakery that just came to my neighborhood. I passed it on the way to the Post Office and it registered hmm…maybe on my way back… So yes, on my way back home I decided today was a good day for a treat. If you’re going to do it, do it right!
treat for me, as a reward for having to deal with the US Post Office.
this ain't no hostess cupcake.
It was DELICIOUS. I enjoyed it thoroughly, and slowly, and with lingering relish.
Fragment #3: Silt wash. My Audrey in Unst will be brown, the gorgeous silt wash colorway. Today I am doing a manuscript evaluation, which means I can knit while I read. I won’t be doing the swatches for Audrey while I read, that’s too focused, so I’ll finish the back piece of my Laurayana and get going on a sleeve. Back, sleeve, front, sleeve, that’s my plan. Then tonight I’ll swatch Audrey. Yippee!!
Happy Friday y’all. Here’s to sunlit trees and chocolate treats. And a good night of sleep.
such a thrill to be able to knit and read at the same time!
I’m paid to read and write all day long (yay! [but sometimes ugh]), and now and then I can read and knit for pay. I know, so lucky. When I’m actually working in the manuscript, editing someone’s words, my hands are on the keyboard and that’s that. But when I’m just reading someone’s manuscript and giving them my feedback on it, I can knit at the same time. Not only are manuscript evaluations my favorite thing to do because I’m good at it, they’re also my favorite because of the knitting time. Yesterday I read a manuscript and made some headway on my Laurayana sweater. I’m about an inch away from beginning the armhole shaping on the back:
the back, with shaping darts -- of course I had to do extra shaping for my waist, as always
that hem facing is madelinetosh DK, in tart. so tarty, so pretty! It won't be visible at all, since this is a pullover, but I know it's there.
Unfortunately for me and my knitting time, the next run of work is editing, not evaluation, and I have so much it’s stressing me out, waking me up at 1am. In fact, I got up at 1 this morning to get some work done. So this rate of progress will come to a halt for now, but it sure was fun!
like Van Morrison says: Put a smile on my face, get back in the human race, on a golden autumn day.
It’s one of those gorgeous, gorgeous fall days that make me so thrilled I live in this part of the world. We went out to enjoy the weather and the foliage (and the nice New Yorkers, who are all as happy-seeming as we are!), and my sub-mission was to take some photos of my newest sweater in the wild. Also, there was a 4-block green market near the Museum of Natural History that was a likely source of apple cider and cider donuts, and to be honest, that was the primary point of the excursion for me. Unfortunately, there were no donuts….boo….you know how it is when you get your mouth set for something. After that disappointment, we walked a couple blocks to that other park — Central Park. Since Riverside Park is my backyard, I tend to forget about Central Park. I should not do that.
central park, so moody
central park, so artistic
central park, such a destination
central park, so dreamy
And now, without further ado, here it is: my version of Thea Colman’s Vodka Gimlet, which I named Ozma’s Delight (my rav project page here). The yarn is Plucky Knitter Primo Worsted, which is merino and cashmere with a soupçon of magic.
my sweet, sweet Ozma Delight. I'll be wearing this one to death.
what's that behind you? yeah, that old trick worked on me.
There isn’t one thing I’d change about the sweater. I’m very very long-waisted, so I had to add a few inches before I did the waist detail; unfortunately, the sweater grew a bit so the detail doesn’t hit me at my waist. Fortunately, I still think it’s amazing-looking. I love everything about it, including the 6″ of ribbing at the cuffs. Of course you can’t see the orange hem that’s hidden on the inside, but you’ve seen that before, a few posts ago.
I figured out the details for my Laurayana sweater, so I’ve cast on and am working away. Knitting + reading + cups of Lady Gray tea = very happy me.
busy, busy, busy. getting shit done. my kind of gorgeous day!
It’s a STUNNING day outside — as soon as I finish this, I’m heading out into it. I’ve been so busy this morning, I’m just beaming. I woke up kind of early, drank some tea and my morning slug of Mighty Maca Greens, ate a few dried figs, took a long shower and tended to all manner of grooming, baked my husband a batch of crumbly buttery oatmeal-apple bars, got my green sweater blocking (FO photo to come asap! Finished knitting it last night, can’t wait for it to dry….), and did my first swatch for my next sweater, which I’ve dubbed Laurayana (gift from Laura + pattern name Ayana = obvious!).
I’ve stepped outside my normal range of colors here. I tend to wear deeply saturated colors, and I don’t really wear purple. I don’t have anything against it, it’s just not a color I’ve chosen. So here, it’s a pale lavender color, kind of dusty lavender. I like the color, love the pattern, and hope by the transitive and multiplicative properties of knitting it turns out to be a sweater I adore. I do like the fit of Amy Herzog’s patterns, so it’s a likely bet.
the color is called Montmartre, Cascade 220 Heathers
We’re running errands this afternoon, some shopping in NJ, sushi for dinner, a busy day for us. When I’m home later this evening, I think I’ll cast one for the adorable hat pattern Kelly gave me, because I just happen to need a hat. What do you know about that.
autumn flares out at the last, boisterous and like us longing to stay — Mary Oliver
There’s a good reason Hollywood shoots so many wistful movies in autumn in New York; we’re at our best, this time of year. The cooler air makes the city’s summer smells disappear, we’re less snappy and cranky this time of year, the less-appealing animal life scampers away from sight on their little rat feet, and most importantly, our thousands of trees put on their show. Usually, the foliage is a bit more beautiful upstate, but this year since Hurricane Irene goofed up the Catskills’ autumn show, our trees are at least as beautiful, if not more so. The trees aren’t as thickly-leaved as they might’ve been, since we had that freak snowstorm a couple weeks ago, but it’s still quite beautiful.
the glorious earthy red of a sumac, always takes my breath away
the sidewalk at the edge of the sidewalk
there's an enormous part of the park below the street level, down at the level of the West Side Highway. The light's very different down there; it reminded me of a di Chirico painting
I never ever EVER get tired of this view. It's everything an urban park should be.
all the lights were on with this one
this guy was quite small; there was a GIANT cardinal in Katie's backyard, remember, Katie?
As always, Mary Oliver has a beautiful poem celebrating this particular glory:
Fall Song
Another year gone, leaving everywhere
its rich spiced residues: vines, leaves,
the uneaten fruits crumbling damply
in the shadows, unmattering back
from the particular island
of this summer, this NOW, that now is nowhere
except underfoot, moldering
in that black subterranean castle
of unobservable mysteries – roots and sealed seeds
and the wanderings of water. This
I try to remember when time’s measure
painfully chafes, for instance when autumn
flares out at the last, boisterous and like us longing
to stay – how everything lives, shifting
from one bright vision to another, forever
in these momentary pastures.
Good job, trees.
Let go of the past and go for the future. Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you imagined. ~[good old] Thoreau
It’s early — only two days into my big life project — so it’s really premature to make any pronouncements. But I do have these comments, in case they’re helpful to any of you trying to pursue a similar dream:
Coming up with a routine has been a great help. Since my dream is writing, my routine is organized to make that as easy to begin as possible, since it’s the beginning that’s usually so hard. Initially, I have these things in my calendar, and I’m being a little bit rigid about them: Up at 6, do my morning page writing (~15 minutes it takes). Have breakfast. Write for a minimum of one hour, but no more than 1.5 hours. Get to work (dang it).
But here’s the genius thing. Morning pages are meant to be crap. Just brain dump, freewriting, keeping the fingers moving until you hit 750 words (or whatever marker you set). It’s meant to be junk. It’s meant to be waste. What I’ve been doing these past two mornings is using the morning pages to work out what I’m going to write. Just rambly exploration, getting me going. This morning when I was writing my morning pages, it felt like something just clicked and I completely understood what it is to be a writer of fiction. I was writing about what I was going to write about, and I started talking about the characters like this: “then the kids should do this. What would happen if the father did this? What would the kids do? The options for the father are this, this, and this. If he does this, what would the kids do? Blah blah blah.” It was also neat because it shifted me more toward fiction and away from just telling my own little story, which is my tendency. It was very neat. So then I was outlining how the action would unfold, after I’d figured out what the father and everyone else would do. Then I went back and made notes – so this is a place to really showcase the mother’s cruelty in dialogue. This section is a good place to get a description of the kitchen. IT WAS FUCKING AMAZING. Like some kind of real shift from navel-gazing diarist to novelist.
The accidental brilliance of this routine is that my morning pages writing has no pressure, but helps me get going. Then I stop and have breakfast, and while I’m making and eating it, despite myself I’m thinking about what I came up with, refining it, and getting more and more excited to get going. I have to force myself not to bolt my food — my other bad tendency, so this is helping me have to stay mindful and “be” eating breakfast — because I’m eager to get to the writing.
I had no idea this would work in this way. I’m great at coming up with schemes, usually overly-scheduled and rigid, and usually ineffective. That’s ok, you try something, it doesn’t work, you try something else. But this time it really opened the door.
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