Friday Unrelated Information

1. Carrying over the Beatles post from last Friday, here's a flowchart of the lyrics to "Hey Jude" (click for big):
2. And because I can't get enough of iconic bands from the 60's, last night we watched Gimme Shelter. No, I don't want to dress like Mick Jagger now, but the movie has the best version of "Love in Vain." Enjoy.

I Have A Cold

Turns out that a month with travel and lots of stress not only makes you unfocused and uninspired (and wanting to spend money), it also makes you really susceptible to the common cold. I am looking forward to the afternoon off and some Chinese food for dinner. And that's all I got today.

#$%&! Snow

Yeah. It snowed. There's snow on the ground and it's cold. I happened across a blog about people who stay year-round at McMurdo station in Antarctica; the latest post is welcoming back the seasonal people, of which my uncle is one. Here's the blog: frozensouth.com. I suppose we can read it and think that it's not that cold here yet. Yet.

Tuesday Project Roundup: Ending Badly, Like All Twilght-Related Things In My Experience

I finished the "Bella" mittens, as inspired by the film Twilight, but they're kind of a flop: Because I knit the first mitten while traveling, its cables weren't even, which meant they didn't match the second mitten. The first mitten's top I had to extend to accommodate my fingers, but because of the cable length on the second one, that top worked OK--giving me mittens that are fraternal twins, not identical. But I'm not happy with my work on them, and overall, they're a little snug.

Obviously, this is all my own fault, but it's easy to blame Twilight itself. And the sort of "Was that it?" feeling I had when I finished these mittens is very, very similar to the feeling I had when I finished the book/movie. So I'm blaming Twilight.

Get With It, Birds

Last week the bird feeder I'd been using for 2.5 years here fell down somehow, which broke the glass and put it out of commission. So last weekend I comparison shopped and got a new, deluxe feeder, one that holds about a metric ton of seed and has a roof and drainage and even two baskets for suet cakes.

I thought the birds would be all over their upgraded feeder (and the suet), but no. In 8 days, no bird has landed on it. The sparrows' consternation the first two days was almost funny--while I assumed they'd get over it. Now it's just strange. I have taken to shaking all of that seed out of the feeder to the ground, where the birds will finally eat it.

I don't think I've lost any bird visitors--and the quail are really happy about all that seed on the ground--but what should I do? Just wait it out? Enter into a contest of wills with the sparrows? It says something about my mental state lately that I think that's a fine plan.

Friday Unrelated Information

1. I've had an unfocused, uninspired week, which is why the blog has suffered: I'm not interested in my latest projects and I'm only reading self-help books, so I don't even have anything good to quote here.

2. But there's always Salinger...in my opinion, Franny and Zooey IS a self-help book, just better written. Here's Zooey at the end talking about detachment, the theme of the week:
You can say the Jesus Prayer from now till doomsday, but if you don't realize that the only thing that counts in the religious life is detachment, I don't see how you'll ever even move an inch. Detachment, buddy, and only detachment. Desirelessness. "Cessation from all hankerings."

3. And finally, I wish this t-shirt used a better font, because I really love the sentiment:
"I knit so I don't kill people." Amen.

Author Trivia

Did you know that Jean-Paul Sartre was a Nobel Prize winner, and he refused it? And that the Swedish Academy said, essentially, "Well, you're still a Nobel Prize winner, even if you don't accept the award." Fun times in 1964. (Today's post courtesy of The Writer's Almanac. You can read more about why Sartre refused the award here.)

[Whenever I think of Sartre, I always think of "The Jean Paul Sartre Cookbook," a satire that someone posted in the early days of the internet and my friends and I found in high school. Oh, we thought that was the cleverest thing. Satire! Sartre! Beginning French class! Good times.]

A Cartoon

Because I it's the 200th anniversary of Poe's birth this year. And I like ravens.

Tuesday Project Roundup: Some Sewing Again

As I finished this dress, it seemed like a long time since I had sewn something else. My short-term memory is really shot lately (I couldn't remember what I did Saturday night when someone asked me yesterday) so the last sewing project before the quilt was a blur, but it turns out I was right: This is the first dress since the beginning of September.


Here's a more detailed shot of the pattern, which I made in December, as well. This time I remembered to lengthen the sleeves and added a belt. The gingham makes it feel very French New-Wave to me...that, or The Womenfolk's album cover from 1964*

*I didn't even know this group existed until two weeks ago, when I was going through my dad's old (mint) vinyl looking for some new music.

Let's Talk About Shoes

Instead of talking about our feelings today, let's talk about brown shoes that aren't too high-heeled. After watching Help! Thursday night, I did some major googling to find a pair of boots like they were wearing in that clip I posted Friday. While all the ankle boots for women this season seem stuck in 1986, I found some: They're Florsheim, for men.


Sometimes I am happy to not have tiny ladylike feet, because a men's size 7 is a women's size 9. My only hesitation? A size 7 isn't available from a site that offers free shipping and returns, so I'd be gambling a little that they'd work.

What do we think about these mod boots? They'd look great with jeans, but not so much with skirts or dresses. But they're a decent price (unlike these $350 boots of magic from Sweden) and I had a pair of jodhpur boots in college that I loved. Also, I could pretend I was a Beatle.

Friday Unrelated Information

1. Check out the Letters of Note blog, which posts scans and transcripts of, well, notable letters. The variety and historical background is really fascinating.

2. I watched Help! last night and now I want the sofa, the chair, and John's boots from this clip:


3. And here's something from McSweeney's that tickled me (click through to read the other two-thirds of it):

What to Expect: The Third Decade

Keep in mind that all adults reach their developmental milestones at their own pace. It is important not to compare your adult's rate of development to that of his peers. The following list is meant only as a guideline and not as a cause for alarm.

By thirty-years-old, your adult will probably be able to...

Feed and maintain a house pet
Hold down a job
Maintain eye contact while speaking
Refrain from discussing high school
Cook a meal (three-course)
Make small talk
Forgive his family
Acknowledge other viewpoints (social)
Detect and respond to ambiguity
Finish school

I Love Stories About The Large Hadron Collider

From a NYTimes article about the latest escapades at CERN (other than terrorist physicists):

A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.

Really, what commentary do I need to add to that? Read it all here.

Get One Last Trip To The Farmers' Market In

They're winding down for the season, as is the garden. I'll make it a two-poem week and post this one about the harvest. (Now I'm going to think "human brains covered in red oilcloth" when I cut up the last tomatoes to freeze.)

Harvest

by Louise Gluck

It's autumn in the market—
not wise anymore to buy tomatoes.
They're beautiful still on the outside,
some perfectly round and red, the rare varieties
misshapen, individual, like human brains covered in red oilcloth—

Inside, they're gone. Black, moldy—
you can't take a bite without anxiety.
Here and there, among the tainted ones, a fruit
still perfect, picked before decay set in.

Instead of tomatoes, crops nobody really wants.
Pumpkins, a lot of pumpkins.
Gourds, ropes of dried chilies, braids of garlic.
The artisans weave dead flowers into wreaths;
they tie bits of colored yarn around dried lavender.
And people go on for a while buying these things
as though they thought the farmers would see to it
that things went back to normal:
the vines would go back to bearing new peas;
the first small lettuces, so fragile, so delicate, would begin
to poke out of the dirt.

Instead, it gets dark early.
And the rains get heavier; they carry
the weight of dead leaves.

At dusk, now, an atmosphere of threat, of foreboding.
And people feel this themselves; they give a name to the season,
harvest, to put a better face on these things.

The gourds are rotting on the ground, the sweet blue grapes are finished.
A few roots, maybe, but the ground's so hard the farmers think
it isn't worth the effort to dig them out. For what?
To stand in the marketplace under a thin umbrella, in the rain, in the cold,
no customers anymore?

And then the frost comes; there's no more question of harvest.
The snow begins; the pretense of life ends.
The earth is white now; the fields shine when the moon rises.

I sit at the bedroom window, watching the snow fall.
The earth is like a mirror:
calm meeting calm, detachment meeting detachment.

What lives, lives underground.
What dies, dies without struggle.

Tuesday Project Roundup: Patterns

Today I mean patterns as in the designs formed from repeating groups of stitches, not the schematic for making an object.

There's a popcorn pattern on the beige cardigan:

And there's a horseshoe cable pattern on one finished Twilight mitten:

The cables got a little off on this one because I had to keep stopping and starting on the plane, and I had to fudge the top to make it longer to accommodate my fingers, but I'm actually kind of liking it. Maybe it will gaze at me in science class and make me flustered.

In Need Of Re-Posting

I know I put up this poem last year, in the heat of the election and seasonal change and economic apocalypse, but let's put it up again this year, for another time of transition:

"How to Like It," by Stephen Dobyns

These are the first days of fall. The wind
at evening smells of roads still to be traveled,
while the sound of leaves blowing across the lawns
is like an unsettled feeling in the blood,
the desire to get in a car and just keep driving.
A man and a dog descend their front steps.
The dog says, Let’s go downtown and get crazy drunk.
Let’s tip over all the trash cans we can find.
This is how dogs deal with the prospect of change.
But in his sense of the season, the man is struck
by the oppressiveness of his past, how his memories
which were shifting and fluid have grown more solid
until it seems he can see remembered faces
caught up among the dark places in the trees.
The dog says, Let’s pick up some girls and just
rip off their clothes. Let’s dig holes everywhere.
Above his house, the man notices wisps of cloud
crossing the face of the moon. Like in a movie,
he says to himself, a movie about a person
leaving on a journey. He looks down the street
to the hills outside of town and finds the cut
where the road heads north. He thinks of driving
on that road and the dusty smell of the car
heater, which hasn’t been used since last winter.
The dog says, Let’s go down to the diner and sniff
people’s legs. Let’s stuff ourselves on burgers.
In the man’s mind, the road is empty and dark.
Pine trees press down to the edge of the shoulder,
where the eyes of animals, fixed in his headlights,
shine like small cautions against the night.
Sometimes a passing truck makes his whole car shake.
The dog says, Let’s go to sleep. Let’s lie down
by the fire and put our tails over our noses.
But the man wants to drive all night, crossing
one state line after another, and never stop
until the sun creeps into his rearview mirror.
Then he’ll pull over and rest awhile before
starting again, and at dusk he’ll crest a hill
and there, filling a valley, will be the lights
of a city entirely new to him.
But the dog says, Let’s just go back inside.
Let’s not do anything tonight. So they
walk back up the sidewalk to the front steps.
How is it possible to want so many things
and still want nothing? The man wants to sleep
and wants to hit his head again and again
against a wall. Why is it all so difficult?
But the dog says, Let’s go make a sandwich.
Let’s make the tallest sandwich anyone’s ever seen.
And that’s what they do and that’s where the man’s
wife finds him, staring into the refrigerator
as if into the place where the answers are kept-
the ones telling why you get up in the morning
and how it is possible to sleep at night,
answers to what comes next and how to like it.

Friday Unrelated Information

1. Have you heard this? First Conde Nast shuttered Domino magazine (which I miss so much, as next year I start advance furniture buying for The House To Come), and now Gourmet will fold after November--the same Gourmet that's been around since the 40s and been home to writers such as MFK Fisher (not to mention the online cocktail gallery). Damn.

2. It's John Lennon's birthday. He would have been 69.

3. I just learned that ravens can live up to 40 years in the wild; the average raven lifespan is between 15 to 25 years, depending on your source. (Collective noun for ravens: An unkindness.)

"A Love Of One's Fate"

Yesterday, the poem featured on The Writer's Almanac was called "Amor Fati," a phrase I didn't know. Wikipedia gave me some good stuff:
[The phrase] is used to describe an attitude in which one sees everything that happens in one's life, including suffering and loss, as good. That is, one feels that everything that happens is destiny's way of reaching its ultimate purpose, and so should be considered good.

Nietzsche used the concept and phrase a lot; Wikipedia also gave me a good quote from him:
My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. To not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it...but to love it.

I like this concept of amor fati. There has been a lot to deal with in my life lately and I think this is a good approach to it.

In other words...SERENITY NOW!

Serves Me Right To Complain About Private Jets

Remember my last business trip? Yeah, I'll wear all the booties you want if you don't make me fly to Orlando and back and arrive both places after midnight. Oh, the humanity.
But I'm home now. And business trips=salary. So I really shouldn't complain about this one, either.

Tuesday Project Roundup: Plane Knitting

The beige cardigan is coming along, but I decided it was too big to take with me on the plane. So I started some mittens with some leftover yarn I had and am working on those on the flights. However, they are mittens inspired by the movie Twilight.

Yes, I saw the movie. The can't-look-away-train-wreck part of me even had to go and read the book after that. I am thoroughly embarassed to be boarding the Twilight Mittens Train. But these will be plum! And will look good with my coat! And I left the first page of the pattern that shouts "Bella's Mittens" at home, so maybe no one will know.


(Top photo from the movie; bottom photo from the pattern.)

Or maybe when I'm finished, my mittens will sparkle and declare their undead love for me. We'll see.

Two Pieces Of Information With a Blues Brothers Tie-In

The first: Saturday night Mr. Isbell and I saw Inglourious Basterds at Brewvies, and a lot of the time I couldn't help but think, "Illinois Nazis. I hate Illinois Nazis."



The second: While I never had to be a juror last week, that trip to Florida I was worried about is happening tonight and tomorrow. So I'm hitting the road and Toby is currently sitting next to my overnight bag, looking worried.

Friday Unrelated Information

1. Happy birthday, Wallace Stevens (1879). I'll try to remember this quote when I'm feeling overwhelmed: "Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore."

2. Go visit myvintagevogue.com before Conde Nast makes them take down the site for copyright infringement. Some of the dresses are so timeless:

3. I agree with this: "What we need is a word to describe 'nostalgia for things we haven’t even experienced.' Things like transistor radios, soda counters, and rabbit-eared televisions. Wes Anderson is a connoisseur of this sensation. No doubt the French have ten different words for it." (From here, a blog about the production of Where the Wild Things Are.)

Happy Tocktober!

How did it get to be Tocktober already? Before you know it, it will be Nosevember.