Salinger-Related Information (On A Friday)

1. I learned yesterday (like most of you) that J.D. Salinger died Wednesday, at the age of 91. His New York Times obituary focuses mainly on his 50 years of reclusiveness, but did have this to say about the italics:
The stories were remarkable for their sharp social observation, their pitch-perfect dialogue (Mr. Salinger, who used italics almost as a form of musical notation, was a master not of literary speech but of speech as people actually spoke it), and for the way they demolished whatever was left of the traditional architecture of the short story — the old structure of beginning, middle, end — in favor of an architecture of emotion, in which a story could turn on a tiny alteration of mood or irony.

2. I have to admit that I always wondered if more Salinger would be published after he died, but now that he's dead I'd rather think of him still writing every day than of being able to read more of his work.

3. If you would like to read any of the short stories online, you can use your subscription to The New Yorker to do so here or you can read them for free (gasp! just like a library!) here.

ETA: 4. And The Onion's take on it: Bunch of Phonies Mourn J.D. Salinger. Thank you, Onion.

Speaking Of Alcohol...

A few weeks ago I found a news article about new research that makes the claim that early humans developed agriculture not for a steady supply of food, but a steady supply of booze. As the article tells us,

[Archaeologist Patrick McGovern's]bold thesis, which he lays out in his book, Uncorking the Past. The Quest for Wine, Beer and Other Alcoholic Beverage, states that agriculture--and with it the entire Neolithic Revolution, which began about 11,000 years ago--are ultimately results of the irrepressible impulse toward drinking and intoxication.

"Available evidence suggests that our ancestors in Asia, Mexico, and Africa cultivated wheat, rice, corn, barley, and millet primarily for the purpose of producing alcoholic beverages," McGovern explains. While they were at it, he believes, drink-loving early civilizations managed to ensure their basic survival.

Hey, I think it sounds plausible. If I had to struggle to survive every day, I'd want a drink, too.

When Hemingway Comes In Handy

Monday night I took a wine class (through the U's Continuing Education) with a friend from work. Our class was "Value Wines of Italy" and as we moved onto a Tuscan red (not, apparently, an "official" Chianti), the teacher asked, "Who knows what the straw-wrapped bottles of Chianti are called?"

And I had to remember all the times the Colonel in Across the River and Into the Trees asked the hotel staff in Venice for "a fiasco" of some wine or another, and that was indeed the answer.

The teacher went on to explain how most Americans' first experience with Chianti was so bad that the term was adopted to mean "a complete failure"--which isn't exactly what the dictionary tells me*, but sounded very charming and plausible when she said it.

*My dictionary says the term came about from the phrase "far fiasco," literally "to make a bottle," and was used in Italy to mean "complete failure" since the mid-19th century. Tomato, tomahto...both of which are very nice with Chianti.

Tuesday Project Roundup: Now With More Cables

Remember at the beginning of the month when I talked about making a traditional Aran sweater? And I was intimidated by the traditional pattern and construction methods? Well, this is the year of speaking up sooner if something is not how I want it to be, and the traditional pattern of the intended sweater was not only difficult--it wasn't cable-y enough.

Here is the traditional pattern:


And for comparison, here's something with LOTS o'cables:I don't like knitting projects to be that challenging (or require that much concentration at night), so this is not the winning pattern. Instead, I compromised with this pattern (very popular among knitters) and a different cable.


Here's the progress so far


and here's the different cable--it's called a staghorn cable.

And I think I used "cable" about 5 times in 100 words. Cables!

Happy Birthday, Virginia Woolf

And happy birthday yesterday to Edith Wharton. If you want to be a perceptive lady novelist, it's a good time to have a birthday.

(Can you tell I've been busy at work? I'm sorry things have just been links or images lately--I don't have as much time to find or prepare better material. On the upside, we are actually helping to promote a mixed martial arts event in South Carolina and I get to write scripts for the ring announcer. My career is complete!)

Friday Unrelated Information

There's an animal theme today:
1. BoingBoing posted about the kid's book Hand, Hand, Fingers, Thumb and used the phrase "beatnik monkeys." I'll have to see if the parents still have our copy so I, too, can admire those cool simians as an adult.

2. Animals with Lightsabers. You may have seen this, but a recent entry was captioned "Jedi Reepicheep"!

3. And finally, seagulls:

Do You Need More Pictures Of Cool People In Your Life?

If you do, check out If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, There'd Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats. It's a visual blog of old photos of musicians, actors, mobsters, famous people--and even vintage pattern covers. There are such diverse categories as "The Gunslinger's Guide to Julie Christie," "Artists in Action," and "Before and After" (in case you want to see how people have aged).

Check it out--any blog that has a category devoted to Bob Dylan pictures is OK by me.

Another Reason To Visit The Cook Islands

If I did, I'd get to see the stars from the Southern Hemisphere. The Astronomy Picture of the Day site had a photo last week demonstrating just that:


On the left the outlines show Orion seen from a beach off Tasmania, and on the right you can see it in the Northern Hemisphere, from the Alborz Mountains in Iran. (See more details and a bigger picture on the APOD site.)

That's just very cool. My sister-in-law is going to South Africa in the spring and I am jealous!

Tuedsay Project Roundup: No Loose Ends

Here's a project from last year for the roundup: I wanted something mindless to knit over Christmas get-togethers, so I made a tube scarf (or infinity scarf) with some very nice berry-colored alpaca (Merry Christmas to me).

I was inspired by this scarf and I have to say that a tube scarf--i.e., a big loop of scarf, with the ends connected--is both fun to knit and wear. Because you don't have to worry about the ends being long enough to go over your shoulder, you're done knitting sooner than you would be with a traditional scarf, and it's nice to not have the bullk of the wrapped ends under your coat.



I just wish my cameral could deal with the light levels in the apartment better. For some reason pictures taken in this same spot of me wearing the scarf came out way too dark, which is why it's modeled on the hangar.

Happy Birthday, A.A. Milne

Today is the birthday of the creator of Winnie-the-Pooh, Alan Alexander Milne. As the Writer's Almanac tells us, "Milne went to school for mathematics, but ended up spending most of his time writing. He wrote a mediocre novel and then started writing plays, and he ended up writing 27 of them."

But after publishing three books of children's poems and the first Pooh book (for his son) within four years, "most people didn't take him seriously as a writer for adults anymore."

That may have disappointed Milne, but it's fine with me--because who doesn't love the Pooh books, and their Random Capitalizations of Important Thoughts?

Friday Unrelated Information

1. I've signed up for "new listings" emails from a real estate office (more to just keep my goal in mind than to actually buy anything yet) and the agent remarks on the houses continue to be great. Did you know that Salt Lake has a trendy acronym-ed neighborhood? One house was located in "SOTRO (South of Trolley)." Groan.

2. Would you like to look at some mid-century gas stations designed by famous architects? (Who wouldn't?) Check them out here. I kind of want to move in to the Albert Frey one in Palm Springs.

3. Here is a recipe for Carl Sagan's apple pie. I'm sure it will be crumbly, but good. (Click for big.)

Rally!

The Paris-Dakar Rally (apparently just called the Dakar Rally even though it's being held in South America "for security reasons") is going on right now. The Big Picture blog has some great images, although there seemed to be even more death and mayhem than I would expect.

But look at this!

Sadly, there were no pictures of Ford Focus rally cars.

Have A Seat

I am really going to push myself this year to be more social--not only to get out more, but to have more people come to the apartment. Last year there were hardly any visitors, and if I'm not going to turn into a crazy cat lady hermit, I need to change that.

So I bought a chair (Thing #6) and rearranged the living room. Now guests can make their way to the seating area easily and we won't have to sit side-by-side and try to talk.

I "cheated" on this, too, in that I picked it out online when I was making my 30 Things list, but I was going to wait to order it--until Target had a sale plus free shipping after Christmas. I do love that Target furniture.
Toby does, too.

Tuesday Project Roundup: Stacking The Deck

I started thinking about the 30 Things in December, and I have to admit that a couple of things were not only thought of but carried out in 2009. I was going to wait on Thing #7 (sew new pillows for the living room), but then I decided to have a New Year's party and I had some time off and the brown pillows were just too much of an embarrassment. So here are the new ones:

I am so much happier with these, which don't collect cat hair and have orange flowers and birds on them to boot. And I have a nice feeling of early accomplishment with my list, even if I did cheat a little.

And speaking of cheating, what's this in the foreground of the rearranged living room? Thing #6, perhaps? Tune in tomorrow to find out!

Off To A Slow Start

I'm taking a sick day today, which is a little indulgent--I'm not THAT sick--but probably a good idea. Here's a lolcat instead:

Friday Unrelated Information

1. The Writer's Almanac tells us
Today, writer Isabel Allende is starting a new book, just as she has been doing every single January 8th for the past 29 years. On January 8, 1981, when Chilean-born Allende was living in Venezuela and working as a school administrator and freelance journalist, she got a phone call that her beloved grandfather, at 99 years old, was dying. She started writing him a letter, and that letter turned into her very first novel, The House of the Spirits. She said, "It was such a lucky book from the very beginning, that I kept that lucky date to start."

2. And here's Toby on an IKEA nightstand nicely finished by my dad as per this hack:

How Little We Know

You can't binge on Humphrey Bogart movies without running into Lauren Bacall. Here she is singing "How Little We Know" from To Have and Have Not.



That dress kind of makes me want to try a pattern from the 40's. Usually I avoid that era because older patterns=sparser directions, and I've never cared for that strong shoulder. But all these old movies are making me reconsider.

Capable

I've been watching a lot of Humphrey Bogart movies lately (Sabrina, To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep, Key Largo, The Maltese Falcon), and when my mom called last week and I was watching another one, she said, "I don't think he's that handsome, really."

And I said, "No, but he seems so capable."

Tuesday Project Roundup: "A long and lovely project."

"It is a cold and snowy January. The holidays are behind us, and Twelfth Night will be any day now: what better time to embark on a long and lovely project? I have masses of thick unbleached natural cream wool, which with luck should work up into a really solid-looking Aran."
That is a quote from the Knitter's Almanac, a sort of pattern "guidebook" by famous knitter Elizabeth Zimmerman, and the source of my next project. This project terrifies me a little: I have guidelines on creating a sweater pattern just for me but no actual pattern, there are complicated stitches, and it involves knitting a tube and then cutting it to make it a cardigan.

Because there's a lot of "knitter's choice" in the pattern, it's hard to find a picture of what it looks like. It's the sweater at 2 o'clock on the cover of the book above, and here's the original pullover knit by EZ. Here are a couple other cardigan options with different cable patterns than specified in the book.

I'm not usually one for crafty challenges, but I've been thinking about this sweater all year (it was on the 29 Things) and I really want to wear it once it's done. We'll see if that's enough motivation, because it certainly will be a long project--hopefully a lovely one.

And We're Off!

I had a lovely three days of celebrating the New Year and my new decade, so let's jump into the first week of what should be a great year with my list of 30 Things:

1. Put the money that I was using to pay off debt into savings for a down payment on some sort of house, townhouse, or condo
   
2. Learn about real estate and home buying through the Utah State Extension classes
3. Stop buying non-essentials (ready-made clothes, really expensive fabric, shoes, magazines, etc.) for three months (months TBD)
   
4. Buy that Eames desk chair. I'll use the money I'll be saving from not buying any non-essentials.
5. Buy that damn garbage can already
6. Buy a living room chair--armless, small-ish, but comfy. This will help with seating to accomplish #22.
7. Sew new pillow covers for the living room
8. Buy a vacuum
   
9. Refresh my yoga skills and then...
10. Start doing yoga once or twice a week
11. Get recycling at the apartment. I haven't had it for three years and I'm tired of feeling guilty every time I throw away some junk mail.
    
12. Similarly, bring in some actual flatware for the breakroom at work to cut down on waste
    
13. November-March, walk or ride to work at least twice a month. April-September, up it to at least four times a month.
14. Eat at one new restaurant a month--any meal, but it has to be somewhere I haven't been before.
15. Eat at Red Iguana
16. Go to Bonneville Speed Week
17. Go to a roller derby game
18. Stop biting my fingernails (I mean it this year)
    
19. Wear more colors of lipstick than "pink" and "darker pink"
20. Find a perfume I want to wear regularly
    
21. Stock and maintain a home bar and keep it stocked. No drinking it up and not replacing it.
    
22. Have more people over to the apartment--not huge parties, but a few people for dinner, or drinks before a restaurant, etc.
23. Learn more about wine
24. Learn and retain the difference between whisk(e)y, bourbon, and scotch
    
25. Learn and retain the difference between brandy and cognac
26. Get my eyes checked again, update my prescription, and start wearing glasses in front of the computer.
27. Find a dermatologist to look at a couple of moles, if only so I can stop worrying about skin cancer
    
28. Learn how to can fruits, veggies, or jam
    
29. Get a better camera
30. Go to Moab and/or Zion