Stockinette

An elastic knitted fabric used especially in making undergarments, bandages, and babies' clothes.

So, for reasons best known to my brain, I have spent the better part of the last week knitting. I really think it started by going into that yarn store on Cedar Lane (see the entry Brick and Mortar for that story.) I mean, there are so many beautiful yarns to play with, who wouldn't want to knit?

Okay, so I haven’t knit anything in 13 years. My great-grandmother was a professional knitter, and she taught me the basics when I was in middle school, but I never did anything with it. Then, I picked up a pattern when I was a teenager and made a sweater. And that was it.

So, I decided to see if I still knew what I was doing. I picked up some spare yarn and a pair of needles from my mother-in-law over Christmas and cast on. My hands seemed to remember how to knit and purl just fine, so I started just knitting different patterns. (Stockinette is the most basic of the knitting patterns people learn, generating the flat knit most people associate with sweaters and such. I have no idea why the definition specifies undergarments, bandages and baby clothes, but so it goes.) I got bored with that pretty quickly. I decided that, until I got an actual project up and running, I would just make a scarf in garter stitch with the yarn I had lying around. But then I saw a project for a laptop holder on the Classic Elite Yarns website. Since I need another scarf like I need a hole in the head, I decided to see if I could improvise a laptop cover out of what I had already started.

The Classic Elite pattern can be found here, but it really was just a jumping off point. I am working in garter, not stockinette. There will be no pear. And I am unsure whether or not I will be felting this. It really is just something to mess around with until my yarn comes in the mail. Ooh, new yarn to play with... tee hee!

Happy New Year!

Self-deprecating

Having a tendency to disparage oneself.

Last night, Anthony and I went to see Dar Williams in concert at a smallish venue in Brooklyn called Southpaw. It was part of his Christmas present (in addition to a book and a CD and a pair of pants. And a dustpan, but that's an inside joke.) It was a really good show, only the second time I'd seen Dar perform live. But Ant used to see her with some regularity, and hadn't in a couple years, so I thought it was a good present.

For those not in the know, Dar is a part of the modern folk scene. The other time I saw her was at the Falcon Ridge Folk Festival a few summers ago, not long after Anthony and I started dating. Being a big festival, we were like a mile away, and her set was a bit shorter. Last night, though, she was very much up close and personal. (She also arrived rather late, and had to slip through the crowd outside to get into the venue, which was kind of funny, but she was maybe 5 feet away from us.) The thing about her performance, though, was not just that her songs are interesting and her voice beautiful, bu she is actually very funny, both with her lyrics and with her banter between songs.




This is one of the songs she played last night, very appropriate to a holiday weekend show. And very funny. I made a comment to Ant about that between songs, and he said that she is known to be very self-deprecating in her humor.She was talking about her hair not being quite the "holiday hair" that she wanted for the performance,the fact that she was wearing unflattering jeans, that the green gods were punishing her for taking her car to the show instead of public transportation (which is why she was late.) When I looked up self-deprecating in the dictionaries, it seemed that no one was acknowledging the fact that self-deprecation is most often used as a form of humor. I know it is not exclusively used for humor, but, really, the average person uses it more for humor than anything else.

I'm just saying, I think someone working at a dictionary needs to get on that.

Brick & Mortar

A store (shop, supermarket, department store, etc.) in the real world.

Lots of things other than stores are made from bricks and mortar- houses, schools, hospitals. But the term "brick and mortar" has come to refer to places to shop. The rest of the definition, from The Free Dictionary, reminds us that this is in contrast to "click and mortar" businesses. While the internet has exploded the assortment available to purchase for anyone, anywhere, and at anytime, it has done so often to the detriment of local businesses. How many small bookshops have closed since online booksellers made everything in print available at the click of a mouse? I am no angel, to be sure- I will take Amazon.com up on its promotions. But I also make sure I take a trip down Cedar Lane (the Teaneck equivalent of a Main Street) on a regular basis to make sure those businesses are getting the share of my wallet they deserve.

All that said, there is apparently a website out there promoting this kind of spending- the 3/50 project. As I was doing some Christmas shopping this morning, on Cedar Lane, I went into The Skein Attraction, a knitting store. In addition to being a very cute little shop, they had fliers at the register for this website. The concept being that everyone should pick 3 independent businesses in their community and drop 50 bucks there every now and again. For my part, I would have a hard time picking which 3 Teaneck businesses to support, as there are several that I like (though Picklelicious is temporarily without a location, you can still get their pickles at Maadan; you can't beat Bischoff's for ice cream; Briar Rose used book shop is always good for an hour of browsing; and don't get me started on the restaurants...) There is a statistic, on the flier, that stood out to me-

For every $100 spent in independently owned stores, $68 returns to the community through taxes, payroll, and other expenditures. If you spend that in a national chain, only $43 stays in the community. Spend it online, and nothing comes home.

Think about that as you're out there finishing your Christmas shopping, and shop independent businesses if you can.

Sublime

Of high spiritual, moral, or intellectual worth. Exalted; lofty. Inspiring awe, impressive.

While studying for my poetry final, and trying to synthesize all of my scribbles into a coherent position on the works I was looking at, I came across a note in reference to this John Keats poem:

Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star'd at the Pacific — and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise —
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

The poem is entitled "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer," and the note scribbled below it is emphasizing the difference between the beautiful and the sublime. A couple of years ago, I blogged on the word beautiful, and the definition contained there was "marked by a quality or a combination of qualities that delights the senses or appeals to the mind." Let's leave aside for the moment that people do not take in sufficiently the fullness of the meaning of the word beautiful (because I talk about that more in the link above.) Obviously, there is a sense of something bigger going on when a person uses the word sublime. But really, when was the last time anyone used the word sublime?

Let me restate that- when was the last time anyone (in normal conversation) used the word sublime correctly? You know, without everyone around you giving you strange looks and thinking you're an ass for thinking that pop-trash song that just played on the radio was sublime? In class, when we were talking about the concept of the sublime, and the professor asked for examples of moments we could call sublime, very few hands went up. Due to the awkward silence involved, I offered up my wedding day. Walking down the aisle toward Anthony was a sublime moment in my life. (Now imagine 20 or so teenagers and 20-somethings staring at me in shock that there is a married student in the room. To be fair, I don't think most of them realized I was over 30, either.) There are books that, at the moment of completion, I have thought to be sublime. Pieces of music. But is anyone else out there noticing the sublime when it happens? Was the class too young to understand the significance of those moments?

Things to ponder. Poetry final tonight, so I am off to read some more.

Acrostic

A poem or other form of writing in an alphabetic script, in which the first letter, syllable or word of each line, paragraph or other recurring feature in the text spells out a word or a message.

With thanks to Wikipedia on this one, acrostics are a common occurrence in a lot of the classical Jewish poetry I was reading for my philosophy paper (read about me procrastinating about it here, or rejoicing about having finished it here.) Acrostic poetry is actually a common occurrence in the Bible as well (most frequently in the Book of Psalms.) I have always thought of acrostics as gimmick poetry- what real sentiment can be expressed under such restriction? Perhaps it is left for those with more talent than I.

Fortunately, the poetry I am studying for the next two days is not acrostic in nature. The poems I am working with is mostly modernist in nature, and modernists were not known for their literary gimmicks, mostly abandoning rhyme and meter altogether. Alas, this is all for a final I have on Tuesday night (I mean, really- 7pm on December 22nd?) Paul, you congratulated me on the end of the semester a little too soon- while all the papers are done, I still have a three hour long final, where I will have to write who knows how many essays. So I am re-reading about 50 poems, from Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, H.D., Ezra Pound, e.e. cummings, Langston Hughes and many others. There is really no other way to study for a poetry final. You just have to keep re-reading the poems, and when the times comes, say what you have to say about them. I am going to miss this class.

Aphasia

Partial or total loss of the ability to articulate ideas or comprehend spoken or written language, resulting from damage to the brain caused by injury or disease.

Last week, one of my blogs drew its leaping point from a word in Lucky's big monologue in Waiting for Godot (see the entry for Qua Qua Qua Qua.) In that same bit, Lucky references "divine apathia divine athambia divine aphasia." I could go on about poetic license or the problem of translating from an original language, but as it is typed (at least in my copy of Godot), apathia and athambia are not words as far as I can tell, and I consulted every dictionary I have on this one. Aphasia, from the Greek aphatos (speechless), is real. But the concept of what divine aphasia might mean to someone has actually struck me a bit dumb (no pun intended.)

Here's where I land. From the word order, it would seem that the author is implying that it is God who is unable to articulate ideas. I have difficulty with this. I think that it is simply a failing on out part to understand God. I think it is a failing of human language to ever be able to express God in fullness. I think of God as omniscient, omnipotent, and benevolent, and I have a hard time thinking of God as being struck dumb.

And I definitely think my class on Classical Jewish Philosophy, a class I literally took because it was the only one that fit into my work schedule at the start of the semester, has definitely gotten under my skin.

The Merovingians

The ruling Frankish family from roughly the 5th through the 8th centuries.

Not just the name of a character from The Matrix, the Merovingians got the got their start as a tribe of warrior chieftains in Roman Gaul, filling the power void left in the fall of the Empire. A mixed bag of tricks, there were some notable bad guys, some saints (Radegund and Clotilde, for example), and some puppets among the lot. The line ultimately died out, and Pepin, a noble bureaucrat, ascended to the throne, starting the Carolingian dynasty.

Why do I mention any of this? Well, I was able to get some reading done today, and the book I picked up was The Birth of France: Warriors, Bishops and Long-Haired Kings, by Katharine Scherman. (I am a bit of a francophile.)

Why is this significant? Because I am finally done with all my papers for the semester! Today was the first day that I was not under some kind of deadline. I slept in, took a long shower, baked bread, caught up with the blogs I read, even tidied up a bit (an extremely little bit.) And I got to read, at length, a book that has nothing to do with school.

Not that I am blameless here. I procrastinated. A lot. I had significant trouble focusing on writing. Not writing in general, specifically this bit of writing (I actually did a fair amount of note jotting for poetry I am working on, but I don't count that as procrastinating.) Too many distractions in the apartment, like baking bread. Or watching the entirety of The West Wing. Or downloading episodes of Charmed from You Tube. Or... well, anything other than writing a paper on the comparison of Solomon ibn Gabirol's philosophy and poetry.

Mokume-gane

Japanese. Literally, wood-grain metal.


This is a picture of my wedding ring (or maybe Anthony's, I'm not really sure, since they are identical except for the size.) They were handmade for us by our friend, Geoff Sullivan, in the mokume-gane style. I am not going to attempt to fully explain mokume here, but I will direct you to the Wikipedia page instead, as I am not equipped to give a metalworking dissertation.

I LOVE my wedding ring. A big part of that is that it is a ring that no one outside Anthony and myself will ever have. We bought the white gold and silver layered billet for Geoff to work with, but the twists and turns Geoff put in to make the pattern will never be copied exactly. If you stack our rings and line them up right, you can see how they belong together. Which is a piece of symbolism that just can't be beat.

Bell, Book and Candle

So, since I haven't done it in a while, I thought it might be nice to pull a random entry from the dictionary again (for a previous instance, see the entry for Netsuke.) Even though I don't blog about it every time I do it, I do enjoy, whenever I have a dictionary out on the table, randomly opening the book to a page and picking out an interesting looking word I don't know.

I thought I would shake it up a little, though, and use a dictionary that I don't often use- The Vulgar Tongue. Complied and published by Francis Grose in 1785, the book was the first recognized dictionary of slang in London. I picked up a copy at Pennsic (the biggest SCA event of the calendar year) a few summers ago. Flipping open my copy brings us to...

Bell, book, and candle. An allusion to the popish form of excommunicating and anathematizing persons who had offended the church.

Well, I probably could have found that somewhere else. "Popish," for those that do not understand the reference, means Catholic in this context. The entry refers to the archaic practice of separating those from the church who had committed especially heinous sins, a ceremony which would conclude when the "bishop would ring a bell to evoke a death toll, close a holy book to symbolize the excommunicant's separation from the church, and snuff out a candle or candles, knocking them to the floor to represent the target's soul being extinguished and removed from the light of God." [Thanks, as is quite often, to The Free Dictionary, for its entry on this one.]

There was a lot of additional information on this entry. The pop culture references abound, so I thought I would post one here. It is actually a bit of an episode of one of my favorites of guilty-pleasure television: Charmed. I used to love this show. When the oldest sister, Prue (played by Shannen Doherty) dies, the song "Bell, Book, and Candle" by Eddi Reader is played over her funeral scene, shown here.




I wonder about the significance of a Wiccan funeral ceremony with background music making reference to a Catholic form of excommunication. The lyric used is "I need a bell, book and candle to keep your ghost away." I won't ramble on about my thoughts about that, for the moment, though they abound. But think I am going to see if Blockbuster has seasons of Charmed for rent.

Also, does anyone understand the significance of the officiant placing the rope in the urn during the ceremony. That one is lost on me.

Qua Qua Qua Qua

Given the existence as uttered forth in the public works of Puncher and Wattman of a personal God quaquaquaqua with white beard quaquaquaqua outside time without extension who from the heights of divine apathia divine athambia divine aphasia loves us dearly...

-Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

Waiting for Godot has always been one of my favorite plays. Anthony and I went to see it this past May when Roundabout Theater Company put on a production of it with Nathan Lane, Bill Irwin and John Goodman. It was amazing. The selection above is the start of Lucky's speech, a bit of dialog by which I have been fascinated by since high school. When we read Godot in AP English, it was my introduction to concept of existentialism, and possibly responsible for my avid interest in philosophy.

I never understood the whole quaquaquaqua bit, though. In my reading for school over the last few semesters, though, I have quite often come across qua: Preposition. In the capacity of character of. [American Heritage Dictionary]

So there's that. I'm not sure that it particularly helps in understanding Godot, but I don't necessarily believe that one every fully understands Godot. One just keeps working at it, letting it mean what it does at the various stages of your life.

Apocryphal

Adj. Of questionable authorship or authenticity.

From the Greek word 'apokruphos', meaning secret, or hidden. The obvious, instinctual connection for most people when they hear the word 'apocryphal' are the apocryphal books of the Bible, like the Book of Tobit, the Book of Judith, or the Book of Wisdom. Defined as the 14 books included as an appendix to the Old Testament in the Septuagint and the Vulgate but not included in the Hebrew canon, and not printed in Protestant versions of the Bible, the Apocrypha (note the capital 'a',) have been referenced footnotes in much of my reading of late, which has brought the word to mind.

While in the process of properly defining the word for this blog, I came across an entry about apocrypha in the realm of fiction (thank you to The Free Dictionary.). Apparently, the word is sometimes used to describe works based on a fictional world or character that were not a part of the original piece (or pieces) of fiction, like all the Star Trek and Star Wars novels that exist (and of which I own more than I will here admit.) In thinking about this matter further, it occurred to me that, while bookstores are full of this type of fiction, it seems to be heavily concentrated to the real of science fiction and fantasy. It makes sense, new worlds and technologies and powers to explore and all, but I want to know- where is my West Wing apocrypha?

Sadly, as I mentioned in my other blog yesterday, a piece of my childhood is about to get apocryphized [I just made that up, probably not really a word, sorry - hk] in three months, when the new Alice in Wonderland movie comes out. I am really not too eager to add to my conception of Wonderland with an addendum by Tim Burton. And the quality of science fiction add-ons are a coin flip, at best. So maybe I should be careful about what I wish for with respect to The West Wing. Oh well...

Must Reads, Revisited

Two years ago, I created a Must Read list of books on this blog. That list was a reworking on an earlier list from an earlier blog of mine (when I still used MySpace.) The list contained 16 books that I had been meaning to read for some time. Two years later, of the 16 books, I have read four (House of the Spirits, Dubliners, The History of Beauty and Breakfast at Tiffany's) and given up on one (Love in the Time of Cholera.) So, I am compiling a new list, starting with the eleven remaining items from the first list, with some new additions. Here is what is has on it so far...

1. Me Talk Pretty One Day, by David Sedaris
2. On the Road, by Jack Kerouac. I've tried picking this one up a couple of times, but have yet to finish it.
3. Lives of the Artists, by Giorgio Vasari. I've read many excerpts, but never the whole thing. Has interesting facts about the lives of famous artists, even if the information is questionable in its veracity.
4. The Prince, by Machiavelli
5. A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess.
6. The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde. (I'm about halfway through this.)
7. Breakfast of Champions, by Kurt Vonnegut.
8. Don Quixote, by Cervantes. I know I've read this, but I think I was far to young to appreciate it, and really don't remember it well at all.
9. She's Come Undone, by Wally Lamb.
10. The Baron in the Trees, by Italo Calvino.
11. The Plague, and The Rebel, both by Camus.
12. The Open Society and Its Enemies, by Karl Popper.
13. Utopia, by Thomas More.
14. Fear and Trembling, by Soren Kierkergard. (About halfway through this one, too.)
15. In Defense of Food, by Michael Pollan.
16. Howl, by Allen Ginsberg. (I actually got an edition that has the poet's original drafts with edits alongside the final version of the poem, as well as lots of commentary.)

Some of these books have been on this list for a very long time now. I am certain there are things that I have meant to read for a while, but am not thinking of right now. The existence of this list and the fast clip at which I tend to move through books notwithstanding, I just can't seem to get this list down, probably because of all the things I pick up to read in passing (recently, News From Nowhere by William Morris, Mysteries of the Middle Ages by Thomas Cahill, and Seven Ages of Paris by Alistair Horne.) Despite this fact, I am always open to suggestions as to what else belongs on this list. Thoughts?

Recidivism

Noun. Repeated or habitual relapse, as into crime.

I am not completely clear as to why this word has been rattling around my brain for the last few days. The best I can guess is that they used the word in one of the many episodes of The West Wing I have been watching over the last few weeks, and it has gotten stuck.

Why have I been watching The West Wing, (aside from the fact that it is one of my favorite television shows, ever, and that I feel the need, about once a year, to re-watch the entirety of the 7 season in a short span of time)? Well, in the transition from full-time employee and part-time college student to full-time college student has left me with time on my hands. Closing out my classes for this semester went from something I did in my spare time to something that I could do before lunch, leaving me with no pressing matters to which I must attend. I have enjoyed doing weekly grocery shopping, and cooking more, and baking bread. All of the fun tools that had been merely occupying space in the kitchen have been drafted into more active use. I think I am going to try making pasta from scratch this week. But I am the type of person that needs to have something else going on while doing domestic things, so I run a season of The West Wing while I am measuring ingredients or waiting for dough to rise.

I finished season 6 this morning. I will start season 7 very likely once I finish lunch.

But I shouldn't. What I should do is buckle down and write the 10-page paper that is due at the end of next week. It is, in fact, the last thing I need to do for the semester, other than attend my last two nights of class this week. Going from working 40 hours, with a couple hours of commuting, plus six hours of class each week, to only having six hours of class each week has allowed me to backslide into that favorite of collegiate pass times: procrastination. (Noun. The act of putting of until another day or time; defer; delay.)

I should clarify: I have not been sitting around baking bread and watching The West Wing to the exclusion of productive work. I wrote another paper last week (8 pages on invocation in the poetry of Hilda Doolittle.) I just have another one to go (10 pages on the use of poetry in the works of classical Jewish philosophers, a topic that I thought would be a nice bridge tying my major and my minor, but is now just making me want to drink.) I'm not having as much fun with it as I would have thought.

I could just watch season 7, and be done with the entire series, having no other episodes to distract me. But there is always watching the whole Lord of the Rings trilogy. Or all of the Harry Potter movies. And I haven't watch all of the BBC's "A History of Britain", hosted by Simon Schama, in a while...