On "knitting past"

I was thinking yesterday how I kind of miss the mood in knitting of the early 2000s, when it had become popular again after a period of dormancy, and how there were so many knitblogs, but also books of short essays or thoughts on knitting.

I don't know if the "KnitLit" books are the best-known of that genre, but they are the ones I think of first - the first one was published shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, as I remember (and one of the essays, there was the chilling footnote added that one of the knitters referred to in the essay had been a flight attendant on one of the planes that was crashed....)

It was a different time. I don't quite know why....I don't know if now, it's that everything that can be said about knitting has already been said (or if people feel like that). Or if a lot of the people who kept on knitting through the 60s, 70s, and into the 80s (eras when handknitting wasn't as mainstream as it is now) have laid down their needles for good, or if the new, shiny, slick Instagram-ready world seems less-amenable to the sort of musings that those books contained: stories of living on farmsteads in Maine and teaching your children to knit for "something to do" on a winter evening, or a perpetually unfinished sweater - unfinished, because it reminds you of the person you were knitting it for who is now gone from your life, or awkward stories of being the only kid in handknits and getting teased for it, or the struggle to find enough balls of just the right yarn....

I don't know, but I kind of miss those books, those essays. In some cases, you read the essay and chuckled and felt a sense of connection (I wasn't the only kid in handknits but I do remember being really snotty to my poor mother over a top she made for me that, to my 12 year old eyes, looked like an absolute "This is homemade and so I should be teased for my lack of fashion sense as well as for the fact that my family doesn't have money" thing). Or you felt like "wow, maybe some day that could be my life" (Living on a farmstead, travelling around the country while knitting, having a group of close friends you knit with....any of those things). Or, in some cases, it WASN'T a familiar or desirable experience but which taught you something about humanity (the woman who wrote about being a refugee in WWII era Britain, and the good fortune her mother had of getting a handknit suit she could unravel and convert into sweaters for her daughters).

I liked the essays, in part, because they made me feel a connection: either there was a similar experience or emotion there, or there was something to think "that would be nice" about, or to have a sense of understanding the other person.

But maybe we don't want that any more? Maybe we each and to go off into our own "silos" and think about how our particular "tribe" is better and more special and doesn't have anything in common with those other people? Or maybe we'd just rather fight about things, and because (except for a few very specific issues), there's less to fight about about knitting? (I don't know. Listening to people fight makes me tired. To misquote that old Monty Python sketch, I came here for a connection, not an argument. (And heh - re-reading that sketch - yes, they are right, a lot of internet arguments are actually not GOOD arguments, at least in the rhetorical sense)

Or maybe the stories actually AREN'T "aspirational" enough (as much as I feel like I'd give my eyeteeth for a cozy life on a Maine farm with a loving family around me) and to work today they'd have to be slicked up and made shinier and richer and....I don't know? Monetized somehow? Could that be it - that there's no good way to "monetize" someone rambling about their hobby, and that's why only blockheads (in the Sam'l Johnson sense) do it any more?

Or maybe the death of blogs  (other than a few of us holdouts, and the very commercialized "buy my stuff" blogs) led to a decline in the type of writing that lends itself well to essay collections, and everything now is very visual. It does seem that it changed from blogs to Facebook/Ravelry and perhaps from there, two streams, one to Tumblr and one to Instagram, and both of those media are primarily visual. (And Tumblr, in a lot of cases, veers into Pinterest territory, where the same few pictures are shopped around from blog to blog without good attribution or sometimes even credit to their creator).

Or maybe those books just don't sell any more. I suspect that although I get the sense there are more people who knit on a regular basis than there were in, say, 1992, a lot of the "fad" quality of knitting has died down and you're left with a smaller core of hobbyists - so people won't buy a book on knitting because "this is hot right now" (I don't even know what the "hot right now" hobby is, unless it's decluttering).

I don't know. At any rate - it's been long enough since I looked at the KnitLit books and the other small compendia of knitting essays that I have, so maybe I can pull them back off the shelf and re-read them again, and they'll be, if not new, at least not so familiar I grow bored with them.