Great many things to share today.

First of all, there’s the Eternal Question come up on Socknitters again: is knitting art?

Well, I sent off a wordy post there but will reproduce part of it here, for those of you who aren’t on Socknitters. (Indulge me, I think some of my insights here are good).

I find that many people (often not those doing the work) take the opinion that "if it's useful it's not art." Meaning, I guess, that beautifully done cabinet work, Bohus sweaters, any quilt that could conceivably lie on a bed, is not art.

I don't really agree with that assessment. I guess I figure, if a person puts a bit of their soul (or, if you don't like the term soul, a bit of themselves) into the work, then it's art. If they're doing it to bring joy to themselves or to the person who uses/views it, it's art.

I think perhaps part of the problem is that the term "craft" - which is what I tend to regard most of my knitting and quilting as - has taken on a bad rap in recent years. Used to be, "Craft" was beautiful work done by skilled people, but it was slightly different from "Art" in that "Craft" had a purpose outside of its beauty or emotional content. Nowadays, it seems that to many, "Craft" means stuff you make out of old gum wrappers, or things designed to keep kids (or others) "busy," or things that are, shall we say, not in the best of taste. In other words, people see "craft" as something "crappy" and "art" as something "whoa, big important people make that."

I wonder if it's also related to something a friend of mine once mentioned re: the decline of "just people" making music - he pointed out that many years ago, many many people knew how to play an instrument and did, socially - think of Pa's fiddle in the Little House books, or all the piano-playing Sweet Young Things in any Victorian novel. There was also much more informal singing.

Nowadays, it seems that more people turn on a CD or the radio for music; part of it is that it's less 'work' for them, but also my friend said he thought (and I agree with him here) that people were slowly being convinced that music was something "best left to experts" - in other words, people you paid to do it.

And perhaps that's part of the art/craft question - that we, as a consumer society, have somehow come to accept that "art" is something done by people we pay to do it - either we buy pieces from them, or they are sponsored by a corporation to gain good pr for the corp., or they are supported by grants. Or that you need "credentials" - either life-experience in the field or a university degree or some measure of "suffering" to do "art." That "art" isn't something ordinary people can do, or want to do, or should spend their time doing. And I think that's sad.

I think knitters and quilters and woodworkers and people who bake bread and beaders and people who sew clothes and people who make toys and crocheters and tatters and embroiderers and I'm sure I'm leaving someone out here think differently - that many (perhaps even all) of us have the gift of being able to make things that are beautiful and worthwhile, and that doing art - whatever that may be - feeds our spirit.

One of the "end" essays in a back issue of Interweave Knits addressed this question pretty well, I thought - the writer commented that often great art seemed to be a response to tragedy - a way of making sense of the terrible things that happen in the world. But she went on to say that craft - things that are useful but beautiful and made by hand - may have a different attitude, that they are more a playful celebration of human skill and ingenuity. (I think the phrase “celebration of the human spirit” was used).

I like the idea of what I am doing as being a celebration of the human spirit, if that’s not too grand a term for my little scarves and socks.

Secondly: the photos.

First of all, here’s the Tilling the Soil vest. Sadly, no picture I could take showed the cables all that well. And yes, it’s a bit big on me. I made the 50” size when I probably should have done the 46,” but this was after the Dolman Updated debacle-that-turned-out-not-to-be. But that’s ok. Bigger will trap more air and trap more heat. And since it was barely sleeting when I drove to school, warm is good.

Also, here’s the Shape It! Scarf (it’s hard to find a place big enough to drape it; it’s really long). I like it much better after it’s blocked; it opened up a little and the colors seemed to settle down a bit.


And here’s a close-up:



Finally, a word on reading – something I do a lot of (although not as much as I’d like to) but don’t talk a lot about here. I finished this month’s Book Club book (“The Master Butcher’s Singing Club”). And I wanted to start something new. I decided I’d sort of had it for a while with “modern” novels where it seems as if everyone is working through some childhood trauma, and they usually work through it by treating other people like dirt, abusing substances, sleeping around, or other “bad behavior” (you get the picture). It is, to me, a somewhat distressing view of the world – I had SOME trauma as a child (didn’t we all), but I find it’s mainly affected my personality to the good – in some ways, made me a stronger and more compassionate person than I’d otherwise be. And so, I guess it frustrates me to read about a character who blames the fact that (for example) she drinks and is bad to her friends on the fact that she was teased in school.

So, as I said, I wanted to start something new. First pulled a copy of “The Stupidest Angel” off the shelf (this is by the guy who wrote “Lamb,” I don’t remember his name now). I bought this on a whim, thinking it would be amusing pre-Christmas reading. Well. I guess my taste in pre-Christmas Christmas-themed reading runs more to “Miss Read’s Christmas Tales” and Jan Karon’s “Shepherds Abiding.” This book is really not to my taste, I decided, after reading 50-some pages.

So, the more I thought about it, the more I realized something I’d been wanting over the past couple weeks – the best way I can describe it is as a sort of hunger – I wanted to read some Trollope again. I’m a big Trollope fan (Anthony, not Joannna). So I pulled my copy of “The American Senator” off the shelf – I had tried this book last Christmas and bogged down in all the family relationships and the fact that, for example, there are three generations of John Mortons, and two of the generations are dead, true, but the book goes a bit back and forth in chronology and it can be hard to keep it all straight. But this time I decided to plug along, go back and reread if necessary, and make a who-is-related-to-whom chart.

And as I read the first few pages, I felt the old delight. I love Trollope. I love his work for many reasons. The books are typically long, slow reads – the sort of thing that, when you start it, you know you are looking forward to a couple weeks or maybe months of reading. His books present such a perfectly imagined world that I can completely picture it. In my mind’s eye, I walk up the streets of Dillsborough and see the different houses and shops as he describes them. I can visualize the characters. And it’s a great joy to me.

I also love Trollope because his books are what I would call “restful” – nothing too terrible happens, they are mostly comedies of manners, the biggest concerns are generally making the right “match” and putting on a good show at the garden parties or foxhunts. And you know, I’m sure there are those who would scoff at the irrelevance of that, but to me it’s a joy – after months of reading books full of abusive relationships, and dead children, and people swindling others out of everything they hold dear – it’s a relief to read a book where the biggest issue is that a (rather unpleasant, anyway) character snubs another because he “married below himself”

And that’s another thing – in Trollope, almost always (or at least, in all the Trollope I’ve read, almost always) the sympathetic characters are good (and are still alive at the end of the novel. Call me old-fashioned but I like that) and the “bad” characters are pretty thoroughly despicable. And you know, maybe it’s simplistic, but I LIKE that. I like to imagine a world where people’s actions are more or less consistent, where you can know for sure that someone is “good” or “bad” (rather than, being a mix of the two, as we all are, in the real world).

I once described the novels to a friend as being like a very detailed snowglobe – something you can sit and watch and enjoy the miniature people scurrying about through their lives. That you can watch the whole story unfold in sort of a detached way, where you’re not gasping in horror or starting to cry every 25 pages.

Sometimes, you don’t WANT catharsis.

So anyway, I’m about a dozen pages in (as I said, Trollope is a slow read for me). I’m very happy. It’s a feeling almost like coming home. And there’s the joy, for me, of knowing for the next several months I can pick up this book and see what the characters are doing. And even when I’m not actively reading it, I sort of carry the characters and the story around in my head, and they pop up at odd moments. (I don’t know. Maybe I’m the only person who does that. And it mostly only works for me with the big old Victorian novels with lots of subplots and lots of characters).