offhand

“The pews and the pipes date from the mid-19th century, when the place was built as St. Mark’s Evangelical Lutheran Church (which effectively died on June 15, 1904, along with about 1,000 of its parishioners, in a fire aboard the steamship General Slocum, en route to a church picnic).”

- NYTimes, on the location of a certain synagogue in New York.

Is this bit of offhand narrative horrifying to no-one else?

LASER WOLF

I remember laughing about it, but, I swear, I don’t remember drawing this back in the index.

Precis-Writing

“Imagine a being like nature, wasteful beyond measure, indifferent beyond measure, without purposes and consideration, without mercy and justice, fertile and desolate and uncertain at the same time; imagine indifference itself as a power – how could you live according to this indifference?”

- Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

vs.

“I suppose it is the teeming evidence that birth and growth, which we value, are ubiquitous and blind, that life itself is so astonishingly cheap, that nature is as careless as it is bountiful, and that with that extravagance goes a crushing waste that will one day include our own cheap lives, Henle’s loops and all. Every glistening egg is a memento mori.”

- Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Infinite Jest

Weird, good, overall ridiculous.

case in point:

A woman receives a Jarvik IX Exterior Heart, “with the extraordinary prosthesis portably installed in a stylish Etienne Aigner purse.” However, along comes the “transvestite purse-snatcher” we’ve met in the previous chapter, who “brutally tore the life sustaining purse from the woman’s unwitting grasp. The active, altert woman gave chase to the purse snatching ‘woman’ for as long as she could, plaintively shouting to passers by the words, ‘Stop her! She stole my heart!’ on the fashionable sidewalk crowded with shoppers.”

Pomo-taining to the max.

Things Learned from the October Vogue, Emotions Elicited

- that Berlin is a wonderful place, good for shopping, stylish and strange, I miss it.

- they’re making a movie about Hypatia (women! math! greece! religion!), which has the potential to be inspiring/stirring/historical/beautiful, but also I might be setting myself up for disappointment (see, Brooks, Geraldine, People of the Book, upsetting).

Creatrix.

See that yarn, that yarn on the bottom of the picture?

I made that. On a wheel. Out of the wool one sees above.

Bursting with pride – feeling slight shame, at being so happy about something so ridiculous.

Clearly, my woman-powers are at the highest they’ve ever been.

shelling shrimp for dinner.

“…the natural world, a world covered in chitin, where implacable realities hold sway.”

- Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

This weekend.

“unremarkable.”

IN PROGRESS

The strap for my mother’s tote bag (a mother’s day present I’d promised to tweak to more exact specifications! – how truant!), made in garter stitch, alternating 2 rows light grey, 2 rows light/dark grey, held together. Hence the lasagne-noodle effect – perhaps that can be ironed out. Perhaps with more felting.

The cardigan I made this summer, out of yarn I’d bought in order to make things for… other people. All it needs are buttons (10. tiny.), and for the ends to be sewn in.

A fresh pair of socks. For some indeterminate, Christmasy end.

“Maru Mori brought me

a pair

of socks

which she knitted herself

with her sheepherder’s hands.”

The yarn is beautiful Uruguayan stuff, Neruda is beautiful Chilean stuff. (Basically, the same thing? Not quite.)

FINISHED: Star-Crossed Slouchy Beret

Pattern: Star-Crossed Slouchy Beret, by Natalie Larson

Yarn: 1.5 skeins of Cynthia Helene Kid Mohair, which was a present from Victor

Needles: US 11s. Needless to say, this was fast.

Becoming: yes it is.