I do not want to be connected

I read two articles in today's NYT that perplexed me. First, an article about social networking by phone, where you can upload text messages to the site and have them broadcast to whomever you want. The article is here. One site, called Twitter, is described as follows:

"Twitter, spun off this month from a company called Obvious, lets people broadcast short text messages from their phones and computers to those of friends and strangers."

The next one is about using an online service to organize and catalog your stuff. You can read more here. According to an executive of one of the companies:

“The concept is that people will list things they own, discuss them with friends and help others decide what to buy,” he said.


I cannot imagine wanting either of these services ever. Why would you want to give continual updates about your life to total strangers, or even to your friends, who probably don't want to know every detail about your daily life? And why would you ever want to make the contents of your home accessible to other people?

My home is far away

The past is a foreign country...

Dawn Powell, why have I heard that name?

Maybe it is a name like Barbara Pym, or Doris Lessing, or Louise Erdrich, where you know they are a novelist, but you haven't read any of their books. You might be faintly curious, but there are thousands of other novels on your list of books to read, not to mention non-fiction, magazines and the daily paper. So you never get around to it. Until one day, you are looking in the library for something to read and you happen upon Powell. Her books are near next to Richard Powers', whose books you really like (especially Gain and Galatea 2.2) but there are no new Richard Powers books on the shelves, so you pick a Dawn Powell one. It is called My Home is Far Away and it is labelled "an autobiographical novel". A sepia-toned picture of three girls is on the cover and the back states that it is "one of the permanent masterpieces of childhood." so you check it out and go home to read it. Many hours later, but the same day, you finish the book, not having been able to put it down much. And you are glad you browsed the shelves the way you did.

Anyway, I encourage everyone to read this book. I an now on a quest to read her other novels, her letters, and her published diaries.

She was born in 1897 in Ohio (biographical information from the Dawn Powell web site here), the middle of three girls. Her mother died when she was young and after a few years her father remarried. Her new stepmother was so awful that all three sisters ended up running away from home to escape, Dawn ran away to her aunt's when she was only 13. After college, she moved to New York, got married and had a child. She wrote a number of novels, some rural novels of life in Ohio, and some witty urbane novels about life in New York City. My Home is Far Away is certainly one in the former category.

Maybe knowing it was autobiographical gave it an extra poignancy, thinking gosh, this really happened to these girls. They were pretty much ignored for five years between the death of their mother and the remarriage, and during this time were passed around to different relatives, none of whom really made them a priority. Then, when they were reunited with their father and his new wife, they were treated horribly. I can't remember the last time I cried when I read a novel, but this book really gripped me. There were a few parts where the descriptions dragged a little, but overall it was a very good book to read.

I was impressed by the details of every day life. Back when people only had one suit per season, lived in boarding houses, got consumption, and died from botched abortions. Back when you could take a streetcar ten miles to the next town (who knew?), or have a supper of bread and milk, run a millinery shop, live in a hotel, or get excited by your one birthday present, which was a pair of underwear. It was only the beginning of the last century, but it may have just as well been ancient Rome for all the similarities their lives had to ours.

I also noticed that crochet was mentioned at least five times in the book, describing some decorating detail, someone's purse, or the fact that the youngest daughter got taught how to crochet by a nice neighbor. Knitting was not mentioned at all, not was quilting.

Highly recommended.

Metacrafting

If you know me, you know I have a lot of hobbies. I quilt, knit, crochet, bead, and garden. But I realized I have another hobby, metacrafting. I define this as thinking about making stuff, and reading books about making stuff, rather than actually making stuff. Metacrafting is cheap too, since you can do it just by going to the library and checking out endless books on the craft/hobby of your choice. Then you can sit in bed and look and the pretty pictures in the books and imagine you will someday make all the nice thing. Now with the internet, metacrafting can be infinite, since you can just blog hop from craft blog to craft blog all day, imagining that someday you will make things like those you see in blogs.

I think this started for me when I was finishing grad school, and I became obsessed with gardening. I was living in a house, finally, that had a yard, and so I could actuelly get interested in gardening. I must have read hundreds of gardening books. Then I moved back into an apartment. I didn't do much actual gardening.

A few years later I moved to Ohio and got interested in quilting. I would go to the local library and get an armful of quilt books and read them all week, then go back to the library the next week and get more. I did this instead of actually making quilts.

Now I am into knitting and crochet, but I find that I enjoy reading about knitting/crochet almost as much as I like doing the actual craft. I get many books out of the library, and regularly read five or ten knitting blogs.

I like to think it is the same as liking music but not actually playing an instrument, of liking to eat more than liking to cook. And it saves money.

Tulip views

I didn't used to like tulips, until I started to grow them. Now I appreciated them for the many forms the flowers can take. I like them when they are shut and formal looking.



And I like them when they are wide open and blowsy.

color too much

Yesterday I was out in the yard admiring spring and I had a really intense feeling of pain. Pain that the grass was so green and the sky was so blue. Do you ever feel things so intensely that it hurts? Sometimes that happens to me when I see colors in the natural world. Yesterday it was the grass, it was so very green. Sometimes the grass seems to green that if you walk on it, the color might come off on your feet. Not like some tacky spray painted LA lawn, but as though the chlorophyll is just bursting out of the leaves.

And the sky was so blue.

It reminded me of a poem I liked in college, one of the few I memorized. Called Spleen, by Paul Verlaine.

Spleen

Les roses étaient toutes rouges,
Et les lierres étaient tout noirs.

Chère, pour peu que tu te bouges,
Renaissent tous mes désespoirs.

Le ciel était trop bleu, trop tendre
La mer trop verte et l'air trop doux.

Je crains toujours,- ce qu'est d'attendre!
Quelque fuite atroce de vous.

Du houx à la feuille vernie
Et du luisant buis je suis las,

Et de la campagne infinie
Et de tout, fors de vous, hélas!

Or, in English:

The roses were so very red
The ivy deepest black.

Darling, for fear that you might leave
Reawaken all my despair.

The sky was too blue, too soft,
The sea too green, the air too sweet.

And yet I fear you'll leave,
such torment, waiting.

I'm tired of shiny-leaved holly
and of the gleaming box-tree

And the endless countryside
And of all, in fact, save you.

Whatever

April, ahh April, the cruellest month. We got this today.






It is a nice phrase. Especially with the rest of the stanza.

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.

Not spoiled at all

Our dog is not spoiled. This is not what she looks like when she wants my attention.


And this is not what she looks like when she is exhausted from her efforts.

Spring IS here.

I know I may have jumped the gun earlier on my pronouncement that spring had arrived. So we have had a week of below normal temperatures, so what? So I went and covered my daffodils and tulips, my bulbs for crying out loud. So what! I know it is spring because today I saw the signs.

1. A man mowing his lawn. What the heck? We have had lows in the teens for the past week, trust me, the grass is not growing.

2. The smell of someone grilling out. That does not count either. We Wisconsinites grill out all year, because we are TOUGH.

3. A guy in shorts and a t-shirt. It was 40 degrees.

4. The first cedar waxwings of the year. Now you're talking. A real sign of spring.

And, my bulbs seem to have recovered. These tulips have ben under a box for a week and they look fine.




These daffodils are a bit droopy.... but I am sure they will perk right up!



And if that isn't enough, the peonies are starting to emerge. It fascinates me that the shoots are blood red. They remind me of buried undead squirrels clawing their way back to the land of the living.

I didn't even notice that green wire when I was taking the pictures, I wonder what it is and why it is in my garden.

Organize it!

Well I am in heaven. We finally got our new furniture - two dressers, a bed, and a double wide bookshelf. Now I can spend the next few weeks doing my absolutely favorite thing: organizing stuff! I think I should have been a professional organizer, it is so satifsying, and so essential to my happiness.

Things I can organize:
the books in the bookshelf
my yarn supply
my fabric supply
my beads
the kitchen stuff
my clothes
all the papers
the dog stuff
the books

I mean, really, the list is endless. I can't really think if things are messy. It is just there in the back of my mind, and prevents me from thinking of anything else. Even right now, I think of all the drawers and cupboards in the house that are not optimally organized, and it bugs me.

This is a major problem at work, because although I can keep my own area clean, I can see other people's messy desks and I want to clean them up for them. And the common areas are always a mess and I spend too much time cleaning them up. The last thing I do before going home is to clean up and tidy my bench and desk. In between experiments, I take time to tidy up.

Not that I am all that clean. I once talked to someone who distinguished between dirty/messy, dirty/tidy, clean/messy, and clean/tidy. I am definitely the dirty/tidy. Not to the point of ickyness, of course, but I will tidy before I clean. It matters more that the books are lined up on the shelves, and the knick knacks are lined up properly than that there is no dust.

Hence, the love of organizing. What I really want to do is organize my fabric. I can just spend a whole afternoon folding each piece and then arranging them by color, or fabric theme.... yummmmm.

All we have done so far is organize the books into nonfiction (large bookshelf) versus fiction (smaller bookshelf) and organize the CDs alphabetically. I used to organize my CDs by color, but now we have too many for me to remember the colors of all the CD cases, so now it has to be alphabetical. My husband won't let me return to the color coding anyway. It was really neat, you could do all sorts of different gradations, light to dark, rainbow. I have always liked to play with colors and colored objects, hence my interest in yarn, fabric, and beads. I guess the CDs were just an earlier manifestation of that.

So, for the next few weeks I will be sorting through my socks and underwear, throw out the old stuff, tidying up what remains. I will be happy.