Posting again...on socks

It's almost three months since I last posted on my blog. I'm not sure why I stopped writing posts. It wasn't really intentional. Over time, one of the things I have most valued about blogging is the record I have of my trips and travels, so it's quite odd that I stopped writing just as I began my recent trip to the UK. Now I really regret that I didn't keep a record of what I saw and what I thought at the time of seeing. Somewhere I read recently a comment of novelist Zadie Smith that 'The very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life'. Writing is not such a central part of my identity as it is for a talented novelist like Zadie Smith, but even writing my blog certainly moves me to observations, comparisons and reflections that fix experiences in my memory.

I've recently been reading Wallace Stegner's 'Crossing to Safety' (which, by the way, is one of the best novels I've read in a long time) where one of his characters observes 'Henry James says somewhere that if you have to make notes on how a thing has struck you, it probably hasn't struck you'. Much as I admire Henry James, I'm not sure I agree with him - or maybe he just had a much better memory than I have. As I get older I panic that if I don't make a note on how a thing has struck me it will simply drop off the edge of my mind.

So to get back into the swing of blogging I'm going to write a simple post about socks. I seem to have spent a lot of time knitting lately, but have very little to show for my activity. This is partly because I've been trying to master new knitting techniques and I've spent just as much time unravelling as I have knitting; I think it will take me the rest of my life to master brioche stitch! But I have been doing some sock knitting. Socks are great to knit when you don't really want to commit to a major project and you want something small enough to carry with you when travelling.

I've knitted two pairs of socks over the last few months - both of them patterns from Nancy Bush's 'Knitting Vintage Socks', my favourite knitting book ever. First there was Nancy's 'Yarrow Ribbed Sock', made from ever-reliable Regia sock yarn in shades of blue and grey :





These became a gift for my friend and ex-colleague Maja who generously hosted me for a couple of days during my trip to the UK. By the way, Maja took me on a visit to the intimate Framework Knitting Museum in Nottingham, but maybe that's the subject for another post.

While in the UK I bought some very British sock yarn - West Yorkshire Spinners 4 ply purchased at baa ram ewe in Leeds (that's another story) - and embarked on what must be one of the plainest sock patterns ever, Nancy Bush's 'Gentleman's Plain Winter Sock'. I was still finishing off my first sock when I arrived back in Sydney and was so bored by my knitting (yes, even Nancy can occasionally be boring) I knitted a red toe with some very Australian Patonyl sock yarn donated by my friend Margarita. It then seemed inevitable to add some red stripes to the second sock to speed my knitting to completion.





In my head I now ironically label these my Anzac socks. I was happily beginning to knit with what I thought was chartreuse yarn when someone casually asked if I was knitting khaki socks in honour of the centenary of Anzac Day. It hadn't occurred to me that the colour was actually khaki! And then knitting with contrasting poppy red only seems to have heightened the Anzac connection. Hmmm... Not really what I had intended.

Documentation

I often wonder about the need so many of us have to document our lives in some way. On the top shelf of a cupboard I have a box of unsorted photos that I kept when my mother's house was packed away after her death. Many of the people in the photos are no longer identifiable, but I am reluctant to throw them away. Next to the photos is a smaller box of diaries that were kept (in a most minimal way) by my grandfather between the nineteen thirties and fifties. Then there are fragments of family history compiled by cousins and more distant relatives over many years. I think my own persistence in blogging, in the face of waning enthusiasm for blogging as a medium of social communication, is just another variation on this need to record; to document.

Sometime last year I began using instagram. I'm not really an early adopter of new forms of social media. I usually join in rather reluctantly because increasingly they are the best way of keeping up with friends and family. But I've taken to instagram with some pleasure. I like taking photographs, though I hate lugging around a heavy and conspicuous camera. As instagram relies on smart phone photos I can be forgiven the not-so-great quality of my images. At the beginning of the year I had the idea of posting an instagram image each day across the year. I think I had an idea that this might capture the nature of my daily life; that over the year it would become an aide memoire to reflecting on my experiences and concerns.

By January 23 and I'd posted 22 images. Early in the month, before I'd really established the picture-taking habit, I seem to have missed a day. Never mind. Already, I can't help classifying the posts to see what they say about my life. There are posts about Sydney (top left is the Queen Victoria Building). I first came to Sydney in the early 1960s, before the advent of shopping malls in the suburbs. The city centre was where I shopped for everything except food, and this is a habit I've never broken. I shop in the city for clothes, for books, for gifts. I often go to the movies and concerts in the city and I meet people there to catch up. Of course, all this is possible because I'm only a 5 minute train ride from the city centre. I love Sydney and I love keeping a photographic record of the bits of it that I frequent.



Then there are images of my neighbourhood - of Redfern, and other surrounding areas (top right is a window in the old locomotive workshop at Eveleigh that's next door to where I live). Redfern's an old suburb and is now a mixture of old industrial sites that have been 'repurposed', public housing, new apartment buildings and old terrace houses. There's lots of visual interest. This is where I live my daily life, buying milk and bread, going to the doctor, having cups of coffee, taking daily walks and visiting some of the lovely old parks in the area.

Some days I spend at home. I enjoy my small apartment and the furniture and objects that I've accumulated over time. I've now lived in the same apartment block for nearly thirty years and am part of the small community of my neighbours with our shared concerns. (The flowers bottom left are from our communal garden which kind neighbours tend).

And, of course, there's my knitting.

I imagine that my city, my neighbourhood, my home and my knitting will be the subjects of my instagram record of the year. So far I'm enjoying the small project of visually documenting my days...and I think I'll enjoy looking back on a year of images when the year ends.

If you wish, you can follow me on instagram where I'm smark31.

Serving the People

My friend Barbara and I have been to visit the White Rabbit Gallery in Chippendale. Australia doesn't have a great tradition of private support for the arts. I imagine this results from a combination of our history as a social welfare society where we have looked to public sources of support for education and the arts, and the relatively recent growth in the number of Very Rich People with the taste and wherewithal to support the arts. The White Rabbit Gallery is one of the few examples of exceedingly generous private support for art and its public promotion.

The Gallery and its collection of contemporary Chinese art since 2000 is the achievement of Judith Nielson. She began collecting in the early 2000s and now has such an extensive collection that the large spaces of the beautiful Gallery are rehung twice a year to display the diversity, richness and contemporaneity of the collection. The current exhibition has been curated by Edmund Capon, who for many years was Director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales and is renowned for his knowledge of Asian art. He's titled it 'Serve the People' in an ironic acknowledgment of art of the Cultural Revolution period when all art necessarily supported the state, and the transformation of artistic expression since the 1980s. Absolute freedom of expression is still not possible in China, but artists are now able to subvert and explore their history and social values in ways that were unthinkable in the recent past.

Barbara and I are both textile tragics, so it's no wonder we are often attracted to the same works. This was our favourite:




Wang Lei has recreated the robes traditionally associated with Chinese Emperors - not from silk and rich embroidery but from pages of a Chinese-English dictionary that are cut into narrow strips, dampened, spun, and then knitted up into the finely detailed robes. He says of his work that it reminds us that the excesses of imperial political power have long since come to an end (and perhaps implies that the present centralised regime will share the same fate). He also says that by knitting together Chinese and English he reflects an emerging contest of a different kind - between China and the West. Maybe such 'meanings' enrich the work for the viewers, but I think this is one of the works in the exhibition that is beautiful in itself. For me, it doesn't need a 'meaning'.



I revisited Sun Furong's 'Tomb Figures' - 100 Mao suits she's attacked with scissors so they're tattered and 'nibbled up' - to use her words.



I remembered I'd already blogged about these suits after a previous visit to this gallery in 2009. One of the things I'm increasingly realising about blogging is that it doesn't always have to be about discovering new things - sometimes it can just be about the continuities in your life. But to return to this evocative work... since I saw this work in 2009 new technologies have enriched the ways the viewer can interact with the works. Nowadays the White Rabbit Gallery, like almost all the galleries I visited in the Netherlands earlier this year, allows photography as long as you don't use a flash. I like having these visual reminders of my visit. More recently, I've discovered the usefulness of the QRReader. For this exhibition the QRReader gives access to most thoughtful commentaries on the works. So I've discovered that Sun Furong worked as a seamstress during the long, hard struggle she had to survive as an artist. Eventually she used clothing and scissors to to express her lifelong 'sense of bleakness and desolation'.

Stabbing [the Mao suits] Sun Furong said she felt as if she was attacking herself; later 'it was as if I were cutting someone else'. Finally, she says, she became calm, 'quite pleased and cheerful', her forty years of tribulations, and those of her country, exorcised at last.

There are paintings, installations, video art, photography, tiny and massive works. The Gallery is a great insight to modern Chinese art, but it's also entertaining and thought-provoking. And it's free - part of Judith Nielson's generous philosophy about making the works accessible to all. There's a teahouse with a selection of Chinese teas served in pretty pots and tiny cups and snacks and Chinese dumplings for lunch. All in all, several hours of pleasure.



By the way, the White Rabbit Gallery has one of the best websites I've encountered. It both informs and entertains and captures the mix of seriousness of purpose and whimsy that characterises the Gallery.

To blog or....

Earlier this month I passed my five year blogging anniversary. Unnoticed. Unremarked. A bit sad, really, when for so much of these last five years blogging has been such a taken for granted part of my life. I've also noted that it's almost a month since my last post, which is the longest time to have passed without posting since I began my blog. A bit of a hiatus. Seems to me that it's time for a reassessment and some decision-making.

The blogging world has clearly changed in the last five years. When I began my blog I can remember being concerned about whether I was catching a wave of blogging as it had reached its peak. Why I should have been concerned about this is a bit of a mystery - did I not want to seem uncool? Sad thought. Nevertheless, I think I was probably right that blogging was then at its peak of appeal and about to trend downwards. Developments in social media, particularly the 'short forms' of facebook and twitter, have a more immediate appeal that better serve some of the purposes blogging initially served. I have some friends who post nimbly across social media formats, including blogging, and engage a wide range of readers. One friend selects particular formats for particular purposes and uses the longer blog format for more reflective and critical writing while reacting immediately and often explosively through shorter formats. The majority of the bloggers I've read over the last few years are posting less frequently and often more perfunctorily, almost as if saying 'I don't really have the inclination to blog but I just want you to know that I'm still here'. There are some blogs I greatly miss as their writers wrote less frequently and then disappeared. Some of the knitting and craft blogs that originally inspired me to reenter the world of knitting and to begin my blog have long since vanished into the ether.

What to do? I guess I, like many others, could just cease blogging. But I don't want to do this. Even though I don't really enjoy writing, I like the way it makes me discipline my thoughts and consider my opinions and judgments. I have a notoriously bad memory for past events in my life and find that writing about them better anchors my memories. Blogging provides an opportunity to link words and images so that at least some of the photographs I take can be viewed and contextualised, rather than being part of the muddle in a box of photos or on my computer. So I don't really want to stop. But I also don't want to continue blogging in the rather desultory way I currently am. I started blogging, way back in 2008, because of my knitting. Rather grandiosely, I wrote that I wanted to reflect on the context in which my knitting happens; how it fits around the rest of my life and into my relationships. Over time I think I've done this less and less. Now when I post about knitting it's usually simply descriptive of the project and my reaction to it. This is a bit ironic because across the time of my blog the relationships developed through knitting have become richer, more diverse, and worthy of reflection and comment. I predicted in my first post that 'inevitably, I imagine I'll also want to mention and try to sort out my thoughts about the other things that happen and are important to me - family, friends, books, theatre and films, travel'. I'm struck by the accuracy of my prediction - or maybe by the predictability of my life.

OK. I want to continue blogging, and my original ideas for the blog are still the chief concerns of my life. I just need to post more frequently and use the blog more reflectively. Pull up my socks (knitted or otherwise). In the past I've had some success with setting goals on the blog and reporting on my achievements, or lack, in meeting them, so I'll set a blogging goal. For the next two months I will post at least twice a week. In my most productive blogging year, 2010, I wrote 120 posts - more than two a week - so I think the goal is achievable. Keep your fingers crossed for me or, more practically, comment from time to time.

That would really encourage me.

Mark Twain, autobiography, and blogging

Anyone who has known me for any length of time has probably heard me enthuse about one of my all-time-favourite blogs - the Language Log. It's a must for anyone with any interest in the ways language is used. Occasionally its more serious posts on linguistics or statistical methods or the way the brain works are a bit beyond me, but it often makes me laugh out loud and on most days it informs and entertains me. I love its anti-prescriptivist nerdiness.

Today's post by one of Language Log's founders and regular contributors, Mark Liberman, reproduced a quote from the recently published Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol 1:

Finally, in Florence in 1904, I hit upon the right way to do an Autobiography: start it at no particular time in your life; talk only about the thing that interests you for the moment; drop it the moment its interest threatens to pale, and turn your talk upon the new and more interesting thing that has intruded itself into your mind meantime.

Also, make the narrative a combined Diary and Autobiography. In this way you have the vivid things of the present to make a contrast with memories of like things in the past, and these contrasts have a charm which is all their own. No talent is required to make a combined Diary and Autobiography interesting

And so, I have found the right plan. It makes my labor amusement - mere amusement, play, pastime, and wholly effortless.

As I reached the second paragraph I found myself thinking 'what wonderful advice for blogging' - only to read Mark Liberman's comment on the quote, 'This is also the right plan for successful blogging, in my experience'.

I imagine that if Mark Twain were alive today he would be a most entertaining and innovative blogger. But given he was a popular, entertaining, innovative and great writer, he'd hardly have a need to blog.

All done!

So I made it through the 30 days of June Busy Blogging.

I'm really pleased I can mark my final June post with another finished knitting project. (See? public declarations of intentions seem to work for me).



This is Sarah Shepherd's Sage Remedy sleeveless jumper that I've knitted from Cascade 220 in a deep blue-green heathered colour. Even with the lace panels it was a quick knit, though it took me ages to get around to seaming it and finishing the the arm and neck rolled facings.



I posted it off to my daughter this morning, so I still have a little anxiety about whether it will fit well...and whether she likes it.



I've enjoyed daily blogging much more than I thought I would. When I started my June Busy Blogging the main rationale was that it would be a daily routine that kept track of my daily reality as my life was rushing by. I think it's had this outcome. I read that MissFee is intending to continue her daily blogging until she moves house - I'm full of admiration for her, though I'm going to slip back, with some relief, to less frequent entries.

Thanks to everybody for reading and commenting. I've particularly enjoyed the interaction with my readers that's come from more frequent blogging. And I've enjoyed sharing daily posts with my Blogfest partners - MissFee and JP. I'm in the midst of renovations, and just beginning sorting and culling preparatory to moving house, so even though I'm no longer committed to daily blogging there'll still be lots to report on and share over the next few weeks.

Double century

As I was writing last night I noted it was my two hundredth blog post. It's just under two years since I started my blog, so that's an average of two posts a week. I'm astonished. As I've noted before, I've spent most of my non-working life avoiding writing. The work I've done has always involved writing - but that's writing with a particular purpose; to a formula. Except for a few sporadic efforts to keep a diary, usually lasting a matter of weeks at the most, I've never before written for pleasure. I wonder what makes blogging different... having an audience, however small? Receiving comments and feedback? Being able to integrate photos? Not needing to write long, sustained pieces?

Of the posts I've labeled, roughly a third are about knitting and around 15% are about travel - broadly defined, as I've included such trips as that to Wollongong for the Knitters' Camp under the label 'travel'. After that, posts are roughly equally distributed among a range of topics - such things as films, Sydney, family, books and home - this last growing rapidly as I'm blogging about renovations. Pretty much a reflection of my life, once you take work out of it.

For some time I've been hearing comments here and there from bloggers that they're losing interest in blogging. I guess this is inevitable with greater choice among forms of social networking. But I'm still interested and engaged by the medium, so I'll still be blogging for a while to come.

Last night at knitting...

Last night at knitting, at that stage of the evening when companionship, knitting and some glasses of bubbly lead you to make rash commitments, I commented to Jody and Fee that June is going to be so busy I am tempted to blog each day for a month. I might even have said that June will be so busy I am fearful it will just zoom by while I am focused on getting one thing done after another. Blogging will somehow make things seem more permanent; more real.

Jody and Fee's blog posts this morning outed this conversation, so now I'm publicly committed to blogging each day for June. I love Jody's title - June Busy Blogfest. I'm a slow blogger, so this will be quite a commitment. But particularly when you're busy, the time it takes to reflect on your day, and see the threads and themes that link its activities, is time spent most satisfyingly.

This blogging malarky

This blogging malarky can be a bit hard from time to time (thanks, Donna, for reminding me of this wonderful word, 'malarky').

I've come to blogging relatively recently - about 18 months and 150 posts ago. For me, blogging's manageable if I don't think about it too much and just write, but once I start wondering what I'm doing and why, I'm in danger of becoming immobilised by self-consciousness. My blogging arose principally from sharing my knitting with other knitters who blog. But as time's gone on, I've blogged about the other things that are inextricably part of my life - principally reading, films, theatre, Sydney, travel and occasionally, politics very broadly defined. Sometimes my family, particularly my grand-daughter, are caught up in the blog, but I've always been a bit inhibited in writing about them - or indeed about my friends - by a fear of intruding on their lives too much.

Over time, my blog has come to reflect my own, idiosyncratic set of interests. I imagine my readers are mainly friends who share my knitting interests, so to assume they'll also want to read about the other concerns of my life is possibly stretching their tolerance...or is this how blogging works?

I've been brought to think about this by my January focus on the Sydney Festival. As someone who has never kept a diary for more than a few days and has a notoriously bad memory for the events I've attended, the books I've read and the films I've seen, I've been delighted by the way my blog allows me to keep a record of such things in the sidebar. But my Sydney Festival entries have gone beyond this and have let me capture some of the feelings and associations from attending particular performances. This has been great for me but I'm not sure it's been great for the blog. Balancing what you write for yourself and what you write for others is hard. I've long thought that the key skill in good writing, or indeed good art, and presumably good blogging, is the capacity to edit well. I suspect my January entries have been a bit self-indulgent.

But having gone so far, I will continue. My final Sydney Festival attendance was last night - a very modern (indeed post-modern) re-working by a British playwright, Rupert Goold, of Luigi Pirandello's 1921 play Six Characters in Search of an Author. The original play tested notions of what's 'true' and what's 'real' by allowing characters to take on a life of their own outside the structure of a play. This modern reworking places these questions of reality and truth within the more recent story-telling form of docu-drama - developing themes around often sensationalised issues such as euthanasia, paedophilia and incest. I was absorbed by the intensity and unpredictability of the performance, but ultimately thought it would have benefitted by the more rigorous editing I admire. There's just too much stuffed into the play.

I'm sad I'll miss Opera in the Park tonight. I'd love to hear Bernstein's Candide again. Perhaps fortunately for my readers, I'm just too tired.

Blogging and social change

A couple of years ago, when I would have thought it impossible that I would ever have a blog, my daughter recommended that I read Sweet Juniper. It was love at first read. Sweet Juniper started as a parenting blog written by a father, but over time has become a more general reflection of Dutch's passions ('Dutch' is the blogger's nom de keyboard).

He lives with his family in Detroit, Michigan in the USA. He has chosen to live in this city - more generally a site of avoidance. The part of his blog I really like, apart from his photographs which are beyond wonderful, is his commentary on living in a once-grand industrial city that has become a reject of the post-industrial world.

But to get to the point of this entry. The Sweet Juniper blog and Dutch's photographs are now quite famous and from time to time he's asked to speak to groups about his work. I was catching up with his blog and read a post from April this year when he was asked to be part of a panel in Ann Arbor (I'll tell you my Ann Arbor/Detroit story another time) talking with a non-profit organisation that was considering integrating blogging into their outreach and fund-raising efforts. This is how he tells the story (forgive the long quote):

During my presentation, I showed them the photo of the tree growing from the books to explain how social bookmarking sites like digg and reddit can help reach beyond a particular audience or region to attract potential readers from all over the world. During the questions afterward, a member of a group of Detroit community activists stood up and angrily accused me of distorting the image of the city to the world, portraying only its ugliness, and she told me I should be ashamed. She had never read this website; she had only seen a few photos during the presentation.

After the room cleared, I tried to initiate a dialogue with these activists. The argument they posed was that there are many people working very hard to do positive things in Detroit and they have been doing so for many years before I arrived (I was called a carpetbagger, and replied that Detroit needs more carpetbaggers: about a million of them). To those working hard for positive change, any media attention perceived as negative (be it about crime or failing city schools or neighborhoods turning to prairie), is somehow a rebuke of their good deeds. These people attacking me were good people. But they were, in a sense, no different from the right-wing ideologues shouting endlessly during the worst days of the Iraq War that "the media never reports the good news in Iraq." I suppose I sympathize with any journalist unable to see past the dismembered corpses of suicide bombers and their victims to write only positive news.

I told these angry activists that I am not a reporter. I am just one man telling his story. If you don't like the story I'm telling, start your own blog and tell yours. That's how this works.

This post echoes, much more eloquently than I could manage, several conversations and discussions I've had recently - at work, with my friends, and within knitting circles. The way we spread information about our lives and our world is changing. We can't control the spread of information - even if we wanted to do so. We also can't control how people read and interpret the information we make available. What we can do is contribute a point of view and make sure that it is as interesting and engaging as possible. As Dutch says - that's how it works.