Possum magic

I’ve got a case of second sock syndrome at the moment. I’m stuck on knitting first socks only.

While first socks are wild and unpredictable, second socks are the duty socks of the sock world. Already known in advance, these poor creatures limp off the needles. And they’re not even limping at the moment.

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Turning pro in a creative enterprise

I write only when inspiration strikes; fortunately, it strikes every morning at nine o’clock sharp.

So said Somerset Maugham when asked if he wrote on schedule or only when inspiration struck. It is quoted in the book by Steven Pressfield, The War of Art, subtitled “How to break through the blocks and win your inner creative battles”.

The book is not a great one. It’s light and the content feels re-heated. And using a war metaphor is as tiresome and melodramatic as it is in all contexts other than war.

There are some useful distinctions, however. One is the distinction between the amateur and the professional.

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In a bend of the river

The act of bringing beauty into the world is always available. At any time, and for all people.

It’s been available for the last hundred years or so in a small bend of the Alabama River where a group of women, poor and uneducated, have been creating patchwork quilts that rival the greatest of modernist paintings.

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Vienna in Melbourne sans pen, sans pencil, sans camera

The Vienna of 1900 has come to Melbourne in the exhibition at the NGV – Vienna Art & Design – and it is spectacular.

Room after room is packed with exquisite paintings, furniture and household objects from the capital of the vast Austro-Hungarian empire at the moment of its apogee: when Modernism was being born, when Freud was writing about dreams and discontents, when artists like Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele were painting real women and an architect called Josef Hoffmann, with Freudian brio, was burrowing his way into the most intimate recesses of the daily lives of the populace with his genius for beauty.

Hoffmann (1870 – 1956) is the star of the show.

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Planning meeting for “People of the sock”

We’re having a planning meeting for the People of the sock project next Wednesday, 3 November, 5-6pm, and you’re invited.

Just to jog the old grey cells …

People of the sock is a community project.  It’s about bringing together experienced sock knitters and people who want to learn to knit socks in a knitting workshop.  The socks knitted as a result of the workshop will be distributed to people who are homeless as Christmas presents.

The project is about spreading the joy of making, and about nurturing and caring for others.

Inspiration

I was inspired to start the project after meeting a spry and youthful 80-year-old knitting socks outside a hospital while her husband was parking the car.  The woman told me she knits socks for a Sydney organisation that distributes them to people who are homeless.  Socks are particularly valued, she said, because they’re warm and easily portable.  When not wearing the socks a person can stuff them in their pocket for the day, unlike the gift of a blanket which has to be carried around or hidden while the person goes about their business.

The meeting venue

The lovely Tal at Morris and Sons is letting us use their space for the planning meeting.  Morris and Sons — if you haven’t already discovered this veritable oasis of craft in the middle of the city — is on Level 1, 234 Collins Street, Melbourne.

Everyone is welcome at the planning meeting:

  • people who may like to be teachers at the knitting workshop
  • people who may like to be students at the knitting workshop
  • people who like getting involved in community projects
  • people who like contributing ideas
  • people who knit socks
  • people who knit
  • people.

Remember, for the planning meeting …

Wednesday, 3 November, 5-6pm, at Morris and Sons, Level 1, 234 Collins Street, Melbourne.

If you can’t attend the meeting and you want to be involved in the project, that’s excellent too.  Just contact me by email, Twitter or Ravelry.

Email: peopleofthesock [at] gmail [dot] com
Twitter: @sockppl
Ravelry: solidgold

These obscure and unobscure objects of desire

Dearest iPhone, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

No, no, maybe not.  Too much like another hymn to Apple and its tiresome CEO.  Too much fetishization of the gadget, not enough genuine delight.

So, forthwith, genuine delight.

The iPhone is the handiest thing I own.  It knows what I want to do before I do, it never makes me read the f – - king manual and it takes photos like these, turning a simple weeknight dinner at a friend’s house into an artistic event.

Of course, it helps if said friend has lovely, obscure objects to share.  For example, what do you think this is?

And how about this?

Or this?

And what about this?

Here’s a hint or two.  The top three concern knitting, the bottom one, playing.  All are made from bakelite.  Answers in an update tomorrow.

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The novel in 11 days

The contrast between Nabokov and Georges Simenon as novelists is about as great as it can get, short of caricature.  Nabokov and Hemingway, for example, would be caricature.  Possibly, Hemingway and Hemingway is caricature.

Nabokov and Simenon, however, are still within coo-ee of each other, though their results and methods were very different, as was their congeniality as interview subjects.  In his interview with The Paris Review in 1967 Nabokov is the nightmare subject – arch, facetious, overweening — Simenon, on the other hand, is forthcoming and transparent.

Georges Simenon (1903-1989) is most famous for the Inspector Maigret detective novels, novels he churned out by the dozen.  What’s less well-known about Simenon — at least until the recent reawakening of interest led by the writer, John Banville, and the New York Review Books republication of some of his oeuvre — is that he also wrote many “serious” novels which are virtuoso lessons in that magical ingredient of any artwork: atmosphere.

What he says about atmosphere in The Paris Review interview is fascinating.  He reveals it is central to his very method.  What’s also fascinating is that he cheerfully volunteers exact details about this method, a method that resulted in 550 million copies of his work being in print today. (1)

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At any time, Simenon says, he has two or three themes in his mind.  They’re not things that “might serve for a novel”, rather, “they are things about which I worry.”  Two days before the writing is to begin – intriguing, this precision — a couple of things happen.  First, he “finds” some atmosphere.

Today there is a little sunshine here. I might remember such-and-such a spring, maybe in some small Italian town, or some place in the French provinces or in Arizona … and then, little by little, a small world will come into my mind, with a few characters.

Second, he consciously takes up one of the “themes” that has been circulating in his mind, and then this theme or idea “will come and stick around [the characters]”:

They will have the same problem I have in my mind myself.  And the problem – with those people – will give me the novel.

Immediately after — “because as soon as I have the beginning I can’t bear it very long” – Simenon would take an envelope, a telephone book and a town map.  On the envelope he’d put the names of the characters, their ages, their families; the telephone book he’d mine for names; and with the map, he’d “see exactly where things happen.”  Then two days later, in every case, he’d begin writing.

Not only is he precise about the interval before starting, the whole production runs to a suicidal timetable.

After I have started a novel I write a chapter each day, without ever missing a day.  Because it is a strain, I have to keep pace with the novel.  If, for example, I am ill for forty-eight hours, I have to throw away the previous chapters.  And I never return to that novel.

At the end of 11 days – the limit of his endurance – he’d have his book.

This was the method by which Simenon created scores and scores of novels, both the Inspector Maigrets, and the serious novels, the two forms of writing he calls his “non-commercial” writing.  His “commercial writing”, a thing of the past by this stage in his life, were the “stories for magazines and things of that kind” that he wrote to earn his living in the beginning.

Simenon is particularly interesting when he distinguishes between the non-commercial and the commercial writing.  In fact, he makes the same distinction between the two I was groping towards in distinguishing between writing and blogging, and he makes it on similar grounds.

For him, commercial work – “I didn’t call it writing” – is that which is done “for such-and-such a public or for a certain kind of publication or for a particular collection.”  Commercial works can be very poor or very good, even wonderful,

but very seldom can they be works of art, because a work of art can’t be done for the purpose of pleasing a certain group of readers.

And when the interviewer asks in what way would this show up, Simenon answers pithily,

in the concessions.

The interviewer asks, “To the idea that life is orderly and sweet, for example?”

But Simenon is too toughminded for such pussyfooting.  He answers:

And the view of morals.  Maybe that is the most important.  You can’t write anything commercial without accepting some code.  There is always a code …

Funny how this business of writing always comes back to morality.  It was the very first question Nabokov was asked, and here it is again, raised this time by the interviewee.

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Simenon was blessed in his interviewer, a man called Carvel Collins.  Unlike Nabokov’s all-too-evident Gold, Collins is not obsequious or obstrusive.  In fact, one of the most satisfying things about the interview is a non-question, a question that wasn’t asked: Mr Simenon: what drives your faintly pathological work rate?

In asking it, Collins would have received an answer trimmed to fit an answer-like space.  In not asking it, he elicits a stimulating picture of a man engaged on a grand and never-ending journey of problem-solving and “problem-finding”, as Richard Sennett, the sociologist, so happily describes the general practice of craft.

It’s an image, this “craftsman” one, that Simenon would own with gladness:

I am an artisan; I need to work with my hands.  I would like to carve my novel in a piece of wood.  My characters – I would like to have them heavier, more three-dimensional.  And I would like to make a man so that everybody, looking at him, would find his own problems in this man.

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Notes

1. Wikipedia

Images: Simenon, courtesy of Wikipedia (top)

People of the sock

Last year I started a community project called A Walk in the Park. The project was about having pedestrian crossings installed at six locations in my local neighbourhood to encourage people to give up some of their car trips and start walking.  The project was a great success: we got our local Council to sit up and take notice, we created a community of people committed to the neighbourhood, we contributed to the just-launched Pedestrian Strategy for Victoria and built all kinds of links between organisations, government and residents. Even today, 18 months after the key rally, I still get enquiries and encouragement from people interested in the project.

Now it’s time to start another community project and I’ve got a beauty in mind. It’s going to be called People of the Sock and it’s about bringing together sock knitters and people who are homeless (I dislike the term “homeless people”; people aren’t their housing situation). The project is to hold a sock knitting workshop and create 100 pairs of socks which are then distributed to the people who sleep near the Princes Bridge at Southbank.

The project is dedicated to my lady of the toadstool who gave me the clue, and to my father.

My lady of the toadstool told me she knits socks for Father Chris Riley in Sydney who distributes them to people who are homeless. They are particularly valued because socks (and scarves) are both warm and easily portable.  As my lady explained, when not wearing the socks, a person who is homeless can easily stuff them in their pocket for the day, unlike the gift of a blanket which the person has to carry around for the day or hide somewhere.

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I have no idea how the project is going to happen, but it could look like the following …

The workshop is late November in a place like a public garden with a big video screen.  Hey, Federation Square just popped into my mind!  Perfect.

We invite everyone who wants to learn to knit socks, including people who are homeless.  They know about the event because we’ve had a story published in The Big Issue and The Age and we’ve been on radio talking about it.  We have 20 to 25 experienced sock knitters working the crowd of wannabe knitters, casting on for people, teaching them how to hold the 4 needles, easing them over those painful first few rows.  On the screen we have the most famous sock knitter in the world, Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, aka the Yarn Harlot, beamed in from her home in Canada.  She’s cracking jokes, talking about beer and sharing secrets.  From time to time, she shares the screen with the sock pattern beamed in from the depths of my knitting bag, and a supremely competent and entertaining compere ties the whole lot together.

All the sock yarn has been donated by Opal in Germany or Heirloom in Italy, and Knit Picks has donated all the double-pointed needles, size 2.75mm.

Now here’s the tricky bit which I can’t even envisage. Knitting socks takes time and it takes navigation of the heel.  We can teach people to start a sock and knit it for an hour or so, but at that point they won’t be up to the heel.  So how do we teach them to start a sock, knit a sock and turn a heel — a sequence that would take a day or two of normal, interrupted knitting — in one session?

Anyway, someone else will work that out.

A few weeks after the knitting workshop — say, mid December — we gather together again and distribute the socks to the people by the river. Just in time for Christmas.

The possibility of the project is spreading the joy of making.

What do you think, dear uncrazy readers?  Could it work?

PS. My toes don’t really look like that. They’re usually beautifully pedicured.  Yarn is Heirloom’s Jigsaw which knits up tight and smooth after a splitty start. 

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