Category Archives: Craftwork

The novel in 11 days

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16

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)

*****

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.

*****

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.

*****

Notes

1. Wikipedia

Images: Simenon, courtesy of Wikipedia (top)

People of the sock

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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.

*****

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. 

*****

Knitting for waiting and grieving

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I’ve never really doubted the value of knitting.  But if I had, going through Dad’s death would have dispelled the doubt forever.

When I flew up to Sydney to the hospital I took a half-finished sock and one ball of Opal sock wool.  And during the long days by his bed, in waiting rooms and the all-too-familiar cafe my mother and me knitted.

I kept on with my sock, and she, coming back to knitting after many years away doing other crafts, started on the matching sock.  I used the yarn from the outside of the ball; she used the yarn from the inside of the ball.  And this one ball of pink and orange sock wool kept us going for days.  Through awful stress and worry, right up to the morning of his death when we sat in the intensive care waiting room at 5am as the machines were turned off.

The hospital too had no doubts about the value of knitting because the waiting room had its own basket of wool and needles with an invitation to others stuck in that horrid limbo to start a “square”.

Neither did the old woman we encountered in a walk round the hospital parking area one day, sitting on her zimmer frame contraption knitting away like queen of all she surveyed.

I’m 80, how old are you, dear?

she asked peering at my mother, as if anyone not yet 80, and most especially anyone not knitting, was not to be taken seriously.  “I never go anywhere without my knitting,” she confided, before leaping off her toadstool to uncover her stash under the seat and telling us the pattern of the squares she was knitting for Africa.

What is it about knitting, especially in hospitals?

Readers may have their own ideas, and if you do I’d love to hear them.  For mine, it’s about the simple, rhythmic movement; the repetition; the tiny sense of accomplishment at the end of a row; and the lulling, affirming effect of this on the spirit.

As my mother said,

I don’t know how I would have got through it without the knitting.

*****

Thank you to all for your messages on my father’s death.  I appreciated them very much.

A short cultural history in yarn

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Some people attribute the earliest examples of knitting to Christian Coptics in Egypt in the 3rd or 4th centuries; others consider the earliest knitters to be Muslims working for royal families in Christian Spain in the 13th century. (note 1)

Partly, it depends on whether you consider items like those below to be knitted. They are socks from the 3rd or 4th century, designed to be worn with sandals. They were excavated in Egypt and are now part of the collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A) in London.

They were made by the process called nålebinding. Technically, nålebinding is regarded as a forerunner of knitting because it uses only one needle, and involves knotting the yarn rather than looping it. Still, compare the heel section of this ancient sock to the heel section of the sock I’m knitting at the moment and tell me what’s different.

Whenever knitting started, it was roaring along by the doublet-wearing age of Elizabethan England.  With all those bare legs shooting out of short trunks, knitting must have been widespread and essential. Elizabeth I was a fan of knitted stockings, but only if they were made of silk, not wool.  The ones below — dating from the 1640s, and also held by the V&A — are beautiful enough to have belonged to the glorious monarch herself.  For it’s rumoured that:

Stockings [belonging] to her still exist, demonstrating the high quality of the items specifically knitted for her. (2)

Of course, this was long before the Industrial Revolution, and all knitting was done by hand, and mostly by men.  In the 1400s in Europe knitting guilds were established which were “exclusively male and with structured apprenticeship systems.” (3) Even a shepherd could knit while watching his flock.

Outside the guilds, “knitting schools were established as a way of providing an income to the poor.” (4)  And if the income of the poor depended on their output, then speed and efficiency were of the essence.

According to the wonderful Judith, the woman who runs the Craft Clinic at Morris and Sons, this meant the style of knitting they used would have been quite different to the one I use, for example.  The hands would have been held low and unobstrusive, with a ruthless economy of movement. This economy of movement would have applied regardless of whether the knitter was using the “English style” or the “Continental style.”

Throwing vs Picking

English style, also called “throwing,” is where the yarn is held in the right hand and it moves back and forth when wrapping the yarn around the needle.  Beginners tend to use English style with their right hand on top of the needle; more experienced knitters use English style with their hand underneath the needle. Continental style, also called “picking,” is where the yarn is held in the left hand, and the right hand, on top of the needle, does very little. Compared to English style, Continental style is deadly. Utterly pragmatic, silent, swift.

Judith’s version of English style is a remnant of this earlier imperative to economy and, no doubt, the Continental style in which she first learnt knitting in her native South Africa.  Sitting side by side with Judith, my style in comparison could be called the English Gothic.  It’s the style that evolved, Judith says, around the end of the 19th century in England with the reign of Queen Victoria and the rise of parlour pastimes for women.

In this version of English style, the yarn is held in the right hand as with all English styles, but unlike Judith’s English style, the whole hand — minus the little finger, which is fetchingly cocked so as to be “more ladylike” — moves forward and back.  It’s a very showy style, and as profligate of movement as befitted Victorian ladies wanting to demonstrate their leisure.

Despite the name, and the fact that prior to Victorian times there were more economical versions of the English style, the Continental style must also have been used to some extent in England.  Because, according to Wikipedia, Continental style fell out of favour in English-speaking countries with the advent of the world wars as it was associated with Germany.

It’s only recently that Continental style has been re-introduced to the US, for example.  With Judith’s help, I’m giving it a go too.

***

Notes

1. Wikipedia

2. Wikipedia

3. Knit a Square

4. Wikipedia

From baked beans to luminaire

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5

Still lingering on the attractions of the portrait, so I thought I’d have a go myself.  I’ve selected one of my unsuspecting friends, Jan, as the first guinea pig.

Meet my friend, Jan Flook, industrial designer, ranconteur and king of the rubbish dump.  Jan is passionate about transforming what other people call rubbish into high-end art pieces.  This is one of his latest creations: a light fixture made for the presentation of the 2010 National Excellence Awards of the Illuminating Engineering Society, and all from the lids of baked bean tins.

While he usually prefers to use only found rubbish, for this piece he supplemented some naturally-occurring tins, as it were, with new unused tins.  Even a man devoted to his craft needs some variety in his diet.

*****

Since the age of seven when he built a bicycle from bits of scrap, Jan’s been fired by the possibilities of used objects.  Used objects call to him and move him in a way new objects do not.  And he believes he’s not alone; many of us are buying new objects that don’t call to us either.

One aspect of recycled materials that appeals to Jan is the energy already embodied in it.  He wants to salute that energy, and shepherd it into something new.  He thinks of himself as a “mechanic,” someone who’s finding performance, or refreshing and tuning what’s already there.  This view contrasts with that of many manufacturers who look on recycled materials as simply another source of raw material with which to start the whole manufacturing cycle again.

A second aspect of recycled materials is that they can provide greater scope for originality, paradoxically, than raw materials.

Many artists have pointed to this phenomenon, what we might call the “freedom through restriction” effect.  Poets, for example, use the restriction of certain traditional forms of composition (eg, sonnet, haiku) and rhythm (iambic pentameter) to create something that would not have been possible with an entirely blank slate.  In Jan’s case, the found object’s materiality gives him something to respect and work with; to act, in a way, as a sort of collaborator.

*****

Traditionally, Jan says, there’s been a big divide in the field of industrial design.  On leaving design school, one is obliged to choose between car design or product design, and thereafter, the die is pretty much cast.  Those in car design stay in car design, those in product design, in product design.  So Jan is unusual in having worked in car design and product design.  Not many young design graduates, however, could have had his combination of naïvety and bravado.

He tells the story of how he presented himself one day in the early 90s, fresh out of design school, to the Head of Car Styling at Alfa Romeo in Turin, on the slightest of distant connections.  He had a portfolio of three photos and nothing else.  What’s more, one of them was a humble wooden bowl.

Don’t look at the wood,

he confided to the Head as he passed over the portfolio.

So dazed was the Head at how he’d ended up trapped with this apparently lunatic young New Zealander, he could only ask weakly from time to time, “Do you know what we actually do here?”  Jan got the job, of course, and ended up working in car designers’ heaven.

A few years later he again leapt the divide when he used his patented job-seeking method to wear down the resistance of Bruce Fifield, the US head of the prestigious Milan design consultancy, Design Continuum.  Jan describes how he “hounded” Fifield to give him a start.  Fifield eventually bowed to the inevitable, and Jan turned up for his first day as Product Designer.  When describing his duties, Fifield asked idly,

Of course, you’re proficient on the Mac …

To which Jan replied, “Well, how hard can it be, my Dad’s got a Mac …”

Fifield must have wondered, just like the Alfa Head, how this had come to pass.

But Jan rewarded his trust and within six months had mastered Italian – which, of course, he hadn’t known either – had mastered all the design programs, and had designed some award-winning products.

*****

Since he returned to the Antipodes and set up in Australia, Jan has been using his design skills in the field of lighting, or luminaire, as it is officially known.  Luminaire, with its suggestion of state change – dark to light, flat glass to faceted crystal – no doubt appeals to the alchemist in him.  He mostly designs luxury luminaire for clients such as large corporations, hotels and exhibitions, though as his baked bean tin creation shows, there’s always room for the anti-luxe too.

*****

Images: courtesy of Jan Flook

To contact Jan, email him on jdotflook at iinetdotnetdotau



The yellow bathmat

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Finally, I finished the yellow bathmat. Not quite before the Olympic flame went out, but soon after. And after consulting the IKOC (International Knitting Olympic Committee), aka the Yarn Harlot, Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, I decided I did qualify for one of these.

As Stephanie said:

I’m proud of everyone who gave it a shot and fell short,  whether you finished or not you are now the sort of person who tries a challenge. I think (and I’m not just saying this because I’m that sort of person) that people who sign up for life have a way better ride.

And what’s more, as she also said, the “beautiful gold medal” designed by the “esteemed Mr Franklin Habit” …

has a vaguely naked man on it which was frankly, more than I had hoped for.

Over 4,000 knitters participated in the Knitting Olympics.  Some, like Stephanie (well, actually, maybe only she), completed something mind-bogglingly complex.  As befits a knitter of international fame, it was the phenomenally technical fair isle sweater she’s modelling below.

During the Oympics she managed to run the challenge, speak on radio about it, blog about it, do it and even steek into the bargain.  Steeking is the arcane knitting procedure whereby neckholes and armholes are cut with scissors.  Purely on her ability to do this without fainting, I’d award her a degree of difficulty of 9.999.

In comparison, my yellow bathmat had a degree of difficulty of about 0.85.  Yet, I reckon it’s a 9.2 for usefulness and a round 10 for rusticity.

*****

Not working, knitting

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It’s 1:00pm on Monday afternoon and instead of working I’m knitting. Because the closing ceremony of the Vancouver Olympics is only hours away and the border of my putative bathmat needs to be twice as wide before the flame is out.

Trying not to brood on the hours I lost last night having to rip back several rows when I got mesmerised and merrily kept K1-ing when I should have been P1-ing.  Back soon. I hope.

Going for (solid) gold

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My favourite famous knitter and Canadian citizen, the Yarn Harlot (aka Stephanie Pearl-McPhee), has convened the second Knitting Olympics and I’m competing. 

The challenge?

You must cast on a project during the Opening Ceremonies of the Winter Olympics, Friday, February 12, 2010 and finish before the Olympic flame goes out Sunday, February 28. That’s 17 days.

I’ve taken the pledge …

I, a knitter of able hands and quick wits, to hereby swear that over the course of these Olympics I will uphold the highest standard of knitterly excellence.

I will be deft of hand and sure of pattern, I will overcome troubles of yarn overs and misplaced decreases. I will use the gifts of intelligence and persistence (as well as caffeine and chocolate) and I will execute my art to the highest form, carrying with me the hope for excellence known to every knitter.

I strive to win. To do my best, and to approach the needles with my own best effort in mind, without comparing myself to my fellow knitters, for they have challenges unique to them.

While I engage in this pursuit of excellence and my own personal, individual best, I also swear that I will continue to engage with my family in conversation, care for my pets, speak kindly with those who would ask me to do something other than knit …

I’ve chosen my triple lutz, the Simple Cotton Bath Mat by Purl Bee in Rowan’s Handknit Cotton (first lutz shown above). 

And along with 2,000 (!) other knitters, I’m competing for the honour of displaying this medal on my blog:


***** 

Needles on a plane

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On Christmas Eve, Australian knitters got the Christmas present they’d been waiting for.  The Australian Government finally removed knitting needles from the list of items prohibited on a plane.

It’s been a sore point for many years that famous knitters in North America like Stephanie Pearl McPhee could swan on to a plane with an armoury of steel and bamboo implements.  While we in the Antipodes were having a little cry at check-in for all the wasted hours ahead when obliged to relinquish our project to the hold.  How was the heel going to get turned down there?

Knitters would scheme endlessly at ways to outwit the authorities.  Which just goes to show they’d got us knitters exactly right: we were not to be trusted. 

One woman on a blog speculated about using a bamboo circular to hold her hair in a bun while getting past the x-ray machine.  Which was clever, yes, and probably could have worked, only I did wonder a tad how she was going to explain the woolly mess on her tray table on the “final rubbish pick-up.”

And then — would you believe it? — we Australian knitters had been celebrating for a mere 24 hours when Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab allegedly tried to blow up a US plane with chemicals in his underpants.  We’ve all been vwerry vwerry quiet ever since lest the Australian Government again put 2 and 2 together and get 5: knitters + Australian planes = terrorists in the US.

*****

Of all the needles worth getting caught for smuggling on to a plane it’d be my Clover 4mms made in Japan from the finest bamboo, or the acknowledged Rolls Royce of knitting needles, my 5mm Addi Turbo circular, made in Germany from nickel-plated brass.

The Clovers are as pleasing to look at as they are to use.  They’re long and light and strong with – really there’s no other way to say it — the most sweetly shaped knobs at the end.  The Addi Turbos claim to be the fastest in the business and they are.  Hollow little torpedoes, they move the yarn smoothly and silkily from one point to the other with a lovely airy click.

Both of them are shown in the picture, along with my unloved Casein needles and my current project.  The Caseins are the white ones and that’s because they’re made of milk.  Yes, milk.  Don’t ask me how a milk protein – Casein – ends up as a stick but it does.  They’re probably designed to imitate the antique needles made of ivory, yet given ivory was the ultimate covetable material I can only think it’s a rather poor imitation.  Because the Casein feels plasticky, and too cool and inert to my hand.

My current project is, wonders, not a sock.  It’s a short cardi-bolero-thingy from a Jo Sharp pattern.  This one’s definitely a “product” knit, not a “process” one.  Can’t say why but it’s boring to knit.  Only way I’ll be smuggling it on a plane is by wearing it.

*****

Images: Jo Sharp (top); by me (bottom)

Socks and jocks

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Well, the car’s half packed, the wine’s chilling, the presents are wrapped and the socks knitted.  Here’s the pair I showed you before, all ready for my brother (no need to worry about spoiling surprises; no-one from my family and few of my friends read this blog).

My brother’s not usually on a first name basis with yellow (I was thinking yellow would give the illusion of warmth when he was in New York for the northern winter, only he went and changed plans on me, and now he’s back under the too-yellow sun of Sydney), yet they’re so his era.

Then there’s this pair for my friend, Jane.

And this which I received from my friend of over 30 years, Theresa: a “knit one, sip one” coffee mug.

*****

Thank you to all who’ve read my blog this year and commented and encouraged me.  It really does make a difference when I’m wondering what’s the point, or when I feel as if I’ve got nothing to say. Thank you in particular to my three star commentors:

  • the redoubtable Mr Phillip S Phogg, Esq,  a truer and more stalwart commentor a blogger never had; Phoggy, your curiosity, wide knowledge and thoughtfulness have greatly enriched this blog
  • the host with the mostest and best-selling author, Mr Andreas Kluth; Andreas, your warm and enquiring mind is a pleasure to be in
  • my good friend, Mulberry; dear R, your grace and empathy are an inspiration to me.

May you and all my readers have a happy Christmas, and a year of joy and satisfaction. SGxx