thirty-three: ripping the work back
There is an upside to Twitter melting slightly; okay, a couple upsides, but I digress. I am on Mastodon now, slightly grudgingly at leahbobet@mstdn.ca, and tiptoeing through it, deciding what I want it to be in my life. Jury's still out on that.
But this month, a lot of the shouting and noise that tended to make Twitter unlivable faded back for a few weeks, and things I actually wanted to see -- things that used to get drowned out -- surfaced again, sort of like drought marks in rivers, but in a good way. And one of them was the Ursula K. Le Guin quotebot.
It's a live improver, having Le Guin show up unbidden in your day, even if they're a small selection of quotes on a cycle. The one I keep stopping at is the one from The Dispossessed about the proper function of a person, which is to unbuild walls.
pragmatic unbuilding
It's been a slow month on the knitting front, mostly because I spent a month working on a raglan sweater (lovely yarn, wool-silk, in a soft dusty rose I've been craving this fall) and once I had everything but the last sleeve done--it was just undeniably, incontrovertibly way too big. Like, I couldn't even squint and call it passable. I was swimming in the thing, even though the base sizing had said that size was right.
There is literally no point in doing handknits that don't fit. The whole draw of handknitted clothing is that it's not sized for abstracts or machines, but for you, the real body you live in. The process has always been its own reward for me: I like making stuff with my hands (almost more than I like using the things afterward, perennial problem), and I find the repetition and visible progress deeply soothing, but the product is supposed to be an act of meeting your own needs. So if it doesn't? Well. No point, hm?
So I sat in my feelings about it for a few days -- I hate wasting work -- and then picked the knot on the sleeve, pulled the yarn out a bit, and cast it on again two sizes smaller: ravel/unravel/reravel.
For most of the month I've been reknitting it in the smaller size, complete with the fussy process of trying it on every seven or fourteen rows (transfer half the stitches to another circular needle, make sure stitches don't drop while I'm taking it off again, repair the ones that inevitably do). The thing is, now? It looks good. It's trim and fitted, and working how it's supposed to -- enough that the sheer pleasure of seeing it work is eating away the defeat and irritation of having to rip it back and do it twice. And I think I'm learning something significant about construction, and how to measure and adjust patterns for the body I actually have, which has always been a barrier for sweater-knitting.
Is this obnoxiously like a life lesson? Yes. I sort of hate how much everything is a process of learning from failure right now. It is the most annoying thing on Earth to live in a society where everything that works out eventually is a functional metaphor for all the shit that won't work, and I'd love a few easy wins and some learning from success and treats and nice roast chickens. But: yeah. I regret to inform that I have figured out things from messing up, frogging, and reknitting the damn sweater.
pragmatic unbuilding pt ii
Similar strategies are working for novel drafting, which seems to have finally finished switching the mental gear that needed switching (I've figured out a few things about why I get stuck, too, interesting in their own right; there might be an essay in it). Even though this is still technically a first draft (I'm pretty sure I'm mille-feuilleing about three drafts into one) there's an element of ripping back to it, in the sense that -- I've had to pull back my own impression of the work. Unpick what I thought I was doing, and look at the whole thing another way. It wasn't wrong, what I thought I was doing. Just that bit's done now; time to do another bit.
It's humbling, in that it gives a glimpse of the actual size of ideas. Ideas are big! We think they're small but that's because we're standing on accreted mountains of context! We don't count the road we walked already! It's those switch points where we get a look at the scale of the thing. So I'm trying to be generally forgiving about the tangled, delicate progress thus far, when I look through half a dozen yet-unfinished files, and the layers of notes I've made on them; the lists of histories and ideas I need to understand to speak the way I want to be speaking. I may be underestimating the difficulty of the thoughts I'm trying to think into existence. I might be underestimating how much work it is to think a complex thought awake.
(We might be underestimating how much work it is for whole societies to think complex thoughts awake.)
things to read
New poem sale! 'white squirrel season again' is going to appear in the next issue of intersectional feminist journal Canthius. It's about the action of regrowth, and local heroes will be able to tell from the title that it's a very Toronto poem. I did the proofs on Monday; it should be out around January.
I found out last week that "fertile week" is going to be one of Reckoning Press's nominations for this year's Pushcart Prize. I know it's debatable if this is even a milestone; every nominating publication throws in five or six names, and only about forty make it into the anthology, so it's a bit of a wide field every year. But this is the first year since 2007 I've had one, and that means -- it's the first year since I started making poetry a deliberate practice, instead of the general messing about I was doing in my early/mid-twenties. It turns out recognition for things you did on purpose is much better than for things you fell into ass-first. So the piece is live in Reckoning: Our Beautiful Reward, and we'll see what happens next. I'm not expecting to win. But stranger things, y'know?
Also, on the non-fiction front: Sometime early next year, I'll be CAROUSEL Magazine's Reviewer in Residence. We're still working the details, but it'll involve two capsule reviews and one longform, inside a month. News when I've got it! And if there's something you think really ought to be reviewed, let me know?
Brief, but I owed you a brief one. One more issue coming before the end of the year: roundups, some holiday food, and the 2022 closing thoughts.
But this month, a lot of the shouting and noise that tended to make Twitter unlivable faded back for a few weeks, and things I actually wanted to see -- things that used to get drowned out -- surfaced again, sort of like drought marks in rivers, but in a good way. And one of them was the Ursula K. Le Guin quotebot.
It's a live improver, having Le Guin show up unbidden in your day, even if they're a small selection of quotes on a cycle. The one I keep stopping at is the one from The Dispossessed about the proper function of a person, which is to unbuild walls.
pragmatic unbuilding
It's been a slow month on the knitting front, mostly because I spent a month working on a raglan sweater (lovely yarn, wool-silk, in a soft dusty rose I've been craving this fall) and once I had everything but the last sleeve done--it was just undeniably, incontrovertibly way too big. Like, I couldn't even squint and call it passable. I was swimming in the thing, even though the base sizing had said that size was right.
There is literally no point in doing handknits that don't fit. The whole draw of handknitted clothing is that it's not sized for abstracts or machines, but for you, the real body you live in. The process has always been its own reward for me: I like making stuff with my hands (almost more than I like using the things afterward, perennial problem), and I find the repetition and visible progress deeply soothing, but the product is supposed to be an act of meeting your own needs. So if it doesn't? Well. No point, hm?
So I sat in my feelings about it for a few days -- I hate wasting work -- and then picked the knot on the sleeve, pulled the yarn out a bit, and cast it on again two sizes smaller: ravel/unravel/reravel.
For most of the month I've been reknitting it in the smaller size, complete with the fussy process of trying it on every seven or fourteen rows (transfer half the stitches to another circular needle, make sure stitches don't drop while I'm taking it off again, repair the ones that inevitably do). The thing is, now? It looks good. It's trim and fitted, and working how it's supposed to -- enough that the sheer pleasure of seeing it work is eating away the defeat and irritation of having to rip it back and do it twice. And I think I'm learning something significant about construction, and how to measure and adjust patterns for the body I actually have, which has always been a barrier for sweater-knitting.
Is this obnoxiously like a life lesson? Yes. I sort of hate how much everything is a process of learning from failure right now. It is the most annoying thing on Earth to live in a society where everything that works out eventually is a functional metaphor for all the shit that won't work, and I'd love a few easy wins and some learning from success and treats and nice roast chickens. But: yeah. I regret to inform that I have figured out things from messing up, frogging, and reknitting the damn sweater.
pragmatic unbuilding pt ii
Similar strategies are working for novel drafting, which seems to have finally finished switching the mental gear that needed switching (I've figured out a few things about why I get stuck, too, interesting in their own right; there might be an essay in it). Even though this is still technically a first draft (I'm pretty sure I'm mille-feuilleing about three drafts into one) there's an element of ripping back to it, in the sense that -- I've had to pull back my own impression of the work. Unpick what I thought I was doing, and look at the whole thing another way. It wasn't wrong, what I thought I was doing. Just that bit's done now; time to do another bit.
It's humbling, in that it gives a glimpse of the actual size of ideas. Ideas are big! We think they're small but that's because we're standing on accreted mountains of context! We don't count the road we walked already! It's those switch points where we get a look at the scale of the thing. So I'm trying to be generally forgiving about the tangled, delicate progress thus far, when I look through half a dozen yet-unfinished files, and the layers of notes I've made on them; the lists of histories and ideas I need to understand to speak the way I want to be speaking. I may be underestimating the difficulty of the thoughts I'm trying to think into existence. I might be underestimating how much work it is to think a complex thought awake.
(We might be underestimating how much work it is for whole societies to think complex thoughts awake.)
things to read
New poem sale! 'white squirrel season again' is going to appear in the next issue of intersectional feminist journal Canthius. It's about the action of regrowth, and local heroes will be able to tell from the title that it's a very Toronto poem. I did the proofs on Monday; it should be out around January.
I found out last week that "fertile week" is going to be one of Reckoning Press's nominations for this year's Pushcart Prize. I know it's debatable if this is even a milestone; every nominating publication throws in five or six names, and only about forty make it into the anthology, so it's a bit of a wide field every year. But this is the first year since 2007 I've had one, and that means -- it's the first year since I started making poetry a deliberate practice, instead of the general messing about I was doing in my early/mid-twenties. It turns out recognition for things you did on purpose is much better than for things you fell into ass-first. So the piece is live in Reckoning: Our Beautiful Reward, and we'll see what happens next. I'm not expecting to win. But stranger things, y'know?
Also, on the non-fiction front: Sometime early next year, I'll be CAROUSEL Magazine's Reviewer in Residence. We're still working the details, but it'll involve two capsule reviews and one longform, inside a month. News when I've got it! And if there's something you think really ought to be reviewed, let me know?
***
Brief, but I owed you a brief one. One more issue coming before the end of the year: roundups, some holiday food, and the 2022 closing thoughts.
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