Round 1

I have a really fierce determination when it comes to learning new knitting styles. I don't consider this trait to be very characteristic of my attitude about other things in my life and I'm not sure why that is exactly. It may be that creating things is so important to me that I feel like a total loser if I can't learn how to make something new at least once a year. Learning to knit was very intimidating for me and the challenge of learning it made me really angry but it wasn't the knitting itself that pissed me off. It was me. It was my own inner blockages that angered me, my own impatience with myself. Because I knew I would get it. In fact for me, I just knew I had to.

In learning to knit in the round last night I faced the same old challenges. Every once in a while I get it in my head to do some sort of craft that I see incredibly talented people (mostly my flickr contacts) churning out on a daily basis. I get this bug! I can do that! And it becomes like a madness. I have to do it or I will become very depressed and disappointed with myself. I know that's not cool but it's how I approach it. But lately I have tried a slightly new approach so as not to be so hard on myself if things don't turn out "perfect." I tell myself that even if it's not perfect on the first try (I like to learn really quickly. It's crazy)I'm still making progress as long as I don't give up. There are steps to everything and you have to appreciate the steps as well a the outcome, because the outcome is only as good as the care you take with each step towards the progress you make. Yeah, I am now philosophizing about knitting.

So I started out with a circular knitting because I thought, "Oh knitting in a circle will make a seamless cirle! Easy!" I was wrong. But I also bought a set of five double pointed needles because I know that this is also another method I've seen used to knit in the round and I didn't want to take any chances in case I couldn't pick up the circular right away. I was right.

I found a really good youtube tutorial right away but in my lack of patience I still kept searching for others that would break this method down step by every little step. What that did was drive me nuts because there must be at least five different ways that people have to start knitting in the round. Finally I came back to this one. I knew that if I could just understand that magic moment when the two ends of yarn get joined in the circle, the rest would be relatively easy, just a repetition of the stitch round and round. This took a lot of pausing of the video and guess work based on my part using my own accumulated knowledge about the knitting in general. I had to go someplace quiet with the tutorial, in my bedroom and away from the television to focus. When I finally got it I laughed out loud or rather laughter tumbled out from inside me. The projected possibilities are what bring me so much joy.

Roundness! Sleeves! Socks! Hats! Ahhhhhh!!!! Well my first project is going to be a soft slouchy cowl scarf. I can remember looking at one a few years ago on a mannequin at Knitty City and never having imagined I could ever make one but loving the look of it so much. God! I might even take a try my hand at making a poncho one day! I LOOOVE PONCHOS! Okay, let's not get ahead of ourselves! LOL! I need to learn patterns if I'm going to get into all of that that and I am not a fan of patterns. But hey, maybe I'll surprise myself again! We'll see!

The Black Power Mixtapes

My bigot supervisor who fancies herself an ally of equality, feminism and civil rights shared this documentary with me this morning. She saw it this weekend and said she just loved it. *Sigh*

I doubt that anything in this documentary made nary a dent in that brain of hers but I am black, female, wearing my hair natural and starting my locks which always signals revolution to white people so I'm guessing her morning share was somehow related. Who am I kidding? It was directly related! But I have to say thank you to her after all! It looks great!

Now I'd like to share it with you! Happy Monday!!

1Q84

I'm just going to say right now that I know this novel is not going to be all it's being hyped to be but as a faithful, and literature thirsty Murukami fan I'm going to read it anyway. I'd never known they could make a trailer for a book before but I guess anything can be made into a trailer right? We've got the format embedded in our DNA by now. I like how they used they strange ominous music from his website. Clever choice. I feel a film may be coming on. I just hope he doesn't sell out too hard.



"Murakami is like a magician who explains what he's doing as he performs the trick and still makes you believe he has supernatural powers . . . But while anyone can tell a story that resembles a dream, it's the rare artist, like this one, who can make us feel that we are dreaming it ourselves."
—The New York Times Book Review

Murakami's Coming!

"Everybody, including me, has the terribly personal sense that Murakami is burrowing into their minds and writing just for them."
-Jay Rubin
"New Yorker" Interview

With Murakami's newest novel not due out here in the US until October, I've had to tide myself over reading some of his older novels which I have read several times before. I just finished "Sputnik Sweetheart" this weekend. It is translated by Phillip Gabriel, who is not my favorite of his English translators but there is a lot good stuff in this story. It just always feels very stitched together to me.  I remember parts of it like the story of the woman who gets stuck in Ferris wheel with a bird's eye of her apartment where she watched helplessly as her doppelganger gets willingly defiled by a man whose clear intent she's been trying to avoid. But I can  never remember how the story gets here or recall all the other narratives and stories in this novel as having any relation to each other, as a whole. It feels like a bunch of short stories thrown together.

In "Sputnik Sweetheart" as in most all his other novel, Murukami writes incredibly well about lonliness, isolation, dreams, death, music, sex and food. He writes fearlessly and irreverently but with great care. It's clear what is important. And his voice is unmistakably anti-authoritarian and yet also mistrusting of joining any group that would have him as a member Yes, it can be stifling. But he is unapologetic. And it is often this lack of a desire to apologize at least not to any external voice of judgment in his writing that I admire the most. It is often this voice both external and otherwise that blocks a steady flow of honest and/or brutal honesty for any writer.

Of course after listening to Jay Rubin's interview in the New Yorker on the challenges of translating Murakami and the fact that a translation means you're primarily reading the translators interpretation which is vastly different from the language being translated, has begun to make me wonder what is being lost! Is it even better straight from the Japanese? Well that's a pretty broad assumption but I'm sure there are many nuances that never make it through translation, which might add something to the work which we're never even aware of. Lord knows I think about that whenever I see a foreign movie with English subtitles. I can always tell when the subtitles are over simplifying dialogue which seems to have a lot more going than we can understand through this particular choice of English subtitling. This is why I admire the bilingual.

Well in the meantime I have also found the release of a short story titled, "Town of Cats" by Murakami in the New Yorker, which I believe is an excerpt from his new Orwell inspired novel, 19Q4. So I'll be reading that this week, trying to pick up some clues on what's to come.

How to make an overpriced Urban Outffitters necklace

How to make an overpriced Urban Outffitters necklace
Originally uploaded by Zanalee

Get a chain, any chain, that chain with the retro pendant you got from Forever 21 that everyone and their mom wore last summer. Find and chunky clip on earring from a thrift store or in your own home. Hang that earring on the chain.

There! That will be 30 dollars please!