Month: August 2019

STEP 7: Choice

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Making choices is exhausting. It is rewarding. It is power but also wearing. Like many things that matter, the creative process pays and pains.

Rebecca Solnit’s Men Explain Things to Me contains an essay about Virginia Woolf and uncertainty. The truth about wandering in the dark. In a journal entry of 1915 Woolf wrote: “The future is dark, which is the best thing the future can be, I think.” Certainty belongs to the past (and is not so very fixed there), but hope is what drives us toward the future. Solnit writes: “To me, the grounds for hope are simply that we don’t know what will happen next, and that the unlikely and unimaginable transpire quite regularly.”

My friend Madora Lawson is a creative person, as are many of my friends. Madora is my friend who made a career of her creativity as an interior designer. She emailed to tell me that a post where I revealed that I rarely used a pattern prompted her to knit without a pattern. See what she made!

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She cannot even remember how she made that dragon’s legs.

It works like that sometimes. We create something, make a series of choices in color and stitch and a dragon has toes!

The toes up top are from an aging walking group who took a weekend and learned to knit slippers from Madora. Each person had plenty of colors to choose from, stitches to try, closures. Being clever takes energy and courage. The reward is something fun lovely grand and strange.

Painting walls builder’s beige or gray is easy. Following decorator’s advice, copying a style. Even when it works, looks appealing and safe. Where’s the fun in that?

Creativity demands the courage to make another choice. The bright textile on the wall, the yellow button on a turquoise strap, the zig-zag dorsal fin, the peculiar combination of orange and electric blue mohair. It’s coming.

Who knows where one choice might lead? Solnit joined anti-nuclear activists in the late 1980s. They “did not exactly shut down the Nevada Test Site, our most overt goal, but inspired the people of Kazakhstan to shut down the Soviet Test Site in 1990. Totally unforeseen, totally unforeseeable.” It might argue for a certain recklessness, a measure of faith in accident and free choice.

In the mean time, I finished the central panel of BlueToo.

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Fifty-some batik fabrics, five hundred pieces, and going-on two thousand yards of thread. So far.

LOLITA

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Literary Hub has an article up: “The 50 Best One-Star Reviews of Lolita.” The first time I tried to read Lolita, I did not get past in the first pages. I went to Amazon and read all 147 reviews, which gives you an idea of how long ago that was. I found they fell into three general camps: people who objected to the immorality of the story, people who loved the writing, and pedophiles. Reviews were not reviewed as they are now. Men wrote how much the novel reassured them that they were not alone in their sexual relationships with children. “Man-Child Love” advocates and rapists rationalized their behavior through literature. You can see it in responses to the one-star reviews.*

That name Hummer Humbert gave Delores, a 12-year-old raped child, has found it’s way into general usage as the name, Lolita, for sexually aggressive young women is perhaps ironic. It is also a horrible abuse of power.

Some argue that Nabokov wanted to see just how detestable he could make a character and still find readers, but ultimately, there are many things we can do but should not do. There is such a thing as judgement.

Here are a few of the reviews and comments on Amazon:

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*Have a look at Edward S. just above. As a reader are you supposed to support HH’s obsession, or see past it as monstrous? I would like to think Nabakov was toying with his readers in much the same way that HH does with a child. It would be something if readers picked up on that, if they recognized how convincing evil can be. Well, friends, there are plenty of readers who fail to see beyond HH’s tale to feel shock that they have even temporarily sided with him.

Pedophiles inevitably find confirmation. They do not find HH monstrous, they find a kindred spirit. They can easily explain HH’s behavior. They are, after all, on his side.

STEP 6: Accident

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Above are a few of the forty-nine pieced square blocks laid out on the floor. The photo distorts them; they are each 8.5″ and carefully squared. So far I’ve used over sixty batik fabrics and cut over five hundred pieces of fabric. And this is only the center panel They will make a center panel 56″ x 56″ once they are stitched together, of an eighty-inch square quilt.

The second blue quilt was meant to be simple. I set specific, easy guidelines in order to piece it quickly and with a minimum of fuss. It’s that staring process, the decision-making at every cut and sewn seam. This color or that one, this way or that, rearrange and rethink the border? It was meant to be almost thoughtless but then the inevitable accidents. Most blocks were planned to be too large and I shave a quarter inch or as little as a sixteenth off the edges. A block might also too small or too dark or pushy or bland. I add another stripe or one going the wrong way, choose a different color or move the whole block to the other side of the quilt. Accident forces me to make decisions I might otherwise avoid, but accident has always served me as an artist. The writer Ron Carlson argues for something similar in writing fiction. Don’t allow serendipity to be cleaned out of writing. Let it flow. It is random chance that often hands us our finest work.

Decades ago, as a Metal Arts major, I was careless firing a base coat of enamel on square of copper sheet. The glass enamel color was called “Pigeon” a pale, perfectly transparent blue-gray. Fired over scrubbed copper it took on a lavender glow. Stenciled on copper, leaving some of the metal bare and then overfired to nearly 1700°F, the copper turned gunmetal-black, the enamel went palest blue-violet. The accidental firescale could be scrubbed off, leaving a line of black firescale on the edges of the enamel. I used that. Later, after deliberately overfiring sample tiles, I began using larger areas of firescale, enameling over the top and producing a unique metallic gleam. It was accident at first, and then a signature effect. It started by mistake.

Mistakes take time. Few are really useful. They are frustrating and not easily corrected. I have picked out stitches plenty of times making this quilt. Changed my mind in an instant. I could follow a quilt pattern or use a kit. There are plenty around that prescribe specific patterns and fabrics. I would not be constantly making choices, and choice is the hard work. But without choice, where’s the fun? I’m only barely interested in covering a bed. I am making art.

Mistakes push me, force me to reconsider, to change direction, to accept what happens sometimes and other times to fix it.

Mistake was at the first and will be at the last, so long as we don’t give up.

“The most important thing a writer can do after writing a sentence is to stay in the room. The great temptation is to leave the room to celebrate the completion of the sentence or to go out in the den where the television lies like a dormant monster and rest up for a few days for the next sentence or to go wander the seductive possibilities of the kitchen. But. It’s this simple. The writer is the person who stays in the room. The writer wants to read what she is in the process of creating with such passion and devotion that she will not leave the room. The writer understands that to stand up from the desk is to fail, and to leave the room is so radical and thorough a failure as to not be reversible. Who is not in the room writing? Everybody. Is it difficult to stay in the room, especially if you are not sure of what you’re doing, where you’re going? Yes. It’s impossible. Who can do it? The writer.”—Ron Carlson, from Ron Carlson Writes a Story

PANTS IN THE FAMILY

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In their official First Lady portraits “20th-century predecessors show a parade of cream-colored gowns, strings of pearls and periwinkle skirts. Clinton rocked a pantsuit in midnight black.”

As first lady, she chaired the Task Force on National Health Care Reform, pushing a proposed healthcare system some in the media dubbed “Hillarycare.” That failed, but she found more success with 1997’s State Children’s Health Insurance Program, and then the Adoption and Safe Families Act, and the Foster Care Independence Act.

She worked with the National Institutes of Health to ensure more funding for asthma and prostate cancer. She did not, in short, stay home and bake cookies. Evidence of her own career is visible within the official portrait itself: Her book, “It Takes a Village: And Other Lessons Children Teach Us,” lies on the table beside her.

I remember having scabbed knees almost continuously as a schoolgirl. I was not allowed to wear pants to school, and my dresses were usually torn open under their short sleeves. I played horses and ran around during recess. My mother liked to say I was hard on my clothes  I liked designing clothes for dolls but not actually playing with them.

It was my mother’s idea to get me a Barbie. I thought the doll’s tiny feet made to wear high heels, blue eye shadow, and bright red lips were stupid. Her hairstyle too. 

In the mean time, I had my Aunt Marcia, who lived in the Bay Area—Berkeley and later San Francisco. She was married to my Uncle Harry, but then lived alone. She was the model I wanted when I was a girl. Not Barbie, but an independent individual. Aunt Marcia made the single life an option, something possible and even elegant. She had affairs and a dog and she taught college Sociology. She empowered my daydreams of a single life as a person in my own right.

Hillary Rodham Clinton would have been a good model. Though I’m sorry for her philandering husband, I might like her better for forgiving her husband and supporting him than my aunt who was the one philandering. She was pilloried for saying: “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession.” She was a lawyer and she took her turn supporting her family. I did that too, taking turns with my husband as the primary breadwinner. I admire what HRC accomplished, both what she did and what she tried to do.

Who wears the pants in the family? Everyone. There are plenty of women  who still believe that men should rule their households. My parents did not subscribe to that division of power. My husband and I do not either.

A family should not be ruled. A family should work together toward shared goals. It should be loving and caring and productive, not a dictatorship.

STEP 5: doubt

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Here are the first two lines of seven. Maybe a little bland so far? Not quite what I had in mind? Once the squares are pieced and sewn, the effort in the first two rows is inevitably tame, inevitably distant from my vision. I began sewing the paler squares, the ones I like least. sigh

I fret and then will rush on to complete the more dramatic rows. I work vertically instead of horizontally, light into the dark. Maybe then I can find the stronger yellow-to-blue tension.

The inner wide border was to be two yellow or orange stripes on each pale blue bordering square (that’s the uncut band just in front of my feet). Now I think maybe dark blue stripes on the pale. Maybe three? Maybe even four? Maybe a narrow orange frame?

The narrower outer border? Four inches wide or thereabout. What do do about that? Color? Stripes? Once I have pieced all these squares, I might be stuck and will soon return to Blue Ladders, the other blue quilt.

More excitement from rentals. A neighbor filed a complaint about the people who pissed on our path, for the cars parked everywhere. This morning there are cars parked all over for another house, which would prevent a UPS truck passing. Not to mention a firetruck or Medic. Apparently there are rules about rentals and parked cars. Our neighbor will likely complain about this rental as well. People always assume it is me, but I have no idea where he is lodging his complaints.

Fireworks (illegal and all summer long) and people pissing in public . . . police and emergency vehicles will come if a life is endangered and that is reassuring. If only they can get here past the parking situation.

 

EMAIL

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It’s a jellyfish, which is neither jelly nor fish, but common names are often like that. It’s actually a colony living together to make a shape. My dad warned against these orangey ones. They sting, even “dead” on the sand like this one.

I received a bulk email from a neighbor. He neglected to use the blind feature (Bcc) so better than three dozen people who apparently do not know one another except through him now have one another’s emails. (I should tell him my story about the Bonsai Kittens—a hoax my then-adolescent niece believed and sent out to well over a hundred people, outing their email addresses at a time people were particularly sensitive to junk email.) The original email promotes Biden as the best bet to defeat Trump. We do not all seem to be on board with that. I have disliked the man for decades and nothing he’s done recently restores any faith in his capacity for making wise choices or any vision.

A Canadian weighed in warning about the radical left. I wish he had been this Canadian:

My 91 year old father in law has been diagnosed as having a terminal illness.  He has lost the use of his legs and has a large cancerous mass in his lungs which cannot be treated due to his advanced age and fragile health.  We are having a lift installed to transfer him from bed to chair and back again.  He will receive 4 times a day care from nurses and aides and housekeeping services for him and my mother in law.  There are no charges for this, NOTHING, no deductibles, no co-pays, and no limit.  There will be no charges for his 3 weeks of hospitalisation either.  Sounds good?  Well, this is Canada, and this is how we treat people.  No one dies from lack of health care at any age, and no one ever goes bankrupt from medical expenses.  We all pay, and we all receive.

This person wrote in response to an article in The Washington Post about the murder-suicide of the elderly couple in Washington State. They explained they were overwhelmed by medical bills. Someone assured readers that they should have planned better in order to have better insurance.

It does not seem like a radical notion to provide health care for people in the richest nation on earth. I will also say that I had a medical emergency in Canada a long time ago. I was in terrible pain and a doctor came in to his office on his day off, took good care of me, and did not charge me a dime. Maybe he was just a nice guy. What a concept.

Before we go dismissing the “far left” for their crazy-impractical-radical notions, we might consider that most of, no, nearly all of the first world is already doing those things. Reducing greenhouse gases, cutting out unnecessary use of plastics, preserving parks and forests, healthcare for everyone, affordable public education right through college, better maternal and infant care, a rising life expectancy—we actually can afford it all and most of the world (well, not third world countries) does.

We are a rich country, but many poor countries take better care of their ill and elderly, care better for the environment, and have lower taxes. It’s amazing what a nation can afford when it does not spend more than the next ten wealthiest countries combined on military spending. Military bases in hundreds of foreign countries (would we pursue or even allow this in the United States?) cost enough to pay for the best medical care in the world for everyone, not merely the wealthy. New paint job for the President’s jets or healthcare? Do I have to choose?

Step 4: stalling

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This is a new bald eagle, born this year and still in juvenile plumage. She was chased off by a tourist’s dog, but came back to feed soon enough.

This has been a bustling week. I am sipping ice water and Vera is playing on Acorn (my subscription runs out in a week or two). We are just back from an evening walk on the shore. Cool air blows in from the skylight and it’s hard to imagine knitting a sweater. Last weekend our younger son and his family were here and my grandson apparently thinks I am magic. He asked several times when his new sweater will be done. I think he expected me to answer: this evening or perhaps tomorrow. I told him perhaps by his sister’s birthday. That gives me until Guy Fawkes Day. I have four sweaters lined up. And just now the room is heated to over seventy degrees.

fullsizeoutput_1006I am stalling. Today I could have joined the blocks of the blue quilt at least into strips of dark dark blue and strips of lighter pieced strips. Instead, I have picked Blue Ladders up in stacks and laid out the beginning of the center panel of another blue quilt in squares. I won’t be casting on a sweater any time soon.

This has been a week. Monday was Scrabble. That was relaxing enough.

Tuesday, the neighbor’s dog Raven got lost. Gary went a little mad chasing around looking. He had seen the dog and recognized she was lost. The beach is overwhelming, sometimes even for local dogs and Raven is a rescue. But found again and safe at home.

Wednesday, we watched a paddle boarder thrashing about out past the surf line for an hour with increasing anxiety. He turned toward shore two or three times and paddled hard without making progress. He fell into the water over and over, a dozen times before I walked out onto the shore to get a closer look. Locals don’t usually surf this shore and maybe falling into the water every couple of minutes is normal? I called the Coast Guard thirty minutes after that, but then he seemed to change his mind and paddled south with the current. He’d been in the water a long time, but seemed to be wearing a wetsuit. Still, the danger was there, a current and an outgoing tide, night coming on soon. He came almost all the way in and then went out past the breakers again. I met others who were concerned. Cannon Beach Rescue showed up. He’d been out for over two hours by then and was a couple of miles south of where he’d first been spotted by a tourist staying well north of us. Eventually a member of the rescue team went into the water and swam to him towing her board. He finally paddled in on his knees and came ashore and I watched all that through binoculars. I called back to the Coast Guard, as I’d been asked to do. I apologized for wasting their time. The Chief Petty Officer thanked me for paying attention.

IMG_4672Thursday, we went to the Tillamook County Fair. I was a little disappointed in the quilts this year, but the rug tufters had lovely work, and as always I was tempted. (Just what I need, another project!)

The pony rides had all appaloosas. The veggies were delectable, the cows looked at me when I told them they were beautiful, but there are fewer cows brought into the fair barns than when we first attended decades ago now. This year there were no goats or sheep or pigeons, but a strong showing of pigs and chickens and rabbits. Lots of children were showing their calves and fully grown cows too. This girl (below) got several wet kissy-nudges from her pretty calf.

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The flowers are among my favorite exhibits. The Tillamook ice cream cone was great, but the onion rings came in a half-size paper dish. Those are my gavotte fair foods. Gary bought a new belt and Gary drove to Astoria to renew his driver’s license.

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Friday, the sun set spectacularly and today we decided not to drive into Portland.

I have not touched my sewing machine since making a skirt for Ruby last weekend. Maybe tomorrow I will work on a quilt. Maybe I will even sew. Maybe I will only make tortillas and enchiladas. Maybe I will sit on the sofa and read. It’s been a week.

more . . .

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What Toni Morrison wrote just after the 2016 election. She saw what was coming.

So scary are the consequences of a collapse of white privilege that many Americans have flocked to a political platform that supports and translates violence against the defenseless as strength. These people are not so much angry as terrified, with the kind of terror that makes knees tremble.

On Election Day, how eagerly so many white voters—both the poorly educated and the well educated—embraced the shame and fear sowed by Donald Trump. The candidate whose company has been sued by the Justice Department for not renting apartments to black people. The candidate who questioned whether Barack Obama was born in the United States, and who seemed to condone the beating of a Black Lives Matter protester at a campaign rally. The candidate who kept black workers off the floors of his casinos. The candidate who is beloved by David Duke and endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan.

I have to remind myself that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote.

The great tennis champion Arthur Ashe spoke long ago about being the first black tennis star. He warned that he was easy to accept—modest in appearance, “well-spoken,” and polite. He was acceptable as the token black man. There would be players in the future, he said, who would not fit so comfortably into the elite white world of professional talent. Yes, he saw the Williams sisters coming. It was not okay but accepted as inevitable that a few white players misbehaved. There was plenty of rudeness and poor sportsmanship among white (male) players long before Ashe’s gentle persona made an appearance and reminded people that tennis was a gentlemanly sport. But a few years later Serena raises her voice and suddenly the white world has hysterics.

Sometimes you need one foot outside the lines to see a bad call. Or to make a good one.

9 YEARS AGO

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NINE YEARS AGO ON MY OLD BLOG I POSTED:

Today’s blueberry-peach pie. My family is of the opinion that a pie is done once it’s bubbled out of the crust. Yesterday I made pesto and apricot-gooseberry jam. Tomorrow… carrot-ginger jam.

8/8/2010: I woke this morning and realized that I didn’t have to run today [I was mostly running every other day until 2012], the weather is perfect, and I’ve spent my entire summer reading to prepare for the new school year and making jam. The jam is tasty, but I like making it more than eating it. The dog is not pregnant. The bathtub for the bathroom remodel is still in the garage. I haven’t written a story. I didn’t attend the Bellevue Arts Fair. I didn’t attend my 40-year high school reunion (that’s another thing, I’m getting old). We didn’t go to Lisbon. We didn’t go anywhere on vacation. I have two weeks before school starts up again.

I’m already tired just thinking about it, but I also look forward to getting back to work, to feeling useful and occupied. It feels good to be working a job I love.

A series of studies Dan Pink describes at RSA finds that once basic needs are met and people aren’t worried about money, money ceases to be a motivator for higher performance. It actually works in reverse—offer them more money and their job performance goes down. Yeah, weird. The study began at MIT but has been replicated all over the world such as rural India. Same thing. Extra monetary incentive for high performance doesn’t work when the work requires thinking. Assembly line tasks—more money, more work. Ask people to problem-solve, be creative, or think… and the whole scenario begins working in a way that seems counter to reason.

So pay people enough that money is not an issue anymore, and then if you want them to think harder and achieve really great things, you need a better motivator.

Instead of money, what motivates thinking people who aren’t worried about how to pay the babysitter or their overpriced medical care are three things: autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

  • Autonomy: Give us a challenge and just get out of our way—let us make our own choices about what to do. We want to be self-directed.
  • Mastery: It’s fun to do things well. That’s why we often work so hard at our leisure activities even though they do not “pay” us anything.
  • Purpose: Humans want to feel useful. We want to make a difference in the world.

What’s the lesson to be learned from this? Some of our traditional beliefs about leadership and motivation are turned on their head. Top down direction and money rewards work for the most simplistic tasks, but fail to address the need for creative and intelligent work in a modern society. To be fair, they aren’t working well for traditional cultures either, which include autonomy, mastery, and purpose in every job from cooking a meal to weeding a field. It’s the industrial system that has caused us to lose sight of the value of work because the end-game tasks are so divorced from the control and skill of the individual worker.

I have two weeks where I can wake up in the morning and decide what to do, practice doing it well, and look toward being useful. I guess that’s how I’ve spent my summer vacation.

Today I did not make a pie, but I took a walk. I made salal scones and eggplant Parmesan. Both turned out well, and we also attended the Tillamook County Fair this morning. I am fully retired, have still not been to Lisbon, and have heard no word about my 50th high school reunion that is coming up next year. I have made two kinds of pesto and six kinds of jam this summer. Nothing with carrots.

But yes, I still want independence, mastery, and meaning.