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Blinks

Sunday, 23 September, 2007

• Refreshing lessons from subway knitting: Knitting makes public transport more bearable and also leads to unlikely conversations;
• The latest issue of Knitty is online (Fall 2007). I love the following patterns:
  
  • Muir—lace shawl (yes, I'm a total sucker for lace!);
  • Henry—a man's scarf (I never know what to knit for men; it's easier to knit for women);
  • Cheri amour—I love the drape of this sweater but it's too immodest to wear in public;
  • Percy—I must make this when my purse breaks for good. And then I must coerce someone else to do the lining for me as I hate sewing;
  • Flower power—unbelievably cute hate for babies. (Would it traumatise them though?);
  • Urchin—I know just who to make this hat for (and Marinka gave me just the right yarn to do it ...);
  • Totally autumn—lace throw;
  • Woodins—they have an almost Princess Mononoke quality to them—they're a lot like the Kodama (Just read the pattern notes and the Kodama were the inspiration for the pattern! One day I will learn how to felt ...)

• Should tots watch TV?: Fascinating interview in Salon about the effects of television on children and what children understand when they watch television which debunks some common myths. This paragraph on background television struck me:
  

  ... [P]arents interact less with their children when the TV is on in the background. And to me that was a no-brainer, because I'm just as susceptible to being distracted by the television as my kids are. But I would have days where I had the TV on and my 18-month-old would be kind of just pushing a toy around the room. And I'd say: “She's fine. She's not even interested in this program.” But what I didn't realize, then, is: How is it changing the way that I interact with her? Is it changing the length of time that I might talk to her about something she sees?

• Kids gone wild: Salon article about what happened on CBS's reality TV show Kid Nation (the one which is sort of based on Lord of the Flies. I mentioned it earlier on this blog);
• Will You Marry Me? Say Cheese!: New York Times article about the increasing practice of hiring professional photographers to snap the very moment that she says “Yes”:
  

  The idea dovetails with the current trend toward photojournalistic realism in wedding photography. In recent years the intimacies of a wedding day—a glimpse of the bride as she dons her underpinnings, the stolen mash session between the newlyweds when the guests aren't looking—have become increasingly fair game.

  “Initially wedding photojournalism was an aesthetic choice by photographers like me because it emphasized the story of the wedding,” said Terry deRoy Gruber, a New York photographer who shot the wedding of Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones, among others. “But as time has gone on, with the proliferation of the paparazzi, reality television and online autobiography all kind of cooked together, people almost feel it's really the only way to document something. Proposal photographs represent the absolute beginning of the marriage story, and for some groom who is influenced by these other forces, this is sort of an obligatory scene to record.”

  What's with the rise in documenting everything? I know I'm part of it—this blog is like a memory bank of things I've done and thoughts I've thought—but why? Why does it matter to me?
• Can I ever reconcile with my father?: Cary Tennis at Salon has some wise words on the subject of difficult parental relationships and learning to grow up:
  

  In situations where we feel that we have been ignored by the most important person in our lives, we may question our own validity; we may be deeply scarred; we may question our own right to live; later in life, we may need to be told that we are acceptable, that these things we have experienced and held in are no threat to our existence. The problem is, a child cannot do this. A child cannot parent himself, as it were. But an adult can. When you reach adulthood and recognize for the first time how many things you needed as a child and did not get, you can do something about it. As adults we can find someone to fill in and say, “Yes, that's perfectly understandable; it makes sense you would feel that way and want to respond in that way. But that happened when you were a child and now you are an adult, and here is what you need to do today to make yourself better.”

  It turns out that although we can find instruction in these matters, such as spelled out above, we have to do most of the actual work ourselves. If we seek, say, a partner, or a child, or a worldwide audience of admirers to constantly affirm our right to exist, we get in trouble. We ask for too much. We ask for what is inappropriate. We distort our relations with others. So once we discover what has happened to us and why we feel the way we do, we have to take responsibility for living with it in our own way, and not placing the burden on others.

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