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Hurricane Season

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For some reason this escaped my attention: three years after Hurricane Katrina, Banksy visits New Orleans. I still remember my friend E. sitting in her Copenhagen flat with the post-Katrina issue of Newsweek/Time. She opened the magazine, looked at the aerial photo of New Orleans and put her finger on a completely devastated area: "That is where I lived until just recently." She had worked in New Orleans during Hurricane Ivan and had decided not to endure another hurricane season.

io9 has an interesting photo feature on Hurricane Gustav: "New Orleans is fast becoming one of the most disaster-prepared cities in the world.."

Where To Go From Here

When I was a teenager, I had to rely on the local library for instructions on how to knit sweaters. I never did make one, although I crocheted a rainbow coloured top out of granny squares. Nowadays there are a plethora of sources, both on the internet and in my local magazine pusher. Knitty is the mother of all free pattern sites. It features young designers and designs that are both versatile, wearable and fairly easy. Clapotis has become ubiquitous, it seems.

MetaPostModernKnitting is quite new and I love it. I love how they have a clear fashion editorial style, how they think about emerging trends and how they pull it all together in trend reports. It's clever, it's fashion forward and it's very cool. I'm seriously considering their Prism sweater although the construction is unlike anything I've attempted before. The designer kindly mailed me to say that a) she liked my projects file on Ravelry (!) and b) she knew I could pull it off. Thank you, Caroline.

Knotions is a UK-based site designed to replace an earlier one called Magknits which was inexplicably pulled down one day in an apparent hissy fit by its Hipknits owners - I quickly decided never to deal with the Hipknits people after seeing how poorly they handled that situation (as well as other situations). not associated with anybody but itself. US-based but feeling international, Knotions is currently on its second issue. I'm considering making Autumn Leaves in red grey with a few modifications.

Popknits is a completely new site with vintage inspired garments. I'm waiting to see where they take this 'vintage inspired' site before deciding whether or not I like them. Yes, I'm on the fence.

The Twist Collective does not offer free patterns, but it offers some very, very nice patterns. Little Birds is gorgeous (although I probably wouldn't be able to wear it).

Any I have missed?

Ripping Back..

Word to the wise: never knit whilst talking to your mother over Skype. You may think you'll be able to easily knit the gull lace pattern of your cardigan whilst going "Mmm.." and "Oh, really?" but afterwards you'll need to rip back your three rows. But other than that, my cardigan is coming along nicely and I'm still ignoring that fateful row on my Tracks & Trails shawl.

Tell Me What It's All About*

Monday. So far this Monday has brought me blue skies, sunshine, absolute silence, an important letter and a book which I finished in less than two hours. I like this sort of Monday. The book was Scarlett Thomas's Going Out which easily summed up as a light UK version of early Douglas Coupland novels. I do not know why I've read three Scarlett Thomas novels because if you take away the colourful packaging of a) metafiction ("The End of Mr Y"), b) anti-consumerism ("PopCo") and c) popculture ("Going Out") you get pretty much the same novel.

New Age health solutions? Check. Schrödinger's cat? Check. Main protagonist being into her math puzzles? Check. Slightly deviant sexual orientation painted in a fairly vague way? Check. C-category drug use? Check. Vegetarianism or some variant upon it? Check. Internet featuring heavily? Check.

But I still like her novels - particularly PopCo - even if they feel like a Linda McCartney meal. You know, easily digested vegetarian fare with a touch of celebrity to it? Perhaps it's just because I can see myself being firm friends with the people populating her novels. Perhaps I just want to go for (organic, herbal) tea with Ms. Thomas?

Next on the reading list: I need to finish Iain Pears' An Instance of the Fingerpost (which isn't a chore to read, it is just really long) and then Andrew Sean Greer's The Story of a Marriage. I also have a strange longing for something non-fiction.

* title taken from Supergrass's "Going Out" (which I bet Scarlett Thomas has heard once or twice).

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On Speeches and Speech Acts?

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So Obama is betting on the word's enduring power as a reformer of American life. Historically he has good reason for, from the beginning, words and texts have constructed American realities, not the other way round. The spell cast on Americans by the mantle of words goes all the way back to the first Great Awakening in the 1740s when flocks thrilled to Methodist preachers such as George Whitefield. Evangelical passion remains a brilliant strand in the weave of American discourse, but when it made way for the reasoning of the enlightenment deists and unitarians who made the revolution, another element of American speech-power sounded loud and clear: the reverence for classical oratory. The Republican bet is that all this is a thing of the past; that, self-evidently, we live in the age of images, and words are just the add-ons to the beguilement of the eye; that all we have are soundbites. Obama's is the more stunning gamble; that so far from the digital age killing off the reign of the word, it has actually given logos a whole new lease of life.

Simon Schama on Barack Obama's acceptance speech, August 28, 2008.

Unsurprisingly my brain went 'ping!' when I realised Schama was trying to make a point about the performative and transformative powers of language. Always nice to be thrown some discourse analysis over breakfast. Even more unsurprising: the comments to the piece are almost all uniformly refusing to take up Schama's gauntlet.