Month: September 2010

De-colonizing and Fair Isle knitting.

sarah

Keep Abortion Legal sweater by Lisa Anne Auerbach

Keep Abortion Legal sweater by Lisa Anne Auerbach (2006).

These are old notes from 21 February 2009. I said I had lots of ideas and then didn’t say what any of them were… I think they were mostly about working with explicit symbols and words using Fair Isle techniques, like the LAA sweater in the photo (which uses Norwegian patterns, I think, not Fair Isle).

I just read several knitting books and several anti-colonial books at the same time, and I have all these new ideas about my own knitting. As happens when you read different topics at the same time, I found where they overlap and connect. An example.

From Michael Pearson’s Traditional Knitting: Aran, Fair Isle and fisher ganseys, 1984.

Pages 121-2.

[The Shetland Islands] lie to the north east of Britain and are in fact closer to Norway than mainland Scotland. … The inhabitants owe their heritage to the Norsemen who settled there in the 8th and 9th centuries, living under the patronage of Norway for over 500 years before the influx of Scottish mainlanders in the 13th century. Norse influence then began to fade and ended with the sale of the islands in 1496 by Norway to the Scottish Crown.

From this date right through to the present day the history of the inhabitants has been one of ruthless exploitation— by the Stuart family till 1615 and then by the splitting up of the islands into estates run by rich immigrant Churchmen and landowners…

The two knitting traditions that had the most resonance for me were Cowichan sweaters and Fair Isle knitting, both affected by Scottish colonialism. The more I read about Scottish history, the more it seems like Scotland has been a volcano of settlers for hundreds of years. They can’t stay home. Why? I continue to read. I want to know more about how I ended up here, descended from at least five different Scottish settler families on Coast Salish territories.

But. Ideas I got from this round of reading.

  • Folk knitting history is patchy and there are many versions of events and stories.
  • Reading books by American and British people mostly involves serious denial about colonization of any kind. It’s almost a relief to read books about North American genocide, because at least the destruction is presented as destruction. I read one book about Fair Isle knitting that presented Norway’s sale of Fair Isle to Scotland as simply a “reflection of the fact that the island was by then more Scottish than Norse.” OK, author, but how did that happen?
  • Knitting has labour politics as well as the more discussed gender roles. I hadn’t thought much before about the history of underpaid cottage industries where poor people knit clothes for rich people, for peanuts per hour. It is still basically impossible to make a living wage selling hand knitting. Like gardening, it’s one of those subsistence activities that middle class people dabble in for leisure. Not sure what to do with that right now.
  • Again, being a folk art, patterns and ideas spread whenever one crafter meets another (or even a craft). It sounds like Cowichan spinners and weavers were keen to pick up knitting from European settlers and missionaries, just as crafters. But also, English style knitting (yarn in the receiving hand) was taught in residential schools as a “civilizing” domestic skill, sometimes to produce items the school sold for profit. I want to find out how Turkish style knitting (with the yarn around the back of the neck) ended up in the Andes, when by the time of colonization I think Iberians were knitting in continental style (yarn in the loading hand). So far I haven’t found a resource that has both crafty knowledge and awareness of colonialism.

More from Michael Pearson.

Page 128.

Because of the natural tendency to identify with areas within reach, British knitters have usually assumed that Fair Isle was the place where two-colour knitting was invented.

I don’t know how natural that is. It does seem to be part of British and maybe European culture, to assume cultural dominance or sameness. Do non-Euro people have a history of that too? Assuming that everything was invented nearby just because it’s here now? (Two colour knitting, as far as I have been able to find out, first turned up in Turkey and Egypt, then spread via trade routes to Baltic and Nordic Europe.)

JZ and DJ interview

sarah

Old notes from 26 March 2009. Reading this again, almost a year after making a strategic decision to work at a tech company, I am realizing how much I integrated that “logic of alienation” bit into my ways of relating to technologies.

This ten year old interview of John Zerzan by Derrick Jensen is helping me think about technology.

DJ: Let’s talk more about technology. Isn’t technology just driven by curiosity?

JZ: You hear people say this all the time: “You can’t put the genie back in the bottle”; “You’re asking people to forget.” Stuff like that. But that’s just another attempt to naturalize the craziness. And it’s a variant of that same old racist intelligence argument. Because the Hopi didn’t invent backhoes, they must not be curious. Sure, people are naturally curious. But about what? Did you or I aspire to create the neutron bomb? Of course not. That’s crazy. Why would people want to do that in the first place? They don’t. But the fact that I don’t want to create a neutron bomb doesn’t mean I’m not curious. Curiosity is not value free. Certain types of curiosity arise from certain types of mindsets, and our own “curiosity” follows the logic of alienation, not simple wonder, not learning something to become a better person. Our “curiosity,” taken as a whole, leads us in the direction of further domination. How could it do any other?

practicing talking about kenya, somewhat exhausted by it

sarah

Old draft from January 2009.

  • i wondered how this part would be, coming home from a trip to kenya and having to talk to people about ‘africa’ and being a rich white tourist in kenya and so on. so far it is patchy and a bit exhausting, but i think i’m getting better.
  • first good talk with my mum about race and white privilege. finally enough tries.
  • i always need some practice to express things in a way people can understand. maybe because i spend so much time alone, and nonverbally? and hypertextually? i’ve really gotten to where i think in a big cloud of bits, not a focussed or linear way without effort.
  • a product of my thinking too much without talking… a lot of catching up to do on the talking front.

things that came up that i expected:

  • people generalizing about “africa” when i’m talking about specific places in kenya
  • people defining kenyan (and generalized african) societies as on a path of progress or evolution or civilization than ends up at a north american model
  • people much more willing to define or consider social problems in africa than problems at home
  • people defining the colonization process in canada as “more successful” than in kenya without considering that calling this successful defines genocide and occupation as a success strategy as long as it results in consumer luxuries.
  • people judging social and environmental problems in kenya and africa without considering their causes in western countries
  • when i try to process parts of my own privilege i’m uncomfortable with, decisions i would make differently now, i get back a lot of… like apologetic responses. ‘oh you did fine, how could you know any better? no one can do better anyway. that’s how things are.’ so many ways to silence a conversation.

Magical politics, a first attempt.

sarah

Old draft from March 2009.

I’ve been hunting around for radical political magic. I ran into this pretty great book review by a druid, The Spells We Are Under, because it popped up somewhere under the site title “Healing Whiteness.”

[Van] Jones was astonished to find that the vast corporate structures against which he and many other progressives had been campaigning so hard— the WTO, the World Bank, and so on— were treated, by the people who run them, as mere tools to be used or tossed aside at will. The elite see themselves personally as the holders of power, and institutions as their means and modes of power. The activists outside the police barricades, by contrast, see the institutions themselves as the problem. The scene from “The Wizard of Oz” comes forcefully to mind; Dorothy and her friends try to figure out some way to deal with the terrifying apparition of Oz, the Great and Powerful, but never notice the little man behind the curtain.

Juxtaposed with:

Consider George Lakey’s fascinating account of the Otpor movement against Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic… One of the tactics Otpor members used to halt police violence against them was to take photos of their wounded and make sure the family members, neighbors, and children of the police got to see them. This was a brilliant bit of magic. The individual human beings who made up that reified abstraction, “the police,” were stripped of that identity by a spell of unnaming, and turned back into neighbors, husbands, children, parents: people who were part of civil society, and subject to its standards and social pressures. That couldn’t have been achieved if Otpor had reified and protested “police brutality,” since that act would have strengthened the reification of police as something other than ordinary members of society.

I know this idea from non-magical people too. (“Those big, powerful corporations have offices and CEOs with addresses.”) But I like having a name for this shift in perspective, and I think I like having a name that triggers dork associations about hobbits and +5 strength against goblins.

Embodiment and drifting.

sarah

Old half-baked draft from 11 December 2008. I kind of want that asterisk question on a t-shirt. I think I was really asking **** How do I want to talk about this on the internet after such a long break??? ****

Talking to Heather about embodiment, being in your body. She had an idea that maybe when teenagers are focussed on having sex even when it is pretty “rape-y” and risky and not beneficial or pleasurable, it has partly to do with their lack of other ways to feel their physicality and be in their bodies. No access to nature, nowhere to safely walk, not allowed to play outside unsupervised, even encouraged to eliminate or replace all body odours, etc. That’s a lot of pressure on sex for being physical.

It got me thinking about how I relate to the internet. I’m on here a LOT, in this disembodied place.

Anyway. I’ve been realizing that one of my big ways to be in my body for the last year or so has been looking at things. Sensing with my eyes, and sensing the reactions my body has to colours and shapes (and letters, boy howdy). When I got to go to the UK with my mum last fall, and we spent so much time in art galleries because it was rainy, that was the most physically altered I’ve felt since I stopped eating psychedelic drugs. High on modern art— physically dizzy and speedy and sometimes getting auras like before a migraine, from seeing enough art nouveau in one room to really experience and understand the concept of biomorphic whiplash. I made this website these colours because they do similar things to me— they are stimulating and encouraging and they make me want to write. I remember using music that way in the past. Galen would come home sometimes and be able to tell when I was working on something important, because I’d be blasting some or other personal power music. In high school— I just remembered this— I did a lot with smells. Other people’s sweaters, specific incense, open window when it rained.

*** where does fucking fit in?? ***

So, notably, none of this involves movement or muscles. It’s all sensing and processing and information. It’s physical to me, but it’s what a lot of people would identify as being in your head.

My forays into physical activity are marked by a lot of head time, too. Office bike— the exercise bike I can pedal while I make websites. Wing chun— if I have to punch and kick to learn which way shoulders bend and how momentum works, I guess that’s alright. Fucking— “erotics is the process through which sex acquires meaning.” I think I get bored, otherwise.

I’ve been casting around for some more physical motion in my life, to make me stronger.

I have high hopes for a bastardized version of this pretentious French art thing, the dérive, or drift. Walking to nowhere. OK. I do not like walking for the sake of walking, even though I love walking. Growing up, my parents were all about taking a walk, but not so much about negotiating where to walk or talking about what they feel like on the walks or whatever, so I have a lot of stored up experience being deeply bored with walks.

Walking to nowhere: ok. Just paying attention to see where you want to walk the most: ok. Also, paying attention to local geography and how it feels, that can go on forever. I think this could be useful in trying to figure out more of how I relate to being a settler on colonized land.

So yeah, I’m glad I’ve practiced walking by myself, home alone from various locations. I’m glad Victoria is a mostly non-threatening place for me to walk around.

“The imperative to renew and expand our observation skills.”

sarah

Another old draft from May 2009. Not sure where I was planning to go with that tantra crosslink.

In a world where the quantity of secondary (mediated) observation and interpretation threatens to drown us, the imperative to renew and expand our observation skills (in all forms) is at least as important as the need to sift and make sense of the flood of mediated information. Improved skills of observation and thoughtful interaction are also more likely sources of creative solutions than brave conquests in new fields of specialised knowledge by the armies of science and technology.

The icon for this principle is a person as a tree, emphasising ourselves in nature and transformed by it.

— David Holmgren, co-originator of the permaculture concept, in Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability

tantra

Haircuts by children, my vanity.

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This has been sitting unpublished in my drafts since 25 February, 2009. Fly free, little draft!

Awkward stage.

This is me at the end of grade nine.

Galen is getting his hair cut by a ten year old in a few weeks, as part of a performance about the segregation and disenfranchisement of children in society. An opportunity to trust the skill and style choices of a kid. I think this is a great idea for a performance and I’ve been telling a lot of people about it. (More explanation if you want it.)

I am not getting my hair cut. It turns out I am still terrified of bad hair cuts. I’m not terrified of no make up, belly rolls, showing cellulite in public, body hair, laundry day outfits, etc. But hair cuts, yes. I’m fascinated.

I had unflattering hair cuts that didn’t express my soul essence for about 13 years in a row, between my mum deciding I looked cute with a mushroom cut in grade 1, through a lot of small town $7 haircuts, through getting my friends to chop off my hair in grade 11 (somewhat better), through shaving it off in grade 12 (worse again), growing that out a bit (better again), and deciding to go to my grandmother’s hair stylist when I moved to Victoria. That was how much I knew about haircuts when I was 18. I thought the neighbourhood wash-n-set was the place to go for the punk rock haircut of my dreams. Granny’s stylist did alright as long as I kept it really short. It took me until I was about 20 to realize there were people who knew how to create a haircut on purpose, rather than just cutting to the approximate length and hoping for the best. My hair trauma is not helped by the coincidence that I was a giant nerd during pretty much the exact same time as the ugly haircuts. That photo shows me five minutes after having my hair cut and styled at some $10 Hair Hut type place at the mall in my hometown. It also shows me about 1 month into a three year stretch of on-and-off suicidal depression. COINCIDENCE? I’m joking about 50%. I could have used a hair mentor.

So. This haircuts by children performance may have cured me of my inner judgments about feminist environmentalists who won’t talk about reusable menstrual products. The shoe is on the other foot now. And even making that connection might help me sort out my hair terror. I had my share of menstrual shame and angst as a teenager. Maybe if I think about how I rearranged that, I’ll be able to rearrange my hair anxiety into something more in line with the rest of my values.

In the meantime I am telling a lot of people about these haircuts by children. So far I’ve prompted I think three people to set up appointments, one of them a stranger.

Why.

sarah

Bob Flanagan. “Why” 1985, from “Sick” 1997. (via Constant Siege)

Keywords for me: BDSM, gender, cystic fibrosis, self-actualization, poetry.

The first time I watched this I got mesmerized and teary and couldn’t tell how much time had passed, especially during the list of hardware and tools.

Sitting unpublished since 20 August 2009, I think because I just posted it on Facebook instead. It can get posted again. I’m tentatively enthused about handling my own data again, links and all.

Family names, Kurt Vonnegut, figuring shit out.

sarah

Oh look, a half-finished draft that has been sitting around since January 2009. This is still my leading idea about family names.

I’ve been considering the idea of giving all my kids different last names. Resurrecting various maiden names or something, picking them the way people often pick middle names out of their whole pool of known family names.

I think it is mainly being married that has me thinking about names and name systems. It’s easy to skip that whole “married name” business, but if you want to give your kid some kind of awesome, non-patriarchal name you actually have to come up with a plan. That gets complicated really fast, even in the common, surface solutions like hyphenating last names or using the mother’s family name in an attempt to go matrilineal (by passing on her dad’s name). All of those schemes run into the usual problems if there is a break from monogamy, if anybody leaves a relationship, breeds with more than one person, or dies. The “team name” gets broken all the time, even if you are trying to play along. Even just making up a new last name doesn’t solve the question of what the grandkids would be called.

Family structures and systems are fucking intense. Where do they all come from? Which ones are good? Research questions.

This multiple last name idea has been wildly unpopular with everyone I’ve mentioned it to. Intensely unpopular. Instant frowning. Worst idea ever. I still kind of like it. Galen and I already have different last names and we manage to be a family team. Maybe it would be good, if we had kids, to remember that they were individual people and not just “ours.” Maybe a team name is just a manifestation of compulsory/wishful monogamy and maybe we can do better than that. It scales well across multiple generations, unlike, say, hyphenation. I’m lucky enough to know a lot of my ancestral family names, and it seems like maybe reusing them would be a fairly robust way to remember your lineage if you moved or were displaced. Or maybe it would just make it impossible to find each other again.

Lacking a unified last name, maybe we could give our household its own name, to make it easy to refer to. That happens sometimes with places populated by roommates. (I’m thinking of places I’ve known called The Husbandry, The Folk Museum, The Queens Den, The Triple Crush Palace…). That doesn’t solve anything about family members who don’t live in the same home, but it’s a start.

This is unresolved. I just found an old booksale purchase called World Revolution and Family Patterns that I’m hoping might contain some inspiration. I also found a Kurt Vonnegut quote via Bex that I have filed away.

12. … Even when Vonnegut dared to propose a utopian scheme, it was a happily dysfunctional one. In Slapstick, Wilbur Swain wins the presidency with a scheme to eliminate loneliness by issuing people complicated middle names (he becomes Wilbur Daffodil-11 Swain) which make them part of new extended families. He advises people to tell new relatives they hate, or members of other families asking for help: “Why don’t you take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut? Why don’t you take a flying fuck at the mooooooooooooon?” Of course, this fails to prevent plagues, the breakdown of his government, and civil wars later in the story.

Complicated middle names: noted.

Good spells, burning buildings, Alan Moore, Leslie Feinberg.

sarah1 Comment

Old draft from March 2009.

Alan Moore

I ingested a lot of Alan Moore media when The Watchmen movie came out this month, and I really loved his take on magic (in the sense of spells and incantations, not card tricks) in a interview with Stewart Lee. The magic topic starts at about 5:30 of part three. (Part 1, and part 2 if you want them.)

I suppose the thing with magic is that a lot of it is about writing anyway. “To cast a spell.” That’s a fancy way of saying spelling. Grimoire, the big book of magical secrets. That’s a French way of saying ‘grammar.’ It’s all about language and writing. It’s all about incantation. It’s all about all these things. And so magic, really, it turns out to just be a continuation of the stuff I’ve been doing anyway. Using certain arrangements of words or images to affect people’s consciousness.

I decided to keep that for my multi-year quest about how to communicate. Magick and neo-paganism is a minefield of gender terrorism and cultural appropriation, a bring your own analysis situation. But still, folks who are into magical spells do have a lot of ideas and practice related to speaking intentionally.

After keeping it on my (giant) reading list for years, I finally read Stone Butch Blues recently, and I saved this quote about semi-applicable resources.

I felt as though I was rushing into a burning building to rescue the ideas I needed in my own life.

It’s been a pretty good spell so far— I say it a lot when I’m getting inspired by a book that has a lot of problems and maybe embarrasses or enrages me. It’s good for books written by druids.