I’m headed out of town for a few days (Doc is holding down the fort), so here’s some early weekend links.
1. Via Girls of a Certain Age, these song titles in the style of pulp novel covers are great. (I need the Maggie’s Farm one!)
2. Good to remember: You don’t owe anyone an interaction (via Swiss Miss)
Something from David Foster Wallace (via Austin Kleon) and something to keep in mind as you choose (or write) your books.
“Look, man, we’d probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it’d find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it.”
Sure, sewing means you can make workout wear and plaid button-downs and an array of knit tops to fill holes in your wardrobe, but sometimes you just need to sew some crazy mustard-colored Japanese printed pants.
Or JAPANTS, as my coworker called them:
I saw this fabric at Miss Matatabi and the idea of JAPANTS sprang into my head fully-formed, like the trouser version of the birth of Athena. I used the Emerson Pants pattern and my serger and in about a day I had the best crazy pants of my dreams.
They are a lot of PANT but I love them–I’m a sucker for a Japanese print and for that Bob Ross yellow ochre color, so together they’re doubly good.
Claim your spot in it the way Toby claims the sunny couch this time of year.
1. Fear not, it’s never too late in the week to work up a righteous head of steam about the state of our culture. From a few weeks ago, A Man explains What so many men are missing about #MeToo
If you take women seriously as full and equal human beings, and you contemplate the hundreds of thousands of victims of abuse who will never be heard or receive any recompense, and you contemplate the untold thousands of abusive acts and relationships ongoing in the US as we speak, and you contemplate the hostility and skepticism with which victims are still met when they come forward, and you contemplate the thuggish misogyny of the current administration and the real damage it is doing to American women, it just becomes really difficult to gin up a lot of sympathy for, oh, Al Franken.
2. Related (for real; here’s a history of pockets*), a survey of jeans pockets to proves that yes, women’s pockets are tiny and useless. “…Like so many things on the internet, we could find complaints and anecdotes galore but little data illustrating just how inferior women’s pockets really are to men’s. So, we went there.”
*”Women’s pockets were private spaces they carried into the public with increasing freedom, and during a revolutionary time, this freedom was very, very frightening. The less women could carry, the less freedom they had. Take away pockets happily hidden under garments, and you limit women’s ability to navigate public spaces, to carry seditious (or merely amorous) writing, or to travel unaccompanied.”
This isn’t new and I swear I’ve posted it before, but it’s more appropriate than ever now that I, too, lift weights and try to look huge:
I wish this poem were 100% accurate and I could tell you I’m spending the rainy day in bed with another Maisie Dobbs book, but I have to ignore the “terrific urge” and go about the day.
Rain
Raymond Carver
Woke up this morning with
a terrific urge to lie in bed all day
and read. Fought against it for a minute.
Then looked out the window at the rain.
And gave over. Put myself entirely
in the keep of this rainy morning.
Would I live my life over again?
Make the same unforgivable mistakes?
Yes, given half a chance. Yes.
My Smartwool funnel neck that I hiked in for years bit the dust last season and I never replaced it, making do with a performance flannel shirt and a neck gaiter. But there’s something to be said for having your neck more draft-proof, so when I saw this wool blend (88% poly/12% wool) at JoAnn I thought, “What if I made the long sleeve Nikko Turtleneck in this?”
The answer was, “I’d have a DIY Smartwool for $19!”
This was my first time making the version with sleeves and I forgot to lengthen them for my looong arms; I could use an extra inch there, even though the body length was good. I cut a straight size 8 but next time I might add a little more width to the bicep–all that POWERLIFTING is making my arms HUGE, bros.
I’ll be on the lookout for knits with a little higher wool content to make another version!
It was a brisk 45 degrees and threatening rain but we made it up the canyon for a bit yesterday. I had to look up this Hopkins poem when I got back home–because who cares about the weather when you can write ecstatic verse in sprung rhythm about nature?
What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
(from “Inversnaid,” by our buddy Gerard Manley Hopkins)
1. Since this turned into Unoffical Rage Week, let’s read an essay by Rebecca Traister (who has a new book out): Fury Is a Political Weapon. And Women Need to Wield It.
If you’ve been feeling a new rage at the flaws of this country, and if your anger is making you want to change your life in order to change the world, then I have something incredibly important to say: Don’t forget how this feels.
Tell a friend, write it down, explain it to your children now, so they will remember. And don’t let anyone persuade you it wasn’t right, or it was weird, or it was some quirky stage in your life when you went all political — remember that, honey, that year you went crazy? No. No. Don’t let it ever become that. Because people will try.
2. Austin Kleon wrote “a willingness to be bad” when you learn something new and gave us this helpful graphic:
