So January One posted her thoughts on the state of knitblogging today and I have to say that I agree with her in many ways. She recognizes the impact that Ravelry has had on knitblogging; I would even go further and say that it's probably had a huge impact on the flow of knitting projects, that projects and KALs might pick up more interest on Ravelry in communities than on individual blogs. I can't remember when I last read a KAL post on a group of blogs.
There are all sorts of blog types; googling "types of blogs" brings up different ways to classify them. Knitting blogs, to me, generally fall into the category of "personal blogs." The author(s) share their current projects, happenings in their knitting and personal lives, show us what they're doing, where they've been, who they went there with, who they met there, what they learned along the way. Knitbloggers share personal experiences and the bloggers we are most drawn to have distinct personalities. We read them because we want to know them, see what they're up to, hear what they have to say, share our opinions with them, share our projects, share their projects, share their joys and sorrows, share.
Bloggers put themselves out into the ether(net), hoping that someone will read what they have to say. They show, they tell, they exhibit. Blog readers return to the exhibitions they find most compelling, interesting, amusing or they follow people they know in real life (which doesn't mean the blog is uninteresting, just that the motivation for regular reading takes on a different character).
In the end, I don't think the knitblog is dead...yet. I do think that for some, the desire to blog was born from a desire to share projects and to have dialogue about projects, to document their knitting lives. Ravelry has now provided the ideal place to document, share, and dialogue; the only thing missing is something blogs never had anyway--a chat feature. So many bloggers, the bloggers for whom these were the primary activities desired, are likely to post less frequently. I know that I really don't feel compelled anymore to share knitting projects on the blog. I take little interest in blog posts about projects. The blogs I read are the ones where I feel a connection to or have an interest in the personality of the blogger behind it. I go to Ravelry to find the information I'm seeking about projects, yarns, patterns, communities. I go to blogs for people.
As long as we're interested in people, and as long as people with good writing chops and interesting things to write keep writing, knitblogging will be around. I think we'll just be shifting from knitblogging as something we do as a community, as an activity that defines us and connects us to knitblogging as one of many forms of electronic communication that knitters use to share, keep in touch, tell stories. Another means of connecting.
]]>What, in your opinion, is the definition of a “reader.” A person who indiscriminately reads everything in sight? A person who reads BOOKS? A person who reads, period, no matter what it is? … Or, more specific? Like the specific person who’s reading something you wrote?
To me, a reader is defined not by what they read, but by the attitude they bring to the world around them. At some point I realized that I read everything: cereal boxes, newspapers, books, movies, television shows, commercials, conversations, body language. Any form of human (or, as I'm learning now that I live with 3 cats, animal) communication can be read if you attend to that communication as readable. The reading attitude questions, examines, explores, and discriminates. Readers are open to possibilities and seek to understand. Readers consume communicative events.
Like I said--noodling. I'm curious to see what others have to say about it. Thanks, Deb, for such a provocative question!
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Now to pack up Steve's place so that we can move to MS!
And yes, someday you'll get a wedding story. Just waiting on pictures!
]]>In case I don't get to do this today, I want to make a toast to my husband.
"A Drinking Song"
W. B. Yeats
Wine comes in at the mouth
And love comes in at the eye;
That's all we shall know for truth
Before we grow old and die.
I lift the glass to my mouth,
I look at you and sigh.
In 2 days I'm headed home for my last few days of singlehood. The wedding is May 10, final grades for UGA are due May 13, and I've got to have my apartment all packed up for a move on May 29. A week or so later, we're off to Jackson, MS. A lot to do in very little time.
So my life consists of:
paper grading
favor making
dishcloth knitting (only thing I can manage now!)
home & office packing
and any other bits of planning/doing associated with finishing up and moving on. I'll try to pop back in again soon with some pictures!
]]>Life is busy, too busy. Grading/teaching, wedding, moving, knitting--to much of some ings and not enough of the rest kind...Off to bed!
]]>Happy Discardia!
]]>That means I need to complete:
My Vest-Turned-Cardigan
My Aqua Velvet Socks
My Hanne Falkenberg
Emily's Warming Truly Tasha Shawl
The Moderne Blanket
The Stripeosaurus
Ruth's Baby Bunting
You know, when I started to write this list, I thought it would be pretty long, but I'm feeling like I can actually finish all of these items by the end of May. No promises--I'm working on only promising what I know I can deliver. Still, this looks manageable.
]]>Not much on my mind. Basically not much exciting going on today. Eh. I've just been letting everything happen without me recently, but it's not important. Pfft. Eh. I've more or less been doing nothing , but shrug. Pretty much nothing seems worth thinking about, but oh well. I guess it doesn't bother me. More or less not much noteworthy happening today. Maybe tomorrow. I've just been sitting around waiting for something to happen. My life's been generally boring today. I haven't gotten anything done recently. I've just been letting everything wash over me these days. Not much on my mind worth mentioning. My mind is like a fog. I haven't been up to anything these days. I can't be bothered with anything.
It's the body of a spam comment. It served its purpose; I actually did a double-take before deleting the message, since it appeared that someone had actually commented with something to say. Of course, since I don't think I know anyone blogging at granny-s*ut I feel fairly certain that this message was not specifically meant for me. Still, I appreciate the effort that went into producing the nothingness. It's probably been lifted from somewhere else.
]]>But enough angst about my lack of writing. What's going on with my knitting?
Truthfully, not a whole lot. I'm looking at my knitting basket right now. It contains my Silkroad Aran Tweed (that's a mouthful) vest, which I'm trying to make a cardigan with the knitting of sleeves (limited amount of yarn--this will be a nail-biter). One layer below is a pair of socks--2 socks, knit at the same time, on the same needle--in Louet Gems. Final layer? A couple of skeins of Galway that were supposed to have been long ago transformed into the fronts of a jacket I'm planning in linen stitch. I have about 4" of the left front.
And then there's the other basket, the long, shallow one that lives under the coffee table. It's full of projects in little ziploc baggies and I don't even want to look in it to see what's actually in there. Flanking that basket are two smaller baskets (part of a set) which hold spinning supplies. SPINNING supplies because I have (thank you sweetheart!) a beautiful new (to me) Lendrum wheel (remember, I showed it to you a while back?) and I really want to do some spinning too.
And my stash. Well, Steve was a sweetheart (as always--I don't deserve him) and photographed the stash I've marked for deletion. I need to price it all and tell the world. It needs to be gone from my home in short order because I just don't want to move it.
Last night I was in a chat room as a participant in an online conference. The keynote was an anthropologist* who had noted (among other interesting things) that the community he had observed underwent a transformation when the technology of writing (we don't really think about paper and pen as technology, but they are). The need for an accurate census listing necessitated the need for actual, discrete names where relationships had named villagers before. And their living spaces were transformed from scattered huts into neat rows.
One of the other participants wondered whether the introduction of the web instead of the introduction of writing would have made a different sort of difference. I immediately fired back the observation that the web is based on writing; writing presupposes the web. The web, for all of its visual and audio offerings, is really a writing-based enterprise. In that moment I was struck with this sense of how truly different we are from less-developed (or differently developed) cultures, and how much our culture shapes the way we think about the world.
What does this have to do with my little stash/time inequality? I realized that these are really silly problems to be complaining about, aren't they? I'm whining about an abundance of fun, productive, creative work. I have too much inspiration around me, too many resources to work with, too much to be and do, and too many opportunities to explore and examine. I think that these things are good and valuable because my culture says that they are so, but to another culture, my complaints about my stash may just mark me as, well, insane.
That's about as brutal as I want to be today, I think.
*The anthropologist is Michael Wesch, composer of a great YouTube commentary on our digital culture called The Machine is Us/ing Us. The presentation that we watched for our conference was called Human Futures for Technology and Education (left column, 4 down).
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From bottom to top:
by Maryanne Wolf
by Richard Restak M.D.
by Henry Jenkins
by Ann Marie Fleming
by Asne Seierstad
by Emma Campbell Webster (this one was actually a graduation gift)
by Elie WieselI haven't cracked a one of these; how tragic is that? I need to read one or two (at least) before I head off to new employment land. But how to pick?
If I use the punctuation method of selection, then I can easily knock out four of them. Because, really? That colon is the mark of academe to my eyes. My dissertation title has a colon, every paper I've delivered in my graduate career has had a colon, every freaking book I pick up at the library to read has a colon.
You see, everybody poops.
But using the colon method knocks out the Austen adventure, which is most decidedly NOT an academic book; I suppose they wanted to appeal to the Austen-loving academics out there.
I could use the length of the title (Wiesel wins that one) or the feel of the book in the hand (Seierstad is satisfying) or the amount of eye-candy (Fleming, in a landslide). I could use social significance (Seierstad and Jenkins) or learning-something-new (Wolf and Restak) as criteria for selection.
Or I could just pick one up and start reading.
Any thoughts/suggestions? Anyone have experience with any of these?
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