Last Chance to See by Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine.

I let this book sit on my shelf for ages.  I love Douglas Adams.  And I am very sad that he’s dead.  Downright pissed, actually.  So, since he’s not writing anything new, I let this one ripen for a while before reading it, since I’m now officially out of new Adams to read forever.  Stupid mortality.

The book is non-fiction, and a departure from Adams’s novels.  Adams was hired by BBC radio in the late 1980s to go on a trip to see a particularly rare animal and talk about it.  Things went so well that Adams talked the BBC into sending him on a series of trips to find other endangered species and report on their plight.  Carwardine, a zoologist, conservationist, and an excellent wildlife photographer, planned and went on of trips, took  photographs, and explained the business of zoology and conservation to Adams.  Adams, of course, is quickly convinced of the need to protect these animals and their habitat.  Any reader who isn’t also convinced might just be dead inside.

The bare facts of these animals’ plights are terribly sad.  But Adams was, of course, a funny guy.  So he describes the wonders of traveling to remote areas and interacting with folks from other cultures and tracking animals with honesty about the difficulties, but also with a lot of humor.  This is a travel book, a book about animals, but of course also a book about people and culture.   Adams’s voice is still his voice, of course, so his fans will find this book comfortable, even when it’s sad. 

Parts of the book and many photographs are available here, so go ahead and get a taste of the book.    Since the research for the book started almost 20 years ago, the facts about many of the species covered in the book have since changed.    The kakapo are doing better now, thanks to a great conservation effort in New Zealand.   The Komodo dragon population is higher now too.  The baiji are still having a tough time, and the Yangtze is still terribly polluted. 

Read the book.  Support wildlife and habitat protection projects.  Don’t buy endangered wild-caught birds or fish as pets.  Keep your housecats indoors so they don’t eat songbirds or frogs, both of which evolved without small cats as predators and both of which are suffering huge population drops and habitat loss.  You know the drill. 

I am not, in point of fact, all talk.

I am mostly talk, but not all talk.

Our new refrigerator is in place, on top of newly-laid tiles.  And our hero Mike came by and did some lovely finish-carpentry for us over the weekend.  Ahhhhhhh.  We may finish the kitchen before, you know, any of the nieces or the nephew leave for college.

And there is knitting progress.  Print o’ the Wave is clearly lace.  See

Not the best half-assed temporary blocking I’ve done, but you get the point.  It’s the prettiest dish-towel I’ve ever made.  I might even keep going until it’s long enough for, like, a big place-mat.  Or an ascot.  But only if she says nice things to me.

The sweater back is complete:

The left front is past the half-way point:

The yarn is from Kiparoo farm, in Maryland, which is a lovely place.  It’s a hand-dyed emerald green wool mohair blend.  I heart it.  It’s very silky, and not at all scratchy to me. 

Now, things are going to get a little scary.  I’m all about honesty, you know, and not everything is pretty lace and soft sweaters.  Some knitting is scary. 

Take this sock, for instance.  I don’t have proof, but I’m pretty sure Trekking made the yarn out of ground-up clowns:

Honestly, it’s the section right above the needles I hate.  Red and orange and lime green all mashed together.  I’ve knit far past this point, but I think I’m just fooling myself.  I took the sock to knitting this weekend, to warn the others.  And some of them are obviously deluded.  Many, many seemingly sane knitters said this is a lovely colorway.  And then maybe they said I was cracked.  But then again, we can’t really be right.  We knit with Tom.  And Tom knit this.

He actually knit it quite some time ago, and he travels with it.  Which I take as evidence of some very frightening pre-meditation in action.  I live in fear, as should you.

Run for your lives.   

Rhinebeck is coming.  Rhinebeck is coming!

And Rhinebeck coincides with my birthday.  I’ve never been there before, perhaps because I hadn’t reached the appropriate level of obsession.  The current plan is for Janet, Jayme, Lisa and I to all road-trip to Poughkeepsie together.  I originally had train-based thoughts, but we did the math, and driving leaves a lot more money for fiber in our pockets.  Not that I intend to shop, because I don’t need fiber.  Nope.  Not me.

There are all sorts of plans in the works for meet-ups and bingo.  But I demand that you celebrate with me.  I will, somehow, acquire a cake.  And I will bring liquor that mixes easily with beverages available in hotel vending machines.  So tell me, what kind of cake do you like?  And how many of you like vodka drinks, and how many like rum drinks?  Do not speak to me of gin.  Gin makes a man mean, and it makes a Meangrrl even meaner.  "Everybody booze up and riot!" is only a funny party phrase in the abstract, you know.  In concrete terms, boozing and rioting are very bad for wool.  But adult birthday celebrations require cocktails, and I’m buying.  Have cocktail shaker, will travel. 

I have, I swear, been knitting in preparation for Rhinebeck.  I can even insert photos once I go to the trouble of downloading them.  I’m trying very very hard to finish a simple cabled cardigan I started last winter, before Scott’s accident.  I tried to knit it once he was home and recovering, but I just couldn’t, because I had serious gauge issues for a while there.   Hence the months of socks, with some socks thrown in for good measure, all knit very tightly, and with frequent finger-tip soreness issues. 

I just cast off for neck on the back, piece so I think it’s possible to finish.  My newfound sweater dedication has left Print o’ the Wave fallow, but that’s ok.  I’ve also had some serious consternation with a would-be Trekking 100 sock.  There is far too much ground-up-clown in the colorway.  A few rows of lovely marled color, and then red-yellow-green muddy Clown detritus.  Bleh.  I’ve already frogged twice.  The yarn may require surgery. 

All of the knitting faces two forms of competition, though.  We are, again, working on the kitchen.  Learn from me, friends.  Do not trust a Swede, no matter how friendly she is, to have total control over the auto-cad kitchen design process.  Swedes think Americans buy ridiculously large refrigerators, and said Swedes use all sorts of trickery to foil the large refrigerator conspiracy.  Not so bad a concept for a family of two, of course, choosing a smaller major appliance to avoid wasting electricity.  But you can’t install what you can’t buy.  We found exactly one fridge that would fit into the slot we left for it.  So, our old fridge moved to the garage last night, and Scott tiled the slot for the new fridge.  Just a little more tiling and grouting to go, and then we really dedicate ourselves to begging our wonderful friend Mike to do all of the complex trim work.  If the begging doesn’t work, we’ll just kidnap Lisa and refuse to return her until he comes with tools.  Sounds desparate, I know, but we’ve been slogging through this kitchen remodel since, well, 2001? 

The other thing competing with the knitting?  Lost.  Lisa loaned us Season One on DVD, and then a whole weekend disappeared.  I got some sock knitting done, but lace and cables require looking, and Lost does not allow eyes to leave the screen.  It is a jealous master.  Season Two is coming from Netflix.  Send help. 

Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris

I found David Sedaris’s work years ago through This American Life, the best radio show ever.  His speaking voice is very distinctive, but his Billie Holiday impersonation is what made me fall for him as a performer.  Also, it helps that Sedaris is ridiculously funny and apparently free of any sort of boundaries or filtering. 

This book is a series of autobiographical essays.  All are humorous on some level, but a few are truly intimate and touching.  Sedaris uses his family as fodder for his stories, but he reveals far more about himself than he does about any of them.  What I found particularly impressive is Sedaris’s ability to write about his failures so openly.  He doesn’t extol the virtues of his favorite recovery method.  He doesn’t depict himself as a hero for overcoming this or that.  He just says what happened.  I wish more people could view their own lives so clearly.

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke

Having been essentially beaten over the head with hints about how much I would love this book, I finally bought it.  All 900 pounds of it.  And then fell for it, and was forced to lug it around on the Metro, ignoring my sock-knitting (yes, I do still knit) and hoping for delays on the tracks. 

The most accurate description I’ve heard of this novel is Jane Austen plus Harry Potter plus Tolkein.  I’d also throw in a bit of White’s The Once and Future King.

The novel is set roughly during the years of the Napoleonic wars.  Both title characters are magicians; one a young man who stumbles into a career he didn’t expect he would ever be interested in, the other an older man who jealously guards both his books and his career, trying to prevent others from reading too much about or practicing magic.  Hilarity ensues.  I don’t want to say much about the plot, of course, because plot matters a lot in books like this. 

I was really impressed by Clarke’s writing.  It’s hard to maintain any sort of style over this long of a book.  Her characters are engaging, the mythology of the book is intriguing, and she seems to have a good sense of both the period she is writing about and the bounds of fantasy we slightly-snootier fantasy readers will accept. 

I’m a bit lost over what to think of them making a movie of the novel.  I know they’re going to.  I just don’t see how they can . . . it’s so long. 

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

I read most of the Pulitzer winning novels at one point or another.  It seems like a safe buck spent.  I was wondering how I’d react to this novel, what with its religious focus.

I needn’t have worried.  The novel is structured as a series of letters from an ailing father to his son.  The speaker, a preacher, knows he is dying, and wants to leave some piece of himself for his young son.   So he writes about falling in love with his much-younger wife and her role in their community; about his relationship with his father and grandfather–two preachers whose styles couldn’t have been more different; his brother; his godson and his child.  It’s beautifully written.  The novel delves into questions of faith, race relations, class, parental love, ethics–but it does all of that while maintaining a sense of gentle, intimate conversation.  It’s a gem of a book.  I’m sure I’ll read it again.

On Sunday, we went to the National Museum of the American Indian.  Bill and Shirley were so happy to see how well everything came together for the museum.  They live just outside a Ute reservation and have been active in the Nine Mile Canyon Coalition for years.  Shirley was also a Latin American Studies major in college, so she’s the right person to go to NMAI with.  She knows a thing or two about a thing or two.

I should point out that you’re allowed to take pictures inside the museum–I wasn’t being a rebel, here, or breaking any laws.  I should also point out that I’m in the midst of some image-heavy blogging, here.  Sorry if I break your computer’s brain.  If it’s all too much for you, just stop after this photo.  I went to a new museum, and I felt like this guy the whole time.

(In a “my mind open, I like spirals, I am listening to whatever you need to teach me” kind of way.  Not in a major head wound, very strange sunburn kind of way.)

I didn’t take any exterior photos–there are other people who’ve done such a good job at it out there.  Suffice it to say, it’s a breath-taking structure, and the grounds are planted entirely with native species from specific regions of North and South America.  And the front doors are made of glass and covered in images from petroglyphs.

Once inside, you find a lobby with great handmade boats.  I fell hard for the boats.  This, of course, is an Outrigger.

And this is a totora-reed boat used by the Aymara people, who live in Peru and Bolivia.

Once we stopped drooling over the boats, we went to the top floor of the museum and worked our way down.  The first exhibition is a cross-section of different tribes’ views of cosmology.  The center of the exhibit is all about stars.  It opens with a glass sculpture of Raven capturing the sun in his beak (sorry–can’t remember the artist’s name).

And closes with a cast glass sculpture called “Raven Steals the Moon” made by a Salish artist named Ed Archie Noise Cat.  If you look closely, you’ll see the phases of the moon on the outside of the piece, and the raven there on the Moon’s brow.  Gorgeous work.

The displays are relatively dark and thus difficult to photograph, but trust me when I say that this museum is a fiber-artist’s paradise.  There are amazing examples of beadwork

(This one is Cree)

Weaving

Tapestry

And fiber-related metalwork

Sweet little llamas.  Teeny, they were.  And gold.

And that’s just in the first exhibit.  Which also had some wonderful skulls for dia de los muertos

(For a sense of scale here, think ginormous.  Bigger than the biggest skull you’ve ever seen, by far.  It had its own weather system.)

And a great calendar.  It wouldn’t have been right to leave out a calendar, after all.

The next exhibit was heartbreaking in spots.  It depicted the havoc wreaked upon North and South American peoples by the coming of Europeans, eschewing Western histories of the conquests in favor of native histories.  It was a sort of reclaiming of history.  Shirley was particularly happy with this section.  It also covered the strides some tribes are making to reclaim land, repair what’s broken, and make things right for themselves.   Not so cheery, but still full of beautiful material culture.

Spinning supplies

Yarn painting

More weaving

And just generally beautiful things.

I’ll pick this as a completely arbitrary stopping point and continue in another post.

As I was saying, Bill and Shirley, Scott’s aunt and uncle the llama-ranchers, were in DC last week for a conference.  We got to claim them over the weekend.  Like most people, we get stuck in the daily work-cook-clean-sleep routine, and forget what our hometown has to offer us.  When guests come to town, we get to remember what this region is all about.  And this time, I remembered my camera.  I remembered my camera in a way I haven’t for years.  It may take a while to show you just a piece of what we saw.

On Saturday, we went to a mini-Celtic fest at a winery in Culpepper.  Tinsmith was playing, and Tuatha made an appearance thanks to Dark Mary, so we figured it would be nice to pop in.  I actually got a lot of knitting done on Saturday, what with the driving and the hanging out in the lovely weather.  But I frogged it all (hence some of the frustration I mentioned.  “Ground-up Clown” is not a colorway I need in my life, or on my feet).

The grapes were beautiful.

The wine was, well the wine was crap.  Sorry.  It was crap.  But the music was great.

I love being friends with such a good band.  I’ve been friends with members of bad bands in the past, and it’s an uncomfortable thing, lemmetellyahsister.  No fun trying to hide your distaste for your pals’ shite tunes.  No fun at all.  I love being able to look this quartet of people in the eyes and say “That was a great set!” and really mean it.  Ahhhhhhh.

Here’s Rowan. looking cool while chatting with a fan, post set.  Rowan has a thing about taking pictures of people, and I really hate to be photographed (Dad’s a photographer, plus some other stuff) The only way to defend myself from Rowan’s lens may be to turn mine on him.  So nyeeah.

Mostly though, I am in love with Brooke’s banjo.   I want to sent it flowers.  And buy it chocolate.  And maybe write it a song.  Brooke, Rowan and I actually had a short discussion about doing some song-writing together . . . I wonder if instruments can be wooed that easily . . .

It’s an antique Bacon.  That in itself makes it deserving of love.  But it’s got fantastic tone.   And great mother of pearl.

I remember talking to Brooke once about how being a banjo player brings the Nashville big-haired rhinestone-loving glitz out of a girl.  Brooke’s not a frilly person.  Neither am I.  I doubt either of us has a sequin to our names.  But show us some shiny crap on a banjo, and whooooo-weeeeeee!  Get the aqua-net!

Her banjo has really gorgeous carving on the heel

But I’m not just after the banjo because she’s fancy.  I love her working roots too.  Look at that head.  She’s been around, and it’s part of what I like about her (still talking about the banjo, here).

Look at that cascade of brackets.

Brooke told me to play this beauty on Saturday.  She may as well have told me to go ask Bruce Molsky to dance.  Actually, I wouldn’t think twice about asking Molsky to dance–he’s just a musician, and I bet I can out-step him.  But I’m sort of star-struck by this beauty.  I wonder if she likes me . . .

I don’t deserve to play her, because I still simultaneously suck and blow as a banjo player.  Please know that I’m not being self-effacing, there.  I’m really not playing in public yet.  Because I never practice, in part because of something I’ll get to in a minute here.  And also because I am obsessed with the freaking wool.  One day though, I hope to earn its equal.

Now I’ll point out more proof of my tenuous hold on sanity.  I love banjo, obviously.  I’m also allergic to nickle.  It’s why I have to be very careful in selecting knitting needles, and why my body occasionally reacts badly to my wedding ring, which was handmade by a dear friend out of white gold.   Gold always has nickle in it.  So let’s take a look at the brackets again.

The brackets on just about every open-back banjo in the country are nickle-plated.  Do you know how much that sucks for me?  In fact, it sucks for most people.  Brooke isn’t allergic, and look at those top brackets, where her arm rests.  Look right to you?   Nope.  One of Brooke’s students has a worse allergy that I do.  She regularly has huge terrible reactions to her banjo, and yet she keeps playing.  I haven’t found the right banjo-strap/arm covering/motivation combination yet.  But I will, one of these days.  If not, someone will confiscate my banjo, and I’ll be sad.  Sigh.

Next: the Smithsonian.

Not dead.  Swamped at work.

Bill and Shirley, the keepers of the llamas-in-law are in town, so we’re showing them some great things about Virginia and DC.  I even managed to take pictures.

I’ve been working away on Print o’ the Wave, on some sock ideas (which all get frogged), and on a circular needle hanging holder (which I may burn at the stake).  Frustration abounds.

The Mummies of Urumchi by Elizabeth Wayland Barber.

If you’re an efficient-minded person, don’t bother to read this review.  Just go buy the book and read  it immediately.  I’d recommend you just get all of Barber’s books.  She is a rare talent–an amazing scholar who puts her learning to great practical use who can also write engaging, lovely prose.

Just get all of her books while you’re at the store.  It’ll save you valuable time that could be spent pouring over Barber’s writing.

This particular book explains the discovery of and research on some ancient mummified caucasoid bodies discovered in the Tarim Basin, which is north of Tibet and south of Mongolia.  Barber, both a brilliant linguist and a fiber artist who has studied ancient techniques, was invited to the region, which is now part of China, to study the bodies and their clothing.   Many archaeologists and linguists agree that the mummified folks were Tocharian speakers, thus Indo-Europeans.  They seem to have been permanently settled in the area. 

What is most interesting to most of us fiber heads is the clothing these people made.  Even after about 3,000 years of burial, their clothes are bright red and yellow and blue.  They wear twill plaids, woven in a structure that is otherwise particular to Celtic tribes in Europe in the Iron Age.  They painted swirling designs on their faces, much like Celts did during their battles with Rome, much later.

Just read the book.  I’m too excited to keep writing about it, because thinking of it makes me pick the book right back up.  So just read the book.  And stare at the gorgeous photos.  And then learn to weave and dye–you’ll be forced to, I tell ya.