Adverbs

About a year and a half ago I read the book Adverbs by Daniel Handler. It came up in discussion recently as an example of a book that was more style than substance, and I pulled out some passages I sort of like. I was going to write intelligibly about them, but I work with computers all day and I try to spend less time in front of them, so the internet is somewhat unlikely to hear anything intelligible from me.

So, probably in the wrong order, some passages:

Love is hourly, too. There are stories about people who have loved someone forever after laying eyes on them for a few minutes and then nevermore, but these stories have not happened to anyone we know. No, when you love someone you spend hours and hours with them, and even the mightiest forces in the netherworld could not say whether the hours you spend increase your love or if you simply spend more hours with someone as your love increases. And when the love is over, when the diner of love seems closed from the outside, you want all of those hours back, along with anything you left at your lover's house and maybe a few things which aren't technically yours on the grounds that you wasted a portion of your life and those hours have all gone southside. Nobody can make this better, its seems, nothing on the menu. It's like what the stewardess offers, even in first class. They come with towels, with drinks, mints, but they never say, "Here's the five hours we took from you when you flew across the country to New York to live with your boyfriend and one day he got in a taxicab and never came back" [...]

And another:


"Kaatu", Gladys said in a mysterious howl, and here we could skip ahead if you know what I mean. It is always tempting to skip past words we do not understand, the parts of a relationship which confuse us, and arrive at a nice clear sentence [like] "They clearly weren't in love anymore". [...] But we cannot skip to that or it wouldn't be a love story. We cannot skip the way we look in photographs, or our own affectations, or the way we like our coffee, or the way the people we love like their coffee, even though they like it some bad, bad way. We must suffer through all of it, without skipping any tiny thing.

And one to prove that the book isn't totally depressing:

(after talking about how this crate of potatoes was too big to get through they door of a cafe. also, this book has a thing about magpies)

It is not the diamonds or the birds, the people or the potatoes; it is not any of the nouns. The miracle is the adverbs, the way things are done. It is the way love gets done despite every catastrophe, and look, - actually look! - the potatoes have arrived! They had to slice through the plastic - attractively, artfully, aggressively, to name three adverbs that didn't make it into this book - but the potatoes are being carried inside, an actual miracle! It can't happen to everyone - as in life, some people will be killed off before they get something shiny, and some of them will screw it up and other will just end up with the wrong kind of bird - but some of them will arrive at love. Surely somebody will arrive, in a taxi perhaps, attractively, artfully, aggressively, or any other way it is done.

Just some things running through my head. Next time, maybe I'll post something from this book on technology and design I'm reading for a seminar.

Inspiration

Harry Clarke - Faust, originally uploaded by alicen.

The illustrations of Harry Clarke are pretty awesome. They're also from the 1920s, which really isn't what you'd expect from looking at them.

I'm trying to figure out where to go with this blog and what to use it for. Currently I'm running on the theory that if I think more about art (for whatever value of art you want to use - my definition is pretty damn loose) the more I'll do it and the happier I'll be. So if I keep track of whatever images/phrases/passages from books are running through my head, maybe I'll actually be able to do something with them instead of just looping through them and feeling vaguely intellectually undernourished.

Here's to 2008!

Papercrafts

I made my mom a silly origami thing for Christmas:



The instructions are here if anyone else wants to try. Also, this thread on Craftster.

I knit, really

I'm making Knitty's Calorimetry currently. The purple and orange will be rather exciting with my current hair color (pictures of that when I finish). The yarn was purchased long ago and sort of destined to be a present for my mother, but I didn't have enough of it and so it's been languishing in my stash for a couple of years.



The colors are rather more vibrant than that in real life, but I'm never home during daylight to take better pictures. Plus my camera is rather elderly.

Domestic Arts

Here's some proof that I've not been up to nothing. I have of course been up to grad school, but also the making of exciting things. First of all, my bed is finally finished. It's been in several stages of "almost finished" for a while, but since I added hooks for pajamas and things a couple nights ago the only thing I'd change about it is the squeaking. And I'm not exactly sure how to fix that.



This picture was taken standing in my closet. In the normal course of things, my room is not large enough to get that far away from the bed. As you can see, all of the mess in my room has now been relegated to the space under the bed. It's not nearly so noticeable when there's not a camera flash illuminated the space under there, but I'll probably add a curtain eventually anyway.

I'm particularly proud of the built-in bookcase:



It doesn't hold anything like all of my books, but it's a start.

Eventually I'd like to put the bed up on Instructables, but I'm not sure I took enough pictures along the way. So I might have to wait to do that until the next time the mattress comes off.

More recently, I've been baking lots of bread. My roommates think this is awesome. Here's the most recent four:



In saran wrap: strawberry bread. Almost gone: banana bread. The big whitish loaf: rosemary bread. In the bowl: cheese bread rising for later. There was also my attempt at Irish soda bread, which is gone now. But it had currants and caraway and was delicious. I do however really, really need to learn that I should not begin baking after midnight. Especially not on a weeknight.

When I get pictures back I'll post about the Thing 1 and Thing 2 costumes a friend and I made and wore for Halloween.

Halloween festivities

I carved a pumpkin. Look:



(My roommate seems to take a lot of silly pictures of me.)

Here's a better shot of all of the pumpkins:



I also carved a very small green squash, but I haven't got a picture of that yet.

Dyeing my hair is like a craft...

It is all bluey green now, and will remain so for a bit.

Someday I will update this more, really I promise. The bed is in limbo as I've lent my drill to a friend who wants to use it to make his own bed. I must go steal it back from him.

Also I've started grad school and this is, not surprisingly, time-consuming. I should update the subtitle on here.