Last week I started reading The Alignment Problem, a scholarly exploration of the history of neural networks (the ancestors of what we now call artificial intelligence). I have only just begun the book, having read the prologue, the introduction, and the first chapter, but it’s already giving me a lot about which to think.
I started thinking about different forms of electronic assistance in various activities and wondering when certain amounts are too much.
Racers and car fanatics might say that the only real form of driving is with a car that has a manual transmission. But the vast majority of drivers have cars with automatic transmissions. That’s driving, too, isn’t it? What about if you use cruise control on long stretches of highway driving? Is that driving, or is the driver merely managing the driving that the car has now been programmed to do? What if you have a car that can do parallel parking for you? And what if you drive a Tesla and give over your control completely? When does driving a car end and something else begin? And what is that something else?
Let’s think about reading. Many of us still imagine reading as something that’s being done when you’re curled up with a physical book. But many readers use their Kindles and Nooks to read e-books. Others drive (cf. “driving,” above) or work out while listening to audiobooks. Aren’t those books as well? Similarly, music has gone from a live experience to a vinyl record to a tape cassette, a compact disc, and a downloadable digital file. It’s all music, isn’t it?
Two years ago I participated in an online songwriting group. I don’t play any musical instrument well enough to accompany myself while singing, so I opened the Garage Band program on my iPad and used the tools it provided to me. I laid down a percussion track and used a virtual session guitarist that (who?) was provided in the software. I recorded my singing of my lyrics to the beat of a digital metronome, then edited and saved the file and uploaded the link to my file to a shared Google Sheet. I wrote a few songs via this process, but does this make me a musician? A singer/songwriter? Or something else?
Art is another obvious continuum. If I apply pencil or pen to paper, brush and paint to canvas, hands to clay, or chisel to stone or wood, I’m rather obviously creating art. But what if my process is digital, and I can Undo the virtual brushstroke I just made and give it another try? What if I have an infinite number of do-overs in Procreate and can create several layers in my file before I save it to my hard drive? Am I still an artist?
And now let’s look at writing. It would be ridiculous to suggest that the only real writing is done using a dip pen in gall ink on parchment. We accept that writers can write (as I am writing now) their words on a computer and published to the Internet. No paper was impressed upon in the composition of this blog post. But is a blog post “real” writing as opposed to a newspaper column? A short story in an electronic magazine? A printed novel? What makes the writing real?
Must I come up with my own words in that written piece utterly on my own? Am I not permitted to use a dictionary or thesaurus? Can I allude to another work or create a parody of it? Can I use spellcheck or the grammar tools within Microsoft Word, or need I turn those functions off within my Preferences menu? May I tap the center button on my iPhone and use predictive text if I’m in a hurry? Or can I enter a prompt in ChatGPT and still call myself a writer?
Where does it change and where does it end? Who drives and who writes? Who is an artist or a musician? You’ve seen the AI-generated art that isn’t informed by the rules of real life. This is something we’ll have to think about as a society, and something we’ll have to decide — preferably before the artists and the writers lose their hope and creativity.
Knitwise, I did all of my knitting on the Habit-Forming Scarf during the sessions of the Grand Prix of China this weekend. The scarf is now 18 inches long, so there is still quite a ways to go in the yarn of the first skein.
This weekend I organized my collection of compact discs, which are stored in a cabinet that was also being used to store yarn. Until I emptied out the bottom two drawers, that is, and found evidence that mice had gotten into the yarn stash. That yarn has since been moved to sealed plastic storage (and I’ll probably set a trap in the bottom drawer). I’d better pick up the pace of using my stash or start giving more of it away before it turns into rodentine bedding.
In the course of this weekend I acquired two more typewriters. The first one, a Smith-Corona Model 88 Secretarial, was purchased from a somewhat local seller via Facebook Marketplace. He ended up being able to deliver the machine to me at work on Friday afternoon.
There are some issues with the tab and margin settings, but I’m sure that if I actually read the manual and do what it says I will have a better understanding of how to move the right levers and press the right buttons, all in the right sequence. But my goodness, look at this beautiful machine! She will clean up just fine.
Ah, 1954.
When I brought her home, I really didn’t know where I was going to put her. She sat on the dining room table for a while, then moved to the coffee table in the library. It’s not the best place, but I’m definitely running out of room for typewriter display and storage.
On Saturday afternoon I met up with a friend who hinted that she would have a “weird surprise” for me. We sat in a coffeeshop and talked for hours about everything and finally had to leave when we noticed that the owners were closing for the day. (Next time we’ll definitely have to try the coffee.) She was getting into her car when we both remembered about the weird surprise.
Someone had set out this little typewriter case in downtown Milwaukee, labeled thusly. How could she not pick it up and take it to a new home? And how could I not take it in?
This machine was built in Korea in 1988 or 1989, as the American market was shifting towards electronic word processors and home computers. Somehow it ended up in the American Midwest, broke its right platen knob, cracked and popped off the key to the right of the spacebar, and became irrelevant to its owners.
I have the broken pieces and I’ll ask someone more experienced than I am to put them back on. In the meantime I have fixed the ribbon setting (in the photo it’s still set to red, not black) and done a little typing test to assess the key action and have a look at the typeface. This Safari III is a little trouper weighing just 10 and a half pounds without its lid.
But where is it going to go?
One of the features of some of the more clever manual typewriters is the half-space. It’s a way to make room for a correction as an alternative to retyping the whole page. You erase the mistake and then have a way to fit the correct word into the space you have left. You hold the spacebar down, then type the next letter before you let the spacebar up. Then a longer word fits into a smaller space without looking obviously scrunched. It’s like a tight kerning before there was word processing software that did the kerning automatically.
I wish I could do some half-spacing around my house. If certain items could take up half their usual shelf space, I could easily slide two more typewriters onto the shelves, the tables, or…wherever. In lieu of that magical happenstance, some of these typewriters will need to find new and more spacious homes.
Project updates: This week, as research for Black Walnut, I listened to a lot of bluegrass music, then switched to a CD set I bought online called Music of Coal: Mining Songs from the Appalachian Coalfields. All of the (48!) songs are related in some way to coal mining, strip mining, unionizing, Mother Jones, and/or black lung. They sometimes tug at your heartstrings and occasionally just run you over with heavy-duty machinery.
I mean, this is from the cover art.
Well, you really shouldn’t have been standing there anyway. My mother’s family comes from an area where these kinds of things are talked about all the time: strikes, mine disasters, being killed by a train. Stuff happens, life goes on, and you have to make a living somehow. The area of focus on my story doesn’t have mountains but it does have some very hilly places, some of which are labels as strip mines on my county map.
I didn’t move forward on the other project at all this week. I kept thinking that I would just sit down and take care of one last task with my library copy of Development of Mathematics, but so many things were happening that I just didn’t make the time. Next week, next week.
I did finally start a short-term project that I had planned to do over spring break, but it expanded and became more complex until I had to figure out how to reschedule it on my own terms. I don’t get time off during spring break anyway — nor for “summer vacation” either — so it’s more of a state of mind than any time away from work. I’ll just say that this is a movie-review project and leave it at that for now. I will be working on this in the background, as it were, and when I have finished it I will share the link to my work. That will probably be sometime in August.
Knitwise, I made one row of progress on the Habit-Forming Scarf this week. I should be able to do more next weekend while I’m watching sessions for the Grand Prix of China.
One or two of you may be starting to wonder whatever happened to my Impossible Read project. To be honest, it’s still sitting in a tote bag next to my Comfy Green Chair in my home library.
I have been very frustrated at running out of time before being able to sit down and work on the project. Eventually I realized that this was happening because I took an admittedly very very long book list and converted it into an extremely time-consuming project. Not only was I planning to read some of the greatest books of all time, but I was also going to create a series of books filled with my own thoughts and annotations. And not only that, but the physical space necessary for working on these notebooks wasn’t even anywhere in my own house.
So I am setting aside the idea of creating a multi-volume artifact for myself. Instead I have a new plan, and I hope that you are sitting down as you read this. You’re simply not going to believe it.
I’m just going to read the books.
You heard me.
I will just read the books, and then watch the movies. I have plenty of other places where I can write about my reactions to the texts — in my morning freewriting, in my evening journaling, and here in my weekly blog posts. It’s even possible that as I work on my two primary writing projects, the great works and my thoughts about them may spill over into the writing I do there. (That’s kind of the point — to finally read these books and be influenced by them in my thought and my expression. To be edified, and to be improved.)
So hang on, Wart! I’ll be back soon to enjoy all of your adventures with Merlyn. I’ll just try not to be taking notes at the same time.
This weekend, for the Impossible Improbable Read-ing list, I found a very good used copy of Grendel by John Gardner. (I’m frustrated that I had to buy it at all, because I recognize the cover but cannot find the copy that I surely already own. ANYWAY.) Then I splurged on a new unabridged copy of The Tale of Genji, translated by Royall Tyler. Evidently this edition was originally published in 2003. It’s more than a thousand pages long and includes exquisite line drawings, a timeline, and a glossary. It’s full of helpful notes to the reader (hooray!) and it’s printed on paper that is soft to the touch (a high clay content?) and makes you want to just sit and pet it.
I marked these titles as “owned” in my Google Sheet, then scanned down the list to what I would next need to acquire. There are several books in a whole time period that I need to find — but they were written in the late 1600s and the 1700s. Before I even get to that point, I will have read The Once and Future King, The Mists of Avalon, The Epic of Gilgamesh, Beowulf, Grendel, The Tale of Genji, The Arabian Nights, The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales (in Middle English), Orlando Furioso, Don Quixote, and Salman Rushdie’s novel Quichotte. I have no idea what that cumulative page count even looks like (and I think it will go better for me if I don’t work it out in advance; I will log them in the spreadsheet as I finish each book [I have already created the formula]). There are also movies planned for viewing at the end of each segment, and those (so far) are The Sword in the Stone, Monty Python’s The Holy Grail, Beowulf, Aladdin, and Man of la Mancha (okay, I do need a DVD of this).
It may be two-three more years before I reach Oroonoko by Aphra Behn or Pamela by Samuel Richardson. But if you do see a nice used copy, could you let me know about it?
On to the Primary Projects mentioned above.
For Black Walnut (the fiction project), I continue to collect and listen to bluegrass music. I’m reading mostly about the early years because that’s the timeframe that will impact my characters, and I’m doing a little side research into the bluegrass radio shows of the 1950s and 1960s, particularly in the Ohio-Appalachia area. In the last few days I managed to pick up a used DVD of O Brother, Where Art Thou?, a CD of the soundtrack, and a CD of live music from the groups on the soundtrack. I also snagged CDs by Mac Wiseman, Alison Krauss, and Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys. From the reading I’m doing, I am starting to recognize the names of key bluegrass musicians. Some of these names may or may not sneak their way into the manuscript when I’m writing again. (I also promised an archivist that I would name a character after him, and I have absolutely no problem with that.)
I can see now how thin and underdeveloped my original storyline was. I’m reminding myself that it was a NaNoWriMo project from 2014 and that it didn’t have to be any better than it was. I wrote 22,500 words in 30 days and it was okay. But now I want to meet the characters and their parents and grandparents, get to know them, get to know the time and the region, and find the big story that’s worth telling. Every so often I get a glimpse of it.
For the Development of Mathematics project (doesn’t that sound thrilling?), I have catalogued almost every annotation in the copy of the book held by my own university’s library. When I’m done with that, the logical next step is to do the same for the other copies in the University of Wisconsin System libraries. The catch is that Inter-Library Loan operates by choosing a copy at random from the system holdings. I’m in consultation with a research librarian and our library director as to how to tweak that system so that I efficiently receive each copy in the system for evaluation and possible cataloguing. That phase will start in June so that I will have the maximum possible time with the books.
Another thing I need to do for this project is to brainstorm until I understand what the core project actually is, then what are the possible spin-off projects. That was something I had hoped to tackle this weekend, but plans changed and that’s been postponed until next weekend.
Knitwise, this week I did put in a few sessions of work on the Habit-Forming Scarf. This evening it measures 15 inches from the cast-on edge, and the remainder of the skein weight 51 grams (out of 100). This backs up my calculations from last week about getting 30 inches out of each skein. Hooray, my scarf is now 25 percent complete.
I’m going to have to normalize adding a couple of inches every couple of days if I want to get out of “slog” territory.
And with that in mind, it might be nice to have a small and colorful project to do on the side, to keep me motivated to work on something so long and grey (although certainly elegant and sophisticated).
My friend Nicole recently crocheted an office plant for me, and my friend Mary sent me a link to some crochet patterns published by the U.S. National Park Service. Here is one for a halibut. Here is another for a walleye. There are some fun patterns out there, including one (somewhere; I don’t have a link) for a crocheted Scottish thistle. It’s time to go stashbusting and color this place UP.
This week, otherwise known as Spring Break, I concentrated on research for a primarily nonfiction writing project. Or at least I tried to.
Almost as soon as I had scheduled the appointments with the University Archives, my brain rebelled and thought it would be much more exciting to focus on the fiction project and research the history of bluegrass music. (Not to say that it was wrong…)
It has been a revelation to discover that, instead of beating myself up for not correctly identifying the One Best Thing that I should be working on at any given time, it has been much more productive to work on two projects at the same time and let themselves fight it out for priority. That way I always have something to do.
The result is that, rather simultaneously, I am listening to CDs of bluegrass music, accumulating more histories of mathematics, figuring out where and how to print and laminate large topographic maps from the early 1960s, updating my spreadsheet of the UW-Whitewater Math Department roster, learning about GM models of the 50s and 60s, thinking about the post-World War II market for math textbooks, and wondering if someone (Casey?) can lend me a mandolin. You know, like you do.
I’m leaning into a lot of neurodiversity here and hoping that I can figure out what works best for me. Oh, and I made another pizza on Saturday. With all sautéed sweet onion slices and half portobello slices. And a homemade whole-wheat-blend crust this time, not a mix from a box. I’m trying to learn one little thing about pizza-making each week.
The next thing I need to learn is who would like some leftovers, as Youngest didn’t take those away at the end of the weekend. More to learn, more to learn.
Knitwise, I added a few more rows to the Habit-Forming Scarf this week. I know that I added eight rows during the Yarnhawks get-together on Monday, because I warned the others that I would probably fall asleep after six rows. But I vowed to push on.
The project is now exactly 12 inches long. I weighed the remaining yarn in the first skein, and was able to estimate that one skein will yield approximately 30 inches of scarf. This makes it a two-skein project when I have three skeins of the yarn. I don’t really want to turn this into a 90-inch scarf, so what should I do with the third skein? A matching cowl? A hat? A brooch? A pterodactyl?
Part of the reason this project is a bit of a trudge (though I’m sure it would go quite quickly if I were able to knit Continental) is that it’s grey. It’s almost spring now: I should probably be knitting a project with an Actual Color™. What would you suggest? Don’t be shy; I have a rainbow of colors in my stash. Whatever you name, I probably already have it.
So…one thing led to another, and here I am waiting for Amazon, or DHL, or somebody to deliver another history of mathematics to my door in the next thirty minutes. Or ninety minutes, depending on where I check the tracking.
The most unusual thing about the previous paragraph is probably not that I have ordered a history of mathematics; if you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you know that I am capable of ordering almost any book. It’s not strange that I have received different estimates on when this book will arrive; in fact, based on past experience, this book probably won’t arrive tonight and instead will travel to Watertown or back to Milwaukee to spend the night before being delivered tomorrow with the rest of my mail. That would be fine as long as it doesn’t go back to Oak Creek, the black hole of Wisconsin shipping facilities.
Doesn’t it seem odd, though, that there should be multiple histories of mathematics? Math always seemed to me like the kind of subject that was, well, just there. Five was five, two plus two was always four, and if you didn’t get the correct answer you just needed to try harder. Math wasn’t a matter of controversy or opinion. It just was.
But if you start to talk to people who study the history of mathematics and the philosophy of mathematics, you find out that it’s whole different story on the inside. To be fair, you wouldn’t want to confuse junior high school students with controversies over whether mathematics is discovered or it is created. (Eight-grader me might have responded, “If you don’t know what math is, why should I have to do my homework?”) It turns out that mathematicians can get really invested in the origin story. So one author writes a history of math and leaves out the parts he doesn’t quite agree with. Another writes a history with colorful stories about the key players in math history; this makes the people easy to remember, but it turns out that some of the stories aren’t quite factual. So another fellow writes a history of math, and so on.
Right now I’m circling one particular rabbit hole that concerns one particular history of mathematics, and if I find any interesting rabbits I’ll be sure to write about them. (You don’t have to read about these rabbits if you don’t want to. I understand.) The reason I ordered a copy of a different history of mathematics was that I wanted to understand why there were so many different histories on the market. What kind of competition was there in the publishing industry at this time (post-World War II), and why? (Like I said, these rabbits won’t be interesting to everybody.) So that’s why I’m waiting to see if a book will make it to my porch in a few minutes, later this evening, or tomorrow afternoon. If it’s not already on its way to Oak Creek.
This week I did not purchase any typewriters. I celebrate my amazing restraint. I did type up a list of tasks for my math-related project (see above) on my Smith-Corona Skyriter. It was originally on a typewriter table, but using it there made such a racket that I positioned it on my lap and typed that way.
It worked for the page that I needed to type in the writing loft, but next time I might try using a different typewriter. I do have a few options.
Knitwise, I have been making progress on the Habit-Forming Scarf. It’s now 10 inches long. The primary occupational hazard is that after about six rows of work on it my eyes start to close, which makes it difficult for me to maintain the quality of my stitches. This, in turn, might be an occupational hazard of my not knowing how to knit Continental. That’s not likely to change anytime soon, especially not in the middle of a project, where it would surely affect my gauge. So I cope by setting the work down and either (a) resting or (b) drinking several cups of coffee before starting again.
Tomorrow I’ll host a get-together of faculty and staff folks who knit and crochet. I’ll have cookies to share and some yarn to give away. And Nicole, I’ll bring the pattern for that slipper you want to make. Can’t think of a better activity on what’s expected to be quite a rainy day.
The Amazon app that I just downloaded onto my iPad now lists my order status as “was expected by Sunday.” As long as it doesn’t go to Oak Creek….
This weekend was the first one in which Youngest, who has lived all their life-so-far in my house, was a guest here — having shifted their primary residence to a site closer to a potential full-time job. I was a bit anxious about it because we didn’t have anything special planned to do and because hanging out with me is rarely particularly interesting. But we managed by going grocery shopping, visiting Goodwill, cooking and baking, and providing an occasion for me to watch them play an incredibly silly game on the GameCube. (In case you’d like to get a glimpse of the silliness, check out this video of the Wario Ware Mega Party Game$! from 2003.)
The change in dynamic is one that I have to keep reminding myself is The Way of the World. It’s supposed to be the case that your children grow up, are not children any more, and move on with their own plans. All of my offspring are at different stages in this process.
The house is also transforming — albeit mildly — in other ways. I ordered a woven jute runner for the dining room, and it finally arrived on Friday morning. Here it is, providing a path for the office chair to move from desk to desk. It also provides a variety of spots on which the dog may lounge (not pictured).
The chair doesn’t exactly roll along the heavily textured weave, but I can raise it slightly and move it to where it needs to be. I do love the look of it, which will be more dramatic when I’m able to move the four-drawer metal filing cabinet and two typewriter tables (topped with typewriters, of course!) out of the dining room. Maybe it will all look better in Next House.
I have gradually begun to make more progress on a couple of my writing projects, not that I’m less likely to be interrupted in the evenings. I’m thinking about setting evening “office hours” for myself so that I can focus on the correspondence I need to keep up for these projects.
The Impossible Read is on hold until I decide how I’d like to proceed with my reactions and annotations. I don’t want to write directly in the books I’m reading, but my method for creating a record of my comments has shown itself to be rather cumbersome. I hope that after I develop a more practical and efficient process I will be able to get back to the reading.
Yet, in the course of the week I have been doing regular freewriting and journaling, coming up with some ideas and concepts to work into the stories that are also hanging out in my head.
Spring? I know you’re trying, but you can’t come soon enough.
Knitwise, I did get in a few more rows on the Habit-Forming Scarf. It is now slightly longer than it is wide. Unfortunately, I neglected to bring it home for the weekend so I can’t measure it and provide any numerical evidence of my progress.
The bigger news on the knitting front is that I’m organizing a get-together for campus knitters and crocheters on the first day of Spring Break. That won’t be until next week, so we’ll see what elements might come together. People bringing projects? Swap yarn? Free patterns? Bring it on, Yarnhawks.
This weekend was the occasion for a lot of change. Youngest has moved out and will henceforth be visiting occasionally rather than living here, which renders my nest nearly empty. I hope that they are not upset that I immediately decided to convert their room into a writing loft for myself, in which I will allow them to stay every other weekend.
But if you know me at all, you know that I can’t change just one room. Everything is moving around. A new bed-set was moved into the loft, the old mattress and [broken] frame were moved into the garage prior to proper disposal, and I moved my recently acquired secretary desk and hutch into the dining room; I still need to figure out a permanent location for a four-drawer filing cabinet full of writing. But first there was the clutter which needed to move aside so we could do things like bring in a mattress and box spring and bed-frame and a desk and a hutch, and move a four-drawer filing cabinet. Then there was the cleaning that needed to be done if Other People would be in the house. It’s exhausting, I tell you. Many thanks go to my friend Elizabeth, who rented a U-Haul and brought me the whole sleigh bed set all the way from Madison.
part of Before
part of After
part of After
It’s all for the good — or at least for the better. All of the Things are getting nearer to where they ultimately need to be, including me.
Writing loft or guest bedroom? Why not both?
I have already moved in the perfect little wooden office chair, which I acquired this week for $4.99. It’s 110 years old and I love it. I need to clean up the cast iron pieces a bit, and it has some settings that I will need to investigate, but it’s lovely and fits right in at the two wooden desks that are already in place along the south wall of the dining room. The next piece I’d like to get is a heavy-duty runner to span the width of all the desks, so the little office chair can just slide back and forth. The runner will also give a visual and physical definition to this end of the room. (The green bath mat below the computer desk? That’s Monty’s mat for curling up while I write. Right now he’s splayed out on the bare floor in the front of the typewriter desk, but sometimes he likes the cushioning.)
One chair to sit at them all.
I also acquired another typewriter and typewriter table this week. The typewriter in question is a Smith Corona electronic with a built-in dictionary; it beeps if you misspell something, and with the touch of one (or more) buttons it will correct the spelling before you go to the next line. The manual was included in the purchase, and I’ll have to consult it before doing much more with it: the machine by itself was not especially intuitive. It’s from approximately 1988, which makes it older than the electronic typewriter I took with me to college in Fall 1985, but a couple of years younger than Ernie, the other electronic typewriter in my current collection.
The typewriter table that I purchased with it is, possibly, more interesting. It may be a Tiffany-brand table — not that Tiffany — which was sold as a kit in the 1940s and 1950s, to provide a sturdy base for the new (and heavy) electric typewriters. It is certainly very solid, and it now supports a 1942 Royal KMM with a 14-inch carriage. I wouldn’t want to rest that beast on anything flimsy. The typewriter table that formerly support the Royal has gone up to the writing loft to support a 1953 Smith Corona Skyriter, which weighs about 3 pounds without its metal lid. I suppose that I’ll need to put some typing paper in the loft as well. Twist my arm….
(Not my carpet.)
Before I picked up the table I thought about cleaning it up and repainting it gloss black with gold trim. But now that I see it’s actually kind of an Army green, I think I’ll repaint it in that color after I clean it up and treat the rust. Someone with a military typewriter might especially appreciate it.
After all that moving around, I just couldn’t stop. Materials for my novel went from the library to the loft, materials for Formula 1 and another writing project went from the library and the dining room to the brick room, and books from the shelves in the brick room went to shelves in the dining room. Where will it end?
Knitwise, I have carried my current project to work and back home again but not knitted a single stitch — not even during the Grand Prix of Saudi Arabia (guess who won). But isn’t it the thought that counts?
Some people would probably pay big money for the trip I recently got to take for free. Having set aside two days to drive from the kettle moraines of southern Wisconsin to the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, I found myself situated to take a side trip to pick up a 90-year-old typewriter from a member of Reddit’s Typewriter community. I had tried for months to get someone else to make this trip up into the mountains, but when my grandmother passed away a couple of weeks ago I knew that I would be able to make that trip myself.
Now, I should have been prepared for my journey after hearing repeated tales of coal trucks being sent up inappropriate roads when they tried to avoid paying a $20 toll on the West Virginia Turnpike. The non-Turnpike roads are lighter and narrower, and cross the mountains in a series of switchbacks. The heavy trucks can’t make the turns, and they get stuck. On this particular road, stuck coal trucks have been a common occurrence. (In fact, a coal truck was stuck there a few hours before visitation began at the funeral home, and we worried that my uncle would need to take a three-hour detour to get off the mountain. Luckily, the road was not as thoroughly blocked as we had supposed.)
Up the road a few miles from my grandmother’s house is Hutch, the only tow driver who can get the coal trucks un-stuck. His fee is $6000. You would think that after the first un-stucking all the coal companies would know that it was safer and more fiscally responsible to send the trucks up the Turnpike. But they keep coming, because every driver thinks he’s the one who can make it through, and they keep getting stuck. (Hutch is doing well for himself.)
All this is to say that I should have been slightly wary when I used Google Maps to suggest the route between Hansford and Tornado. In fact, Google Maps suggested three routes for me, and I chose “fastest route” without carefully examining the specific roads that I would take. (Note To Self and Others: carefully examine the specific roads that you will take.)
Grandmother says: Check the route.
When I chose the “fastest route” option, I made the assumption that I would be traveling on an interstate highway for as long as possible, then taking state and county roads as needed until I arrived at my destination. You know, just like in the physics story problems. I was so wrong.
Somewhere in the settings, I must have clicked on an option for either “Take Me on the Scenic Route at All Costs” or “Please Bring Me Within Sight of a Fast Road, but Make Sure I Don’t Get to Travel on It.” Because I traveled next to I-64 all the way to the other side of Charleston. Some of the roads I went on looked like the borders of a parking lot. I was puzzled, but I continued. Other sections of the route were like a drive down Memory Lane; I had made the trip to West Virginia 1-2 times a year over the course of my life, and naturally the roads had improved and changed over time. So it had been a while since I had actually traveled on the actual roads we had used when I was a child with nothing to do on the trip but look out the window and pass the snacks.
Finally I got on the roads that went up into the hills, as I expected. What I didn’t expect were the areas where work crews were flagging motorists through sections of one-lane roads as they patched potholes. We are already talking about two-lane county roads that wind up (and down) through the mountains, with sharp curves and no shoulders to speak of. Google Maps seemed to have no idea that I would also have to wait, stopped, on steep inclines.
But eventually I made it to the house of the typewriter owner. I parked in his driveway, he carried the 1934 Royal out to the car and loaded it (thank you, Brandon!), and I slipped him a thank-you card containing a modest amount of compensation for the “free” machine.
Great typer!
After I found a way to turn around, it took a surprisingly short amount of time for me to reach a more major road. Soon, I thought, I would be back on I-64 and headed for Ohio.
The drive in cross-section.
Not so fast. As I sat at an intersection where most cars took the left turn to reach the highway (turning right would have taken me into the Kanawha River), my map urged me forward: under the I-64 bridge high overhead, and along the river on what is now Route 817 and used to be, decades ago, old 35. I knew I would see some familiar sights along the route, so I went straight ahead to Winfield on another stretch of Memory Lane.
And after Winfield, the route sent me not to Route 35 but on a bridge that crossed the river and took me down Route 62 towards (vaguely) Point Pleasant. This is the point at which I really should have told the navigator, “No, thank you, I’ll take the big road now.” (I could have also said, “Learn how to pronounce ‘Kanawha’,” but I didn’t do that, either.)
I had never taken this route before, and the towns — Buffalo, Eleanor, Arbuckle, Leon, Grimms Landing — were new to me. Surely, I thought, I would soon be in Point Pleasant and could cross back over to Route 35, go over the Ohio River, and take the roads that I knew. But no. This road wound on and on along the river, and suddenly, just before I arrived in Point Pleasant, I was directed to turn left and go up a huge hill. Well, maybe it was a shortcut. I was halfway up before I realized that the road wasn’t even paved. Rainstorms from the day before had created several potholes, and I started to worry that the road would be washed out. It wasn’t, but on the tricky descent I realized that, once again, I was on a road that was far below the modern one.
In Point Pleasant I didn’t even see an option to go south and cross the Kanawha before crossing the Ohio. Instead I was given directions to head north on a small road next to the river on the West Virginia side. I went north for about 30 miles before getting to cross the Ohio, and then the journey became truly frustrating.
Could I have turned around? Well, yes, but I didn’t know how much time that retracing my steps would add to the trip. One thing I did know is that I was already late getting to Athens, where I had an appointment with the library’s archivist. So, rather foolishly, I kept driving forward.
I wanted to trust the directions, I really did. But now it was clear(er) that something was truly awry. No matter how I tried to access Route 33 — which was RIGHT THERE — the app kept navigating me towards the oldest, narrowest, least maintained roads it could find. Even while I was making a right turn onto the road I needed to be on, the app suggested that I make a U-turn. Clearly I should have taken Rocksprings Road down past the creek instead of the four-lane divided highway heading directly toward my destination of Athens.
At long last, my language unrepeatable, I turned off Google Maps, resisted the urge to hurl my iPhone out the window, and vowed (very loudly) to make it to Athens solely by following the posted highway signs.
I made it, I found a place to park, I threw all the money I could into the parking meter, and I grabbed my things and scurried to the library to meet with the archivist. I was only about 30 minutes late. And the parking ticket was only $35, and my car wasn’t towed.
I think the real problem for Google here is that they’re sitting on a gold mine and they don’t even know it. Here they have directions to some of the most rustic roads in rural West Virginia — and they’re not charging extra to direct travelers to towns where the only business is the Dollar General. Why are they not monetizing this through a “scenic route” surcharge? Any old traveler can take the interstate and get from point A to point B quickly, and even stop at a gas station or a restaurant along the way. You don’t even need an app for that! If you want to see the real West Virginia, it should cost you. But in retrospect maybe it’s not a gold mine so much as an empty coal mine.
Knitwise, I did break out the Habit-Forming Scarf project while I was away from home, but only when there were just a few guests in the house. After a couple of days we had more people around, whether socializing, dining, or sorting through books and photos, and I was a part of all those activities. The next two days were filled with driving, researching, unpacking, cleaning, repacking, and unpacking again. So I wasn’t knitting then, either.
But hey! The scarf is now five inches long.
By working on this project out in the open, I may have confused some more distant relatives who have never seen me knit. They might not know about the throw and the ten pairs of slippers that I had knitted for my grandmother in the last several years. That might explain why they kept asking me what I was knitting. I don’t see anything here but a nascent scarf. It sure doesn’t look like a sweater, a sock, or a hat.
As I catch up on a week’s worth of work, as we enter advising season at the university, I might not have any large blocks of time in which to make a lot of progress on the scarf. (And it might well not be scarf weather when I have finished it.) But knitting two rows at a time will be something I can do between different tasks, to manage my stress levels and help me re-acclimate to Wisconsin society.
This week I came up with a new plan to trick myself into doing more writing. I bribed myself with new pens — Pentel EnerGel 0.7mm pens in purple and blue liquid gel ink — and gave myself permission to start using a journal that proclaims on the cover that “Anything is Possible.” So far, the plan is to only allow myself to use the pens and the journal on the weekends, until such time as I truly can’t take the wait any more and insist on having half-hour free-writing sessions during the week.
We’ll see how it goes. And for those whose neurology is as unconventional as mine, you may be intrigued to know that the blue (cyan) EnerGel pen is made in Japan, while the purple (violet) EnerGel pen is made in Mexico. I am not making this up. And now you know, too.
Zoom in for more similarities and differences!
I don’t have any progress to report on actual typewriter maintenance. I did purchase a can of something called PB Blaster that is supposed to help with loosening the tight screw on the spool cover, but I haven’t had enough time to devote any of it to the Galaxie II. Maybe next weekend — or maybe not, if I have to go out of town (see below).
I haven’t found any time to do any reading for the Impossible Read, either, but this weekend I purchased two of the books on the list (The Old Man and the Sea and A Tale of Two Cities) and two of the movies I’ll watch between groups of books (The Sword in the Stone and Aladdin). That doesn’t really keep me moving forward on the project, but it does make me more prepared for forward progress when I have some. It will be a long time before I need a copy of the next text, which is Grendel by John Gardner, which I am reluctant to purchase because I think that I already have a copy that I can’t find.
I’m also collecting DVDs for a Kevin Smith movie watchathon over spring break at the end of March. At first I thought I would watch Clerks-Clerks II-Clerks III, but now I’m wondering if the order should really be Clerks-Mallrats-Chasing Amy-Dogma-Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, and then Clerks II and Clerks III. What do you think? What do you think Kevin will suggest? (I’ll ask him.) For this project I’ll blow the dust off one of my other blogs, Take Five Movie Reviews, and link to it from here.
Knitwise, I cast on for a new project this week. The yarn is Patons Classic Wool, worsted weight, which I bought three skeins of by mistake when I was searching in vain for Plymouth Encore last fall to use in the recently finished Stripe Scarf.
This pattern, by Madison knitter and knitting designer Elizabeth Morrison, is called “Habit Forming” and is modeled on the pattern sheet by Friend-to-All-Knitters Franklin Habit. The pattern, which is a free download on Ravelry, was designed with Noro Kureyon in mind — whether or not you choose to edit the colorway — but I think this grey wool will look rather elegant. I have been finding it easy to sit down and knit two rows of the pattern at a time to take a break from the other items on my task list, so it’s slowly growing. I’m finding that breaking some tasks into tiny chunks is allowing me to devote larger chunks to other tasks. Imagine that.
I did mention earlier that the Stripe Scarf was finally completed. After I found the Perfect Box™ it was also shipped, but unfortunately I didn’t have the apartment number for my son. USPS returned the package to me, I obtained the apartment number, and I re-shipped the package. It arrived today (!) to some acclaim. Or perhaps it arrived yesterday and the acclaim was sent today. ANYway, the scarf has made it to its requestor. Will it snow again this winter? Who knows, but it sure has been cold. I do like knowing that Liam can now be more bundled up against the cold and the wind.
I think the Habit Forming scarf will be for me. The knitting itself is therapy, and it’s been a little while since I intentionally made something for myself to wear. (As you can imagine, I already have several hand-knitted shawls, hats, scarves, cowls, and pairs of socks.) Lately I have been trying to find patterns that will give me some pleasurable knitting and allow me to use up bunches of yarn. “You know, I could make myself a scarf” hasn’t exactly been the first thought on my mind. But now I’d like to give myself a nice cozy gift.
This week’s post has been brought to you by the memory of my grandmother, Elizabeth Christine (Chris) Walker, who departed this world earlier today at the age of 101-1/2. She was a force of nature and there will never be another one like her. She also loved the slippers I knitted for her over the years; I stopped making them because she became unsteady on her feet and I didn’t want her to slip. On Ravelry, where I haven’t updated my project records in several years, I found photos and notes for ten pairs of slippers that I knitted for her — so there may well have been more. She did wrap herself up in a throw that I knitted for her. Rest in peace, Grandmother.
A few nights ago, I took shelter as a first-ever February tornado made landfall about 45 miles away and blew its way into Wisconsin’s weather history. In a state where almost any weather can happen at any time — I have heard that July and August are the only two months which have never seen snow — it’s getting even more ecumenical here with regard to weather events.
That’s not snow in my back yard: it’s hail. I remember one July in Ohio when I was equally startled to see hail. (Is hail expected in any season?)
It felt like a long week full of stress building up to the day the tornadoes came. I helped to put together a campus forum, and I stayed a few extra minutes to make sure it got off to a safe start. Then it was time to head back to my department, lock up for the night, and head for home. As soon as I got out of town I could see the strong flashes of lightning to the west.
When I got home I was still thinking that I would head out again to a show to which I had a ticket. But it wasn’t long before I decided that it might be wiser to put the car in the driveway and hunker down with my boys. Eldest leashed up the dog and Youngest baked up some snacks that we took with us to the basement. Two rounds of hail pounded against the house before it was calm again and we felt it was safe to return to the ground floor.
When I wasn’t hiding from tornadoes, planning campus events, or setting up writing retreats this week, I was preparing to clean the next typewriter on my list: my mother’s 1966 Smith-Corona Galaxie II. I did get some of the dust blown out of it, but one of the critical screws — to the ribbon cover — wouldn’t budge. So I put almost everything back together. I’ll take the screw’s twin to the hardware store this week to see if I can buy a better screwdriver (and perhaps pick up some extra screws in case I destroy this one in order to save it).
After I get the cover off and have better access for cleaning the hammers, I can work on repeated gentle cleaning of the keys themselves. Mom wasn’t particularly rough on the typewriter, but time in storage did take its toll.
Knitwise, the only thing I did with yarn this week was to completely frog a finished object (my apologies to the Noro triangle I knitted up a few years ago just to be making something). Oh, and move some project bags into a different space, and move some unallocated yarn to yet another different space.
Well, that’s not quite all. I did — finally — wash out the Leroy Cowl I made from Laurenspun and “block” it out to dry. This was one of the side effects of deciding to de-clutter my bedroom this afternoon instead of doing, well, just about anything else.
It will be resting and air-drying for about the next 24 hours, after which it may be cold enough again to give it a real-life test. Who knows? It’s frosty in the mornings, windy all day, and occasionally warm enough to spawn tornadoes.
While I was sorting through the boxes and bins of clutter in my bedroom, I found a steno pad (remember those?) in which I briefly started a journal in 1986. Those were college years for me, and I used it to take notes during campus visits by novelist Tom Wolfe, Poet Laureate Rita Dove, and legend Kurt Vonnegut. I also used it to write drafts of a fiction workshop response and an article for the honors program newsletter, and brainstorm directions for two fiction pieces I was working on at the time. One ultimately wound up in my creative writing portfolio, and I have no idea what became of the other one. But how glad I am to discover the thinking behind those two stories!
During the time I spent in the basement, though, I peeked into several boxes of old notebooks, journals, and folders; the answer to the background of the forgotten story might lie in one of those cardboard moving boxes.
Chocolate Sheep 