Ozarque's journal (http://www.livejournal.com/users/ozarque/7566.html ) is currently discussing the problem of women's feeling invisible -- and being treated as though they were -- as they grow older. I am finding this a fascinating discussion, though I have not experienced it (yet?) myself. But one of the comments today suggested that part of the problem is a lack of empathy among young people, created perhaps -- and here is where it impinges on what I was thinking about yesterday -- by the shift from reading to TV. TV, the commenter says, is passive. Reading requires you to make some effort, to pay attention. And, by extension, to make an effort of imagination to think about how someone else might feel.

I hadn't thought about that. It could be true. You can read the whole thing on the page linked above.

Here is one of my own nice, empathetic kids, practicing music. We are getting ready to sing our Mendelssohn trio with our dear friend, Fine Soprano. I'm thrilled because I get  a chance to sing a low A. Frankly, I have a very good low A, and not many women do, but I rarely have any chance to sing it. Obviously, this is because I sing classical music. If I had stuck to folk music, I could have just picked my own key. Fine Soprano gets to sing a lot of brilliant stuff above the score. And #2 daughter gets to swoop up and down as the mezzo. We are all pretty jazzed about this trio. Mendelssohn must have liked women to write stuff this enjoyable for us to sing. And perhaps, since it does require you to make an effor to understand and convey what another person felt, singing or playing music might be an exercise in empathy, as reading can be.

#2 daughter, the pianist in the picture, has finished knitting a wonderful evening wrap suggested to us by the good ladies at Handheld http://handheldknitting.com/ . It is basically a long rectangle of stockinette with every fifth stitch dropped, folded in half and sewn up one side. It's in a gorgeous shade of Brilla with a lurex stripe along the edge. If I can get a snap before she leaves for college, I will post it. She is currently blocking it while Extra Boy and the menfolks of the family watch some bizarre TV show. It seems to be Japanese game shows dubbed with vulgar jokes in English. I am not quite following it, but I'll bet it will have a deleterious effect on the guys' empathy levels.

I realized that in my last post I defined watching TV as "doing nothing" and reading as "doing something." Knitting also made it into the "doing something" category. This reminded me of the recent report that American reading has fallen by 10%. I initially understood this to mean that those who had read 100 books a year before were now only reading 90. But what it actually meant was that 10% more Americans now fall into the category of people who do not read even one book a year.

Here's the link:http://www.nea.gov/news/news04/ReadingAtRisk.html

This seemed alarming, not just to me, but to most of the newspapers that reported it. But as I looked into it further and discussed it with others, I began to wonder whether it was really alarming or not. For one thing, the study made a strong distinction between the reading of fiction and of nonfiction. Is The Knowledge Web really less an example of literature than Redneck Riviera? However, upon checking the data more closely, I found that, fiction or nonfiction, fewer than half of the respondents finished even one book in the previous year.

My mother suggested that Americans might be reading more in non-book form -- blogs, newspapers, magazines, and whatnot. Only books counted in the study. A colleague pointed out that books read for school or work were not included. Perhaps the phenomenon was not so much that people weren't reading as that they were working more, and their reading time was spent on assigned things -- a loss not of literacy but of leisure. All these quibbles aside, though, let's bear in mind that we are talking about ZERO books a year. I would think that it would be hard to avoid reading just one book in a year. I mean, you'd be hearing all this stuff about The Da Vinci Code and just pick it up, right? Or there'd be nothing on TV and you'd absentmindedly dip into that book your aunt sent you for your birthday. I mean, how could you avoid it?

The one thing which was not questioned in any discussion was the idea that people ought to read.That reading was better than, say, watching TV -- regardless of content. I watch a few specific programs on TV. I also watch a couple of movies on DVD each week. The main difference between watching Monk and reading a few chapters of a detective novel, as far as I can see, is that you can do more complicated knitting while watching TV than you can while reading.

Those who read and knit need not worry that the decline of reading will lead to a decline in the number of knitting books available. There are new knitting books heading our way. Hollywood Knits Style has designs with stories about celebrities who have made or bought them. Doesn't thrill me, but to each her own. The Yarn Girls (whose first book, bad directions or no, helped my daughter to make her first sweater) are coming out with a book of designs for kids.  The Gift Knitter has patterns for kids and also for dogs. Both Reader's Digest and Stackpole are bringing out new basic knitting collections. Hot Knits is going to paper and Stitch'n'Bitch has a sequel. The most intriguing of the new hip-knit books, at least on the basis of the little bits of advance information I have, is After Dark, which consists entirely of evening things -- beaded halter, shawls, an obi belt, stuff like that. Could make nice gifts for folks who don't happen to be kids or dogs. Sandra Polley has a book exclusively of teddy bears and gear for them. There are several knit lit books, too, for people who like to read about knitting:  The Knitting Sutra, KnitLit (Too), and For the Love of Knitting. The third in the group is the prettiest, if a coffee table book would fit your holiday gift list. Another gift option might be The Little Box of Scarves, a box full of laminated scarf patterns which might inspire the novice.

None of these upcoming books is on my personal book shopping list. I'm still coveting The Celtic Collection. If you are one of the millions of Americans who has not read a book in the past year, however, why not read a knitting book? There are always lots of pictures.

I do classic time management. That is to say, having established my priorities, I make a list of goals each year. Then, each month, I choose a subset of those to work on. My weekly and daily to-do lists come right off the list of goals, plus all those maintenance things we all have to do. People who are not familiar with this approach sometimes find it impressive, but they shouldn't. I am only halfway through a huge goal I started on a couple of decades ago -- produce four productive adult humans -- so all my other goals are pretty small and important only to me.

But in August I do not attempt to accomplish anything except two essentials: get everyone back to school, and try to not to whine too much.

Not that this is all I do. I finished Siv. I finished the first pair of socks made with Siv's leftover yarn and started the second. I'm singing in the Mendelssohn trio. I'm reading, visiting with friends, doing minimal housework. I am continuing to do the tough things my doctor told me to do. The key to surviving August is not that I don't do things, but merely that I don't have to. If I want to spend all non-work time watching TV, then as long as I also end up with three kids in school, clean and dressed and fed, I have had a successful month of August.

As long as I don't whine too much.

Good movie. Intriguing story, great landscapes, spunky women, handsome men, exciting scenery, nice music and dancing, great knitting, clever camera work, and serious social commentary. What more could you want?

Since "I Know Where I'm Going" is an old movie, people get lots of exercise in it, naturally, by tramping and boating and fishing and dancing. No one heads off for the gym. Our modern life affords us little physical work -- helping to unload the occasional truck, the weekly stroll through the farmers market, a little gardening.

So #2 daughter and I go to the gym. My husband's work offers a family membership in a major chain for practically nothing, so that's where we go. It is not a girly kind of place. There is a ladies' side, actually. It isn't labeled or anything, but that is where the aerobics machines are, and the pink and aqua thigh and ab machines, and the magazines. On the other side, the machines have names like "Hammer Strength" and are all in construction-site yellow and black. There are murals saying "Huge by Choice" and "---'s Gym Rules the World" with cartoon-ish bodybuilders grimacing in livid colors. We can tell that this is the guys' side.

It took us weeks to gather up the courage to go over to the men's side of the gym and try out their equipment. Now we go all the time. The surprise is, no one cares. No one even looks at us. And, while Ozarque  http://www.livejournal.com/users/ozarque/  is currently discussing the phenomenon of older women's becoming invisible, so there might be nothing unusual in my being ignored there, people normally look at #2 daughter a lot. Not at the gym. We are of no interest whatsoever to the fellows on the guys' side. We made ourselves feel like interlopers at first, but we have gotten over that.

At one point in the movie, the people are making fun of a rich man for building a swimming pool when there is the whole sea available to swim in. They have a point. There is a certain silliness in going to the gym, too, when there is plenty of manual labor to be done, and we could walk places instead of driving there. We make our lives so easy that we have to create artificial physical work for ourselves, using machines to recreate the walking and climbing and other efforts we have used machines to avoid. But hurrah for the air conditioning!

There is a brief spell after you buy a new knitting book when you think that your collection is complete. The technical issue is covered, the lack in your stitch pattern collection is corrected, the sheer number of designs you would like to make is sufficient to last you forever. You can now make everything from tea cozies to piano bench cushions, socks to gloves, and you will never need another knitting book.

The spell is brief. I own a mere 32 knitting books (I have 47 cookbooks, for perspective). I have stitch pattern collections, American, British, and French. I have books on technique. I have Barbara Walker and Elizabeth Zimmerman. I have baby collections, children's knits, knitting books for children, sweater collections,  and a couple (well, four if I count the ones I bought for my daughter) of hip-knit books. I have Dutch and German knitting magazines. It would be hard for me to say that I really needed any more knitting books.

But things change. Sometimes something really new comes along -- like Viking Knitting. I had to have that book, and I love the things I have made from it. And felting -- which rates only a brief historical note in Mary Thomas's knitting compendium -- is now all the rage, so I have to have at least one book on that. Can I be the only knitter on the planet who does not have a pattern for a cell-phone holder? Hardly! And sometimes a book is just so full of lovely patterns that you want it for no good reason except desire.

I now have my eye on Alice Starmore's Celtic Collection. I clearly must have this book because it continues the methods in Viking Knitting, my current favorite. And it has a lot of Fair Isle knitting, and I only have three or four books that discuss Fair Isle. Even just the pictures of people in vampire-like makeup and elaborate sweaters strolling moodily across the moors make this book well-nigh irresistible.

Okay, here is an example of the problem with blogs. Bloggers are only writing for ourselves, even though we let other people read our maunderings. We therefore do not have any fact-checkers to check up on us. Thus, we end up claiming that the dramatic figures wandering aimlessly through photographs are on the moors when, truth to tell, we have no idea what a moor is. I'm thinking Ms. Starmore is in Scotland, and I vaguely associate Scotland with moors, and I have faint memories of Heathcliff in torment wandering aimlessly across the moors -- it's been a long time since I read that -- so I leap to the conclusion that they are on moors. For all I know, these goth girls and their ghostly dogs are in a field, or for that matter a tundra. Beach, hills, forest, and city about exhaust my direct geographic experience. Fortunately, I have a knitting blog rather than a political one, so I expect to get away with it.

So perhaps they are not on moors. The photographs are still gorgeous. The  marvelous landscapes have clearly inspired the marvelous colors and textures of Starmore's sweaters. And I am sure the models will cheer up once they find something to do. The guy who's fishing seems cheerful enough.

It suddenly occurred to me that last year at this time, I was not only swamped at work and getting ready for back to school, but also preparing for a wedding. #1 Daughter got engaged in June and married in October, so in August we were tasting cakes, pricing flowers, and sewing dresses, not to mention learning Pinkham's Wedding Cantata.  This picture is of the cake table. Non-Southerners may be confused by the groom's cake, at the extreme left of the photo. If I start whining again about being busy, throw things at me.

I finished Siv. I altered the sleeves a little while sewing them in, washed it, blocked it according to a favorite sweater, folded it neatly, and put it away till the weather cools off a little.

While working on the second sock, I learned something new about the history of socks from The Knowledge Web. Hosiery knitters had started using frames (like big versions of knitting spools)to speed up their knitting, since Napoleon's blockade had done terrible things to the British economy. The payments for socks were getting smaller and smaller, and the knitters then had to rent the frames as well. As times got harder, the rents went up and the payments went down. The last straw was when knee breeches went out of fashion. With the advent of long trousers, men no longer cared so much about their hose, and the hosiery-makers could cut them from big pieces of machine-knitted cloth instead of using the fully-fashioned socks the knitters made. Enraged, the knitters (who were known for some reason as "sock weavers") followed Ned Ludd on a rampage, breaking up the big machine frames. Wearing masks and scarves (knitted?), they carried on their destruction until many of them were caught and transported to Australia, and in a some cases even executed. Fourteen young men who died on the gallows for frame-breaking in 1813 sang hymns as they awaited execution, and the crowd joined in.

Perhaps only dyed-in-the-wool knitters will be moved by the drama of this story. I think it would make a great movie, though. It was Lord Byron, who later made a name for himself by cavorting about in Turkey and writing spicy poetry, who spoke stirringly in the House of Lords on behalf of the Luddites. Johnny Depp, Orlando Bloom, and maybe Kevin Kline as the crusty old weaver -- I see the possibilities here. 

We are well into Back to School mode at work. We are seeing people who want to homeschool and don't know where to start, people who are in their first year of teaching and don't know where to start, and people who have suddenly been moved from kindergarten to sixth grade. We see people who are excited about getting back into their classrooms, people who dread getting back into their classrooms, and people who can't get into their classrooms because they are still under construction. We see people who want to match what they had before come hell or high water, people who want something new, and people whose lives would be perfect if only they could find the kid-drawn letters in multicolored gingham boxes instead of red ones.

The other part of back to school shopping, the part where I am a customer instead of a worker, is buying stuff for my kids. Since #1 daughter started kindergarten in 1987, I have each year taken my August 15th paycheck and headed out to do the Back to School shopping for one, two, three, and then four kids. We go to the office supply place first thing, then go out to breakfast before hitting the clothing stores. We follow my mother's principle of being at the mall when it opens in hopes of avoiding the crowds, but that is hopeless in mid-August. We have lists and clothing inventories, and a sense of cooperation. By lunchtime we are home, and the kids are putting everything away. This is the time-honored ritual.

But this year, for the first time in 17 years, we will not need to follow this ritual. For one thing, #1 daughter is not only not going back to school, but for the first time in history she will nor be here for the back to school shopping trip. (She will be with her husband, many states away.) For another, #2 daughter worked all summer and is capable of buying her own gear. Third, both sons are now in secondary school, where we know to our cost that the supply lists in the stores bear no resemblance to what they actually need. And the most amazing thing: #1 son went online and found all the clothes he needs and emailed me his list. He measured to make sure he had the right size. He checked the companies in question to make sure that they did not employ sweatshop labor. And he helped his little brother do the same. What a guy!

We do not have a local, non-chain source of school clothes or school gear, so there is no moral objection to this plan.

Socks are the perfect thing to knit in August! They are small, so however wooly, they still aren't too hot to knit. They consist of long -- but not that long -- stretches of plain work interspersed with the occasional flurry of shaping activity to keep you interested. And they're little and quick enough that frogging doesn't break your heart.

Frog I did. I was using a modern sock pattern that I found online. It specified the type of yarn that I am actually using (how often does that happen?) and it is part of being a hip cyber-knitter to troll the web for free patterns. But it had a nasty square heel and ugly perpindicular gusset. It would be a sock when it was finished, of course, it could be worn, but where is the elegance? Where the satisfaction of making a real sock?

Back to Mary Thomas's Knitting Book. In her discussion of socks, she begins with some prehistoric ones, with no ribbing and a division for the toes, and talks about the evolution of socks (hose) up to the Middle Ages. At that point, she says, the evolution was complete. There have been no big changes since then. She continues to give directions for knitting a perfect sock, any size, any yarn, any length. And, if you follow her directions, you will always achieve a lovely sock.

Mary Thomas's book was written shortly after Mencken's Treatise on the Gods. We have made great progress, socially, since then. We would not now accept the kind of things Mencken says about the Jewish people, to take just one example, without outrage. We would not allow a popular newspaperman to dismiss most of the world's people as "savages." But our progress in knitting is not so exemplary. As Thomas points out, it took 1500 years for the sock to reach the marvelous stage of engineering at which it stopped -- the kind of sock now made by machine. Why, in the name of hipness, should we now be willing to throw away that hard-won perfection just so that everyone can make a sock without having to learn to turn a heel properly?

Of course, no one is forcing me to use the new sock pattern. But I offer this unsolicited advice to the new breed of knitter: buy your socks. There is nothig wrong with machine-made socks, even if they don't have beads and fur on them. The knitters who don't know what "skpsso" means, whose natural gauge is 3 to the inch, who hate dpns -- let them make scarves!

I have begun the first Wool-ease sock. I also found a nice online pattern for just such a sock, with a leaf lace, and got started on it. But, after a few rounds of knitting while saying to myself  "yarn over knit one slip knit passover knit two together yarn over..." , I remembered the inspirational words of a knitting blogger named Claudia: http://www.bolgenlaw.com/2004_07_01_blogarchive.htm

"There are some knitters who knit socks as experiments in creativity. ...I am not one of them. Give me five bamboo double points, a ribbing-less picot edge, and a short-row heel and toe. A clam could not be happier than moi." And in response to those who would suggest that this is not creative, she says, "Hey. I've got a huge drawerful of warm, colorful, perfectly-fitting socks for winter. How about you?"

Accordingly, I frogged the lace rows and got going on a nice, ordinary sock. It has been years since I made any, so I will enjoy doing a plain one. I'll do the lace on the next pair.

I inadvertently discovered that "frogging" is used in some circles as a swear word. As in Father Ted they say "fecking" and my kids say "freaking" until they get in trouble for it. I believe it was Tallulah Bankhead who, upon meeting Truman Capote, said, "Oh, you're the young man who doesn't know how to spell f**ing." So, just in case any Gentle Reader is unfamiliar with the term, I think I had better explain that "frogging" means to tear out the stitches of knitting. I understand that the origin of the phrase is that you "rip it, rip it."

This lady is knitting a sock on her dp needles. I decided to do mine on a sleeve needle (a 10" circular) with help from dps of the same size. I knew you were wondering.

Mencken, having dealt with the origin and growth of religion, has moved on to Christianity. He has some unuusal points of view. For example, he suggests that Jesus "preached a scheme of conduct that was bearable only on the assumption that it would not have to be borne very long -- that is...that the kingdom of God was at hand." He is referring to chastity and humility, here, as well as concern for others and repudiation of materialism. In reading him, I cannot help thinking -- often -- that he is very smart and very well-read. Since I spend most of my time with smart, well-read people, I rarely notice this in a writer. So I figure I can say with assurance that Mencken was a very smart and knowledgeable guy.

He is aware of this. His writing is filled with distinctions between the civilized and enlightened person -- himself -- and the "savages," the ones not "worth knowing." His scorn for the ordinary person, and his satisfaction in being one of the "small minority" of worthwhile people, is a bitter wash flowing through his otherwise entertaining works. If you have only read isolated remarks of his on Jews, Southerners, or some other group, you might think of him as a man filled with prejudices. Instead, he is a man filled with bitter disdain for nearly everyone in the world.

I think he must also have been miserable. You hear sometimes about geniuses who, although they were so obnoxious that most people avoided them, had families who shielded them and cared for them in spite of how awful they were. As an undergraduate, I had a prof who once said to me and another student, "Of course, my husband is a very unpleasant man." There is nothing she could have said that would have shocked us more. Maybe Mencken was in this position. Or perhaps he was the center of a social set composed entirely of nasty old curmudgeons who all enjoyed one another's company.

Until I find out, though, I have to think of him as a smart, well-read, but miserable old coot, his bitterness ameliorated by his pleasure in writing barbed comments about all the pleasant, happy people around him. Indeed, he calls happiness itself a "boozy delusion of well-being."

Mencken, writing in 1930, expected religion to be done away with entirely by science fairly shortly thereafter. Already, he said, "no one worth knowing," "no man of dignity," "no reasonable person" held religious beliefs. He died in 1956, and I suppose the fact that religion lived on beyond him would be for him another "argument against the human race."