Diamond Patchwork Pullover

This is a woman's sweater, knitted in patchwork as directed by Vogue Knitting in the 1990s. Gena Greene's comment on the patch-knitting technique was "Never again." She knows more efficient ones and thinks this one may always look just a bit puckery.

In real life the colors are royal blue, light blue, and white. This is our current "Home Team Colors" sweater. (Royal blue and white socks are also available.) It would also fit in with blue-and-white beachwear.

It fits a 36-38" bust, typically 5'4" to 5'8", as is. Cotton knits can be stretched either horizontally or vertically and this cotton sweater needs a bit of stretching and pressing.

Price is $50 plus $5 shipping. A better picture should be available soon.

Book Review: Posada el Novio de la Muerte

A Fair Trade Book

Book Title: Posada: el Novio de la Muerte

        
Author: Eduardo del Río (Rius)

        
Date: 2003

        
Publisher: Grijalbo

       
ISBN: 970-05-0721-1

        
Length: 94 pages

        
Illustrations: black-and-white prints, mostly by the subject, some by the author and others

        
Quote: “A través de la obra de (José Guadalupe) Posada puede realizarse el análisis más completo de la vida social del pueblo de México.”

        
That was what the legendary painter Diego Rivera said about an obscure cartoonist of the previous generation, much of whose work had already faded out of existence. In this little book, Rius, the contemporary cartoonist who gave the word “macho” its current meaning in English, pays tribute to his long-gone master with a selection of Posada’s wonderfully grotesque cartoons and engravings, offered with only a half-dozen or so comments from Rius’s own characters.

(Fair disclosure: Both Rius and Rivera were extreme left-wingers even by Mexican standards. Rius has written sympathetically about Marxism and less sympathetically about the United States; his web site is censored by some browsers in the U.S., which is why I can't post a link above, but there's one on the Wikipedia page about him. Posada is a biography in cartoons that shouldn't offend anyone much, but right-wingers won't like most of Rius' books. If you don't want to support a living writer with whom you disagree, you might want to check the Wikipedia page...I do not have a problem with sending $2.50 to a writer with whom I disagree.)

        
Perhaps only in Mexico would an art history book be printed as a cheap black-and-white paperback. Blurry, Xerox-like reproductions of  cartoons that were mostly engraved, rather than drawn, can hardly do justice to the books from which the cartoons were taken. Text is often included in the illustrations (Posada illustrated several books of popular songs) and far too often the text is illegible. Apparently this presentation is in keeping with the way Posada’s work was published during his lifetime—he drew a lot of cards and labels of which nobody even tried to save a copy. It seems incongruous, though, with Rius’s assertion that Posada was a real artist who, if he didn’t found a “school” of art, at least inspired a genre of cartoons.

        
I say “cartoons” because that’s the genre of art, in my time and place, that includes this kind of images. Most of them are not, however, the pen-and-ink scribbles “cartoons” implies. In Posada’s time, drawings and paintings couldn’t be photocopied; in order to publish illustrations an artist had to engrave images on a hard surface that could be covered with ink and stamped on paper. (Lettering, if used, had to be done in reverse.) Several processes were devised to make commercial artists’ job easier. Nothing made it as easy as it is today. Posada worked in printing shops and experimented with various engraving and printing techniques. The pictures that look most like modern cartoons, Rius explains, were actually produced by a process called “zincography.” 

        
Rius calls Posada “Death’s boyfriend” because, although Posada was willing to draw anything, he was best known for cartoons in which the likenesses of living people were anonymized into images of skulls and skeletons.  Skeletons model the fashions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century; they kneel at their significant others’ feet, they head for a fishing hole with a bottle of beer, they race bicycles, they work on jobs, they play guitars, and they appear in every rank of every contemporary armed force.

        
Readers in the U.S. may be turned off by the guitar-playing, beer-drinking, and hat-modelling skeletons on the cover of this book. We have to remember that Mexican Catholic culture had used skulls and skeletons to remind people to behave well (with Final Judgment in mind), even shaping sugar skeletons as party treats for children. Posada’s audience were conditioned to feel less uncomfortable looking at skulls than many of us are. Nevertheless, the drawings are clear and stylish, realistic without becoming calendar art; their surrealism can’t be completely lost on anyone who likes Dali or Chagall.

        
Posada could draw living faces, too, even good-looking ones. He did “holy cards” with images of saints, flattering drawings of celebrities, and attractive models, as well as sensational news items, political cartoons (for whichever side was paying), and his calaveras or skeletons as cartoon characters. His grotesque and comic images seem to have been the ones recognized as original and memorable, after most of the pretty pictures of saints and young couples had been thrown away.

        
Not much is known about Posada, and the available facts of his life are rather pathetic. José Guadalupe Posada had three older brothers whose first names were also José; big brother José Cirilo attended a “real” school, briefly, and then shared his primary-school education with little José Guadalupe. “Lupito” was born in 1852 and died of acute enteritis in 1913. Although Rivera and Rius, as left-wingers, liked those of Posada’s cartoons that seemed to sympathize with “the struggle of the workers,” both had to admit that Posada had no political education—not much education of any kind—and sold his talent to anyone willing to pay for it. There seems to be no suspicion that Posada wrote any of the words that appear beside his pictures. He knew how to read, and did some attractive lettering, but he was an artist not an author.

        
He was, however, an artist “100% mexicano.” That would have been enough to cause either Rivera or Rius, patriots both (although left-wingers), to write favorably about Posada, so it’s a pleasure to report that patriotism is not the only reason why people still collect and reprint Posada’s work. There’s still a fresh quality about his images, whether they’re Art Deco angels tucking toddlers into bed, portraits, “holy cards,” bullfights, hangings, or skeletons drinking at bars.

        
If you like cartoons, and are not nervous or depressive, you will enjoy this introduction to a cartoonist who was very different from anyone in the U.S. or the U.K., in his time or in ours. (Amazon amusingly identifies the cheaper edition with the skeleton guitarist on the cover as "the Spanish edition." There is no English edition. Rius writes in Mexican Spanish, although he's not averse to quoting things written in different languages. Since most of his books are, like Posada, mostly pictures, any second-year student with access to a dictionary should be able to read them.)

Because it's not been published in the U.S., Posada sells for collectors' prices. I'm afraid the best price I can offer would be US$20 for the book plus $5 for shipping. (Shipping costs can be combined if different items can be packed and shipped together.) And "pos yes!"--out of this Rius or his favorite charity (I'm not sure I want to know) get $2.50. 

This web site supports writers whether they agree or disagree with any members of this web site on anything. We recommend good right-wing books to readers who may be left-wingers; we recommend good left-wing books to readers who may be right-wingers. Fair's fair. 

Painterly Impressions Jacket

This close-up photo came out a little darker than Gena Greene's version of the "Painterly Impressions" jacket pattern from a recent issue of Knitter's magazine. The predominant color of the tweedy, textured, soft acrylic yarn is creamy white, plus those shades from blue-violet through blue-grey and blue-green.

Gena knitted what was described as the "extra-small" size, as specified. Well...for extra-small women it'd be "oversized." I'm 5'4" with a 37" bust, and I could comfortably wear this jacket over a lightweight sweater or sweatshirt. When I think of an extra-small woman I think of someone who's 4'10", 95 pounds, 30" around the bust, 15" from neck to wrist...I suppose magazine writers think that sort of person buys her casual clothes in children's sizes.

Made in Lion Brand Homespun, this jacket should last through years of reasonably careful machine laundering. It may stretch; it won't shrink.

As shown, the jacket does not have buttons or buttonholes. We can add snap fasteners and decorative buttons for an extra $10.

As shown, the online price is $40 for the jacket, $5 for shipping.

Book Review: From Housewife to Heretic

A Fair Trade Book

Title: From Housewife to Heretic

        
Author: Sonia Johnson

       
Date: 1981

        
Publisher: Doubleday

        
ISBN: 0-385-17493-4

        
Length: 406 pages

        
Quote: “We are concerned...that women’s struggle for equal rights and responsibilities...is viewed as contrary to religious values.”

        
Orrin Hatch was a young senator, and Sonia Johnson was an unpublished writer, when a politically active friend recruited Johnson and two other women to organize “Mormons for E.R.A.” Feminist organizations were still claiming that only the extreme left wing represented “women”; conservative women, like Phyllis Schlafly, whose lives and work were still consistent reflections of the belief that women are at least equally as valuable as men, were often bullied into identifying themselves as “antifeminist.” Feminist activists were still, however, several years away from group self-destruction by allowing feminism to be identified as something of interest to lesbians. The movement was still primarily for housewives who wanted to reenter the workforce, preferably after the children were in school, on levels of pay and prestige that seemed a little bit “higher” than the student labor jobs most of them had left.

        
Memo to young women who consider themselves “post-feminist”: This situation has been in no way improved by the exportation of semi-skilled manufacturing and office jobs overseas. The brave effort feminist activists made to market “careers” for married women as a trendy yuppie thing were never more than decoration for the fundamental fact that, for most women, some form of paid employment was a necessity rather than a choice. This is true for more of us now than it was in 1979, and meanwhile, for those of us who’ve been attracted to older, better paid men, the new economic reality is that our husbands are likely to be laid off sooner and rehired later than we are...but that’s a different rant. Back to Sonia Johnson in the Carter Administration.

        
A national Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution was failing to carry the popular vote because too many Americans, including women who wanted Equal Rights Amendments in our state constitutions, didn’t want to give up young women’s exemption from the draft. (For many of us this had nothing to do with the equal value of males and females; personally I think a country that can’t muster an all-volunteer army should reconsider the whole war.) Some feminists, like Johnson, wanted to reject anything that was not a precise counterpart of whatever was being offered to men. Including the reality that Americans whose memories of the Vietnam War were still raw might want to secure equal civil rights for women, via state law, but not risk having young women drafted into unpopular wars. “[I]nsisting that, though men have never had to win their civil rights state by state, women must...[is] very like Lincoln’s advising the slaves to  win their freedom plantation by plantation.”

        
What this meant for Johnson, and for Hatch, was Mormons in the national news...but in the news as adversaries, whose supporters were slinging mud at each other, rather than as members of a religious group that prefers to be known as a source of common-sense counsel and practical charity.

        
At the time Johnson was very seriously and radically a Mormon (she’s changed), a devout member of what the rest of the Christian world regard as an heretical splinter sect. She has a lot to tell us about what Mormons preached and practiced. Temple weddings, special underwear, the sexualized folklore and even theology (God is envisioned as being divided into a Father and Mother whose marriage is, furthermore, polygamous), the church’s paid employment of men in a “priesthood” and unpaid exploitation of women in a “relief society,” the belief that departed people are still active in this world, the Anglo-Israelite “history” in the Book of Mormon (where Native Americans are cast as apostate and inferior “Lamanites,” and the less said about Asian and African people the better), “Avenging Angels”...it’s all here. This is not even the faith to which Glenn Beck recently converted, but this is the faith in which Mitt Romney grew up.

        
Whatever you may think of Johnson’s version of Christian doctrine, you have to respect the sincerity with which she describes her friends and relatives practicing their beliefs. Personally, I’m particularly grateful for the descriptrion of Johnson’s mother’s classic introvert spirituality: “She took as a com­mand the scriptural admonition to pray always...I used to feel as if I was inter­rupting something whenever I wanted to speak to  her, and I was.” The natural tendency of the introvert brain is to carry on an interior “conversation,” wordy or wordless, always focussed on the task to which the introvert feels called, so that other people always are felt to be interrupting something; this is what it’s like when the vocation is prayer.

        
All churches, all therapy and recovery groups, all professional associations, all college fraternities, even all corporations and social clubs, occasionally turn into examples of certain laws of social psychology. Basically, these laws can be summarized as elaborations on the theme, “People are imperfect, and when people form groups they’re always in bad company.” When members of a group of people are committed to the group, yet they disagree on something they consider important, one law of social psychology is that groups tend to develop cultlike tendencies to venerate the person on one side of the disagreement—usually the one with higher status in the group—and turn against, often harm, the person on the other side. Rarely does the outcast keep enough friends to retain a splinter group. This predictable process is experienced as harrowing by people who expect fellow members of groups to be or become friends merely because they claim to be.

        
Hatch remains a Mormon, a senator, and a solid opponent of anything he thinks likely to benefit women. Johnson’s next three books detail her retreat into radical left-wing feminism, communalism, and finally a dysfunctional lesbian relationship in which “The Relationship” becomes The Ship That Sailed into the Living Room.

        
What’s not to love about From Housewife to Heretic is that it was written immediately after Johnson’s excommunication from the Mormon church, while she was still feeling shocked, hurt, and hopeful enough of recovering some social acceptance among old friends, to leave all the details in the book. This makes the second half of From Housewife to Heretic a longer, more detailed report on the church’s process of excommunication, with a formal “trial” and all, than some non-Mormons might want to read. For some readers the long, almost word-for-word, story of Johnson’s excommunication may be helpful, perhaps to provide reassurance that once the group has decided to cast someone out no amount of sincere, ethical, public-spirited behavior will change their decision. For more readers, I think, the ending drags.

        
Perhaps equally valuable, to a different audience, may be Johnson’s description of how her supportive, lovable husband came to leave her at the same time she was being excommunicated. Rick Johnson is credibly, even affectionately, described as first a man whose wife and children love him because he’s sensitive, and then, also, a man who’s too sensitive to be an ideal husband and father. Anxiety-prone, he withdraws from the noise, the mess, the emotional drama, and the financial burden of four children and an increasingly angry and edgy wife. Perhaps, if they’d had fewer children, Sonia Johnson would have been the woman to whom her husband looked for reassurance when his anxieties were attacking...but they had four, and she had no nurturing energy left. She demanded more attention at just the times when he was withdrawing to keep his panic—or rage—under control. He left. She tells us she’s almost glad he’s gone. Readers who may need both of their incomes to feed and educate their children, and don’t want to subject their children to the miseries of changing addresses and “blending families,” could do worse than to share this personal part of Johnson’s story with each other and talk about ways they can avoid replicating the Johnsons’ divorce.

        
Inevitably, Johnson reports, political opponents reported her divorce as evidence that her husband was threatened by her feminist activism, while her perception was in fact that he encouraged it. This is ironic, but by now it’s become commonplace: when someone else expresses concern about your independence, as when Johnson was willing to quit college and “Put Husband Through” his degree, but her husband insisted on her finishing her own doctorate...the person’s help may become valuable, and the person may anticipate death or disability rather than abandonment, but it is a way of saying “Don't count on me.”

        
Worthwhile, also, would be reflection on what Johnson didn’t dare to say, or think, about the divorce. She chastised her ex with the accusation that, as a man seeking a divorce in order to marry another woman, he was wallowing in the benefits of “the patriarchy,” which they’d agreed was such a bad thing. What would happen, in the now proverbial words, if one woman told the truth about...it’s not “the patriarchy” that offers loving arms to a straying, cheating ex-husband; it’s a woman who has never liberated herself far enough to reclaim her personal honor, which seems to be a specialty of right-wing as distinct from left-wing feminists. What would happen if women, first in those consciousness-raising groups of the 1970s and then independently for themselves, let ourselves think, “Regardless of what has or has not been accomplished in the national government, I claim my personal power to help rather than hurt others. I choose not to indulge my hormonal feeelings at the expense of another woman. I will not touch a man who has a living wife.”

        
How successful is Johnson’s indictment of “the patriarchy” as supplying failed husbands with an endless supply of fresh bedmates? How successful are the charges brought by more “traditional” older women who blamed feminism?  Although Ayn Rand usually gets the credit for writing things that recalled young feminists to a sense of personal honor, Rand avoided writing about this particular aspect of “objective morality.” I’m not sure whether Johnson’s story, or any other older feminist foresister’s story, really tells young women what they need to know about sisterhood and the defense of marriage. Nevertheless, for a Mormon Johnson makes the case against polygamy, or serial monogamy as de facto polygamy,  wonderfully well.

        
However, her book’s main value to society is probably its inside view of Mormonism. Reading From Housewife to Heretic is probably as close a look at Mormons as you can get without being pressured to give them money. (Then again, consider Glenn Beck's testimony that Mormon "relief societies" still function to help people keep working and say no to welfare. Maybe giving them money is not all bad.)

Although Johnson and partner Jade DeForest seem to have retired, at least from their web site, Google reports that they're still living, so if you buy this book from me Johnson or a charity of her choice gets $1. (This comes out of $5 for the book + $5 shipping; shipping charges can be consolidated if multiple purchases are packed and mailed together.) 

How to Be a Trendsetter

[Reclaimed from Bubblews. Some people undoubtedly wondered whether a person who frequently writes about not having money can possibly be a trendsetter. Hate to say it but...yes. Not having money may not be marketed as a trend, but it's definitely a trend.]

(Topic credit: BeaShe wrote http://www.bubblews.com/news/6935583-you-don039t-need-a-leader ; Angterese13 commented that people who consider themselves leaders don't like the idea that any of us can be our own leader; I commented...)

"You can go your own way." Readers of a certain age are familiar with this song lyric. I think the song was about breaking up, but we can choose to "go our own way" in many different ways.

Don't like the garbage you see on TV? Owning a TV set is optional.

Don't like the way you start having to replace parts of a car before you've finished paying for the car? Owning a car is optional.

Don't like the way a friend fails to make it clear whether "I'm heading your way" means "I'm driving straight to your house and will be on your doorstep in ten minutes" or "I'm doing all my weekly errands and may reach your house in four hours"? Obviously this person has something to offer, but if you really can't stand this habit, being his/her friend is optional.

Yes, there are people who truly hate any kind of difference from themselves. I'm not sure whether the most obnoxious people in this category really are leaders. I observe that a lot of them are tragically unattractive females. And I've noticed them mostly in primary school, where it's obvious, at least in hindsight, that the obnoxious brats were kids who hated being in school and couldn't do anything productive about it, but they could try to make other people as miserable as they were. I also suspect that many haters don't digest whatever they eat very well.

So the function of primary school in these United States is not so much to teach us to read (which many of us didn't even learn in primary school) as to teach us about haters. 

"What are you reading? Why are you reading that? You're weird." 

"What have you got for lunch? Ewww, ick, that's a disgusting lunch." 

"Where'd you get those ugly shoes?" 

"You got that problem wrong? You're stupid. You got that high a score? You're a nerd." 

"That's a stupid game! I broke your game box because nobody should be allowed to play that stupid game!"

Leaders? Er, um...the ones who get away with very much of this are bullies. The other ones bring out the bullies within us. (In grade one, I was a normal happy child whose social instincts focussed on my family, so I wasn't interested in other six-year-olds...except the little brat I had to hit, kick, and shove, although I was taller and stronger and would have preferred to ignore him, because if I didn't hit him he'd hit me.) But they *are* quite effective at making us distrust our own preferences about what we want to do. Is something "cool" or is it "too weird"?

Bullies tend to find most writers "weird"...in surprisingly similar ways. How many Bubblers think the "weirdo" behaviors listed here are actually "cool" and, well, characteristic-of-people-we-actually-like?

http://www.bubblews.com/news/6931761-what-do-you-do-to-earn-your-quotweirdoquot-nametag

Say it loud: "I'm different-from-the-bullies and I'm proud." At first we do tend to attract more harassers than followers. Over time, the harassers lose interest and find easier targets to attack, and the followers become friends.

Some of my lifestyle choices are still considered "weird" in my home town, even though a book called Bobos in Paradise has documented that they are, in fact, mainstream. (Yes, I miss going anywhere in an upscale suburb of Washington and having my clothes and other style choices fit in...not enough to go back to the city though.)

On the other hand, some things that were "weird" when my parents and I were doing them in the 1960s are now trendy. Some are mainstream. And some are actually required by law.

It's such fun, being a trendsetter.

Phenology 9.8.14: Goldenrod

(Reclaimed from Bubblews. Photo from Morguefile.)

Goldenrod is blooming abundantly in my part of the world now. It blooms about this time every year.

Goldenrod and another late summer wildflower called ragweed are often blamed for respiratory allergy reactions, or "hayfever." Isn't it interesting that "hayfever" didn't become a widespread or serious complaint until Americans started spraying poisons on land? Goldenrod certainly does release a lot of pollen. Pollen, dust, and other substances that can float through the air can irritate the human nose, sinuses, and throat. If the person is having an allergy reaction this irritation can trigger "hayfever." But the trigger is not necessarily the cause of allergies.

Most allergy reactions occur when people are exposed to either chemical pollutants in the air (such as pesticides), mold, or food they don't digest properly, or to some combination of these. Once the real cause of allergies is identified, a person who can avoid the real cause is usually free to enjoy flowers and animals.

Dark Green Sofa Blanket

The colors in these pictures, snapped with a cell phone camera, came out looking so unfamiliar that I have to stop and think about what each photo was a photo of. This picture, which is showing up a sort of mauve-taupe or a shade of purple on different computers in this building, was a close-up shot of an afghan whose actual color is dark green. The bands of color pattern that show up as chartreuse, pink, gold, and mauve on this computer are actually lighter green, red, yellow, and light blue.

This is one of a series of sofa-size blankets Gena Greene and I have made as pattern samplers. No two are alike. All are nice light warm washable blankets designed to cover a single bed, cot, or couch...about 6' long and 3' wide. Made in decent grades of acrylic, they keep their shape and color through years of machine-laundering. They can be made to order if you specify a color (pick any shade of Red Heart Super Saver, Vanna's Choice, or Simply Soft, to pay $75; if you prefer cotton or wool, expect them to cost more).

To buy it here, e-mail salolianigodagewi@yahoo.com. The price is $75 for the blanket plus $5 for shipping.

(Not sure? You may want to save the link to this site. More and better images should be available soon.)

Book Review: Invisible Man

Book Review: Invisible Man

       
Author: Ralph Ellison

        
Date: 1947, 1952

        
Publisher: Signet

ISBN: 2246323223

        
Length: 503 pages

        
Quote: "Sylvia, you were raped by Santa Claus."

      
First the chronological note: Invisible Man was published as a hardcover novel in 1947. What I have is the 1947 hardcover edition. What Amazon has is the 1952 paperback edition. Ralph Ellison no longer needs payment from the Fair Trade Books system, so online readers are welcome to go ahead and buy the paperback. However, it's especially noticeable with long books and I find it outstandingly noticeable with this one that the hardcover edition is easier to handle and read.

A few years before Ralph Ellison died I remember being surprised by an interview in which he told a younger writer that Invisible Man is meant to be a comic novel. Like most of my generation I’d read it as a serious protest novel and judged it a failure. I went back and reread it as comedy. It’s subtle and very noir, because the reality of the segregation era wasn't funny, but as comedy it works. The Invisible Man is done wrong because he's African-American; he also gets opportunities to improve his life, either because or in spite of his ethnicity, but he misses out on them because he's the walking definition of the word "sophomoric."

        
The nameless narrator, the Invisible Man, would like to be a politician. He’s unlikely to succeed as one. He has some public speaking skills, but he’s not especially intelligent, and people who know him don’t like him much. His family don’t want him to come home. His main childhood memory is of being cursed by a dying grandfather. He doesn’t have friends at college. At the end of the year he’s given letters of introduction to trustees of the college, told that these letters will help him find a summer job, and finally shown that what the letters actually request the trustees to do is to keep the young man waiting so that he won’t find a job that will get him back into college. He finds work in a factory, but he’s useless, even dangerous, on a real man’s job.

        
Eventually he stumbles across a sight that momentarily distracts his attention from himself. An elderly couple are being evicted from their home. After their things have been set out on the street, the old woman wants to go back in and pray. The Invisible Man makes a speech, leading other observers of this scene to pray with the couple and even take their belongings back into their home, because “We are law-abiding people” who don’t want elders and their things to be littering the street. In this moment of genuine concern for someone else, he becomes visible, and is offered a job.

        
Unfortunately, he’s tapped by a group who call themselves the “Brotherhood.” All good mid-twentieth-century American readers would recognize these characters as a Communist Front Group. The Invisible Man doesn’t care what their long-term goals are; he’s concerned only with his own long-term goal, which is to get ahead in the organization. He does not make friends in the organization. In fact, when funding drops, he’s laid off.

        
His association with the Brotherhood makes the Invisible Man unpopular with some people. He has to change names a few times, and finds it useful to adopt a simple disguise: hat, sunglasses, and the fashion disaster known as a “zoot suit.” When this cautious shopper disguises himself as a man who spends money foolishly, he’s mistaken him for a man called Rinehart. The Invisible Man doesn’t know Rinehart. The people who do know Rinehart don’t seem  to know him very well either; he has a different reputation on every block, each one more disreputable than the last—the final revelation of his depravity is that Rinehart is a gospel preacher.

        
In the whole novel, the Invisible Man meets only one other man (and no women) whom he can like or respect. This is Ras, the African Nationalist preacher, his rival in demagoguery. If the Invisible Man were more honest, brave, intelligent, or public-spirited they might become friends. As things are, they become what a more sentimental writer might call noble enemies. Their last scene together might be read as an apocalyptic clash of symbols.

        
Toward the end of the novel the Invisible Man is ineptly, but willingly, seduced by an older woman who thinks she wants to be raped. This scene is a little too preposterous to be believable in a serious novel, but likewise a little too close to reality to be really funny.

        
The novel had to be highly acclaimed by people who didn’t completely understand it, and Ellison had to become a distinguished old man, practically a Good Gray Poet, before Ellison could offer the public a clue to understanding his major work. Er, uh, is it possible that minority writers, even in the act of protesting against oppression and disenfranchisement, could have a sense of humor? That the Invisible Man is not an unsuccessful attempt at Everyman, or even Everyblackman, but an individual African-American youth whose misadventures are meant to be read, by African-American youths and others, as the kind of thing that happens when a person persists in being sophomoric? Well, yes...when read that way the novel does make more sense. We always knew that the Invisible Man’s story wasn’t much like the story of Martin Luther King, or Andrew Young or Marion Barry or Arthur Ashe. We didn’t know we had permission to look for closer parallels in the stories of Tristram Shandy, Adrian Mole, or Tom Sawyer in Huckleberry Finn.

        
Read as comedy, Invisible Man is definitely edgy. A lot of us—not the writer known as Priscilla King, but a lot of other baby-boomers—had parents who thought the Old Left Wing offered valid solutions to real, serious socioeconomic problems, racial and otherwise. Invisible Man, read as a comedy, comes very close to saying that they were immature and sophomoric and deserved the betrayal they got. I’m not sure that that’s what it’s meant to say. I’m not sure exactly what it is meant to say. I think part of what it was meant to say is that even in 1947, when racial discrimination was as potent and as putrid as raw sewage, even a sensitive, talented African-American could still laugh at many things—including a sophomoric shadow-self he or she might be trying to outgrow.

        
Read as serious mainstream fiction, Invisible Man can seem like a morbid wail to the effect that “This was or is what Everyblackman could expect in life. Everybody always does Everyblackman wrong, even his own immediate family, just because some of his ancestors were African. If he’s dangerous to himself and others on a job, falls for Communist Front Groups, sleeps with idiots, and becomes a homeless has-been before he’s twenty-five, who could have expected anything better?”  That, I think we can be reasonably sure, was not what Ralph Ellison meant to say. It’s not true, nor is it what Ellison did say in the rest of his life and work. And this is why I’m glad to have received his official permission to read his best-known book as comedy.

        
There are fact-based books about what real African-Americans were doing during this period of history—older ones like Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and James Baldwin, and younger ones like Maya Angelou,  Eldridge Cleaver, and Joycelyn Elders—that are truer history than Invisible Man. I’m not especially sorry to see Invisible Man disappearing from school reading lists. However, one reason why this novel should disappear from school reading lists is because teenagers are more likely to appreciate it if they discover it for themselves. As comedy Invisible Man is a delightful, snarky send-up of sophomoric kissers-up. Warmly recommended.

There Will Never Be Another... (edited for clarity)

(Reclaimed from Bubblews.)

Topic credit: BeyondRoses wrote http://www.bubblews.com/news/5986647-there-won039t-be-another-cat . After all these years, reading about this other family's loss still brings a sympathetic tear.

I remember the year my once-in-a-lifetime cat, Black Magic, died. Even while she was alive, the fact that my Best Pal and Working Partner couldn't have kittens made me observe regretfully that there'd never be another cat like her. She adopted kittens, and left heirs. None of whom could take her place. They were hardly even pets. "Little Cheaper-than-Mousetraps" was how I described them, remembering a children's story. My mother was the one who reminded me that cats are better than mousetraps--more humane, unless you have time to sit around watching your mousetraps and personally killing every mouse who may otherwise struggle in the trap for days.

True confession: I may have emotions of "caring" for all animals, including dogs, and cute little mice, and don't-let-it-get-close-to-me little spiders, as well as cats...but I don't really like all cats; nor do all cats like me. Minnie, the Second Queen of the Cat Sanctuary, and I never really liked each other. One of the things I liked about Graybelle, the Third Queen, was that she was someone else's pet, not mine, and only seemed to put up with me because Her Human had told her to. However, Black Magic, the Founding Queen, had been an adopter of kittens and other animals, and my memorial to her has been to continue adopting kittens and other animals.

Around the time Magic would have to have died of old age if she hadn't died earlier, some "humane rescuers of alley cats" sent me a bold and friendly kitten they had found in an alley in Kingsport. Though he never forgot that he'd been born feral and could live without humans, this young mackerel-tabby had started training a child to offer him food, which he dutifully took home and shared with his family in the alley...so inevitably he and I bonded. Most of his family were captured and brought to the Cat Sanctuary later. They feared and loathed humans, as feral cats typically do. Mackerel coaxed them to stay at the Cat Sanctuary, accept food, play with him and me in the yard, and eventually let themselves be held and stroked and taken to the vet. In my mind a little of the glow faded from my sense of Magic as an utterly unique animal. There was another cat on Earth who could be a friend and working partner to a human, after all. I didn't mind.

Mackerel's sister Polly became our Fourth Queen; her daughters Mogwai and Bisquit became the Fifth and Sixth Queens, and the Cat Sanctuary is now in the third year of the reign of Heather, the Seventh Queen. I bonded with Mogwai; although she was as reckless and as much a "crazy clown cat" as Magic had been sensible, there was a day when Mogwai's intelligent cooperative efforts prompted me to call her "Magic" by mistake. I missed Mogwai, too, even though I couldn't keep her.

Between Heather, Irene, and Ivy there is a clear division of labor, though not a clear hierarchy--whichever one most wants her own way can assert herself, and the others will respect her claims. However, Heather is the biggest and strongest sister, the best hunter, the one who brings in food treats for the others. All three sisters both "talk" and "listen" to humans, but Ivy (a reasonably competent hunter) is the most efficient communicator, the one who translates messages between cats, humans, and other residents of the Cat Sanctuary. Irene, a poor hunter and generally the least energetic sister, is the "sweet" sister who spends most time with the kittens.

These social cat sisters keep the house mouse-free and raise kittens as a team, and thus all three of them are my Friends and Working Partners. Because they have each other, none of them is as close to me as Magic was. (Living with other social cats has made me realize that, although Magic was too kind and too loyal to complain, she probably was desperately lonely, not knowing any other social cats.) I've never had another pet like Magic. I never will. I'm no longer sure I even want to. But I think Magic would be pleased to have these worthy heirs. I still remember Magic as a unique animal, remember living with her as a unique experience...but I feel less of an ache of loss, knowing that there are other cats who are capable of being real friends to humans, and having been blessed with a family of them.

I think anyone who's lost a pet can relate to Carol Ryrie Brink's fictional character who sneered at even a favorite uncle's kind offer of another pet: "A puppy--any old puppy--to take the place of Nero!" I didn't say anything unkind to the first generation of Magic's heirs because they weren't Listening Pets and I didn't talk to them much...but once, I have to admit, I did upbraid Mogwai's sister Grayzel with the dreaded "You're not Mogwai and you never will be," and she understood those words, too. It is possible to become an unworthy human companion to a good animal because some part of you is still blaming the animal for not being the other animal you still miss. That can be a valid reason for not adopting another pet right away.

I also think anyone who cares about animals enough to have loved a pet that much has a duty to...oh, at least "foster" or "rescue" other animals. Animals, plural, not the same type or even necessarily the same species as the one we miss. At first the idea that we're doing our duty by our lost friend's species, merely "rescuing" other animals, may help us. The animals certainly need human friends. We don't have to talk to them, or love them, or bond with them. Maybe we're only sheltering them, temporarily, and actively looking for someone else to adopt them. We don't have to give them names. "The stray cat" and "the shelter dog" and "that possum" need care, too, whether they ever win our love or not.

Ten Things Pris Has Done

(Posted at Bubblews; may seem repetitious to regular readers; the only label that seems to fit it is "wail," and I don't think we need a new label.)

(Topic credit: Jabo wrote http://www.bubblews.com/news/6136328-10-things-that-jabo-has-done in response to this meme, and credited BeyondRoses for suggesting the topic with http://www.bubblews.com/news/6049304-ten-things-i039ve-done .)

1. Started a business, which outlasted huge corporate-funded competitors for several years, with less than US$100.

2. While "unemployable," if not "disabled," from viral hepatitis (from a contaminated vaccine I was required to get, against a disease I'd already had).

3. Been a foster mother...once, and I'd do it again.

4. Climbed sixty feet up a tree, vertigo and all, to rescue a stranded stray cat. We estimated that it was sixty feet up after persuading the fire department to extend a forty-foot ladder up the tree. (Actually I didn't rescue the cat; my failure inspired a housemate to open a tin of fish at the bottom of the tree, and that rescued the cat!) Later, but in the same vein: tamed feral cats.

5. Earned money as a singer in college; raised money for charity as a singer later on; was paid to record an album, a copy of which may still exist somewhere.

6. Coffee-dated a People magazine cover bachelor; married an obscure Anglo-Indian-Canadian diplomat.

7. I suppose the Dean's List at Berea College is worth mentioning. Being on the Dean's List at the church college I attended first wouldn't have been worth mentioning if I hadn't been (a) financially independent and (b) eighteen years old at the time.

8. What friends may remember as my big achievement at the church college was pulling together the first multiethnic and bilingual social group recognized at our school. One thing the church college taught everybody was public speaking--most of us weren't going to be ministers but we had to be able to give a chapel talk!--and there was a sort of annual rite, in February, where people stood up and bewailed the fact that in the school cafeteria the people sitting at each table were almost always all the same color. Some people also liked to bewail their perception that the school was divided into cliques, instead of everybody being everybody else's best friend I suppose. Anyway, I was there for a few terms, made friends who weren't trying to form cliques but hadn't got to know each other well, and eventually these people started sitting where I was sitting in the school cafeteria, and what d'you know, we had that United Nations look. And the would-be demographers and social planners haaated it!

9. Back to adult life...as the masseuse to whom the official White House masseuse referred people, met three of the four Clinton Administration celebrities who demonstrated to the world the four most common side effects of SSRI antidepressants: painful muscle spasms, "parkinsonism" (twitching like a patient with Parkinson's Disease while not necessarily having that disease), citing unpleasant but unlikely "memories" as a factor in suicide, and convincing oneself that these drugs are safe for other people to use without supervision.

10. Lived on an income of US$100 (or less) per month...recently. I can't say I recommend that other people even try this, but it can be done, and I've done it.

Phenology: Damsels and Dragons

(Topic credit: Bubblews' BeaShe used a cool dragonfly image here: http://www.bubblews.com/news/6647377-i039m-still-not-part-of-the-isaf-club .)

As mentioned in previous posts, this has been a slow year for insect watching in my part of the world. Most of the insects I've seen have been the fast-multiplying nuisance species like gnats, flies, and mosquitoes. And carpenter ants. I don't watch those species; I whack them. No apologies. I think even Buddhists should do their bit to reduce the populations of these insects. If I were a Buddhist I wouldn't want to leave a horsefly trapped in horsefly form. I'd want to give it a chance to come back as a nice beetle or something.

One interesting insect I *have* seen at the Cat Sanctuary recently, though, was a dragonfly. A new kind.

When I was growing up, my part of the world contained two kinds of dragonflies, and--I'm not sure--either one or two kinds of damselflies. One kind of dragonfly looked like this:

http://www.visitingnature.com/twelvespottedskimmer.htm

If you have taken your computer to the lake, or persuaded a dragonfly to sit on your desk, this site will help you identify other species of dragonfly...

http://imnh.isu.edu/digitalatlas/bio/insects/drgnfly/idkey/1.htm

But it's not helping me identify the less common kind that was occasionally found in my neighborhood. So I can't even tell you what that kind was, except that it was shorter and fatter than the Twelve-Spotted Skimmer, less common, less pleasing to the eye, but otherwise apparently similar.

The ISU site didn't help me find the official name for the local damselflies, either. I never got close enough to them to answer the key questions the site asks about them. All I can say is that some were bright royal blue, and some were bright emerald green. A photographer known as Maxardu donated this photo of a similar species to Morguefile:

So those were the dragonflies and damselflies, and there didn't seem to be much more to say about them, until I grew up and North America started to recover from our disastrous experiments with DDT and similar poisons. I was over thirty years old when I learned that there are actually hundreds of different species of dragonflies and damselflies.

Dragonflies are large, sturdy-looking insects that hold their four wings out to the sides. For their size they have extremely large jaws. Some also have little barbs or hooks at their tail ends. Dragonflies don't bite or sting, but they look as if they might, and they *can* nip.

Damselflies are slim, needle-shaped insects that draw their four wings together over their backs like dainty young ladies in bygone days. They also have large jaws, and may have little barbs or hooks at the tail ends, but they look delicate and harmless.

In scientific fact, both dragonflies and damselflies are fierce predators, obligate carnivores who kill more than their own weight in other insects for food...which makes them useful animals to know. Dragonflies and damselflies spend most of their time near bodies of water. (Baby dragonflies and damselflies live in water, and eat other aquatic insects.) Sometimes the stronger, hungrier hunters fly away from water, near houses...and sometimes they're attracted to humans because humans attract gnats and mosquitoes. Dragonflies pay no attention to humans "as people," but they love to protect us from nuisance insects. For reasons of their own, they really want to help us stay out of the "I Swallowed a Fly" club.

Random Baby Blankets

I've actually done five of these blankets, and the colors came out so badly from these cell phone photos that I'm not sure which is which...I think this might be the one that's actually shades of faded denim blue and cream, in real life. I knitted one baby blanket in each of the Peaches & Cream cotton multicolor yarns that was sold on not-quite-one-pound cones in Wal-Mart that year. Three of them sold "right off the needles."

Here's the one that's actually bright blue, turquoise, and yellow:



All of them were knitted in a random stitch pattern created by working a random number of plain and a random number of purl stitches, over and over, on every row until done. As shown, this breaks up and mixes up the streaks of color produced by knitting in ombre yarn, and produces a lightly textured, crinkled-looking fabric. No two things worked in random stitch are completely alike even if they're similar in shape and colors.

Southern babies seem to appreciate being wrapped in soft thick cotton blankets, and in baby-free homes these textured cotton baby blankets make nice cheerful-looking towels.

Each blanket costs $15. Shipping it to online purchasers costs $5 (but this can be combined with the cost of shipping other items to the same place at the same time).

Book Review: Julia y el Leon

Book Review: Julia y el león          Author:  Hortensia Moreno Author page: http://www.compartelibros.com/autor/hortensia-moreno/1          Date: 1999          Publisher: El Barco de Vapor          ISBN: 968-7791-76-4          Length: 62 pages          Illustrations: watercolors by Verónica Murguía          Quote: “Éste era una vez un león que trabajaba de gato.”          Once there was a lion who was employed as a cat. To keep from being recognized as a lion, he had to wear a cat suit, and he was afraid to play with his humans’ toddler, Julia, because his disguise was old and tight and might fall apart.          As if this plot weren’t silly enough, Verónica Murguía has never studied what cats and lions really look like; the cat suit is green, and although the lion’s face is drawn as a feline rather than a human face, the eyes and whiskers aren’t right and the body shape is definitely human.          The moral of the story is “Be what you are,” but frankly, as a children’s story with that theme, I preferred The Sneetches and I’d bet your toddler will too. Children like The Cat in the Hat, who’s not drawn like and doesn’t act like a real cat, so maybe some five-year-olds like Julia y el león...I don’t think I would have liked this book when I was five years old. It lacks the wackiness and the rhymes that attract kids to Dr. Seuss. It’s funny in the way telling elephant jokes with a straight face is funny; apart from the fundamental absurdity of the situation, everything that happens is predictable and told in an earnest, serious manner. Some children this age can laugh at the idea that an adult doesn’t know as much about the real world as they do, some find it offensive, and I don’t want to think about the possibility that a five-year-old would not have noticed the difference in the shapes of humans’ and cats’ legs and feet. It’s not always easy to predict into which of these categories children will fall.          So, this book might be better appreciated by someone who’s just beginning to read Spanish. It’s short and simple, told in very familiar words, and it offers readers whose first language is English some useful contrasts between the preterit and perfect past tenses.

Book price: $5. Shipping price: $5. If you buy it from me, Hortensia Moreno or a charity of her choice gets $1.

Blazing Daze in Duffield, Virginia

About a year ago I posted on my Blogspot that I'd been "Dazed in Duffield." For those who don't remember, Duffield is the name of a town where many people in my part of the world have worked, and Duffield Daze is the name of the annual Town Festival where these people get together to catch up, listen to music, buy and sell junk, trade or just admire antique cars, and occasionally succumb to heat exhaustion.

Last year, I hadn't felt likely to succumb to heat exhaustion, but my face must have been showing some effects of the heat because an old acquaintance mistook me for my mother.

Well...last Saturday was very warm and humid, and I didn't have a lot of money to throw around and seriously considered giving Duffield Daze a miss this year. Then at the last minute someone called and invited me to fill an empty seat in a car. I walked out to meet this car. I kept walking, because I find walking easier to tolerate than standing. I walked for an hour and a half. This car had an empty seat in it because some dear old person was ill, and the person's young relative, who was driving, wasn't feeling very good either.

Needless to say, we missed the parade. We heard a passable live band playing Nashville-type music. We saw the antique cars. They are always a sight. The company that sponsors antique car shows in this part of the world frowns on "garage princesses" and encourages prizes to be awarded to old cars that are still actually rolling around on local roads, at least once or twice a year. Some of these cars are sixty or eighty years old, and sometimes their shells really are about to fall apart, but if you're on the road before the car show you'll see them actually running on the highway.

A Chamber of Commerce booth was handing out free styrofoam cups of ice-cold water. I took a cup with me as I walked around the field where vendors were lined up around the children's rides and inflatable "bounce house." The sun was blazing through the steamy air by now. Vendors were sitting under shades, fanning themselves.

The next to last vendor on the last row was Tree and Tra. Both of them and another helper were doing a brisk trade, mostly in one-dollar and two-dollar souvenir items, sitting under their shade with their iced drinks.

As I approached their booth I heard an older couple, who were the very last vendor on the row, talking about going for cold water. This couple had tried to economize. They had set their wares, just yard sale stuff, out on a table in the sun, and they were sitting in their truck with the doors open. I saw the man head off toward the water dispensers, and then I saw the woman collapse on the seat of the truck. She was taken to the hospital in Kingsport by helicopter. The word went around that she had had a heart attack.

The Scott County Life Saving Crew now have a helicopter to rush people to the hospital in. I have mixed feelings about this helicopter. Last winter the Cat Sanctuary's oldest volunteer, Oogesti, became ill while walking up the road above the Cat Sanctuary. When I found him he thought he'd be fine if he rested a few minutes; a few minutes passed, a neighbor came out to check on him, and Oogesti consented to let the Life Saving Crew be called. They sent for their helicopter. Another neighbor came out to see if she could do anything, and she and I drove to the hospital while Oogesti and the young men checking his vital signs flew...and I waited at the hospital for nineteen minutes before the helicopter landed. I think the helicopter is like other expensive luxuries. People are tempted to use these things when it would be more practical to use something simpler, just to justify the expense of having the luxuries.

Anyway, if residents of Scott County talk about having seen black helicopters, these days, they probably have. The Life Saving Crew's rescue chopper is painted in a combination of colors seldom found in nature. NASCAR fans of a certain age might be reminded of Dale Jarrett's car. The helicopter is almost a fluorescent green above, and true, glossy black below.

Sobered by the old lady's accident, but confident that she was in good hands, the rest of the crowd went on with the festival. I accepted an invitation to explore a new bookstore with a man who...since small-town types don't recognize that men and women can be friends, unless they're related, I'm glad to be able to tell them is some sort of distant cousin. I'm not sure exactly how distant, but people usually guess he's my brother, by looking at us. He is almost exactly two years older than I am. He is not the eldest child in his family. He had nearly lost an uncle on Friday and, on Saturday, was stressed and frazzled.

So he and I went into this bookstore, which deserves a Bubble all to itself, and someone coming into the store out of the bright sun looked at me and said, "Oh, you were with [his name], weren't you...are you his mother?"

I may never go to Duffield Daze again...