Month: November 2013

A reader writes:

Jenny Diski’s thoughts on knitting is missing my favorite aspect of knitting: socialization.  Never before have I had a hobby that was so easily shared with others. I just moved to a new city (San Francisco) and was worried about making friends.  But after just a cursory search, I found a lunchtime knitting group at work, and a group that meets in the evenings three blocks from my apartment.  In both cases, I expected the group to be welcoming and friendly, and I was not disappointed.

I’m surprised more men don’t take up the hobby; it is a great way to meet women!

Actually, several more men than women have written in responding to our post:

Being a stocky and bearded 6’1″, I don’t necessarily fit the knitting stereotype, but I very much identified with the tranquility that Diski finds in the craft.

Whether waiting at the barber shop or riding Philadelphia’s El train, knitting brings me a curious mix of calm and focus. I started knitting at the example of my younger sister.  She gifted me with a beautiful knit blanket, and I later learned from others something that amazed and humbled me.  Before my sister starts a project for someone, she spends time in intention prayer for them.  When she finishes the work, she does the same.  In my case, I’m sure part of her prayer for me was that I would come to realize that I had a serious problem with alcohol and that I would seek help and recovery.

As a Roman Catholic priest, I was floored that my little sister could teach me something so profound and beautiful about prayer, the work of human hands, and the creativity of a compassionate spirit.  So I dropped my pride, and I replaced a bottle or shot glass with a set of knitting needles.  And so I knit away in AA meetings, where in a little bit of yarn I find the patience and attentiveness to drop my guard and draw from the experience, strength, and hope of others.

Another burly knitter:

Great piece on knitting. I’m a bear-ish guy and I knit.  But I’m mostly in the knitting closet, mainly because of the annoying questions people ask if they see a guy knitting.  Especially when I’m knitting a complicated fair isle sweater.  But it’s a great hobby and people really appreciate a handmade gift.  In fact, I rarely make something intending to give it away; I just give it to someone who notices it and really likes it.  A spontaneous gift is the best kind.

You may have linked to this before, but have you seen the amazing site ravelry.com?  It’s the most functional social network on the Internet because it brings together knitters and crocheters who are a naturally helpful and friendly bunch.  Slate did a piece on it a few years ago.

Another:

You might also be interested to know that men who knit are a small (and growing) but enthusiastic group of knitters. We contribute to books, do online courses, and there are even celebrity male knitters.

In 2008, we held a gathering of male knitters at Easton Mountain retreat centre near Albany, NY. The organizers (I’m one) figured we might get 10 guys, and as it turned out we had, I think, 45 guys attend from all over the USA and Canada. That retreat – identified as the “East Coast Retreat” or the “Men’s Spring Knitting Retreat” – has been held annually since then. Retreats have also been held in Seattle (originally San Francisco), in Michigan, Colorado, and South Carolina; also in New Zealand, Wales and Australia. The events are run with volunteer labour; programming at each event is largely generated and delivered by the attendees. A couple of the retreat locations raise funds to provide “scholarships” to allow a less financially-fortunate guy to attend. At the 2013 East Coast Retreat, one scholarship was ear-marked for a guy who wanted to learn to knit; he was also paired with an experienced knitter to learn the basics of the craft.

In 2011, three retreat organizers were interviewed during the East Coast Retreat on a program from WRPI radio (Troy, NY). If you are at all interested in listening to that interview, you will find it here.

Update from another:

Check out this WSJ story about truckers who quilt and knit.

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Todd Krainin reviews Photojournalists on War: The Untold Stories from Iraq:

In one shot, the burned bodies of slaughtered American contractors hang from a bridge over the Euphrates. In an image that conveys how violence became integrated into the daily lives of Iraqi children, a boy hopscotches over corpses exhumed from a mass gravesite. Some of the book’s 160 photographs have been widely distributed already, their impact indelibly marked in the American mind. Others are being published for the first time. …

A harrowing work of anti-mythology, the images in Photojournalists on War look nothing like the understated, bloodless snapshots provided by daily newspapers.

Mark Murrmann reviewed the book last month:

A number of the Iraq photos you may remember, but not in the same way that you remember the iconic images from Vietnam, which we’ve seen over and over. Most of the Iraq images were just published once, and the news cycle marched on. If you missed the relevant issue of Newsweek or Time or the New York Times, that was that. Many of them weren’t even published in the United States—too grisly for the American palette. And others were published for the first time in this book. A number of photographers Kamber interviews say the conflict’s most indelible images were not shot by photojournalists, but by soldiers. The notorious Abu Ghraib collection includes some of the strongest, most shocking photos to come out of that war. …

If anything, the interviews help wear the shine off the perceived glamor of being a war photographer. Sometimes explicitly, sometimes less so, they press the point that you never come back the same person you once were.

Gene Healy rips apart a new JFK book:

There are, by now, thousands of books on the Kennedy presidency’s thousand days, and 2013 has brought dozens more to coincide with 50th anniversary of JFK’s assassination. But in JFK, Conservative, Ira Stoll, former managing editor of the New York Sun and current editor of FutureofCapitalism.com, has managed something truly original—and truly odd. This may be the first book-length attempt at Kennedy hagiography from the Right.

Stoll lays it on pretty thick:

in his telling, JFK was a great president, a good man, and—no kidding—a good Catholic. Moreover, Kennedy’s policies—his “tax cuts, his domestic spending restraint, his pro-growth economic policy, his emphasis on free trade and a strong dollar, and his foreign policy driven by the idea that America had a God-given mission to defend freedom”—show that he was, “by the standards of both his time and our own, a conservative.”

It’s a cramped, reductionist account of conservatism, one that collapses the entire political tradition into its neoconservative variant. But an even less charitable person than I could make the case that it’s a fair approximation of “actually existing conservatism,” and Stoll’s thesis has already received a fair bit of praise from commentators on the Right.

Larison agrees:

Treating his anticommunism as proof of conservatism is mistaken for obvious reasons that I’ve mentioned before, and that anticommunism led Kennedy to make a number of serious foreign policy errors that cost the U.S. and the other countries involved grievously over the decade that followed. In the end, it was what defined his record, and marked him as one of the worst postwar presidents. Kennedy wasn’t a conservative, but even if he had been conservatives should want to disown him.

David Greenberg lays out the case for JFK being an “unapologetic liberal.” Update from a reader:

I understand and appreciate the momentous nature of the Kennedy assassination, and I do not object to the extensive current coverage, given its 50th anniversary, and given its impact on US history.  I do wish that, perhaps not right now but in general, some mention be made of Kennedy being an unremarkable president?

I have voted for more Democratic presidential candidates than Republican, so this isn’t an ideological slant.  But when I think of Kennedy, I think of Vietnam and the Peace Corps, and the trading of missile withdrawal in Turkey for missile withdrawal in Cuba. OK, Apollo. By my reading, he was a follower rather than a leader regarding civil rights. That isn’t a great list.  That should not get one on the half-dollar coin.  I certainly appreciate that his life was tragically cut short and he was unable to become whatever he would have become, but he in actuality had not yet become that much.  He has become a symbol without much substance, or perhaps an icon (of what?).  As close to a computer avatar as a Hindu avatar.  I simply object to so many pinning their hopes on what JFK could have become and then inferring he was a great president. Perhaps this email is better sent tomorrow, but here it is.

Another responds:

I think your correspondent who said Kennedy was undeserving of his spot on the half-dollar coin was right if one looks at Kennedy’s actual achievements, but that’s not why he’s on there. Kennedy made Americans dream. Apollo, Civil Rights, the Peace Corps … those were huge, arguably insane dreams at the time. If he’d lived, I’m not sure either Apollo or the Civil Rights Act would have succeeded when they did. In death, though, he somehow inspired the entire polity to see through what he probably couldn’t have. He reminds me a bit of Thomas Jefferson: a deeply flawed man whose redeeming grace was that he sold a nation on dreams far greater than himself.

Simon Usborne doesn’t want us to forget that two literary giants also left us on November 22, 1963:

[Aldous] Huxley died [of cancer] at 5:20pm, London time, on 22 November 1963. About ten minutes later, CS Lewis died [of renal failure]. Just under an hour after that, of course, JFK was shot and killed in Dallas. There may never have been a deadlier 70 minutes for celebrity….

I interviewed CS Lewis’s stepson, Douglas Gresham, for a story in today’s Independent. He recalled touchingly discovering that his only parent at the time had died just hours after he and his classmates had huddled around a TV to absorb the shock of JFK’s assassination. But for him, there was no sadness in being consumed by the President’s long shadow. If anything, Gresham said, Lewis would have enjoyed the posthumous privacy. It also made dealing with grief easier away from public glare – it took weeks for the world to realise the Narnia author was no more.

Steffie Nelson pens an appreciation of the Brave New World author:

[I]t wasn’t until Huxley moved to America — specifically, to Los Angeles — that the seeds of his lifelong fascinations with technology, pharmacology, the media, mysticism and spiritual enlightenment fully blossomed and bore fruit.

It’s often said “The Sixties” officially began with the death of JFK and America’s “loss of innocence.” But without the dedicated and well-documented cosmic explorations of Aldous Huxley and his cohorts, the decade would have looked very different. It’s not an exaggeration to say that, without Huxley, Timothy Leary might never have tuned in and turned on, and Jim Morrison might never have broken on through. …

On a now-legendary May morning, Huxley ingested mescaline for the first time, with [psychiatrist Dr. Humphry] Osmond and [wife] Maria as his guides. He admitted that he was “convinced in advance that the drug would admit me, at least for a few hours, into the kind of inner world described by [William] Blake.” He found the “door” in an unexpected place: the casual arrangement of a pink rose, a magenta-and-cream carnation and a pale purple iris on the kitchen table. As he recalled the moment in his 1954 book The Doors of Perception:

Fortuitous and provisional, the little nosegay broke all the rules of traditional good taste. At breakfast that morning I had been struck by the lively dissonance of its colors. But that was no longer the point. I was not looking now at an unusual flower arrangement. I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation — the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence […]

Wes Alwan responds to the hand-wringing over Alec Baldwin’s “cock-sucking fag” controversy:

These condemnations are grounded in a number of highly implausible theses that amount to a very flimsy moral psychology. The first is the extremely inhumane idea that we ought to make global judgments about people’s characters based on their worst moments, when they are least in control of themselves: that what people do or say when they’re most angry or incited reveals a kind of essential truth about them. The second is that we are to condemn human beings merely for having certain impulses, regardless of their behaviors and beliefs. The third is that people’s darkest and most irrational thoughts and feelings trump their considered beliefs: Baldwin can’t possibly really believe in gay rights, according to Coates, if he has any negative feelings about homosexuality whatsoever.

The fourth, implied premise here—one that comes out in the comical comments section following Coates’ post—is that we are to take no account whatsoever of the possibility of psychological conflict. We refuse to allow ourselves to imagine that a single human being might have a whole host of conflicted thoughts and feelings about homosexuality: that they might be both attracted to it and repelled by it. That they might associate it with weakness and submission on the one hand, and on the other with the strength and courage required to face discrimination and disapproval. That they might be personally repelled by homosexuality yet be ashamed of that feeling, and meanwhile an ardent supporter of gay rights.

These are all good points. But my calling the man a bigot is not meant to be some cosmic, eternal or simple statement about the guy. It’s a simple inference from repeated threats of violence – often including anal rape – toward other men, coupled with classic homophobic slurs. If used against any other minority, we would not be having this discussion. And my post was motivated above all by a sense that Baldwin’s public support of gay equality is somehow reflexively used by him and other liberals to excuse this classic homophobic behavior. It wasn’t him so much as his liberal enablers that got my goat as I wrote at the time.

Is Baldwin insincere in his support for marriage equality? Almost certainly not. Does he reflexively use homophobic slurs and imagery – and then near-hilariously lie about it even when caught in the act? Absolutely. The lies are particularly strange, as Anderson Cooper has noted.

The idea that a 55-year-old intelligent person only just found out that “cock-sucking” is a pejorative adjective alluding to gay men is preposterous. Ditto the notion that he had no idea at all that the word “queen” as in “toxic little queen” had homosexual connotations. The lies in these cases – instead of a candid admission that he brought up phrases from his own less enlightened past to lash out in anger and now regrets it – do not help his case that he is not guided by various forms of homophobia. Subsequently dragging his gay hairdresser out in front of the paparazzi he supposedly disdains doesn’t help either. Nor does making cringe-inducing jokes about his love for another man in public.

David Sessions agrees with Alwan. He finds irony in the liberal moralizing, arguing that “for so many liberals, the words are everything” and that, for them, there is “no bigger sin than using the wrong term, or revealing that you haven’t completely purified your inner life of unapproved sentiments”:

Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is a devastating mentality for the left to embrace. I left behind the religious conservatism I grew up with partly because I saw, over the first 20 years or so of my life, the self-defeating absurdity of movement orthodoxies and the obsession with moral shibboleths. There is some basic part of humanity that resists imposed conformity, especially when it claims the authority to judge even one’s individual inner experience. I became a liberal because I believed in the fundamental sovereignty of the individual to determine their existence as they see fit, free from totalizing legal or religious regimes; I became a leftist when I understood that systemic economic conditions impose even greater constraints on that self-determination. If all liberalism is about is policing the state of one’s soul, entirely apart from what one does to tear down those restraints, we might as well give up politics and go back to church.

Andy Issacson covers the Gates Foundation’s push for a better condom:

“The undeniable and unsurprising truth is that most men prefer sex without a condom, while the risks related to HIV infections or unplanned pregnancies are disproportionately borne by their partners,” said Dr. Papa Salif Sow, a senior program officer on the HIV team at the Gates Foundation. “The common analogy is that wearing a condom is like taking a shower with a raincoat on. A redesigned condom that overcomes inconvenience, fumbling, or perceived loss of pleasure would be a powerful weapon in the fight against poverty.” Many of the grantees are tackling the sensation problem by turning to materials other than latex.

Among other materials being tested are beef tendons:

If the Holy Grail is to simulate human skin, then by a certain logic, animal tendons make perfect sense. Mark McGlothlin, of Apex Medical Technologies, in San Diego, will use his grant to produce a male condom using collagen fibrils from cow tendons, a material he’d once investigated as an alternative to latex in the mid-1980s at the height of the AIDS epidemic. (He eventually put out a polyurethane condom instead, which stayed on the market for 15 years.) “A lot people are trying to get stronger and thinner material—that was always my focus,” he said the other day. “But the texture of collagen is very much like the mucous membrane: The feel of it, the heat transfer of it, and to the touch, it feels very much like skin.” As McGlothlin explained, you can think of collagen condoms as a bio-safe, micro-thin cow leather, without the nasty tanning chemicals.

(Photo: Material made from beef tendon by Apex Medical Technologies)