vom_marlowe

1a. I've bought the Stoorstålka "advanced" and "professional" kits after all, for practicing basic Baltic pickup with zero context.
( recent tries at weaving )

3. Weaving as a diversion has paused. The process of warping a second inkle attempt and weaving it off has shown me that my vast ignorance crosses understanding how something can function and getting one's fingers to do it at a strange angle. In sport-weight cotton yarn, most of my 2" = 5 cm band looks as neat and even as the stuff that Etsy-shop vloggers show themselves making on Instagram or TikTok; I'm a fumbling beginner with peripheral neuropathy only for starting and ending. Sew the ends under, and no one would see---but learning to make tidy starts and finishes is more than my current hands could endure.

I dipped back into weaving specifically to practice being a beginner at something. Having learned a few things since I was a knitting beginner (almost 20 years ago) regarding dexterity, mobility workarounds, how other people do various fibercrafts including forms of weaving, and how plant and animal fibers behave, the on-ramp for my hands-on weaving is quite short. Like, that's it, I'm already into an objectively intermediate stage, and my hands cannot do what would need doing there.


4. Crocheting has always been tougher on my joints than knitting, or rather, my best refinements over time of self-accommodation for each craft succeed better for knitting. Weaving at narrow output (tabletop, backstrap, inkle) demands less of any individual body part than crochet or knit because it's better distributed across many parts---but weaving wants specific actions that need fingers, not fingernail-substitution or the use of an external tool.

I can tie square and surgeon knots with my nails (lacking usual-range fingertip sensation), but the junk comm packets I wrote about a few years ago, whereby since #2020 my brain or central nervous system directs a limb to do something and it fails to report back timely, or CNS forgets momentarily that the limb exists---junk buildup is still a thing. Trying to weave more, doggedly doing more by eye, would mean accumulating more of a junk backlog than I have the capacity to expel (nap/resting self-accommodations). Weaving and laptop typing and food prep occupy the same bucket, just about. So, weaving drops out, at least for now.

(Knitting is still fine in moderation.)

Random link: We Were the Scenery (2025), a 15-minute documentary about the experiences of two of the background extras in Apocalypse Now (1979). It's written and produced by their child.

Coincidentally, Piecework magazine's newsletter recently had a link to a short essay on Hmong story cloths and the US NE---same cluster of ruptures, different segment.

Aditi Rao's review of Spinney's Proto and Scappettone's Poetry after Barbarism asserts mildly that "both books mobilize language, and the prospect of translingual communication, as their objects of study, with markedly different political ambitions and veneers," but there's so much thought and care amongst the review's remarks that I can't summarize. The review's title is "Against Babel: or, How to Talk to Strangers."

Jodi McAlister, An Academic Affair: A Novel (2026): two scholars in Sydney who've been competing since they were undergrads inhabit enemies-to-lovers without doing it, become housemates, and then inhabit sham-marriage (obviously, they're aware of the relevant topoi---he's an early modernist, she does pop fiction) because a job and a family hang in the balance. The Goodreads detail page has a more spoilery summary.

It's a relief to find that I haven't become a fan of romances, only better able to grasp them. This one is fine, like, whatever---but as academic novels go, it's almost alarmingly solid despite the brisk, casual tone. It's not satire when the caricatures resemble people one's met, people one's friends have worked with. Though one could say the same of Lodge (whose character-bases lasted long enough for me to've met a few, glancingly) and perhaps of Smiley and Tartt, Lodge wanted things to seem flash to the uninitiated while he took apart what suited him; all three writers sought to construct various levels of mystique. McAlister knows the world I was in for some years, despite being the other side of it geographically, and her narrative defines "precariat" for the uninitiated.

(Lodge: Changing Places et seqq. Smiley: Moo. Tartt: The Secret History, which I DNFed.)

I've finished the introduction of Emily Mendenhall's Invisible Illness: A History, from Hysteria to Long Covid (UC Press, 2026). Mendenhall is a medical anthropologist; this is a research-informed narrative, not an individual memoir.

Since I'm all done with being a pseudo-reviewer, this post occurs before I finish reading Mendenhall's book, deliberately. Instead, here's Kirkus, and an excerpt.