27th July Weekly(ish) Roundup

So many things going on this last week, most unrelated to the others. I was a bit of a headless chicken because of that, but not entirely in a bad way.

• I finished reading The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. It is incredible. And incredibly devastating. And gorgeous, and hideous. You should read it. I don’t think I’ve written very explicitly about it here, but since I was a teenager I’ve been fascinated by post-apocalypse fiction. It’s my genre of choice, really, and it’s what I’m compelled to write when I’m compelled to write fiction. At the heart of it is an exploration of humanity, which is something I spend a good deal of thought on. This all might lead you to think I’m a pessimist, or even a fatalist, but really I’m not. I’m just not in any way inclined to shield myself from the possibility that we’re all doomed, and I have no fear of examining the bad in something along with the good. It keeps me in line, really. Makes me remember to live well, and it’s a chicken-and-egg thing when it comes to whether my end-of-days fascination came before or after my inclination to delight in (and to create) the absurdity of everyday life.
• Speaking of. No word from Joss Whedon yet. Gotta think of some new ways to approach this quest. Any ideas?
• And continuing on this topic, I enjoyed making my Jayne hat this week. My strongest motivations to craft have always been absurd things. That’s where the ugly dolls and critters come from. It’s also why I don’t design for the magazine beyond staff projects. My personal bent is far too bizarre for the magazine, which is why I love working with designers so much. It’s to fulfill a vision I’m pretty much incapable of fulfilling myself.
• And continuing on this thread for one more bullet, it’s been really fun to watch the Whedon-CrochetMe.com posts spread around crafts blogs. Although I did begin this adventure by sending a blind fax to the agency that represents Joss, all of my further efforts to land an interview with him have been community-based. I absolutely consider this to be as important as an eventual interview. The day after I blogged about it on Cme, a formal letter was passed on to his assistant, due to connections made by a reader. If this thing happens, and I think it eventually will (because, really? If I were Joss Whedon and someone told me about all this I’d laugh my head off and then I’d do the interview), it will be because we all acted together. And if it doesn’t happen, we’ll still have had our collective geeky fun (I mean, man. I knew there were some geeky crafters out there, but I had no idea there were so many. Thanks, everyone, for pitching in!). More soon, I hope. Keep that word going ’round!
• I’m reading Late Nights on Air, by Elizabeth Hay, for book club. It won the Giller Prize here in Canada last year, and it’s quite lovely. She introduces too many characters at once at the beginning; it’s hard to keep straight which quirks belong to which character when they’re all treated with equal weight from the onset. But I think once they’re more fully established this will be a very good read. Do you Americans out there have access to this book? It’s about radio in the Canadian North—two things I’m quite fascinated by. One of the most salient feelings I took from our trip around British Columbia a few years ago was a pull north. We spent only a few hours in the Yukon during that trip, and I just want to go back. Not forever, but I’d love to live in the North for a year or two. Then maybe I’d be able to find the words to describe how I feel about it; now I can’t.
• I’ve been thinking about my radio fascination lately. If I were to ever leave the print world, I’d like to see if I couldn’t do some radio work. It’s the only one of the two major communications media I’ve never worked in that I’d want to work in (I don’t count cinema because it’s so large-scale, though I was once a very bad extra in a short film). I’ve never been interested in newspaper work. I’ve always loved radio, and I’ve always loved voices. Radio is the medium you fall back on when all others fail. Yup. Radio.
• I met my brother-in-law’s girlfriend this week (she rocks) and went for a girl-bonding manicure with her and my mother-in-law. Being in a particularly Rainbow Bright mood, my nails are now a sparkly dark blue.
• Liz Gipson and I were on the Webs Ready, Set, Knit podcast this weekend, talking about Knitting Daily TV. It’s tough to do a three-way interview! Liz and I kept waiting for the other to answer. Having done it once, though, I imagine the next time will be easier. Have any of you seen KDTV yet? I’m still waiting for my DVDs because of a warehouse mix-up, so I’ve yet to see a full episode. I hope you enjoy it!
• I picked up a copy of Rolling Stone the other day. I haven’t read this magazine since I was in high school. It was fun to spend some time with it today. There’s a great article on Rush that totally brought me back to being fourteen. So then I had to buy some Rush, and I’m, like, rockin’ out to it over here as I write this. There’s also a good interview with Barack Obama.
• Finally, I’ll leave you with Wil Wheaton at Comic Con. Two parts of his interview, below, made me happy (also, he has a great voice). First, what he says about the egalitarianism of the internet is right on. The things he points out are the things that make me love the internet so much, and that make me enjoy tooling around on it as much as I do. Second, later on in the interview he gives some advice to writers that I think is just as applicable to crochet designers: Start with something, even if that something is terrible. Then work at making it better.