Adventures of a Desi Knitter

First things first - do take a look at the photo albums, all neatly organized to the right. (Click on “view gallery” in the right sidebar, then album title, and one individual photo - it will bring up a cool lightbox slideshow.)

After realizing just what a herculean task it was to migrate my blog from Typepad to Wordpress, I have been laboriously editing every post in my archives to repoint each individual photograph to its new Flickr home. This process is only half-done, but I’m getting there slowly. (I had 200+ pictures, so now is the time for someone to step up and tell me how I could do it all through some simple code. Don’t worry about my feeling like a fool about the work I’ve already done. I’m used to that.)

In the process, I deleted many pictures and in many cases, altered the posts as well. I felt a wee bit guilty tampering with the archives, which is, as the good old Positivists used to say, anathema. I was altering the record I had made myself of my (knitting) life, and it would not remain the pristine original way I had blogged about it.

And yet, this belief in an original archive is, of course, always misplaced. We know that texts have been “improved” upon all the time - there is no pristine record of the past. A lot of my own work has examined these textual methods and their ideological environments. Depending on which period and kind of documents you work on, we can trace these “improvements” - sometimes they appear in handwriting differences and in our electronic age, they leave digital footprints. If I really wanted the first version, surely some geek would be able to get my computer - or some google index - to cough it up, right? (The “why in the world would you care, and who would read the archives anyway?” question is irrelevant - heck, it often isn’t for a lot of other topics - so it must be for my blog’s archives!)

The tedium of editing the posts was thus made a mite more tolerable by having my academic and knitblogging worlds collide. But also, my hesitation at altering my older posts made me realize how deeply and implicitly we still seem to trust in its fixity. It reminded me of my intrepid friend Sepoy’s Polyglot Manifesto again, a brilliant rumination on how historians can, and should, engage the digital world to their considerable advantage.

I should confess that in addition to this effort to make my blogging hassles feed my academic imagination, a good bottle of Chianti has greatly aided the entire migration effort.

But amidst (literally!) all this ruminating, you can witness some knitting progress.

My red alpaca pullover for the spouse, requested last year and only a year late in submission, is now entering the interesting phase. Sleeves and body done separately and joined. Right now I have 468 stitches on the poor 24-inch needle! Serious overcrowding. 8 stitches are being flung off the ship every third row, but it isn’t creating much room for the remaining masses. Deep breath for the next few inches, before the stitches (and I) can breathe more easily. But the good news is that I might actually have it done this Christmas.

Tags: sweaters, Students, Work, etc. //