Technical Difficulties

This is a list of all the words MS Word has mishyphenated in Unnatural Creatures. (And, yes, I double-checked all of them with the American Heritage Dictionary. Well, except "although," because really.)

• alt-hough
  
• anim-al
  
• catech-ism
  
• circ-ling
  
• Co-leridge
  
• des-cended
  
• domin-ies
  
• edit-or
  
• Esth-er
  
• extra-vagant
  
• ima-gined
  
• irrit-ation
  
• juni-or
  
• lib-rary
  
• natur-al
  
• philanthrop-ist
  
• posit-ively
  
• reas-onably
  
• re-cognized
  
• squeam-ishly
  

Booth would be appalled.

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Also, for reasons that do not need exploring at this juncture, the sale is extended another day.

I really don't want to pick on Bruce Seeds, because the fact that he came to my attention under inauspicious circumstances is no fault of his, but there's this thing in his FAQ:

Do you really make these yourself? Yes, the cutting, the piecing, the sewing and the ironing are all done by me, with one exception: the stitching process that binds the top, the batting and the back together requires special equipment. So I pay a service provider to do that step for me, in a pattern and thread color of my choosing. For most of my quilts, that service is provided by Patched Works of Elm Grove, Wisconsin.

Now, if you go to Patched Works' site, they do in fact have a special machine called a long arm, so what Mr. Seeds says here is not wrong. On the other hand, and the thing that's bugging me, "the stitching process that binds the top, the batting, and the back together" is called quilting. It's what makes something, you know, a quilt. The fact that he chooses to outsource this part of the process--while a totally legitimate choice with which I have no beef (although I'd prefer it if he'd phrased it slightly differently, so as not to give the impression that quilts cannot be made without special machinery)--really does reinforce the already somewhat more than subliminal impression that a divide has been created here between The Artist (design) and The Craftsperson (mere manual labor), and again makes the Milwaukee Art Museum's choice to showcase his work with their early American quilt exhibit--especially given the number of superb whitework quilts they had--almost painfully ironic.

Again, I think Mr. Seeds' quilts are lovely, and I do not think there's anything wrong with having one's quilts machine-quilted by a third party. (I love Rose Wilder Lane's comment in The Woman's Day Book of American Needlework about what nonsense it is to romanticize the non-technological past: her mother and aunts and grandmothers would have leaped at the chance to use a sewing machine.) My gripe is about semantics and self-presentation. And the valuation or devaluation of artforms created and practiced by women.

And now I really am going to shut up about this.

"The meeting soon broke up into a series of fish-fights."
--The Piltdown Forgery, J. S. Weiner (Oxford UP 2003): p. 62, n. 23.

Project Valkyrie
TIME: 25 min.
DISTANCE: 3.0 mi.
TOTAL: 6.0 mi.
NOTES: Got up to 8 mph, but couldn't sustain it. 7 mph is pretty much where I stick.
SHIRE-RECKONING: We have crossed The Water.

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So while I row to Mordor, I'm listening to Masterpieces of the Imaginative Mind: Literature's Most Fantastic Works--or perhaps I should say kibbitzing. (Repeat after me: "Fiction with scientific principles in it is not Science Fiction." NOTHING YOU DO TO IT can make "The Pit and the Pendulum" science fiction, no matter how beautifully the idea slots into your argument.) Professor Rabkin earned my wrath very early on by asserting that Hamlet's meeting with the Ghost is in the first scene of Hamlet (Act I, scene v, thank you very much), and, well, honestly, I'm a pedant. I nitpick. If you're going to quote "The Walrus and the Carpenter," or "Jabberwocky," you should be able to quote it correctly. If you're going to make a foray into biography and talk about Lewis Carroll's intense fondness for small children, get your details right. Because it's not all small children. Carroll did not like little boys and said so in his letters. His adoration was given to little girls. Which maybe matters and maybe doesn't (that's why this is a nitpick), but if you can dig up the details about his nude photographs of children and why he destroyed them, you could surely find this. Also the great Victorian photographer is Julia Margaret Cameron, not Margaret Julia Cameron.

The devil is in the details.