the middle knitter

Tonight, the creative writing department sponsored a reading of student works, and I was able to participate. I read an excerpt from one of my stories from last semester. But, I think my best work in that class was actually done in a couple of the exercises we did. So, since this blog is supposed to be devoted to my hobbies in general, I thought I'd share one of my favorite things from last semester. If you come here to look at pictures of wooly handknits, I won't be offended if you skip this one.

It's called "Lord's Day", and I'm sticking it behind a jump so as not to spam the blog. (For anybody reading on the RSS feed, I have no idea how the feed handles those, so . . . we'll find out!)

This blog was designed to be "public face" as a counterpart to my LiveJournal, which is full of whining and memes and the like, but occasionally I'll feel the urge to post something more substantial on my LiveJournal. So, in the interest of keeping this blog updated when I have No Time Whatever for knitting, I thought I'd start cross-posting some of the more interesting posts. My apologies to those of you who see these twice.

I've been meaning to write a post about the bittersweetness of speculative fiction, particularly my favorite kind of speculative fiction, the kind that combines the fantastic with the real world. I love it, of course, but part of the reason I do is that when I read it, I'm filled with this aching longing to be part of it.

It's been like that since I was a child--I wanted so badly to stumble across another world like Narnia that I used to carry around a kit of essentials that I would need if I did magically get transported to another world. (For all my fantasizing, I was a practical kid, and I knew that an adventure would be less fun if I didn't have a toothbrush.)

As I've grown up, I've been struck more and more by the sobering realization that nothing fantastic will ever happen to me. I'm never going to visit another world (like in Narnia). I'm never going to witness an encounter with aliens (like in Doctor Who). I might do interesting things with my life, but never something fantastic. Never something with magic.

That ache has been particularly bad lately, because in the past few months, I've been introduced to Doctor Who, and The Golden Compass. It's The Golden Compass I want to talk about here, and the concept of daemons. I feel like I should clarify the concept briefly to avoid confusing people who haven't read it--the daemons in the trilogy have nothing to do with what we call demons nowadays. They hark back to the original meaning of the Greek word daimon, a little spirit. In the trilogy, every person has one, and in the world of The Golden Compass, a person's daemon is sort of semi-embodied--it takes the form of an animal.

A girl in my speculative fiction class commented on how lonely reading these books always makes her. The concept of these daemons, that are always with you, so you're never alone. And when I read the books, I can't help but picture myself with a daemon of my own. (I'm even fairly confident of what it would look like.) And I ache.

Orson Scott Card once said that speculative fiction is the last surviving realm of religion fiction. This isn't what he meant, but it makes me think that perhaps this ache I get when I explore speculative fiction is exactly the ache that has driven people to religion for all of human history. It occurred to me in the shower yesterday that if Philip Pullman's trilogy were a religious text, I would convert in a heartbeat, just so that I could believe that it was really true, that people had daemons and everything. (Given that Pullman is infamously atheist, it's a strange impulse on my part, but there it is.) Over and over, growing up, I was exposed to the idea that everyone on Earth is looking for something do believe in. I wish I could believe in magic.

I finally went through my 827 pictures from Rome and managed to pare them down to 318, which I have now exported into a nice little Picasa photo album and uploaded for your enjoyment.

Click here to go to the album.

I should note that most of the claims I make about what you're seeing are either vague memories of what somebody said while we were in Rome, or me consulting a guidebook (which I didn't have while I was actually there) a month and a half later to try to determine what's in the photo. As such, inaccuracies may exist, and I apologize. Don't use my photo captions to study for any tests and you'll be fine. Also, there are a few obvious typos--it's kind of a hassle to get them fixed, so I probably won't. Sorry about that.

I understand that 318 is a lot of photos, so they're organized in the same order as our trip, with little narration and anecdotes to keep you interested. Since I never managed to write up the trip, this is the closest I'll come to telling you about what went down. But, if you don't want to sit through the entire thing, here are a few of the highlights:

Links go to the first photo from a given site--just keep clicking "Next Picture" until you get bored or start seeing pictures of cats and ivy instead of, I dunno, Pompeii.

St. Peter's
The Baths of Caracalla
The Colosseum
The Forum
The Capitoline Museum
The Ara Pacis
The Pantheon
Ostia
Pompeii

PS: This project involved uploading over 900 files on an Internet connection that was spotty at best. I think I've managed to fix most of the files that didn't quite make it, but if you notice one I missed, could you drop a comment here so I can fix it? Much obliged.