My Literature Classes Didnt Help. My Professors Stressed The Importance Of Approaching A Text With Detachment,

My literature classes didn’t help. My professors stressed the importance of approaching a text with detachment, with a critical gaze rather than an emotional one. There wasn’t a place in academia for gushing or ranting. There wasn’t room to simply say, “I loved this and I don’t know why.” One had to use academic jargon. One had to be methodical and thorough. It was like listening to a song and wanting so badly to get up and dance, but instead of dancing, you have to sit there and think about why those sounds made you want to dance and consider the exact mechanics behind the formula of a danceable song. And I didn’t want to fucking do that. I just wanted to dance. I just wanted to read. I just wanted to write. I didn’t want to deconstruct lines of poetry or do a close reading of Faulkner’s usage of semicolons.

Jenny Zhang, ‘The Quiet Importance of Angst-y Art’, Rookie (via tristrapedia)

As far as I’m concerned, counteracting this kind of limited approach is one of the primary goals of the para-academic. We need to understand and teach that understanding, appreciating and celebrating an emotional engagement with a text as a valid form of approaching a text, and one that enhances intellectual approaches to it.

Sometimes in my art I actively want to throw the intellectual engagement out, to say “no, not this time, not with this piece, come at this from a different angle, your degrees and grasp of theory aren’t the most fruitful approach here.” And that’s precisely because I’m so used to, and so tired of, seeing anything non-intellectual thrown out.

But in an ideal world we would just completely deconstruct this false, exclusive binary and accept that some people will favour one approach, some another, that for some people they can be combined with different levels of each approach present, and that none of these are intrinsically better or worse than the other, they’re just the approaches that we like best.

Right and below the needle: 8 stitches in five different threads, all in the wrong place. -____________________-

Yarisal & Kublitz - Anger Release Machine, 2008

“Experience the most satisfying feeling when a piece of China breaks into million pieces . All you have to do is insert a coin, and a piece of China will Slowly move forwards and fall into the bottom of the machine, breaking, and leaving you happy and relieved of anger.”

This afternoon I am giving a talk at UCL about the Stitched Iliad. It is open to the public, if you happen to be in London at around 4.00pm

Things I'm working on at the moment: a giant hyperbolic mass, in super bulky/chunky yarn. This is 12 balls in. (It takes about 40 minutes to get through one ball). And some geometric crochet - beginning with a simple series of Platonic Solids. Currently layering and layering fabric stiffener onto one triangle for the tetrahedron to see how many coats it's going to take to get a sturdy enough facet.

Behold the awesomeness that is the World’s Largest Crochet Blanket, certified by Guinness World Records on January 31, 2016. Measuring 11,148.5 square meters (120,000.98 square feet), this colossal blanket was created in Chennai, India by members of a social media group called Mother India’s Crochet Queens. A total of 2,500 participants contributed to the project, ranging in age from 4 to 93, and originating from all over India and 13 other countries besides.

“Subashri Natarajan, the crocheting enthusiast who initiated the project, asked contributors to send in granny squares, rendered in their choice of color and style. The simplicity of the request was deliberate: It allowed not only beginners to take part, but it also made it easy to combine disparate pieces into one massive whole. Many sent in entire tapestries, each revealing the unique personal style of its maker.”

The entire project took about six months to complete. After the blanket was assembled and the record certified, it was divided up into 8,034 individual blankets to be distributed to people in need, which is possibly even more awesome than the world record itself.

[via inhabitat]