Don’t know what the yarn is but hope it doesn’t pill.

“Novel Academic Novels“, Emily Toth, The Chronicle of Higher Education (5 June/11): reading list that prompted me to download Terry Prachett’s Unseen Academicals.

“Why We Write About Grief“, Joyce Carol Oates and Meghan O’Rourke, The New York Times (26 Feb./11).

“Cult Stud Mugged: Why We Should Stop Worrying and Learn To Love a Hip English Professor“, Kevin Mattson, Dissent (31 Jan./11).

With these reversals in view, let me go full circle and propose a master narrative for contemporary American intellectual life: the silliness of the nineties has melted into a seriousness for the 2000s (and hopefully beyond). It feels as if the country’s going through a change similar to that from the twenties to the thirties.

“The Case Against Economic Disaster Porn: Stop slobbering over abandoned cityscapes!” Noreen Malone, The New Republic (22 Jan./11).

“How novels came to terms with the internet“, Laura Miller, The Guardian (15 Jan./11): Ignores SFF but then deals at length with an arguably slipstream writer.

So let us cast off the inferiority complex towards the cerebral continent and move on to more interesting questions. What, for example, is a public intellectual? In his study of the species, the American legal scholar Richard Posner defines them as “intellectuals who opine to an educated public on questions of… political or ideological concern”. It’s not just enough to be interested in ideas, therefore; to count as a public intellectual (or PI, for short) one must participate in debate to clarify issues, expose the errors of other public intellectuals, draw attention to neglected issues and generally vivify public discussion. The French polymath Pierre Bourdieu saw PIs as thinkers who are independent of those in power, critical of received ideas, demolishers of “simplistic either-ors” and respecters of “the complexity of problems”. The Palestinian literary critic Edward Said saw the public intellectual as “the scoffer whose place it is publicly to raise embarrassing questions, to confront orthodoxy and dogma, to be someone who cannot easily be co-opted by governments or corporations”.

None of these definitions is sharp enough to be very useful: any ranter with a megaphone and a mastery of rhetoric could qualify. In his book Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain (Oxford, 2006), Collini goes to the other extreme, arguing that a public intellectual is someone who first achieves a level of creative or scholarly achievement and then uses available media to engage with the broader concerns of wider publics. So the novelist Ian McEwan, say, would qualify but a widely read newspaper columnist might not.

Thanks to twist collective for the link.

[Update: "U" is posted.]

Parking metre cozy by Janna Maria Vallee

Yarnbombing:

• Yarn bombing: improving the urban landscape one stitch at a time
• Ladies fancywork society
• Yarn bombing UK DIY
• urban knitting: the world’s most inoffensive graffiti

Artyarn.org: “a collaborative fibre arts project”

Victoria and Albert: great page of knitting links, including these marvelous pictures of items in the collection, and a very good links page (knitted Elvis wig, anyone? Historical patterns?)

Casglu’r Tlysau/Gathering the Jewels: decorative knitting sheaths

Open Directory: page of links

Knitting bloggers ring

World wide knitting in public day

Have become a knitting geek these past few months. No doubt it is avoidance of various sorts, as well as the most recent manifestation of what is clearly an obsessive streak, but at least it is productive. Even calming.

They don’t sell “I knit so I don’t kill people” tee-shirts for nothing.