Archimedes screw – Deborah Makarios

January 15, 2016

Swings and Roundabouts

No, this is not a post about playgrounds, although while I was on holiday I did pay a brief visit to the largest playground in the Southern Hemisphere. (Well worth a visit. I especially enjoyed the Archimedes’ Screws, reminding me as they did of piston-filling fountain pens.)

Rather, I thought I would start my fourth blogging year (can you believe it?) with some exciting news on the Simplicity Front. Remember the epic quilt of craziness I slogged away at in my Year of Finishing Things? I finished it.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I am now an official card-carrying member of that mysterious cadre, People Who Finish Things. (All right, there isn’t a card. But there should be. Maybe I’ll make one. I’ll even finish it…)

Not only did I finish the Giant Quilt of Craziness, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, I also delivered it to the intended recipient and it is no longer in my house. I do still have the scraps, but I am intending to make a hussif with them as a permanent reminder to myself never to begin such an enormous and ambitious project again.

So far so good. The house is less one large sewing project, which is a good step in the direction of simplicity. But… what you lose on the swings you make up on the roundabouts.

There’s the Box. The ancestral box which came down to me from my grandmother via my mother (the latter, I am happy to say, is not deceased, but rather, well ahead of the pack when it comes to pruning).

The box started out as three bags full (which should give you some idea of what was in it, if this didn’t). Actually, four bags full – there was a small one hiding behind one of the big ones. What it worked out to, once I had cunningly smuggled it home in my luggage (and the Caped Gooseberry’s luggage, obviously) was a 60L clear plastic storage container full to lid-not-fitting with yarn. “A good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over.” Instant stash (although not SABLE, unless I pop my clogs well before my odometer ticks over to three-score and ten).

Not all of it is actually wool: some of it is 100% acrylic (I am shocked, Gran, shocked) and some of it was made up of worn out slippers and odd sleeves, button bands etc. Some of it was a Gordian Knot of odds and ends partially wound into little balls and partially wound into each other. This was gradually unwound over the course of three days with the help of The Occasional Visitor. (Alexander may have had a swift solution to his knotty problem, but I’d like to see him try to knit with it afterward.)

Deceased slippers and assorted body-parts aside, I am welcoming this boxful into my home. Why? Because the point of simplicity isn’t to have as little as possible of anything. The point of simplicity is to have just enough of the right things – that’s lagom – and for me the right things include knitting wool. It makes me happy, and I make it into useful things for keeping people warm and well-dressed.

But fear not! I have by no means given up on pruning, or on Finishing Things (details to follow). In the meantime, I have large quantities of mystery yarn to test for fibre content. By which I mean setting bits of it on fire. So much happiness, from just one box…

November 20, 2015

The Surprising History of the Bath

The humble bath is so often overlooked. This useful piece of household equipment just sits there, mostly unused, sometimes even downgraded to a mere surface for shower run-off, and yet, the stories it could tell…

A good many people have entered this vale of tears via a bath, since the popularity of water births has increased. One assumes that a warm bath is less of a nasty shock for the new entrant, although presumably they need to be fished out fairly sharpish so they can start breathing in the normal way.

Even more people have departed this vale of tears in the bath. Even overlooking all those who were insufficiently careful with their electrical appliances while bathing.
As it says in Green Eggs and Hamlet,
“To sleep, to dream, now there’s the rub
I could drop a toaster in my tub.”

Winner of the gong for “Most Often Portrayed Dead in His Bath” is Jean-Paul Marat. Marat was assassinated in his tub, which should serve as a warning to all mankind about not giving audiences to young ladies while in the bath, especially when your wife warns you not to!

Agamemnon’s wife is said to have murdered him in the bath, although frankly, after sacrificing their daughter, staying away ten years, and then arriving home with his mistress and their children, he had it coming.

Three of the nine women who believed themselves to be married to George Joseph Smith – under a variety of different names – died in their baths shortly after making wills in his favour. The experienced diver who was helping the pathologist figure out howdunnit had a narrow escape too – it took the pathologist and a doctor half an hour to bring her round.

That’s births and deaths, what about marriages? I thought things probably hadn’t got that far (except perhaps in California) until I saw this. Which, now I look into it, appears to be from California. Where anything can and probably does happen.

The bath is also a great place for thinking. Archimedes figured out the whole water-displacement-volume thing in his tub time, and then invented a scientific method of stealing someone else’s bathwater: the Archimedes’ Screw. Centuries later, the great Agatha Christie dreamt up plots while lying in the bath and munching apples.

I myself am entirely pro-bath. I have lived in bath-having houses for the last twelve years, and while I have nothing against showers, there is nothing so luxuriously comforting as a hot bath when you come home soaked through on a cold rainy day.

This probably seems all the more luxurious to me as bathtubs did not feature largely in my childhood. When I was very little, we lived in a place where clean water was a rare and treasured thing.

We had a little bowl of water to soap up with, and another little bowl to rinse off. Admittedly, I had less surface area back then, but it is actually possible to get clean that way, and it is definitely water-efficient.

Fast-forward a few years and it was bucket showers, with the hot water heated in an enormous black kettle over an open fire. Baths were sometimes had in a large pink plastic bowl, with each member of the family using the bathwater in turn (while Dad read The Lord of the Rings outside the bathroom door). Proper old-school, that was.

I do try to be eco-friendly, which is why I have not made maximal use of the baths available to me for the last decade or so. But I recently realized that two showers take about as much water as one bath. (Seriously, try putting the plug in next time you shower. You will be surprised. Especially if you only have a shower stall…)

And then I made my great discovery. Using the water-displacement theories of that great bather of antiquity, Archimedes, one can enjoy a deeper bath without using more water. How, you ask? Add mass, ideally in the form of one’s dearly beloved. The volume of water thus displaced is experienced as greater depth.

Eureka.

April 27, 2013October 19, 2017

Writing In Flow

:Keys to Enhanced Creativity
by Susan K Perry, Ph.D.

This book is based on the thesis which earned her that Ph.D. – hence the 8 page Appendix, 10 pages of biographical information on the writers who provided her research material (including Diana Gabaldon, Sue Grafton and Ursula K. LeGuin), 19 pages of notes and 12 pages of bibliographical references.

That said, it’s by no means a dry tome – Perry is primarily a writer, after all – and it holds the interest, whether you approach it from the academic level (what an intriguing phenomenon, I wonder how it works) or the personal (do others experience this the way I do and what can I pick up from them?

The “flow” referred to is that experience of losing awareness of the world around you, when the words just pour out of you, and time stops.

The ‘sweet spot’, ‘the zone’ – whatever you call it, that’s what we’re talking about here. In great detail. Too much to cover here, so you’ll just have to read it yourself if you’re curious.

Chapters cover what flow is. How it happens. What it feels like. The keys to getting into flow – have a reason to write (“Don’t coerce yourself. Find your motivation.”), think like a writer, loosen up, focus in, balance among opposites. Writer’s block – the complete opposite of flow. And my personal favourite, Specific Techniques for Luring Flow.

These include: specific rituals or routines around writing, specific writing tools, time and space, music/silence/meditation, re-reading what you’ve written so far/reading others’ work to spark your creativity/stopping in the middle of something, eating/drinking/fasting, walking or jotting or knitting or doing physical work or tiring yourself out or climbing a tree or (like Colette), picking fleas off your cat.

Obviously, you can’t use all of these at once. (Picking fleas off a cat halfway up a tree while knitting? I think not.) But there’s plenty to play with here. Try something. See how you like it.
Try something else. Play with the combinations and wait for the tumblers to go click.

Myself, I am drawn to the rituals/routines and the specific tools.

For example, I like to drink tea while I write. Actually, I like to drink tea most of the time, but I let myself have a lump of sugar in it if I’m writing. Perry notes, “As a writer who wishes to write regularly, you need to seek out ways to complexify your day to day life so that it remains fresh and inspiring to you,” but then, she is a full-time writer – a DDJ being more or less the antithesis of fresh and inspiring, yes?

As for writing tools, I believe I have mentioned before that I write with a Faber Castell fountain pen. It’s old enough that it uses actual ink from bottles, not plastic cartridges like my modern Parker does. I thought it used an Archimedes screw to draw up ink (how awesome would that be?) but apparently it doesn’t.

There is a screw-shaped bit, but it sucks up ink in the same way an eye-dropper sucks up eyedrops – it creates a vacuum, which nature abhors and therefore obligingly fills with ink.

Which is all to say that I will need to buy a bottle of ink sooner or later. Possibly later, given how long the ink lasts. For purposes of comparison, a disposable pen (ballpoint) contains between .27 and 2mL of ink. The smallest bottle of ink I’ve seen for sale contains 30mL.

At present I am using a fine blue ink bought for me (along with an elegant blue/green glass dip pen), by a friend visiting Venice. (Clearly, this is a Good Friend.) But what shall I use when the blue is finished?
When I started writing up notes for The Black Joke, I decided to use creamy paper (I bought a ream) and sepia ink from an old calligraphy kit, (the Made in China kind – bleeds like mad).

So when I read this book, two synapses touched, there was a minor explosion, and I thought ‘I could have a different colour ink for each Work In Progress – a thematic colour, as it were.’

Hard upon that thought followed the question “I wonder what the thematic colour for Tsifira would be?” At the moment, I lean towards a sort of amethysty purple – bright enough to be light and sparkly, but dark enough to be actually readable. Preferably even by candlelight, for the winter dark comes on apace.

I shall leave you with a final thought to chew on from Susan Perry’s book: “Your own preferred way of thinking about and describing flow is as unique to you as your writer’s imagination. Learn something about your creative process by taking a moment to consider your own sense of what flow is and how you get there… If you construct your life around words, the right metaphor can be critical.”

What is your metaphor? What is your method? I’d love to know.