Sunday, March 22, 2009

Slogany mittens

Ok, I should post about this now for time reasons.
The idea for this comes from a discussion about Lisa-Anne Auerbach's knitting. LAA knits amazing designs with witty slogans on them, and is quite simply amazing. You can find her on Ravelry, and she also has a couple of websites. Her subjects are usually political, often provocative and always genius. My project won't actually look anything like hers, but I really wanted to plug her work.

So, sloganny mittens. The idea is to have a pair of mittens, with a slogan on each.
On the right:

"Community,
Identity,
Stability."

The motto of the world-state from Brave New World. And on the left:

"Listen!
Avoid Magic!
Be Aware!"

A saying from a short story "Solitude" by Ursula le Guin(in the collection "The Birthday of the World").
The first is the guiding principle behind the perfect(in some sense) human society, in which everyone is cared for and looked after, everyone is content and noone wants for anything. It's also entirely social - noone does anything individually or has(or needs) any privacy.
The second is a saying from what le Guin describes as a society of introverts - they live alone, not intruding on each other, everyone in perfect freedom. The meanings of the three phrases are a little obscure, and exactly what is meant by them is kind of the point of the story(go read it!).
So the two slogans are kind of opposite, but neither is really the whole story by itself - Brave New World is written as a dystopia, this perfect world is in it's own way a nightmare scenario, as would be the world of "Solitude".

I wanted to post this now because I notice radio 4 have a programme about Ursula le Guin up just now - it was broadcast on Tuesday, so folks in the UK will still be able to find it on iPlayer(I think iPlayer is only available in the UK, but I could be wrong?)

That's the plan!
Hugh.