A Bluestocking Knits

2020, We Hardly Knew Ye

 

Well, I didn't get much Christmas-ing done this year -- no cards even though I bought some on sale in January last year, no we-are-still-well newsletter even though I started planning one in October or thereabouts (we've never done one before but having missed so much family news this year it seemed a good idea), no decorated mantel over our fireplace/bookshelf even though we raided -- with permission! -- the trimmings pile at the tree lot, no cut-paper snowflakes in the big living-room window, a rather Cratchit-like Christmas dinner though in all fairness that was mostly on purpose as it was just the four of us and not a dozen as usual, no "12 Days of Christmas Carols" series which I've enjoyed doing here in years previous.  It isn't for lack of Christmas spirit, mind you, just that weird sense of time shifting and turning just outside the door but rarely actually inside or at the same time as oneself.  But there it is -- 2020 has been a bit of a bust, to say the least, and Christmas has been as weird as pretty much everything else.  (Even my search engine doesn't know what day it is -- the other day its calendar had the 28th highlighted, while the taskbar on my computer said it was still the 26th.)

(I can't tell where this graphic came from, but it's brilliant and I wish I could credit the artist.  Its days not only melt Dali-like and disintegrate more with each week, but the numbers get increasingly out of sequence, or even non-existent, very like the surreal normality, or the new-normal surreality, that has been 2020.)

I couldn't help noticing that the Los Angeles Times's year-in-review section in Sunday's paper was 27 pages of their top columnists mostly in a sort of "WTF?!" daze and one page at the end of "well, there were some good things, though".  There has been a lot of stress and disappointment just here in our house, and none of us has been sick so in comparison with others we've had it pretty easy.  But I thought it would be good to say goodbye to this year on a positive note, so here are some of my "Best of 2020" lists --

Best New-to-Me Recipes (in no particular order)

• Skillet Turkey Chili from Smitten Kitchen (now a regular go-to meal)
• Finnish Rye Bread from Nigella Lawson's How to Be a Domestic Goddess (Nigella's version of recipe isn't online, but here is a slight adaptation)
• Bien Cuit's Salted Chocolate Buckwheat Cookies (do read and follow at least some of the advice in the comments, though, especially the one about refrigerating the dough overnight before baking; mine didn't look at all like the photo but tasted amazing)
• Honey Wheat Rolls from King Arthur Flour
• Cream of Celery Soup (and we hate celery!)

Best Escapist Fiction

• Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin series and Arthur Ransome's "Swallows and Amazons" series tie for first, partly because they are both wonderfully transporting into their respective worlds, and partly because there's a whole series of each and so therefore all the more immersive.  As Emily Dickinson said, "There is no Frigate, Sloop, or Sailing Dinghy like a Book / To take us Lands away"!
• D.E. Stevenson runs a close third only because I'm reading The Young Clementina along with the DES list at the moment, and it's rather sad for much of the middle of the book
• Molly Clavering deserves an honorable mention for Near Neighbours (1956), a charming novel in which "nothing much happens" but everything turns out satisfyingly well

Best Needlework for Daydreaming Over as well as Potentially Actually Doing

• Darlene O'Steen's counted-stitch samplers
• scrap quilts (Amanda Jean Nyberg -- whose book I got for Christmas -- and others)

Best Old Song that's Suddenly Pertinent Again

Simplicity, Peace, Integrity, Community, Equality

I've long had a soft spot for the Quakers, I guess ever since reading Steal Away Home -- maybe in third or fourth grade -- in which two runaway slave boys are helped on their journey north along the Underground Railroad by, among others, generous Quakers, and from Jessamyn West's Except for Me and Thee which I read in high school, I think, coming away from the story not only with one of my early book crushes (after Tom Sawyer!) but also with a growing respect for a religious community that from its earliest days gave its women a place beside its men, not below them, that not only preached the values of tolerance, peace, and integrity but practiced them.  It was an easy decision for me to choose a nearby Quaker college when I finally went back to get my degree, and although it was not a "religious" college at all, those values were nevertheless very much in evidence.  When I first started becoming intrigued by antique cross-stitch samplers last summer, one of the first I saw was this "Quaker Virtues" by ByGone Stitches, and it spoke to me deeply, on many levels.  There is the Quaker connection, of course, but I also loved its jigsaw-puzzle-like blend of small and large figures -- that so often look like Scandinavian knitting motifs, another deep pleasure for me -- and the intertwining of letters and words with the motifs, words that would speak to me deeply with or without the Quaker associations.  I bought two sampler patterns at about the same time, and started with the "Froth and Bubble", then got sidetracked by the "Peace to My Friend" -- but lately, stitching of a summer evening on a little freebie chart that will soon be finished --

which is by Beth Twist -- my thoughts turned once again to the "Quaker Virtues".  I had bought the linen at the same time as that for "Froth and Bubble" but held off on getting the threads, and when I started planning in earnest this week, I remembered why.  The recommended threads are overdyed cotton flosses by Gentle Arts or by Classic Colorworks, both of which are extraordinarily beautiful -- the downside is that the chart says you will need 38 skeins of the main color and 3 of the accent one, and 41 skeins of overdyed thread tip into three figures in one's shopping basket, I was rather aghast to see.  Even with David back at work (huzzahs and relief all around), that's a lot to spend on thread -- even on the assumption that 38 is probably a generous estimate.  So I've wistfully but realistically set aside Classic Colorworks and Gentle Arts for smaller projects, and have been auditioning the more budget-friendly DMC --

Their "Antique Blue" is I think my absolute favorite DMC color family, so the 931 is a sentimental favorite, and I'm sure would be very handsome for this chart with the sand-y 3782, though I'm also really liking the way that the slightly-more periwinkle "blue gray" 161 plays with the taupe-y 07 -- and there is a possibility of overdying at home, with my one bottle of RIT "Evening Blue," carefully saved in this 2020 shortage.  (Would it stretch to 38 skeins?!)

And, if you are wondering how a group that promotes simplicity and plainness can inspire designs full of such near-giddy abandon as the sampler above, you are not alone.  I had to laugh when I pulled out the "Virtues" chart again this week, that after months of looking at antique Quaker samplers, how "modern" this one looks to me now!  Like most sampler styles, different regions evolved different arrangements and styles of design, some quite distinct from others.

The earliest-yet-known Quaker sampler is this one by Elizabeth Pim, dated in different places 1729, 1731, and apparently 1750. The Pims were a noted Quaker family in what is now County Laois in central Ireland, and Elizabeth may have been associated with the Quaker school there at Mountmellick, or simply worked hers in the then-emerging Quaker style.  Samplers were originally simply models for future reference, so it is not surprising that Elizabeth worked hers on different pieces of linen at different times, then sewed them together.  Interestingly, the distinctive scattering of initials of family and friends is already in evidence on her second piece.

Eliza Swinborn's sampler of 1803 is already a "typical" Quaker sampler, with its border of half-motifs surrounding full motifs in the center, with scattered initials. The motifs of paired birds, swans, flower sprays, and eight-pointed stars, because of their association with the Quaker virtues of equality, community, simplicity, and peace, would quickly become used widely by Quaker teachers instructing their students.

The Ackworth and Westtown Quaker schools, in West Yorkshire and Pennsylvania respectively, took the alphabet-and-motifs sampler combination and went in different directions with it.  Ackworth samplers were typically a selection of half-motifs around the edge of the sampler, with full motifs in the middle, and like Elizabeth Pim's with the initials of school-friends or family scattered in the spaces between motifs.  I don't know if it was the girl's choice or the teacher's, but Ackworth samplers are found in both monochrome and polychrome, as these by Rebecca Blake in 1809 and Ann Grimshaw a few years later in 1818 --

(Nobody online wants to venture that the two Grimshaw girls were related, but as a genealogist that seems to me an interesting tidbit worth researching!)

Although some Westtown students worked samplers very much in the Ackworth style, some of the teachers went in a different direction and emphasized the alphabet with a plain set of letters like Rachel Ellis's above.  (Perhaps this was for the younger girls, just learning to stitch?)

Susanna Furman's 1831 sampler has a less "typical" arrangement, but still shows the influence of the Quaker tradition with its central wreath of birds and a number of floral motifs that are found in other Quaker samplers.  She may have been from the Delaware River Valley.

It was not a Quaker school, but you can see the relationship between Quaker samplers and the style that developed at the Bristol Orphanage.  This one by Emma Sandford in 1867 is typical of the Bristol Orphanage style, with its lines of non-stop alphabets at the top that gradually decrease in size -- sometimes surrounding a motif in the middle, sometimes not as the stitcher chose -- then a closely-packed assortment of borders and motifs in the lower section.  (Bristol Orphanage samplers were always hemmed, as the goal was for the girls, and sometimes the boys, to learn to sew and mark neatly and efficiently, in order to obtain good jobs in service to support themselves honestly.)

So you can see that the unusual octagonal shape and closely-packed assortment of motifs of the "Quaker Virtues" sampler give it a much more modern air than traditional Quaker samplers, but it bears a very close resemblance to them, especially to the Ackworth style!

(Sources for much of this historical information comes from here, here, here, and here.)

National Women's Equality Day, August 26

One hundred years ago today, Carrie Chapman Catt, one of the leading figures in the women's suffrage movement that had had its beginnings in the U.S. some sixty years before that, celebrated the certification of the Nineteenth Amendment with a speech including these words:

The vote is the emblem of your equality, women of America, the guarantee of your liberty. That vote of yours has cost millions of dollars and the lives of thousands of women. ... Women have suffered agony of soul which you can never comprehend, that you and your daughters might inherit political freedom. That vote has been costly. Prize it! The vote is a power, a weapon of offense and defense, a prayer. Understand what it means and what it can do for your country. Use it intelligently, conscientiously, prayerfully. ... The vote is won. ... but human affairs with their eternal change move on without pause. Progress is calling to you to make no pause. Act!

"Woman Suffrage" (1915) photo from the Library of Congress.

You are Not Alone

The Librarian and the Ligature

One of the things that appealed to me about the "Peace to My Friend" sampler is the beautiful old-fashioned alphabet with its unusual inclusion of a selection of ligatures, something that is rarely seen in samplers, old or new.  As I approached it, though -- working as I am from the top downwards -- I thought, "Now, why aren't those ligatures in alphabetical order, I wonder."

And of course, the closer I got to them, the more I wondered until, princess-and-the-pea-like, I realized that I would find it that tiny bit niggling forever -- and more importantly, my friend would too, being of a similar turn of mind.  And looking at the chart, I began to see other little details that puzzled me -- the missing dot of the i in the long-s-plus-i combination, the lack altogether of a bar of any size on two of the ligatures ...

Now, I am not as learned as it might sound from this, but I do know where to at least start researching, and in this case I chose Wikipedia, the article on ligatures.  Much of this article was lost on me, truth be told, but much I appreciated very much.  Isn't this a thing of beauty?! --

Ligature "Th" in handwriting font Taumfel, illustration by Nikolai Sirotkin on Wikipedia

Ordinarily, the lower-case h would have a loop for its ascender in this cursive-like font, but that looks a bit clumsy coming right after a capital T, so it has been adjusted to have a single-stroke ascender, with the addition of that delicate turn at the top that is like the difference between John Curry and, oh, even a second-place skater, really.
Ligatures "Wh" and "Th" in handwriting font Taumfel by Nikolai Sirotkin on Wikipedia

Not long after this, I also opened up a window with the article on the long s, and decided that, although I am told that the long-s is found with its "nub" or without, it seemed to me that consistency was called for in a single document, and I should choose one or the other.  Since it had already been established in the lower-case alphabet that the long-s has its nub, I went with that rather than have to go back and pick out the earlier instance (!).  (Further research seems to indicate that the barless long-s is in fact the italic version, so would presumably appear in its barless or uncrossed form only in an italic font....)

I was concerned that the descender of the lower-case j in the line above would be obscured by the numerous ascenders in the line below, but as it happened, it all went together quite smoothly and the sometimes-impulsive changes that I made gave it a nearly-perfect amount of space to be enjoyed and appreciated for the small-but-graceful detail it is.  I changed my mind as I stitched, and re-inserted the space in the ff ligature as the white space wasn't as glaring as I thought it would be, after all, and that after some more research I made the crossbar in the fi ligature connect all of the way across as it should do, and does in the original ffi ligature.

For further amusement, should you desire it, may I recommend "An Excellent Original Project Designed to Reduce Ignorance of the Long S" and, in case somehow you should think that librarians don't have a sense of humor, "fociety for the Reftoration of the Long f" ....

Make More Music

Made with a Creative Commons image by MorningbirdPhoto.

Booking Through Thursday: Gratitude

An "unofficial" Booking Through Thursday question --

Tell us about the person who gave you a book that became important in your life.

My very first job was at the library where my mom worked, at a small Baptist seminary at the base of the foothills.  I was very young -- I don't know how it was managed, but I guess being a small private school has its advantages! -- and my job was simply to paste in pockets and bookplates, so neither onerous nor critical, requiring only an eye for straight lines and the ability to sit quietly for a few hours, both of which I was pretty good at.  I would find a cart of books to process when I arrived, already cataloged and any dust jackets removed, and I pasted a plate at the upper left of the inside cover -- sometimes it had a note of thanks to a donor typed in -- and a pocket, probably with a date-due slip as well.  I don't remember property-stamping, but presumably that was also part of it.  Sometimes if there was something especially valuable in the dust-jacket blurb, it would have been carefully cut out and included for me to paste inside the end-papers at the back.  I had a stool to sit on at one end of a longish narrow workroom, which was filled on two sides by windows looking out over a little valley and the foothills to the north (very rural-looking, though it was not), so that the afternoons were rarely dull, even if the books themselves were a bit bland and scholarly! 

The library was in a curious sort of building that had the feeling that it might in an earlier life have been a house -- I don't remember the outside at all, but once inside you were in a smallish room with a desk where the students could check out their books.  A pair of short hallways led from this room at right angles to each other -- off of the right-hand one was my mom's office, where she did most of the secretarial work, as well as ordering and receiving all of the books.  (A favorite family story was that when very young my little sister was asked what her mommy did, and she said brightly, "My mommy works at the cemetery opening boxes!")  Across from this office was a small, narrow, and windowless room with the card catalog, and further down the hallway, through a pair of glass-paned French doors, was the reading room, with tables in the middle and bookshelves around the walls.  Along the north hallway was a series of small rooms which is where the rest of the book stacks were -- I always thought this a very appealing way of housing a library, so I suppose it's no wonder that my house now has multiple bookcases in every room and even in the hallway!  I guess I didn't take advantage of the staff discount as much here as I did in later library jobs, but I remember very distinctly that the first book I ever bought with money I had earned myself was during this time, Lucile Morrison's The Lost Queen of Egypt -- this was the beginning of my lifelong fascination with ancient Egypt, and I have to say that though Morrison's scholarship may be quite out-of-date now and her writing perhaps a little old-fashioned, it was wonderfully atmospheric and I still remember entire scenes quite vividly, even though I haven't read the book for years!  (My copy, as it happens, was missing the frontispiece, which I did not realize until some years later, but I hardly noticed the lack of it, contented perhaps with the more authentic-looking line drawings in the text!)

Most of the books at the seminary library, of course, were not anything a child would be interested in, but I remember that my mom borrowed for me one day a copy of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and of course I was hooked.  A great story -- adventure, magic wardrobes, talking animals, and all with a dry humor that clearly appealed to my nascent Anglophilia.  (Am I an Anglophile because I am by nature "English" or am I more "English" because I have for so long been an Anglophile?  Clearly, the latter has had some bearing on the development of my interests and my sense of humor, but I feel certain that the former is the case.)  When my mom came home a week or so later with both Prince Caspian and A Horse and His Boy, she was astonished -- since I was also horse-crazy -- that I didn't immediately dive into "the horse one" first, but of course I knew somehow (how? I wonder now, as I'm sure none of them had dust-jackets -- perhaps the clerk before me had pasted in a list carefully cut out from the blurb?). 

That was another thing I have to be grateful for from that first job, the Narnia books, of course.  But what prompted this post was the mass-market copy of The Hobbit given to me by the seminary's librarian, bless her, Dr. Genevieve Kelly.  I hope she knew what she was starting, as I'm sure it would have pleased her.  The book is yellowing and a bit brittle now, but still has the dedication inside the front cover, and it is one of my treasures.  I don't remember much about Genevieve, I'm sorry to say -- from what I hear, she was quite an interesting and eccentric person.  She had a beach house (I was sure it was Carpinteria, but my mom says Malibu), which was on a rather run-down and precarious stretch of beach, built out over the rocks so that you went in the front door at street level but once out on the balcony the waves at high tide were crashing underneath your feet.  The house had begun to settle in a rather alarming direction -- towards the water -- and a great crack, perhaps two or three feet wide, had opened all along the front of the house, which necessitated a large plank laid across what Genevieve called "The Abyss" to the front door, and I remember (although my parents forbade us to go near it) thinking it a charming bit of sang-froid!  She had a deep interest in music, and somewhere I have a madrigal she composed, in hand-written score, and my mom tells me that she used to practice her German by reading translated Zane Grey novels.  I do remember that she had very frizzy hair! funny, what sticks in your mind.  She died quite unexpectedly of cancer in 1975, in her late forties.

Amazingly, I just didn't get The Hobbit at first -- I couldn't even get past the first few pages and was nodding off.  I'm embarrassed to say this now, as it has pretty much everything I love -- musical prose, cozy rooms and good food, maps and a bit of magic, brightly-colored waistcoats and gentle English humor -- and I am glad that I had another go at it not long after, for of course I fell in love with the Shire and Tolkien's wonderful stories, and can hardly imagine my life without them now. 

“If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.”

Thank you, Genevieve.

10th Update

(Not the tenth one, on the 10th ...!)

I finished the knitting on the second Mora mitten late last night -- now only have the weavings-in and they're done!

This is less successful -- my nth attempt at a sontag, which every single time so far has either been far too big or far too small, curled mercilessly, shrivelled ditto (twin rib stitch), or just generally disappointed.  I keep varying the stitch pattern or the sizing, without yet finding the right balance.  This one is too small -- again.

These, however, turned out exactly as I'd planned.  I have been continually dismayed at the ease with which the girls manage to dent and scratch the metal water-bottles they take to school daily for lunch and various after-school activities.  Most of our older ones don't stand up straight any more, from being dropped or knocked over, etc. etc. etc.  When I found these new ones at Costco recently -- the mouth is large enough to easily get ice cubes or a bottle-brush into, and the lid has no moving or difficult-to-clean parts! -- I decided that I should take some protective measures, and so of course being me I thought, "well, what about a crochet sling-type cover?"  These are a mash-up of two free patterns, Kat McCab's "Water Bottle Cozy" and Kelly Spenhoff's holder with a strap -- I used the stitch and the shaping of the former, and the latter as inspiration for the carrying loop.  So far, so good!

I am also slowly doing some handy-man work on the dollhouse -- regluing loose pieces of trim, mostly.  Am dreading sanding that dark-green paint from the upstairs room, which I am sure is going to be a challenge to cover up, but it is just not attractive -- I should just get started, I'm sure it will give me great satisfaction once it's done!

A few weeks ago I joined Postcrossing, an international postcard exchange group.  Ireland is the latest country to issue a postage stamp in honor of the group.  I used to collect stamps, a very long time ago, found it interesting at the time but only from a distance once I stopped, but it is appealing to think of the occasional first-day cover like this one, to keep in a box or perhaps an album now.  I've just sent my second postcard, so am looking forward to my first arrival!

(I joined because I was feeling rather wistful about not really having anyone to exchange letters with any more, my oldest friend being hors de combat, as it were, and limited to e-mail as a result.  It's just not the same.  What a loss to the younger generation.)

I was delighted to see the Google Doodle for today -- it's Nansen's birthday.

As for my current petitpoint project, the Turkoman is slowly coming into shape.  I like the design a lot, mind, and the "faded" colors I decided on -- but it's tedious, I must say.  I've watched rather a lot of television, filling in all of that red background.

Goodness, I think I forgot to say that I started a separate blog over at Blogger (because it's free, to be honest) for the photos from our canal-boat journey.  We enjoyed it so much that David and I certainly plan to do another trip as soon as possible (Julia says wearily, "just not so many locks") -- maybe another stretch, or the rest! of the Stratford Ring, maybe Oxford ...?  I decided on making a separate blog so that I could play around with subject labels as well as focus exclusively on narrow-boating -- plus of course it's more of a family thing than just my own natterings here chez Bluestocking.

Time Travel

A recent post on the D.E. Stevenson list about this farmhouse reminded me that I've had these pictures sitting in a draft post for ages.  Some time ago, I came across a newspaper story online about a farmhouse in England where the brother and sister who had lived there since the 1940s had kept things pretty much exactly the way they were since then.  The brother and sister were quiet and reserved, and neither ever married, and when they recently died, the house and contents were sold off.

I was more than a bit dismayed by a comment on the article from someone who had viewed the house and thought that it was "creepy and sinister", because I find it anything but -- a little sad, perhaps, thinking of the people who had lived there, quietly and uneventfully, and are now gone, but also fascinated by this insight into the 1940s and 50s which we usually only get to see in bits and pieces.  Perhaps the person who found it creepy was thinking of those reclusive hoarders who barricade themselves from the world behind piles of newspapers and dirty dishes and filth, but it is said of Grange Farm that it was "spick and span" and the auctioneers had hardly any cleaning to do before the auction, just re-arranging things for the inventory.  (Nor were the brother and sister recluses by any means, to judge not only by the stories from neighbors of regular musical evenings and the delight they took in amateur theatricals, but also by the number of spare rooms ready for guests!)

I am not an utter Luddite by any means -- I have a blog, for one! -- but I am a little hobbitish, perhaps, or like Treebeard the Ent, who says, "I do not like worrying about the future" because like his trees he is so deeply rooted in the past, in the earth and rock and forest itself.  I mistrust change for the sake of change, and I must admit that I find this farmhouse utterly fascinating, not just the wooden tennis rackets, the packets of soap flakes, the patterned linoleum, the rather saggy armchairs, the things we don't have any more, but also how all of these things are interesting and beautiful in their own way, the way things get somehow when they have been cherished and used for decades.  It gives one a sense that although time is passing, it is also standing still.  I have always been intrigued by time-travel stories -- Tom's Midnight Garden, "The Love Letter" by Jack Finney, the Narnia stories, Diana Gabaldon's "Outlander" series to some extent (although she seems to have lost interest in the time-travel aspect as such, more interested in the characters themselves and the historical events that surround them).  These houses are rather like that, opening a gate or door and finding yourself in another world.

There are two other places like this that I know well (I mean from having been fascinated for years with them, and read about them) -- Bonnettstown Hall, in County Kilkenny, Ireland, and 18 Stafford Terrace in Kensington (the Linley Sambourne House).  I don't meant re-creations, interesting and valuable as those might be -- I mean places where the people who lived there simply saw no reason to change things.

In the early 1980s, American photographer Andrew Bush was hitchhiking around Ireland, when he met and was befriended by an elderly aristocrat living in a rather frayed early-18th-century house called Bonnettstown Hall with three companions, also in their eighties.  Bush, rather desperate, as he wrote later, "to soak up as much as I could before it was gone" began to photograph the house.  His book of these photographs was published in 1989, and the ones below are all from there.

It is almost impossible, even without knowing that the house would soon afterwards be cleared out and sold, to see these photographs and not feel that they are an elegy, but even so the photos are deeply nostalgic yet unsentimental.

Number 18, Stafford Terrace was the Kensington home of artist Linley Sambourne, a frequent contributor to the humor magazine "Punch", who moved into the house with his wife and two children in 1875, and redecorated it in the new Aesthetic style, which drew on the aesthetic value of things (objects, literature, music) and not their political or social values, with the ideal that one's response to all of this this beauty, this "art for art's sake", was a spiritual improvement in itself.

The Sambournes were not a static family by any means, and they did change their house now and then -- the drawing-room, for one, is papered in a William Morris design from some decades after they arrived -- but when Sambourne died in 1910, and his wife Marion a few years later in 1914, their son, the bachelor Roy, made few changes of his own, and the house remained virtually the same as it had at the turn of the century, until his death in 1946, when it passed to his married sister.  Already having a house of her own by then, she kept it but like her brother had, unchanged, and eventually the house passed to her daughter, who by then had become the Countess of Rosse, and had the foresight and determination -- as well as a great love for the house and its contents -- to found the Victorian Society in 1957, partly in order to ensure the survival and upkeep of the house and to be able to open it to the public -- which, to the fascination of those like myself who find it a way to make time-travel really happen, it still is.

(Sharp-eyed viewers may recognize the Stafford Terrace drawing-room as the home of Cecil Vyse and his mother in the 1985 film of "A Room With a View", and the dining-room as that of Aunt Agatha in the Granada "Jeeves and Wooster" series.)

In Which My Faith In Humanity Takes Another Knock

I very rarely write here about unpleasant things, either in my life or in the world in general, because I want to keep this blog a place where the most stressful thing for me is having to unravel a piece of knitting or not having enough wool to finish a certain patch of needlepoint.  I am also, though, a bluestocking both by nature and by designation, and as such I can't help waxing philosophical at times -- so instead of going into specifics, I'm going to ponder this morning the general nature of city politics.

Here is what I came up with last night: "Question: At what point does a concerned citizen become a gadfly?  Answer: When he or she stands up to speak against a development proposal at a planning commission meeting."  Is this truly the way it works?  (And is this a theory or a theorem? -- it's certainly a sidetrack.)

I couldn't help noticing, at this first city meeting I have ever attended, that the proposal procedure went like this: the representative of a certain development corporation spoke for as long as he wanted, with slides of idyllic architectural renderings, about a proposed high-density multi-story structure, then citizens in attendance at the meeting were allowed to speak for a maximum of three minutes each, yay or nay but without any visual aids, then the public forum was closed and the developer's representative was allowed to respond, again with visual aids, to these compliments or concerns for as long as he wanted, and then the commissioners offered their closing remarks and voted.  Well, yes, this is certainly democratic, up to a point at least, but is it quite fair? 

Nor could I help remembering, when one of the commissioners observed that few opponents of the development had bothered to come to the meeting, that when the commissioners were making their closing remarks, many of them thanked and complimented the citizens who had spoken in favor of the development ("when Mrs. Jones spoke -- is she still here? oh, too bad, isn't she wonderful! what a great citizen of our fair city! --") but in response to those who had spoken against the development they merely brushed aside the citizens' concerns ("well, Mr. Smith, it's actually irrelevant that you currently live in a similar high-density development and your common spaces that were intended to be open to the community at large have since been fenced off and locked from said community because of misuse and homeless congregations, because this one is going to be different").  Mrs. Jones is therefore a stalwart citizen, and Mr. Smith is an annoyance -- QED.  Is this really the nature of things? was Orwell right, that some citizens are more equal than others?

I don't know -- I hope not.  But I do suspect that the only way I am going to understand city politics is to become deeply cynical, and my whole being resists this like anything.