Tag: Books

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Culture

Day 1228 and Fabric of Our Lives

I love cotton. In my Waldorf third grade, our year long class project was to plant, grow, harvest, gin, card, spin & dye cotton. Along with a similar wool project, this childhood experience instilled a love of fibers, fabrics & textiles in me.

Early in my career I crashed textile trade shows like Premiere Vision which is where I fell for the extra long stable fibers of American grown Pima cotton. Cotton remains a big business in America. We’ve got trademarked cotton like Supima is sold as a luxury fabric.

From the Supima cotton website

You’ve probably seen the work of organizations like Cotton Incorporated. Catchy campaigns like “the fabric of our lives” market cotton with the United States Department of Agriculture’s commodity check off program.

The Agriculture Marketing Service of the USDA oversees efforts to improve the position of various commodities produced in America. Other campaigns include Got Milk, Beef: It’s What’s for Dinner, and Pork: The Other White Meat

All commodity producers & farmers must pay into the check off program and it amounts to almost a billion dollars of mandatory spending. As you might imagine this system has had its share of controversy and corruption.

It’s not all sloganeering according to Cotton Incorporated.

We work to make cotton the best it can be through research, textile innovations (like water- and wind-resistant cotton apparel and moisture-wicking, wrinkle- and stain-resistant cotton), and sustainable advancements like finding new uses for cotton and cotton byproducts, reducing land and water usage, and modernizing agricultural processes.

We make sure you know about all of cotton’s amazing benefits through advertising, retail and influencer collaborations.

You might be annoyed to find that American cotton growers are obligated to pay into a government marketing program which underwrites social media influencers.

Cotton is the most popular natural fiber in the world with 25 million tons a year produced so it’s perhaps not unexpected American has an incentive to promote it as one of our commodities.

Cotton is crucial natural fiber which means it has its share of a controversies as commodity for things like its water & pesticide use and genetic engineering to withstand the herbicide glyphosate.

If you’d like to learn more about cotton and its history Empire of Cotton and Cotton: The Fabrice That Made the Modern World are both comprehensive. I personally recommend Virginia Postrel’s The Fabric of Civilization for a broader appreciation on how textiles drove crucial technological innovation of our species.

In The Fabric of Civilization, Virginia Postrel synthesizes groundbreaking research from archaeology, economics, and science to reveal a surprising history. The cloth business spread the alphabet and arithmetic, propelled chemical research, and taught people to think in binary code.

This thesis suggests to me that fashion bitches are one of the original tribes of technology brothers. To care this much about the feature sets of a base layer clearly marks us as nerds. So I’ll finish this up with a personal anecdote.

I am furious at a brand of upper market cotton basics called Splendid. I’ve been buying the same long sleeve classic tee-shirt from them for at least a decade. It claims to be a 50% blend of Pima cotton and Modal. Both are considered premium fabrics with long fibers. Modal is a semi-synthetic developed in Japan made from beech trees. There are many grades of both fibers Splendid could source and in the past I’ve found the tee to wear extremely well. I’ve got a half dozen that never pilled, held its color & shape, and gave me years of wear.

Last month I bought three new Splendid tees as I becoming fearful of the downward trend in quality of manufactured goods. I’ve been trying to stock up on basics I’ve relied on in the past. Alas it would seem my most reliable shirt in my favorite fabrics has come to an ignoble end.

Splendid no longer manufactures with premium extra long cotton fibers as a new shirt pilled & caught onto other fibers in my tee shirt drawer.

Categories
Reading

Day 988 and Independent People

I prefer literature to non-fiction. My reading time is spent with stories. It so happens I’ve been immersed in a story about an Icelandic homesteader by Halldor Laxness.

Originally published in 1934 and out of print for decades, this book by the Nobel Prize-winning Icelandic author is a huge, skaldic treat filled with satire, humor, pathos, cold weather and sheep. Gudbjartur Jonsson becomes Bjartur of Summerhouses when, after 18 years of service to the Bailiff of Myri, he is able to buy his own croft.

Publisher’s Weekly.

It was described to me as social realism as it follows the harsh reality agrarian Iceland, debt bondage, and the things that are lost in the quest to be free of obligation to anyone. Set across multiple vignettes of Iceland’s history it trace’s the family’s arc from servitude to owners of a sheep farm during World War 1.

Halldor Laxness’s Independent People

It’s a sad story. The protagonist experiences loss after loss in pursuit of his independence. The dream of being indebted to no man comes up against the hypocritical fantasies of the upper classes and their own views of what constitutes a free life.

I am by no means living the kind of homesteading life of the rural agrarian Icelandic people. But the tragic losses that come as part of seeking to be less reliant on systems that enrich others (the church and local landed gentry feature) resonates. It is not easy to be independent people.

The cycles of nature and life come as they wish with little thought to one’s philosophies. Independence and dependence are just ideas that must face reality. I thought of Bjartur as we buried the dead laying hen in the back pasture.

Categories
Biohacking Emotional Work

Day 733 and Rollercoasters

I felt amazing last night coming out of my weekly therapy block. I was emotionally present. I was kind to myself. I felt like I was making progress. What a way to kick off the New Year I said to myself. I was riding a high.

I went to bed at my usual time feeling relaxed. I definitely thought I was doing the moisturized, thriving, in my lane meme perfectly. But then I woke up at 1am completely alert. Fuck.

I usually have more trouble falling asleep than staying asleep. Coming down from an emotional high like therapy can often take me a few hours. But every once in a while, I will wake up in the middle of the night and find myself unable to fall back asleep.

I felt like I was on a roller coaster. I was up then I was down and then I was up again. I was energized and completely awake for three hours in the middle of the night.

The sleep hygiene folks tell you it’s best to get up and do some sort of activity if you find yourself awake during your normal circadian sleep cycle. I decided to read a book.

I’m in the middle of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. It has been recommended on numerous “best of” lists. I am enjoying it quite a bit as it’s about friendship, a gaming startup, disability and creativity.

Eventually I felt myself getting drowsy around 4am. According to my sleep tracker I was in and out of light sleep until around 6am when I finally transitioned into deep sleep. The rollercoaster had ended its ride.

Categories
Reading

Day 143 and Fiction

I like to read stories more than I like to read any other form of writing. I just can’t seem to get into non-fiction. History, self help, how-to just doesn’t grab me. I’ve got a particularly intense allergy to business books of which my aversion is so strong I would rather pulp a “helpful” book than crack it open.

Some of this may be because of how I perceive rest. If I have any indication that something is bettering me in any capacity it’s just not relaxing. Deliberate learning reads too much as work. It’s not that I mind edifying content, not at all, it’s that if it’s meant as some kind of life and skill improving text I’m indignant that I didn’t spend the time doing something restorative.

I happen to think that this preferences for fiction has actually made me a better thinker. Stories and hypotheticals force us to expand our mental models. If I’m being instructed in a useful topic like venture deals or better management I am learning something specific with a perspective on how things should be done. If I’m reading a story about anti-memetic weapons I’m being forced to consider entirely alien ways the world might work. There is no expectation that I find utility in the thing or that I put into practice what I’ve learned. It’s purely an expansion of my reality.

Not being pressured to accept something makes it’s eventually welcoming all the more pleasurable. You’ve simply lived your way into this new mode of being. It’s a little bit like forcing an orgasm, sure we can all do it, but is it really necessary? And yes I just compared sex to reading but that probably tells you a lot about me.

Everytime I try to integrate more utility driven books into my routine I reject the habit. I make time in the day to sit up and do the edifying books. And then I put it off for other activities. But I never put aside fiction. Every night I read for an hour before I sleep. It’s a habit so engrained it’s more necessary to my day than brushing my teeth or my morning coffee.

And so I stay with stories. I look for the most strange and different works I can find. I preference science fiction as it tends to meet that criteria but in truth I will read all genres and types. I’ve loved tight family dramas as much as a thriller. As long as something about it alters my mind even just a little I’m game. Remaking the metaphors I use is ironically the best use of both my leisure and work time. Creativity comes from the hard work of changing who you are to ever truer and more honest forms.