Make Do and Mend, Ministry of Information/Imperial War Museum (365 Books, Day 76)

This is the other book Thrud picked up at the Imperial War Museum in London some time ago, along with the cookbook from two days ago. (By the way, over in the Dreamwidth comments to that entry Zeborah has both made and reviewed those potato truffles.)

This one is about clothes: keeping them, mending them, making them, reusing them, and preventing them from wearing out. I suspect it of being a lot more useful than the cookbook to a modern audience, because knitting tips have not changed that much since WWII, but I also think it's a lot less likely to be of general interest, as it is quite technical. Large chunks of it boil down to 'to mend x sort of tear in x kind of garment you should use x stitch', and although I would consider myself at least intermediate at sewing (i.e. I have made entirely by hand garments which were worn in public by myself and other persons), and I live with at least one person who is professional-caliber at it, I have no idea of half what they are talking about. Stitch names may have changed in the interval, or across the ocean, is one thing; and also the fabrics that are common today are not the fabrics that were common then, but I also think the skill set of sewing has changed generally, at least in a local way.

I mean, I am not joking when I say I am living with a professional-caliber seamstress; Thrud has done everything from genuine eighteenth-century costuming to a wedding dress. We were just talking yesterday about the fact that no one in the house has the vaguest idea how to darn anything. The thing is, we don't have to. You can't darn synthetics and the other things are, like, socks, which are cheap enough to us that it would be worth more in labor to fix them than to get new. (If I ever knit anyone in the house socks, well, that is when we will learn how to darn.) And that is one of the major differences between Now and Then: labor, and our time, are by far the more expensive thing, and as far as clothes go, throughout history the reverse has been true more often than not. The skill set of a person who is very good at sewing, in our particular first-world academic-upper-class milieu, is centered around making things, and making them to look pretty, and also if possible to last. The skill set of this book is centered around making things and making things to last, and last, and last, and, if possible, to look pretty. So not orthogonal, but not overlapping much. This could therefore then be a useful reference book to me, assuming I can extrapolate from it to mending modern fabrics-- and assuming that I want to take the time.

Because I have that option. Of course, one of the things this book is good for is reminding one that other people didn't and often still don't.

Also, of course, it reminds one of many other things which are actually past as opposed to just not right here-- for example that women used to wear rubber corsets, and a whole lot of other garments which have gone out. The sections on the care and maintenance of corsets are sufficiently arcane and technical to be by themselves reasons I am glad I've never had to wear the things. I have seen small animals with less complicated life-cycles.

Oh, and if you have a lot of leather boots, you can certainly learn how to keep them in good condition from this. Mostly I have learned I am doing everything wrong.

I shall leave you with the place this book became not just history but living at me and basically kicked me in the stomach. This is a chapter heading:

Here are some ways in which a man's unwanted garments can be converted to your own use, if you are quite sure he won't want them again after the war.

I mean. Ouch.

Make Do and Mend, Ministry of Information/Imperial War Museum (365 Books, Day 76)

This is the other book Thrud picked up at the Imperial War Museum in London some time ago, along with the cookbook from two days ago. (By the way, over in the Dreamwidth comments to that entry Zeborah has both made and reviewed those potato truffles.)

This one is about clothes: keeping them, mending them, making them, reusing them, and preventing them from wearing out. I suspect it of being a lot more useful than the cookbook to a modern audience, because knitting tips have not changed that much since WWII, but I also think it's a lot less likely to be of general interest, as it is quite technical. Large chunks of it boil down to 'to mend x sort of tear in x kind of garment you should use x stitch', and although I would consider myself at least intermediate at sewing (i.e. I have made entirely by hand garments which were worn in public by myself and other persons), and I live with at least one person who is professional-caliber at it, I have no idea of half what they are talking about. Stitch names may have changed in the interval, or across the ocean, is one thing; and also the fabrics that are common today are not the fabrics that were common then, but I also think the skill set of sewing has changed generally, at least in a local way.

I mean, I am not joking when I say I am living with a professional-caliber seamstress; Thrud has done everything from genuine eighteenth-century costuming to a wedding dress. We were just talking yesterday about the fact that no one in the house has the vaguest idea how to darn anything. The thing is, we don't have to. You can't darn synthetics and the other things are, like, socks, which are cheap enough to us that it would be worth more in labor to fix them than to get new. (If I ever knit anyone in the house socks, well, that is when we will learn how to darn.) And that is one of the major differences between Now and Then: labor, and our time, are by far the more expensive thing, and as far as clothes go, throughout history the reverse has been true more often than not. The skill set of a person who is very good at sewing, in our particular first-world academic-upper-class milieu, is centered around making things, and making them to look pretty, and also if possible to last. The skill set of this book is centered around making things and making things to last, and last, and last, and, if possible, to look pretty. So not orthogonal, but not overlapping much. This could therefore then be a useful reference book to me, assuming I can extrapolate from it to mending modern fabrics-- and assuming that I want to take the time.

Because I have that option. Of course, one of the things this book is good for is reminding one that other people didn't and often still don't.

Also, of course, it reminds one of many other things which are actually past as opposed to just not right here-- for example that women used to wear rubber corsets, and a whole lot of other garments which have gone out. The sections on the care and maintenance of corsets are sufficiently arcane and technical to be by themselves reasons I am glad I've never had to wear the things. I have seen small animals with less complicated life-cycles.

Oh, and if you have a lot of leather boots, you can certainly learn how to keep them in good condition from this. Mostly I have learned I am doing everything wrong.

I shall leave you with the place this book became not just history but living at me and basically kicked me in the stomach. This is a chapter heading:

Here are some ways in which a man's unwanted garments can be converted to your own use, if you are quite sure he won't want them again after the war.

I mean. Ouch.

You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are comments over there.

The Encheiridion, Epictetus (365 Books, Day 77)

If you're going to read Stoic philosophy, it's best to do it when you're sick. You see, the Stoics placed illness quite firmly on the list of 'things a person is not responsible for and does not have much control over', so it makes a very good antidote to the current cultural thread that holds that illness is the result of some kind of moral failing (i.e. if one had just taken care of oneself better/not interacted with xyz/done or not done something imponderable one would of course not be ill ever, which is, demonstrably, untrue).

Therefore, when I am annoyed about having spent a very long two days in interminable vocal rehearsals while having, as far as I can figure, a bad sinus infection and a strained chest muscle, I can derive some relaxation from having Epictetus point out to me that the sinus infection is not under my control, the strained chest muscle was a direct result of something I did but was not necessarily a predictable result, and the sitting-through-rehearsals must, on some level, have been a result of my wanting to be there, seeing as how they are a voluntary activity under my control. Which means that by the standard of things directly under my control, which is the standard that matters to the Stoics, this weekend went off perfectly and I should be happy about it.

I promise to get right on that when I'm over the sinus infection.

Seriously, though, it does help, when miserable, to differentiate what one is miserable about that one can control from what one is miserable about and can't. This is the thing that is so seductive about Stoic philosophy. They hold that there is no point in ever being unhappy about anything one can't control, which turns out to be, in the final analysis, most of the world, as the Stoic universe is deterministic. For them, everything that happens was meant to happen: why be upset when things go the only way they can possibly go?

The Encheiridion (which is literally a handbook, the title word's based on the Greek word for hand) is Epictetus' book of advice about how not to be upset about anything, ever. Detachment is the Stoic virtue. (Well, detachment and being happy to fill one's foreordained and correct place in the ever-moving clockwork of the perfectly predestined cosmos.) Mostly it consists of him telling you to think about things as though they were happening to someone else. If a passerby drops a cup and breaks it, you say 'It's one of those things that happens sometimes', but if you drop a cup and break it, you're annoyed, though the objective circumstance that it's one of those things that happens sometimes hasn't changed. Since it's the same circumstance, why are you upset on one occasion but not the other? Epictetus holds that the answer is 'the social convention of property', which is arbitrary, artificial, and ignorable. You're upset because you think you have some kind of control over the cup, and it's just been demonstrated that you don't, because property is not a natural law.

This is exactly the kind of thing that causes me both to applaud and be annoyed at the Stoics, because my position on them tends to be that they're right about the self and terrible at other people; it's a philosophy with an occasionally staggering lack of empathy. I accept his reasons as sensible reasons why I should not be upset if I drop a cup and it breaks, but if someone else drops a cup and it breaks and they're unhappy about it, my response is not going to be 'it's one of those things that happens sometimes', it's going to be 'I'm sorry that happened because it made you unhappy', you know? Epictetus generalizes from the cup to the people around one, that we should be no more sad when people around us die than we would be sad at the deaths of people we've never met, because everybody dies. This seems to me to be ignoring huge swathes of the things about human nature that have caused us to actually live together in social groupings in the first place.

So yeah. Helpful with the annoyingness of my weekend, but as a philosophy with larger applications, the Stoics are never going to be my principal recourse. Fun to read, though, and Epictetus in particular is trying very hard to be clear and sensible, on account of how he is trying not to be Chrysippus, his most famous Stoic predecessor, who is famously as clear as mud. Also, this is a book in which he actually tells you that you should ask yourself more often 'What would Socrates do in this situation?', and those, those are words to live by, right there, especially because the answer is quite frequently 'burst out laughing'. I could see 'What Would Socrates Do?' as a bracelet or a bumper sticker, really, I kind of want one now.

The Encheiridion, Epictetus (365 Books, Day 77)

If you're going to read Stoic philosophy, it's best to do it when you're sick. You see, the Stoics placed illness quite firmly on the list of 'things a person is not responsible for and does not have much control over', so it makes a very good antidote to the current cultural thread that holds that illness is the result of some kind of moral failing (i.e. if one had just taken care of oneself better/not interacted with xyz/done or not done something imponderable one would of course not be ill ever, which is, demonstrably, untrue).

Therefore, when I am annoyed about having spent a very long two days in interminable vocal rehearsals while having, as far as I can figure, a bad sinus infection and a strained chest muscle, I can derive some relaxation from having Epictetus point out to me that the sinus infection is not under my control, the strained chest muscle was a direct result of something I did but was not necessarily a predictable result, and the sitting-through-rehearsals must, on some level, have been a result of my wanting to be there, seeing as how they are a voluntary activity under my control. Which means that by the standard of things directly under my control, which is the standard that matters to the Stoics, this weekend went off perfectly and I should be happy about it.

I promise to get right on that when I'm over the sinus infection.

Seriously, though, it does help, when miserable, to differentiate what one is miserable about that one can control from what one is miserable about and can't. This is the thing that is so seductive about Stoic philosophy. They hold that there is no point in ever being unhappy about anything one can't control, which turns out to be, in the final analysis, most of the world, as the Stoic universe is deterministic. For them, everything that happens was meant to happen: why be upset when things go the only way they can possibly go?

The Encheiridion (which is literally a handbook, the title word's based on the Greek word for hand) is Epictetus' book of advice about how not to be upset about anything, ever. Detachment is the Stoic virtue. (Well, detachment and being happy to fill one's foreordained and correct place in the ever-moving clockwork of the perfectly predestined cosmos.) Mostly it consists of him telling you to think about things as though they were happening to someone else. If a passerby drops a cup and breaks it, you say 'It's one of those things that happens sometimes', but if you drop a cup and break it, you're annoyed, though the objective circumstance that it's one of those things that happens sometimes hasn't changed. Since it's the same circumstance, why are you upset on one occasion but not the other? Epictetus holds that the answer is 'the social convention of property', which is arbitrary, artificial, and ignorable. You're upset because you think you have some kind of control over the cup, and it's just been demonstrated that you don't, because property is not a natural law.

This is exactly the kind of thing that causes me both to applaud and be annoyed at the Stoics, because my position on them tends to be that they're right about the self and terrible at other people; it's a philosophy with an occasionally staggering lack of empathy. I accept his reasons as sensible reasons why I should not be upset if I drop a cup and it breaks, but if someone else drops a cup and it breaks and they're unhappy about it, my response is not going to be 'it's one of those things that happens sometimes', it's going to be 'I'm sorry that happened because it made you unhappy', you know? Epictetus generalizes from the cup to the people around one, that we should be no more sad when people around us die than we would be sad at the deaths of people we've never met, because everybody dies. This seems to me to be ignoring huge swathes of the things about human nature that have caused us to actually live together in social groupings in the first place.

So yeah. Helpful with the annoyingness of my weekend, but as a philosophy with larger applications, the Stoics are never going to be my principal recourse. Fun to read, though, and Epictetus in particular is trying very hard to be clear and sensible, on account of how he is trying not to be Chrysippus, his most famous Stoic predecessor, who is famously as clear as mud. Also, this is a book in which he actually tells you that you should ask yourself more often 'What would Socrates do in this situation?', and those, those are words to live by, right there, especially because the answer is quite frequently 'burst out laughing'. I could see 'What Would Socrates Do?' as a bracelet or a bumper sticker, really, I kind of want one now.

You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are comments over there.