learning diverse arts

At Pennsic I attended the vigil of Duncan Blackwater, who was elevated to the order of the Laurel (peerage for arts and sciences) for falconry. A vigil, at least in AEthelmearc, is a party surrounding opportunities for the candidate to speak with order members (and other people) privately. When I spoke with him he had one question for me: how do you evaluate candidates whose areas of work are so different from your own? That's a fair question, especially coming from someone being elevated for an obscure area. It's not a new question for me; I'm a music Laurel who doesn't necessarily grok embroidery, armor, and Elizabethan clothing, for instance. But I hadn't tried to articulate an answer before.

In order to become a Laurel you (generally) have to focus on a small number of areas. (Sometimes that number is one.) But once you're in the order, I think you have an obligation to broaden your scope, partly because you're now in a position to evaluate other candidates and partly because random members of the populace will come to you for help with all sorts of questions. Yes, in vigils I tell people that the correct response to "I have a question about [some art you know nothing about]" is to press your Laurel medallion to your forehead, concentrate, and then say "go ask $EXPERT", but that's only half true. Of course I should send people to the experts for most questions, but I also ought to be able to provide broad entry-level clues, too. I got the award for music, but the newcomer from another group just sees the medallion; it doesn't say "music" on it. If someone asks me how links in chainmail are held together, or which fabric colors could be produced by natural dyes, or whether counted cross-stitch is period, I ought to be able to give him something to start with.

(I write this fully aware that one of my readers recently asked me for documentation help that I haven't yet provided. I haven't forgotten you.)

So what does this mean? It means we need to learn at least a little bit about a lot of things. That's fine with me; I want to learn a little bit about a lot of things anyway (and a great deal about fewer things), so that fits my natural inclination. I think it fits the natural inclinations of many people in the order, and I don't think that's a coincidence.

How do you do it? You take classes. You read (not a hardship for most of us :-) ). You look at stuff in exhibits. You talk with people who are working in areas you don't know and you ask them to tell you about their work. People love to talk about their work. You can usually tell which ones have done their research, which ones are guessing and could use help, and which ones are BSing. I've learned a lot about miscellaneous arts in one-on-one conversations with people who didn't set out to teach me. It's pretty nifty.

And I think Laurels have an obligation to teach each other, too. When someone in the order tells me that so-and-so is doing Laurel-level work, I ask that person to tell me why. What makes that armor, beer, tablet-weaving, clothing, or jewelry well-crafted? What are the key sources in that art and is the candidate using them? What research, experimentation, and innovation is the person doing, and on what foundation is that work based? Why is this work Laurel-level?

I try to teach other members of the order about music. They teach me about other things. Our candidates teach us a lot, perhaps without knowing it. We all learn a little in the process, and if learning isn't the reason we're here, then what is?

short takes

A random observation while leaving Pennsic: many drivers appear not to understand the basic etiquette of simultaneous left turns. Suppose you're at a four-way intersection (sans signal) trying to make a left turn, and the guy on the cross street to your left is also trying to make a left turn. If you let him go first, he will block oncoming traffic for you and you can slip your turn in behind his; meanwhile you are blocking oncoming traffic from his right in your lane so that he only has to worry about that oncoming traffic coming toward you. You both win. If, instead, you rush through the intersection ahead of him, you get your turn and he's out of luck because of the traffic behind you. Why don't more drivers understand this? It took me more than five minutes to make the left turn out of Cooper's Lake onto Rt. 422 (a 55-mile-per-hour road) during which time three drivers screwed this up.

Amazon is now starting to sell short electronic texts (2-10k words) for order of 50 cents a pop (though I can't now find that price info on their site, so I don't remember why I know this). It's called Amazon shorts. I gather that they're mainly targeting established authors (short stories? essays?), but it sounds like they'll consider anyone. I find myself wondering if there is a class of content that I could provide that people would pay fractions of dollars for. (I don't know how much of that 50 cents the author gets, mind.) It's probably not worth the hassle for a new author unless you're working toward a book and want to build some buzz, but even so I find the idea interesting. (I probably got this link from tangerinpenguin.)

St. Augustine on intelligent design (from siderea).

Rob at Unspace has an interesting entry on faith that rings true for me. "So, I live sort of an inverse of Pascal's famous wager. But if I am wrong, and there is no God, I won't have many regrets. My life has been better because I believe in Him."