Raphael for Samhain

Just in time for Samhain*:



The rewards of quick and dirty knitting -- giant ribbon, giant gauge, mindless pattern, shiny thing done in time to get worn -- it'll even work today, though we're at the end of October, cause it's unseasonably warm. I've got a skein left of the Colinette "Giotto" in "Raphael" -- I've discussed the absurdity of this name earlier -- what to do with it? Scarf, I guess, but I don't want one, and I don't know anybody who wears these colors -- I seem to mostly know blondes who wear blues and greens, or brunettes who wear intense purples and black, or redheads who wear REALLY BRIGHT stuff in any color at all. Browns? Nope, just me. So, either I'll resell my remaining skein on eBay, which is where I got it in the first place, or keep it in the stash for someone someday who will appear in my life and require a scarf done in mushroomy dark forest floor colors.

Now, I'm back to serious, real knitting -- by which I mean anything 1) with a difficult pattern, or 2) with a gauge over 7 stitches to the inch, or 3) both. Preferably both. I get bored by the quick and easy stuff. Good thing it goes so quickly.

I read James Lileks every day -- never a waste of time -- but I especially recommend him today; an enjoyably rambling column -- scroll down near the bottom, though, to reach his deconstruction of the lyrics to Canned Heat's "Going Up the Country." Not to miss.

Also, I read Queer Joe everyday, but I'm finding him especially delicious this morning because he's trying out a new way to drive more traffic to his blog, which is to sprinkle it with google-friendly words sure to attract the "porn-starved masses who also like to knit," so you'll be reading along today, and all of a sudden run into phrases such as "large breasts," which arrive out of nowhere and don't go anywhere, either, and amuse me no end.

And oh, what else....

Oh, yes, the Knitting Tarot. XVI, "The Tower," is -- no surprise here -- "Ripping Out."

No surprise, no. But what I love about this conception is the shift in focus. The Tower energy comes from outside. Forces greater than ourselves shatter our constructions -- our beliefs, our plans.

But "Ripping Out" -- that's not the same. That's not about things we didn't foresee messing up our schedules. That's about putting our own hands on what we have spent time and energy on, and shattering it ourselves.

Willful.

Cool.

*************

*Irish; Means "November," though it's used to mean "Halloween." Pronunciation: SAH-win. Really. I'm not kidding. Yes, I know you want to pronounce the "m," and maybe have even heard other people doing it, perhaps even at medievalists' conferences, while I'm sitting in the back of the hall trying to keep from sticking my knitting needles in my ears. Nevertheless. The entire reason the "h" is in there is to tell you not to pronounce the "m." I'm just saying.

Hoop-la

(Short today; work overload. More tomorrow, and maybe pictures -- Sam's been asking if I need some. Occasionally he looks at my knitting and says, "we haven't taken a picture of that lately." So I figure we're overdue.)

I get emails giving me news on the progress on the Knitting Tarot, so I knew that Amber and Megan were working on the knitting equivalent of XIV, "Temperance," before it showed up on the website, and had some time to think about it.

I could NOT imagine what Amber was going to come up with. Impossible card. How to translate alchemy into knitting?

Intarsia, that's how. Differing yarns melded seamlessly -- not so that they become mixed (as happens if two yarns are held together), but so that they are clearly differentiated, but create a fabric together.

Hoop-la.

I like the way the join line of intarsia gives the feel of balance, not just of connection, and keeps the integrity of the separate forces -- yarns, in this case -- even though the join is itself part of the fabric.

Intarsia -- all about the joining.

Dialect Map

Knitting content first: I'm behind on my running commentary on Amber and Megan's Knitting Tarot -- they've been busy lately, and I was doing who knows what, and lost track. Also, #VII, "Blocking," gave me pause.

I'm not too fond of the Chariot anyway, these days; it's all about mastery of opposing forces and bringing things into line, and I've been feeling more rebellious than that. I admire its translation into "blocking," which is also about Making Things Behave -- brilliant move. Amber says, about it, "Blocking is a step or two beyond 'persuasion'; it's domination."

Well. Appropriate sometimes -- and especially appropriate for anybody who wants to actually create, and shape the world.

Reversed? -- Let go. Hand it over. (I'm not planning on giving a reverse for all your cards, Amber -- but sometimes the reading's Right There.)

*************

Natalie, the wild woman over at Pickle Juice, has found a dialect survey which can easily, for some of us at least, eat up a morning, so be careful. But if you do click on it, you can go to the state you grew up in, if indeed you grew up in the States, and discover something about how people talk there, and see if you fit in. If, like me, for instance, your Mother Tongue is Texan but you were raised, after the age of 8, in New Mexico, you can find out that the reason you didn't know what a "cruller" was until you got to New Mexico is that Texans, apparently, have no idea what one is; that the reason you call the act of throwing toilet paper over a house "tp'ing" instead of "wrapping" is that you left Texas before it occurred to you to do it; and also you can see hard data for what you already knew, that New Mexicans do not say "y'all," but "you guys."

But I do, and I'll go to my grave saying it, even in professional situations, because it irks me no end to have been raised with a perfectly good 2nd person plural that then other people want me to lose just cause their ancestors did, in some moment of insanity, and then didn't think another one up. "You guys," which is what New Mexicans say, will not do. And don't get me started on "yinz."

While I'm thinking about this, I'd like to explain the phrase "all y'all." This is not some cute phrase that Southerners say while they're trying to imitate Stage Southerners. It has a precise meaning. It's the intensified 2nd person plural, and means "every damn one of you, I'm not kidding."

As in the sentence, "ALL y'all shut up back there, or I will come whop your butts!" as has been spoken by Brannen-type parental units -- my dad or his sister, either one -- during various cousinly get-togethers, while we were all lying on pallets on the floor in the back bedroom at our grandpappy's house in East Texas, waiting for Christmas and pinching each other, whacking each other, and terrifying the littlest ones with Terrible Stories about the Ghost Down the Road.

(All my love, cousins. Miss you. ALL y'all.)

Bonding with Totally Spies

We have one of those families, growing in number, wherein the mom goes off to work in the morning, coming home sometimes late at night, and the dad stays home and is there when the child gets off the school bus. So Sam and the child have this whole nother life that I only get glimpses of -- they're Deeply Bonded, and they've got lots of Shared Activities. They go to the dollar store and buy toy guns, they go for long walks in the neighborhood, they play poker, using wooden matches for chips. (I like to have dramatic fits when I walk in on this last activity: "Gambling!" I cry, "Gambling! and Arson! What are you teaching my child!" The child thinks this is hilarious.)

Last night I discovered yet another Shared Activity: They're addicted to "Totally Spies." (Link needs Flash 5 plug-in, and won't let you out. But you can see the show in action.)

"Totally Spies" is a cartoon featuring three well-built girls with tight clothes and fairly big hair ("They're TEENAGERS," the child told me. "Yeah, I got that," I said), who fight -- I gather -- crime, using some serious cartoon anti-crime technology. Right. They live in Beverly Hills. They like the mall. Right. And what is the attraction of this cartoon?

In the child's case, I think it's the cartoon girls themselves -- "Clover is a Fashion Freak!" he said. As if that explained everything.

And in Sam's case, alas, I believe it's the cartoon girls as well, though he gave me some semblance of analysis of the thing -- "It's like 'Charlie's Angels,'" he told me, "except..." Analysis broke down there. Yeah, except they're cartoons, honey! "They're Valley Girls," he said. Ah. Well, there you are. He likes how they talk. They say "whatever" a lot.

Well, they're cute, all right. When they come on, the child goes to the bottom of the stairs and calls Sam down, so they can watch the show together.

Neither of them missed a minute of it last night; Sam, former Navy flyer, former scholar of Victorian lit, put his book down -- I believe he was reading Trollope -- and looked Really Cheerful for the whole half-hour.

Well. I'm going to go off to work now, where I'm slated to discuss Edna O'Brien's The Country Girls, and the repression of women in mid-20th century Ireland, while the guys back home are watching gum-chewing teenage cartoon girls kicking major butt on Cartoon Network, and God help me, I know these things are connected, probably inevitably so, but I do NOT want to think about it.

Whatever.

War and Peace

Some time back, when I had first started reading War and Peace, I had a lovely theory about the importance of needlework -- almost entirely knitting -- in the book, which theory, alas, I believed had to be thrown out, as the text wouldn't uphold it, darn oh darn. The war parts are pretty much NOT about needlework. This could have been predicted, but I had hopes. Only needlework in the war sections consists of a Russian prisoner sewing a shirt for a French solder, badly.

But I'm getting pretty near the end now (I'm on page 1235 of 1444), and recently I came across more knitting, in the intersection of the domestic and the martial worlds: Prince Andrei is dying of a shrapnel wound, and Natasha is looking after him:

Ever since she had begun looking after him he had always had this instinctive awareness of her presence. She was sitting in a low chair placed sideways so as to screen the light of the candle from him, and was knitting a stocking. (She had learned to knit after Prince Andrei had casually remarked that no one made such a good sick-nurse as an old nanny who knitted stockings, and there was something soothing about knitting.) (p. 1164 of the edition linked above)

So, this is promising, cause we have an articulation of theory here. Also explains why there's no needlework to speak of except in the "peace" parts -- needlework is sane, for one thing, and an emblem of spiritual development, for another. (The Russian prisoner who sews the shirt mentioned above is a little matrix of spirituality; apparently if you've not got some level of spiritual development you can't even darn your socks. This would be part of the reason that the war's going so badly. All the ragged uniforms are lying around in the snow, unmended.)

I enjoy Tolstoy, and I'm pleased that he noticed knitting and thought about it. But there are some problems with this passage.

Prince Andrei's not been dying for THAT long; it's great that he's washed up in Natasha's bailiwick so that they can be reconciled before he dies and she can attain a higher state of spiritual development, etc. etc., but think about this; she Just Learned to Knit! And she's doing stockings! You KNOW they look dreadful, and her gauge is off, and has completely changed -- probably loosened up about halfway down the stocking. Also, there are lines running down the stocking where she switched from one needle to another. Also, she's doing it by candlelight, whilst in the middle of Deep Turmoil, and she's been dropping stitches right and left. Also, one sentence later she's going to drop the ball of yarn off her lap, and it's going to roll around on the floor, which nobody is cleaning very well these days, on account of everybody being so discombobulated after fleeing Moscow and abandoning the books.

Tolstoy doesn't say who got the stockings, but it seems clear to me that the stocking themselves are irrelevant. The entire project concerns the presentation of the act of knitting, and not the knitting itself. I can only hope that the stockings got put in the grave with Prince Andrei, and Tolstoy forgot to tell us. Cause they are for sure unusable.

I wish that somebody who knows 19th Century Russian literature would take this up, cause I don't have time to get up to speed on the critical history, and I can see I'm onto something here.

Fall Decorating

The guys were Very Happy when I got in today. "Look! Look!," they said, proudly displaying the living room. They'd been decorating for fall while I was gone. The floor was clear of the usual building projects, the table was clear of all the mail, they'd found the autumnal tablecloth covered with autumnal leaves, they'd piled gourds in the center of everything.

It was quite impressive, and I was happy to be impressed.

Then, since I was home and had seen it, they pulled the building projects back out and put the mail back on the table. Now everything looks like it normally does, except there's a bunch of gourds around.

Darling guys.

But I am home, and I survived nicely, and Fayetteville was lovely, and now I'm doing laundry and cooking dinner. Well, not this EXACT minute, no, I'm blogging, which apparently Maggie the Cat is a crucial part of -- she thinks so, anyway. Can't get anything done on the computer unless you've got a cat on the lap.

I made great progress on the vintage cardigan over the weekend -- so much so that I may just focus on it now and finish it up. And there was a good yarn store near my hotel. It was, alas, open when I walked by -- thought I'd be safe, since it was after 6:00 on a Friday night, but NO, they're open till 8:00. Nevertheless, I got away with sock yarn and some point protectors, but no sweater yarn, though I saw some I loved. (Mohair, with a metallic core, copper colored. To die for.)

And I'm pleased to come home and discover that Amber and Megan have posted another installment of the Knitting Tarot, Card #XI, "The Gauge Swatch." Love it. All about Justice -- neither good nor bad. Just how it is. Reality check.

Only gets scary if you ignore it.

Crispin and Crispian

Wait! Before I go!

Forgot to tell you Saturday's the feast of SS. Crispin and Crispian, which means it's also the anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt. If I were to be here, I'd say it's a good day to eat French food -- you could eat English and French food both, which we used to do, but then we decided, what the hell -- the French got slaughtered; let's commemorate them. But I won't be here, so I tell you now.

And I'm outa here -- bye-ee.

****************

Oh, all right, all right. Shakespeare got in on this, too. It's just that I knew you knew that, is why I didn't mention it.

Naughty Elizabethans

It's not a good thing, I think, to discover that one can write a conference paper in 6 hours, because one is very likely to try it again the next time, if I know one, and next time one might not actually have the ingredients to hand, and discover that indeed, one will not be getting the thing done before one gets on the plane.

Today, all is well, and I've got it together, and not only is the paper ready to go on the plane, but I myself will be able to go cook dinner tonight and actually Pack My Bags, and leave at 0'dark thirty in the morning, WITHOUT staying up all night writing.

But it's a fluke; I don't think I can necessarily do it again. I just happened to have a Bunch O'Stuff in my head, and in files, and in notes, about Cambridgeshire morris dancing.

Here's a lovely picture of Will Kempe, by the way, dancing the morris from London to Norwich, which he did over the course of 9 days in 1600, thus inventing the Marathon Morris. One wonders, "why?"

One does not know. But after that, people did it a LOT, at least in Cambridgeshire. Dancing from town to town. All over the Isle of Ely.

Actually, the morris dancers in Cambridgeshire were sort of boring, which is actually what I'm talking about in my paper -- they're very well behaved, unlike morris dancers all over the rest of the country. I think they just don't care about it much -- they clearly don't think morris dancing is a big deal.

On the other hand, I know of LOTS of Elizabethan citizens of Cambridgeshire who were Very Badly Behaved. Most of them got hauled into the church courts for fornication and adultery -- it's astonishing how deeply tedious fornication seems if you sit and read Elizabethan church court documents long enough -- but many of them are Really Inventive. They drag their neighbors around on poles, whilst throwing grains out of pails (this Means Something, but we don't know what); they dress like men -- if they're women -- or women -- if they're men -- and run away to London; they take off all their clothes and walk naked around the altar in the local church; they steal the minister's vestments, and wear them at the Ely fair while imitating him; they get really really really drunk and go over to some poor grieving widower's house and pretend to be his newly dead wife. (Did Elizabethans pretending to be ghosts wear sheets? Sorry. We don't know.)

Oh, it's worth learning how to read Elizabethan secretary hand and a truckload of Latin abbreviations just to be able to read this stuff, I tell you.

Except you still have to wade through all that fornication.

Anyway. I'll be back sometime Sunday.

Hanged Man

Second card in the Knitting Tarot is in; Amber and Megan aren't going in numerical order (thank goodness; that would get stultifying), but rather in some other order, so though we started with #0, the Fool, as is numerically correct, the second skips on over to #12, the Hanged Man. Sort of like The Canterbury Tales, where you also have a nice clear order in theory that gets disrupted with the second story.

I digress, sorry. We'll just drop this analogy now, shall we, and move on.

So. Their card #12 isn't really the Hanged Man, it's just in the slot belonging to the Hanged Man -- it's the Put-In-The-Closet Project! Yes! Lovely. A very useful card. Upright, it means "Put the project away. It is SO not working right now." And it has the advantage of being one of those cards that actually makes absolutely clear sense when reversed -- "Take the damn thing out! Right now! Finish it up!"

Marvelous.

It's going to make sense wherever it shows up, isn't it? Forces hanging over one's head. Yep. The way one sees oneself. Yep. Deep hopes and fears. Yep.

Hearse for a Family Car? Yes. I Think So.

We're not in the market for a new car for me. My car is doing just fine. Around here, we drive cars until we have to scrape them off the asphalt with a spatula, and mine's nowhere near that -- we've got another 10 years left on it. At least. Sam's the one who needs a new car, since even getting his started is a hit-or-miss affair these days. Now that he's a retired stay-at-home dad, he needs a pickup truck (I'm still unclear as to the logic of this, but never mind), but it can't be ANY pickup truck -- it has to be used, it has to have room for three people, it has to receive the local jazz station -- oh there's a list of things it must be, and he's not actively looking -- he just sorta eyes the used car lots as he drives down Route 51 -- so we're not getting a replacement for the Naughty Bad Car any time soon.

Which is a shame, because I'm going to have to upset the entire intricately balanced buying-of-cars schema we've got, and jump the line, because I have Found My True Car.

I get to see her every afternoon while I'm driving home, stuck in a long line of single lane traffic going towards Hazelwood. She's sitting, not in a used-car lot, but the parking lot of a filling station, and while I inch by in rush hour traffic, I look her over. She's mine, mine, I say; I just have to figure out how much the filling station will give for my three year old Subaru station wagon, and then look over the state of my retirement fund.

I don't know if she runs, or anything, but who cares? Small detail. She's a beautiful silver hearse, and I want her.

Oh, yes. Not your usual run-of-the-mill, dime-a-dozen black hearse -- a silver hearse. With cream-colored curtains. Oh, a darling car. A truly darling car. Mine.

I think this would be a Very Practical Purchase, too -- it looks to me like there's even more room in the back than I've got in the station wagon -- we need that space for the annual drive down to South Carolina and the annual purchase of Christmas tree, and I think this car could handle it just fine.

Also, the lovely cream colored curtains would nicely hide the goods I invariably forget about and leave in the back, and if the thieves can't see them, they can't be tempted.

In fact, I'm pretty sure that thieves in general don't mess with hearses.

Now, I don't know how FAST it goes -- that's maybe not a concern of hearse makers. So that could be an issue.

Also there's the parking thing -- I think this might not fit in the spaces over in the parking lot at work.

But that car is me. It is SO me.

And hearses don't show up so often in the used car trade -- you gotta snap them up.

Opera

The child wishes to be blogged; he has learned how to blow bubbles with his bubble gum and thinks you should know.

Now you know.

I now understand why the first prize in every blasted school fundraiser is a yard-o-bubble-gum. We used to get these things and lean them up in the corner of the kitchen until they were hard and then throw them out; I couldn't see the use of them. This week, however, the first thing the child does in the morning, and then again when he comes home on the bus, and then again after dinner, is go to the yard-o-bubble-gum in the corner, bite a piece off, and practice blowing bubbles until he's required to spit the damn stuff out. I see that an entire yard of the stuff is indeed useful. Didn't know. Learn something every day.

Here's some knitting:



Black mohair shawl with Shiny! Beads! on the fringe. I get to wear it to the opera tomorrow, along with the vintage 50's cream-colored brocade dress I bought on eBay. EBay is a darling place for vintage clothes, if, like me, you despise the hunt but like the goods. I can't bear to go shopping, unless my friend Michelle takes me and then we get lunch, so it's not actually about shopping, it's about having time without EITHER our beloved families OR our current production schedules. The annoying thing about shopping is that the item which is in my head is seldom extant in the stores, and so it's all a big waste of time. But eBay! Ha, ha! One nice saved search for "scenic print" in the vintage clothes section will snag, over the course of 6 months or so, several darling cotton skirts from the 50's with panoramic scenes of Tuscany, or bonvoyage steamers carrying off passengers to, one gathers, Europe, and you never have to actually get in the car and drive over to the mall -- which is all we've got around here, let me tell you -- and have little snit fits for an entire afternoon. Yes. And this brocade dress I've got for the opera is a killer. And I get to wear my mohair shawl. And the whole outfit was cheap, cheap, cheap.

It's The Barber of Seville tomorrow. I'm ready. I don't know a damn thing about opera, really; I like the music, and I like the singing, and I admire mightily the costumes and the scenery, and nobody, I tell you nobody, is more appreciative than me when the sopranos sing coloratura arias whilst lying upside down on the stairs after having stabbed their bridegrooms (that'd be Lucia di Lammermoore), but I'm ignorant about the opera, in truth. So I generally prepare for these events by buying some CD of the upcoming opera and playing it on my office computer --then I have some sort of idea as to what's going on. But I stopped doing that with The Barber of Seville pretty quickly, cause it was Totally Unnecessary, and if you grew up watching Bugs Bunny cartoons every Saturday of your childhood, you wouldn't need to listen to the CD either, even if you knew nothing, I tell you nothing, about opera, cause you already know the score; it's the music by which Bugs torments Elmer Fudd.

Proof that I'm not a true opera buff is shown by the fact that I think this is hilarious, and if I were a Real Aficionado I would be Appalled.

A week from hell is over -- on Friday alone I had three meetings and a pile of midterms and papers to get graded -- midterm reports were due. Oddly enough, every one of those meetings was productive. No time wasted there. Cool. And unusual. But next week will be more tightly packed than this one was. So, I should have a restful quiet weekend, full of renewal and recuperation, fitting me for the hard work ahead.

But I'm not! Ha!

Must go work on the head of Medusa now...

Colourway Names

Oh how quickly the Giant Gauge knitting progresses, even in midterm week:



Now, this is being whipped up out of Colinette's "Giotto," in the colorway "Raphael."

Why?

I mean, specifically, why "Raphael"?

The last "Giotto" pullover I did was in "Monet," and this I can see:



The reference seems pretty clear to me here. But I'm lost on this "Raphael" reference. In what piece, exactly, did Raphael dwell in these colors? None that I'm familiar with.

I love these colors; I'm looking forward to wearing the pullover, which, at this rate, ought to be done in about a week and a half. I just don't think it should be called "Raphael." I think "Vermeer" would be better. One of those dark Dutch things with flashes of meaningful light.

The colorway reminds me very much of an afternoon I spent in a nearby state park with my mom -- she was hunting mushrooms and I was sitting on a log looking at birds. The forest floor was created out of EXACTLY these shades -- if I were to wear the soon-too-be-finished pullover and lie down on a mushroomy forest floor, I would be invisible except for my jeans.

A useful sort of garment.

Knitting Fool

I fully intended to drop the Colinette for a while and be serious here, but I really love that slightly shiny thing I finished over the weekend, and, as I mentioned, I just can't wear it till spring. So:



Same yarn, different color; same pattern, different stitch. If I get this done quickly -- and at this large gauge I ought to -- I'll be wearing it soon.

And THEN back to the high gauge, higher quality knitting.

The first card of Amber and Megan's knitting tarot has been designed. Excellent. Only 77 cards to go -- this is going to take a while, apparently.

I'm just guessing here, but I THINK that nagging won't hurry it along. I'm going to rely on occasional interested queries.

One advantage to watching the process unfold, however, is that those of us who have our orders in for the finished deck can consider each image in advance, before the deck arrives, so we'll already know it when it arrives in the mail.

Card #0. The Knitting Fool. Starting out; you never know where, exactly, things will end up. Whether this is casting on for a swatch or an item can only be made clear by the cards around it.

Which don't exist yet.

And it's only one stitch, isn't it? Could be the beginning of a Shetland shawl or a length of I-cord.

I'm interested in the necessary spikiness of the deck, too -- I've been thinking about this. Like a giant deck o' swords, all those knitting needles everywhere. So I'm looking forward to seeing how Amber solves this problem.

(Amber! Don't tell me! I want to watch the deck work its way on out.)

Pink Giotto

After going back upstairs and fiddling with the camera, Sam brought me this:



there you go! Isn't that pretty. And SO quick, too -- it's some ungodly thing like 11 stitches to 4 inches, which is less than three stitches to the inch! Ha! Lots of fun. Impressed the hell out of Sam, who's gotten used to sweaters that take months to finish.

And let's see if the shininess -- the subtle glitz -- of the "Giotto" shows up here --



There you go! Thanks, Sam!

Now, back to those tiny little stitches I'm working on both "Margaret Tudor" and the vintage cardi.

I've got green tomato pies in the oven. Bless the colleague who brings green tomatoes to us every year. We'll fry some of them -- they'll be very nice with pork chops tomorrow -- but I make a lot of them into pies.

One could have green tomatoes all during the summer, as one could just pick the tomatoes before they got ripe, but one never does. One waits till fall, and then eats them all at once.

This is a ritual.

It was that sort of day. We had the creating of the gingerbread haunted house, we ate pomegranate seeds, we worked on the head of Medusa, we messed around with green tomatoes, we took pictures of a nice spring pullover...

wait, something's wrong...

Unauthorized Science

I've got my nice shiny Colinette "Giotto" pullover all done and sewn up, and now it's ready to go! Next spring! The colors are, to my mind, distinctly springy -- pink and green; when else could I wear it? I'm never never never going to wear it in the fall and winter, on account of it violates my deep understanding of Seasonal Etiquette.

But no pictures, at least not at the moment, because Sam did experiments with the digital camera (he's my photographer) and now the photo files are SO LARGE I can't upload them. The computer got all flustered and wanted to send messages to Microsoft. No, no, little computer, just forget it. We'll try again later with less sharp photos. I gather the photos Sam took this afternoon are VERY sharp, but they're sharp in some electron universe I can't actually reach.

Anyway. No pictures.

Yesterday I was getting the laundry together and discovered that several of the towels had large yellow streaks on them. Extensive questioning of both the child and his stay-at-home-dad revealed that this effect is what you get if you let your yellow play-dough get dry and then attempt to revive it by washing it and drying it off on the towels.

Ok, child, fine. Don't do it any more.

He's not in trouble though, because, though this was technically a scientific experiment, he didn't actually KNOW it was a scientific experiment -- it seemed a simple reasonable activity to him.

He's not allowed to perform scientific experiments without clearing them with one of the Parental Units, as he's got a long background of Scientific Experiments Gone Awry, and at this point, all I want is a little notice. Just give me a heads up, that's all I ask.

For a while last year we were having an embarrassing domestic problem, because the house was smelling like urine, and I couldn't figure out why. I cleaned, I aired, I washed all sorts of laundry; nothing helped. I was distraught.

At about the same time, the cats were apparently falling apart -- one of the first symptoms that cats are On Their Way To Creating A Big Veterinarian Bill is an abundance of urine in the catbox, and as far as I could tell, both my cats needed to get dragged into the vets for batteries of tests. Which they SO do not enjoy, and we don't either.

Also, besides peeing abundantly, they had begun to create designs in the litter boxes -- I couldn't figure out how they were doing it.

Well.

I contend that if I hadn't been so overworked I would have figured out what was going on sooner, but as it was this went on for about three or four weeks until finally a lightbulb went off in my head and I asked the child if he'd been peeing in the litter boxes.

Yes.

Why? He was attempting to bond with the cats.

So. No more scientific experiments. Just none. Not even any in those nice books the child can get out of the school library, but ESPECIALLY none the child thinks up for himself.

Just a little heads up. That's all I ask.

Further Repentance

Also. I repent me of leading you to believe you could actually BUY the theory action figures, when you can't, not really. That was WRONG of me and I'm sorry, sorry, sorry. (Oh, no, Dr. Brannen! Does this mean more penance for YOU? Yes, kids, I'm afraid it does.) But you can buy them in theory, which is cheaper and probably better for you. So don't like, you know, despair or anything. But for sure don't send any money overseas, either.

Devil's Blackberry Day

Oooh! Oooh! I forgot to tell you today is the Devil's Blackberry Day, and so you have to eat up all your blackberries NOW, on account of today, in the old calendar, was St. Michael's day (the current one's already gone by), and when St. Michael threw the Devil out of heaven, he fell into a patch of blackberries, and cursed 'em, naughty angel that he was, and they're no good after today until next year.

Though I'm pretty sure that if you have any in the freezer, they're ok.

Knitting Content, yes, but Mostly Links

First things first: Knitting Content. Have finished a leper bandage. Am about half done with the vintage cardi. Have nearly finished the first thistle panel of "Margaret Tudor." Will be sewing up the glitzy Colinette pullover tonight.

There. I do too knit.

However, my knitting time is about to be Severely Curtailed, for a couple of weeks at least. In the next 10 days I must, besides all the regular jobs, both domestic and academic: 1) grade midterm exams and papers and turn in the midterm grades, 2) create that Perseus costume I promised the child, and 3) write the paper on Morris dancing I'm giving Very Soon at my favorite regional medievalist conference. Luckily for me, I found the abstract I sent in originally, and apparently, I not only had a thesis already, it's defendable. Cool. That'll expedite things.

In an earlier blog entry I extolled graduate students for their gifts of Wonderful Links, but I dunno, I may have to take this back, as now I'm getting more of them, and occasionally these things are dangerously seductive.

As for instance, this site, which can eat up a bunch of time, if you're not careful, and get yourself hooked into the exciting adventures of Cat Town.

But, hey! Academics! Did you know you could buy these extraordinarily impressive action figures? (I expect to be seeing them show up on the desks over in the graduate student office soon. Whap! Take that, Anthony Giddens! Eat chalk, Michel Foucault! Pow! Very useful, I'd think during exam time.)

Found Poetry

I'm gratified that the retranslated translation of my Thackeray entry (see below) has been so meaningful for so many of you -- Lisa especially has been finding LOTS of meaning in it, having noted an eerie hyper-text feel to the whole thing. I gather that certain lines are haunting her now, which is sort of disturbing. "She sent a book of a window. That one is everything what he needed to know" is her favorite part. I myself favor the last evocative description of, one gathers, Thackeray: "vista charitable Clara-eyed but of the foibles of the human beings." Who the hell is Clara, I want to know, and how did she get in here?

But I can't take credit for the thing, really, as Mark Twain made up the process, in the course of retranslating the French version of "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" -- "To jump plain -- this was his strong. When he himself agitated for that Smiley multiplied the bets upon her as long as there to him remained a red. It must to know, Smiley was monstrously proud of his frog, and he of it was right, for some men who were traveled, who had all seen, said that they to him would be injurious to him compare to another frog. Smiley guarded Daniel in a little box latticed which he carried bytimes to the village for some bet."

So. Not my idea, though I'm glad I remembered it.

However. I have another trick, Lisa! Look! You can add Even More Meaning by taking the garbled text and making it look like poetry:


She sent a book of
a window. That

one is everything
what

he needed

to know.


Wait! Wait! Leader of the Blog Ring! Knitting content next time! Really! I promise! Don't throw me out!

Thackeray: English to Spanish to English

As I mentioned last night, someone took the trouble to translate one of my archived pages into Spanish, using the Google translating function.

Let's see what happens if we translate some of it back!



"the traviesos are traviesos, no doubt, and they are lost and they lowered, and they come by its deserts; but who can say to the prank which does the very virtuous ones " That one is Thackeray for you, and you are its birthday today -- it was born in Calcutta in 1811. He could not find any thing that sounded good at the moment in my Victorian Cookbook -- it has pleasant things in him nevertheless, they who all as soon as he sounded to too much stodgy today. Therefore, obeying a colonialista impulse, we are having shrimp to curry. And we will read a small piece outside fair of the vanity -- I must take it towards outside again; It reread every 10 years or therefore, but I have not watched it in awhile. He moves backwards when the BBC happened with his "we go to film each always written stage of the novel of Victorian", demonstrated a version of the TV which he was pretty to entertain -- the baby watched the first part of her with me, and was SCANDALIZED of Becky Sharp, as in fact all we must be -- in his case, although, was because she really sent a book outside the window of a movable car. A BOOK, I say to him. How badly he is that one! All sexual his shenanigans and greediness never did no mind to him. She sent a book of a window. That one is everything what he needed to know. That one is surely one of the ways that you can recognize a future serial assassin, the right? The friends of Torments, animals of the tortures, send books of windows? Like the content doing point today: The behavior goes here for the interpretation of Thackeray of the spin-coil and its relation spider-like a, and here for the illustration of Thackeray of how a certain seam class -- he does not look like to take care of much exactly of what class is -- can be used in later phases of courtship. Yes, I think that I will go reread Thackeray. Vista charitable Clara-eyed but of the foibles of the human beings, and a sense of pleasant solid humor.


Very nice! (Here's the original, by the way.)

Breaking News...

Breaking news:

Somebody got to my blog through this page.

It's pretty good, actually, though I'm not sure why SCANDALIZED won't translate....

St. Brigid

As I mentioned previously, there's a reason I do indeed carefully swatch, at least when I think it's going to matter. Here you may see an example, not a good one, of a "St. Brigid" sweater, made from Alice Starmore's excellent design, found in Aran Knitting:



Actually, it's TWO "St. Brigid" sweaters. The first was too big -- I started it when I was oh, quite a bit larger than I am now. I laboriously did all the math to get the thing to a decent size 2X, or whatever it was, and, luckily, only got halfway up the back before embarking on the Getting Healthy project which led to having to frog everything I'd done up to that point, and start all over in size medium, or whatever.

I swatched for that very carefully, though not, as it turned out, carefully enough; that is, I swatched carefully, but I didn't measure carefully. But since I HAD swatched, I refused to believe what was obvious from the beginning, which was that I was way off gauge, and the sweater was going to be Very Tiny. Indeed, I so deeply refused to believe this that I wouldn't remeasure my work, and got Almost Entirely Done with the damn thing before I admitted that it wouldn't do, and that indeed I was only going to be able to wear it if I became severely ill and wasted away, at which point it wasn't going to be much fun to wear.

So I frogged it completely. Sam still hasn't recovered -- that I would actually rip apart a work that had taken me months was more than he could take in. But I did it, anyway, and washed the yarn and tried to get it back to its near original shape, and that is why the lovely "Scottish Heather" -- color "Seabright" -- is lying in hanks in the photograph above. I think someday I'll knit it up into Starmore's "Little Rivers," when I think I can work with that wonderful yarn again. (Sidenote here -- I see, by the bands on the untouched skeins, that I bought the Heather for $5.60 a skein. Wailing and gnashing of teeth.)

But I didn't give up on the "St. Brigid" design itself; I worked it again in "Hebridean 3-ply," in the color "Sundew":



In this one I'm on gauge.

Last winter I was wearing it in Manhattan and I stopped in a coffee shop for an expresso-to-go, where the woman behind the counter got a bit excited: "Where the hell did you get that sweater! You can't BUY a sweater like that! You MADE that!" Very satisfying, having jealous strangers yell at you about your knitting. I love New York. Strangers accost me about my sweaters in Pittsburgh, sure, but they don't actually yell. It's not the same.

Graduate Students Provide Links

Graduate students are a lovesome thing, God wot, and I bless the day I got sent here so I could have me some. Also I especially bless the two who were sitting in my office yesterday afternoon, knitting leper bandages and looking, as I have mentioned, just like the March girls. (I was knitting on leper bandages too, but I didn't look like any of the March girls -- I looked like Marmee.) I bless them because, besides helping with the bandage project and being entertaining, they have provided me with the following two items of information:

1) The Incredible Hulk has a blog. You might think, on first learning this, that it couldn't possibly be worth reading, but it is. Oh, yes it is. Hulk is a superior stylist, to my delight, and the next time I want to be somebody besides me, I think I'll be him (as opposed to Dave Barry, which is who I was being yesterday). (Oh, come on, you did too know.)

2) There is a marvelous site with a lot of pictures of Dresses From Hell, and if you have any you want to contribute, I believe there's still room. (Mostly they've got bridesmaids' dresses, since that's the most fruitful category of dresses from hell in America, but they do have other examples as well.) And besides the dresses from hell they have -- look sharp, Ryan, you don't want to miss this -- a lovely photo of slippers made out of Maxi-pads. (Here's what you could hear me saying, if you stood outside my office yesterday afternoon: "Oh, my God! Oh, my God! Oh, my God! Oh, my God!" ad infinitum, or for about 15 minutes, at least.)

These things were worth the whole day.

Ok. I've been thinking for some time about Debbie New's book, Unexpected Knitting. I ordered it from Schoolhouse Press sometime this summer -- I think they had a deal whereby I got free shipping if I ordered ahead, something like that -- and so I had forgotten all about it and then it arrived in the mail.

I want to write about it, as it seems right I should, but I don't really know how to even start talking about a book which has pictures of knitted boats. It was like falling down the rabbit hole -- I'd take a knitted teacup off the wall, and just barely get it back on a shelf before I'd fallen further and was going by the giant knit labyrinth created on 1" wooden dowels.

The most doable project in the book is the "Scribble Lace Shawl," which is done by alternating sewing thread and some thick yarn -- Colinette's "Point 5" works well, we're told. Lisa's got one done already, and a lovely thing it is, too. I'll do one at some point. I like the look of them, and covet the experience. Also it's a good excuse to buy a skein of Colinette's "Point 5," and I'm in a Colinette mood these days.

I like the knitted tea cups, too, though God knows I don't need any more art around here. (I thought they'd enchant Sam, too, but he's been mesmerized by the knitted boat. "Look. A knitted boat," he said, and mentioned it again later: "I can't believe somebody made a knitted boat." Sam. Honey. I am not knitting you a boat.)

And the "Labyrinth" knitting is intriguing, and I might mess with it sometime. (This would be the knitting wherein you knit a long zig zag strip and then assemble it into a sweater. You know. Don't you do that a lot?)

I'm glad to own this book. It's gorgeous. But it's not a book you buy because you want to knit the projects in it, though you could if you wanted. Even the boat. It's a book to buy because it's very useful, sometimes, to get somebody to take the top of your head off and stir your brains around.

We Pretend to be Somebody Else

Normally, this blog does not address political issues, being essentially frivolous and shallow, but this morning this blog found itself royally pissed off at the news that the latest froufraw instituted by Homeland Security is the mandate that mutual fund sellers will now have to run background checks on potential buyers of said mutual funds, and though normally such news wouldn't cause a blip on this blog's radar, this blog suspects that its phytoestrogen levels were abnormally low this morning, causing it to intend to write a scathing political tirade concerning Its Rights as an American Blog, but now that it's actually composing itself it can't find any news on the web about this terrible Infringement of Its Rights, and has begun to suspect it made the whole thing up.

Tomorrow, back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Death and Destruction

Ok, first off, before I do anything else, I have to tell you to go visit Being Daddy, who has Extremely Important Information about soap.

Back again?

Then I have to tell you it's worth visiting Pound, who's having another articulate snitfit about Jemima J.

Hi! I'm still here. But wait! You might want to check out the Lego-style (not a true Lego product!) Holy Trinity, which has a glow in the dark Holy Ghost. (In the category of Things-I'm-Not -Buying-For-The-Child-This-Christmas-Or-Ever.) (As usual, got this from Fr. Bryce.)

I was intending to discuss Debbie New's book, Unexpected Knitting, which has so far been ably discussed by Lisa and Teresa, but I got sidetracked, so more on that later.

What sidetracked me is an entirely different book which arrived recently (here's a plan; be a literature professor; marry a literature professor; stack books three feet deep all over the house; order more. Yeah. That'll work.). It is The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook: Holidays. I have ALL the "Worst-Case Scenario" books, and I love them all dearly. Dearly, Dearly. I was cheered by the information found in the original one, for instance, that in order to elude a mountain lion what you need to do is open your jacket and spread it out like wings. Apparently this makes you look really really big. Or just idiotically scary, I'm not sure. But at any rate, it's the Best Method We Know for escaping the dreaded mountain lion. (I've got no call to try this out around here in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, as far as I know, but while I was still living in San Francisco there was a renegade mountain lion who was snacking on joggers on Mount Tam -- easy pickings, I gather, cause they weren't running THAT fast, and they had those headphones on. Mount Tam joggers! Keep your jackets open!)

I come from a family that's enchanted by death-and-destruction stories, and their counterparts, the how-to-escape-death-and-destruction stories. We love the Darwin awards. We exchange books on hilarious deaths. We're full of advice on how to elude the disaster which awaits us at every moment, ready to pounce on unsuspecting joggers. This is not our fault. When my brothers and I were kids, our dad received, for a short time, some magazine called "Family Safety," which was full of stories about Mr. Brown, who was carelessly mowing his lawn, without having any idea that the blades were about to pick up a rock and fling it, tragically killing his next-door neighbor, or Mrs. Smith, who carelessly whipped up some hot drink in her blender, having no idea that the blender glass would explode, tragically severing her arteries, all of them. Oh, we loved that magazine, but it disappeared pretty quickly. I think my dad finally copped to how gory it was. But the damage, alas, had been done. Now we're insatiable, and according to the laws of karma, all three of the Brannen kids who got addicted to that magazine are going to die horrific, but sadly hilarious, deaths. We're waiting. Meanwhile, we're taking notes.

Anyway. The new Survival Handbook is very useful, containing, as it does, good hints on how to stop charging reindeer ("Do not raise your arms over your head!"), how to get down a chimney ("Feel and smell for a lighted fire!"), how to fit into clothing that is too tight ("Use safety-pins on pants with side and rear closures!"), and how to fend off an unwanted kiss ("Employ evasive maneuvers!").

Oh, it's a treat. Guess I know what I'm sending my brothers for Christmas.