I Will Drink Life To the Lees

It's deeply unfashionable, of course, but I love me some Lord Alfred Tennyson. "Ulysses" continues to resonate strongly with me:

I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'
Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!
As tho' to breathe were life! Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains; but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

Tithonus is magnificent too. What gets me about Tennyson is how he is often branded 'sentimental' and 'feeble' (mostly by my beloved modernist poets and critics) - and yet the poet I encounter strives to understand the world around him through characters (just like my beloved modernist poets). I read Tennyson's dramatic monologues and find a restless mind. That's someone as far from sentimental and feeble as you can get.

Now, I've never understood the love for Robert Browning..

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Spoils

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Stephen Moffat does write the best Doctor Who episodes. A planet which is one giant library? Yes, please! And that is all I will say as I do not want to give away any spoilers.. Now, as some longterm readers/friends may know, I'm absolutely obsessed by paratexts and paratextuality: tables of content, indices, illustrations, prefaces, typefaces, paper textures etc. Everything that makes a text a book, basically. I have found an absolute gem: A Book of Tables of Content. You can see a slideshow at the site and there is even a Flickr group where you can upload your own favourite Table of Content. Personally I have a thing about the ToC in Iain Banks' The Bridge (my favourite Banks novel, by the way). The novel takes place on the Firth of Forth Bridge and if you turn the ToC ninety degrees, it actually takes on the shape of that particular bridge. Nifty.

Finally, a very, very cool/scary photo of when volcanoes spew lightning.

PS. I have finished my first sweater and I'm very proud

Hanging Around With Scientists Gives Me Ideas

Experiment: sleep for X amount of hours (X being the amount of sleep I'd get pre-illness), try to be moderately active (i.e. go for a 20 minute walk), read a book, talk on the phone briefly and then see how this down-scaled version of 'normal life' works out. Result: I'm not well. Head foggy, speech slightly slowed down and I need to search for words (and use spell-checker). Hands shaking if I'm not sitting down. Mouth dry. Was on the verge of collapsing during walk.

I'm going to counter this little experiment with jasmine tea, my jammies, some knitting and a flick through The Knitter's Handbook I found secondhand (just £1!) during my brief excursion..

Dammit.

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The Bonfire of Good Intentions

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If I'm going to have to rip out another effing row on the neckline on my effing sweater, I swear I'm going to toss the effing thing on the bonfire I'm going to build in our backyard. What do you mean "Well, it's your first attempt at an actual garment and you did abandon the pattern after the first three rows"? That's not the point!

The bonfire I'm going to build will consist solely of good intentions gone awry: my copy of James Joyce's "Ulysses" that I took with me across the North Sea in the misguided belief that I'd read it (and left my vintage Georgette Heyer novels in the discard pile while I was at it); the tins of dry yeast that have been sitting in my cupboard for a long, long time waiting for my bread-making to re-ignite; the clothes I was going to mend last summer but haven't; the plants I forgot to water after having declared 2007(!) the year I was going back to have plants in my home. Let's not go into my decision to re-reinvent cabbage.

Okay, maybe the sweater will not go the way of the plants or the culinary plans. Knitting continues to astonish me - not just the process of taking a string of X material, looping it in various ways using fancy sticks and ending up with a textile, but also the actual community surrounding fiber arts and crafts. I may be frustrated by a sweater refusing to shape up exactly as I had envisioned it, but the frustration is countered by warm and witty encouragement from the knitting community.

Just three more rows of moss seed stitch and I swear this'll be it. Grrr..

PS. I have actually begun reading again! Hooray!