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Just Call Me Ariadne

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Friday afternoon I went through my yarn stash and decided to give some of it to charity. Okay, so it was some not-really-funky cheap acrylic novelty yarn that I picked up at the beginning of my knitting career (i.e. February), but it doesn't matter if the destashed yarn was cheap and nasty - I destashed yarn. I have also put myself on a strict yarn-diet after a very sinful yarn excursion with a handknitted pirate last weekend.

So here's what I'm not buying:
+ Natalie Yarn Yard's Wicked laceweight in grey-white-pink.
+ 10 balls of Debbie Bliss Donegal Tweed Aran in shade 11
+ 6 hanks of worsted merino wool in shade "Forest"

On a different note, I'm amused to see that I'm currently numero duo in Google's search for "fourth edition". I'm pretty sure that won't last very long seeing as D&D 4thEd is about to make serious business. Hey, this might be a really great time to re-purchase all the D&D 3.5 stuff that I gave away when I moved to Scotland..What did I say about not spending any money? Ebay, here I come..

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When I Say Bad, I Mean BAD

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Danish blogger Emme has a category of books she calls "matadormix" - "mixed candy". These books do not ask much of you as a reader: they're easy to zip through, leave you feeling slightly bloated if you overindulge and there's a bit of everything in them. "Mixed candy", indeed. These past few days I've made my way through such books.

Background: I do have a pronounced weakness for regency romances for which I blame my mother (who has an almost completely collection of Barbara Cartland's books). I also grew up on a heady diet of Jane Austen and fashion history*. When I encountered my first Georgette Heyer, I was clearly doomed. Heyer wrote sharp-witted books filled to the brim with historical costume design details, eccentric characters and frothy plots.

Unfortunately, most regency writers are not Georgette Heyer. And even more unfortunately, I have not been reading Heyer. I've been reading atrocious, atrocious books involving dead clairvoyants, pervy lords, stupid heroines, serialised novels .. oh, and a kitchen sink too. I feel bloated and unhealthy now. Time for something a bit more fibrous: Heyer, here I come.

(* indeed, I neglected studying for my third grade history exam because I was convinced my superior knowledge of fashion history would dazzle my teacher. Sadly I was given a question on Iron Age agriculture)

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