Breathing

The past few weeks have been really stressful for a number of reasons, but I'm feeling like I'm into the homestretch now. Hopefully this means I can muster the mental energy to start writing regular blog entries once more. I have been at this blogging lark for nearly a decade, you know, and I loathe whenever more than a few days pass between posts. I'm writing this blog for me, essentially, and I don't like when my writing dries up. It is usually a sign that I am too busy or that major upheaval is happening in my life. This time around I have simply been too busy to do much else besides working, earing and sleeping. Not a good place to be, I'm sure you will agree.

I am really looking forwards to my little Denmark trip, in other words.

I shall be spending a huge chunk of it in rural Denmark - this always fills me with a strange sense of unease. I have unhappy memories of growing up in rural Denmark and feeling hugely out of place. All the things I was supposed to love and 'be into' (handball, horses, and country fairs) just filled me with dread whilst all the things I did love (books, art, and history) were considered 'weird'. I was always the quirky outsider and yet even today I'm expected to miss and long for those small towns that I fled as quickly as I could.

Anyway.

I shall also be spending some quality time in Copenhagen - a place I actually do miss and long for - with some of the best people I know. I have also being doing a bit of prep for this part of the trip: I shall be visiting my favourite LYS (Jorun is Faroese and specialises in North Atlantic wool) as well as a few other places. I am keeping an eye out for Christmas wish list candidates and Danish knitters have pointed me towards some books that look really interesting (I particularly like Hvirvelstrøm from the last book). I'm also going to look out for some special Danish wools and I'm trying desperately not to go for rustic laceweights from the North Atlantic because, well, my stash already harbours quite a few and it is not really what I'm knitting with these days..

Also, this autumn is shaping up to be absolutely cracking. Some really exciting new projects are in the pipeline and I have to pinch myself sometimes. Even though I am busy (and just on the wrong side of being stressed), I count myself lucky. Life is very good to me right now. I just need a bit of breathing space to appreciate it fully.

Deep Breath.

A Bit About Knitting

Have you checked out the latest issue of The Knitter? It features an article about making a living from knitting and I had to smile at the number of familiar faces popping up: the indomitable Kate Davies talks about combining academia with knitting, the extremely lovely Emma King talks about being a workshop tutor, and the ever fabulous Ms Old Maiden Aunt talks about being an indie yarn dyer. A cornucopia of friends and acquaintances - and it leaves me wondering just how big the UK knitting world really is. On the subject of knitting, everybody and their aunt have aired their views on the Deep Fall issue of Knitty. My considered view is be summarised thus: Sorry, But Not For Me. Do not get me wrong, I like some of the patterns but none of them strike me as a Must Knit. Beatnik stands out with its vintage feel and lovely cabling - it is a Norah Gaughan design, after all - but most of the other patterns just feel anonymous (or in one pattern's case, downright unflattering). Maybe it is the styling? Maybe I have become jaded? Maybe most of the really cool designs get submitted to Twist Collective or are self-published?

I'm still working on my baby alpaca cardigan - things have been a bit too hectic for my liking lately and my knitting has taken a back seat. I'm pondering my next big knit, though. I have some ideas swirling round my head, but many of these ideas have been thwarted by the Self-Stitched September project. Like so many other SSS participants I have realised I have actual wardrobe gaps and that I have FOs I hardly ever wear. Roobeedoo sums it up quite nicely:

Identifying my palette will undoubtedly help: if all my new items fit the colour-scheme, it should be easier to put together a coherent outfit in the morning. And that's quite exciting! In the past, I have been guilty of making ever-shifting plans, which got conveniently "forgotten" when the next shiny project caught my eye... and ended up with a great big heap of mismatched summer quirkiness. With a clear practical objective and a colour frame of reference, there will still be room for a dash of quirk, but it will "work".

I have recently been looking at my clothes and I'm very far from a capsule wardrobe. What does help is that I tend to gravitate towards the same colours (peridot green, deep purple, dark lipstick red, deep fuschia, rich teals) again and again. Now I just need to gravitate towards neutrals too and I can build upon that. I think. I also think I'm starting to gravitate towards a more minimalist style (I'm DEEPLY in love with this outfit, for instance) which may muddy the waters a bit.

A lovely weekend lies ahead. We are having overseas visitors and I'm really looking forward to showing them fair (and rainy) Glasgow.

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Damaged Sentences

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Tom McCarthy's C is my current commute + night-time reading. Except that I am so scatterbrained at the moment that I only manage a few pages every other day and it is almost due back at the library. Still, I am really enjoying it as I suspected I would. Except it is not the book I thought it was going to be. This is an enjoyable thing too. I have only read the first part - the part which outlines Serge Carrefax' childhood - which is set amongst silk production, deaf children and mad-cap amateur scientists in the early parts of the 20th Century. Interestingly, this first part is strongly, strongly reminiscent of AS Byatt's latest novel, The Children's Book. The plot similarities are there: vague mothers, precocious children hiding in the woods, unsettling amateur theatre productions, bizarre charity work, and unravelling bohemian family life circa 1900. Stylistically the two books are oddly similar too and use many of the same tricks: fragments of verse flowing through the narrative, the dichotomy of muteness/speech, and a certain learnéd verbosity knowingly reined in.

I think the book might be about to change. Serge is heading for a sanatorium in Eastern Europe. I shall expect echoes of Joyce and Mann. So far I like C a lot even if it is not a high-flying avant-garde homage to Modernism but rather a literary book about ideas. I like literary books about ideas.

Incidentally, I googled Byatt + McCarthy and found this lovely review from The London Review of Books. I particularly take great pleasure in this tidbit:

Like McCarthy, I used to get exasperated by the self-impoverished narrowness of mainstream British so-called ‘literary’ literature, its obsession with Amises and McEwans, its deliberate ignorance of so much else; after a while, I realised this was not a literary but a cultic matter, to do with fertility rites and myths of social renewal. I remember that in the early 1980s on Channel 4 there was a chaotic late-night chat show, which my memory frames as having on it Vi Subversa from the Poison Girls, crowning Boy George as the young god of the year just out. As she did so, she warned him that the promise of regeneration embodied by his figure could be made good only with his sacrifice. As with hindsight, it duly was, as for Jesus and Osiris and Gazza and Martin Amis.

Recently I also found Sell the Girls, a blog entry about the old chestnut known as "dead white men and poor suppressed women writers". I happen to like reading books and poetry by Dead White men and I've often had to defend myself against outraged feminist students who thought I was betraying my gender. Seeing as these outraged feminist students frequently did not show up to extracurricular seminars because they had to do the dishes before their boyfriends came home (true story), I rarely paid them much attention.

However, the blogger behind Sell the Girls is vastly more genuine in her outrage and brings her own experience from the publishing world to the table:

I suggest that perhaps what we ought to consider is the presentation and the representation of the female author, because—and I speak from hard experience here—a female author is simply marketed and presented differently. From the color and tone of the cover, to the review coverage, to the placement, to the back cover copy, to the general perceptions of female issues.

Jane Austen was "girlified" a few years back, of course and, famously, Joanne Rowling was advised to call herself JK Rowling or no boys would want to read Harry Potter. Other than that, I struggle to recognise a world where Dead White Men are taught to the exclusion of female writers. I remember being taught Mary Sidney, Lady Mary Wroth, Aphra Behn, Mary Wollstonecraft (and her daughter), Fanny Burney, Austen, the Brontës, George Eliot etc and that is even before we get to the 20th C. Maybe I was just lucky with my tutors.

Scatterbrained. I meant to say something profound about Sell the Girls but I lost it.

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Points

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1. I overheard a conversation today between a little girl - maybe six years old? - and a woman who was clearly the au-pair. The little girl was a nightmare and the au-pair tried to calm her. The little girl turned to the woman: "You need to get yourself a PROPER job. Oh wait - you CAN'T which is why you are minding me." Ouch.

As a friend of mine pointed out when I posted about this overheard conversation on Facebook: "Well, if she's that precocious she can probably deal with being told all the horror stories about graduate unemployment these days. And that maybe she can use insults like that when she's old enough to have a proper job herself. After her parents have paid for her to have a gap year so she can find herself."

Zing.

2. This past week has been full of I Am Officially Getting On In Years moments. The other day I realised that Freddie Mercury has been dead for almost twenty years. Then I saw a young teenage boy sauntering down Byres Road looking like a young Brett Anderson circa 1992 (and then it hit me that the first Suede tracks are also almost twenty years old). And I learned that one of my erstwhile hang-out spots in Copenhagen has closed down. I'm facing my own mortality and it feels really weird.

3. A couple of crafty projects have been finished with much success. My Idunn hat is splendid and I'm rather pleased with an Amy Butler skirt I made too. I have failed miserably at keeping track of my Self-Stitched September, but I have been wearing something self-made every single day. I have been having a hard time understanding the instructions for a particular decrease section for my current Big Project, but I have cracked the code (sleep helps) and Progress Has Been Made.

4. Work is swamping me, so non-work things have suffered a lot these past few weeks. That means the house is a tip, I'm 75 pages into a library book due next week, very little blogging/commentating, and crap food. I hope to catch up with myself (and the housework) before too long as we're having Very Important People visiting us from the States very, very soon.

5. Finally, I was very pleased to see this news story about ABBA and Scandinavian politics as the top BBC Entertainment news story the other day. One day I need to write about the other reasons why I left Denmark and why I'm so ambivalent about my country of origin.

So, how are you?

The Big Knit

Perthshire Amber - The Dougie MacLean Festival is repeating its Big Knit again this year. Last year people at the festival and across the globe got their knitting needles out to help raise £2,000 for Shelter Scotland. (..) For knitters who want to get involved and can’t come to the festival, all they have to do is to get hold of some Artesano wool and knit a six inch square in one of the approved blanket colours, and then send it off to the Festival.

More info at Shelter Scotland. If you are a Glasgow knitter, you can purchase Artesano yarn at Mandors or The Life Craft.