A Bluestocking Knits

Moebius &c. &c.

Here is Elizabeth Zimmermann's justly famous Moebius ring, to the pattern in Knitting Around, in about 2 1/2 balls of RYC Cashsoft DK in white, worked as a gift for an elderly friend who remarked recently about the chill in her upstairs room, in snowy Bristol.  "Aha!" I thought to myself.

I gussied up the I-cord edge with a little bit of faggotting (or is it technically only a column of eyelets?), by working a K2tog, yo at the end of each row in the garter-stitch section. This had the very satisfying effect of looking pretty much exactly as I had hoped it would, setting off the I-cord just a little.  I regret to say, though, that I did not have the brains to figure out how to graft it, so it is not as invisible a join as I would have liked, but it's finished and off to its recipient.

The finished size is 15 in. x 10 in., when laid out as in the photo below.  Wasn't sure how big to make it, but thought I should err on the larger side, rather than the smaller.  It does tend to leave the neck a touch bare when draped artfully, but there it is -- it could also, as EZ  points out, be laid flat against one's chest, thereby providing a double-layer of warmth.

I read an interesting review of Sebastian Faulks' A Possible Life recently,

and was pleasantly surprised to find that my local public library has it.  (They do not seem particularly interested in fiction, I regret to say, though I must confess that I myself was not either until a few years ago.)  It is unfortunate that Faulks' book comes on the heels of Cloud Atlas, which in its structure of different stories in different voices it resembles very much.  Faulks' stories are much more independent, though -- a certain block of flats, a plaster statue, and so on, are the only links between them, bar of course the common themes of humanity, love, and the complexities of our relationships with each other.  Mitchell's ability to create unique and amazingly disparate voices is what impressed me most about Cloud Atlas, and Faulks has some of this too, though not quite so dramatically -- his one piece set in the US is narrated by an Englishman, and I had to wonder why (except that it is said somewhere to be based on the relationship between Joni Mitchell and Graham Nash).  The problem, I think, with this format -- like with Cloud Atlas -- is that perhaps inevitably there will be parts that a reader will relate to far more (or far less) than others.  As with Cloud Atlas, I was bored by the story set in the 1970s, and was completely absorbed in the Victorian one.  This of course makes the whole book feel more than a little uneven.

In other news, Mary Lou was wondering a while ago -- well, it was more than a few months, I guess -- about a stain on a piece of cross-stitch her mother had worked.  This is the first cross-stitch I ever worked --

and I didn't realize that what I thought was a clean hand (blush) was not, and that holding it in the same place for hours on end left yellowish stains on the canvas.  This disappointed me so much that I rolled it up and left it to knock about in various cupboards and boxes since then (thirty years!).  I found it again last autumn, and thought I might as well try anything as it was unlikely that I'd mount the thing with long yellowish streaks across the corner.

I started out gently, as one does, with laundry detergent, graduating to stain removers, nothing worked -- then I thought, "oh, well," and poured bleach straight on it.  This worked pretty well, in fact, and didn't fade the colors of the embroidery floss at all.  I ended up doing this twice, and re-blocking.  You can still see a hint of stain in some lights, but it was good enough to frame at last.

I'm not sure I would recommend such a drastic measure with something really valuable, but I was impressed that this floss came through so beautifully.  Aaron Bros. framed the piece very nicely for me, too.

Ripping Yarns

After reading an intriguing article on the making of the new-ish "Cloud Atlas" movie in the Los Angeles Times, I put my name on the waiting list for the book at the public library, and as that list was very long, I have only just got around to reading the novel by David Mitchell.

I must admit that my head whirled more than a little as I read this, and did not really stop even after I finished.  I was impressed by the different voices Mitchell put on, how Adam Ewing's section sounded like an early-Victorian American and Robert Frobisher's like a 1930s aesthete, and how Luisa Rey's section sounded like a 1970s television drama and Sonmi-451's like a dystopian cautionary tale even though neither of those two things were anything that I would have been at all likely to pick up on their own.  I appreciated the philosophical points that Mitchell made, and was carried along by most of the stories -- although I thought that Luisa Rey's and Timothy Cavendish's dragged more than a little for me -- but my appreciated of Mitchell's fluid prose took an unexpected tumble towards the end, when I came across no less than three examples of subjective and objective "hypercorrection".  Alas, I did not make a note to myself of the specific wording, but it was those "John and me went to the store" kind of things, two instances at least by characters who certainly should have known better.  I find this even more jarring than I used to, and I'm afraid that it really jolted me out of the story.

I read this pretty much all in one sitting.  Tyldesley has written numerous biographies of ancient Egyptians, and her prose is very accessible without losing her air of scholarship, although I don't think this book has anything new to say about Tutankhamen and his family, but instead provides a capable account of both Tutankhamen's life and the discovery of his tomb by Howard Carter and the aftermath of that momentous event, in a compilation of current research and theories.  I could have wished that there was much less about the so-called "curse", though, to which Tyldesley devotes an entire section of her book.

I picked up The Importance of Being Seven at Costco a month or so ago.  I must admit that at the time I had not read many of McCall Smith's books except the Isabel Dalhousie series and the one-off La's Orchestra Saves the World, but I have really enjoyed both of those, finding McCall Smith one of those gentle, undemanding, lightly humorous writers that one turns to for a pleasant, comfortable read.  I saw an interview with him somewhere in which he said something like, "Some people complain that nothing much ever happens in my books.  I think that there is enough happening in the world today!" which amused me greatly and really does describe his books, certainly the Isabel Dalhousie series, up to a point.  I really like the way that Isabel goes about her life as best she can yet occasionally -- for she is a philosopher -- goes off on these mental tangents.  Why does such-and-such happen? why do we do the things we do? and then life breaks back in and she comes back to earth, as it were.

So I thought, "right, well, I enjoy the Isabel Dalhousie books, I should read something else of his," even though I found myself for some peculiar reason putting off starting any of the other series.  (Why do I do this?...)  Of course, this sixth book of the "44 Scotland Street" series is also charming and gently humorous and filled with interesting characters and philosophical musings now and then, so much that I went to the library the moment I'd finished it and borrowed the previous five volumes and read them in about a week. 

Laura got this for her birthday.  Unfortunately, she is absorbed in horror stories at present, and isn't interested at all in gentle stories of lonely children in bombed-out London or in gardens, but I read it for the first time the other day and loved it.  I don't think I've read much Rumer Godden -- only (curiously, because I was probably about twelve at the time) In This House of Brede in the Readers' Digest Condensed version, wh. I remember being very moved by.  The story in An Episode of Sparrows doesn't seem much like something a child might want to read, and even as I read it I thought that it would take an extraordinary child to appreciate it these days, but the writing is beautiful and rather elegaic, and the characters are vivid and for the most part marvellously unstereotypical.

As for the more literal use of the title of this post, I spent a few weeks knitting up a skein of Pagewood Farms' Denali, which has haunted my stash for some time, into the Amala Triangle from the Spring 2012 Knit.Wear magazine, which would have been quite lovely had there been enough yardage in the skein to work the thing full-size.  I could have taken out a bit of the garter stitch section and finished the border, but the smaller size would have grieved me too much, I think.  Who wants a poky shoulder scarf?

By the way, here is a fairly blatant example of why you should not be impatient and rip out a stalled project and go straight into the next one without un-kinking the wool.  Just about halfway up in this photo, you can see where I got to the end of the kinked wool and the start of the "new" bit.  Well, it's all in a sodden hank on my back porch now, gently relaxing and almost ready for something else.

Jaywalkers in Sensations Truly sock yarn, which I got at Jo-Ann's.  Would have been nice, except that I made them too big.  Have started over again, but seem to have lost interest for the time being.

And my Invercargill scarf, which to my dismay curls mercilessly.  I did not "help" it any for this photo.  I really dislike that in a scarf, and realized after pushing it aside any number of times as I looked for something to wear, that I really should accept the inevitable and make something that I actually would use.  Yoga socks, perhaps?

"Like all sweet things it passed away"

My choir concert, upon us this weekend, includes a setting of four poems by Christina Rossetti.  I am not overly enamored of the settings, I must admit, finding them curiously antagonistic to the poetry, but I find that this has made me look a little closer at the poems, at Rossetti's choice of words and the rhythm of her lines, as well as the images she evokes.

The concert also includes a number of Brahms part-songs, so that the whole hour seems full of longing.  This is certainly a significant characteristic of Rossetti, though my first thought in trying to describe her poems -- defending the unusual rhyme scheme in "A Birthday" -- was that she can be kooky, but she is a very meticulous craftswoman.  This is, I realize, a rather flippant characterization -- remembering perhaps only a rather warm and enervating afternoon spent in a lecture on  "Goblin Market" -- for much of her poetry is simple only deceptively, and as someone said, she “speaks more obliquely the more she has to say”.

 

May

I cannot tell you how it was,
But this I know: it came to pass
Upon a bright and sunny day
When May was young; ah, pleasant May!
As yet the poppies were not born
Between the blades of tender corn;
The last egg had not hatched as yet,
Nor any bird foregone its mate.

I cannot tell you what it was,
But this I know: it did but pass.
It passed away with sunny May,
Like all sweet things it passed away,
And left me old, and cold, and gray.

 

Song (When I am dead, my dearest)

When I am dead, my dearest,
         Sing no sad songs for me;
Plant thou no roses at my head,
         Nor shady cypress tree:
Be the green grass above me
         With showers and dewdrops wet;
And if thou wilt, remember,
         And if thou wilt, forget.

I shall not see the shadows,
         I shall not feel the rain;
I shall not hear the nightingale
         Sing on, as if in pain:
And dreaming through the twilight
         That doth not rise nor set,
Haply I may remember,
         And haply may forget.

 

Echo

Come to me in the silence of the night;
         Come in the speaking silence of a dream;
Come with soft rounded cheeks and eyes as bright
         As sunlight on a stream;
             Come back in tears,
O memory of hope, love of finished years.
Oh dream how sweet, too sweet, too bitter sweet,
         Whose waking should have been in Paradise,
Where souls brimfull of love abide and meet;
         Where thirsting longing eyes
             Watch the slow door
That opening, letting in, lets out no more.
Yet come to me in dreams, that I may live
         My life again tho’ cold in death:
Come back to me in dreams, that I may give
         Pulse for pulse, breath for breath:
             Speak low, lean low,
As long ago, my love, how long ago.

 

Virginia Woolf, after a typically Woolfian arch and witty beginning to her essay on Rossetti in the second Common Reader, was amazed at the variety of scholarly opinions of Rossetti's poetry ("what very different impressions they seem to gather from the same works -- by what different standards they judge!"), then got, I think, right to the heart of Rossetti --

"It would appear, then, that there are at least three schools of criticism: the refluent sea-music school; the line-irregularity school, and the school that bids one not criticise but cry. This is confusing; if we follow them all we shall only come to grief. Better perhaps read for oneself, expose the mind bare to the poem, and transcribe in all its haste and imperfection whatever may be the result of the impact. In this case it might run something as follows: O Christina Rossetti, I have humbly to confess that though I know many of your poems by heart, I have not read your works from cover to cover. I have not followed your course and traced your development. I doubt indeed that you developed very much. You were an instinctive poet. You saw the world from the same angle always. Years and the traffic of the mind with men and books did not affect you in the least. You carefully ignored any book that could shake your faith or any human being who could trouble your instincts. You were wise perhaps. Your instinct was so sure, so direct, so intense that it produced poems that sing like music in one’s ears -- like a melody by Mozart or an air by Gluck. Yet for all its symmetry, yours was a complex song. When you struck your harp many strings sounded together. Like all instinctives you had a keen sense of the visual beauty of the world. Your poems are full of gold dust and “sweet geraniums’ varied brightness”; your eye noted incessantly how rushes are “velvet-headed”, and lizards have a “strange metallic mail”-- your eye, indeed, observed with a sensual pre-Raphaelite intensity that must have surprised Christina the Anglo-Catholic. But to her you owed perhaps the fixity and sadness of your muse. The pressure of a tremendous faith circles and clamps together these little songs. Perhaps they owe to it their solidity. Certainly they owe to it their sadness -- your God was a harsh God, your heavenly crown was set with thorns. No sooner have you feasted on beauty with your eyes than your mind tells you that beauty is vain and beauty passes. Death, oblivion, and rest lap round your songs with their dark wave. And then, incongruously, a sound of scurrying and laughter is heard. There is the patter of animals’ feet and the odd guttural notes of rooks and the snufflings of obtuse furry animals grunting and nosing. For you were not a pure saint by any means. You pulled legs; you tweaked noses. You were at war with all humbug and pretence. Modest as you were, still you were drastic, sure of your gift, convinced of your vision. A firm hand pruned your lines; a sharp ear tested their music. Nothing soft, otiose, irrelevant cumbered your pages. In a word, you were an artist. And thus was kept open, even when you wrote idly, tinkling bells for your own diversion, a pathway for the descent of that fiery visitant who came now and then and fused your lines into that indissoluble connection which no hand can put asunder:

         But bring me poppies brimmed with sleepy death
         And ivy choking what it garlandeth
             And primroses that open to the moon."

"Anonymous"

I finally saw "Anonymous" the other day.

Leaving aside for a moment the question of whether I think William Shakespeare of Stratford or Edward de Vere wrote the plays, the film itself is such a curious mixture of intelligent speculation and absurd rants that I hardly know what to think.

Roland Emmerich says in the behind-the-scenes clip on the DVD, "I think the whole authorship question comes out of the fact that there was a man who was just the first modern author, who in more than thirty plays summed up what we humans are....  I had heard inklings, there’s like an authorship question, then you read a script about it and you all of a sudden say to yourself, wow, this is an amazing story.  Basically, the more and more I read, the more I think that William Shakespeare has not written these works, had nothing to do with it.  I’m always drawn to these kind of things when there is something there that people can argue about."  Perhaps it wasn't his intention, but this makes it sound like he just wanted to make a movie that would stir things up.

He certainly does.  I just think he goes too far.  The Ben Jonson storyline, that de Vere selects the already well-established Jonson to front de Vere's play "Henry V" -- de Vere's inability to do so himself is because of the play's propagandistic nature -- and that Jonson's reluctanct agreement then leads to the opportunistic William Shakespeare stepping in ahead of him, is quite logical.  If Emmerich had stayed there, he might have had a good argument.  The idea that Elizabeth had a youthful affair with a courtier and bore a child in secret, I found a little harder to accept, but also remotely possible, if only very remote.  The idea that this illegitimate son then grows up to be none other than Edward de Vere himself, and all unkowing, has an affair with Elizabeth and sires an illegitimate son which Elizabeth bears in secret, pushes the whole thing way over the edge of credulousness.

This leads to my other point about the film, that the extensive use of CGI gives the whole thing such an air of artificiality that it's difficult to believe that Emmerich himself believes it, certainly in the exterior scenes.

(Don't even get me started on the fact that all of the good characters are blond and handsome (and male), and that all of the bad characters are dark-haired and ugly.)

"I'm not a big theatre nut," Emmerich says in a Guardian interview last year. "But when I realised that I had to make a movie about Elizabethan theatre, I read everything I could about it. I tried to look for other movies that showed these scenes, and the only films I found were Shakespeare in Love and Stage Beauty, and they didn't really show it at all. There was no performance there, ever. There were rehearsals and then little snippets of things, but there was nothing that showed what the theatre meant to people. So I said, 'Guys, we have to show how it really felt.' Because it hit me, in the middle of a rehearsal that, at the time these plays were performed, 80 or 90% of the audience was illiterate. There was not much reading material. Books were incredibly expensive. So they must have eaten it up."

Now, I happen to consider "Shakespeare in Love" one of my favorite movies ever, one that I can watch again and again and enjoy more deeply every time, from performances and production values to its theories about the sources for the plays -- even though, yes, the Lady Viola character for one is a complete fiction, it all makes sense in the context of the film.  Anyway, for Emmerich to say that there is "no performance" in "Shakespeare in Love" makes me wonder what on earth he saw, since the production of "Romeo and Juliet" takes up a good portion of the end of the film, and the whole point of it was to show, in fact, "what the theatre meant to people".  If the astonished faces of groundlings and gallery-goers alike doesn't do that, I don't know what would.

Well, it is fascinating to see Rhys Ifans in such a subtle, dark role, when I am so familiar with him from "Notting Hill" and "Danny Deckchair".  (Look at his hand in the picture at the top of this post.  There is an actor who knows how a Renaissance-era courtier poses.)  And Rafe Spall is so good that I almost believe that the man from Stratford was a simpleton.  Almost.

And as a last word -- for today, at least -- I happened to be reading a preview of John Mullan’s What Matters in Jane Austen.  Now of course Mullan is writing about Jane Austen and not about Shakespeare at all, but in the introduction he points out that there are only a few manuscripts of her novels surviving -- some juvenilia, unfinished fragments of Sanditon and The Watsons and a few others, and Persuasion.  This of course immediately made me think of the Oxfordian argument that we have so little in Shakespeare's writing.  Mullan goes on, "Jane Austen’s obscurity among her contemporaries is all the more striking when one considers her technical audacity.  There was nothing so surprising about the fact that she wrote novels.  There was something miraculous about the fact that she wrote novels whose narrative sophistication and brilliance of dialogue were unprecedented in English fiction.  She introduced free indirect style to English fiction, filtering her plots through the consciousnesses of her characters.  She perfected fictional idiolect, fashioning habits of speaking for even minor characters that rendered them utterly singular.  She managed all this with extraordinary self-confidence and apparently without the advice or expert engagement of any other accomplished writer.  She had had access to books, of course, and the conversations of a bookish family, but no circle of fellow authors.  It might be a wrench to think of Austen, the conservative literary genius in a revolutionary age, as an experimental writer, but such she was.  This has nothing to do with her subject matter: indeed, provide some bare plot summaries of her novels, and they can be made to sound rather less daring that those of contemporaries such as Maria Edgeworth or Mary Brunton.  Her brilliance is in the style, not the content.  Even when it comes to her characters, her success is a matter of formal daring as much as psychological insight.  We hear their ways of thinking because of Austen’s tricks of dialogue; their peculiar views of the world are brought to life by her narrative skills."

I've Been Reading ...

Just finished Lucy Worsley's If Walls Could Talk, a social history of various rooms of the house, in the vein of Bill Bryson's recent At Home : A Short History of Private Life. Worsley has a unique perspective, being chief curator at Historic Royal Palaces, where she is surrounded by living-history re-enactors, and has in fact actually done many of the things she talks about here: blacking a range, carrying the hot water to fill a bathtub, sleeping in a Tudor bed, and so on. Her book is rather light, I thought, and such an easy read that I finished it in about two days of not-particularly obsessive reading, which lightness I found something of a disappointment, but she has some very interesting things to say in her afterword, that history seems to be circling back on itself where houses are concerned. Because of dwindling energy supplies, natural fuels and methods of house construction are returning -- chimneys for both heat and ventilation, thicker walls and smaller windows, shutters, natural building materials, earth toilets -- and design is also, perhaps unconsciously, looking to the past in its return to multi-purpose rooms. Town planning, too, is looking to the past, with the increase in walkable communities with their mixture of residential and commercial, high- and low-income. And she makes an interesting point about these last, that separating the rich and the poor can be argued to have disastrous social consequences, that it benefits everyone to have, as she calls it in relation to a place like Hardwick Hall, "a common endeavour". "We don't know enough about our neighbours, and the dwindling of natural resources which have fuelled our way of life since the eighteenth century will force us to change and to share more fairly both the work and the reward."

As part of my recent discovery of Stella Gibbons, I have been reading the biography of her by her nephew Reggie Oliver. I discovered somewhat accidentally Gibbons's 1938 novel Nightingale Wood, as I was trolling about at Amazon looking for free Kindle titles -- although Nightingale Wood was in fact a purchase, it sounded too fun and interesting to pass up, and I'm glad I did, for the moment I finished it I turned around and read it again, so charming and funny and perceptive it is. It is an unashamed re-take on the Cinderella story, complete with poor yet naïvely optimistic heroine, handsome prince, "ugly" stepsisters, and fairy godmother, yet all of these are at once both recognizable and turned on their heads -- Viola is amiable but unimaginative, Victor (the prince) is handsome but not a little shallow, and one of the sisters, thirty-five and feeling desperately unloved, has a crush on the much-younger chauffeur. I must admit that this last storyline was the one that caught my imagination the most, since being of course a Cinderella story we already know that the heroine will get her prince, but not how the other storylines -- and there are a number of them -- will go, and having been one myself I tend to be especially sympathetic to such Unclaimed Treasures as Tina. What I appreciated most about the book was that Gibbons kept me not only laughing out loud at times but on tenterhooks wondering what was going to happen -- and all I will say about this is "yes, and no!" -- and that she manages to give even her unlikeable characters moments of real sympathy.

I have just started reading Jonathan Bate's Soul of the Age, which he pointedly subtitles "A Biography of the Mind of William Shakespeare", and so far at least he is refreshingly judicious and non-speculative about the lack of concrete evidence about Shakespeare's life. (I'm still astounded by Anthony Holden's blithe assertion that Anne Hathaway was homely. Is there even circumstantial evidence for this?).  I suppose that Shakespeare, being Shakespeare and in that respect utterly unlike literally anyone else, deserves equally unique biography, and I am certainly of two minds in the works-as-autobiography school of thought (remind me to speculate about this in respect to Stella Gibbons, in fact), but with Shakespeare, Bate is making eloquent and convincing arguments that there is much to be gleaned about the man from the works.

I've also got from the library Patricia Meyer Spacks's new book chronicling her year-long project of re-reading various novels, from childhood favorites to canonical works she feels she should have liked but didn't and "guilty pleasures". I so enjoyed Anne Fadiman's collection of essays by various writers on the same subject that I am looking forward to Spacks's musings. (But, rather ironically, I notice, for a book that one actually might want to re-read in itself, there is no index for you to find Spacks's thoughts on, say Pride and Prejudice or Dickens or in fact any one of the innumerable Bertie Wooster stories, which though Spacks considers one of her "guilty pleasures" I adore quite openly and unashamedly.)

For the D.E. Stevenson list, we have just finished reading Crooked Adam, Stevenson's 1942 spy thriller -- yes, spy thriller! an unusual departure for Stevenson, yet recognizably her usual brand of gentle humor and romance. Here, a crippled schoolteacher, the "Crooked Adam" of the title, discovers a plot to steal the plans for a scientific invention that could Change the Course of the War. I must say that for me this is obviously a D.E. Stevenson novel -- it certainly has her light touch with dialogue -- but is not perhaps one of her best efforts. I wonder how long ago it became a cliché to have villains who love to hear the sounds of their own voices, who end by wrapping everything up for the hero and the reader because they can't stop talking about how they did it. Well, for my "Stevenson Knitalong", I've chosen the above 1940s pattern (via The Vintage Knitting Lady), for its usefulness in chasing Nazis across the damp Scottish hills, as well as for the photograph's not-a-little sinister look of half-seen smokers!

Summer Time

I'm not knitting much, I'm afraid, though this project has been great for these first few weeks of summer -- a cowl/neck scarf in Noro Sekku -- as it is small, portable, and completely memorized.  I stuck it in a Ziploc bag and took it with me to Girl Scout day camp, and at lunch time actually managed to knit a round or two every day before our girls wandered back and said, "What are we doing this afternoon, Miss Jeanne?  Ooh, what's that?  Is that knitting?  I wish I could knit!"  The colors are much more vivid in real life -- I'll try to get a better picture when it's finished.

(Yeah, it's Noro.  When I came home with it a few months ago, David said, "I thought you were never ever going to buy Noro again!"  Well, what can I say?  The colors are fascinating.  I still don't like knitting with it.)

I've been reading much more than knitting.  Yes, that's a Kindle -- I finally succumbed.  I looked at all of the yellowing classics on our shelves one day, and thought, "I suppose I could get a Kindle and have all of these in less than an inch of shelf space."  I've been downloading freebies like a wild thing since then -- P.G. Wodehouse, Mrs. Gaskell, Jane Austen.  I confess that a few purchased ones have made their way across the ether to me as well -- this one is Edith Pargeter's The Brothers of Gwynedd, after I found that you still can't get the Brother Cadfael series in e-books.  I'm a little vexed with some of the features of the Kindle -- don't like the font and that you can't change it, don't like that you can't flip pages fast when you're looking for a particular spot (mine at least often gets stuck in a circle of three pages, and just goes round and round those three) -- but it's still amazing enough to me that you could have hundreds of books in one little place that I'm still happy.

Works-in-Progress

This is the sand-dune-y landscape of a Burberry-Inspired Cowl, which unfortunately got stalled when I cut the ends of wool just too short to graft together, so that I am now resigning myself to ripping out the last balls' worth in order not to have to splice in yet another length.  The good news is that the whole thing took only a few hours to knit, so once I get up the nerve to pull the needles out, it shouldn't take long to actually finish.

Another work-in-progress is the Brahms German Requiem, which we started rehearsing the week before last.  How very lucky I was to be able to sing this in high school -- how lucky I still am, to be a part of it again.

This is a lovely version, a yummy Romantic tempo, and the parts are beautifully balanced.  It's interesting, the different perspectives you get, from the chorus or from the audience; I have to not look at the video at times, as it can be distracting, although educational.  That is some serious stink-eye Nikolaus Harnoncourt gives even before he lifts up his hands!  Rather consoling, in a way, to see that even the Vienna State Opera Choir has trouble with getting their eyes off of their music.

I'm currently reading a "medieval noir" that I found on the new-book shelf at the library the other day.  I think I've got spoiled by Ellis Peters, as I find this one more than a little anachronistic in vocabulary -- "décolletage" for example, a late-Victorian word at the earliest, or even more jarring, "gifted" (in the sense of having presented something as a gift), at the same time that the characters say things like "'How fares your good wife?'" and "'Is that the weapon that committed this most foul deed?'".  There certainly can be a good argument for writing a historical novel in the modern vernacular, since at the time period of said historical novel, the way that people commonly talked was in fact "modern" -- compare, for example, the 1920s Charles Archer translation of Kristin Lavransdatter with the 1990s one by Tiina Nunnally.  And there can be an argument that people in the Middle Ages talked more like the Wife of Bath than like Brother Cadfael, too, I suppose.  Still, there it is.

I went to the library, in fact, for the omnibus Mapp and Lucia volume, thinking that I wanted something terribly, terribly English and 1930s. Have not read any of them before.

I'm also reading one of D.E. Stevenson's "lost" novels again, Emily Dennistoun, the current book of the Stevenson discussion list at Yahoo.  The more I think about it, the more I think this was not only an early work of Stevenson's, but a very early work, and one that she may have not bothered to dig out of the drawer because the things she wrote later were so very much better.  Anyway, here is my choice of something late-1920s for my virtual Stevenson "knitalong" --

I think that Emily Dennistoun would be rather shocked to think that her underwear might be discussed in public, but it is not at all unlikely that she would have actually knitted such things herself.  I was surprised at first to see the number of patterns for "vests and shorts" out there -- this is one of dozens from The Vintage Knitting Lady.  I had not in fact given much thought to knitted underthings, but upon reflection suspect that in Scotland at least, where this novel is set, one might want such things more often than not.

As for "real" knitting, I did start the Kid Mohair Wrap the other day.  Found a number of mistakes in the pattern right off, but once that settled down it has gone very quickly, so quickly that I am rapidly nearing the end of the first ball of Kidsilk Haze and at the same time am becoming increasingly alarmed that I will not finish nine repeats of the crossed-eyelet section, as the pattern assures me I can do, before I get there.

Well, we shall see!

"It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade"

(Might be about time to read Great Expectations again ....)

Finished The Shakespeare Thefts by Eric Rasmussen, a blithely quick read, but interesting.  The title is somewhat misleading, as there is not really much theft involved -- it is about a project to trace all known copies of Shakespeare's First Folio, the famous 1623 first "collected works" of Shakespeare.  There were 750 copies in the run, of which only 232 are known to still exist, so Rasmussen has made it something of a life's work of his to not only find them all but to examine them minutely, even to the marginalia scribbled by innumerable hands down the centuries, partly just for the fun of it, but partly also so that in the very-real possibility of theft not only the books themselves but the individual pages are identifiable.  He has a light, breezy style that sits somewhat oddly, to my mind, with such a scholarly obsession, but it certainly makes for a good popular introduction to the subject.

I am now working through the four "historical" novels of Joanna Trollope that my public library has -- I say historical in quotes to distinquish them from her "modern" ones, called somewhat disparagingly "Aga sagas" by some.  I pay that no mind, as I've always found her to be an interesting writer, serious yet not at all without humor, and some of her novels I count among those I have reread a number of times.  I did not, I regret to say, much like the first of these historicals I read, Eliza Stanhope, which I thought more than a little formulaic and with little to distinguish it from any other Regency romance writer except perhaps a good ear for dialogue.  I was a little relieved to find out that it was her very first novel.  The Taverners' Place was an engrossing multi-generational family saga, stretching from the 1870s to the 1930s, which I quite enjoyed, although I was rather depressed to realize towards the end that very few of the many marriages were happy.  The third one I read -- because I had (characteristically, I suppose) arranged them in chronological order by historical period -- was the Boer War drama The Steps of the Sun, about which I had very mixed feelings, thinking it well-written but finding it surprisingly difficult to tell the main characters apart -- although in Trollope's defense, this may have been only because I seemed to have the time this past week to read only in three- or four-page bursts, and therefore could never really get involved in the story.  I am now in the middle of The Brass Dolphin, set in World-War-II-era Malta, and am much involved in it, interested in the characters and appreciating Trollope's easy hand at describing the Mediterranean beauty of the island.

Knitting?  Well, yeah, I'm thinking about it, actually.  Got two balls of Kidsilk Haze yearning to cover my shoulders this spring.  Only two.

Nona's Tie One On from knitty?

Plain-but-pretty, probably a quick knit.  Useful too -- and I mean that in the best way, in that the trapezoid shape will actually stay on your shoulders.

Or the Kid Mohair Wrap from Susan Cropper's Pretty Knits, excerpted in Canadian Living?

Perhaps a little impractical? can you actually do anything with this fallng off of your shoulders all the time?  But rather spectacular, certainly, and a lot of wow for only two balls of Kidsilk Haze.

This and That --

We had a booth sale the other day, and I managed to get a good way down the leg of a Welsh Country Stocking -- this is is Paton's Kroy, a bit heavier than the original wool, so I've had to adjust the stitch counts considerably.

But other than this I haven't done much knitting, still absorbed in Swedish church-books.  Found this the other day, which amused me greatly --

Imagine the ruckus when papa found out that little Stina had been looking for a piece of paper and decided to make do with one of those old books in the vestry....

And in bookish news, I haven't seen "War Horse" yet, but came across this charming little video in which three of the actors talk about the book and their childhood reading -- that Tom Hiddleston was rather precocious, it seems!

Cardies and Blue Sapphires

The D.E. Stevenson listers at Yahoo are currently reading The Blue Sapphire, first published in 1963.  I fully meant to participate in this discussion, indeed was delighted when this was the next book proposed, as I not only own it but have enjoyed reading and re-reading it -- but alas, time ran away with me, and they are three-quarters of the way through before I've had a chance even to start.

Nevertheless, for my virtual Stevenson knit-along, here is a 1960s mohair cardigan with sweet-yet-modest scalloped edges, very suitable for the shy Julia Harburn, whose rather dull life is changed when one spring morning she has an unexpected conversation with a stranger on a park bench.  It is, I think, a classic Stevenson novel -- a light, rather madcap romance yet with serious moments, full of lively characters and a bit of poetry for good measure.

(Image from Musings from Marilyn.)