A Bluestocking Knits

When Pythons and Polargeeks Collide

Cut to the icehut at Framheim, circa 1911.  All the occupants are Norwegian polar explorers – Wisting, Bjaaland, Johansen, Prestrud, Stubberud, Hassel.  Amundsen and Helmer Hanssen enter – downwards (on wires).

Amundsen  Morning.

Lindstrøm (the cook) Morning.

Amundsen  What have you got, then?

Lindstrøm  Well there’s egg and penguin; egg, skua and penguin; egg and seal; egg, penguin and seal; egg, penguin, skua and seal; seal, penguin, skua and seal; seal, egg, seal, seal, penguin and seal; seal, seal, seal, egg and seal; seal, seal, seal, seal, seal, seal, baked beans, seal, seal, seal and seal; or lutefisk aux crevettes with a gjetost sauce garnished with truffle pâté, aquavit and a fried egg on top and seal.

Helmer Hanssen  Have you got anything without seal in it?

Lindstrøm  Well, there’s seal, egg, skua and seal.  That’s not got much seal in it.

Helmer Hanssen  I don’t want any seal.

Amundsen  Why can’t he have egg, penguin, seal and skua?

Helmer Hanssen  That’s got seal in it!

Amundsen  Not as much as seal, egg, skua and seal.

Helmer Hanssen  Look, could I have egg, penguin, seal and skua without the seal?

Lindstrøm Uuuuuuggggh!

Helmer Hanssen  What d’you mean uuugggh!  I don’t like seal.

Norwegians (singing)  Seal, seal, seal, seal, seal … seal, seal, seal, seal, seal … lovely seal, wonderful seal …

Brief stock shot of the Fram.

Lindstrøm (to the Norwegians) Shut up.  Shut up!  Shut up!  (to Hanssen) You can’t have egg, penguin, seal and skua without the seal.

Helmer Hanssen  Why not?

Lindstrøm No, it wouldn’t be egg, penguin, seal and skua, would it.

Helmer Hanssen  I don’t like seal!

Amundsen  Don’t make a fuss, Helmer.  I’ll have your seal.  I love it.  I’m having seal, seal, seal, seal, seal …

Norwegians (singing)  Seal, seal, seal, seal, seal …

Amundsen  … baked beans and seal.

Lindstrøm  Baked beans are off.

Amundsen  Well, can I have seal instead?

Lindstrøm  You mean seal, seal, seal, seal, seal, seal, seal, seal, seal and seal?

Amundsen  Yes.

Lindstrøm  Arrggh!

Norwegians … lovely seal, wonderful seal

Lindstrøm  Shut up!  Shut up!  (but it is too late and the Norwegians drown his words)

Norwegians (exuberantly)  Seal seal seal seal. Lovely seal! Wonderful seal! Seal se-e-e-e-e-e-al seal se-e-e-e-e-al seal. Lovely seal! Lovely seal! Lovely seal! Lovely seal! Lovely seal! Seal seal seal seal!

Exeunt.

(The moral of this post is, of course, never watch Monty Python videos after a late night of reading about Norwegians at the South Pole.  Unless you like that sort of thing.)

Love Letters

In honor of the day, here is what must be one of the most romantic letters in fiction, Captain Wentworth's to Anne Elliott near the end of Jane Austen's Persuasion --

"I can listen no longer in silence.  I must speak to you by such means as are within my reach.  You pierce my soul.  I am half agony, half hope.  Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever.  I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own, than when you almost broke it eight years and a half ago.  Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death.  I have loved none but you.  Unjust I may have been, weak and resentful I have been, but never inconstant.  You alone have brought me to Bath.  For you alone I think and plan.  -- Have you not seen this?  Can you fail to have understood my wishes? -- I had not waited even these ten days, could I have read your feelings, as I think you must have penetrated mine.  I can hardly write.  I am every instant hearing something which overpowers me.  You sink your voice, but I can distinguish the tones of that voice, when they would be lost on others. -- Too good, too excellent creature!  You do us justice indeed.  You do believe that there is true attachment and constancy among men.  Believe it to be most fervent, most undeviating in

F. W.

I must go, uncertain of my fate; but I shall return hither, or follow your party, as soon as possible.  A word, a look will be enough to decide whether I enter your father's house this evening, or never."

Sigh!

"You pierce my soul.  I am half agony, half hope.  Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever.  I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own, than when you almost broke it eight years and a half ago --"

Red, White, and Blue

We're off to Girl Scout Day Camp -- the theme this year is "The Red, White, and Blue"!  See you next week!

Mountain Garland Redux

Marie asked in a comment the other day what the whole mountain garland plant looks like -- pictures being worth a thousand words and all, here is one.  It does spring from the ground in a single long stem, not a clump.  Now that it's getting bigger -- nearly knee-high -- new stems are branching out from the main stem.  It's a lovely, willowy thing, tall and slender, with the flowers held high above the leaves -- so pretty in a mass, I would think.

Speaking of a thousand, Marie's comment was the thousandth on this blog!  Many congratulations, and a little something will be winging its way to her shortly!

Dona Nobis Pacem

It seemed appropriate that on Memorial Day, we were singing this evening Haydn's Paukenmesse, "Mass in Time of War," and Vaughn Williams' "Dona Nobis Pacem."  These are very different pieces, one melodic and classically structured, the other unsettling, brutal at times and disillusioned, but with a stark beauty -- and yet the two works share not only their use of a fabulous percussion score, wonderfully stirring and martial, but a culmination on the Latin text dona nobis pacem, "grant us peace."

Garrison Keillor, in "The Writer's Almanac", which I heard on the radio on the way to choir practice, said that Memorial Day was originally not a day for speeches and debates, but simply a day for both sides -- as it was not long after the Civil War -- to come together and remember, not to judge, but just to remember.  We do so much judging these days, and so little remembering.

The Vaughn Williams piece is set to Biblical texts -- "Nation shall not lift up their sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more" -- and three poems by Walt Whitman.  Whitman is a lot like Vaughn Williams, I think, weird and wonderful.  Sometimes I think he's a bit, well, over-the-top, but other times, even with the same poem, I can't read it without tears in my eyes.  This is from "Dirge for Two Veterans" --

I see a sad procession,
And I hear the sound of coming full-keyed bugles,
All the channels of the city streets they're flooding
As with voices and with tears.

I hear the great drums pounding,
And the small drums steady whirring,
And every blow of the great convulsive drums
Strikes me through and through.

For the son is brought with the father,
In the foremost ranks of the fierce assault they fell,
Two veterans, son and father, dropped together,
And the double grave awaits them.

Now nearer blow the bugles,
And the drums strike more convulsive,
And the daylight o'er the pavement quite has faded,
And the strong dead-march enwraps me.

In the eastern sky up-buoying,
The sorrowful vast phantom moves illumined,
'Tis some mother's large transparent face,
In heaven brighter growing.

...

The moon gives you light,
And the bugles and the drums give you music,
And my heart, O my soldiers, my veterans,
My heart gives you love.

(The soldier in the photograph is a cousin of mine, some half-dozen generations back, from Ohio.)

Be Kind. Work Hard.

Cara's post about blog manners makes me glad that the eight or ten folks out there who actually read this blog are really nice.  I've never gotten a mean comment here, in two years of blogging.  (There's not many of you out there, to paraphrase Spencer Tracy, but what there is is cherce!)

So here are a few somewhat random thoughts that have come into my head while reading Cara's post and the resulting discussion --

I do disagree with the people who said that because blogging is a new medium, we are still working out the issues of politeness.  Talking has been around for thousands of years.  It's the same thing.  Blogging is a monologue at first, yes, but there is a significant area of it which is dialogue, or we wouldn't do it, we would make scrapbooks for our knitting projects, or keep our writing in the journals under our pillows.  We want the connection to others.  (This is another reason that I always reply to comments made here.  It's not just because my grandma told me I should be polite, but because I appreciate that someone has made the effort, small as it might be, to comment, to make that connection.  I also think that we should reply to the commenter.  Would you make someone come to your house to get the thank-you note you wrote?)  We should apply the same courtesies we give in conversation and everyday life to the conversations we have online.

Of course we want to be liked, of course we want just a little bit of attention, or we wouldn't be blogging atal.  (Aren't we just a bit dismayed when we write a post and nobody comments?)  That doesn't mean we want to set ourselves up as a target for someone's rudeness and/or bitterness.

We have lost so much of our sense of personal responsibility in the last fifty years or so that we don't always remember that it isn't "me, me, me" all the time.  "Free speech," in the classic example, doesn't give us license to shout "fire!" in a crowded theater, and it doesn't give us the right to heap invective on someone who happens to have an opinion different from our own, or who is spending a lot of time being fascinated with a project that we may, perhaps, er, find relatively uninteresting.

I never thought I would knit socks.  "Meh, socks.  What's the big deal about these Jaywalkers, anyway?"  Now look at me!  Wouldn't I be feeling really stupid right now, if I'd told Cara last summer to stop already with the Jaywalkers!

 

It can be difficult for readers who don't personally know the blogger to "get the whole picture."  Unlike some bloggers, I choose not to give the whole picture -- there is much of my life, even much of my blogging life, that does not appear here, and so I don't always realize that the mental image that Bluestocking readers have of me is not the mental image I have of myself.  I have to accept the fact that I may be misinterpreted because the alternatives are either a) be less reserved, or b) stop blogging, neither of which I want to do.  Likewise, I must understand that I may misinterpret a commenter who chooses not to a) be reserved, or b) stop commenting.  But then by a fairly logical extension, the commenter must consider that I, or any other blogger, may in fact be a real person with real feelings, and might as it happens be someone not unlike the commenter him- or herself.  (A year or so ago, I passed along something I thought amusing, which another blogger found quite revolting, to my utter surprise, and said so in no uncertain terms.  It colored my whole perception of that blogger, and I was so stung that I could not bring myself to even lurk for some time.  But now that I do again, I am constantly amazed at how similar we are in so many other areas.)

Maybe I'm a bit sensitive on the subject of catty remarks because I've always been a bit awkward and bookish and I use words like "rivulet" which makes me a dork (isn't it funny how your mental image of yourself still sticks around from junior high?!), and I've been on the receiving end of those kind of remarks, even as late as in my thirties.  I can't be surprised that there are rude people out there -- I see it too often, from ostensibly trivial things like blog comments to drivers on the freeway to horrible events in the news, rudeness taken to its ultimate, devastating conclusion.  Just because I'm not surprised doesn't mean that I understand it, though.  Why waste all of that time and mental energy on being mean?

(And yes, I have made a few of those catty remarks in my time.  Sometimes I wish the earth would swallow me up, I'm so mortified.  That's what's so great about the "publish" button -- you don't have to click on it.  You have a second chance to think about what you're saying before you say it.) 

Stephanie's remark that her blog is like her living room, and that she expects people to behave in her comments section the way they would (one hopes) in her living room, is worth remembering.

I apologize to the people who come here today and think "not another post about blog manners!"  This is just my two cents.  I was sorry that Cara felt compelled to write her post, because it meant that she is disturbed by the negativity she's experienced, but on the other hand, I was glad that it was Cara who wrote it, as she obviously reached a lot of people -- 185 comments at the time I write this! -- and if more eyes have been opened, so much the better.

Jaywalkers in "Java" Cherry Tree Hill Supersock, finished yesterday.  I worked these on larger needles than I've used before for Supersock, so the fabric is finer than usual -- maybe just a tad thin, but wonderfully silky.

And the Winner Is ...

Joy, of joyousknits!  Huzzah!

Honorable mention goes to Kelli Ann of avoir une famille n'est pas comme un téléroman, just because she used the word déguste.  (Actually, Meriel, I was already thinking of it!)

Thank you, everybody, for taking part in A Bluestocking Knits' first-ever giveaway!

Blogiversary

I think it's time for a little celebration of sorts, don't you?

I've always loved the idea of giving gifts on one's own birthday, and so now it's time to put that into practice.  In honor of my two-year "blogiversary" on March 19, I will hold a drawing for two skeins of lovely Lorna's Laces Shepherd Sock in "Lakeview," enough for a pair of Jaywalkers or whatever your imagination comes up with.  Just leave a comment on this post, and on the 19th one or other of my darling daughters will choose a number at random for the winner.  Please, of course, be sure to include a valid email address if you want to be included in the drawing!

DLF, your entry would include the knitting!

Thanks for stopping by!

Happy Valentine's Day

Twelfth Night

Today is Epiphany, also known as Twelfth Night, and no self-respecting bluestocking can resist a little Shakespearean fun on this day -- and so here is a photograph from a production of, of course, "Twelfth Night".

This one is from a 1979 Royal Shakespeare Company production, with Kate Nicholls, on the left, as Olivia, Jane Downs in the center as Maria, and John Woodvine as Malvolio with some truly, er, impressive cross-gartering.