A Bluestocking Knits

Thoughts on the Parley Cardigan, and Some Catching Up

My Parley was finished and worn exactly a month ago, to be honest, but it has been quite summery lately, really too warm to want a sweater, and I've been rather busy with other things as well, so haven't had the wherewithal to photograph it.  But the weather dropped about twenty degrees quite suddenly this past weekend -- I kid you not, twenty degrees -- and I wanted wool, so I am wearing the cardigan again today.  It is of course the Parley by Mary Lou Egan of Yarnerinas, from her book with Gale Zucker and Kirsten Kapur, Drop-Dead Easy Knits.  The book is full of good-looking knits that are fairly low on the concentration scale, which is great for those of us who tend to have -- cough -- numerous projects going at once.  This particular one comes in pullover and cardigan versions, with simple shaping and lots of stockinette, with a bit of twizzle at the edges to keep it interesting.

This is just four skeins of Briggs & Little Sport in mulberry, which I got from Penelope Fibre Arts in British Columbia, as it's apparently a rather small line produced in Canada, and not many US shops carry it, even online -- it's worth perusing the B&L website to see the "tour" section and how the wool is processed, from grading to shipping.  Mine is a lovely purply color, with hints of blue and red and black giving it a lively depth which is very difficult to capture with the camera!  The yardage on the Sport wool is quite impressive, as I still had a good-sized ball and another full skein left over -- I bought five.  The wool is a single-ply, so tends to worm a little while winding and knitting, but not frustratingly so, although it doesn't feel particularly pleasant to knit with since it is rather rough in itself and perhaps it is that combined with the single-ness that makes it feel a little like wire when wrapped around my fingers.  Much of the roughness does wash out, though, and so now it has a sturdy wooliness to it and a light sheepy smell which is not atal unpleasant.  I am a little concerned about the alarmingly frequent thin places as I went along, two or three of which were such a hair's-breadth, literally, that I broke and spliced them on the spot.  I was tempted to weave in a bit of extra wool as a reinforcement in the less-alarming places, and had at least a dozen safety pins marking them as I went along, but in the end I didn't -- although I do have so much wool left that at least there is enough for repairs if that does become necessary later on!

The buttons are La Mode no.214 (eleven, not ten, since the buttonhole band came out with that many, as it happened).

The purple is generally a bit darker than I could get in these photos --

The sizing is quite generous, and I probably could have made the next size down instead of the 42 for my US12 figure, but there it is -- it's a great no-fuss cardigan, and in this yarn is good for nicely-cool days, not too light, not too heavy.  It probably does look its best with a scoop neck underneath, not a collared shirt, to play up the slightly-rolled neck, which has a gracefully curving line to it that I really like.

We had a good bit of rain this past winter, much to everyone's relief.  The down-side is that all of the weed seeds that have been lying dormant for the past three or four years of drought have apparently all decided to sprout and grow now.  Our backyard, which has a gigantic pine tree in it and therefore little else, has been since February or so a veritable sea of stinging nettles and crabgrass, which I have been digging up -- with a shovel, mind, not one of those mild-mannered forks -- an hour or so every morning, filling usually two trash cans a week. 

Unfortunately for the butterflies, some of whose caterpillars subsist pretty much exclusively on stinging nettles, this is not good.  I fully expect the nettles to come back again next year (she said, weeping quietly into her tea), but this year for the bees and other insects in our little patch of wilderness in the middle of suburbia, I scattered around a packet of California wildflower seeds in the few spots that get any sun, and a packet of shade flowers for the more woodsy corners.  The photo above is the very first bloom, which is a baby blue eyes (Nemophila maculata).  It looks like a little bit of everything in the sunny packet has come up so far -- I am quite looking forward to the mountain garlands and the lupines!

This is something else that has been keeping me busy, albeit indoors -- a pair of Elizabethan venetians (which are sort of ur-trousers) for David's Renaissance Faire garb.  These have been a real pain in the neck, to be honest, but I am on the home stretch at last, and only need to do buttonholes and lacing eyelets now, which will mean that -- huzzah! -- David will for the first time have a complete period outfit, bar the shoes of course.  More photos to come.

We took the afternoon Saturday to go and see the "Dressing Downton" exhibit at Muzeo in Anaheim.  I have rather mixed feelings about "Downton Abbey", not as keen in the later seasons as I was at the beginning -- but from start to finish, the clothes are pretty wonderful.  This suit of Lady Sybil's, from season 1, is probably what I would choose if they were to say, "Yes, you may have one!" although Mary's red suit from the same season would run a close second.  Cora's court dress from season 4 would be my favorite of the fancier ones, I think, but, goodness, how often would I get to wear it?!  More photos later of this, as well ...

The weather has been cool enough too, this past weekend, for me to enjoy again the feeling of wool running through my fingers, so last night when I had three hours in front of the television (new episodes of "Call the Midwife" and "Home Fires", and a repeat of "Wolf Hall"), I managed to get the rhythm going and finished the thumb gusset and worked over half of the medallion of the first two-end mitten.  It puzzles me why this cast-on doesn't lie as smoothly as the first one, but I tried a different technique, so I guess it just does.  V. glad that these fit well, to be sure!

And, yes, there is a new petit-point carpet!  It's spring, how could I resist?  This one is the Flower Trellis by Sue Bakker from Venus Dodge's Dolls' House Needlecrafts.  I haven't yet worked a Bakker chart that was free of significant errors and this one is no exception, I'm sorry to say, and in fact has some real doozies.  The chart gives symbols for "red, light red, green, gold" etc. with the materials list specifying which colors of DMC floss are used, either by themselves or in combination with similar shades -- but although there are symbols for "blue" and "yellow" there are no indications in the materials list that you need any blue or yellow at all.  I had to just choose shades I thought went well with the other colors.  The chart has the full border and the "trellis" in the main field, but only one each of the flowers inside each medallion, so the stitcher must decide where to put what -- this is perhaps not a serious drawback for a more experienced stitcher, but a beginner may not appreciate this, nor the fact that one long edge of the "vine" is clearly marked with the symbol for yellow, not green. 

But, yes, it's a very pretty carpet now that it's finished, I must say!  I worked out before I started the flowers which one I wanted where, and whether or not I would reverse it (just to make each medallion a little different).  I also reversed the light and medium pink blends here and there, for the same reason.  I used a partial chart for the half-medallions, leaving a one-stitch edge between them and the gold border, to match the trellis-work -- some have worked it differently, I find from poking around the internet.  Mine is kind of busy as a result, but in an ordered sort of way -- quite garden-like.

I used the following shades of DMC floss (3 strands, on 22-count mono canvas) --

• dark gold = 680 and 420 (1 + 2 strands)
• yellow = 745 and 3078
• blue = 931 and 932
• pale pink = 223 and 224 (2 + 1)
• medium pink = 223 and 3372 (1 + 2)
• red = 356
• pale green = 3347
• medium green = 3347 and 3052 (2 + 1)
• grey = 646
• background = 3033 (instead of ecru)

Note that I needed 3 skeins of the background color, not 2 as on the materials list, and that the number of red stitches (the "tulip" stamens) is a mere six per medallion, so if you have a bit of a pretty red already, you really needn't buy a new skein!

"Shakespeare and His World": "Othello", "Antony and Cleopatra", and "The Tempest"

For the "Clash of Civilizations" unit in the FutureLearn "Shakespeare and His World" course, we discussed "the outsiders" in Elizabethan society.  I watched two productions of "Othello", first the Trevor Nunn film from 1990, with Ian McKellen as Iago and Willard White as Othello.  This production is set in a vaguely American Civil War-era, I'm not entirely sure why, perhaps some commentary on race, though it doesn't quite carry through since if Othello is black he would not be a general, surely! -- but after a while it is not distracting.  White is a majestic and compelling Othello, and McKellen is pure poison as Iago.  Imogen Stubbs is delicate and trusting as Desdemona, and Zoë Wanamaker is excellent as Emilia, as is the rest of the cast.

I also watched the 1995 film with Irène Jacob, Laurence Fishburne, and Kenneth Branagh.  Jacob was an unexpected choice, as she is a little old for Desdemona, and her accent was a little distracting, but she is lovely to look at and one can see why Othello was so taken with her, and she conveys a real sense of shy love for him, and distress when he is cruel to her later in the story.  Fishburne handles himself very well both with the verse and the magnetism of the soldierly Othello, and with his headlong descent into jealousy, and Branagh is brilliant as usual as Iago.  Iago's motivations on the page seem not entirely clear, but Branagh's Iago certainly makes us feel that he himself feels justified.

I don't think I quite agreed with the director's choice to make it obvious that Cassio slips a dagger to Othello in the last scene, perhaps because it's a little too ambiguous as to why he does it.  I suppose we are to think that Cassio is allowing Othello "a noble exit", but it just doesn't ring true to me.  It doesn't "ruin" the film for me, but the fact that it comes so near the end makes it stick in the mind longer, as it were, so it looms a bit larger than it should.

Last week the theme was "The Roman Example" and, instead of choosing the more obvious "Julius Caesar", Bate went with "Antony and Cleopatra," and so I watched the 1981 BBC Shakespeare production, with Colin Blakely and Jane Lapotaire.  Colin Blakely is not someone I ever would have thought of as playing Mark Antony, but he does remarkably well, and he has the legs for it.  Perhaps his working-class-yob air helps bring out the sense of Antony's being out of his depth here.  This production goes for a rather Shakespearean look to it, with not Roman or Egyptian costumes, but "contemporary" Italian Renaissance ones.  Not one of my favorite plays, but with some really gorgeous poetry.

For this last week of play-viewing, titled "O Brave New World", I watched 1980's BBC Shakespeare production of "The Tempest", here with David Dixon as a seriously creepy Ariel and Michael Hordern as Prospero.  This version starts out with an exciting storm, but beyond that it turns bland, with little sense of magic or wonder.  Christopher Guard is dull as Ferdinand, and there is no chemistry between him and Pippa Guard (his cousin in real life) who plays Miranda.  Warren Clarke is a weirdly hairy yet effective Caliban, but other than a mildly amusing turn from Nigel Hawthorne as Stephano, Hordern is the only one who is at all interesting.  A shame, really.

(By the way, despite the much-vaunted premise of the BBC Shakespeare series being that the plays are produced with minimal cuts, the Ambrose DVD version I have is surely edited, as I've seen images of this fey Ariel sprouting enormous wings and alighting on a table at one point in the play, which is certainly not in the one I saw.  Good heavens, I would have remembered that.  Iris, Ceres, and Juno appear in the credits, yet their lines, in IV.i, are not here.  Curiously, the DVD box gives the running time as 150 minutes, while both IMDB and Wikipedia give it as 124 or 125 minutes.)

Lastly, I watched the 2010 version directed by Julie Taymor, with Helen Mirren in the role of Prospero, rewritten for her as Prospera, wife of the Duke, who becomes Duchess upon her husband's death and then is banished as Prospero is in the original play.    This actually works pretty well here, so is not terribly distracting, but it does of course lend some different aspects with a mother/daughter relationship being one of the central themes, instead of a father/daughter one.  I don't always like Taymor's interpretations -- I didn't much care for her "Titus Andronicus" though that may be as much Anthony Hopkins's fault as Taymor's -- but I thought that this film was really wonderful, and wonderful in the sense that Shakespeare would have used the word, too.  Taymor really uses the capabilities of film to convey a sense of magic, things that could not be done on the stage -- Ariel's shimmering transparency, for instance, as in this photo of Ben Whishaw and Helen Mirren.  In the BBC version, Ariel dashes off and, jumping into the air, simply disappears into a film cut, which even in 1980 I found anticlimactic, but here he leaves a vapor trail across the sky that really gives a sense of Ariel's otherworldliness.  I also found Prospera's relationship with Ariel very touching, possibly due to cuts -- I don't really know the text especially well -- but I'm sure very much due to Mirren herself, the way that she speaks to him, sometimes rather cruelly, but with great fondess certainly, and that she takes his gentle chiding, towards the end, and accepts it, and learns from it. All of the supporting actors here are excellent, although perhaps Chris Cooper was the least effective with the verse, though his physical presence as the jealous brother Antonio certainly works very well.  I usually find Russell Brand exhausting, to be honest, but here he was well-cast as the jesterlike Trinculo, playing off the more stolid Alfred Molina as Stephano.  Djimon Hounsou is excellent as Caliban, not-quite-human yet profoundly moving at times in his primal humanity.  It was also a pleasure to see Tom Conti again, perfectly cast as the gentle courtier Gonzalo, with his faintly tedious nattering.

This series of "play-going" was an interesting exercise in itself, besides the online course, in watching sometimes wildly different productions hard on the heels of each other.  It's curious that, traditionalist that I tend to be, I often found the stagier productions more dull that the modern ones, even though sometimes I deplore the tendency of directors to feel that they need to fizz up Shakespeare for modern audiences (I didn't think Baz Luhrmann's "Romeo + Juliet" worked very often).

PS, I've recently seen an excellent and hilariously funny production of "The Merry Wives of Windsor" which really brought this lesser-known play to life for me -- it's the Globe production from 2008 (revived in 2010), with Christopher Benjamin as Falstaff and Sarah Woodward and Serena Evans as Mistresses Ford and Page, respectively.  We all laughed so much -- even the girls, who think Shakespeare is "boring" -- that our sides hurt.

Knitting in the Movies: "Tell Them of Us"

Here is another picture-heavy post, hard on the heels of the last one, but at least this is about knitting!  I read just this morning about a small independent film in Britain, "Tell Them of Us", about a real Lincolnshire family, the Crowders of Thimbleby in Lincolnshire, during the Great War, a project inspired certainly by the centenary this year of the outbreak of that war.  The call went out for knitters to help recreate the wonderful amount of knitted garments the director wanted for the film, and Mary Lou of Yarnerinas was fortunate enough to have been part of the knitting team -- she tells a bit about the experience on her blog.

There is a book, called Centenary Stitches, available from Northern Lace Press, including "about 70" period patterns used in the film, rewritten for modern knitters.

Robert (played by Reece Ackerman) writing a letter, certainly with "comforts" received from his mother and sister at home, a warm knitted waistcoat and what is either a sock or a balaclava hanging on the X of the table leg.

A wonderfully jaunty ensemble, hat and matching scarf -- with pompoms! -- and the sailor's jumper.  Love the fluffy stripes on the collar!

Notice too the hap that the woman on the left is wearing, garter stitch with a simple lace edging.

Grace (played by Victoria Rigby) is wearing a wrap-around sleeveless jumper, a natural progression from the sontag of her grandmothers' generation.

A hug-me-tight, perhaps! and Mrs. Crowder has put down her knitting to read the letter.

The dark blue cardigan is almost exactly the same shape as the light blue one Grace wears above, but in a brioche stitch here, and with the front buttoned closed. 

Mary Lou admits to having knitted this cardigan, which she adapted from a photograph of the real Grace Crowder, as well as the camel-colored jumper below, which is from a 1912 "sport sweater" pattern.

Notice the wonderful assortment of knits here, from old-fashioned shawls to "modern" jumpers and hats.

I am sorry to say, though, that Robert Crowder was killed at Passchendaele in 1917.  The film was in fact inspired by the local memorial, and a window in the Thimbleby church which his family dedicated to his memory.

"Shakespeare and His World": "The Merchant of Venice" and "Macbeth"

Last week in the FutureLearn "Shakespeare and His World" online course, we discussed "Money and the City", with "The Merchant of Venice" as the focus play.  The public library had three productions on the shelf, so since I have long found this play intriguing, I brought home all of them.  I decided to watch them chronologically, so began with the 1972 BBC Play of the Month production, with Maggie Smith and Frank Finlay.  I like both of these actors, and so it may have been no fault of theirs, but this was a rather dull production.  I kept getting distracted by various things, that Antonio looked laughably like Henry VIII, the absurd pumpkin breeches worn by the younger male leads, which were made out of cloth lattice-work, revealing all -- though, to their credit, the gentlemen wore them well -- and, really, how unlike a man Maggie Smith looks in drag.

Next I watched again, after many years, the 1980 BBC Shakespeare production with Warren Mitchell and John Franklyn-Robbins -- Gemma Jones is Portia.  This held up pretty well.  It's a difficult play, and this cast does it capably.  I just feel that the "quality of mercy" speech shouldn't be a lecture, as so many actresses do it.  It seems to me that, yes, Portia has prepared all of her arguments -- she knows that she has the ultimate one, a pound of flesh but no drop of blood -- but that Shylock's stubbornness should come as a bit of a shock to her.  How can he really be demanding that a pound of flesh be cut from another man's living body?  "Then must the Jew be merciful," she says, and Shylock replies, "On what compulsion must I? tell me that."  If she looks at him in disbelief, then tries to reason with him -- because, because "the quality of mercy is not strain'd" -- I think it plays better, plus it would sound less like a set piece that we've all heard a thousand times before.

The third was the 2004 Pacino version, here also with Alan Corduner as Tubal.  The cast is first-rate, and Pacino does a terrific job (I was going to say "for an American", but I don't always get Pacino).  Visually stunning, with wonderful costumes and gorgeous photography, and the only production to actually be filmed in Venice, so there really are palaces and canals -- though of course, to be fair, the other two were television studio productions.  I just wish this one hadn't cut so much.

By the time it came for this week's unit on "Witches and Doctors", the only "Macbeth" left on the library shelf was, alas, the 1982 BBC Shakespeare production with Nicol Williamson and Jane Lapotaire, which I didn't like much the first time around either.  He was wooden, and she took up the slack and went in rather the opposite direction.  This is one of my favorite plays, so I was hoping to see the 1972 one with Jon Finch and Francesca Annis again, after many years, or perhaps a new-to-me production -- McKellen and Dench, say, or Patrick Stewart and Kate Fleetwood.  Will definitely have to look for those.  (Alan Cumming has done what looks like a stunningly bizarre yet effective one-man version set in a mental hospital -- this takes away all of the "reality" of the play, of course, since it's obviously all in his mind, but what a tour-de-force!)

Professor Bate accompanies each unit with a selection of objects from the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust collection, a contemporary map, a hornbook, a ceremonial pike.  I think the one I found most fascinating was this, which is a glazed money pot used for collecting the pennies from the audience at the theater.  It has no bung like a modern piggy bank, so that the only way to get the takings out is to smash it -- obviously intact ones are therefore very rare, which is why he is holding it here so gingerly!  Apparenly it was not unusual for the lesser members of the company, the wardrobe or props for instance, and thus often women, to be the ones to go round with the money pots. It's a very evocative picture.

"Shakespeare and His World": "The Merry Wives of Windsor", "A Midsummer Night's Dream", and "Henry V"

I recently signed up for a free online course at FutureLearn called "Shakespeare and His World", presented by renowned Shakespearean professor Jonathan Bate, taking a cultural (Elizabethan) theme and examining a particular play that illuminates it.  This is not actually the first FutureLearn course I signed up for -- I started the "Literature of the English Country House" and "England in the time of King Richard III" but although they were both interesting, I was having trouble finding the time to do even one of them, let alone two nearly simultaneously, and so I regret to say that I haven't yet finished either of them.

But Shakespeare -- but Shakespeare and Jonathan Bate! -- well!  So here are some potted reviews of the productions I'm watching as we discuss them.

After the introductory week, the second week was "Shakespeare and Stratford", with the focus play being, perhaps unsurprisingly "The Merry Wives of Windsor", since despite being nominally set in Windsor, it is very much small-town England of the time.  I watched two productions, as it happened, both that the public library had, first a production from 1980 with Gloria Grahame as Mistress Page.  It was, I'm afraid, a not especially good production, though that was perhaps more the fault of the sound man and the costume designer and the cameraman than the actors.  Despite being touted as being "Staged as seen in the 16th century" Grahame wore a gown in the style of at least a hundred years later, though everyone else was more-or-less 16th century.  More irritating was the fact that the actors' mikes picked up every movement of their bodies, so it was a lot like the scenes in "Singin' in the Rain" where Lena's pearls drown out her dialogue.  Grahame acquitted herself tolerably well with the Shakespearean prose, though she still carried herself as an indelibly 20th century woman.

I had seen the 1982 BBC production of "Merry Wives" when it was first broadcast, and I'm pretty sure I fell asleep halfway through, but I must say it improved with age.  Prunella Scales and Judy Davis play Mistress Page and Mistress Ford respectively -- Davis's very modern lipstick was a bit jarring, but Scales could do this kind of role in her sleep.  Ben Kingsley was alarmingly manic as Master Ford, but then Ford is supposed to be madly jealous; Richard Griffiths seemed surprisingly bland as Falstaff.  (Actually, it was also fun to play spot-the-actor, as there were quite a number of familiar faces, from Nigel Terry to Elizabeth Spriggs and Alan Bennett.)  The costumes were excellent, and I admired the set as well, which is supposed to have been based on Hall's Croft.

For "The Birth of Theatre" in the third week, the play was "A Midsummer Night's Dream", and I watched the 1996 Adrian Noble production currently on Netflix.  This was kind of weird.  I liked the framing of the play as a little boy's dream -- he hides under a table during Theseus's and Hippolyta's first scene, and so on -- but it doesn't seem to hold up when we are asked to believe that he's still dreaming this when the "translated" Bottom (Desmond Barrit) and Titania (Lindsay Duncan) go at it, and pretty obviously.  The fairies were quite Seussian.  The slapstick was good -- I especially liked the multiple doors when the four young lovers are wandering in the forest -- but, hmm, I'm still waiting for a really good filmed version.

This week is "The World at War" and "Henry V".  My library has a number of productions, but Kenneth Branagh's was the only one I brought home.  A cracking production -- first-rate acting, great production values, and a real sense of the both the grit and glory of war.

"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."

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!

Recycled costume alert!

Jennifer Ehle as Mrs. Logue in "The King's Speech" (2010).

Geraldine McEwan as Miss Marple, with Joanna Lumley as Dolly Bantry in "The Body in the Library" (2004).

It shouldn't surprise me -- indeed, I am more amused than surprised -- that there is a website for recycled-costume spotters: Recycled Movie Costumes (the two pictures are from there).

I'm a bit late to the game on "The King's Speech" here, which I saw a few months ago and thought was absolutely wonderful.  Pooh to those who complain about its historical inaccuracies -- now, sometimes I complain with the best of them about historical inaccuracies in films, but this one I thought did a brilliant job of both compressing a long story and conveying the hard slog of the Duke of York's/George VI's treatment into a mere two hours.

I must admit that I'm rather biased -- George has long been perhaps my favorite of the English kings.  He took a bad situation and did a splendid job.  I always liked the anecdote of Elizabeth replying to someone who asked during the war if the little princesses would be evacuated from the bombing in London, "The children will not leave without me, I will not leave without the King, and the King will never leave."

Here is a clip from around 1938 showing the King making a speech to open the Empire Exhibition at Ibrox Park in Glasgow.  It is difficult not to feel for him from the very start, and to cheer him on in spirit.

THE KING'S SPEECH

LOTR

You know, I thought that when the girls were both in school -- even better, both at the same school -- that I would have more time.  Wrong!  It's a little-known fact that school- and extra-curricular activities actually expand to fill parental time.

So there hasn't been much knitting....

I did manage a pair of socks this month.  I found the yarn rather unexpectedly at one of my local craft stores -- they usually have mostly acrylics and novelty yarns, although a bit more "upscale" than Michaels' selections -- but at the moment, they actually have a basket of sock yarn! so I snapped up a ball with my 40% off coupon -- Meilenweit Stile in color 8005, a blend of blacks, creams, lavendar-greys, and sages.

It was not, I admit, particularly pleasant to knit, feeling rather stiff and artificial in my hands, but it has softened up a bit with washing, and I'm counting on it being as filzfrei and extra-strapazierfähig as promised on the label ("non-felting and hard-wearing").  It bled a bit in the sink the first time -- a midrange blue, curiously, so apparently the black isn't really -- which toned down the cream somewhat.  I'd thought the cream was a bit loud, as it happens (!), so for myself I wasn't terribly annoyed, but it's something to take into account next time.

 

These are plain stockinette with an eye-of-partridge heel and the squared-off grafted toe from the Jaywalker pattern.

I will probably forever after remember these as my "LOTR" socks, as I watched the entire cycle of Peter Jackson's "Lord of the Rings" movies and a fair bit of the extras as I knitted!

Now I'm picking up that Ravenclaw "Prisoner of Azkaban" scarf that I started in summer.  (Wool scarves in summer! what was I thinking?)

Mish-Mash

Every so often we have mish-mash for dinner, when the refrigerator is full of single servings left over from the week's meals.  Tonight, Laura had the last slice of pizza, Julia had Swedish meatballs, and David and I had the remnants of my first promenade through My French Kitchen by Joanne Harris and Fran Warde -- lentil and sausage casserole and garlic soup, respectively.  This is a lovely, evocative book that set my mouth watering as soon as I saw it.  The lentil dish is pleasant and earthy (much depends on the sausages, I suspect), and the garlic soup very tasty.  I didn't much care for the Poule au Pot, but then I've made various versions of this and never found it to speak to me much, so I can't fault Harris'.  Her Boeuf en Daube, redolent of bay and thyme and olives and an entire bottle of white wine, was heavenly!

So, then, this post will be a mish-mash too, since life has been increasingly hectic chez Bluestocking these days, and little that I have to say would stretch to a full post on its own.

I made an Odessa the other day for my aunt, whose cancer is returning.  Cashsoft DK again, so wonderfully soft and comforting -- this color is 525 Kingfisher, and worth seeking out, a lovely tealy greeny-blue.

I could not resist the lure of the laceweight -- the ball is one skein of Skacel Merino Lace, in 339 Pale Grey, luminous and pearl-like -- I'm thinking something Shetlandish.

A cup from Annie Modesitt's clever Fiesta Tea Set, in some ancient Tahki Cotton Classic that I dug up from one of the deeper drawers in my closet.  Am not sure yet if I'm going to make the rest of the set in the same color (wh. is all I have), or find some peppier shades, or just enjoy this piece on its own.

I put up a photo album in the sidebar of some of my dad's model trains, the ones I have.  Trains were such an intrinsic part of his life that I feel absurdly grateful to have these.

My Daisy troop is up to fifteen.  Fifteen kindergarten girls in one room!  Need I say more?

I've been watching a lot of movies lately, curiously enough all Norwegian ones, hard to knit to since I need to read the subtitles, my Norwegian stretching mostly to exclamations -- "Gud!"  "Nå da?"  "Fy!"-- and words that I probably shouldn't know.  Anyway, first was "Insomnia", a bleak and gritty crime thriller from a few years back, in which a detective in the far north accidentally shoots his partner during a murder investigation, and finds himself increasingly mired in guilt and the insomnia of the title as he tries to cover up what really happened.  "Hamsun" is the story of  Norwegian Nobel Laureate novelist Knut Hamsun's involvement with Hitler's occupying forces during World War II, and of Hamsun's turbulent relationship with his wife, a fervent Nazi supporter.  It's a ghastly, riveting film -- like watching a car crash that one is powerless to stop -- with Hamsun played with arresting dignity by Max von Sydow. 

"Kitchen Stories (Salmer fra Kjøkkenet)" is the lightest of the bunch so far -- and by far -- and one that I can recommend without hesitation for those who like quirky, subtle, character-driven comedy.  The premise is that Swedish researchers in the postwar craze for scientific research and efficiency are sending a team of observers to study Norwegian bachelor farmers' kitchen habits -- resulting in the quietly absurd set-up in the photo.  One of these objects of study has had a change of heart and resents the intrusion stubbornly, but through a series of small events he and his ostensibly objective observer become unlikely friends.  The ending is bittersweet but entirely believable and satisfying.

Little-known Fact #133: All Norwegian movies feature Sverre Anker Ousdal in some role, large or small.

(Not that I'm complaining, mind.  Fellow polar geeks will recognize him from "The Flight of the Eagle", the lyrical and harrowing film based on the Swedish attempt in 1897 to reach the North Pole by balloon, and

as Roald Amundsen in 1985's "The Last Place on Earth".  The sight of Amundsen and his men skiing towards the South Pole is as stirring a thing I've seen in many a year.)

I read the last of the Aubrey/Maturin series while David was in Hong Kong.  I'd been reading them slowly, trying to spin out the last few as long as I could, but then one night after finishing The Hundred Days, I picked up Blue at the Mizzen as if there were no covers between the two, just another chapter break.  It was like running down a hill -- I ran through it in delight, unable to stop myself and not caring a whit, and was surprised when I turned over the last page with something like utter joy and came to the end, not without a bit of a thud at my sudden return to reality.  So, that's that, and I guess -- unless somebody stands me 21 for my birthday -- I'll start over again from the beginning.

I've just finished reading the fourth in the Brother Cadfael series, St. Peter's Fair, retrieved deep from the basement storage area of our local public library.  It's interesting, reading the books hard on the heels of one another, instead of a year or two apart as I did when they were published -- I begin to get a sense of Peters' developing style and feeling for the characters. I had quite forgotten after so long that Hugh Beringar in his first appearance -- in the second book -- was in fact an opponent, not an ally of Cadfael's.  Almost makes me want to see the television series again, but not quite.  Only for Sean Pertwee,

for whom I almost seriously considered starting a write-in-campaign-of-one to Peter Jackson, as I had long pictured Sean Pertwee in my admittedly fertile imagination as Faramir, one of my favorite characters in "The Lord of the Rings" cycle.  Not too much of a stretch, though, I think!  (I would rather, too -- not that I've anything against Viggo Mortensen -- have seen Sean Bean as Aragorn, as he was much more my idea of the character -- but that's another story, for another time.)