fourth edition

Oh dear. Following a visit to the neurologist, I’m sitting here going: “I so need to buy myself some yarn as a treat.” I don’t exactly lack yarn, so I’m guessing that I’ve fallen into the trap of so many other crafters: buying supplies as a substitute for actually making something. Or perhaps I just really want something new and shiny to pet. Both?

The neurologist visit was surprisingly constructive although I find it difficult to explain exactly how it was constructive. I’m having some bloodwork done and am scheduled in for another MRI scan. It feels as though I’m finally heading in the right direction.

It is time for tea, some cookies and an afternoon nap. I still need naps, alas.

I don’t know if anybody’s keeping tabs on the Now Reading section of the sidebar. If you do, you will have noticed that it seems to have frozen. Could it really be? Has Ms Bookish given up on reading?

Of course not. I’m just reading books that don’t really fit into my usual categories. Yes, I’m reading knitting books. Gasp! Shock! Horror! And when I’m not reading about knitting, I am knitting. Or listening to knitting podcasts. I’m even contemplating setting up a knitting blog because otherwise Fourth Edition might just crumble under the weight of my ruminations on yarn I want, patterns I adore and angsty reflections upon my knitting abilities. You know, same type stuff that I used to blog about at my former blog .. but substitute “first edition books” with “limited edition handdyed yarn”.

I’ll be mulling over the knitting blog idea for a few more weeks. Days. Hours. Oh sod it, here’s a picture of my first sweater. It’s colourful. Expect slightly more refined stuff from my hand, though.

PS. Happy and constructive vibes please as I’m seeing a neurologist tomorrow.

I’m not the only crafty-creative person in this household. Far from it. Other Half has a degree in textiles, after all, and his latest project is customising shoes. These are his Day of the Dead shoes (aren’t they fab?):

Speaking of shoes and craftiness, my crafty friend Lilith is going to run a 5k race later this year to raise money for cancer research. If you want to sponsor her, she’d be a very happy bunny. Lilith has even arranged a prize draw which any knitter (or friend of a knitter) should check out.

Robert McLiam Wilson is an author from Northern Ireland who wrote a series of critically acclaimed novels in the early to mid-1990s. Unsurprisingly he was interested in exploring what constitutes ‘nationality’. At that point I was interested in his works from a literature student’s point-of-view: could I say he was ‘post-colonial’? Could I yoke him in with writers in Scotland who were busy reclaiming their history, language and culture?

Nowadays I am an expat and I find myself wondering about nationality in far more personal terms. McLiam Wilson claimed that he could only define nationality negatively: “What gives it its chiaroscuro, its particular flavour is a dash of hatred and fear” (I quote this from memory). As a Dane, I find myself part of a history which is not unique - it is the history of any small nation fearing its bigger neighbours. Danes’ attitudes towards Germany and Sweden are complicated. In recent years the ‘dash of hatred and fear’ has become more than a dash in Danish politics as right-wing politicians play upon fear of the Others to secure votes. But is that my definition of being Danish? That I support any football team playing against Germany (and to be frank, I actually do for some bizarre reason)? It’d be a poor way of defining oneself.

As the days are getting longer and as the sun starts to beam down, I find myself longing for koldskål - a dish which is the epitome of summer in Denmark. And so it is: the most obvious expression of my being Danish is through food. A positive definition, thankfully. I have found a near-by supplier of rye-bread and my local supermarket stocks food items I never used to touch in Denmark, but which I now happily sample ever so often: salami sausages, Danish cheeses and the inevitable bacon. Sometimes I even make frikadeller (meat balls) with kold kartoffelsalat (cold potato salad). It feels silly but in a comforting way.

Koldskål is not so easy to come by, though. Its main ingredient is buttermilk and that’s not very easy to find (unless you want to go to another part of Glasgow and pay about £1 for half a pint from an organic food store). Here’s the recipe and yes, it’s a main dish..

4 cups of buttermilk
2 eggs
4 tbsp sugar
Dash of vanilla
Juice of 1 lemon

Beat the eggs, sugar, lemon juice and vanilla together in the bowl the soup is to be served in. Beat the buttermilk and fold in a little at a time. Chill. Serve on top of small vanilla biscuits.

Yum.

Found at Kunstbetrieb.org via SwissMiss.

Watching the Austrian cellar abuse scandal unfold, I could not help but wonder one thing. How had the imprisoned children’s linguistic skills developed? I learned from the BBC that some of the children communicated with each other in ways that did not adhere to standard German linguistic structures. The Austrian news story is horrifying, of course, and I feel slightly guilty that I find its language acquisition aspect so intriguing. It also led me to briefly reacquaint myself with the legend of Kaspar Hauser and the idea of universal grammar. I should get out more.

Speaking of which, I just finished knitting my first major project (I’m going to be self-indulgent enough to post a picture once I know the recipient has received it). The cherry trees outside are beginning to bloom. And while I am still struggling with stamina and energy, I do think I am getting better ever so slowly.

Oh wow. Humankind at its slimiest. Just when I thought I had heard it all.

(via Ellie and a few others)

Yesterday I wore my bright green woollen coat to celebrate that spring was in the air. A man approached me: “I don’t like green.” I blinked a couple of times and then sighed.

Ever heard of Sectarianism? It is: “..bigotry, discrimination, intolerance or hatred arising from attaching importance to perceived differences between subdivisions within a group, such as between different denominations of a religion or the factions of a political movement.” In Glasgow, sectarianism is linked to football.

I was wearing green, so to the stranger I was obviously a Celtic supporter. He was evidently a Rangers supporter given his “I don’t like green” stance. He moved across the road to confront me head-on. I’m not proud of this, but I did a little girly giggle and put on my best Danish accent: “Oh, are you talking about the football stuff?” And after I had explained I was from Copenhagen, didn’t know anything about football, and he had repeated his “I don’t like GREEN” about a dozen times, the man told me that I was lucky I was such a nice girl .. otherwise he would have messed me up.

(and I once showed up wearing green nail varnish at work and was told that I better be wearing blue nail varnish the next day just to show my neutrality. It didn’t matter that green is one of my favourite colours and I don’t give a t*ss about club football. Honestly.)

This is the dark side of Glasgow life.

Wheylona and I go back a decade (gosh). We first met when she worked in Sweden and was heading with friends to Denmark for a concert. I remember us walking through the streets of Copenhagen singing History Never repeats (youtube link) about twenty minutes after meeting for the first time. Ten years on, the American lives in the Basque country (Spain) and the Dane lives in the UK. History may never repeat, but time does move swiftly.

W. has written a fantastic entry about Will Ashford’s recycled/re-contextualising word-art:

The artist, Will Ashford, takes pages from books and finds words and (near-)collocations that call to him, then designs his artwork around them. For me it’s an amazingly engaging combination of art forms, resulting in layered, textured, juicy pieces that need to be savored and digested slowly. I find them very visually appealing–I love the the swirls, arcs, lines and dots, the touches of color on occasion, the contrast between sharp and blurred. I also totally dig the idea of taking words–things that seem so stable and static and fundamental–and highlighting the fact that they are not at all what they seem, or rather that they are more than what they seem.

Gorgeous stuff. And W. was lovely enough to say that experiencing Ashford’s work brought me to mind. That means a lot to me, W.

Ashford’s work brought another friend to mind. Bonnie MacAllister also works with the intersection of visual art and words. She’s a performance poet, a visual artist and a feminist educator. I was lucky enough to receive a copy of her latest collection, Some Words Are No Longer Words about a month ago.

Sometimes I wish I could bring all my friends and acquaintances together in one room - all the writers, poets, thinkers, photographers, painters, crafters and performers - and just feed off the synergy. Whilst the internet does allow for easier interaction, having them all in that one room would be absolutely amazing.

How good are you at recognising fonts? I got a measly 24 right out of 34. At least I still know my Helvetica from my Arial. It’s all in the curves, baby.

I have actually been watching quite a bit of TV lately. BBC4 is having a rather funky Medieval Season, so I’ve been lapping up programmes on Thomas Aquinas, Abelard and the aformentioned Stephen Fry & the Gutenberg Press (which was pr0ntastic, incidentally). I get to flap my arms around excitedly and repeatably which is really nice. TV, I forgive you your multitude of sins when you indulge me like this.

Finally, I’d like to thank everybody who asked for my mother. She was discharged from hospital on Tuesday and is back home again. It is a relief.