Injury Time
I thought the tragedy should be captured in majestic black/white and adorned with a Photoshop effect. Yes, it is my left wrist. No, I cannot knit. Yes, I'm icing it and am booking a doctor's appointment today. And I'm typing this entry with my right hand only which means blogging is really slow and annoying.
Instead I'm reading and I'm very glad that I got the new Scarlett Thomas book out of the library instead of paying real money. I will tell you why when I can touch-type again.
Update: "bruised tendon" and I "need to watch the activity level". My doctor muttered something about I should have gone to A&E back when my injury first happened. Cough.
A Big Dose of Grrrrr
Disaster has struck - or, rather, my own clumsiness has struck.
Last night I walked from our kitchen into the living room, closed the door behind me, and somehow my left hand got entangled in the door-handle. The wrist sort-of twisted around the pinkie and .. well, it was not good. I iced the wrist/pinkie immediately and bandaged the area. I also made it through work today thanks to a heady combination of pain-killers, ice-packs and assorted swearing. Sadly knitting seems to be out of the question (I managed one row during my lunchtime and it did not feel good) and I'm now wearing my left arm in a sling.
This could not have happened at a worse time as the next fortnight will be very, very busy in terms of knitting, working and socialising (and even all three activities combined). I have a shawl with a looming deadline, a 4-ply cardigan I am exceedingly keen to get started within the next five days, and a ten-hour train journey which I had planned to pass with some knitting. Oh, and a concert with my favouritest band.
Poor timing, Karie, poor timing.
If the pain down my arm continues I will seek medical advice, but for now I'm all about painkillers, ice-packs, copious swearing and therapeutic sessions of Cursed Treasure. Wish me luck.
Dictionary Definition
uncool /ˌʌnˈkuːl/
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when you take a photo from a Ravelry user's notebook and upload it to your blog without seeking permission.
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See also: cool (Antonym)
Usage example:
"Seeing my disembodied self on a foreign-language blog was really uncool," said the knitter
Photo taken down with apology. Thank you.
The Other Things In Life
First of all, a huge thank you to Fineskylark and Paula. Ms Fineskylark sent me these gorgeous oak buttons (made in her part of Canada) and Paula has given me the official (and very cute) Ravelympics 2010 pin starring Ravelry's mascot, Bob the Boston Terrier. Thank you, ladies.
I wish I could say that I knew exactly which cardigan calls for those oak buttons, but my knitting mojo has gone AWOL. I'm about to graft the toe of the first Monkey sock, but my Frankie Says .. pullover is languishing in my knitting bag. I love the pattern, I love the yarn but I'm beginning to have second thoughts regarding the shape of the pullover. I'm, well, "top-heavy", as the professionals say, and I'm unsure whether a cropped pullover in quite heavy silk/cotton will do my figure any favours. I'm beginning to eye Blithe from Rowan 47, but I'm not quite ready to change my project just yet. I might need to talk this over with my knitting group.
Moving on.
I was disappointed in humanity when I came across this MetaFilter post about a recently discovered mass grave in England discovering during work on the 2012 Olympics site. The grave contained over fifty beheaded Vikings, possibly killed during the St. Brice's Day massacre in 1002AD. My disappointment arose after reading several MeFi comments of the "Vikings, LOL!" variety. I know this may come as a surprise to people who generally know Vikings as bloodthirsty barbarians from films, comics or Christian monks' annals, but, hey, they were actual human beings. Actual human beings who were my ancestors and I fail to find the funny side in beheadings or mass-graves. Show some respect, please. The only good thing that came of the entire Viking thread on MeFi was a link to Star Wars re-written as a saga .. in Old Norse. Now that's hardcore.
Finally, I'm trying to decide whether to go see A Single Man or, ahem, Legion. I need to make my mind up quickly as I suspect neither will be shown in cinemas for much longer..
Books 2010: Ishiguro, Larsson
As I was reading Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (or Män som hatar kvinnor, Men Who Hate Women, a much preferable title which I shall use forthwith), I kept thinking about my previous read, Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go. What was it about Ishiguro's novel which singled it out as an automatic qualifier for the "Worst Read of 2010" post I will be writing early next year? What made it particularly awful?
Only a handful of books make it to my all-time God-Awful Reads list.
Jonathan Myerson's Noise is one: wildly inconsistent pacing, one plot dropped in favour for another as Myerson seemingly got bored with his original idea (or found himself incapable of writing the novel he set out to do) and a constant sneering, smug sense of contempt running throughout the book (the only consistent thing about it). Julian Barnes' England, England is another. Barnes had two great ideas (England as a theme-park and a Baudrillardian take on said theme-park) but could not get them to work in the context of a novel. A cautionary tale that sometimes you need to write an essay rather than try to work your ideas out in fiction. And then dear Ian McEwan with his Booker-winning Amsterdam, a book so contrived, self-indulgent and ill-executed that it has coloured my reading of everything else McEwan has written.
I think what bothers me about Never Let Me Go was the pointlessness of it. I cannot even pretend to loathe it as there is nothing there to loathe. I cannot point to any smug, self-inflated sense of importance (Myerson's Noise), any over-ambitious intellectualism running rampant (Barnes' England, England), nor any toe-curlingly bad writing and plotting (McEwan's Amsterdam). Ishiguro's book is just .. there. It doesn't challenge, doesn't engage, doesn't take a stand and doesn't make you think. I'm bothered by this (which could be argued is an achievement, of course).
By contrast I finished reading Larsson's novel this morning having raced through it over the course of the weekend. Män som hatar kvinnor is not my cup of tea. I am a squeamish reader who does not enjoy reading page after page filled with gory details or graphic sexual encounters. I also had real issues with the main characters (the main investigator, Mikael Blomkvist, was an author surrogate; Lisbeth Salander, Blomkvist's hacker sidekick, was a pile of clichés, or, as Joan Smith points out in her excellent review, 'a revenge fantasy come to life.'). Having said that, the book made me care. I cared about finding old photographs and piecing together what happened one afternoon in 1966. The plot was convincing (if too gory for me) and unpredictable. Larsson's real strength, to me, was his description of milieus: both the remote Hedestad community and the smart and educated Stockholm media intelligentsia were drawn with a strong, decisive hand. I do not think I shall be seeking out the two other books in Larsson's trilogy - I'm too squeamish and not much of a crime-writing connoisseur - but if you like your crime novels smart, well-written and compelling, I'd recommend Män som hatar kvinnor in a heartbeat.
Next: I need to read a book written by a women, I think. Mantel & Wolf Hall, here I come.
Frankie Says .. Gone.
This morning I packed my bag for work knowing that I'd be heading to knitting group after work. I zipped up my Frankie Says jumper on its KnitPro needles, threw in the pattern and was too lazy to fish out my sock needles. Now, my workplace is the sort of place where you can waltz in with a a project bag and no one lifts an eye brow, so I did just waltz in with my project bag, left it in a secure place and got on with work. Hours later I was leaving for knitting group, dipped in to fish out my project bag and it was .. gone. I spent thirty minutes looking into every little nook and cranny wondering if I had been absent-minded enough to leave it elsewhere. No, it was definitely gone.
I started to second-guess myself. Maybe I had forgotten the bag at home, maybe I had just imagined taking the bag with me to work and maybe it was still in Casa Bookish. I called David who looked All The Usual Places but couldn't see anything. Right, I thought, I'll take a detour home, pick up the project bag from its ingenious hiding place and then I will go to knitting group because, obviously, David would not have spotted said project bag even if it were sitting on top of the kitchen counter. I got home, started looking and, no, the knitting bag is definitely gone gone gone.
I am surprisingly upset about this loss. By "upset" I mean "holy crumpet, I'm going to burst into tears any second now and sob hysterically for thirty minutes unless something really uplifting happens in the next fifteen seconds". We are talking half-a-front of a jumper, some Rowan Summer Tweed, my precious KnitPros and the fact that some **** thought it okay to avail him/herself of my private property.
I mean, who the hell steals a half-made jumper?! Oh lowlife, may your tension become wonky, may you lose stitches and may you develop a sudden allergy to all things woolly.
(of course if the project bag suddenly reappears next time I come into work, we will pretend this little interlude never happened)
Still Winter
This has been the coldest winter in Scotland since the early 1960s. So I have not just been imagining things nor have I become obsessed by that most British of things: the weather. It has been bloody cold and, despite today's sunshine, it continues to be cold. I am so, so ready for spring to arrive. Failing that, I wouldn't mind spending a week holed up somewhere like this place with its "underfloor heating (..) boosted by a woodburner with logs from the garden (..) passive ventilation and thick insulation whist inside there is a drying room with an extra radiator to get those outdoor clothes dry after bad weather." To me, that sounds like heaven.
But I am in Glasgow and I am wearing my sleeping bag like it's the new black.
Confessiones
When I started university many, many, many moons ago I fell in with the wrong crowd. Looking back, I can see how it happened. The nice girl living next door to me in student hall invited me in for tea and soon after she was offering to "lend" me things. "Nothing bad was going to happen", I was told, "everybody's doing it and it's perfectly normal". And this is when I began playing role-playing games.
I had long wanted to play Dungeons & Dragons, but the only ones playing RPGs in my erstwhile home town were boys hanging out in the library basement, and they had a strict "no girls" rule. When my student hall neighbour, Liz, offered to lend me the Player's Handbook 2nd Edition, I felt vindicated. To this day, most of the D&D players I know are women. And they are hardcore, I tell you.
Eventually most of my Copenhagen social circle was composed of RPGers - this is not to say that we only hung out in order to slay orcs, but most of the interesting people I met also just happened to be gamers. Smart, interesting people from all walks of life with real jobs, real lives and actual social skills. They were interested in communal storytelling and in imaginary flights of fancy. I miss them. Sadly I have not been able to find a gaming group here in Glasgow - the ones I have found all meet on my knitting night! - but I keep toying with the idea of starting up a small group.
So, imagine my reaction when I read that a murder spree was linked to the perpetrator playing D&D.. yeah, I was not impressed. As someone in the comments remarked: "1989 called, and it wants its favourite baseless accusation back."
A few apt links:
- Dicey Knitting - let a d20 guide your knitting
- A Cthulhu dice bag pattern
- A d4-shaped dice bag pattern
- Impaler - "this battle helmet features bobble rivets and a pre-bloodied spike" (I felt this pattern name needed to be written in bold)
- The awesome Cthuhluclava
Reading the Past
The economic recession has claimed many victims. The first phase saw people losing jobs, companies going bankrupt and banks folding. Experts say that this first wave is over. Signs of economic growth are visible in the financial sectors. We are now living through the second phase: spending cuts have to be made. This is all very textbook Keynesian economic theory and I recommend reading up on John Maynard Keynes (quite apart from being a significant economist, Keynes was also part of the Bloomsbury group alongside Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster and Lyndham Lewis) if most of the current financial news leaves you confused.
Spending cuts hurt. Before Christmas, many of my physicist friends were shocked when spending cuts to the tune of £115m were made in the science research sector. When I graduated from university in Denmark some seven or eight years ago, I saw what huge spending cuts will do to scientific research. It was not pretty. My then-department went from being autonomous with at least six new PhD students every year to being yoked together with five other subjects and get one PhD student every other year. The departmental restructuring made for some interesting cross-pollination, but also for disastrous academic results.
And so I learn that Kings College London may have to shut down its Palaeography department in order to meet budget targets. No restructuring, no "let us marry you to Library Science (however awkward) or maybe History or how about Archaeology?" and no shuffling the cards. I am not just saddened. I am shocked. KCL is the only place in the UK to have a Palaeography department and, I believe, even the only place in Europe.
Palaeography, the study of ancient handwriting, may sound like a very obscure subject - and really it is an obscure subject - but it is also incredibly important to scholars. Printing being a very recent invention, most available written material was done by hand and scholars need to be able to decipher handwriting. You get different writing systems (think Cuneiform), different alphabets (think how different the Phoenician alphabet looks to the Latin alphabet) and then different ways of interpreting the alphabets through writing. Pre-printing, many European kingdoms would have their own way of combining and forming letters - Johanna Drucker is particularly good on this, if you want to read more - and some handwriting is only intelligible to specialists who have studied handwriting traditions of a particular area (South Germany, for instance). So much material is now being made available by library specialists, but now I wonder who will be around to read, understand and disseminate this material.
(If I had know that Palaeography existed as a discipline when I started university, I would have ended up in a very different place to now. As is, most of my knowledge is filtered through print culture, so I apologise for any glaring mistakes)
Turning It Around
I am very bad at receiving compliments, but am very good at taking criticisms to heart. Yesterday I was called something Not Very Nice by a random passer-by at my workplace. It was completely out of order, had no basis in reality and all my colleagues were stunned into silence (which does not happen often). I felt so bad yesterday that I bought two balls of Kidsilk Haze and then went home for a big hug. I'm in my mid-thirties and I still do not know how to handle unfair criticism. That too makes me feel a bit blue and inadequate.
So let me write about good things. Happy things. Things, thoughts, places and people who make me smile.
- Sarah Haskins makes me really happy. She hosts Target Women which takes a look at the often-ridiculous way the media reaches out to women. The Yoghurt edition had me at "yoghurt is the official food of women!" (and not just because I'm lactose-intolerant and yoghurt makes me feel really sick), but they are all very funny and, excuse the pun, on-target. That's Gay looks at gay representation in mainstream media with equally great results.
- At Academia Nuts, my good buddy R. writes about art as resistance and wonders how she can incorporate her thoughts into her knitting. I have similar issues with regards to my own crafting and would love to read other people's thoughts on this.
- I bought the pattern for the Snapdragon Tam today after coveting the hat ever since I first spotted a photo of it. Paula has just knitted a gawjuss version which pushed me over the edge. I am going to use one of the oldest yarns I have in my stash, a Malabrigo-ish 1-ply merino in a dark, lush forest green. This yarn was once fondled by Robert Carlyle, I'll have you know.
- I was watching Nerdstock: Christmas for Rationalists last night on BBC4 (BBC4 makes me very happy very frequently). The show was very hit-and-miss: I continue to have huge problems with the evangelical branch of atheism (hello Richard Dawkins), some of the comedians were clearly out of their depths and the shiny face of Professor Brian Cox distracted me from whatever he was saying - but I really, really enjoyed Baba Brinkman's Rap Guide to Evolution. Brinkman's not the best rapper in the world but he is very clever (and I find it delightful he also does a rap version of Canterbury Tales).
- I have finished my second shawl of the year (Rav Link - I have reasons for not writing about it here just yet) and am 2/3rds through my third shawl. I'm knitting this one out of Fame Trend (yes, still knitting up what I brought from Scandinavia) and I'm liking the yarn so much more than Drops Delight. I must admit I'm a tad tired of knitting shawls out of self-striping yarn.. but hey, it's good that I'm getting through projects!