Forum knitting
I keep thinking I’ll have a forum round-up post. At this point I need to have several forum round-up posts. . . .
blondviolinist
And looky! Almost finished legwarmers! (I really like the look of those knitting needles.)
They’re rosewood. I loooooove them. They’re my FAVOURITE. Hannah was telling me that her knitting mentor had emphasized that she was going to have to use wooden needles on airplanes* and I’ve kept forgetting to tell her that I don’t even like the bog standard metal ones. I have one pair because they were a size I needed RIGHT THEN, patience never having been one of my strong points, and this lack is probably at its most lurid concerning a shiny new obsession, and I disliked them so much I went back to the hellhound blanket till I could buy bamboo needles in the right size. And when I saw rosewood . . . of course I had to have them. They’re glorious to knit on. They feel as nice as they look.**
Have I mentioned here that the yarn for the second pair of leg warmers is the wrong size? Arrrrrrrrrgh. It’s a whatsit too small.*** I stared at this obstacle to happiness—I BOUGHT THIS YARN TO BE LEG WARMERS, SPEAKING OF BUYING YARN FOR A PROJECT—for a few minutes, and then cast on six extra stitches (it’s 3×3 ribbing) and got on with it. Feh. But the point is that my standard inability to follow directions is manifesting itself early in my knitting career.
Meanwhile . . . the yarn I want to use for my First Cardigan? Of course I don’t have enough. Of course. But—speaking of (not) following directions—I want it about eight inches shorter than the pattern calls for . . . so I still don’t really know if I have enough or not. ARRRRRRGH. Possibly the Right Front or One Sleeve will be in a different yarn. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature. While I was contemplating these prospective traumas, of course I went on line and had a little cruise for yarn . . . and found some gorgeous streaky dark russet-scarlet-orange wool—real wool!—and on sale! And when I tried to order it . . . they didn’t have enough of it left.
Joseph-ine
I have a list now of shops – it’s growing larger after I did some googling the other day! I have to be near some of them on my travels around Manhattan surely!
We are expecting a report, you realise.
I was delighted by the mentions of the male knitters, and it reminded me that way back knitting was the domain of men (was reading something about the history somewhere but I am getting my info from some favourite childhood books). Written by Monica Edwards, one of her characters was a wonderful creation, sea-man, pirate (potentially), smuggler etc, also knitted, because as a man of the sea, you had to know how to make nets, and knitting was also their domain. . . .
The Romney Marsh books. Love love love love LOVE. http://www.monicaedwards.co.uk/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monica_Edwards
THE SUMMER OF THE GREAT SECRET was the one I read to pieces, and then read the pieces. The great secret is . . . smuggling. And the Guernsey-wearing fisherman-smuggler is a major character.
I don’t know what her books would look like to anyone, child or grown up, reading them for the first time now. But they were perfect for a horse-mad girl half a century ago. And I still read them with enormous pleasure—unlike, say, the BLACK STALLION books which I also read to pieces at the time. I kept the first one but (unless I lost my nerve at the last minute and they’re in a box in Third House’s attic) the rest of the Farley series(es) have gone to the great Oxfam heaven. I still have all the Romney Marsh books, and most of the Punchbowl books although I never adored them in the same way. And I still read them. In bed, with hellhounds, and the frelling dawn chorus chirping annoyingly away.
Lenni
I, alas, do not knit. But my girlfriend (who makes all of my Hawaiian shirts) learned to knit by making squares that were then made into a blanket.
I realise I have a frivolous mind, but I am riveted by the thought of what your Hawaiian shirts may look like.
Diane in MN
My first knitting project (in a class) was a sweater. It didn’t require a lot of shaping and didn’t involve fancy stitchwork, but I wanted to make something I’d actually wear. I don’t wear winter scarfs.
YAAAAAAY. SWEATERS. YAAAAAAY. Gods, that yarn store on Wednesday was a mistake. I’m all riled up again. I was going along nicely, a gentle little leg-warmer row at a time. . . . . I HAVE ENOUGH YARN. (Nooooooooo . . . I have this new pattern. . . . )
Reward yourself for finishing the leg warmers with some nice smooth wool yarn–it will be just as easy to knit with, and probably more forgiving if you have to correct any mistakes (but you won’t make the same ones anyway), and you’ll like it better. Especially if you find it ON SALE.
I’M TRYING.
Knitronomicon
. . . Nest in Crouch End . . . www.handmadenest.co.uk/ and they do mail order…
Oh gods. Oh gods. Oh . . . knitting gods. And goddesses. But I’m sure the blokes are crueller.
Katsheare
The first time I visited England I wanted to visit some yarn shops, see what cool local stuff might be on offer. Google search: nothing. . . . Because it’s WOOL here. Oh. ‘Wool Shops’ turned out results (no so many as I’d been hoping for, though in the meantime a very nice wool shop has opened in our town centre) and I’ve since almost entirely stopped using the word ‘yarn’. The opening sentence of your post today made me homesick in a way I’ve not really been yet.
Well not always: http://www.dragonyarns.co.uk/
I had noticed that the locals tended to say ‘wool’ rather than ‘yarn’, including when it was acrylic, which I found peculiar, but I can’t remember if I googled ‘yarn’ to begin with or not—but I usually google knitting and that works just fine. I also don’t know what time frame you’re talking about, but knitting has gone from something embarrassing your grandmother did because she didn’t get out much to madly hot and cool (so to speak) in something like the last ten years over here—I don’t know if America led the way on this or not. Or anyway that’s about what friends my age say about looking around on the tube and in staff meetings. Ten years ago, everyone scowled at their newspaper or their notepad. Now they knit. And Notepad is a software programme.† So I think pretty much anything remotely related to sticks and string now will bring a lot of crafty retailers out of the woodwork happy to sell you whatever you want to call it.
The thing I love about knitting is that there is always some new challenge for you . . .. You don’t have to, either. You can stay in your comfort zone forever if you like, but there’s more out there, if you’re interested. I love that.
Yes. Me too. You can actually knit something almost immediately. It’s not like horse back riding or bell ringing where it’s weeks or months before you have any real basic skill. As I say I took a fairly substantial hit in morale from overfacing myself with my Secret Knitting Projects last year, but I’m so silly over my leg warmers it’s a little alarming in a woman of my advanced years. And having graduated to ribbing I’m now convinced I can do anything. Eventually. Maybe starting with yarn overs. Meanwhile, I can make more leg warmers. I may even get back to the original leg-warmer yarn that was only making things worse by being too fuzzy so I couldn’t see what I was doing and noooooo I can’t knit I am too stupid. ††
nickithomas
I had great fun accumulating stocks of odd balls in sales etc and then using them in Kaffe Fassett type patterns, but I think my favourite UK yarn supplier for a single wool project was this one: http://www.colinette.com/
Yes! I aspire to this! I admit I haven’t quite had the nerve yet to start picking up odd bits of yarn on sale but I’m moving in that direction.††† And the only really big shiny hardback knitting book I’ve bought—I’ve bought quite a few modest paperbacks‡—is a Fassett pattern book—patterns for his blocks (you can see him coming from quilting), not for finished garments.
But . . . pardon me . . . I’m having a stupid moment . . . I can’t find where to click on the colinette pages to find the practical details. http://www.colinette.com/products/Zanziba-%252d-Rose-Garden.html for example. I want it, but what’s it made of? What’s the size and what’s the gauge? What am I missing?
CateK
You could combine your love of yarn and your interest in Japan, and visit Habu Textiles
http://www.habutextiles.com/
Oh my . . .
And . . . on another topic entirely, Oisin was encouraging about my singing today. It was really quite unsettling. I had to come home and knit a few rows.
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* Which is a big step up from not long ago when, I have been told, you weren’t allowed any kind of knitting needles on an airplane. I’m not at all sure that hollow aluminium needles are any more physically dangerous than bamboo^, but whatever soothes the professionally paranoid.
^ They’re not expecting you to have put something in them, are they? Ugggh.
** I admit I have two pairs of vintage pink plastic ones . . . bought for about 69p on . . . wait for it . . . Etsy. But they’re little gauge and I don’t do little gauge yet. It’s not just a patience thing: the more stitches, the more opportunity for strange lumpy bodges.
*** J’accuse the shop. It was in the same bank of cubbyholes as the pink yarn. Unfair to the inexperienced and the stupid.
† Can anyone recommend an iPad stylus? I find writing with my finger dumb and inefficient, and while I resist the idea of another piece of loose kit I have to carry around and potentially frelling lose, I would like to try a stylus. But the reviews are contradictory and contumelious.
†† Nooooo I can’t [insert occupation of choice] I am too stupid
††† Possibly even starting with the russet-scarlet-orange yarn there isn’t enough of to make my First Cardigan.
‡ And on the subject of learning things out of books, which I almost never can, someone has to SHOW ME, the beginner knitting book that I can actually use, is this one: http://www.amazon.co.uk/A-Z-of-Knitting/dp/0975709445/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1337387330&sr=8-1
I bought it because it was on sale because it was pretty shop worn, and because it was spiral bound so it would lie flat. You need two hands for your needles, you know? One of my many frustrations with pretty much all my knitting books^ is trying to make them stay open. You know, if you want to try something . . . And even if you decide to get serious, why should you have to Photostat the frelling pattern just because the blasted book won’t lie flat?^^ And then if your copying machine happens to be Possessed By Demons . . . ARRRRGH. Maybe I’ll take up hang gliding.^^^
Anyway. A to Z has photos that actually show. And the text actually matches what is being shown. This is rarer than you might hope.
^ Aside from the Nooooo . . . too stupid part.
^^ Granted if you’re going to want to carry it around, the two-page version as opposed to the 200-page with covers and a spine version is to be preferred.
^^^ Very sensible. I’m afraid of heights.
Writery things
In the first place:
Hee hee hee hee hee hee hee. (Peter’s publishing daughter sent me this.)
Okay. That was your light relief.
Now, in the second place, a lot of you will have seen this already, including anyone who follows me on Twitter:
The headline reads: In E-Reader Age of Writer’s Cramp*, a Book a Year is Slacking. And any sane author’s reaction is: Killlllllllllllllllllll Meeeeeeeeeee. (Maureen Johnson’s retweet says: Here’s an article in the [New York Times] about how everyone is trying to kill authors.)
Well. Yes. I would love to attain a novel a year. Or a novel most years. Or a novel every eighteen months. Or something. And there are writers—a few—who can write two novels a year at least occasionally** and still stab you in the heart with their amazingness. Or if you’re producing stories that genuinely aren’t supposed to do anything but while away an hour or two—I hope I’m not getting myself into too much trouble here, but I do think there’s a place for stories that are only trying to divert: and, if I’m not getting myself into too much more trouble, I might suggest Agatha Christie as the sort of thing: I don’t think anyone goes to Agatha Christie for empathy or catharsis, do they?—then maybe, that’s maybe, you can write more than one book a year and keep your quality (and your pride in your work) up.***
But for the rest of us . . . for those of us who essay the occasional well-rounded character, who wish to evoke rather than report, who hope for readers who don’t quite shake the dust of our stories off their page-turning fingers at the end . . . I’m a slow writer. I know I’m slow. But I flatly don’t believe any mere human can produce two good books every year and go on doing it.†
I had a lot of lovely tweets from people†† saying they’d rather wait for books that have been written rather than not wait for those that have been churned out to an anti-human schedule. And I don’t really have a choice: this is how I am. This is how I write. If this doesn’t work, I am going to have to run away to the circus.††† I tell myself that the world has always claimed to be on the brink of final breakdown of one sort or another—I imagine this dates back to gossip around the fire just after that seditious object the wheel had been invented. But I admit that the particular part of my world that is disintegrating as a result of what is in many ways a great invention, the internet, worries me . . . more than a little.
To end this post on writery things, I give you, in the third place: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/books/review/the-writer-in-the-family.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1
I don’t, in fact, agree with a lot of it, but then I’ve also never been a member of the standard family, with growing-up children I’m somehow part responsible for and all that, so my view is skewed. But I love the exchange: ‘Would I have read anything you’ve written?’ from some clueless dweeb you’ve just been introduced to, and Rosenblatt’s reply, ‘How should I know?’ I’m going to remember that one.‡
But the paragraph that had me in hysterics is the one about E L Doctorow trying to write an excuse slip for his daughter, who had missed school the day before. YEEEEEEEEEEEES. This is exactly what happens when you pull your specialised, carefully conditioned, writery bits out of the rarefied atmosphere of fiction and try to make them produce a grocery list or a thank-you note or an email to the department store that sent you a toaster instead of an electric blanket. Yesssss.
Hee hee hee hee hee hee. Which is a much better place to both come in and go out.
* * *
* Which should be recategorised anyway as writer’s repetitive stress injury
** Peter did this more than once
*** Is this writing as craft rather than art? Sometimes you don’t want to be engaged. Sometimes you just want to sit quietly and drink your tea and read a rose catalogue.^ Sometimes you want your chair to have four legs and a seat and not be a dazzling heirloom for the ages when you stagger downstairs in the morning and reach for your electric kettle.
^ Credit card engagement is a different issue.
† Even Charles Dickens, for example^, took holidays, and the quality of his writing is drastically variable, from the mind-explodingly tremendous to the diabolically awful.
^ I’m reading Claire Tomalin’s biography of him right now. I knew he was—erm—a complex character and not all of it good, but the thing I probably find the most fascinating is how narrow the line is between socially aware and engaged literary genius with some personal issues and WHINING, SELF-ABSORBED COMPLETE TICK . . . who by the way wrote some fabulous stories and did some amazing things. You may have guessed I incline to the latter opinion. It’s all about him, all of the time. And I don’t deal well with the sins of the extrovert.
Fascinating book however. I recommend it. And it’s not that Dickens didn’t have to cope with more than one human’s fair share of bulltiddly: he did. I’d have drowned his unspeakable father, for example, and I’d’ve had apoplexy if I’d been trying to earn a living as a writer back in the days before there was an international copyright law. I am riveted by the standard accusations thrown at Dickens when he had the balls—and good for him—to stand up and say stealing people’s work is wrong. He is being greedy, sneered the newspapers, and he should be grateful that people want to read his books. Plus ça frelling frelling change. And we’ve even got, or anyway had, international copyright law for quite a while—although the whole e thing is busy taking that to bits too. Greedy? Grateful? How, pray tell, are us storytellers supposed to earn a living? How do you think we frelling eat and pay the mortgage if we don’t sell our stories? Leprechaun? Printing press in the cellar for counterfeit money? Wealthy indulgent lover? What? What? I get really bored with people who think that all writers are wealthy, but at least these people are acknowledging that being a professional writer involves money. The people who think that writers^ are supposed to give it away and be grateful if anyone wants it . . . should frelling try it some time. Show me someone who is giving it away and doesn’t have either another, paying job, a trust fund, or a joint bank account with a Fortune 500 CEO, and I’ll show you a hologram, an alien from another dimension, or a homeless bag person who is about to die of starvation.
Which is more or less where we came in . . .
^ I assume that painters, sculptors, jewellery-makers, knitters and so on have the same problem. Maybe it’s that we work in words that it seems to me we get so much (wordy) stick. Maybe it’s just that I’m a writer, I notice writer-aimed stick more.
†† Including a gratifying rant from our own Maren. Thank you. And a horrified fellow-feeling my-fingers-are-shrivelling from Jodi, who had already seen the article.
††† And to you who tweeted me about this too: hellhounds would love the circus, once they got a little used to the uproar. And if New Thing’s heroine can haul a rose-bush around in a pot, why can’t I? I can put it (or them) on the steps of my trailer every time we stop.
Peter, I admit, is a problem. I don’t think he’d like the circus at all.
‡ I can hear Merrilee clutching her forehead.
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Blah blah blah blah SICK blah blah blah SICK blah blah blah blah SICK. Blah. SICK.
I’m actually better—sort of—but not all that much, and after hurtling hellhounds twice and doing some work, now by evening blog time I’m pretty much cole slaw again.* Not being able to breathe really takes it out of you. And I have a cough to frighten small children. Hell, it frightens me. I have to stop and lean against a wall, or a hellhound, if that’s what’s available. I’m also at the my-nose-has-been-running-for-so-long stage that smiling makes the entire centre of my face crack painfully. My ears and forehead throb. My stomach doesn’t want to know about food. Since I realised last night was going to be grim I left the radio on—Peter sleeps with the radio on pretty much every night which I am sure has a detrimental effect on the quality of his sleep but we won’t get into that here but I close the book and turn the light and the radio off in the same habitual gesture. Last night I left the radio on and it was comforting in the dark unpleasant hours.** And then—I can’t remember if it was at 6 or 7 o’clock—it suddenly got all chatty. I am an obsessive listener to Radio 3, which is classical, with a few unappreciated-by-me forays into jazz, and they don’t do the in your face DJ thing on classical stations. But they can get fatuous*** and they can certainly get garrulous. And apparently the given wisdom is that people staggering around getting ready for their office jobs want chat. Uggh. People late (even for them) in bed with demonic head/upper respiratory colds do not want chat. Blah. Sick.
It took me three tries to get out of bed at all and then I only remained upright long enough to shiver downstairs and let poor patient hellhounds out of their crate. Then I went back to bed (which was popular with hellhounds†). It was after noon by the time I managed to make and drink my first cup of perilously strong tea . . . gods. It’s PERFECT gardening weather†† and I’m too wasted to take advantage. My fritillaries are blooming away like anything, my robin is still sitting on her nest and my new roses came three days ago and I haven’t been up to anything but ripping the packages open and making sure the roots are damp. Today I at least got them heeled in and roses will last a surprisingly long while merely heeled in . . . ahem . . . although planting them would be preferable.
Blah. Sick. Blah.
I’m also reading another perfect book for low lurgified distraction—Patricia C Wrede’s A MATTER OF MAGIC, which many if not most of you know since many (if not most) of you have recommended it.††† And now, if you’ll forgive me, I think I’ll go lie down again and read some more of it.‡ Well, no, first I’m going to go back to the cottage and bring the frelling sweet peas indoors again.
Blah blah blah blah SICK blah blah blah blah blah STILL FRELLING THRICE BLASTED SICK BLAH.
* * *
* And I’m sure my mayonnaise has gone off.
** I can’t believe the timing of my electric blanket going phut. I’d managed to buy a new one before the lurgy prostrated me . . . but I presently haven’t got the energy to spare to rip the bed apart^ and put the freller on.
^ It’s an under-your-bottom-sheet one, which seems to be standard over here, and what I’ve got used to.
*** As during the week of non-stop, all Schubert all the time, which is finally over. I love a lot of Schubert, and Schubert lieder make me want to get to German sooner with Nadia^, but not continuously, relentlessly, day after day after day after frelling day.
^ Although this is a classic case of, we have Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, so why? Stick to Jingle Bells, honey.
† Oh reckless dog owner beware of precedent.
†† Except for the fact that we’re having ANOTHER FROST TONIGHT and since I didn’t know that earlier everything at the cottage is still outdoors . . . but in fact I probably will get home earlier than usual tonight. Like . . . maybe now.
††† For any of you who read the originals, it’s a one-volume of Mairelon the Magician and The Magician’s Ward.
‡ But may I just say that it amuses me that yesterday’s blog, preoccupied as it was with not only handbells but the miseries of illness, roused comments about what on the forum? Knitting. Most of you remembered to say off handedly ‘oh, hope you feel better soon!’ but clearly your focus was on the knitting.
Lurgy Reading
I am tired. I am tired. I am tired of this lurgy.* I am also garblattingly tired of schlepping plants indoors and then back outdoors. We may or may not have had a frost last night—I think we didn’t quite, but it was near enough to be putting towels on the windscreen** and I certainly brought an awful frelling lot of frelling plants indoors last night. And slapped them down on a plastic sheet on the sitting room carpet. My dahlia cuttings haven’t even arrived yet and I can already pretty much fill up the sitting room carpet. This may say more about the size of my sitting room*** than the number of my tender young plantlings . . . but it’s still way too much haulage of leaking pots ARRRRGH.† And then you get to do it all over again in reverse the next morning. BORING. BORING BORING BORING. Especially the part about tripping over hellhounds, who want to go out themselves. I haven’t yet dropped a pot and sprayed the kitchen with wet compost and terra cotta shards . . . but it could happen. Especially when I’m already kind of seeing double from the lurgy. And I had to bring the little green frellers all in again tonight. . . . with Chaos standing in the middle of the floor looking outraged because we wasted good hurtling time last night doing the same stupid thing. I couldn’t agree more.††
Meanwhile I’ve spent a lot of time on the sofa, reading. I’ve thrown several books at the wall in the patented hellgoddessy way, and there are at least a couple that I will probably tell you about later, but the one I finished today which is perfect for someone with a lurgy, is TO BE A CAT by Matt Haig. It’s a kids’ book, the hero is having his twelfth birthday on this the worst day of his life, and it’s written in rather deceptively simple language. But it’s full of good stuff for any age with a sense of humour.
Barney Willow’s parents divorced a couple of years ago, which was bad enough, but what was really awful is that ‘ . . . two hundred and eleven days ago (Barney was counting) his dad disappeared altogether. He’d never seen him since, except in dreams. . . . This was the first birthday he’d had without his dad being there.
‘If that wasn’t bad enough it was also the first birthday he’d had at his rubbish new school. And school meant Miss Whipmire, the head teacher from hell. He didn’t know if that was her exact address, but it definitely shared the same postcode.’ And then there is the bully, Gavin Needle, who thoroughly has it in for Barney, and Miss Whipmire, who seems to hate Barney even more than all her other students, blames Barney. Even a best friend named Rissa Fairweather who lives on a barge (with no TV although her mum does make fabulous carrot cake) and loves astronomy can’t entirely make up for these defects.
And the title? Things get so bad for Barney that he wishes—really really hard—that he was a cat so he didn’t have to be Barney Willow any more.
You can guess this does not go well.
It’s a cracking good story anyway and all the stuff that I, as a cranky elderly person who has read many, many, many evil-teacher stories before, and even a certain number of magical-cat stories, was sitting there thinking, well, what about—? are all answered satisfactorily. But the best part (to this cranky elderly person who has perhaps spent too much time reading) is some of the throwaway stuff:
‘He saw books with spines as tall and wide as doors, large names on them: William Shakespeare. Leo Tolstoy. Mark Twain. Voltaire. Barney had no idea that all four of these very famous dead writers had, at one time or another been cats. Or that one of them had even admitted to having been a cat. (That one was Mark Twain, who had written very brilliant books about Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, who were both boys but acted more like wild and adventurous cats and were based on Mark Twain’s own early years as a tomcat . . . ) . . . most of the really brilliant people who have ever lived have been cats . . . because many of the great cat geniuses, in cat form, get very fed up of not having the kind of wiggly thumbs and fingers that let you write a book.’
Also, Rissa is totally cool. ‘This isn’t just weird, she told herself. This is over the hill from weird.’
And I love the illustrations.††† There’s also a little repeated series of a leaping cat in the lower-right-hand corners of the pages so if you run your thumb over the edges really fast so they fan down, it looks like a cat really is leaping.
Also . . . you know there’s the whole business of how much blood and gore are suitable for kid readers. I can’t deal with horror in most of its graphic modern incarnations, but on the other hand the whitewashing of fairy tales because they’ll be too distressing for children makes me crazy because it is utterly wrong-headed. There’s enough real blood and real death and real cruelty in TO BE A CAT to give it an edge that—particularly as it’s also so funny—it would be less engaging and effective without.
I liked it a lot. I recommend it.‡ And I know Matt Haig is a big deal for some of his other books, but this is the first one I’ve read. I’ll have to go look him up now. I need more books on The TBR Pile.
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* It’s all Hannah’s fault! She left it here! And her grovelling from three thousand miles away does not appease me in the slightest! . . . Moan.
** You would not believe the racket an ice-scraper makes at mmph o’clock in the morning
*** Made a good deal smaller, of course, by three walls of bookshelves
† It’s like how many ways can you confound yourself? We haven’t had rain in months so of course you’re watering everything by hand. And the best way to be sure you’ve watered thoroughly enough is if it oozes a little out the bottom end. This is not a problem outdoors.
†† I have no idea how I’m getting hellhounds hurtled, but the odd and surprising truth is that I am. This is one of those absolute confirmations about coping with ME—whatever your level of capacity is, you have to use it frelling DAILY or you will, by the gods, lose it. And if you do use it to the absolute last whisker there will (probably) be some left even when you’re going through a bad patch, or a lurgy. I wonder if they’ve done any studies of people with ME or similar having holidays? I’d say the ten days or a fortnight doing nothing kind of holiday is positively harmful to someone like me, but this is probably one of the many, many things that varies with the individual. I think the trick is recognising where the last whisker is. You go over your limit and you will pay. But if you don’t tap yourself out, tomorrow you will have less to tap.
††† By Pete Williamson http://www.petewilliamson.co.uk/books.php
‡ This is not an April Fool.
Three (or four) links
Read this: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/mar/12/twitters-tales-of-sexism
I’ve wasted some time trying to annotate it a bit from my own life. Linda Grant is only a year older than I am; the world she’s talking about is the world I grew up in too. But this kind of thing is—still—one of my hot buttons, and I’m tired, having had my head down for a protracted period over SHADOWS* today, and not feeling 100% after the friendly weekend visit from the ME either. So I keep getting to the gibbergibbergibber *&^%$£”!!!!!! point, hitting ‘delete’, and starting again. I would do more political stuff in the blog if I didn’t have such a short fuse—but I arguably don’t have a fuse, I just go from jolly la-la-la to global meltdown in the wink of an eye. And I don’t have the time or the strength to support that kind of blog.
So, if you haven’t already read what Linda Grant says, read it now, and assume that I’ve got stories to go with most of these. Arrrrrgh.
* * *
And then, speaking of How the World Changes, Sometimes in Ways That Don’t Make You Entirely Happy even if You’ve Known It Was Coming:
This has been all over the place—I had like six tweets with links to six different articles in the space of half an hour. I’m interested that they’re saying that Wikipedia is generally considered reliable; I use it, but if and when they have to start charging for it, I’ll stop using it, because their hands-off policy on editorial bias is not okay with me, on the subject, for example, of homeopathy, which article is pretty blatant about saying it’s bulltwaddle. It isn’t. But any alteration toward the positive is smacked down at once.**
But I grew up worshipping the Britannica and—I’ve told you this story—with my tiny advance for BEAUTY, my very first published novel, I bought . . . two bookcases and a Britannica.*** And I’ve been buying the yearbooks ever since. That’s a lot of yearbooks. Peter will be delighted if these stop, which I assume they will too. But . . . the passing of an era, oh. . . . I am less nostalgic for the paper encyclopaedia than I might be because the instant-update online thing is completely persuasive. But the fact that this is the way world now is—pretty well incredibly different than thirty-four years ago when I bought my Britannica—is a little vertiginous. And I still want a copy of the—eleventh edition, is it?—for what I suppose amounts to nostalgia. But I have an old two-fat-volume eighteen-sixty-something Pears Cyclopedia which I love to bits†. You’re not going to get the same picture of the contemporary world thirty-four years from now from a daily updated on line encyclopaedia, even if it keeps chronological records—although perhaps the world will have changed incredibly again by then.††
* * *
Third link, and returning at last to the frivolous, where I am (perhaps) less likely to get myself in trouble:
http://www.vulture.com/2012/03/john-carter-doomed-by-first-trailer.html
Um. I kind of liked the first trailer, although I was seeing it on a laptop screen and not in a theatre. It wasn’t totally in my face trying to bully me with how clever it was and how much money it had spent on its special effects—even if how our hero woke up on Mars was a little obscure to me. Has anyone actually seen this epic-disaster-epic? I’ve seen three or four reviews, each one breathless to outdo the last in bludgeoning this film-like object into paste. But then I’m one of these old people who has read Burroughs’ John Carter books and hasn’t seen every science fiction and fantasy movie since STAR WARS. I might be the deluded director’s target audience.††† I wanted to like this film. Didn’t Michael Chabon write the screenplay?!? The Pulitzer-Prize-winning novelist who takes comics and SF&F seriously?‡ I still do want to like it, although it begins to look like one of those feats painfully accomplished for inclusion in GUINESS WORLD RECORDS: I ate 1,000,000,000 chocolate chip cookies at one sitting! I LIKED Andrew Stanton’s John Carter of Mars!
My problem, from looking at the trailers, however, is that the hero looks like a git. Sigh. So I’m not the target audience after all. . . .
* * *
* Yes. It and I are running late. Now shut up and go away. I’m busy.
** Note that the Britannica online is pretty negative too . . . and also just wrong. However. This is another of those political swamps I stay out of to maintain my fragile mental health.
*** Which was as far as the tiny advance would reach.
† Although it was already pretty much in bits when I bought it for $1 at a garage sale twenty years or so ago
†† But if ‘incredibly’ is going to involve plugs in the back of my neck, I’ll pass.
††† It is possibly relevant that I hated THOR. If I stick to the minority opinion, then I have quite a good chance of liking JOHN CARTER.
‡ And wrote The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, which is better than Kavalier and Clay