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. 

* * *

* 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.

In the first place:  

http://a2.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-ash4/s320x320/423615_272724886138698_100002035654088_610973_443590055_n.jpg

 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: 

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/business/in-e-reader-age-of-writers-cramp-a-book-a-year-is-slacking.html?_r=1

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.

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.

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.             

* * *

* 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.

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: 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/mar/13/encyclopedia-britannica-halts-print-publication?newsfeed=true

http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/13/after-244-years-encyclopaedia-britannica-stops-the-presses/ 

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

My stomach is better.  But that may be because the ME came roaring in and took over, which is what it does.  In this case I think I’d rather be bone tired than sick and dizzy but I’d really rather not be either.  But merely tired usually permits lying on the sofa covered in hellhounds* and reading and this is clearly to be preferred over eyes that don’t focus and running to the bathroom a lot.  However aside from the considerable entertainment derived from watching Oisin packing up his fancy electronic organ and its 1,000,000,000,000,000 feet of wiring and its 1,000,000,000 component parts this afternoon for the wedding he’s playing tomorrow in a tiny organ-free church, and which I’m sure I could spin out into 1000 words if I had more available brain**, I have done nothing blogworthy today, so I thought I’d suggest a few books for you to read the next time you’re trapped on the sofa with hellhounds.*** 

WONDER, R J Palacio

Anyone plugged into the kiddie lit world will already know about this one;  it’s making a big splash on both sides of the Atlantic right now.  It’s about a boy named Augie who knows he’s ordinary—on the inside.  “ . . . But I know ordinary kids don’t make other ordinary kids run away screaming in playgrounds.  I know ordinary kids don’t get stared at wherever they go. . . . I won’t describe what I look like.  Whatever you’re thinking, it’s probably worse. . . . Next week I start fifth grade.  Since I’ve never been to a real school before, I am pretty much totally and completely petrified.  People think I haven’t gone to school because of the way I look, but it’s not that.  It’s because of all the surgeries I’ve had.  Twenty-seven since I was born. . . .  I’m much stronger now, though.  The last surgery I had was eight months ago, and I probably won’t have to have any more for another couple of years.”  Even that little snippet should give you an idea how immediately convincing and appealing Augie’s voice is.  WONDER is about how that first year in an ordinary school goes for a boy who is only ordinary on the inside.  (And then again maybe he’s not so ordinary on the inside either.)  The majority of the book is told by Augie, but several other people take their turns:  I particularly like his sister, Via. 

Here’s an interview with Palacio:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/feb/19/rj-palacio-interview-wonder 

MOCKINGBIRD, Kathryn Erskine 

This came out in 2010 and was a National Book Award winner, Young People’s Literature.  The back flap about the author begins:  ‘As a resident of Virginia, Kathryn Erskine was devastated by the 2007 shootings at Virginia Tech.  In the aftermath of this tragedy, Kathryn was driven to understand how community and family—particularly families with special-needs children—dealt with this violent event, and how our lives might be different if we understood each other better.’ . . . Um.  So, this is to tell any of you who either have or would have instantly put the book back on the shelf before you caught a fatal dose of worthiness, that it’s a good read and a good story—that the moral rises gracefully and organically from the story.  And furthermore, it’s funny, although most of the laughing hurts.  Caitlin, the ten-year-old narrator, has Asperger’s.  Her mother died when she was three years old, but her older brother, Devon, has always explained the world to her—but now her brother is dead too, as the result of a horrifying event like the Virginia Tech shootings, and her father (and small blame to him) has gone to pieces.  It’s Caitlin who has to figure stuff out, and help both herself and her dad figure out how to go on without Devon. 

            “ . . . The librarian won’t let you take the Physicians’ Desk Reference home even if you hide it in the middle of thirty-two books.  She says you have to leave it in the reference section so others might enjoy it.  I don’t think I should have to leave it in the reference section just so others might enjoy.  I know I will enjoy it.  But she says that’s not the point.  She never does tell me what the point is but Devon says sometimes you just have to do what a teacher or librarian says even if you think it’s stupid.  Also he says you shouldn’t tell them out loud that you think it’s stupid.  That’s a secret that stays in your head only.”

http://www.nationalbook.org/nba2010_ypl_erskine.html 

IN THE SEA THERE ARE CROCODILES, the true story of Enaiatollah Akbari, (by) Fabio Geda (translated from the Italian by Howard Curtis †) 

 This came out last year.  All three of these books nail you with voice right off:  ”The thing is, I really wasn’t expecting her to go.  Because when you’re ten years old and getting ready for bed, on a night that’s just like any other night . . . with the familiar sound of the muezzins calling the faithful to prayer from the tops of the minarets, just like anywhere else . . . I say ten, although I’m not entirely sure when I was born, because there’s no registry office or anything like that in Ghazni province—like I said, when you’re ten years old, and your mother, before putting you to bed . . . says, There are three things you must never do in life, Enaiat jan, for any reason.  The first is use drugs. . . . Promise me you won’t do it.

           “I promise. 

           “The second is use weapons . . . never pick up a gun, or a knife, or a stone, or even the wooden ladle we use for making qhorma palaw, if that ladle can be used to hurt someone.  Promise.

           “I promise.

           ”The third is cheat or steal. . . . You must be hospitable and tolerant to everyone.  Promise me you’ll do that.

           “I promise.

           “Anyway, even when your mother says things like that . . . and starts talking about dreams . . . if you hold a wish up high, any wish, just in front of your forehead, then life will always be worth living . . . says all these things in a strange low voice . . . it doesn’t occur to you that what she’s really saying is, Khoda negahdar, goodbye.”

            Enaiatollah is an Afghan boy, from a tiny village.  His mother has brought him to Quetta, a town on the Pakistani border . . . and left him there.  Alone.

             You get that far, and you have to read the rest, don’t you?  You have to find out why, and what happens.   

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/in-the-sea-there-are-crocodiles-by-fabio-geda-trans-howard-curtis-2313603.html 

             People are different.  No they aren’t, they’re the same.  And Enaiat’s mum has the right idea. 

* * *

* Who are, fortunately, willing to trade an abbreviated hurtle for more sofa time. 

** Yes I have been applying myself to SHADOWS.  At one-quarter speed.  Siiiiiigh.  At least when you’re watching someone else coil up 1,000,000,000,000,000 feet of wiring no one is measuring the speed of your watching.  

*** I’ve found that knitting over hellhounds is not really very satisfactory.  Well, you can knit squares.  But very long leg-warmers trail over said hellhounds and cause restiveness.^  Or possibly this is merely an indication of my lack of experience.  Or my lack of spinal flexibility.  Although speaking of squares . . . I’m going to have to start carrying around two knitting projects in my knapsack.  I’m getting tired of fixing the mistakes in my leg-warmers that I made while knitting at stoplights.  I still have to look at what I’m doing for ribbing.  

^ And yes, I am severely tempted to design my own hellhound coat with attached leggings.  But that will have to wait till I know enough what I’m doing to do . . . something that no one who knew what she was doing would do. 

† Because translators don’t get enough credit.  Says the woman working on (maybe) her second hundred words of Japanese.

Happy Leap Year Day.

         Because we were a little short of hurtling yesterday I took hellhounds well out of town on one of our epic walks this morning.  It’s one we haven’t been on in yonks and yonks and they’ve relocated the freller which you aren’t really allowed to do with legal public footpaths but at least it’s still there at all.  The best relocated ones are when we’re three-quarters through the long loop back to Wolfgang and we do not want to turn around, and Sleeping Beauty’s hedge rears up in front of us.  The standard bad-attitude farmer’s tactic is ploughing right up to the edge so you have nowhere to walk, but you can at least flounder on.  Worse is the electric fence set three inches from the hedgerow.  We’ve negotiated a few of these too, with hellhounds on strangle-short lead and clearly wondering what’s sent me off my nut this time.  Chaos nonetheless managed once to sting himself and he turned around and looked at me reproachfully, the ungrateful cur.   Possibly my favourite is the dog-impassable stile.  I don’t like lifting forty-odd-pound hellhounds over these things* and there’s one chest-high one** that is a nightmare.  I haven’t been that way in a while, to see if the frelling city council was sufficiently buried under infuriated dog walkers to have had the wretched thing altered.  Arrgh.    

            But I digress.  I never got very lost and the available paths were perfectly adequate, they were just kind of in the wrong places.  And there’s one long stretch of open field where hellhounds were blistering away in all directions, checking back with me a good half a second before I panicked***, and blistering away again.  This meant by the end of our epic walk . . . I wasn’t quite looking around for poles to rig a travois†, but I was beginning to wonder if it would come to that. 

            The rest of the day was pretty much head down over SHADOWS.  No, it is emphatically not going to be done tomorrow.  But it is moving along.  Just not quite fast enough.  I was supposed to go bell ringing tonight but I immolated this desire on the altar of getting paid sooner.††

            The good news is that Wolfgang has a brand-new 2012 tax disc yaaaaaay.†††  Now all I have to do is remember to put it on.  Ahem.  The other thrilling news is that someone emailed me the details of the Japanese country cookbook she was morally certain was the one I was quacking about the other night . . . and she’s right.  More yaaaaay.  This was several days ago.‡  I instantly went on line ‡‡ and found a clean copy, since it’s out of print and I have a deep dislike of cooking through other people’s splashes and maculations, wrote the bookseller a query . . . and didn’t receive an answer.  I didn’t receive an answer to my follow-up either.  So tonight I capitulated and applied to ungleblarging amazon, which as we know has everything. . . and I now have a second Japanese cookbook on its way. 

librarykat 

My Japanese mother has to deal with the (she thinks) drastic changes in the Japanese language; she left Japan in the late 1950s after she married my dad. He was stationed there again from 1961-64, 

I was there then.  Shall we play the silly game of did we pass each other on the street?  We were in Yokosuka for the first year and a half— ’61 to ’62—and then Tokyo for the rest. 

and since then she’s just gone back a few times to visit family. It’s even worse for the Japanese in Hawaii- their great (and multiple great) grandparents left Japan in the late 1800s, so many Hawaii-born Japanese speak an archaic Japanese, and in dialects that have almost disappeared in Japan. 

This sounds a bit like the Appalachians?, where up till recently, since I don’t think there’s much untouched back country left, there were isolated areas where they still spoke the Queen’s English—Elizabeth I, that is, not II. 

I remember a co-worker in the library system who hosted a Japanese college student back in 1992 – that student laughed at my co-worker’s Japanese, which was fluent but so old-fashioned the student could hardly understand her. My husband was teased by his great-aunt and cousins when he visited Japan as a teenager; same thing – his Japanese was not only old-fashioned, but also too polite, his cousins informed him. 

This is one of the things that keeps stirring in the back of my mind as I plug on through my modern lessons.  I don’t remember enough to be able to cite examples but that’s certainly my impression.  I’m also sure—well, nearly sure—that I was told fifty years ago that there were five levels of politeness, although you probably wouldn’t need the most extreme two they existed.  Modern lessons only even mention three and rarely deal with the third . . . and yet school lessons are always more polite than what you’re going to hear on the street.  

When I lived in Japan as a young girl, the kids in the military dependents’ school sang a little ditty to the tune of “London Bridge is falling down” – moshi moshi ano ne, ano ne, ano ne; moshi moshi ano ne, a, so desu ka. 50 years later, I can’t get this out of my head! Apparently it’s called “Denwa Uta” – Telephone Song. Translates roughly as “hello, uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh; hello, uh-huh, ah, is that so” 

Oh gods I haven’t thought of this in . . . fifty years.  Yes.  Oh dear.  Yes.  I was in one of those military dependents’ schools, and . . . well, the other kids sang it.  Even then I was uneasy about the whole dissing another person’s culture thing, and I wasn’t sure if that’s what was happening or not.

Funny thing, though, when my mother talked on the phone with her friends, her side of the conversation often sounded just like that! 

YES.  I loved this when I heard it.  But I was always too timid to ask a real Japanese person for details. . . . 

* * *

* And to think I complain when hellhounds wish to skip meals. 

** What do you do if you’re short?  And have three Newfoundlands? 

*** This involves standing in the middle of the field whimpering and chewing on your knuckles and remembering the old lurcher rule that your dog will come back, but it will come back to the place it left you, and staring around for two little dots appearing on the horizon and hurtling toward you till you can recognise them as hellhounds.  Mine streak up to me, goose me energetically, and stare around hopefully, willing me not to put them back on lead yet. 

† It’s pretty warm.  I could have lashed my coat between the poles.  With a combination of the bits of green garden string I always have in my pocket^ and the wire from my frelling mono earpiece which would then give me the excuse/impetus to buy another one preferably that does not make me crazy.  I’ve been complaining about listening to one stereo earphone for months—listening to chaos theory or Japanese language lessons this way isn’t bad, but listening to music is dire—because I like to have some warning when we’re about to be mugged by off-lead Fluffy, which requires one ear free to detect the panting breath and thundering feet of approach.  I haven’t been able to find anything plausible online in the UK^^ and then Peter strolled into the local ironmongers a few weeks ago . . . and came home with a mono earpiece.  Calloo callay.  Except it’s one of these gods*&^%$£”!!!!frelling D-ring things that fits entirely over your ear AND I HAAAATE IT.  Between glasses, earrings and hair there isn’t room for it anyway.  ARRRRRGH.   But I do hear Fluffy coming, and I’m not always standing on the wire to the other earpiece after I’ve bent over to pick up freshly delivered crap and the wretched thing has fallen out of my pocket again. 

^ Except occasionally when I want one and there aren’t any 

^^ America is apparently rotten with mono earpieces, well how nice for you 

†† Also it’s a last Wednesday of the month which means that Wild Robert has a practise for us scum at some arbitrary tower while Forza is taken over by demiurges and celestial beings.  This month’s arbitrary tower is in New Zealand or something.  I didn’t think I could drive that far.  

††† I know you can do it online.  I already said I knew you could do it online.  I don’t want to.^  Especially when I have a perfectly good husband who walks past the post office every day because it amuses him to buy his newspaper in person rather than have it delivered.  Although I hadn’t known, till you and Nadia told me, that the database would already know that Wolfgang is insured, even if I’ve lost the damn form. 

^ And ‘old’ is a relative term.  In my case it means I’m old enough to say ‘I don’t want to’.  This middle-class first-world society I, and I assume most of you, live in is wildly overloaded with stuff to do, learn, experience, understand, seek, puzzle out, encounter, participate in, organise and reorganise your life by and blah blah blah blah blah.  I don’t want to know how my computer works.  I just want it to start when I turn the key in the little hole.  Etc.  If Peter stops walking past the post office to buy his newspaper every day, I promise to learn to get my task disc online. 

‡ I’m still waiting for A SIMPLE ART to arrive.  Don’t worry.  You will be the first to know. 

‡‡ See?  I’m perfectly capable of going online when I’m sufficiently motivated.^

^ This didn’t do me a lot of good with the mono earbud however.

Well I’m NOT buying the book on Japanese cooking because they frelling CANCELLED my order.  And you know why they cancelled  it . . . ?

            I got the flat official notification from amazon first and assumed it was just that it had been sold to someone else fifteen minutes before I’d ordered it.  In the used-book world this happens all the time, of course, because there’s usually only ONE copy available.  But then I received an email directly from the bookshop.  They’ve cancelled it because the book is TOO BIG AND HEAVY to ship overseas:  the postage is prohibitive.

            What the frelling hell has gone wrong with the world, and specifically the international postal system, that we can no longer ship books ANYWHERE in the world?*  We’re talking total screaming meltdown here, epic tantrum, total refusal to accept reality and the status quo.  There’s a lot I don’t like about our modern world** but some things are supposed to be SACRED.  Ready availability of shipping for the written word is supposed to be one of them.***

            Meanwhile . . . I came to the end of my beginners’ Japanese audiobook on Pooka today.  They have a web site, but I bought it from audible.co.uk: 

http://www.audible.co.uk/pd/ref=sr_1_6?asin=B004FTSX4M&qid=1329955490&sr=1-6

And I got to the end, pressed the button and . . . ahem . . . started over at the beginning again.  I have nothing to compare it to, of course, since I had (maybe) ten words of Japanese going in†, but it seems to me a very good introductory course.  It kept my ricocheting interest††, at any rate, and I’m not the easiest audience.  It gives you native speakers doing little as it were real-world conversations using the vocabulary for that lesson and then an American fluent in Japanese and a Japanese native speaker who teaches it having little chats with each other about Japan and Japanese as they do a breakdown and reiteration of what you’re supposed to be covering.  You can’t—well, I can’t—possibly absorb the amount of information they’re flinging at you†††, but I found you can at least grasp it, so you would have a hope of memorising/inward-ing it if you put the necessary time in.  

            There are gleeps and lacunae of course.  But I liked that the teachers sounded like real human beings with a clue about what people need to know to use the language, and I liked that they try and tackle a bit of informal language and slang, and that they spend a lot of time trying to give you an idea of what the differences in the cultures are that are going to have immediate impact on you trying to speak Japanese to the Japanese.  Overall I recommend it—with the caveat that I have no way to check how accurate the information is.   But most of the little stuff, the inconsistencies and confusions that have tripped me up, I’ve been able to look up in—ahem—hard copy books I’ve bought.‡

             Two things remain awkward.   One of them is that if you go to innovative language learning dot com‡‡ and try to download your programme notes . . . well, I had problems, and I’m still having problems, although when I’ve emailed them they’ve answered, and I hope they will this time too.  And the notes themselves are a little messy, although some of that may be The World vs. The Printer interface which in my experience is always more or less aggrieved.‡‡‡ 

             The second problem . . . arrrggglllrrrrrggggaaaugh.  The second half of your lessons follows someone who is supposedly an American businesswoman through a trip to Japan.  Okay, I get it that they want a native Japanese speaker playing this woman—or let me say she sounds like a native Japanese speaker—so that us clueless learners are hearing Japanese as it should be spoken.  This is fine.  And I’m willing (mostly) to swing with some of the inconsistencies this tends to throw up—the stuff she knows (she says ‘um’ in Japanese, for example, which according to the lesson notes is ‘ano’ although it’s not in my dictionary) is a little erratic.  But the actress playing the role does it in this breathy hysterical little-girl manner that is UNBELIEVABLY ANNOYING.  Not to mention that it makes her sound not at all like a businesswoman—especially, let’s say, an American businesswoman who might conceivably be trying her hardest to appear cool and professional in a country a trifle still notorious for being traditional in terms of gender roles.  ‘Ashley’ is so annoying that . . . I may not make it through the second half of the programme again.  I’ll have to go back to quantum physics or something. 

* * *

* And while we’re at it, note that this is, or would have been, coming from the States, and postal rates are worse in the UK. 

**Starting with, oh, just at random, the relentless and persistent ads for losing belly fat and wrinkles, for whitening your teeth, and the latest range of bad judgement and missing the point that is the New New Twitter.  I even like Twitter.  But it is run by aliens who don’t like humans and are in a bad mood all the time. 

*** However my beginner’s kanji book did arrive.  Yeep yeep yeep yeep.  

† I now have at least twenty.  Unfortunately they’re not the twenty I need for SHADOWS.  

†† I will, I hope, pick up another 2% on this second go-through. 

†† Barring incidents of aggressive off-lead dogs 

††† Sometimes you do wonder who’s making the editorial decisions.  There’s a lesson toward the end where an American visitor stays with a Japanese couple at their home.  We’ve already been told firmly that if you visit someone you must take a gift.^  This woman does not appear to have brought a gift for her hosts.  The two teachers chat about this at the end of that lesson.  Why didn’t someone just write a gift into the script? 

^ This is one of those things that was true fifty years ago.  From my extremely unreliable memory, the thing that has changed the most is formality levels—which is echoed by some of the recent forum comments. 

‡ Which I’m not giving a live link to because it has an OBTRUSIVE voiceover introduction that I can’t see how to turn off 

‡‡ All right, I’m old fashioned.  I wanted them on PAPER so I could write notes in the margins.  I understand how to write notes in the margins on PAPER.

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/invisible-ink-no-110–peter-dickinson-6776955.html 

They certainly are too smart to be lost.  I admit it’s tricky about the language, but we’re all still reading Charles Dickens—and Mark Twain, who is regularly subjected to gratuitous attempts to clean him up, which of course ENTIRELY miss the point.  When Dickens was a racist, he meant it.* 

            I remember reading THE GLASS SIDED ANTS’ NEST for the first time** not long after it came out, which means I was still a teenager.  It totally blew me away—I had at that point never read anything that was such a combination of sharp intelligence and, well, thrills, it being a murder mystery and all.  I read all of the Pibble books, and (nearly) all the rest of Peter’s adult novels, some of them genre mysteries and some of them not, pretty much as they came out***.  What can I say.  He’s a brilliant writer.†  And maybe I’ll go on about this some more some other night, when I haven’t already written enough words to make a blog post and when I haven’t put myself back an hour I needed for SHADOWS by inadvertently starting to reread GLASS SIDED which I had responsibly pulled off the shelf merely to check the original pub date. . . . 

* * *

* I’ve recently written an introduction^ to a Classic Work of Fantasy Literature^^ that has exactly this same problem and I knew going in that I was going to be blunt about it.  Here it is, I would say, and there’s no rationalising it away.  But I love the book anyway and I hope you will too.  Fortunately the editor agreed with me.  And this is my take on this kind of thing:  there probably are exceptions, but as a principle I would say that you don’t mess with what the author wrote.  Introductions, notes, flap copy, author bios and so on can annotate what needs it.  Again there are probably exceptions but generally speaking you’re already aware of historical context by the time you run up against something that makes you go ‘oh dear’—at which point you decide whether you can roll with it or not.  Generally speaking I will roll with racism and sexism—both kinds of sexism, genderism and sexual-orientation-ism—and, er, classism, that’s (say) a century old or more . . . and diminishingly put up with it the nearer it is to the present day.  I will pretty flatly not put up with it in any writer my age or younger, which means there are great swathes of modern literature, including F&SF^^^, that I won’t touch with a barge pole and, in some cases, make me froth at the mouth and wish to kill things. 

            I’m also aware that Twain’s hands aren’t clean either.  He was still a man of his time.  But I believe he was genuinely sending up the dishonesty and cruelty of the society Huck Finn found himself at odds with.  Do you play the Who would you like to have a cup of tea with? game, about characters in books?  (The rules of the game say they would cooperate.  Whether you’d get along with them or not however is open to delicious speculation.)  Who in HUCK FINN would you like to have a cup of tea with?  Me, it would be Jim.  Huck himself is only second.  

^ Which is another story.  Due to Circumstances Beyond My Control I found myself doing this at the end of January.  Yes.  This January.  It was Stimulating.  Not in a good way. 

^^ I’m not sure I’m allowed to talk about it in public yet, and I can’t check till business hours tomorrow and I want this piece about Peter to go up NOW.  I’ll certainly tell you when my intro comes out.

^^^ I’m a bit puzzled that Fowler+ says ‘whereas fantasies keep their timeless appeal, crime novels are subject to changes in society and language.’  What?  Do we have to cite any examples past . . . oh, say, HP Lovecraft?  ( . . . Edgar Rice Burroughs?  Robert E. Howard?  . . . JRR Tolkien?  I can’t read Burroughs or Howard any more, but I still read Lovecraft, who is grotesquely racist++, and Tolkien, who doesn’t get his knickers particularly in a twist about miscegenation+++, but all of whose good guys are white and a lot of whose bad guys are swarthy.)  And on the other side of the genre fence I don’t believe either Agatha Christie or Dorothy L. Sayers would win any awards for prescient political correctness and they’re still in print and, I believe, much loved.++++ 

+ Whose own books are a lot of fun and great reads, especially for those of us with a penchant for tangents.#  The Bryant and May series is London as You Have Never Seen It Before (and Rather Hope It Stays Between Book Covers).  http://www.bookreporter.com/authors/christopher-fowler 

# ahem.  ::whistles:: 

++ I belong to the faction that believes that part of why Lovecraft’s best creepy stuff is quite so effectively creepy is because he was so creepy a human being, with a menagerie of private demons.  This makes me sad.  Again, generally, I want to believe that the healthier a human being a writer is, the better they write.  So if Lovecraft hadn’t been a sick dude maybe he’d’ve written The Great American Novel. 

+++ Unless you want to count Saruman’s experiments with orcs, but that doesn’t give off miscegenation fumes to me.  I could be wrong. 

++++ Although not by me.  

** AAAAAUGH.  . . . And I’ve just spent the past hour reading . . . well, the first hour’s-worth of it again.  Several things strike me, very much as they struck me thirty-odd years ago:  how frelling intimidating I find it^:  too clever by half, with both an intellectual sparkle and a creativity to scare me silly.  The murder victim is—was—the chief of the remains of a primitive (black) New Guinea tribe who were moved to London to save what was left of them, by a (white) British woman who is nonetheless a member of the tribe.  (In what manner she is a member of the tribe is one of my favourite bits.  She’s also the character I want to have a cup of tea with.)  This tribe, the Kus, are fully developed, with a history and a society, with rituals and habits and points of view, and these are totally fascinating.

            The other thing about this book—and, for me, about all of the Pibble books—that glares out at you like a searchlight is how unpleasant most of the people are.^^  To me—and to the teenage American I once was—the reason the author gets away with the ‘wog’s and the ‘nig’s is because the people who use these terms are underlining their own reprehensibleness.  ‘Wog’ and ‘nig’ may have been in common usage in England in 1968—I wouldn’t know—but I’d bet on it that you weren’t demonstrating the finest flower of humanity by using them. 

^ I’m . . . what?  I’m married to the author?  You’re joking, right? 

^^ Peter has kind of a line in scintillatingly unpleasant people.  Most of the time I’m dazzled and drawn in and riveted by how plausible they are and how well the author understands them+.  Every now and then they just make me cry. 

            Pibble himself is a case in point.  I don’t like him.  I never liked him.  I don’t want to have a cup of tea with him.  But I like his bitter, skittery mind, his own awareness that his self-deprecation is half-real and half-resentful, and that (I would say) there’s a deep depressive streak underneath it all.  Yes.  I get this too well.  That I don’t like him makes this mix of comprehension and aversion all the more effective, all the more evocative, to me-the-reader.++ 

+ hmmm. 

++ Favourite Pibble novel?  Probably SLEEP AND HIS BROTHER.  But really I should reread all of them to be sure. . . . 

*** Up through into my era, that would be. 

† I didn’t discover his kids’ books until I was well dug in to the murder mysteries—over a decade later, in fact, and after BEAUTY was out and I was working in the Little, Brown children’s department, and lo, on their shelves, a row of Peter Dickinson novels.

I was climbing through eight hundred years and forty-six thousand miles of church history this evening, which is the system for gaining access to Forza’s ringing chamber, and thinking, you could want to join this tower for its scenic approach alone.  Or possibly as an exciting addition to your fitness programme.  I dragged myself through the last arrow slit, which is at the top of a spiral staircase so tight that even the outsides of the steps are only long enough for Flower Fairy feet, and collapsed fainting on the floor . . . next to Charlotte, who, by her gasping breaths, had clearly only just arrived before me—and who is also a visitor.  Maybe you get used to it.  Maybe the members have a secret lift. 

            I had spent a good bit of today telling myself briskly that I was going to Forza tonight** and that it was just another tower and the years, the miles, the thirty-seven bells and the Rhode-Island-sized ringing chamber*** are all incidental.  Then I got there.  I suppose the fact that your first view of it, every time, is from the floor with a red haze of oxygen deprivation and lactic acid build-up clouding your vision, may have a demoralising effect.  I lay there tonight thinking, well, I did bring my knitting . . . †

            And I did not get off to at all good start with a bell rope in my hands.  Which is to say I once again made a drooling foozle of Grandsire Triples.  ARRRRGH.  It was so drooling a foozle that even standing behind someone ringing it accurately I still couldn’t see what was frelling going on.  I’m going to develop a complex.  I can ring it perfectly well †† in other towers.  But put me in an 800-year-old abbey with a ringing chamber you need satnav to negotiate and I lose my mind.†††  ARRRRRRRRRRRRRGH.  If there had been a sword I’d’ve fallen on it.  You’d think in a ringing chamber the size of Rhode Island there would be at least one sword hanging on the wall somewhere, wouldn’t you?  But nooooooo.  Just peal boards,‡ notices,‡‡ and handbells.§  So I crawled away and hid in a dark corner.‡‡

            I was hauled back out again by a call for plain frelling hunt on ten.  I can’t do ANYTHING on ten.  Ten is too many, even when it’s just plain hunt.  The thing about ten is that you have to hold up and wait, every frelling blow, because there are so many other bells in the row to ring before it’s your turn again.  So it’s bong and then you stand there with your arms over your head thinking you could have got half a row of knitting done while you’re waiting§§, and then it’s bong again.  Also there’s always a bit of necessary speed control adjustment—not only do you ring more slowly going out than going in, you also ring closer over smaller bells and with more of a gap over bigger bells.§§§  When there are ten of the frellers all of this is very exaggerated, which makes it additionally difficult for notable foozlers like me. 

            And then . . . it wasn’t too bad.  I was actually getting the hang of the holding-up-and-WAAAAAAAITING thing.  I tied up my rope at the end without having a last despairing look round the walls for a sword.

            I hung around watching people ringing things I should to be able to ring, but probably can’t at Forza.#  And then finally, at the very end, I was offered a rope of my very own again, to ring bob minor.  Dear miserable gods of ringing and disgrace, I OUGHT to be able to ring bob minor.  I ought to be able to ring bob minor dead, drunk, asleep, and suffering severe lactic acid overload.##  

            And, indeed, I did ring it, despite being alive, sober, awake and maybe a little lactically acidulated.  I also did despite the fact that someone else was going wrong, this being the true sign of knowing a method, being able to hold your line when other people are failing to hold theirs.  I was not ringing it beautifully, but I was ringing it—and I was ringing it in one of Forza’s horrible queues, and since I was on the four I had several### people on each side, which means you need 358.5° vision like a horse (or a robin). 

            So.  Yaay.  There is hope.  I will go back next week.  Note that I am announcing that here in public.  I am going back to Forza for next Wednesday’s bell practise.

            And tomorrow I start the third draft of SHADOWS. 

* * *

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaand . . . look what arrived in the post today: 

* * *

* Maybe. 

** After all I had told the blog I was going to Forza tonight.  

*** Sure it’s a small state.^  It’s a VERY LARGE ringing chamber. 

^ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhode_Island 

†  I have half a leg warmer on my needles.  Maybe even two thirds of a leg warmer. 

†† sometimes 

††† Maybe I have lactic acid build-up in my brain. 

‡ My situation was made somewhat more precarious by the fact that the Scary Man was in charge tonight.  They have a kind of rotating ringing mastership and you don’t know till you get there on the night who’s going to be beating you with the knotted rope . . . I mean, who’s going to decide what methods to ring and who’s going to ring them, and whapping you up longside the head when you . . . I mean, who tries to wrest a modicum of order out of campanological chaos.  I confess to feeling a little fragile about ringing admins at the moment but he hasn’t done anything to me yet . . . except give me bells to ring and say I’m welcome to come again. 

‡‡ Full peals are these ghastly feats of ringing endurance, and significant ones frequently get painted on a varnished plank—the names of the method and the ringers, the date, and sometimes the time it took, which is usually around three and a half hours—and hung on the wall of the ringing chamber involved. 

‡‡‡ ‘On 18 February there will be a sale of all the umbrellas, bicycles,  spectacles, spectacle cases, mobile phones and small children left in the abbey grounds, proceeds to the after-service cake fund, the canons have been complaining about the shop biscuits’ 

§ I have no idea.  If I keep going, I’ll ask. 

§§ It’s almost as bad as that frelling stoplight on the way to Nadia. 

§§§ Yes.  It’s horrible physics.  And I don’t think you can even get any of the fun quantum stuff out of it.  It’s all that unpleasant fellow Newton. 

# I’ve told you on previous devastatingly humiliating evenings I’ve spent there:  in the first place because there are SO MANY FREAKING BELLS if you’re only ringing six or eight of them, they’re in a queue, not a circle, which is maddeningly confusing for those of us who are easily confused and are used to ringing in a CIRCLE,^ and also, I assume again because of the frelling SIZE of the ringing chamber there’s something peculiar about the acoustics.  Which in my case is to say I can’t hear a thing but a kind of smudgy blast of noise. 

^ Remember that you’re always looking frantically around for the next bell to follow.  Your sheer frelling depth perception is off if you’re suddenly looking along a line instead of across and around a circle.  

## Gemma was there tonight and said to me after, of course we can ring bob minor.  It’s ringing it on only one bell that is challenging.  

### All right, my definition of several is a little loose.