No, wait.  That was last year.

Instead of resolutions this year, I decided to list eleven books I want to read during 2011.  This isn’t in any particular order (or any type of organizational system at all, really).

I’m feeling the need to spend more quality time with my books.  As much as I love the Internet, I feel that my brain has become too easily distractable, if not a little mooshy around the edges.

All links go to the book’s amazon.com page

1. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (Michael Foucault)
2. Landscape and Memory (Simon Schama)
3. Lord of the Flies (William Golding)
4. All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age (Hubert Dreyfus)
5. A Briefer History of Time (Stephen Hawking)
6. The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature (H.P. Lovecraft)
7. Meditations (Marcus Aurelius)
8. Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War (Charles Bracelen Flood)
9. The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot’s Contemporary Prose (T. S. Eliot, Lawrence Raney) 
10. Something From the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s American (Laura Shapiro)
11. The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (Michael Pollan)

I was browsing Ravelry (which is always a dangerous occupation) looking for a lace scarf or shawl pattern, when I saw a project done with Madelinetosh Tosh Merino Light in a colorway called Calligraphy.  It hit my Vintage, Victorian and Retro buttons, so I ordered two hanks of it right away from The Loopy Ewe.

I was not disappointed.

The first thought that came to my mind was “Miss Havisham.” I usually think of her when the autumn rolls around.  A faded bridal bouquet.  The rustle of moldering silk.  Genteel decay.  Shadows.

I’m going to try the Deep Peace shawl/scarf with it.   Try is the operative word.  I know my knitting skills are up to it, but I don’t know about my ability to focus.  Another thing that comes around with the cooler weather is a bad case of Startitis.

Okay, then.  Have I thrown out enough distractions?  Bored the non-knitters to tears?  Maybe I should toss in another photograph, or a bit of poetry…. Whatever it takes to keep the readership down to the knitters and allows me to get to the raison d’etre of this particular post: hand-knit Christmas gifts.

If you’re one of my sisters-in-law (on Teh Husband’s side of the family), stop reading now.

Really.

We mean it.

Click here to continue reading and see the pretty pictures, unless you’re one of my sisters-in-law.  You don’t want this cat to go medieval on your butt now, do you?

]]> http://itsfuriousbalancing.com/index.php/2010/09/18/nothing-to-see-here-folks-its-only-yarn-move-along-please/feed/ 0 http://itsfuriousbalancing.com/index.php/2010/04/24/i-think-too-much/ http://itsfuriousbalancing.com/index.php/2010/04/24/i-think-too-much/#comments Sat, 24 Apr 2010 15:24:35 +0000 Laiane http://itsfuriousbalancing.com/?p=1524 I was surfing the Innernets this morning, reading the news and minding my own business, when an article in Slate started an avalanche in my Wee Little Brain.  I don’t think I’m capable of crafting an honest-to-God blog post out of this yet, but I thought I could amuse someone out there with my notes on my train of thought.  My utterly derailed Train of Thought.

I did go back over this inchoate list of notes to make it look somewhat formatted, and I added in my links.  It’s not all off the cuff.  Hopefully, there is a gram of sense in it.  Somewhere.  All I know is that I need to go back to my World War II/German history books and do a lot of re-reading.

————————————-

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
– George Santayana

William L. Shirer made these words the epigraph for his Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1959).

Note that I should finish Rise and Fall, former bedtime reading, having only made it up to the Anschluss.  I would read two pages before falling asleep, worry of breaking nose from hardcover book.

Don’t Ignore the Tea Party’s Toxic Take on History, Slate article by Ron Rosenbaum.

Tea Party movement = Ignorance of History.  Ignorance of meaning of the words socialism, Nazism, Communism, etc.

Rosenbaum is the author of Explaining Hitler, which is not a Hitler apologia apologist (determine noun, an historical apologist writes what?  Apologies, certainly, but there must be a better word, based on root apolog-.) My reading of that and of personal narratives of German citizens during the Hitler years has been met with unspoken condescension — usually from people unable to cope with anything that actually requires them to think about what they read.

These books are not a glorification or a rationalization of Hitler or of Nazi Germany, but stem from a need to understand; and I read them due to my own German descent and my interest in the complicated nature of human evil and in the lack of black/white dichotomies.

My fascination with shades of gray in the human psyche, how easy it is to push someone from sanity/rationality over the edge.  Incremental and unnoticed for the most part.  Similar to ease of losing humanity under extreme duress [lack of food, example of Primo Levi (?) -- or was it Elie Weisel (?) --in Auschwitz listening to father's death rattle in hopes of getting his stuff.  Boots?  Blanket?]; or not [1950's or 1960's psychological research study at U.S. college of prisoners vs. wardens - find link The Stanford Prison Experiment, 1971].

If it is that simple — simple as in “not complicated,” not “easy” — to become inhuman to others, how simple is it to manipulate the narrative to merely plant the seeds of a social movement that takes us backwards towards intolerance, racism, xenophobia, and worse.  A spiral into madness.

Weimar Republic, social history.  Analogous to today?  Tea Party, by their inability to understand history, is becoming a tool to lead us into a repeat of that not-understood history.

Three times Randolph Carter dreamed of the marvellous city, and three times was he snatched away while still he paused on the high terrace above it. All golden and lovely it blazed in the sunset, with walls, temples, colonnades, and arched bridges of veined marble, silver-basined fountains of prismatic spray in broad squares and perfumed gardens, and wide streets marching between delicate trees and blossom-laden urns and ivory statues in gleaming rows; while on steep northward slopes climbed tiers of red roofs and old peaked gables harbouring little lanes of grassy cobbles.

It was a fever of the gods; a fanfare of supernal trumpets and a clash of immortal cymbals. Mystery hung about it as clouds about a fabulous unvisited mountain; and as Carter stood breathless and expectant on that balustraded parapet there swept up to him the poignancy and suspense of almost-vanished memory, the pain of lost things, and the maddening need to place again what once had an awesome and momentous place.

H.P. Lovecraft, The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath

When I find myself under stress, when I’m overwhelmed, there are several things that always help me feel better.  One of the tried and true methods involves sundry combinations of chocolate, sugar, and caffeine.  Another is immersive computer gaming, fantasy RPG being my preferred genre.  The last, oldest, and perhaps the most important for my mental health is reading.

That should be re-reading, actually.  I go back to my favorite books; they’re comforting and familiar.  It is, perhaps, my choice of books that may appear… unusual.

I’ve been going back to savor the stories of H.P. Lovecraft.  Curling up with Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath or The Case of Charles Dexter Ward has helped maintain my equilibrium for the past week or so.

It’s the delicious, dense, antiquarian prose that draws me in.  I love the sound and shape of words for their own sake, and Lovecraft’s words are what lead to my idea for this post.

When I read, I use a large Post-It note as a bookmark.  I use this to keep track of interesting words I encounter in whatever I’m reading at the time.  Words I want to look up since I’m not quite certain of the meaning.  Words that are complex and multifaceted.  Words that make me pause and think  “Oh, this looks really, really cool.  How delightful.”  These words eventually appear in one of my lists at Wordnik.com

I’ve filled up two Post-It notes and part of the back of an envelope with Lovecraft words.  They’ve been lurking on my nightstand.  When I saw them this morning, I thought — for the first time in a long while — that I had something worth sharing.

Without further ado, in no particular order, and in nowise comprehensive:

miasmal, cenotaph, niter, necrophagous, aegipans, lambent, interdicted, acidulous, eidolon, teratologically, squamous, vigintillion, ductile, ichor, palimpsest, quintile, foetor, cartouche, labyrinthine, cumbrous, illimitable, bas reliefs, terrene, pallid, spheroid, aggultinations, dadoes, cryptical, similitude, austral, Cyclopean, anent, bizarrerie, portent, preternatural, immensurable, trans-montane, ineluctable, nefandous, congeries

One post would be a righteously indignant screed concerning the utter stupidity of the public and the media in their interpretations of the latest recommendations on mammograms for women between the ages of 40 and 49.  Honestly, people; get a grip.

I threw that idea out because I really don’t have the energy for righteous indignation right now.

The other idea for a post was how I find myself thinking more and more about my own mortality.

I have to point out — here and now — that this has nothing to do with my chronic depression or chronic pain, nor is it anything suicidal.  I’m not getting all emo-gothy-weird — I don’t have the wardrobe for it.  I’ve just been thinking thinking, and I feel myself Running Out of Time.

I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker

There is so much I want to see and do and experience; it’s really not so much of a memento mori thing as it is a sic transit gloria mundi thing.

In any event, that’s where my head is — for what its’ worth — and I’ve just reminded myself that I really need to get around to reading the annotated The Waste Land that’s been sitting on my to-be-read bookshelf for the past twelve months.

Damn.

I better get up on that.

It’s a slender volume that  “recounts the events and activities in the lives of a group of spinsters and widows who struggle in genteel poverty to maintain their standards of propriety, decency, and kindness.”  It’s much more entertaining than that sounds.

I had not heard of Elizabeth Gaskell until now, and I have to say I admire her writing style a great deal.  Here’s a bit I particularly enjoyed:

[E]very lady took the subject uppermost in her mind and talked about it to her own great contentment, but not much to the advancement of the subject they had met to discuss….I asked Miss Pole what was the very last thing they had ever heard about [Peter], and then she named the absurd report to which I have alluded, about his having been elected Great Lama of Thibet; and this was a signal for each lady to go off on her separate idea.

Mrs. Forrester’s start was made on the veiled prophet in Lalla Rookh – whether I thought he was meant for the Great Lama, though Peter was not so ugly, indeed rather handsome, if he had not been freckled…. [I]n a moment, the delusive lady was off upon Rowlands’ Kalydor, and the merits of cosmetics and hair oils in general, and holding forth so fluently that I turned to listen to Miss Pole, who (through the llamas, the beasts of burden) had got to Peruvian bonds, and the share market, and her poor opinion of joint-stock banks in general….

In vain I put in “When was it – in what year was it that you heard that Mr. Peter was the Great Lama?” They only joined issue to dispute whether llamas were carnivorous animals or not; in which dispute they were not quite on fair grounds, as Mrs. Forrester…acknowledged that she always confused carnivorous and graminivorous together, just as she did horizontal and perpendicular; but then she apologized for it very prettily, by saying that in her day the only use people made of four-syllabled words was to teach how they should be spelt.

I was never aware that llamas were carnivorous (and I had to look up graminivorous).  Perhaps the Monty Python troupe was correct.

So, do I read Cheney’s memoir when it comes out?  I’m certain it will have me frothing at the mouth, yelling obscenities, flinging it against the wall, and stomping on it until the pages fall out.  Then again, that would be the most exercise I’d have gotten for quite some time.  Aerobic Righteous Indignation.

But anyway.

I’ve been completely lost for blog post topics. There have been a few ideas flitting around my head, but nothing that takes on actual substance. I’m chalking it all up to my Reverse Seasonal Affective Disorder. I’m looking at the months of June, July, and August as being similar to a prison sentence; there’s a part of me that wants to “x” out each day on the calendar with a black Sharpie. I’m about ready to dig out Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s The Worst Journey in the World, crank the air conditioning, and camp out on our sofa until the leaves start to turn and I feel like a normal human being. A relatively normal human being, that is.

You’re going to have to bear with me until I have the energy to think and compose coherent sentences. You may have to put up with a few memes and a LOLCat or two in the interim.

I’ll be back. Before September. I hope.

In any event, there was some major excitement going down on Friday when the Yarn Harlot made her Ann Arbor appearance to promote her new book, Things I’ve Learned From Knitting (Whether I Wanted To or Not).

I’ve been a fan of the Harlot’s blog for many months, and she is just as witty in person as she is online and in her books. It’s hard to explain to a non-knitter that there truly is such a thing as “knitting humor,” but the Harlot had 150 knitters laughing uproariously with her vignettes on the Ridiculous Things Non-Knitters Say to Knitters. If you’re a knitter, you know. The “patience” line. The “time to knit” line. The “You know, you can buy socks in a store” line.

The Harlot is a class act. She took the time to stay and sign everyone’s books (all 300 some of us), and pose for pictures.

That’s my good friend and knitting buddy, HunterXan.

And here’s me:

Click the pictures for larger images. That blue amorphous mass the Harlot is holding is my current knitting project. It’s the Knitted Baby Thing for my Pregnant Co-Worker. Since it’s an Amorphous Blob, I’m pretty sure my friend won’t be able to identify it from this picture. It’s the Elizabeth Zimmerman Knitted Baby Thing that every knitter makes at some point, and the Harlot was able to name it from 10 feet away.

In any event, the Knitted Baby Thing is almost done. I hope to finish it today, so it’s time for coffee and yarn!

This year’s selections are:

• The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream, by Barack Obama
• How to Cook a Wolf, M. F. K. Fisher
• Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950′s America, Laura Shapiro
• Moleskine City Notebook: Seattle

Every Easter morning after my book buying spree, I sit and write a check for an equivalent amount to a charitable organization. Lent isn’t just about self-denial — it’s about almsgiving. So what, Laiane, if you’ve not bought a book in 40 days; what have you done for other people?

This year, my donation was to Doctors Without Borders/Medecins Sans Frontieres.

Welcome back, Jesus. Pass the Cadbury Creme Eggs.