“Daisy Chain” and chain selvedges

Spending so many hours knitting, I am sometimes driven to read (listen to) books I would otherwise not touch. Today is L. M. Alcott’s (as she signs herself), A Garland for Girls, a collection of shortish stories each named for “the flower that inspired it”. (I have recently read another that spends a great deal of time describing the lovely flowers the protagonist passes, totally boring for one who has no idea what a scarlet runner looks like, nor love-in-the-mist nor verbena nor what kind of ivy, besides the poison kind, has red leaves in fall. At least in print I can skip.) The red ivy is Ms Alcott’s, and by wearing it instead of the flowers she has no money for the heroine (and I mean heroine, not protagonist) attracts the man who will, naturally, be the solution to her poverty.

Having read so many English Victorian novels it is a shock to find the same thing by an American. In “Pansies” (thoughts, get it?) the girls discuss books and the Wise-And-Kindly adult advises them. The books are Romola (too serious) Cecilia and Evelina (too old-fashioned and stilted), Wanda (which may be invented) too trivial. The serious-minded girlremarks how much she likes Miss Yonge’s books “I’ve read Daisy Chain nine times.” Daisy Chain (1856) is the most nauseating book I’ve ever forced myself to finish (from a horrified fascination). I wanted to write about it here but got too upset to do so. Now, having it included in a list of books for young ladies (and I mean ladies, not women) I’ve got to take my stomach pills and get down to it.

daisy chain in beading

The daisy chain (have you ever seen one? I haven’t) goes from Margaret the mother to Margaret the oldest daughter through ‘Daisy’ the youngest, to Margaret the grandchild. (Margaret means daisy, through an etymological link I’ve now forgotten.) This is a moral tale, and how! As we all know sex doesn’t exist in Victorian literature any more than the lower half of the body does, so the first Margaret dies, not in giving birth to her eleventh child, but in the first carriage drive once she’s allowed out. The father drives, with a wild horse he’s warned against but thinks he can handle, and she is killed in the accident that, naturally, ensues. The father seems to recover but continues racked with guilt under his stiff upper lip.

I think, and Azalea is amazed that she could so readily recognize a Symbol, if that’s what it is,  that the accident that leaves the family motherless (and this is the point of the story) is really death in childbirth, death due to s-x, that is. The husband’s real fault is  in forcing his animal needs on the mother of his children, a saint (if Protestants had saints. Wise and kindly isn’t in it!) The children come to her room for their weekly Bible study, but we do not even think about how the baby is being fed.

Margaret the daughter comes to love a young naval officer during the weeks between the birth and the drive, and she is gravely injured in the accident (‘nuff said!). When the brave, loyal, etc, etc, officer dies she declines, bravely, etc, etc. and dies beautifully. (Though there is a hint that, had she tried harder to walk when her spine was first injured she had a chance of recovery, that is, that she’s dying of lying, bravely, on the sofa!)

But the worst of all is what happens to the daughter who begins the story impatient at her governess’s ceremonious greetings. She chooses, as the eldest daughter at home,  to (continue to) be the Angel of the Hearth to her father:

Her dear father might, indeed, claim her full-hearted devotion, but, to him, she was only one of many…she had begun to understand that the unmarried woman must not seek undivided return of affection, and must not set her love, with exclusive eagerness, on aught below, but must be ready to cease in turn to be first with any. Ethel was truly a mother to the younger ones; but she faced the probability that they would find others to whom she would have the second place. To love each heartily, to do her utmost for each in turn, and to be grateful for their fondness, was her call; but never to count on their affection as her sole right and inalienable possession.

I would have flung the book at this point but an ebook reader is too fragile. Now had it been Jane Austen writing one could think that the author is smiling at Ethel’s extravagance:

She felt that this was the probable course, and that she might look to becoming
comparatively solitary in the course of years –then tried to realise what her lonely life might be, but broke off smiling at herself, “What is that to me? What will it be when it is over? My course and aim are straight on, and He will direct my paths.

But given that the second sister’s baby dies because the mother is ambitious (through her husband, of course!) and the brilliant scholarly brother goes off as a missionary to the back of beyond so he won’t be vain of his accomplishments, I take it that we are to approve of Ethel’s choice and applaud the girl’s stifling all her abilities and interests to become a housekeeper who will eventually be out of a job. Got out your indigestion pills yet?

But don’t take my word for it: the complete text is available here, in plain text (.txt format) so that every system can open it. If you want a text formatted for a specific reader ManyBooks.net has every kind.

Now, as to knitting-here is more on Noro.

The pattern is Latitude-Longitude by  Huan-Hua Chye, an adaptation of an old idea, but she’s worked out all the details for a charming har, cowl and scarf.  I used one ball of bluish-greenish Noro Kureyon for two rows, then greyish-brownish in alternation. (The selvedges are chain edge so the yarn change is hidden around the second stitch. Something I’d never thought of.)

latitude face

Actually, I ripped this, since the colors didn’t look as good in reality as on the screen.

longitude face

 

This just in – the bad old days

In my never-ending quest for something good to read, when I find a new author I try to go back and read all his/her novels from the earliest forward, made easy since the library catalog software automatically sorts by publication date. Hence Jane Aiken Hodge’s The Adventurers,  a romance that was old-fashioned even in 1965, if memory serves. From the first appearance of the hero (and I mean hero) we know whom the heroine will marry at the end – a great relief (for us) during her dangerous adventures. And by old-fashioned I mean that bedrooms are for secret passages, eavesdropping through chimney flues, and keeping captives but not for sex.

However, old books are for more than enjoying the writing. In newer ones I like to read the metadata (correct usage?) about the publication – what the cover image is, what font, etc, and about the author. The jacket of The Adventurers says very little of  the author except that “she is the daughter of the poet Conrad Aiken”. Annoying, I thought but that was then. Well, well, and now I’ve read The Winding Stair, an even better book where the heroine (and I mean heroine) actually considers doing you-know-what with her fiance before they suffocate to death. This jacket does give Ms. Hodge’s impressive credentials, a B.A. from Oxford and an M.A. from Radcliffe, and then notes that:

“She has particularly good sources for the historical background of her novels; her husband Alan Hodge is the editor of the fine English magazine History Today.”

I wonder if her latest work, published in 2003 when she was 86, talks about her eldest son’s profession! (Alas, poor thing had only daughters!)

And now for some sexy knitting:

 

geometric solid from a book ad

Quick and dirty geometric hat

quick and dirty from the side

I hope you can see how I tried to use the squares and triangles of the model to create a semi-shere (using my last precious scraps of Malabrigo Silky). The earflaps were a concession to the cold.

Detective-Inspector Jekyll and Sergeant Hyde

I am now listening, for lack of better, to a very recent detective novel by an author whose earlier works I have read over and over with great pleasure. This one is awful! Cardboard amateur detectives in a preposterous story.

Which leads me to wonder. I can think of three mystery writers whose one series has deserved the many awards it’s won while a second or third series is really unpleasant to read. (To me, that is – they must sell or they would not have been continued.) Two are still living and I respect them too much to throw their names around but Edith Pargeter has gone beyond any concern with criticism.

As Ellis Peters she wrote the Brother Cadfael series which is not only delightful to read but was adapted to an excellent television series. In the very first book,  A Morbid Taste for Bones, the absolute darkness of the medieval night became real to me in a way that this Brooklyn girl had never before been able to imagine.

So why does any book I try in the  George Felse series give me the untitivated pip?

And here is a pip of a piece: My first try at felting, done on the fly by using the knowledge of curving I’d gotten from making so many hats.

fulled (felted) bowl

You discover a new literary horror and a beautiful horrible yarn

Dear friends,

Azalea is back, still suffering from transplant shock and loss of habitat, but determined to unburden her mind of unflattering remarks about inauthentic writing and good knitting.

(How’s that for literary prose?)

Having already bitched about first-person novels, I was astounded to discover a worse horror – second-person narration! (Joseph O’Connor, Ghost Light, 2010, supposedly about John Synge’s relationship with Maire O’Neill, an actress at the Abbey Theatre.)

In the top floor room of the dilapidated town house across the Terraces, a light has been on all night. From your bed it was visible whenever you turned towards the window, which you had to do in order to fetch your bottle from the floor.
– opening paragraph.

He actually writes well, that is the sentences and paragraphs hold together in a pleasing way, which is why I didn’t fling the book across the room after that paragraph, rather stuck it out until the ‘plot’ (and the message, god save the mark) became too obvious to be worth continuing. Before I had quite decided to give up I looked at the back and found that

the experiences and personalities…differed from those of my characters in uncountable ways. Chronologies, geographies and portrayals…are not to be relied upon….Most events in this book never happened at all.” (p. 244)

So why use the names of real people? And there is no indication that the author is a teacher of Creative Writing! Rather he is a professional author whose previous book, Star of the Sea, won several prizes. Perhaps he just ran out of ideas for a story but had to write his yearly book anyway?

Now, as to knitting, hoo boy! I have been getting drunk on color, ever since Little Knits had a sale on Noro Kureyon Sock. If you don’t know, Noro yarns have very long repeats of intense, beautiful color – badly spun, with dirt in the wool, knots in the yarn, sometimes overtwisted and repeat lengths varying from ball to ball.  Kureyon Sock (in Japanese pronounced kuh-ray-on, crayon, get it?) calls itself single-ply and looks it but a wise Raveler observed that it is really two-ply, and therefore much stronger than claimed. Here are two of my experiments, which I’ll discuss later.

This is done bustrephedon (Ancient Greek: as the ox plows) edge to edge, back and forth. I can’t show you the completed work because I gave it away before taking a picture and the $%^&* recipient hasn’t photographed it either! The turquoise color is a lot more intense than appears on my monitor but no amount of fiddling would get all the colors true at the same time.

Here’s that same turquoise color, spun into a mostly cool colorway. I used two balls here, alternating every two rows, in the feather-and-fan stitch. (Looks good on both sides, important for a scarf  I think.) You can see how many rows of this color there are and in one solid block they turned my stomach. Even tamed by the darker colors from the other ball it is still too intense to look at.

Colonial Boston, and a sun hat to keep the anachronisms out of your eyes.

Once again, Azalea is moved to write by a bad book, or rather, one that has been praised beyond its merits.

Blindspot, by a Gentleman in Exile and a Lady in Disguise was actually concocted by Jane Kamensky and Jill Lepore, one a historian, the other a writer of fiction. It is set in Boston in 1671(?) and heavy on local public events – the Stamp Act, quartering of troops in the Town Hall, etc, to provide a you-are-here viewpoint. (Any readers old enough to remember that radio show?) This part works well, the historical events being worked into the plot and not over-emphasized, but the effort at describing the physical setting gets real tedious real fast – “…she walked quickly along  ___ Street, passing __, ___, and ___, before turning the corner onto ___ Avenue, where the ___ was under construction…” This sort of thing is of the essence in a historical novel, but it needs to be part of the setting, not stopping the action.

The authors put three very interesting characters into this scene – a portrait painter just arrived from Scotland where he has run from debts he couldn’t pay in a lifetime, a girl who disguises herself as a boy to escape the workhouse by working as the painter’s apprentice, and a learned (black) doctor (in both the 17th century senses of that word) who has run from slavery. (Actually the doctor is only talked about for the first few hours of the audio book, which goes to 20 cds!) Are the man and woman going to marry? Is the doctor going to be instrumental in exposing the evils of slavery? Are you reading this blog?

The first part, where the painter learns his way around Boston and its possible customers, the apprentice learns painting, and Othello is off-stage (you didn’t think the learned authors would miss that reference, did you?) is really well done, interesting and believable. Then doctor ex machina arrives and the ‘story’ takes over!  Who really killed Edward Bradstreet, and why? How will the lust floating around the painter’s house be resolved? How will slavery be ended?

And this is told, preserve us, in letters! The painter addresses his “dear reader” in almost real time, without any explanation. Fine – that’s a literary device and I accept it. But for some reason the girl writes supposedly real letters to a real friend in another city, including

SPOILER ALERT!

whether they make love with her on top or him! OK, maybe that only turns up in his sections, but hers is still far more frank than can be believed. And speaking of frank, how does she pay for the postage? Or was it on the old English system of the recipient paying? In any event postage charges were not trivial. We hear how she painfully wraps her “beautiful breasts” to avoid detection, and is nearly discovered by a menstrual rag (with a realistic discursion on how she’d almost forgotten about menstruation, having been too starved till now). But men were very relaxed about peeing in company back then – a missing penis is  a lot more difficult to disguise than breasts, so the authors ignore it.

It continues to surprise Azalea that authors who will tell you a lot more than you want to know (anyway, than I want to know) of the precise details of a sex act, and talk a lot about food, will leave out the bathroom, except sometimes as a place to hide in. We hear several times in this book how muddy the tidal flats are but nothing about going out in the yard to the privy, and believe me, that’s what they did, except when they stayed in and used the chamber pot. (Who emptied it?)

But once you start in on the anachronisms… The one that gets Azalea’s goat the worst (know the origin of that saying?) won’t bother most people – “thrived” is not the past participle of  “thrive”, though the NY Times is striving to make it so.  (Was the man drived mad by drink ?)

I think at some point Jane Kamensky went back to her classes and Jill Lepore carried on regardless with the plot – regardless of logic, common sense and historical accuracy. Just as a taste – Jamie runs into his room to shave and dress hurriedly, at a time when the household has no servant – how did the water get into his room? Who heated it, or did he shave in cold? (Much more interesting to me than which part of her anatomy he put his fingers into – I am not making this up!) How did the water even get into the house with no one doing the housework – and it was work in those days? (see Susan Strasser, Never done: a history of American Housework – and she’s talking about the nineteenth century!) A runaway slave  turns out to have been freed years ago, how come the slave didn’t know it?  etc, etc.

I listened to the audio book: John Lee is a champion. Were it not for his charming Scots accent I would have pulled the (metaphoric) plug once the book degenerated into a nonsensical romance. Cassandra Campbell, granted she had a much worse part to try to pull off, sounded always 21st century, not quite Valley Girl, but not far off. Disappointment in what promised so well for the first few hours is what is fueling this post.

Yuk! Enough.

Earlier posts told of my experiments in making a sun hat out of inappropriate yarn – I finally made one in white cotton to be like the pattern picture, but in the confusion of moving that never got photographed – until this week, courtesy of the social work intern at Azalea’s new greenhouse.

Ta da! Windansea hat, as she should be knit:

Bad books and nice knitting

Azalea continues to be astonished at the drek to be found on the shelves of respectable public libraries. She followed her current practice of pulling 10 books in a row off the shelf then trying them out at home and came up with this gem, Station Break, by Steve Friedman and Rosemary Ford. He worked in tv production for many years and she was a book editor so they thought themselves capable of  together perpetrating producing a novel about the (evil) business of television.

Samples:

Although she could not articulate what she sensed, she knew she was no longer afraid. Something in his look told her this man was not going to hurt her.

(No, it isn’t a romance novel, though, of course, the single heroine gets a guy by the end.)

Mary took a sip of coffee. This was hardball, and she needed to think. She sensed the power of the man as he swept her along with the force of his conviction.

(He’s a talent agent, not a Regency seducer.)

There follows a violent situation, or two or three, caught live on camera.  The technical details of how this is handled by the local station staff is well written and interesting, as is a primer on the relationship between network news and the local station and the ambitions of  the ‘talent’.

And then to wind it up:

Mary looked at Hansen. “But I’ve learned something. There is a line between what I do and what I am….I think I’m going to live differently from now on.

Wonder if he wrote the technical scenes and she put in the ‘novelistic’ bits?

Bunting I designed myself:

baby bunting, adaptable to car seats

Also made the buttons – that is fun! The lacing was my idea,to allow the bottom to be loosened or opened for a three-way car seat belt. Made of the same cotton thread as the buttons!

Plant your azaleas at the New Year

Azalea has been replanted, into a brand new garden in the lovely village of  Croton-on-Hudson, NY.  She is busy spreading out her roots, after being pot-bound in the not-very-well-converted garage she had to call home the last year. (It’s a long story.)

And having a wonderful time sorting her books before putting them back into the bookcases – no room to put them on the floor before.  Not a whole lot of books, but, in the immortal words of Spencer Tracy, “what there is is cherce”. They fell (literally) into categories easily, bless their little hearts. I can’t describe the pleasure of looking at each one and saying “I have this nice book to gladden my heart whenever I want it.”

The reading and knitting go on, despite all the unpacking, etc – a flower’s gotta refresh her petals! Couldn’t find my mp3 player for the free downloaded novel from the library system so am just playing it on the computer, easily heard from the couch. And I am here to tell you that Bram Stoker wrote other things besides Dracula – I am listening to The Jewel of the Seven Stars, all about mysterious vapors from Egyptian curios, a tomb curse, or is it an accursed tomb?, a woman who may be a cat or vice-versa… good stuff for a winter evening. (I was actually reluctant to listen to it in the daylight!)

I recently dug out an old yarn friend, too, and liked it so well that I bought more of it, discounted on eBay. (It’s now out of production.)

Moda Dea Sassy Stripes “Polo”. Here’s a 5-hour sweater I made with my  original skeins:

The colors are just lovely, better than the photograph.

Yiddish in the English country house

The Yiddish words which surprised me so much come from Hilaire Belloc’s The Emerald of Catherine the Great, 1926!

As you would expect of an English writer of the 1920′s, this is a country house novel, snowed-in variety. The author says this is the mystery story he has promised, only nothing goes missing and no one is hurt. : )

The first chapter, on the changing names and social positions of the ancestors of the family is really funny if you know anything of the English social classes. I didn’t find the book on Project Gutenberg but perhaps it exists somewhere on the Web so you can read at least that. The rest of the story would work better on stage, as farce, with all the opening and shutting doors that involves. (The Westchester Library System owns one copy, which is crumbling to pieces in my hands.)

Compliments of the season: for some reason I don’t know enough color theory to say, these color combinations seem peaceful to me though I didn’t select them for that.

I designed them on the fly, that is, on my needles as I worked. Squares aren’t so square, I still haven’t solved that. (No sewing involved, all picking up from bound-off edges.)

Yiddish words in English writing

Azalea nearly fell out of her flowerpot on encountering the lines below in a comic English county house novel:

It has been remarked by the less stupid of psychologists – and that is not saying much – that cunning and intelligence are not often combined. Conversely, as Dr. Nancy Neerly shrewdly remarked, when her assistant at the Hospital for Nervous Diseases, gonophed her microscope, extreme incompetence is often accompanied by cunning.

She banged down the receiver. . . There’s a schlemozzle! Telephone broken down! Saturday night…! And no redress, no aid.

I challenge the reader to guess the year within 10 of the book (answer tomorrow).

Are there no editors?

Yesterday I commented on Outlander, by Diana Gabaldon, as being pornography, though it won an award as a romance novel. (Guess I don’t know what romance consists of nowadays.)

But now I want to query the editor of the book, or was there one? As I said, I was listening to a reader who can do Scottish like a native, or perhaps she is. The lilt is so different from English speech patterning that you can hear how close it was to becoming a different language. The author seems to take pride in the “Och, aye, bonnie wee lassie” type of writing, so when the hero, in 1740 or so, responds to heartfelt thanks with “No problem” I LOL! When the Lowland attorney starts a sentence with “In terms of ” I began to be queasy. When the hero talks of reducing problems to their “lowest common denominator”  I was feeling pretty low myself.

I can understand that the author may have been having an off-day and her tired brain let a current cliché slip through to her fingertips, but didn’t anyone read this stuff before publication? In an early chapter the heroine is given, and much relishes, cherries and apricots. There are several sentences about them. I don’t really know when apricots ripen but I have the feeling it isn’t cherry time. Many, many chapters later, she admires the hero’s red-gold hair set off by the pink cherry blossoms behind him.! (Did cherries even grow in Scotland back then?)

In knitting we say “once is a mistake, twice is a design feature”. What’s the excuse in book publishing for howlers like these?

Reviews:

must choose between distant memories of Frank and her happy, uncomplicated existence with Jamie. (Publishers Weekly, 1991, per Amazon.)

Did the reviewer read the book?

Once-in-a-lifetime romantic passion and graphically depicted torture sessions are only the two extremes of this lively time- travel romance set in 18th-century Scotland–an imaginative and lighthearted debut by a promising newcomer. (Kirkus Reviews, 1991, per Amazon.)

Lighthearted torture sessions? Am I crazy or is the Kirkus reviewer?

Ms Gabaldon is reported to have said that the Hero is based on a character in the Dr Who television series. If you like time travel series, that’s  what the Doctor does, and he touches only his female companions’ hands and only when they’re running from danger (which is frequently!). (It’s almost like travelling yourself to watch the original episodes from almost 50 years ago. )

And I’m surprised that no one seems to have mentioned an earlier novel by an American of travel to England’s past: Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.

In the immortal words of Alfred E. Neuman, Blech!