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.
