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I just got back from Steamboat Springs, Colorado last night. It was a very nice trip, though rather tiring because my knee is still recovering from that hellish spider bite. I took some photos, and will post some of those and the ones from my Ohio trip, along with some descriptions of what we did… after we come back from Alaska. That’s right—we are going on a sudden trip to Wasilla, Alaska to visit Jeremy’s brother and family, leaving at some ungodly hour tonight, and coming back just after the holiday. So be prepared for a photo barrage of all those trips next week.

Knitting Update

I am close to being finished with the Victoria Tank. Actually, all the body knitting is done, and now I am just waiting for the chance to get a 16″ #2 circ to do the finishing around the neck and armholes. In the meantime, I started the lacy shell with my red Brilla to take with me to Colorado. I’m two pattern repeats in at this point, and concerned that I need to go down a needle size, because the measurements are coming out larger than I was expecting from my swatch. It is hard to measure accurately pre-blocking, because of the way the lace twists and pulls the fabric, but I will not be worrying too much about that until next week.

Reading Update

Obviously, I have not been able to finish working on The White Devil yet, and that won’t happen now until I get back. On the Colorado trip, I started reading another Elizabeth George mystery, In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner. I’ve read several, and they are good vacation reading–quick reads, and most have been really good mysteries. My only gripe is that I don’t really care for most of the characters. The only even likable character is Barbara Havers, but she never seems to be able to catch a break, and has serious self-esteem problems.

One of the local drawing groups that I regularly attend has found itself with a surplus of operational funds. To remedy this situation, I proposed that we hire a guest lecturer to come and give a demonstration to the group. Last night (Tuesday the 22nd) this plan came to fruition. One of the models from our group also models regularly for artist Clint Brown, who is a professor of studio art at Oregon State University.

I’ve always found it fun to watch someone who is really good at something—it doesn’t matter what that something is—do what they are good at. Clint was no exception. What he was able to capture in 5 minutes with the model was impressive.

Here is an early sketch for a drawing that he would develop over the course of an hour.

And here is the same work after an hour or so of intermittent work and answering questions.

It was interesting to hear Professor Brown speak so highly of Robert Beverly Hale, a draftsman and instructor whose philosophy has heavily influenced my approach to art as well. Hale’s work is one of the main reasons that I decided on the New York Academy of Art and it is encouraging to see that contemporary artists can still wield a sufficient knowledge of proportion and anatomy to render the human form convincingly from imagination.

Clarissa

Since last August I have been volunteering with Project Gutenberg, transcribing texts that are in the public domain by typing them out. No, it’s not particularly efficient, but since I am choosing books I would also like to read, I can do that and type at the same time, and make the books available to anyone else at the same time.

So in August I started typing Clarissa, by Samuel Richardson. It is an epistolary novel, which means that the entire thing is written in the form of letters between the main and subordinate characters. The character development is consequently astounding, while the plot is very … very … very slowly built upon, to the tune of 3,000+ pages. If I was just reading this book for fun, which I would have considered doing, I would not have gotten half as much from the book, because I would feel compelled to skim through some of the expostulations. As it is, I spent 9 months typing this book (420 hours!) and getting to know every nuance of the story, even down to spellings, sentence structure, and the way Richardson subtly varies the writing style between characters. It is now online in nine volumes; the first volume is here.

The Queen of the Air

When I finished Clarissa in May, I expected to want a break from the typing, but instead I ended up plunging right back in, and have since been typing The Queen of the Air by John Ruskin. It is a short scholarly book from 1869 based on a university lecture he gave in London about Athena.

I knew Ruskin primarily for his books about drawing technique and art history, but I was also interested in this particular book because I have my bachelor’s in Classics and English. The book as a whole is not so much about Athena as it uses that goddess and her characteristics as a frame in which to expand upon subjects of interest to Ruskin. The first section, written as a lecture, was very well organized, and Ruskin masterfully entwines the various myths about clouds and mist and sky with observations about the real world, and how all of that bears on the Greek conception of Athena. The second section primarily uses Athena as an excuse to discuss the various properties of birds, snakes, and plants. The third section begins with a brief attempt to convey Athena as the goddess of war and heart-reasoning, but then degenerates into a melting pot of tirades about morals, modern economy, the nature of modesty, and sundry other notes that he could not publish individually, capped off with a lesson about good and bad art, focusing on Greek art and summing up with advice about how to go about becoming a good artist. He even includes a poem he wrote as a child in this section.

I suspect Ruskin was a compelling lecturer, and he was a good writer in general: he does at least apologize in the Preface for the state of the book. I was very impressed with the first section of the book. Ruskin was clearly a very intelligent scholar with a wide range of interests, from art and art history, to biology and the natural world, economics, morality, etc. He comes down strongly against the industrial revolution, emphasizing throughout the value and aesthetic charms of the natural world over the time- and labor-saving benefits of unsavory machinery.

“…it is always better for a man to work with his own hands to feed and clothe himself, than to stand idle while a machine works for him; and if he cannot by all the labor healthily possible to him feed and clothe himself, then it is better to use an inexpensive machine—as a windmill or watermill—than a costly one like a steam-engine, so long as we have natural force enough at our disposal.” (para. 130)

At any rate, I think The Queen of the Air was an interesting text, and one that might well be useful to scholars studying the character of Athena and the relationship of the Greek gods to the natural world. I am glad to have made it available to anyone who might find use for it. It is now online here.

Coming Soon: The White Devil

Next on the table is The White Devil by John Webster, a 16th-century playwright contemporary with Shakespeare. I am working on the fifth and final act now, but if I don’t finish it up by tomorrow, it will likely be a few weeks before it gets posted, due to crazy vacation schedules.

Julie and I were fortunate enough to get some tickets to see a Salem-Keizer Volcanoes baseball game this Father’s Day. Apparently baseball is no longer considered The American Pastime—but I’d still rather see a baseball game than just about any other sporting event.

The game ended up with the Volcanoes beating the Eugene Emeralds 10 to 7. Perhaps that sounds exciting, but baseball aficionados will tell you that the good games are the ones that end up 1 to 0 or 2 to 1. As high scoring as the game was, I think at one point there were more errors than runs. I didn’t actually keep score, but I believe that only half of the runs scored on either side were earned runs. No matter: it was a gorgeous day at the ball park and it’s always fun to watch a ballgame.

I’ve decided to put off the next Ferret of the Week until next week because I will be out of town for my second family reunion later this week, and because of the minor disaster that is my knee. I got a bug bite on the back of my right knee last week, and over the course of 6 days, it swelled up, turned purple, and this morning kinda exploded. Maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but it was still no fun, and I’m not doing much walking. I will put a photo of how it looked last night, pre-eruption, at the bottom of this entry so you will have ample warning to avoid it if so desired.

Between now and Wednesday, when my flight leaves, I’m going to talk about books. Tomorrow and Wednesday I am hoping to put up some reviews of my most recent reads, but for today, I’ll take the easy route. I’ve been seeing this list of classic literature floating around the blogs lately. Can’t seem to find where it comes from, or why these particular titles are chosen out of all the potential thousands and millions of excellent books, but oh well—who am I to stop the spread of a meme?

Titles I’ve read are in bold, and my comments are in parenthesis:

Beowulf
Achebe, Chinua – Things Fall Apart
Agee, James – A Death in the Family
Austen, Jane – Pride and Prejudice (I’ve read all of her books.)
Baldwin, James – Go Tell It on the Mountain
Beckett, Samuel – Waiting for Godot
Bellow, Saul – The Adventures of Augie March
Brontë, Charlotte – Jane Eyre (Oddly enough, rereading it right now.)
Brontë, Emily – Wuthering Heights
Camus, Albert – The Stranger (On my list. The Plague was excellent.)
Cather, Willa – Death Comes for the Archbishop
Chaucer, Geoffrey – The Canterbury Tales (In Middle English.)
Chekhov, Anton – The Cherry Orchard
Chopin, Kate – The Awakening
Conrad, Joseph – Heart of Darkness (Been avoiding this one.)
Cooper, James Fenimore – The Last of the Mohicans (And The Deerhunter.)
Crane, Stephen – The Red Badge of Courage (Possibly, but if so, I was a child and don’t really remember.)
Dante – Inferno (Read the entire Divine Comedy.)
de Cervantes, Miguel – Don Quixote (One of my all-time favorites.)
Defoe, Daniel – Robinson Crusoe (Read Moll Flanders, though, and really didn’t like it)
Dickens, Charles – A Tale of Two Cities (Another favorite; I’ve read several of his books, though not all, and love David Copperfield too.)
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor – Crime and Punishment (On my list; I have definitely read The Devils, and possibly The Idiot)
Douglass, Frederick – Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Dreiser, Theodore – An American Tragedy
Dumas, Alexandre – The Three Musketeers (And the Man with the Iron Mask, Count of Monte Cristo, and Queen Margot.)
Eliot, George – The Mill on the Floss (On my list; Middlemarch was great.)
Ellison, Ralph – Invisible Man (Possibly read it, but I can’t really remember.)
Emerson, Ralph Waldo – Selected Essays
Faulkner, William – As I Lay Dying (I’ve avoided Faulkner like the plague.)
Faulkner, William – The Sound and the Fury
Fielding, Henry – Tom Jones (On the list; the antithesis of Clarissa?)
Fitzgerald, F. Scott – The Great Gatsby
Flaubert, Gustave – Madame Bovary
Ford, Ford Madox – The Good Soldier
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von – Faust
Golding, William – Lord of the Flies
Hardy, Thomas – Tess of the d’Urbervilles (I strongly dislike Hardy, yet have read most of his books of my own accord: Return of the Native, Jude the Obscure, Mayor of Casterbridge, Far From the Madding Crowd, etc.)
Hawthorne, Nathaniel – The Scarlet Letter (Hawthorne’s not my favorite; also forced myself through The House of Seven Gables.)
Heller, Joseph – Catch 22 (Started it, but wasn’t able to finish – blech!)
Hemingway, Ernest – A Farewell to Arms (Another name I have been avoiding.)
Homer – The Iliad
Homer – The Odyssey (No comment – hangs head in shame)
Hugo, Victor – The Hunchback of Notre Dame (And Les Miserables, another favorite.)
Hurston, Zora Neale – Their Eyes Were Watching God
Huxley, Aldous – Brave New World
Ibsen, Henrik – A Doll’s House (Saw it performed…)
James, Henry – The Portrait of a Lady
James, Henry – The Turn of the Screw
Joyce, James – A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Kafka, Franz – The Metamorphosis
Kingston, Maxine Hong – The Woman Warrior
Lee, Harper – To Kill a Mockingbird
Lewis, Sinclair – Babbitt
London, Jack – The Call of the Wild
Mann, Thomas – The Magic Mountain
Marquez, Gabriel García – One Hundred Years of Solitude
Melville, Herman – Bartleby the Scrivener
Melville, Herman – Moby Dick (One of these days…)
Miller, Arthur – The Crucible
Morrison, Toni – Beloved
O’Connor, Flannery – A Good Man is Hard to Find
O’Neill, Eugene – Long Day’s Journey into Night
Orwell, George – Animal Farm (Not my favorite Orwell – 1984 was better.)
Pasternak, Boris – Doctor Zhivago (Love the movie!)
Plath, Sylvia – The Bell Jar
Poe, Edgar Allan – Selected Tales (Poe’s great; I especially like his humorous stories.)
Proust, Marcel – Swann’s Way
Pynchon, Thomas – The Crying of Lot 49
Remarque, Erich Maria – All Quiet on the Western Front
Rostand, Edmond – Cyrano de Bergerac
Roth, Henry – Call It Sleep
Salinger, J.D. – The Catcher in the Rye
Shakespeare, William – Hamlet (I’ve read more Shakespeare than I feel like listing here: most of the comedies, all the sonnets, tragedies and romances, and fewer of the early and history plays.)
Shakespeare, William – Macbeth
Shakespeare, William – A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Shakespeare, William – Romeo and Juliet
Shaw, George Bernard – Pygmalion
Shelley, Mary – Frankenstein
Silko, Leslie Marmon – Ceremony
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander – One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Sophocles – Antigone
Sophocles – Oedipus Rex
Steinbeck, John – The Grapes of Wrath
Stevenson, Robert Louis – Treasure Island
Stowe, Harriet Beecher – Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Swift, Jonathan – Gulliver’s Travels
Thackeray, William – Vanity Fair
Thoreau, Henry David – Walden
Tolstoy, Leo – War and Peace (And Anna Karenina.)
Turgenev, Ivan – Fathers and Sons (DH Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers has a similar title, but I suppose that doesn’t count.)
Twain, Mark – The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Also Tom Sawyer and Connecticut Yankee.)
Voltaire – Candide
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. – Slaughterhouse-Five
Walker, Alice – The Color Purple
Wharton, Edith – The House of Mirth (Also Age of Innocence and Ethan Frome
Welty, Eudora – Collected Stories
Whitman, Walt – Leaves of Grass
Wilde, Oscar – The Picture of Dorian Gray (And The Importance of Being Earnest.)
Williams, Tennessee – The Glass Menagerie
Woolf, Virginia – To the Lighthouse (Read Jacob’s Room and loved it.)
Wright, Richard – Native Son

Not a bad number, all considered, though there are many more classics I’ve read that got left off the list. And this will give me some more titles to add on to my personal reading list.

Alright, I gave you plenty of warning. Here’s the spider bite, as of last night:

Now my knee is covered in bandages, and thanks to the antibiotic shot, I should be on the mend soon. No fun at all.

As I noted earlier in the week, Pandora is high-strung, and dislikes going anywhere unfamiliar or unpleasant. This means anywhere outside the family room where the ferrets have their play-time, but particularly includes the bathroom, which she regards as a sort of ferret torture chamber. It’s the place where we clean their ears and teeth, but worst of all, it is the place where they get baths. We only bathe the ferrets two or three times a year, but Pandora is Not Amused. When we put her in the water, all her limbs go stiff, and she stares up at us with an utterly betrayed look—often followed promptly by frenzied attempts to leap from the tub, or climb up our arms. She dislikes being wet so much that when she drinks from a water bowl instead of her bottle, she tries very hard not even to get her chin damp. This is especially difficult with Rocky around, sticking his face in the bowl and then shaking off.

The photo above was taken at Pandora and Loki’s very first bath. The day we got Loki we decided it would be a good idea to bathe both of them so that they smelled the same, and would consequently be buddies henceforth. Didn’t really work, and this is the most relaxed either one of them has ever been in the tub. But bath-time ends eventually, and then it is time for drying off, which means a lot of frenetic activity, with ferrets running all over the place, rubbing their fur against anything at all to try and get the natural oils back.

All the ferrets have their own individual tastes and interests when it comes to toys. Pandora prefers stufties. Her favorite toys are usually ones she can sink her long lovely teeth into: stuffed animals, stuffed balls with jingle bells inside, sock toys, and—my slippers. She has been obsessed with my slippers ever since she first saw them, and does not seem to have a preference as to style or brand. The first pair she smuggled off into her cage, chewed part of the soles off, and nearly gave herself a blockage. After that scare, we’ve been extra careful of her toys, and the slippers stay on my feet or otherwise out of her reach at all times. Not that Pandora considers my wearing the slippers a deterrent–she attempts to steal them off my feet every single time she is out and about.

Other than rearranging toys, Pandora’s favorite activities include stealing socks and eating the elastic out of clothes. This means she is constantly trying to make off with exercise clothes and pairs of underwear when we fold laundry. She loved digging in the rice box (it was made for the ferrets, but abandoned when some of them decided it could also double as a litter box— harrumph!). She loves crinkly paper and plastic bags, and boxes filled with tissue paper. She is excellent at begging for ferret treats—her favorites are raisins and cooked chicken, but she would eat practically anything. And finally, she loves to explore, and has a wonderful time when we take her outside with a leash and harness. So much to see and sniff!

On and off for the past month, I’ve been working on the Victoria Tank from this spring’s Interweave Knits, partly because I already happened to have enough of the yarn called for on hand. I was working rather slowly because I didn’t want to reach the armhole shaping before my family reunion trip to Ohio, but then on the trip I ended up not even knitting an entire round.

Since I got back, I have been trying to finish this tank so that I can take it to my second family reunion this month, in Colorado. Not sure if that is going to happen, but I just finished the shaping on the back of the tank. I am quite happy with how it is turning out. The lace pattern is really easy to memorize; and the only kinda complicated part of this pattern so far is keeping track of all the shaping at the armholes and neck edges. That’s halfway done, and then there is only the neat edging around the neck and straps.

Stash Enhancement

Since at the moment we are starting to make preparations for Jeremy’s move to New York for school, one of the first things that came to my mind was planning out my knitting projects while he is away. I have to do something to keep myself occupied, right? So last week I ordered enough for a few more projects from Elann. Here’s the rundown:

Filatura di Crosa Mirto, silver sage (cotton/ viscose/ linen):
This is to make the Juliet pullover from the Summer 2004 IK. That pattern uses a cotton/viscose blend of comparable weight, so I hope this will be a good substitute. I plan to leave off the beads, though, because that makes it too fancy for my tastes and lifestyle.

Schoeller Stahl Morea, vintage orchid (merino/ microfiber):
I have been wanting to make the Pinup Pullover from the Spring 2003 IK ever since that issue came out, but I have had a hard time finding the right weight yarn that has some spring yet doesn’t irritate my sensitive skin. I am crossing my fingers that the combination of merino wool and microfiber will make the yarn soft enough to wear next to my skin without dying of the itchies.

Filatura di Crosa Brilla, ruby (cotton/ rayon):
This will go for the lacy turtleneck shell from the Spring/Summer 2004 Vogue Knitting. The bright color is quite a stretch from my usual neutrals, but I am going to try to be brave (and probably wear it under a jacket or cardigan anyway).

With those three projects lined up, plus the ones I already have yarn for, I should have enough knitting to keep me busy until this time next year, right? (But don’t hold me to it.)

Pandora has a rather dominant personality. For over three years, she was our alpha ferret and queen of the cage. (That all changed when Ajax came along, but that’s a later story.) Not only did she dominate her younger “sibs,” Loki and Ragnarok, she also felt compelled to test every human she encountered for weakness. This consisted of casually coming up to the test-subject, and sniffing their arms and feet very carefully for the best spot to bite. She never bit hard or broke the skin—she just wanted to find out if that person was worthy of her respect. As it turned out, however, the only person worthy of Pandora’s respect for a long time was my husband, Jeremy. She tested me for several years. As she has aged, this aspect of Panda’s personality has mellowed. She no longer deems the testing necessary, and she has decided I’m ok.

Pandora’s personality also means that she does not put up with frivolity from the other ferrets. She only likes to wrestle with them at her own instigation, and hisses her complaints when she’s not in the mood to play. When she first met Loki, who was then a hyperactive 6-week old kit, Pandora was Not Amused. In hindsight I think she probably would have been happier as an only ferret, and she still seems to have the most fun when she gets to have play-time all to herself.

Pandora (a.k.a. Panda Bear, Princess Panda, Pandamonium, Lady Fang) is a 5-year old spayed female, also known as a sprite in ferret lingo. When we got her, she was a dark brown sable, with “Siamese” markings: a V-mask, darker points (legs and tail), and a dark “zipper” on her stomach. After a year or two, her color pattern changed to sable roan, which means that her tail and back legs gradually lightened: first to a salt-and-pepper effect, and eventually to nearly white. Today even her front half is salt-and-pepper, making her look like an entirely different ferret. (The photo above was taken just a few days ago; her tail is yellowish because it is spring and she’s extra-oily right now.)

As Jeremy likes to brag, our vet once told us that Pandora was a perfect specimen, fit to be “the mother of all ferrets.” She does have perfectly shaped and balanced features, and great health. Her teeth and ears stay relatively clean, her toe nails are perfectly shaped and don’t splinter when we clip them, and her fur is gorgeous and thick. We call her Lady Fang because her canines are long enough to peek out of her mouth.

Pandora has inspired our artwork, despite how difficult the gradation of her fur is to capture. For an example of this in my illuminations, click here.