I'm still obsessed with the owls. I think it as 'owls' in my head - not 'the jumper', or 'the blue jumper', or 'current knitting project'. No. Owls. Sometimes, when I'm being silly, I think of it as 'owls - squee'. But always 'owls'.
The New Lanark yarn didn't want to be owls. I tried. It resisted. I tried again. It still resisted. I tried again. It just wouldn't budge. No owls for Blue John. So I picked up some bright blue Drops Alaska I had sitting around (a sweater's worth!), and it so wanted to be owls. It felt totally right - I could practically hear it hooting! There was a lot of knitting yesterday, and I now have a body and a third of a sleeve - how exciting is that? Very, I know. And the best part? My maths still made sense. I'm knitting this on smallish 4.5 needles, at a tight gauge, and the measurements were the same as the original design plan. Excellent I thought. Most excellent.
In between the knitting I read a chapter of the book I'm currently reading for work, Matthew Wickman's The Ruins of Experience. Scotland's "Romantick" Highlands and the Birth of the Modern Witness. I've had it for a while but haven't read it before. I'm not quite sure if I like it - it's got some very interesting ideas, and most of the sections on the 18th century are very interesting, but I've spotted a few sketchy bits (particularly in the Macpherson section), and I'm generally not too keen on the modern parts. I think it's an Americanism - the need to theorise, to put things in a modern context, to evoke modern philosophers and thinkers in a book on the 18th century (and I don't mean other critics). Often, it seems, American scholars come up with a theory and then find examples to back them up. Or they start with modern thinkers and then work their way backwards. Don't get me wrong - I'm not saying that's bad, just that it isn't the way I do things. I work the other way round - I look at 18th-century texts, then work out their links and common points, and then use modern critics. Critics, but rarely philosophers. I would never, for example, compare Macpherson's and fake Holocaust memoirs, which Wickman does. It works - it just doesn't do anything for me. I must admit I find myself skimming most of his modern bits. However, and this is why I brought this up, Wickman's main point is a very interesting one: there was a shift in the legal system in the 18th century - it went from being mainly witness-based to being based on circumstantial evidence. He links this to a number of texts, including Ossian, where he applies it both to the authenticity debate and to the poems themselves.
This, in turn, is linked to the 'fun' book I'm reading at the moment (or rather, the 'fun' book I finished this morning), Robert Loehr's Der Schachautomat (The Secrets of the Chess Machine, Penguin 2007)). I was given Loehr's other book, Das Erlkoenig-Manoever, for Christmas, and I enjoyed it thoroughly. It's an adventure story that involves Goethe, Schiller, Kleist, Bettine Bretano, Alexander von Humboldt and Achim von Arnim and their quest to rescue the French king from Napoleon's men. Very exciting indeed. I thorougly enjoyed that book, so I bought Loehr's other one as well. Der Schachautomat is about Wolfgang von Kempelen, the inventor of the 'chess turk' chess automaton (Wikipedia is your friend) and Tibor, the brain of the machine - he operated it from inside. Unlike some of my other fun reading, this has an obvious connection to my work: fakes and hoaxes. While my PhD is not focussed on the Ossianic collections, any study of Macpherson and his works cannot escape these issues - and I must say I'm thoroughly enjoying reading about all sorts of practical jokes, forgeries and deceptions - and about the fraudsters that perpetrated them. (Of course, Der Schachautomat is also set in my period - the mid to late 18th century). I love it when my readings overlap - sometimes the connections is obvious, sometimes it only appears in retrospect. But there usually is one. I'm intrigued by this - does this happen to everyone? Sometimes I consciously pick books set in my period, or classics, but sometimes I just pick up something fun - a Neil Gaiman, for example, or a Walter Moers - and halfway through I realise they're totally connected to what I've been reading all day long. I'm fascinated by this.
I'll therefore leave you with a challenge: can you predict the connection between my work interests and my unread Christmas books?
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