Knitting, Sex and God

Concerning Books

2012-01-22T12:20:00.007Z

Unlike a great many people, I didn’t get a Kindle for Christmas. Although I will probably get one eventually (very useful and back-preserving when it comes to reading large academic tomes whilst on the go), I find the greyness of the screen a bit depressing-looking, and I really do love the materiality of books. (An aside on that subject – I hope I can get to London beforethis exhibition of illuminated manuscripts finishes, and if I was rich and lived in that part of the world I would love to take this class with Su Blackwell at the V&A. This year my imagination was captured by book art through the magical video promoting Pottermore, and the wonderful sculptures mysteriously donated to various Edinburgh libraries and museums ‘in support of libraries, books, words, ideas’).

I am very much with Giles from Buffy when it comes to books.

So I didn’t get a Kindle. But I was given books, as always, and I bought books whilst I was away, and returned to the perennial problem of how to store them in an organised and accessible way in a tiny flat filled with stuff. And for the last few years I have opted for cramming as many as possible onto the shelves, into vague subject categories not in alphabetical order, keeping the fiction books I haven’t read yet separate from those I have (I tend not to keep fiction I’ve read, unless I’m very sure I’ll want to read it again). But I decided to do away with arbitrary subject categories, other than poetry, fiction and non-fiction (categories problematic in themselves) and keep all my fiction books together. I can see on Goodreads what I have ‘to read’. I also wanted to be able to take books off the shelf without potentially causing an avalanche, which I managed to achieve through the acquisition of a new wee bookcase (from eBay, out of reclaimed wood). Most pleasingly, they are now all in alphabetical order (by author, unless there is no author per se, and thus ordered by title). The achievement of this took six or seven hours, a sore knees and back, not to mention coming into contact with a great deal of dust, but it is worth it. And I like how having all non-fiction together (ok, apart from knitting, recipe and travel books) reflects my diverse interests.

Another plan for life post-thesis was to read The Lord of the Rings. Partly because it's now ten years since I first (and last) read it, and partly to fill the Song of Ice and Fire–shaped hole since I finished A Dance with Dragons. First I read The Hobbit, and I enjoyed it, but not in comparison to The Fellowship of the Ring, that I'm currently at about a quarter of the way through. I'm reading it fairly slowly, partly because I remember that on my last reading I infinitely preferred this first book to the subsequent two. Apart from All Those Bloody Songs, which I'd forgotten about (must have repressed the traumatic memory).

Thankfully I don’t need a Kindle to read and do simple knitting at the same time, as my solid, material, tactile book can be held open for me by my lovely Bookseat, which I got from Amazon Marketplace. It's expensive for a beanbag and a bit of Perspex and elastic, but a great design that is very much worth it.

January Dreams

2012-01-21T17:52:00.005Z

On New Year’s Eve my sister suggested that, before the wine and cheese and boardgames, we wrote down our dreams for the coming year. Mine, written in the front of what is now known as ‘My Purple Book of Dreams’, were a lot more prosaic than hers (click to enlarge):

I also wrote down some goals for January 2012, knowing that life I’d need to impose a certain amount of structure and deliberateness onto Life After Thesis. These included ‘re-organise books’, ‘de-clutter’ (ha ha ha) and ‘learn about Asian religious traditions’.

As we’re nearing the end of January, and I’m acutely aware of my failure in my resolution to blog more frequently, over the course of the next week I will blog about these ways that I’ve tried to make a new start and routine since returning to Glasgow after Christmas and not having a thesis to come home to, getting round to things I’d long intended to do, and now have ample time for. Tomorrow: Things Concerning Books.

'Faeries' by Brian Froud and Alan Lee

2012-01-04T00:21:00.016Z

As child, my favourite section of Walt Disney's Fantasia was the one with the tiny fairies, because of the seamlessness between their magical world and the 'real' natural world of flowers, leaves, snowflakes, etc. Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell rekindled an interest in fairy lore, in tales and rituals concerned with morally ambiguous beings who inhabit the edges of our world. I love Alan Lee's illustrations of Tolkien, and, having noted the book Faeries in a list of his works, I've had a vague desire to get hold of the book for a few years now.

Unbeknownst to me, a copy has been in my mum's possession since the late 1970s, and I came across it on one of her shelves when looking for Christmas reading. And it's wonderful: illustrations that are charming, eerie and beautiful, and stories and a wealth of information on fairy-lore. I learned some things that surprised me - for example, although I was aware that people used to attribute prehistoric flint arrowheads to the fairies, I didn't know that the word 'stroke' for paralysis derives from a belief in seizures caused by the touch of a fairy, or 'Elf-stroke'. And although I've read the Harry Potter series a number of times, and tend to notice which elements of myth and fairytale Rowling draws on, it wasn't until reading Froud and Lee's description of Brownies being insulted by the gift of clothes, that I made the connection between Brownies and House Elves (furthermore I was a Brownie Guide when I was about seven!).

Faeries reminds me how people from not so long ago viewed the world very differently to how we do now. Our ancestors dwelt in a world that was mysterious and unpredictable, shaped by capricious beings whom they sought to propitiate and protect themselves from. My favourite pictures and tales in Faeries are those which emphasis the thin membrane between the human world and the enchanted one, such as fairy islands or or cities under the the surface of a lake.

And those that remind me of the uncanny sense of magic I sometimes gain from the world I live in: in my walks along the River Kelvin near my home in Glasgow I can just imagine coming across a Ghillie Dhu in the birch trees, or a lonely, Gollum-esque Urisk.

I have these words of Roald Dahl's, illustrated by Rima Staines, on the wall of my living room:

The book Faeries will help me to heed them.

New Year, New Blog Post

2012-01-01T22:27:00.012Z

So I didn't blog much at all in 2011...largely because I was in the writing-up year of my PhD, and had few words to spare for non-thesis writing. But I submitted it in December (woo-hoo!) and want to make an effort to write regularly in this blog in 2012. My other New Year's Resolutions are the usual sort about being healthier, and I've also decided to become a vegetarian. And to learn to love job applications (which will be a big part of Life After the Thesis).

2011 may have been a fairly horrendous year for humankind in general, but it's been a good one for me. I'm enjoying my late 20s more than any previous phase of my life - I'm a lot more at ease with myself and able to value the present moment. I (mostly) found writing up my thesis to be pleasurable and rewarding. And I got a tattoo!

This year all the places I've visited have ancient associations as sacred sites, not only Israel, but also Northumberland and Iona. In June I returned to the familiar landscape of the North East, visiting Bamburgh, Holy Island, and the Farne Islands for the first time.

In September I had an amazing time on Iona, which was far more beautiful than I'd imagined:

In cultural terms, my 2011 included going to lots of gigs: highlights were Patrick Wolf, Wild Beasts, Anna Calvi, Anaïs Mitchell, Vivian Girls, Amanda Palmer, PJ Harvey, Tori Amos, Los Campesinos! and Josh T. Pearson. My favourite albums of the year were Anna's Calvi's self-titled debut, The Rip Tide by Beirut, Paradise by Slow Club, Let England Shake by the ever-glorious PJ Harvey, and Alela Diane's Alela Diane and Wild Divine.

This year I read some wonderful novels: I really enjoyed Michael Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White, which reminded me how much I love being absorbed in a really long, transportative book. A.S. Byatt's Possession and Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin were both books that I should have read long ago, and that provoked lots of ideas important for my thesis, as well as being a delight to read. The HBO TV series drew me into George RR Martin's behemoth series A Song of Ice and Fire. I love its world-building, depth of characters, complexity, and unsentimental portrayal of war, but it does have an underlying sexism and racism that troubles me somewhat.

I've knitted lots, as ever, and I'm most proud of my Chrysanthemittens...

...and May Woodland Shawl:

The knits that have proved to be most wearable are the scarf I made for Brigid's Day...

...and the cheap and cheerful I Can Sing a Rainbow jumper:

I want to knit lots more lace shawls in 2012, and to perfect the act of knitting and reading at the same time. And come up with a plan for postdoctoral work that combines my love of knitting, theology and feminism...We'll see.

Happy New Year!

Clippings

2011-06-04T12:08:00.005+01:00

Things of interest in the news media this weekend:

Cameron-backed report to protect children from commercialisation (The Guardian)

My feminist-ness has very mixed feelings about all this. Whilst I applaud proposals to sell 'lads magazines' in brown covers, and discourage shops from selling children's clothes with "suggestive or gender-specific slogans" (hopefully this will include the Playboy logo on kids' stationery!), the over-all project of "let children be children", "shielding" them from being sexualized "too young," makes me uncomfortable. Partly because of the puritanical, 'no gay kiss before the watershed,' 'abstinence-only education' that goes with that sort of thing. But also because the problem isn't sex, it's how we - all of us, adults - think about and portray sex, and ourselves as sexual people. Trying to build a barrier between the "wallpaper of children's lives", whilst not trying to change the way that we envision our own sexuality, is not just ineffective, it also exacerbates the dualism of our culture that makes sexual images so degrading in the first place.

Also, since when is a black bra (for pubescent girls) sexualising?! There's an example of looking through the (paedophilic) male gaze - black bras are sensible because they don't show the dirt or go grey in the wash!

Is religion just a matter of taste? (New Statesman)

This was tweeted as "Religion, disgust, and soft drinks - the connection between moral and physical aversion" - so I was expecting an article about Kristeva's idea of 'the abject' and Powers of Horror - something I could link to as a tongue-in-cheek comment on how my tomato ketchup phobia has psychoanalytic roots and is not all that different from the origin of religious purity laws. But no, instead the article is about a psychological study, whose findings suggest that the 'disgust' induced by copying passages from Richard Dawkins or the Qu'ran affects the taste buds, thus making an identical soft drink taste less pleasant than it did after reading the Bible - though this effect seemed to be counteracted by hand-washing. The article goes on to draw conclusions about religious identity being constituted by opposition to other identities/ideas, and this manifests in aversion. All very Kristevan (though she is talking about society at large, not just 'the religious' as something 'other' from 'rational' ways of thinking). I work in literature and theology, and am interested in the material, fleshly aspects of spirituality and writing - but still find this study a turn-off. It uses very polarised texts - Dawkins is deliberately inflammatory, and, post-9/11, Islam isn't just 'another religion' - I wonder what the results would have been if they'd used Bertrand Russell or the Bhagavad Gita. It's a shame that 'psychology of religion' research usually seems to have the theological subtlety of a sledgehammer.

Gig review: Anaïs Mitchell 29th May 2011, The Pleasance Bar, Edinburgh

2011-05-30T02:21:00.008+01:00

Arriving in a bar with a comedy-club set up, full of stupidly low stools and tiny tables, not to mention as audience paying rapt attention to a couple of blowsy-haired Gaels strumming and reciting earnest verse, I realised ‘we’re not in Glasgow anymore, Toto.’ Having adjusted to the culture shock, I started to enjoy the niceness of it all, though I never really warmed to the Iain Morrison and Daibhidh Martin's support set, despite my affection for all things Hebridean.

I had travelled to see Anaïs Mitchell on the strength of Hadestown — a really remarkable album, a folk opera about the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, set in a ‘post-apocalyptic Depression-era America.’ (The website is worth a look for the libretto and Anaïs’s story of the show’s development). I was slightly disappointed that it was going to be a solo show, because I regretted not going to see it performed as an ensemble during January’s Celtic Connections festival in Glasgow (due to prohibitive CC prices), and the orchestral and jazz arrangements of Michael Chorney, as well as the contributions of Justin Vernon (Bon Iver), Ani di Franco and Greg Brown, really make the album for me. And I wasn’t particularly enthused by Anaïs’s solo albums, which are pleasant enough, but seemed to lack the depth and weight of her songwriting and performance as Eurydice on Hadestown.

My preconceptions were overturned however—it was a great set, with Anaïs— large-eyed and smiley, wearing holey cowboy boots—a captivating performer. I found her solo versions of ‘The Wall,’ ‘Wedding Song’ and ‘Hadestown’ as foot-tappingly enjoyable as on the album, but was astounded that ‘Eurydice’s Song’ —which she was nervous about playing without a string section— and ‘If It’s True’ —sung on record by Justin Vernon as Orpheus—were even better than on the album. With only guitar and her voice, the tragedy of these songs, and of the whole piece, really rang out. As she writes, ‘The real moral of Hadestown to me is, yes, we’re fucked, but we still have to try with all our might. We have to love hard and make beauty in the face of futility.’

As well as songs from Hadestown, she did a lovely version of Nic Jones's 'The Humpback Whale' and played some of her new material - mostly in the folk storytelling vein, grief and magic flickering on songs’ edges. Not often playing solo these days, she was unsure about which songs to do and sought requests from the audience. There were calls for songs off her 2004 and 2007 records, Hymns for the Exiled and The Brightness. She described ‘Old-Fashioned Hat’ –as one of her few happy love songs’ – written for her ‘sweetheart in America, who plays bass in a Honky Tonk band called J.P. Harris and The Tough Choices – he’s one of the Tough Choices’: ‘I used to scratch my poems / on the backs of other lovers in / the darkness of my mind / back before I made my home / in the marrow of your bones’. This is all very much ‘girls with guitars and hearts on sleeves’, but the lyrics resonate much more when performed live than on the record, in this and the other love songs from her earlier albums, such as ‘Cosmic American’ or ‘Namesake.’

Maybe it’s the power of live music, or a voice that has become richer in the intervening few years, perhaps related to a confidence that comes through succeeding with a project as complex and collaborative as Hadestown – but hearing these songs in the hush of an Edinburgh cabaret bar, Anaïs Mitchell is more comparable to Joni Mitchell than to Jewel. I found myself welling up during ‘I Wear Your Dress,’ a song for her grandmother, about the connection to female forebears whose experience as young women was so different to now: ‘this is just to tell you that I wear your dress sometimes / the one you made with the gold brocade and the empire waistline / you fitted to your figure when it looked just like my own / that was jersey in the fifties, and the women stayed at home [...] I wear it down to the bar in town and dance around all night / talking and joking, swearing and smoking like any stranger in a crowd / and nobody stares, nobody cares to tell me I’m not allowed- I am allowed.’

PS - Some of the gig has been uploaded by a kind dude here on Youtube.

Rather than knitting... embroidery

2011-04-17T23:41:00.012+01:00

The idea was that by Not-Knitting I'd embrace with enthusiasm all sort of other crafts that have hitherto been neglected. But it hasn't quite worked out that way... mostly I've been replacing knitting with needlework of some kind.

I finished embroidering a vintage linen tea and egg cosy set (which are still in need of pressing):

I finished a cross stitch embroidery sampler celebrating Tankerton. A year ago, I wrote about the design process in an article that has recently been accepted for publication the Feminist Theology journal. Here is an excerpt:

As I write this I am planning a cross stitch sampler. I want to represent in tiny squares of embroidery silk the place I still call home, the place where my mother lives: Tankerton-on-Sea, with its colourful beach huts, sea gulls, windbreakers, stones, limpets and sailboats. This imagined sampler will hang in what was my bedroom, which we are in the process of redecorating. The room is being rearranged and repainted and, when finished, will no longer contain any traces of my teenage self, now that all my things are in my flat in Glasgow, or else my father’s loft. The redecoration will make it a nice room for me, and other guests, to sleep in, but it will also perhaps increase the house’s attractiveness to any prospective buyers when my mum comes to sell it in a couple of years time, after my youngest brother is settled at university.
[...]
I have chosen to redecorate the room with a theme appropriate to the house’s seaside location, the size of the room (tiny), and that most marketable aspect of Whitstable and Tankerton — beach huts, sailing, oysters, and so on. Yet I have I to admit that I have not chosen this theme just because of its saleability, but also as a way of managing the emotions stirred by the passing away of my old bedroom: in decorating the room in a manner particular to where it is, and with a child-like design theme, I am commemorating my childhood on this beach, my growing up, my moving on; recreating and mourning at the same time.A sampler is a particularly apt medium for this: in cross stitch complex and multi-faceted realities are reproduced in charmingly stylised and simple icons, arranged in a composition that commemorates a place or an event. Cross stitch is also significant to my particular childhood in this house, in which hung my mother’s samplers celebrating the births of all four children, my parents’ wedding, and ‘home sweet home’.

As teenagers, when showing in friends who had not been to the house before, my sister and I would explain all the samplers and other embroideries and tapestries on the wall with the throwaway line, ‘Mum was bored in the ‘80s.’ I suppose there is some truth to this; after, all there was in a marked decrease in her needlework production after she went back to university once we were all at school, and stitching must have been a way for her to stay sane during all those years at home with the children. But there is also something dismissive in that explanation of the painstaking and beautiful work that hung throughout our house—that the needlework of stay-at-home mothers is an activity done to stave away boredom, not an artistic endeavour deserving of merit. This encapsulates how ‘women’s work’ has long been regarded by society: as trivial, as craft, as a hobby rather than an art.

My mother’s stitching was not just a convenient activity easy to put down and pick up again inbetween changing nappies, a quiet hobby that wouldn’t disturb sleeping children. It was also an act of meaning-making, of self-expression during a period of her life when she was not (due to the constraints of family and church expectations) able to express herself more loudly or fluently. It was a way of marking and remembering significant occasions in her life. Similarly, I, despite being a somewhat scruffy and impatient needle worker, plan to stitch a sampler celebrating the place where I grew up, because it seems a constructive means of expressing my feelings about changes and losses I have no control over, a way of ritualizing these important events and emotions.
[...]

I'm not sure which came first - the sampler design or all the thoughts I was having about gender, craft and spirituality, but anyway, here is the finished sampler - thought in need of pressing and framing:

I hope my dear mummy won't mind the academic liberties I have taken in my interpretation of her stitching... this year I showed my appreciation of her in a mother's day cross stitch card I also designed myself, a mother hen and her four chicks:

It was also the birthday of a family friend who is an avid vegetable gardener, and I designed* and stitched him this card:

*When I say designed...both the Tankerton and the gardening samplers are heavily dependent on the designs of Jo Verso. 'Composed' might be more accurate.

Rather than knitting... reading

2011-04-16T00:30:00.003+01:00

As previously mentioned, I have given up knitting for Lent. The idea was that this would make space for me to do a lot of the things I love doing, but don't do much of any more because I'm knitting instead. Now that we're heading for Holy Week, with only one week of Lent left to go, I thought I'd look at what I have got done in place of knitting.

Firstly, reading. In the last few weeks I've done a lot more reading for pleasure than in the last few months, and have found reading more sustainedly compulsive than I have for the last few years. Now, this could be because of the lack of knitting...but I read very little for the first part of Lent, when knitting was replaced mostly by sewing (see tomorrow's post). So I'm led to conclude that the return of my 'reading mojo' was instigated not so much by Not Knitting, but by Not Working. After a spell of being very productive, I've just had a bit of holiday, during which time I wanted to read fiction for enjoyment and relaxation. But most of the time, when the absorbtion and production of words is my day job, as it were, the last thing I want to do with my non-thesis time is read yet more words.

Not that my academic work is inimical to my love of literature - it's just that it's hard for them to co-exist in the same space simultaneously. Actually, some of the books I've read in the last few weeks have had a deep impression on me precisely because of how they relate to my thesis. I'd just finished a chapter on the pleasures and perils of life-writing, of taking one's life and making it into a narrative which pupports to have some kind of 'truth.' I am about to embark on a chapter which discusses the generative relationships that are formed in the reading and writing of texts. Thus my academic work enriched, rather than exhausted, my leisure-time reading of AS Byatt's Possession and Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin (and to a lesser extent Sarah Walters's Tipping the Velvet and Maria McCann's The Wilding)- books about storytelling, history, secrets and literary relationships.

Hopefully, my newly-rediscovered pleasure of diving into a book, unaware of the time or what page I'm on, will survive my getting back into hardcore thesis-writing mode, and also when I take the knitting needles back up again. Because I don't think that Not Knitting and Reading More are entirely unrelated... without the temptation to put the book down and do another few rows, I've persevered with the book. Also, with less energy put towards creating with my hands, my reading has once again accessed the part of my brain that creates through reading someone else's words, rather than simply analyses. Not that I want to leave my analytical behind as I travel into the world of a book, rather I want her to follow, rather than determine, the imaginative path.

My Israel Adventure: Days Seven and Eight

2011-03-25T23:26:00.017Z

Wednesday 23rd February

Today was the Dead Sea – the lowest point on earth, too salty to sustain any life other than 15 types of bacteria, and thus very buoyant. Longish walk along busy roads to the central bus station, to get the bus to Ein Gedi. Bus more like a coach, with blinds and seatbelts and fans. Really good value too.

Amazing scenery of the desert and its hills, and then of the sea – sparking like bright blue glass. A very warm and sunny day.

Oversized and overpriced lunch at the only restaurant at the public beach, then hobbled down to a spot underneath one of the large red umbrellas.

After getting into my swimming costume, feeling wobbly and white, I took my book down to the sea. Not as easy as I thought! Stones and rocks on the seabed covered in salt crystals, which were very sharp and so I cut my feet and hands quite a few times. Getting into a reclining, floating position wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be either – not supposed to ‘swim’ at all, but stay on one’s back, near the shore, or else the coastguard with a loudspeaker will reprimand you.

Once I did managed to sit back and float, it was fun – absolutely glorious views. Afterwards my skin felt all slimy and the cuts were really sore – rinsed off beneath a shower on one of the umbrellas.

The sea is getting a lot lower, and there are sections where it’s no longer accessible from the beach – so there are ‘skeletons’ of umbrellas no longer in use.

Long wait at the bus stop – but what a setting!

The journey back in the lowering sun was amazing. I could imagine biblical characters hiding in desert caves. Had a lovely meal in the evening. Sad to be going.

Thursday 24th February

Checked out the Jerusalem Hostel – which I heartily recommend as a place to stay.

Went to the Mahane Yehuda market – loads of stalls selling fruit, pastries, nuts, bread, vegetables. I was a bit fazed by it all and probably got in people's way with all my looking round and staring!

Went to Armenian ceramics shop, which was beautiful, and so welcoming. ‘Leisurely brunch’ at T’mol Shilshom, the bookish cafe, and then goodbyes* and my sherut – a shared taxi/mini bus that you book in advance. Driver was crazy – arriving early everywhere and honking his horn. Went to the areas of Jerusalem dominated by ultra-orthodox Jews. I was the only person in the taxi who wasn’t an orthodox Jew, I think (which was interesting as someone who spends most of my life as a member of the ethnic/religious majority). Pair of young woman with Brooklyn accents dressed in black, holding babies on their laps; a British rabbi and his son; two teenage English girls talking excitedly about one of them getting engaged to an Israeli lad the previous evening. A hasidic young man got on, and didn’t take a seat, and then the rabbi asked me if I would move and sit next to one of the girls, because ‘they don’t like to sit next to women. Don’t like it spiritually, I mean!’

I’d had a truly wonderful and amazing time in Israel – but after the experience of leaving the country, I wondered if they’re trying to put people off coming back. You get there three hours in advance, which I thought was a formality – but no, I was queueing, having things scanned, queueing again, having more things scanned, rinse and repeat, for 2.5 hours! Shattered by the time I got on the plane.

On the flight home I read Jim Crace’s Quarantine. Whilst I was in Israel, I’d thought that I hadn’t found it very spiritual – but reading Crace’s evocation of the Judean desert, where I’d been the previous day (and strangely he never has!) I realised that the landscape had affected me deeply; as had the churches and the museums etc, and although it wasn’t ‘spiritual’ in my usual understanding of that word- it was powerful, and will forever shape my religious imagination, I think.

*spending time with my dear friends was a big reason why I went to Israel in the first place, and huge part of why I had such a wonderful time. I've not written of them for reasons of public/private boundaries etc, not because they're not important.

My Israel Adventure Day Six

2011-03-23T23:49:00.027Z

I feel strange posting this after today's events. I am glad that my friends are ok. It is weird to think that a month ago, and the day after the day I'm about to post about, I was at the Jerusalem central bus station. I write about how the experience of the Bethlehem checkpoint made me feel; I can only hope that Benjamin Netanyahu's words quoted below do not signal the daily lives of the Palestinian people being made even more dehumanisingly difficult than they already are.

They are trying to test our will and our determination, and they will discover that this government and the army and the Israeli people have an iron will to defend the country.
Israel will act aggressively, responsibly and wisely to preserve the quiet and security that prevailed here over the past two years.

Tuesday 22nd February 2011

Another very long day, which took in an awful lot. First a taxi up to the Mount of Olives; the small round Chapel of the Ascension, with a basin in the centre with what is supposed to be Christ’s footprint.

A gorgeous day, with amazing views of the Jewish cemetery, Old City and West Jerusalem.

Dominus Flevit Church, with lovely garden; inside the view is framed by this window design.

The church marks the spot in in Luke 19:37-42, where Jesus weeps for Jerusalem and longs to gather its people under his wings like a mother hen. Jesus as 'mother hen' is clearly too much for the RC church, who present it here as a rooster!

Russian church of Mary Magdalene: shiny onion domes, tranquil winding garden path. Queue through the Garden of Gethsemane to get to the Church of the Nations – very crowded but astounded purple and gold interior.

It was a beautiful morning, with beautiful sights, though the tour groups made me embarrassed to be Christian.

Next got the bus to Bethlehem (from the ‘Arab’ bus station) – enjoyed looking out the window at the rocky hillsides.

When we got off the bus in the modern part of the city, ‘taxi drivers’ argued with each other over who would drive us up to the old city. A policeman came along and pointed us to a real taxi!

Church of the Nativity – pleasant but unassuming from the outside, delightful on the inside. Dark walls, red and white limestone pillars, hanging baubles, chandeliers and gold lanterns. Like the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, there were Armenian and Roman Catholic processions in quick succession, but much less cramped and busy. Grotto of the Nativity very twee. A really wonderful church.

Walked along a street packed with shops selling nativity scenes carved in olive wood, onto the Grotto of the Milk Chapel - carved out of white limestone; the chalky walls said to bring fertility.

Then walked back and up towards the Christmas Church, and the Palestinian Museum, which recreates life in Palestinian homes from the 17th to mid-20th centuries. Little old lady showed us around – lovely objects, light bouncing off the limestone. I found it immensely moving. Like the folk museums of Yorkshire Dales or the Hebrides.

Then taxi to the checkpoint. Wall, so high and imposing, with powerful graffiti, the cattle-herding nature of the checkpoint barriers; Big Brother-esque signs, military observations points; tourist posters very ironic in this setting. It was very upsetting to see in real life. Can’t imagine what it must be like to go through in the morning, every day, just to get to work.

Back in Jerusalem – disaster! Had somehow forgotten my PIN and couldn’t get cash out – embarrassing and shaming. Worse for wear, made it to the Israel Museum. Shrine of the Book, which houses the Dead Sea Scrolls, absolutely gobsmacking.

You start at the fountain that looks like the a lid of one of the jars the scrolls were found in, down through dark caves, to the presentation of the scrolls in a kind of arena. Rest of the museum – huge and glass – equally impressive. Wonderful collection of ancient glass, goddess figurines, Jewish illuminated manuscripts. Was brilliant. Exhausted. Food time.

My Israel Adventure: Day Five

2011-03-18T22:02:00.017Z

Very early start today – 5 a.m.! walked in the dark to a posh hotel, to wait for the coach, which took us to various other posh hotels, picking up other tourists. At Tel Aviv train station we were joined by more tourists and our guide, who was of the talkative variety, and throughout the journey kept referencing the great achievements of Israel’s industry. Entering Galilee we saw how green it is, large areas of flat land and then sudden, dramatic hills, one of which sits atop Nazareth. Many lovely views as we drove up the winding roads to this Arab town.

Stunning Church of the Annunciation. The Word made flesh and dwelt among us.

Marys representing each of the nations:

We entered via the lower level, dark and empty—womb-like—but pockets of light. An old grotto in which she was supposed to have lived. Upstairs a great domed roof, and more Marys. This magnificent church made the whole long trip to Galilee worth it.

Then across to Jospeh’s church – nice but unremarkable. Interesting, the ingenuity that goes into ‘identifying’ these sites.

Then we set off for the Sea of Galilee, through more beautiful green countryside, with palm trees and exotic fruit plantations, but otherwise the landscape and the weather was much like home, or Scotland, or Yorkshire!

Had lunch at a restaurant – a whole fish (Galilee fish!) and chips.

Then off to Capernaum, where I found that the lake Jesus hung out on is not that different from Loch Lomond, or Buttermere. There were seagulls that would be perfectly at home in Tankerton.

Capernaum has lovely gardens, and the very interesting remains of a 4th century synagogue.

Up the road to the Church of the Multiplication, with mosaic floor from the Byzantine period. So many layers of history piled up on top of each other. Tiberias like Margate! Then the horrendously tacky Jordan ‘baptism site’ – people kitted out with white robes, and the option of a DVD film of their dip to take home.

Driving down the valley of Jordan and then Jezreel, the hills of the Golan – so green and stunning.

Slowly and subtly turned to desert – equally dramatic, hit by the light of the lowering sun.

Tour guide making horrible statements about Palestinian agriculture, as opposed to the Israeli plantations, which take ‘know how’. Grr.

Once back in Jerusalem, a potter round ceramics shops – some gorgeous things – and a failed attempt at waffles for supper, but all ended well with takeaway falafel eaten back at the Swedish Theological Institute. I was exhausted and slightly grumpy, but very glad to have made the effort to go north.

My Israel Adventure: Day Four

2011-03-15T23:04:00.014Z

A bit of a lie-in today: didn’t get up till 8.45! Went to St. Andrews, the ‘Scottish Church’, built in the 1920s as a WWI memorial.

Beautiful and sparse inside, white with touches of blue.

Nice hymns and prayers, including a special one on social justice. The seats are sponsored by various Church of Scotland congregations, and I spotted one for Hillhead, Glasgow.The guesthouse attached to the church has huge windows, out of which is a great view of the Old City.

Houses a shop which sells the products of Palestinian craft co-operatives—lots of amazing embroidery. The weather was extremely changeable – sunny, wet, but all the time incredibly, unnervingly windy. As we walked passed the YMCA, we decided it was not a good day to be up on the Old City walks, so we’d do museums instead.

Waiting for Alana to join us, we looked in the shop windows of the Arts and Crafts Lane – expensive and beautiful Judaica, including things made from old Roman glass.

Up to the Jaffa Gate and then into the Tower of David – a museum woven into the old walls. Turned out that it involved heights and slippery steps in fierce wind – but worth it for the wonderful views and good overview of Jerusalem’s history.

Quaint illustrative displays and animated film, which had some political understatement: ‘Jerusalem was now holy to three major religions: a flattering, but somewhat uncomfortable position’...Afterwards we tried, but failed, to get to the City of David archaeological park. Cup of tea in the Jewish Quarter instead, during which time it started pouring down with apocalyptic amounts of rain.

We went into the Burnt House Museum, the excavated remains of a Second Temple priestly family’s home burnt down during the Roman destruction. It involved a tacky and overtly political/religious ‘multimedia’ dramatisation. I’m not used to propaganda in historical museums, at least not quite so blatant, or maybe I’m just not used to it here. Also not accustomed to walking around museums full of soldiers, squeezing past people with big guns on ancient staircases.

As we made our way out rain was still absolutely pouring down, the streets of the Old City streaming with water – slippery limestone, shopkeepers sweeping rainwater away from their wares. Also very windy still, so I was glad went we made it to T’mol Shilshom, a cosy literary cafe/restaurant. Had delicious chai, then spaghetti, finished up by a drink/desert called sahlab.

My Israel Adventure: Day Three

2011-03-13T23:09:00.018Z

Managed to get up at 6 a.m. without too much trouble, probably because it was already light and cool.

Some lovely early morning views on the walk to Notre Dame, where Fred, our Israeli-via-Edinburgh-via-US-guide, of Green Olive Tours picked us up. On the drive down through the West Bank there was much talk of Israeli-Palestine politics and interreligious dialogue. Lots of very new sights – hillsides carved into steps for farming, paved with limestone. The green faded to desert as we headed for the checkpoint back into Israeli territory at the Negev. I learnt a lot through asking stupid questions. We had to get out of the car at the checkpoint, run by a private security firm. Big security guard with big guns. I was unnerved by this, but also had the assurance of being white and British, which the Palestinians who live here don’t have.

We arrived at Asira, the village of our Bedouin guide, Khalil. Lovely welcome and beautiful children wandering around. The sweet spiced tea and biscuit on the porch was very welcome.

Then on to the traditional market in the town of Ksaifa – unlike Khalil’s home, it’s ‘official,’ a place where Beduoin were forced to settle. Saturday morning market – lots and lots of goats, some sheep, men and boys milling round, chatting to each other.

It was simultaneously alien and familiar – like most things I’ve encountered here so far. Palestinian farmland like the Yorkshire Dales (kinda), this like a Dales livestock show (kinda).

In Ksaifa we saw some adorable camels, and a mosque the community had recently raised funds to build.

Then back to Asira, for some refreshment and a brief overview of the village, the desert undulations in the distance, small boys looking after goats.

It’s like any number of rural villages in bleak parts of the British Isles. Except with tin roofs, solar panels, all sorts of ingenuity required for drainage, energy etc - and the threat of destruction – because it’s an ‘unrecognised’ village.

We were treated to a deliciously and epic lunsh – big platter of rice, vegetables and beef, very fresh pitta (Khalil said he sometimes even grinds the flour!), followed by dark, rich coffee.

Such a warm welcome; Khalil – a maths teacher, currently studying law - so proud of the food he grows, the internet he’s rigged up for the village, of his home that has belonged to his family for seven generations.

Next we went to the Lakiya women’s weaving co-operative.

Again, very familiar – spinning, dyeing, weaving – but the familiar with a twist, in that the spindle was different to any I’ve tried before, the loom held up with large tin cans. Really wonderful products available there.

This town is ‘official,’ but so run-down, or never run up in the first place. Poverty far far beyond what I’ve ever seen before. More political chat on the drive back through the West Bank– we passed a number of Israeli settlements of all shapes and sizes, from tents, hill-top forts to suburban developments. A lot to think about – and I needed the sleep when we got back at 5ish not just because I’d got up at 6, but because my mind had had so much to take in.

Later we had a meal at Ticho House, one of the oldest houses outside the Old City, with yummy and substantial Ashkenazi cuisine. Wandered round the shops that stay open late in the evening – absolutely beautiful, varied and good-value artisan ceramics on sale here. Walking down Mahane Yehuda I was reminded of Sauchiehall Street, or any other pedestrianised high street on a busy evening, but then someone ‘jokingly’ fired a gun onto the pavement, and I remembered 'this is Israel.'

My Israel Adventure: Day Two

2011-03-12T00:30:00.017Z

Slept as long as I could, but some of my room-mates had stirred, and nearby there are incredibly noisy building works of some sort. I’m currently having tea sitting outside on Jaffa Road, in absolutely glorious sunshine. Just had a very fresh, delicious croissant – though the service was rude, an Israeli trait, apparently. Alana and Mark’s place of abode is beautiful and quaint and Mediterranean – looking forward to seeing it in sunlight.

Seen a lot of things I’ve never seen before today. In the gardens in the Swedish Theological Institute, pomegranates and kumquats growing, and a lizard. After sitting there for a while, we walked along the Ha’Nevim – could see the Dome of the Rock sparkling in the distance. Past the Damascus Gate, bustling with Arab market stalls, sacks of dried beans, boxes and boxes of fruit. Crossed the Green Line.

Through the Herod Gate to the Muslim Quarter of the Old City, surrounded by Arabic signs, people shopping, eventually onto the Via Dolorosa. Muslims streaming to midday prayers. Then the Way of the Cross, with Station V, where Christ was supposed to have touched where he stumbled, so now the spot has been worn into handprint of sorts by people touching it over years and years. Soldiers standing by a Via Dolorosa sign. Arab boys playing football. Then through streets that are more like covered markets, selling sweets, jewellery, scarves, ceramics, crosses, icons.

Up some stairs to the roof of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the outside of the Ethiopian monastery, a courtyard with a dome in to the middle, to bring light to the crypt below. Through Ethiopian chapel to the main courtyard of the church.

Then we went to have food – falafel and salad and baba ganoush. Mark and Alana went to a goodbye lunch for the Institute’s cook, who’s Palestinian and has got a new job at the British Consulate, where she’ll have less trouble getting her entry permit. I went for a walk around the Ramparts – the southern side, the north closed on Friday. Got a bit confused finding where to go, then gave my shekels to a man called ‘Mr Happy’ (or Sahid) who kissed my hand. Amazing views outside the walls of West Jerusalem, the church of the Dormition on Mount Zion. East Jerusalem – with its hillside box houses, washing hanging out to dry. And the archaeological site of the ancient city. Inside, the golden Dome of the Rock.

Went down to the Western Wall plaza – first time my bags are checked. Strange and beautiful sounds from the prayers. An odd atmosphere – it’s very pristine and ordered, less intimate than it looks on TV. Children banging drums in anticipation of Shabbat.

I walked through the Jewish Quarter then back into the Christian Quarter. Started to feel uncomfortable – countless men offering to guide me around, or show me their shop. Walked up the Via Dolorosa with Christian worshippers flanking both sides, doing the Stations along with a priest with a megaphone. Seen so many different types of holy dress. Found my way back to the Ethiopian monastery, and sat to wait for Alana and Mark. Crowds of pilgrims and tourists coming and going.

Once we met up again, we went into the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Robust-looking Armenian monks, chanting heartily. Darkness but different points of light, in the gilded paintings, jewels, candles. Huge wooden Sepulchre. Catholic procession simultaneous with the Armenian one. Orthodox icons being kissed. Six denominations – some of which seem frozen in time – Coptic, Syrian, etc.
Then we had tea and biscuits in an Armenian place, with sofas and round metal tables with removable tops. Outside the Jaffa Gate I bought oranges from a seller, who was shouting at the rival stall opposite. Sundown over West Jerusalem; walked through shopping centre at Jaffa (Mamila) – posh shops, with purchasable religious sculpture on display. People hurrying to Shabbat. This afternoon I’ve rubbed shoulders with sacred moments of three major religions, but not much has felt particularly holy to me yet. Not in the way that Lindisfarne does, for example. But so many different works in such a small space, so many different times as well.

My Israel Adventure: Day One

2011-03-11T11:13:00.004Z

On the plane to Israel. Clouds below me, blue sky above. When we passed over what must have been Germany I could see snow-capped mountains through the gaps in the clouds, both as white as each other.

About 15-20 Hasidic men praying, facing east, rocking forward, tugging their forelocks. I find it slightly moving, and slightly disturbing. Also chilling to see a large number of people blocking a plane gangway, all looking in one direction.

No problems going through customs. Israeli-Palestinian taxi driver, who professed to hate Jerusalem, but was very friendly. Seeing any place for the first time by road at night is a strange experience. Motorways are pretty much the same anywhere, but I can see the trees are different, the buildings, and of course the language. Driving into Jerusalem, Agrippas Street had lots of food outlets, places selling cheap fabric, bit stores. The hostel is tatty, but cheerful and slightly eccentric.

Had a meal in the German Colony – Jerusalem’s version of Glasgow’s West End. I was too tired to appreciate the novelty of ordering wine being a political minefield: one of our party, a Jewish American who works at Brigham Young Jerusalem university, wanted to know exactly where the wine came from in case it was produced by Israeli settlers in the West Bank. The restaurant was like any in the west, but kosher.

As we walked back to the city centre, I tried to absorb my surroundings. YMCA building, and King David Hotel, along the British Mandate stretch. Rising up into the sky, beautifully lit, but like nothing in the UK. This is the most ‘diverse’ place I’ve ever been, in that the locals all like they come from all over the world. My hostel is right on the intersection of two streets like Buchanan Street and Sauchiehall Street – noisy, because it’s Thursday and thus an Israeli version of a British Friday night. Ate some amazing ice-cream, dark and rich, again, like nothing at home.

Garterstitch100 for Centenary of International Women's Day

2011-03-09T23:24:00.023Z

Yesterday was the 100th anniversary of International Women's Day, and in Glasgow (with the help of women from around the world) it was celebrated by the creation of a truly behemoth knitting project, 100 million knitted stitches to represent the 100 million women who are estimated to be missing from the world's demography. Although knitted squares fill the the large theatre/arts space the Tramway, it's actually nowhere near 100 million stitches - which really hits home the hugeness of that number.

Most of my pictures were taken on the day before the big event, when I helped out a wee bit with the sewing up and hanging up in the Tramway - the hours I put in a drop in the ocean compared to the amount of time, effort and love put in the organisers Ruth and Jude, and numerous extremely devoted helpers.

I found the experience deeply moving - and it's been described much better in an article here and by Karie (who also contributed a wonderful visual art piece, about knitting, heritage, identity and connection). Just the sheer amount of knitting is mind-blowing, and all the letters that people have sent in along with their knitted pieces.

If you're in the Glasgow area, it really is worth popping into the Tramway to see the knitting and other displays, and make a bid in a silent auction on the handknitted blankets, with money going towards women's charities.

It was all a big Shrove Tuesday feast for me, because I'm giving up knitting for Lent! Not so much as renunciation, but as a way of thinking about the role it's played in my life for the last ten years. I will knit on Sundays, but a 40-day knitting fast will be difficult, even if not consecutive days! I'm also doing it so as to spend time doing other things that I don't do because I'm knitting - reading, exercise, embroidery, quilting, spinning, writing - and that includes writing in this blog, which I'll try to keep more regularly over Lent, documenting my non-knitting experience. And I also need to type up the journal I wrote during my time in Israel a couple of weeks ago...

Brigid's Day

2011-02-01T18:47:00.005Z

Today is St.Brigid's Day, or Imbolc - my favourite Christianised pagan day of the year. I wrote a bit about it last year. And the year before, in fact. Seems it's become a bit of way-marker for me, since moving to Glasgow, it means that I survived the long dark winter. To celebrate I bought a myself card from Opal Moon, this design by Jaine Rose:

lit some candles,

and made a (somewhat dishevelled) Brigid's Cross out of reeds I'd picked earlier:

I've also been knitting, as one of my sabbat shawls, a stole in a colours and a lace pattern that reminds me of flames, as Imbolc is a festival associated with the lighting of fires, to encourage the coming sunlight:

From a poem by Ruth Bidgood,

We call her now to walk on the riverbank,
Brigid of Ireland, Ffraed of Wales, the Saint, the golden one,
who breaks the ice, dipping first one hand, then two hands,
freeing the river to flow into time of seed,
time of ripening, time of harvest.
We greet her from her churches and her wells,
from the cold sea-coast and the doorsteps of hill farms,
with the immemorial cry,
'Ffraed is come! Ffraed is welcome!'

We call you, saint of fire,
Protectress of the peat-stack,
meet us where we kneel on the hearth.
Give kind warmth of fire
to us and our kin,
like the outstretched hands of a mother
taking our hands,
like her arms sheltering us.
Be in the midst of the house,
be the mothering fire
in the midst of the house.

Yule Shawl

2011-01-10T19:20:00.002Z

I've come relatively late in my knitting life to the Joys of Proper Lace Knitting, i.e. shawls made with non-acrylic yarns and blocked with some measure of care. Lace might look pretty whilst it's being knitted, but the pattern and size of the thing you've been working on for ages don't really show until you've wet it and pinned it out...

...nor how airy and soft until it's dry and you've unpinned it.

I'd chosen the yarn and the pattern (Rav link) to evoke ice, snowflakes and frosty spiders' webs, in keeping with the midwinter theme. But stretched out, it looks like a pair of angel wings, and thus reminiscent of the Nativity and the Christian midwinter festival. It was snowy when I started it, and the snow returned just as I was finishing it.

Sabbat Shawls

2011-01-08T00:30:00.002Z

At the moment the floor of my living room is taken over by intersecting foam mats, on which I am blocking a lace shawl. It's the shawl I've knitted for Yule, or Midwinter, as part of my project of knitting a lace shawl for each of the eight pagan sabbats in the wheel of the year, in mindfulness of the changing seasons.

I blogged the Mabon shawl here, but realise, having cast off the Yule one, that I never wrote about or posted pictures of the Samhain shawl, which I finished back in November.

For Samhain I knitted a large circular shawl, using the Lon-Dubh (blackbird) colourway of Old Maiden Aunt's merino/silk laceweight. The photos don't represent the yarn at all well, but it has these really subtle shades of an inky grey-blue, and it was perfect for a shawl that represents the death of summer, and yet the beauty and light inherent in the darkness, what the mystic writer Pseudo-Dionysus termed 'the luminous dark.' (It's a shawl that could be accused of being pretentious).

The pattern, Stor Rund Dug (which Karie informs me has the romantic Danish meaning of Big Round Table Mat), seemed to be evocative of the vortex of darkness of the triple goddess's waning, crone aspect. It is is a deceptively simple pattern, but it did take many knitting hours.

And I'm really happy with the twinkling darkness of the beads.

This time of year, in Glasgow where it feels like one can go days without seeing any sunlight, it's nice to admire this shawl (I look at it smugly and think 'I made it! Me!') and remember that the darkness is only temporary, part of a necessary cycle.

I'll write about the Yule Shawl once it's blocked and photographed!

Foxes

2010-12-30T18:15:00.004Z

I’ve been thinking about foxes quite a bit lately. Mostly this is because, whilst walking in the snow, Belle and Sebastian’s song ‘Fox in the Snow’ wanders into my head, along with the striking image of a fox in the snow (a sight not uncommon in actuality over the last few weeks).

As a child I was drawn to foxes – partly because of the book series The Animals of Farthing Wood, and because of the debate about criminalising fox hunting.

Now I think that I find them attractive because of their beautiful russet colour and brush tails, but also because foxes seem to live on the periphery between the wild and the human; they are ‘other’, but, at night they run around our cities or sneak into our rural settlements. Unlike their relation the wolf – wholly wild and ‘other’ - or the dog – completed domesticated and part of the human world.

Today I watched a lovely film called The Fox and the Child, set in the Jura Mountains region of France.

It's like a children’s picture book filmed in live-action; about childhood, imagination, wildlife, and the nature of love. It expires on iPlayer tomorrow morning, but I’d really recommend seeking it out.

I’ve also happened across some beautiful illustrations of foxes, such as Karolin Schnoor’s cut-out card design:

and a number of Karen Davis’s pictures,

some of which are currently for sale at her Etsy shop. Also on Etsy: Oh My Cavalier's running fox silhouette gift tags:

this lovely wee felted fox by SoftForest.

WIth all this inspiration, I'm thinking of designing some knitting with a 'fox in the snow' theme - perhaps a Fair Isle piece with silhouettes in the mode of Kate Davies's Tortoise and Hare design...

Weekend Knitting-y Goodness

2010-10-24T22:54:00.012+01:00

This was a good weekend to be a knitter in Glasgow. After lots of anticipation and hard work, the knitting cafe the Yarn Cake has opened on Queen Margaret Drive!

I'm lucky enough to live 5-10 minutes walk away, and so had a lovely time on Saturday afternoon chatting, knitting, coveting Drops, New Lanark and Yarn Yard yarn, drinking loose leaf tea and eating Antje's yummy cake.
I also knitted a 'yarn cake' themed card in celebration:

Earlier today I took part in more Glasgow-based knitting-y goodness with a PicKnit at the Botanic Gardens. In the spirit of autumn and halloween, we knitted wee pumpkins which were placed around Kibble Palace glasshouse, much to the delight of the many children and other passers by, who were making the most of a beautiful sunny Sunday.

I've blogged before about how communal knitting, especially in public, and activities like yarnbombing, make the world around us a bit friendlier and get strangers talking to one another. The Yarn Cake and Glasgow PicKnitters are both projects that really embrace that ethos and make this city feel a bit more like home :-)

Autumn Leaves

2010-10-16T18:26:00.004+01:00

I've just been for a wee wander, to pick up a few samples of the lovely leaves that have fallen on the nearby riverside path: I keep noticing them as I dash from A to B, and wanted to collect some to trace for various art purposes, before they get wet or too scrunchy. Which reminded me to blog about my Mabon Shawl (Rav link), which I finished a couple of weeks ago. It's the 'Haruni' pattern (free!) and uses Violet Green hand-dyed sock yarn. I don't have any action photos of the shawl, and those I do have don't really do the yarn or the shawl justice. But ah well.

This is the first of the shawls I plan to make over the next year to mark the eight pagan sabbats - so this one was for the autumnal equinox, celebrating the colours of autumn leaves. My Samhain project is a lot more ambitious...

Wolf Hall

2010-10-15T22:12:00.004+01:00

That it has taken me three and a half months to read all 650 pages of last year's Booker Prize winner, Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, is perhaps not a ringing endorsement. Mantel's interpretation of the historical characters of Thomas Cromwell, Thomas Moore, Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn and her family, Cardinal Wolsey etc., is remarkably similar to that of the soapy Showtime series The Tudors (or maybe I just couldn't read it without thinking of the TV characters).

The writing style is difficult to read. The novel's structure is very repetitive. But these are also the things that make it quite an extraordinary novel - how the situations and the characters develop without any narrative trumpet-blowing. It's a story told from one man's point of view, but with the minimum of his own interpretation of the arc of that story.

What I most like about Wolf Hall- and the reason why I'm keeping my copy although I don't intend to read it all again- is the amazing sentences and phrases strewn throughout the novel like jewels. 'You can have a silence full of words. [...] A shrivelled petal can hold its scent, a prayer can rattle with curses; an empty house, when the owners have gone out, can still be loud with ghosts.' ... 'The world corrupts me, I think. Or perhaps it's just the weather. It pulls me down and makes me think like you, that one should shrink inside, down and down to a little point of light, preserving one's solitary soul like a flame under glass.'

Edinburgh

2010-08-18T00:37:00.007+01:00

So, one month shy of two years of living in Glasgow, I went for my first day out in Edinburgh today. It's been a tongue-in-cheek sign of devotion to my adopted city, that I've not thought its arch-rival worth visiting, and I did feel a bit guilty at how jaw-dropping I found Edinburgh's vistas, and how magical its steep, windy and quaintly-named streets. Though it doesn't seem real in the way that Glasgow does; rather the whole thing is very set up for people who don't live there: tourists and festival-goers what with all the tartan, cashmere and ghost stories. On a non-festival day, however, I think I'd really appreciate a lot of the independent shops and cafes (though nothing better than we've got here in the West End...).

It was exhilarating to be around all the Fringe-related stuff (though I didn't see any shows as much - might go back next week!) and the gig that I'd gone to see was great - Withered Hand (charmingly witty miserablist anti-folk, saturated in lapsed evangelical allusions, with lyrics like 'Lord, won't you deliver me from the wave machine/ and transparent bikinis/ or 'you'll lose your looks/ I'll lose my religion / we'll be God's tiny carrier pigeons') .

But the most exciting thing was a complete accident: call it luck, or serendipity, or providence. I only just made that train from Glasgow...I randomly wandered into a gallery to pick up a festival guide that also happened to have the Book Festival brochure...I happened to open that one first - to read that Michele Roberts (one of the two novelists my PhD thesis is about) was speaking in twenty minutes time! So I dashed, along crowded streets that I don't know, to only just make it to the box office before they closed the doors of the lecture theatre ('Please! I'm writing my PhD on her!'). The reading and discussion (also with Helen Simpson) was very enjoyable and informative, and I got a copy of Michele's new book (Mud) signed. I told her, briefly and slightly gushingly, about my thesis. I don't particularly want to interview her as there are lots of very good and useful interviews published already, so it was nice just to meet her and get a book signed.

I also walked past Simon Callow. I'm never one for bothering celebrities, especially when they're muttering to themselves (going over his lines, perhaps).

Suddenly this summer...

2010-08-08T10:53:00.017+01:00

...is fast going by without any blog documentation.

Well, since my last post, my co-organised Re-Writing the Bible conference went ahead, smoothly and successfully and was actually fun! It was great to meet and listen to the wonderful writers Sara Maitland, Michelene Wandor, Kei Miller, Michael Symmons Roberts, Michael Schmidt and Nicola Slee. Picture of me chairing a panel with Sara and Michelene:

One of the papers I most enjoyed was Kate Blanchard talking about a project in which her students at Alma College, Michigan, wrote and performed their own 'Biblical Vagina Monologues.' This version of Bathsheba's story is transfixing and thought-provoking and really worth watching.

Then I went on holiday in the Outer Hebrides, with a week on Harris and then a week up on Lewis. Jaw-dropping beaches:

Lovely machair:

Stones!

Lots and lots of tweed:

With added Doctor Who-related 'squee' factor at the Carloway mill:

Then after a couple of weeks in Glasgow, starting to deal with the consquences of some big and painful life decisions (hence my not posting for a while), I went home to Whitstable for a fortnight, and had a lovely time with family and old friends:

I sometimes forget how beautiful Whitstable, so it was good to be around during the Oyster Festival, and events like the Blessing of the Waters and the building of grotters. My lame attempt to capture the magic of the candle-light flickering through the oyster-shells on the beach in the sunset:

In knitting news, I finished a Fair Isle cardigan that I designed myself and took nine months to knit:

Since then, I haven't got much finished other than a beautifully soft Leda scarf (Rav link) knitted from handspun cashmere I bought from Scalpay Linen.

Currently working on a Sharon Miller Shetland lace pattern (Rav link), a blanket representing Highland peat-cutting (Rav link) and a pair of alpaca socks celebrating my beloved river Kelvin (Rav link to pattern). Yeah, I know I'm ridiculous...

I read quite a bit whilst on Harris and Lewis, but not much since... read Virginia Woolf's The Waves for the first time since I was a teenager, and decided that I need to read it again, underlining all the brilliant and earth-shattering phrases (ironic, because in the end one of the protagonists realises the uselessness of his notebook of phrases). Lewis writer Peter Urpeth's debut novel Far Inland, which interweaves Hebridean and shamanic myth, started brilliantly but got a bit disappointing by the end. I read a few books that were in the self-catering cottage that I ordinarily wouldn't have picked up, such as Ian Crichton Smith's Consider the Lilies (guess I've got a lot of catching up to do with Scottish literature...) and Kevin MacNeil's poetry collection Love and Zen in the Outer Hebrides, which I loved. I highly recommend the collection of non-fiction 'place writing', A Wilder Vein. I'm currently working my way through Wolf Hall, trying not to let my visualisation of it be too coloured by (ahem) The Tudors TV series.

This summer I've been discovering new music I love by folks who hail from near me (My Latest Novel, Trembling Bells, Zoey Van Goey), slightly less-near-me (Kid Canaveral, Withered Hand) and not-near-me-really-but-still-good (Allo, Darlin, Betty and the Werewolves, Pocketbooks, Shrag, Sky Larkin, Standard Fare).

Where I Live

2010-06-03T00:46:00.008+01:00

I love my home - both the flat and the location. It's near to the Botanic Gardens but doesn't feel too rarified, and is close enough to my university for me to get there easily, but far enough away for stretching my legs and not feeling like I live in an academic bubble. But I've often commented about the oddity of this location, that I feel like I live on the cusp of two completely different worlds: if I face one direction outside my front door I see the steps leading down to the Arboretum and along to the gentrified West End, if I face the other way I see the high rise flats and mass unemployment of Maryhill.

Today I saw this in stark statistical form, in the data from the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation, which uses data from small areas (i.e. the median population is 767) to identify and relativise the 'pockets of deprivation' throughout Scotland. It utilises data on employment, income, crime, education, health and geographic mobility.

The precise area where I live is ranked low for overall deprivation, 5287th in Scotland:

Only 7% are on a low income, and only 5% are unemployed, though there any many less children and retired people than the average in Scotland - essentially it's blocks of tenements occupied by young professionals:

But if I walk 200 yards along the road, going north-west, I'm in one of the top 5% most deprived areas in Scotland:

48% are income deprived and 39% are employment deprived:

I find it fascinating, and disturbing, that where I live a swing from good income, education, health and employment as high as 41% moves not across miles, borders and waters, but feet and inches.

New Tory regime a risk to the rights of women and gay people

2010-05-02T20:47:00.004+01:00

Whilst most of the mainstream media are ignoring it, on Facebook and Twitter there is plenty of talk about this story:

Rising Tory star Philippa Stroud ran prayer sessions to 'cure' gay people (The Observer)

Who would voters be electing Sutton and Cheam - Phillipa Stroud or her husband? (Ekklesia)

I’ve got all sorts of conflicting emotions about it. I don’t think that demonising people with extreme religious views is the right approach, and I really don’t like the language of Philippa Stroud being a ‘nutcase’ or ‘mad of a box of frogs’ etc., which denigrates mental illness. The Observer article is quite sloppy, i.e. equating New Frontiers with ‘US evangelicalism’ when its roots are in the house church movement in Britain.

I was raised in a New Frontiers church, and my grandparents are still very much involved in it. So, on one hand, I know that there are a lot of good, loving and well-intentioned people in those churches. On the other, I am still so angry about things (to do with demons, sexuality, gender, mental health) that I, and others, experienced in New Frontiers churches, and their ilk. Things worse than anything the Observer has reported about Philippa Stroud. I try to direct my anger towards the ideas rather than individual people, who, for the most part, do mean well (and I get the impression that is the case for Philippa Stroud). But it is still so raw, and my journey away from thinking that there was something deeply wrong with me, something satanic, has not been easy. This sort of story brings it all up again, when I want to forget it. I don’t want to be a bitter person.

But I am terrified of living under a Tory government in which someone who propagates beliefs that women should submit to their husbands and not be church leaders, and that lesbian relationships lead to mental illness, has contributed up to 70 policies on ‘the family,’ and is part of a ‘centre for social justice’ (what a mockery that name is). I am angry that the BBC, who my licence fee pays for, has not reported it, when it is arguably much more significant than Chris Grayling or that Ayrshire candidate that Cameron quickly got rid of, trying to make his party look progressive.

I really worry that our hard-won rights to sexual and reproductive freedom are in danger of being eroded.

What a yarn!

2010-05-02T12:48:00.003+01:00

The final installment of Knitting and Crochet Blog week! I've enjoyed it, and am glad I decided at the last minute to take part, especially as I've been such bad blogger of late. Anyway, today we are blogging about a particular yarn, and I'm going to take the opportunity to show off and write about a yarn that I spun myself.

I learnt to spin more than 5 years ago, and am competent: I generally make rustic looking sport-weight 2-ply yarns, full of lumpy bits and character. I am not a perfectionist when it comes to spinning, and I hadn't been making much effort to improve my skills. But looking at the photos of the perfect yarns in the handspinning forums on Ravelry made me think that maybe I should try a little harder. So I decided to try and spin a skein of wool that it as fine and as even as I could possibly make it. And this was the result:

12 grams and 143 yards of gorgeousness. I was so delighted with it (and amazed that I span it) that I knitted it up into this lace kerchief in only a couple of days:

Revisiting a past F/O

2010-05-01T18:24:00.003+01:00

In the spring of 2007 I started knitting myself the above jumper. I don't have any photos of me wearing it, sadly. It's a significant project for me because it's my first top-down raglan (I used the Incredible Custom-Fit Raglan method) and my first project knitted entirely in the round. It's also my first Fair Isle piece that uses traditional Shetland 2-ply wool, which was donated to me by the lady from the Shetland Isles that I mention in Day Two. She gave me a bag of various random skeins, and my design was on the basis of the colours I had, and the many designs from Sheila McGregor's Complete Book of Traditional Fair Isle Knitting.

The design process was pretty haphazard (i.e. I picked the patterns and colours I liked as I went along) and it's definitely more a sampler than a design. (Unlike the carefully thought out, but painstakingly slow, cardigan here (Rav link), still using a lot of the Jamieson and Smith bits and bobs that Ann gave me three years ago). Another thing I berate myself for is not noticing that Incredible Custom Fit Raglan method of rounds beginning at the front would be a problem that would be noticeable and really I should have customised. And I really should have made the sleeves longer. Despite all these problems, I do love this jumper, and am rather proud of it.

Location, Location, Location

2010-04-30T22:33:00.005+01:00

Day 5 of Knitting and Crochet Blog Week - on the location of one's knitting. In private, I like knitting on the sofa (in my flat and on the sofa in the family home that I learnt to knit on, on 'my seat,' leaving little bits of yarn and fluff in my wake), and propped up in bed. In public - when I started knitting I did a lot on the bus to school, in the 6th form common room, and in the cafes my friends and I sat about in after school. I never went to a knitting group until I set one up at Durham Uni in my third year there, and we used to knit in the student union cafe:

Now I go regularly to a lovely knitting group in Glasgow, and I really enjoy it. I think there is something magical about a group of people getting together whilst they make things.

Mimi says in her post that, for her, knitting in public isn't making a political statement. I'd say that it is, actually, but an unintentional one, a side-effect, if you will, of knitting whilst out and about purely because it's enjoyable. I think someone doing something in public, in a group or alone, that is unusual and somewhat countercultural, that challenges people's notions of what sort of person knits, is a kind of microrevolutionary activity, whether one intends it to or not. Mimi talks about how, when she knits on public transport, people start chatting to her, and that's part of what she likes about it. And I think that is subversive, in a way, because people on trains and buses often don't talk to each other, and strangers don't come up to someone reading a novel and ask if it's a good book, like they do with someone knitting. The knitting makes a point of contact between people in a world that is so often very isolated/isolating, and that is political, and also rather wonderful.

To carry on in a political vein - because I've just come back from an away-day(and night) with my research seminar, and I'm thinking in left-wing humanities academic speak...the word 'location,' the title here, is often used to refer to class/sex/race/world context, one's 'social location.' And, in that sense, the 'location' I knit in is that of young, middle class, single woman - like most people at my knitting group (which admittedly has a lot to do with the place and timing of the sessions I go to - the afternoon and weekend meetings have a different demographic) - but I would say that in general, and internationally, the knitting revival is rather white, and middle class, and female. In the UK, there is a bit of a divide between the knitters who use acrylic (and call it 'wool') and those who spend lots of money on real wool (and cashmere, and alpaca, in 'skeins', not 'balls'), and this divide can be based on class as much as on age. And this makes me sad sometimes: I don't want knitting to be an exclusive, luxury hobby, and I want beautiful, natural and environmentally responsible wools to be available at affordable prices (see New Lanark!). And I want knitting groups to be places where people from a variety of backgrounds (or 'locations') feel comfortable - which hopefully is the case for most knitting groups, including my own :-)

A wonderful art project from Glasgow Women's library, and my wee version!

2010-04-29T01:50:00.004+01:00

Check this out:

As part of the Making Space project, Shauna McMullan is creating a single, long, blue, line of books borrowed and collected from women throughout Scotland.You are invited to take part in this artwork.Can you lend a book to the Blue Spine collection? Your book needs to: 1) Have a blue spine or have blue somewhere in the spine & 2) Be written by a woman.

You will be invited to celebrate the opening of the artwork and to see your book as part of this collection in The Mitchell Library in May 2010. Following the exhibition your book will be returned to you with a numbered bookmark enclosed, recognising your book’s place within this collection. Your book will need to be borrowed until August 2010 and it is important to include a note of your name, address and contact details with your book.

Please send your book to Blue Spine Collection, Glasgow Women’s Library, 81 Parnie Street, Glasgow, G1 5RH – or drop it off at the Library.

So taken was I with this concept, that I immediately started perusing my bookshelves for blue-spined books written for women. Then I saw that I had enough to do my own mini-version:

Pretty representative of my reading tastes, really. Not sure which one to lend to the project - I'd rather it was one that was meaningful to me, but not so meaningful that I'd worry about not getting it back...

All Tooled Up

2010-04-29T01:36:00.006+01:00

For Day 4 of Knitting and Crochet blog week, I'm going for the wildcard question - Do you have a particular knitting/crochet tool or piece of equipment that you love to use? Yes, and, although I don't use her much anymore, let me introduce Knittin' Bag.

I got Knittin' Bag when I first started knitting - it had been my mum's, and she gave it to me to ensure that I kept my knitting tidy. 'A good knitter always clears their work away at the end', she told me. And so 'Knittin' Bag' was born - an object very significant in my life, the holder of my artistic endeavours, sometimes swallower of tobacco tins (I often lost my baccy, only to find it later in with my knitting - 'why does Knittin' Bag eat your things, Narnie?' my brother asked), and so she became personified.

Never beautiful, not quite kitsch enough to be termed retro, and yet I love her. My mum and nan have bags just like her, though theirs are less raggedy. For the last five years or so I have only used her to store needles, because of her holes and tears, and I keep my various projects in plastic bags, stuffed into a wicker basket. My wicker basket is pretty, and practical, both things that Knittin' Bag is not. Yet I have an affection for her that I don't have for the basket, which is very much an it, not a she. Knitters are weird that way.

One Great Knitter

2010-04-28T19:49:00.008+01:00

Once again for Knitting and Crochet Blog Week...today's heading is 'one great knitter,' in which we choose one knitter whose work we'd like to share. My 'one great knitter' is my friend and colleague, pedantka (Rav link), who blogs overs at The Kippah and the Collar (she's Kippah). We are part of the same research seminar, and at first I hadn't known that she was a fellow knitter until I saw her photo on a ravatar in the Glasgow forum on Ravelry. Then I clicked on her projects page, and was amazed!

I have come to have even greater appreciation of her knitting greatness since then, especially in the enormous and gorgeous Lady Eleanor stole, her autumnal version (Rav link) of Knitty's Laminaria and the sheep-yoke sweater (Rav link) that makes me want my own children, now, just so I can dress them in cardigans with wee sheep on them.

Pedantka is a knitter's knitter, who makes beautiful and complicated lace shawls more for the challenge and artistic process than the finished item. She is also a very generous knitter, always making things for friends, colleagues, family, and their children. This creative generosity is reflected not only in her wonderful cooking and baking, but also the care, energy and intellect she puts into her work at our department, and society at large (this is also true of her partner). I am being particularly forthright in my praise because she has her viva defending her Phd thesis this week, and, despite this, is putting hours of her time into making sure that students get their essays back before their exams. So (and the two are not unrelated) a great knitter, and a great person.

An Inspirational Pattern

2010-04-27T23:28:00.004+01:00

Another post as part of Knitting and Crochet Blog Week, today about a pattern that inspires me and that I would love to make, but don't yet feel up to. Well, I would one day love to make one of Sharon Miller's beautiful 'wedding ring' Shetland lace shawls, in particular the Unst Lace Shawl (Ravelry link) from the Heirloom Knitting book, which my grandparents gave me on my last birthday. It's a traditionally constructed Shetland lace shawl, with a centre square, border and edging, worked in a variety of lace patterns with incredibly fine, 'cobweb' wool. Hence the term, 'wedding ring shawl', because the finished article may be pulled through a wedding ring.

I was aware of Shetland lace for a while before I met an elderly lady from the Shetland Isles, then I became fascinated by it. Anne, had lived in County Durham for nearly fifty years, but still held on to her heritage. Her mother had been a professional knitter from the isle of Unst, and she herself had made a few prize-winning cobweb lace shawls, folded beautifully in boxes.

1935 Shawl from Unst, V&A Museum

She gave me some of her 1-ply wool, as her arthritis made it difficult for her to work with it now (although she could still manage with 2-ply!) and I made a pair of fingerless gloves with it, but it was a real struggle because I kept snapping the yarn, and got in a tangle trying to wind it into a ball. So, despite my initial ambitions, I never made the Shetland shawl that I had hoped to.

But I am working my way up to it! Two years ago I made an old shale stole in very fine 2-ply wool:

and last year for my mum's 50th birthday I knitted her a shawl constructed in the traditional style, though the yarn is 4-ply so, whilst I'm proud of it, I'm not there yet.

Knitting with 1-ply is so difficult.... I have some very fine 2-ply lace Blue-Faced Leicester wool, and I'm planning to make a thinner version of the Unst Lace Stole (Ravelry link), which will stand me in good stead for one day making the big, square shawl version. In Shetland 1-ply. Oh yes.

Starting Out

2010-04-26T21:45:00.006+01:00

What follows is from the opening paper that I've just submitted to my supervisor (the paper that has had a lot of to do my nonappearance here of late...), called 'Making Things'. It draws a lot on some posts in this blog, so I hope you'll forgive the repetition. I'm also posting it as part of Knitting and Crochet Blog Week, which I really want to take part in after reading Karie's beautiful post.

January is always an unpleasant month, and this year’s was particularly cold and dark, but for me it was considerably brightened by the ‘A History of the World in 100 Objects’ programmes on Radio Four, part of a wider BBC and British Museum project. The programmes, narrated by the British Museum curator Neil McGregor, aim to ‘tell the story of our world through the things human beings have made over the last two million years,’ in partnership with web and community-based initiatives encouraging people to think about the historical and social significance of the things they own and use. I already liked the concept of the series, of understanding history through the stuff we make, because my love of knitting extends to an interest in textile crafts and their social history. And because there is something especially transportative and memorable about things, objects that can be touched, stroked, held, even if one never actually gets to hold them. It is in the odd little folk museums in rural locations around the country, run as labours of love by slightly eccentric locals, that one comes across the coal scuttles, wool carders, tobacco tins, harnesses, butter churns, that give glimpses into the daily lives of ordinary people from the past.

Yet these are artefacts from the relatively recent past, and listening to the second instalment of the ‘100 Objects’ series, I was astonished by the beauty and humanity of the thirteen-thousand-year-old ‘swimming reindeer’ sculpture, carved from mammoth tusk towards the end of the Ice Age. Looking on the website at the image of that carving, I felt a doorway open to thirteen thousand years ago, to the incredible quiet and harsh cold, to someone sitting by a river, watching the play of light of the water, the reindeer in mating season, whittling at a bit of tusk. Even that long ago, people found moments in which to live, not just survive, to see the beauty in the world around them, and make beautiful things to represent it.

Thus I was particularly receptive to the deep velvety tones of Archbishop Rowan Williams, explaining on the programme what the swimming reindeer piece says to him about art and spirituality:

What I think you see in the art of this period is human beings trying to enter fully into the flow of life around them, so that they become part of the whole process of animal life that's going on around them, in a way which I think isn't just about managing the animal world, or guaranteeing them success in hunting or whatever. I think it's more than that. It's really a desire to get inside and almost to be at home in the world at a deeper level, and I think that that's actually a very deeply religious impulse, to be at home in the world.
[...]
With that, and in your identification with the processes of the world, you begin to understand or intuit what in the 'Old Testament' is called 'wisdom', a kind of principle of cohesion or cohesiveness underlying it all, and you identify that eventually with the mind of God.

That phrase explaining the human desire to make things—‘to be at home in the world’—resonated with me, and stayed with me. Not only did it seem to be a good way to describe the spiritual significance of daily acts of making in the writing of Michèle Roberts’s (whom I am working on in my thesis): it also helped to explain what ‘making things’ has meant to me.

For a large proportion of my life I have just not wanted to be here: from about the age of eleven, for me the world was charged with horror. A number of factors have been involved with the gradual easing of my depression since my late teens, but it was through teaching myself to knit in particular that the world has become re-enchanted again. One day when I was eighteen I decided, quite at random, to have a rummage through my mum’s old knitting needles and wool, and try and remember that which my grandmother taught me when I was six. With a bit of struggle, and my mum’s help, I did, and I made a scarf for my sister, then one for my friend Jess (purling as well!), then one for myself (made up of patches trying out lots of different stitches), which I still wear, then I made my friend Rosie a ‘Mini-Rosie’ doll, and since then I’ve carried on knitting and never stopped.

I am not sure why knitting, rather than any other craft, has so engaged me: I suppose because of its rhythmic, meditative nature; the fact that it employs some parts of the brain, but leaves the others free to concentrate on other things; the usefulness and enjoyableness of its products (clothes!), and that it can be simultaneously original and part of a long tradition. If something goes wrong, or is not working out as planned, knitting is quite easy to unravel and start again. Whilst a rather skewed perfectionism means that my other creative activities of writing and drawing/painting are fraught with the danger that if the end product is not very good I will feel like a useless human being, I am not nearly so bothered if a knitting project turns out hideously. I suppose this is because of the lesser status that knitting has as a creative art, it is less associated with the ego. My knitting has been a sustaining comfort and distraction during particularly difficult times, and more than anything it gives me a general sense of purpose; a structure to my life that might otherwise have been lacking. I always have something to do that I enjoy, something that keeps me engaged, and because I used not to enjoy anything much at all, that is very valuable. Being someone who makes material things has made me more attuned than I was to the beauty of the world, and able to value beauty for its own sake. Knitting has helped me to become at home in the world, when depression made me want to leave the world, and Christianity told me that I should look beyond the world, that it was not of ultimate importance.

In evangelical Christian circles, individuals share their ‘testimony,’ the narrative of how they became a Christian. Many gay people also have a ‘coming out story’. There seems something terribly silly about this knitter’s version of a coming out story, or testimony. But I’ve had those other stories, those other significant turning points of my life, and, ridiculous as it seems, I think that knitting may actually have been just as significant for my mental and spiritual health as becoming a Christian and accepting my sexuality. Yet why is that so surprising, so ‘silly’ or ‘ridiculous’? Writers often say far more solemn things about the impulse to write, musicians to play, artists to paint. Is it blasphemous, that making things out of loops of wool has almost certainly been better for me than any number of dogmas of the church? It may be that they—writing, knitting, praying—are not such different things, but all part of the same ‘entering into the flow of life,’ that intuiting of ‘the principle of cohesion underlying it all,’ that Rowan Williams talks about.

And if there still seems something rather silly about valuing knitting as part of the divine flow of life: why? Because (the whole) knitting is not art, it does not make statements, it does not have immaterial meanings attached to it? Or because (on the whole) only women knit? This paper, on feminism and the spirituality inherent in making things, has come out of my joy in learning to be ‘at home in the world’ through creating with my hands. It is also the result of my profound irritation that academic theology fails to appreciate the value of small, ‘feminine’ acts of making, such as knitting.

Holy Island

2010-03-14T19:12:00.034Z

Thank you for all the kind comments re. my tooth. It is mostly better now, thankfully. I was amused by my having something of a Liz Lemon, 'Anna Howard Shaw Day' moment when I explained the dentist that scheduling the removal of a wisdom tooth is a bit difficult because I live on my own and don't have anyone to drive my sedated self home unless someone comes to stay specifically for that purpose.

Anyway, over a week after I got home, I will now get round to blogging about my retreat to the Holy Island of Lindisfarne.

I was really lucky with the weather, and on a glorious sunny day the snow-covered Campsies looked beautiful through the window of the train between Glasgow and Edinburgh:

The journey from Edinburgh to Berwick-Upon-Tweed is always a pleasure because of the sudden, grandiose appearance of the North Sea, though I didn't manage to get any pictures. I got a taxi from the station across the causeway to my destination, St Cuthbert's Centre, to stay in 'the Bothy'. I got a really nice welcome from the people running it, who managed to be friendly whilst giving me the space I'd come there for, which in my experience of working at a retreat centre is actually avery difficult balance to achieve. The Bothy itself was very cosy and pleasant, much nicer than the pictures on the website, but it is difficult to photograph small indoors places. Here's my attempt at capturing the upstairs part where I slept:

I was also quite taken with the St Cuthbert's Centre itself, originally a Presbyterian church and now a space available for the use of groups, and open during daylight hours for the use of all visitors to the island:

Especially the prayer tree, adorned with glass leaves:

The embroidery hanging on the lecturn is a mini version of a large one that hung in the reception area at Scargill:
After unpacking my things (whenever I go anyway I immediately have to make myself at home) and eating some lunch, I determined to make the most of the weather and see as much of the island as possible whilst the sun was still out. I walked past the harbour towards the castle: then round to the old lime kilns, strangely church-like structures:

I followed the coast round, delighted to be near sun, sea and sheep!:

It wasn't until I got round to the other side from the village, away from the few workers and other day trippers, that the light, the waves, the dunes, the sand, the birds and the wind started to quiet down my noisy head, and I began to feel elated at being there, on this mad solitary holiday.

I was amazed by the patterns the sea had left on the sand, and I'd like to try and reproduce them in wool somehow:
My camera ran out of battery, so I have no photographic record of my losing my way a bit and continuing round the the edge island with an ever-incoming tide.

The first evening there I had a fantastic meal at the Crown and Anchor pub, and I was relieved that I didn't feel uncomfortable eating there on my own. I was half freaked out, half delighted, by the Wicker Man -ness of how quiet the village is at night. I also discovered that, when sung, one of my favourite short traditional prayers fits to the rhythm of the stitch pattern of the knitting I brought with me, which I'll share with you once it's finished/I have decent photographs. I think I got a very important insight about myself from my attempt at lectio divina, which amazed me because reading the Bible in that kind of way is very difficult for me, because my mind is trained now to read critically and with a hermeneutics of suspicion. (Which is why our Re-Writing the Bible conference will be so interesting).

I slept really well and on a cold and blustery morning I managed to get up early enough to go to Eucharist at the very old and beautiful, but utterly freezing, St Mary's Church.

I then then wrapped up warm and walked round the island again, starting with the tiny Hobthrush island where St Cuthbert would retreat:

It's possible to clamber over the rocks, seaweed and limpets to the island when the tide is out, and it affords a nice view of the church and the priory:

I then battled the wind round to the harbour again, taking time to photograph the wonderful sheds made from upturned boats:

Retracing yesterday's steps, I foudn that the same coast looked so different less than a day later, with the clouds overhead and the tide out:
I stumbled (quite literally - rocky beaches are hard going in the wind!) across this magical little hut, which seemed to belong to a winkle picker or a sea witch, to use as a shelter from the not inconsiderable elements:
When I looked inside I couldn't believe my eyes: it was full of colourful bits and pieces that have washed up on the shore, and made something so enchanting out of lost and discarded materials (sorry about the shoddy photos):

This little oasis of safety amidst the roaring wind and crashing waves even had a window with a sea view:
But I left this hideaway, to see bizarre rock formations:

rushing expanses of sand:

Then 'the Snook', with its 18th century folly:

and eerie dunes, like miniature mountains and lakes:

Once again I walked back along the causeway:

I'd walked quite a long way in the last two days, and after about six hours of wandering I spent the rest of the afternoon and evening relaxing by the fire, intermittently praying and reading Kate Atkinson's When Will There Be Good News. I'd got lots of new freckles, even in the cloudy weather, my muscles ached and I was really satisfied and happy. On Day 3, before getting the bus off the island (which only runs twice a week!) I 'contributed to the island's economy' by buying various mementos in gift shops and looking round the church, the priory and the heritage centre. The latter is really worth a visit, with lots of info about the island's wildlife and social history, as well as great exhibits on the Lindisfarne Gospels, including some amazing quilts. Waiting for the bus, I bumped into Tractor Girl, who I know through the internet and (in my distant past) real life, which was a nice but very odd coincidence.

On the train journey back I rather wished that I could have stayed there, with the beauty and the peace, but the fantastic sunset was some consolation:

Moss Witch Socks

2010-03-09T18:52:00.007Z

I'll blog about my trip to Holy Island in a bit, but at the moment my brain can't cope with anything as taxing as that: for the last couple of days I have been plagued by an infected wisdom tooth, that has caused one side of my face to swell up to a size that even shocked the dentist. It hurts a lot, and I can't leave the house because I'm embarrassed to look so disfigured, plus I feel faint and weak because my inability to chew, combined with the nausea from the antibiotics, means that I haven't been able to eat much. But anyway, I am very fortunate to have been born in a time with the scientific and medical advances that make pain relief and cure possible, in a part of the world where good dentistry is available (and, in my case, free).

Some knitting I finished recently: a pair of socks that are extra special because I dyed and spun the wool myself.

I dyed some merino tops in various shades of green, and carded them together:

Then I span up the wool:

It occured to me how much the greens resembled the mosses that grow on the walls of Belmont Bridge on on the River Kelvin:

I also thought of a story called ‘Moss Witch’ by Sara Maitland (whom part of my PhD is about), which recently came second in the BBC National Short Story Award. It’s about a magical, moss-like woman, the guardian of the mosses and lichens that carpet the floor of Galloway’s ancient woodlands. The moss witch even wears mittens that are knitted in moss stitch! So I wanted to knit something out of this yarn that would bring to mind the green light amongst the trees of ancient woodlands, with the ground covered in moss. Janel Laidman's Lothlorien pattern -adapted so that the feet are worked in double moss stitch - was perfect for that.

Preparing for retreat

2010-02-28T18:38:00.007Z

I will get back to writing about my objects soon, but as I'm about to start working on a paper about feminist spirituality and material objects (the ideas for which emerged from my blog posts, actually) I don't want to think about it too much on a Sunday, because Sunday is the day when I do not, under any circumstances, do any study or work. This isn't for religious reasons, particularly, other than that the need for one day off per week is enshrined in many of the world's religions, mine own included. Of course, my 'work' is a strange sort of work, in that I don't get paid, I choose my own hours, and it's very difficult to clock off, and a lot of the time it is more like a hobby, or a vocation, than 'work' per se. But however one classifies PhDing, it is something that occasionally requires some time off, especially with paid work, teaching, conference organisation, committee-sitting, etc. on top of it. We all vary in our ability to cope with life's stresses and strains, and I am not always the most resilient of people, and as I do have a lot on at the moment I decided to take a few days at the beginning of March to go on retreat.

Later in the week I am going to Holy Island (Lindisfarne), to stay in a tiny annex of a church there, made available to private retreatants at a very reasonable price (I also got very cheap train tickets). I first visited Holy Island when I was 21, and was really quite affected by its beauty, the vastness of the beaches, its exposed feel, the amazing quality of the light, and the sense of holiness that pervades the air there. I think it had a lot to do with the direction my spirituality has since taken.

So in the Lenten quest to make an effort to seek God and to have some peace, away from my laptop and television, and all the enriching and frustrating distractions of my daily life, I'm going to spend three days on my own, in a strange and isolated place. It will be hard not to think about the issues explored in Sara Maitland's A Book of Silence, although I'm not seeking silence as such, as I plan to attend the church services there and shelter from the weather in teashops and pubs, as well as looking out at the North Sea and walking amongst sand dunes. I am taking books and knitting. So it's hardly St Cuthbert shoulder high in the sea or that guy that lived on a pole in the desert. But it won't be easy, and I'm beginning to get a bit terrified, and today I've been trying to reassure myself with a litany of what to pack, and what to do and see while I'm there. I am also very excited and really looking forward to it.

Me paddling in the painfully cold North Sea in June 2005

A Life in 100 Objects: Wood - Totem.

2010-02-21T22:04:00.013Z

Before I was a PhD student living in Glasgow, I was part of an intentional community named Scargill, in Kettlewell in the Yorkshire Dales. It is an incredibly beautiful place.

It was there that I learned what it is to really love a piece of land. And there I learned to love trees, because of the gorgeous broad-leaf woodlandthat had been planted and tended, as well as the native conifers, as part of the community's mission.

At Scargill I also learned that ideals, faith and hard work will not always result in a good end, because our community and retreat centre ran out of money and had to close. It was a very sad experience, because, although I'd only been there ten months, I had put a lot of myself into it, and being there was very intense and engrossing. I've been in Glasgow twice as long now as I was at Scargill, and yet I still kind of feel like I'll go back to Scargill soon.
I won't. Although the buildings haven't been bulldozed, or turned in a posh hotel, the place I lived in doesn't exist any more. It is not the same because the people aren't the same.

On our last day together as a community, we did a number of activities to mark the day, and make it special: a walk, a service in the chapel, a meal. I was asked to come up with something 'crafty' for us to do. I wanted to do something connected with the land, and with us as the group, and our parting ways. So I asked the resident handyman to divide the logs in the woodshed into 15-inch-high pieces. We gathered in the art room:

We each decorated our own log as we wanted, as a 'totem' of ourselves:

Then we took our totems out to the ampitheatre-like clearing outside the chapel, stood in a circle, with our totems placed on the ground in front of us. We took two balls of wool, and threw them across the circle to each other, wrapping the wool around our waists:

This made a web that bound us together, before we lifted it up over our heads, and then down on to the ground, held in place by our totems.

The idea had been that our totems would stay there, after we'd gone, but when it came to it most of us wanted to take them with us! But the web of wool stayed there. I visited a year later whilst on holiday in the region and curious as to the progress of the group who'd banded together to buy the place and have another go at running a retreat house. I was moved to see that, although the wool (my handspun) had been picked up from its web on the grass, and put into a bucket, there were tiny green shoots growing out of it.

S today my object is my 'totem', a reminder of Scargill, a piece of tree that I painted according to the grain of the wood. Now it is in my living room, as part of my altar:

That's my last wooden item - sixteen in all!

A Life in 100 Objects: Wood - Cross

2010-02-17T23:49:00.005Z

Having attended a beautiful Ash Wednesday service at St. Mary's Episcopal Cathedral, I had a cross on my forehead, painted from ashes that were once palm crosses, that were once palm leaves on a tree. The Anglo-Saxon poem 'The Dream of the Rood' reminds us of the origin of Christ's cross: a 'wondrous tree / lifted into the air, enveloped by light / the brightest of trees' .

These days I prefer to focus my spirituality on looking at trees rather than in looking at crosses, the ashing refrain 'from dust you came and to dust you shall return' is for me more about interconnection and atoms from the dust of stars, about the transcience of this life, than it is fear of death leading to repentance from sin (not that there isn't any repenting going on, just for different reasons).

Some years ago I made myself a 'sort of' rosary, with flowers knitted from my handspun wool as the 'beads', completed by a wooden holding cross. The cross fits my hand perfectly; I feel comforted and centred as I hold it. I can't remember when I got or where from. But for me it represents combining reflection on the natural world and of my own creativity with religion, with seeing the cross more in terms of trees than ashes:

A Life in 100 Objects: Wood - Willow Teepee

2010-02-13T22:42:00.008Z

I love educational reality TV! In a series that seems to follow where Victorian Farm left off, Mastercrafts, in which enthusiastic beginners compete in learning traditional artisan crafts. It's like an updated Jack Hargreaves 's Out of Town (here on Youtube) or a televised John Seymour book. The first episode is about green woodcraft, defined in this here pdf as follows:

crafts whose basic raw material is ‘green’ or freshly cut coppiced wood, cleft not sawn. Chestnut and hazel are the most commonly worked species, followed by willow, oak, birch, alder and sycamore.Apart from lightweight chainsaws, which have largely replaced bill hooks for wood-cutting, the equipment comprises mainly hand tools or, in the case of rake-making and pole-lathe turnery, simple machines.

Mastercrafts is a really good programme, that shows the hard work, skill and time that went in to traditional wood-working, often done by 'bodgers', people who lived in the woods themselves. Monty Don, the presenter, says lots of lovely and true things about connection with the source material of our everyday objects.

I enjoyed watching the use of the pole lathe, which I had seen used before in real life by the re-enactors at the Crannog Centre in Perthshire. A crannog is a dwelling held on stilts over a loch, throughout Iron Age Scotland. At the Crannog Centre the archaeologists have reconstructed a crannog, using the ancient crafts and materials, based on evidence found at the bottom of Loch Tay and other crannog sites.

To get back to my objects, I suppose that I've actually done a little bit of green woodcraft myself. At Glastonbury 2007 I wandered around the craft bit of the Green Fields looking at the various crafts, and there was a willow weaving tent in which you could have a go. It was completely different to my normal sort of craft, and interesting to me because my maternal grandmother's grandfather was a basket weaver (and thatcher - which is the craft featured in the next episode of Mastercraft) in Norfolk. This is what I made:

Willow-weaving was fun, but not easy, because of the control needed to bend the strips in the right place, and not snap them. I ended up with the above funny teepee-like thing, which survived the terrible mud and rain to make it home with me.

A Life in 100 Objects: Wood - Home

2010-02-07T15:43:00.010Z

After a somewhat busy week, I'm going back to thinking about the wooden objects in my life. Today's post is about the things made of wood that represent home - my flat in Glasgow.

Before I moved in here in June, I had moaned a lot about wanting 'my own front door', after the insecurity of moving from a community that closed down to shared and soulless student accommodation. When I started out life at Scargill I missed the sense of my own space and direction over the rhythm of my life that I'd had in my various homes at university, and this sense was much worse living in student halls, and I hated my entire time there. I had moved home every summer for the last six years, and in those horrible flats my sense of groundlessness, and dislike of the space I had to live in, made me very unhappy. Thanks to the kindness and generosity of my father in particular, and other family members, for the first time this academic year I live somewhere that I can call my own, that I can decorate how I like, and that I won't have to move out of for a while.

So Object No. 10 is this wooden keyring charm, representative of my thankfulness to have this flat to rent not only because it goes with the keys that open 'my own front door', but also because it was a wee Christmas present from my dad, who enabled me to live here.

Also these shelves, some of the many which my dad worked hard to put up, at the end of a weekend which involved driving 400 miles with lots of my stuff from home, moving that in, then moving all my things from my room in Glasgow down four flights of stairs, then up another four flights. Then shopping for bits and pieces, culminating in driving round trying to find a B&Q warehouse, then, goods procured, putting up three sets of bookshelves. I am very grateful for my daddy...

I feel a bit guilty telling this story though - guilty for being a spoilt middle-class girl, still reliant on family for financial and practical help, for having 'my own front door' meaning so much to me when for so many the idea of a roof, let alone a door, is a distant luxury. It is important to own my 'privilege', I think, to face up to the undeserved advantages that I have. But it is also important to feel gratitude, rather than guilt, about the blessings in my life, one of the most important of which is my family.

I do have lovely family - sometimes unconventionally so! - and my dear youngest brother teases me mercilessly (imagine a teenage, prettier, less humane version of Charlie Brooker...) but shows occasional and random signs of affection. One of which was buying me this wooden candle holders for Christmas a couple of years ago:

I was touched that he chose them because they matched the decor of my bedroom at home. And that he reacted to a long trip to a fair trade warehouse, during a visit to me in Yorkshire that he really wasn't enjoying.

Thinking about a sense of home, I realise that my 'bit tray' has followed me to my various abodes ever since I first moved out of home to university:

It's where I chuck all my thingumy-bobs and bits-and-pieces, and so it's pretty and useful. At the moment it lives on top of the microwave.

No doubt it will come with me to my next home, wherever that may be...

Loom Blessing

2010-02-02T22:54:00.005Z

The 1st-2nd of February is when we celebrate Imbolc, St. Brigid's (or Bride's) Day, and Candlemass. A curious hotchpotch of paganism, Christianity and folk religion, all of which are celebrating women and birthing, and the coming of the light. Fires are lit to welcome in the faintest intimations of spring, beginning to appear after the long winter.

The Carmina Gadelica, the turn of the century collection of Gaelic prayers, songs and sayings, says this about the saint-goddess Bride:

There are many legends and customs connected with Bride. Some of these seem inconsistent with one another, and with the character of the Saint of Kildare. These seeming inconsistencies arise from the fact that there were several Brides, Christian and pre-Christian, whose personalities have become confused in the course of centuries--the attributes of all being now popularly ascribed to one. Bride is said to preside over fire, over art, over all beauty, 'fo cheabhar agus fo chuan,' beneath the sky and beneath the sea. And man being the highest type of ideal beauty, Bride presides at his birth and dedicates him to the Trinity. She is the Mary and the Juno of the Gael. She is much spoken of in connection with Mary,--generally in relation to the birth of Christ. She was the aid-woman of the Mother of Nazareth in the lowly stable, and she is the aid-woman of the mothers of Uist in their humble homes.

In honour of Bride, and of 'thingyness' - having a sacramental attitude to the everyday objects we live and work with - here is a Highland loom blessing, also from the Carmina Gadelica:

THRUMS nor odds of thread
My hand never kept, nor shall keep,

Every colour in the bow of the shower
Has gone through my fingers beneath the cross,

White and black, red and madder,
Green, dark grey, and scarlet,

Blue, and roan, and colour of the sheep,
And never a particle of cloth was wanting.

I beseech calm Bride the generous,
I beseech mild Mary the loving,
I beseech Christ Jesu the humane,
That I may not die without them,
That I may not die without them.

A Life in 100 Objects: Wood - Turn Turn Turn

2010-01-31T22:37:00.006Z

More things! made from wood. The ones I've selected for today were made by and bought from independent artisans - woodturners to be precise. What I love about woodturned things is how they are simultaneously the product of human design and skill, whilst preserving the memory of their natural origins, the trees they came from. I particularly lust after woodturned objects because woodturning is one of those crafts that I know I will never myself master, whilst not being able to afford those lovely things that others have made. There are some wonderful objects on sale from Wheelchair Woodturners and the Coach House Trust shop, both local charitable organisations, but at prices that are fair, but make a purchase more of an investment than an 'ooh, pretty!' Happily, the objects below were bargains.

I got this thermometer, made of elm, from Turning Time on Folksy - it was only 5.50 (excl. P+P) so I snapped it up because I think it's gorgeous. I use it to justify turning on my heating! I usually only buy things on Folksy or Etsy that I would Never in a Million Years be able to make myself, otherwise I'd spend all my money on the handmade loveliness available online now.

I got these red cedar buttons (vendor's photo) from The Hickory Tree on Etsy, and these special buttons will adorn a special project - a fair isle cardigan (Ravelry Link) that I've been working on since August, but probably won't complete by the 2012 Olympics. Possibly. I'll wear it for the opening ceremony. There, look, I've set myself a goal.

This last object, wee mushroom, made from banksia nut, wasn't bought online, but from one of the shops of the craft village at Quex Park near Margate, where my mum works. Quex is home to the madness and eclectic beauty of the Powell Cotton Museum, which features countless made objects from around the world, brought into the possession of the sort of colonial family that has thankfully become a thing of the past.

I like the mushroom not only because it is whimsical and cute, but also because it reminds me of a family day out to Quex last spring, one on which my grandparents came along too, which doesn't happen very often now that they are getting on. On that day I took this photo of my Nanny, which I'll share (hope she doesn't mind) because it's not often that I take good photos, let alone good portraits:

More on Spinning

2010-01-30T20:13:00.003Z

Further to my post yesterday, Andygrrl’s comment reminded me of the many interesting appearances that spinning makes in mythology and folklore, and how this has made its way into the cultural imaginary of the feminist movement, in terms of women’s writing and spirituality. Here is a description of a number of instances of spinning in myth and fairytale, especially northern and eastern European ones that English speakers may be less familiar with, with emphasis on the spinning of a yarn as the making of fate. In feminism’s appropriation of spinning as a symbol for womanhood, it has focused not on fate but on storytelling, especially in terms of the formation of a (perceived) collective identity and struggle. The notion of ‘common threads’ is why there are more instances of the symbolism of weaving in feminist writing, used to denote the many becoming the one, stronger and more beautiful. Which is also what the traditional women’s work of patchwork quilting is used to symbolise. Often spinning and weaving become conflated in the modern feminist writer’s mind – presumably because today we are more familiar with spiders’ webs than with ancient textile arts. Talking about my own wooden spinning and knitting implements reminded me of those I saw in August during a visit to the Swaledale Museum .

Wool-combs, goosewing knitting sheaths, carders, blah, all jostle for space in this lovely collection of the objects from the daily life of the Dales, not so long ago. More about knitting sheaths here and here.

A Life in 100 Objects: Wood - Spinning and Knitting

2010-01-30T00:47:00.012Z

Of my objects made of wood, the ones I think and talk about the most are those involved in making things! out of wool. First up, my spinning wheel:

Technically this Ashford Shetland Wheel (bought second hand) isn't mine, it's my mum's, but as she never got the hang of spinning, I purloined it. This wheel is more compact than my own, and would thus fit better into my halls of residence room last year, so this is the one I brought up to Glasgow. My own wheel (also a second hand bargain) is currently in a cupboard in Kent, having lived with me in two houses in Durham and one in the Yorkshire Dales, where I am using it in this picture:
It was on the wheel pictured above that I learnt to get comfortable with spinning, and I've made a lot of wool with it over the years. But it is with the shetland wheel that I've been able to make increasingly fine yarn. Spinning requires a relationship with your wheel (which is doing much more of the work than you are, after all) and you have to trust the wheel, that it will twist the fibres sufficiently, and be attentive to its needs, a twiddle here, a bit of oil there.

Spinning wheels are fascinating and beautiful objects, which is why I'm so fond of this mini-spinning wheel, with moving parts and all:

After spinning and plying yarn onto a spindle, I'll make it into a skein and wash it in some warm water, then leave it to dry. To knit from it, I need to make it into a ball, and this is done more easily by putting it around a swift, presumably so named because it speedily spins round to release the yarn. The antique wooden swift below (bought from Relics just off Byres Road, where many a fascinating object is to be found) has never actually been used by me, because I've yet to find an appropriately sized axel rod for it. But I enjoy it as a pretty and weird-looking thing, all the same:

The last wooden item related to woolly arts is this substantial pair of wooden knitting needles:

They bring out my inner slayer, especially whenever I'm transporting a project using them, and one falls out onto to the floor, then people do look at me funny... "You're building a really small fence...?" (Xander, Buffy Episode 1).

A Life in 100 Objects: Wood - 'Pidgin'

2010-01-28T19:15:00.007Z

In my last post I pontificated at some length about the significance of 'things', of the objects in our lives, and my plans to write a series of posts about some of the artefacts in my life. I'm going to thematise it in terms of materials: wood, clay, metal, cotton, plastic, paper, wool, and so on. Starting with wood.

Meet 'Pidgin', who was carved by my mum. I am fortunate enough to have a very creative and talented mother, so I expect that a significant proportion of the objects I choose will be her creations. This lovely bird was one of her first wood-carvings, the result of evening classes a few years ago, and a number of the emails from home referred to her work on 'pidgin'. When I came home for vacation I was surprised to find pidgin in my bedroom - surprised because I didn't imagine something so lovely and professional-looking for a first project, and also surprised because I wasn't expecting him to be given to me. I think he just got put in my room because my mum wasn't particularly proud of him, which was silly of her.

Pidgin is a comfortingly solid object, with an atmosphere of a rather smug kind of inner calm :-) The wood is a very rich shade of brown, which doesn't really come across in the photo. Nor does the careful definition of the wings - my mum is a much better woodcarver than I am photographer! She doesn't do much woodcarving now, preferring ceramics - partly because woodcarving is unsociably noisy and is physically tiring - which I think is a shame.

Beginning 'A Life in 100 Objects'

2010-01-26T14:02:00.002Z

Inspired by the BBC and the British Museum’s ‘A History of the World in 100 Objects’, I’ve decided to write a series of posts looking at the made things that I own and use.

I want to do this not to show off – ooh look what lovely things I have and aren’t I and my friends talented! – though no doubt that’s a temptation to which we all succumb – but rather as a way of exploring a number of interrelated issues I’ve been thinking about recently, all of which centre around the title of this blog, in a funny sort of way:I think a lot about the significance of objects in our lives: in self-expression, in making a home, in a sense of meaningfulness, in our worship...

Things are terribly important to me – having them and creating them. Whenever I move house, I become horrified and embarrassed by the amount of stuff that I have amassed in my short time on this earth, whilst needing to arrange and organise all those things in a beautiful way in order to feel safe and at home in a new environment.

I think that my shame at having so many clothes, books, pictures, and knick-knacks, and other general clutter, is a Protestant kind of guilt. I am the inheritor – personally and culturally – of an intellectualised, desacramentalised kind of religion that emphasises a mind apart from the world, creation through words rather than bodies, and the sinfulness of coveting material possessions. And at the same time, the necessity of Being Useful, of justifying one’s existence through what one is able to produce. I am part of a capitalist society in which people are to a large extent defined by what they own, and in my earnest left-wing desire to resist this, I have felt deeply uneasy about my own materialism.

However, ‘things’ are a source of such great joy to me – they encapsulate memories of times and places, they represent people. I feel this especially about the things that people have made for me or that I have made myself. Making things, choosing things, displaying things – these are all such an important part of how I understand myself and relate to the world around me. Material objects have become an important part of my spiritual life as well, in contradistinction to the Word-Only religious backdrop that I come from.

Yet I don’t want to talk as if ‘emphasis on thingy-ness’ (my oh-so sophisticated shorthand for material spirituality in women’s writing in my thesis notes) is somehow pure and unproblematic, as opposed to the object-hating, disembodied ways of post-Luther Christianity and Cartesian philosophy. I did love how Rowan Williams talks about art as definitive of what it is to be human, of connection with the world, and religious impulse. But a lot of that kind of theological reflection on art and spirituality has been characterised by a certain kind of high Anglicanism that is intellectually and materially exclusive, with strictly defined parameters of what constitutes ‘art’ and what constitutes ‘theology’ – both of which operate with a particularly white western male sphere of reference, looking to galleries and cathedrals rather than the implements of shamanism, for example.

What I have enjoyed about the 100 Objects series so far is that it is collapsing distinctions between ‘art’, ‘craft’, ‘tools’, ‘technology’, etc. The only criterion is that each object is an artefact – made by human beings. The semantic awkwardness there is significant – the words that easily slip in the structure of our language are ‘man-made’ – made by men, or with men representative of the whole of humanity. The whole traditional men/women, culture/nature division is particularly significant as regards ‘thingyness’, because men ‘make’ and women ‘generate’, men invent things and make decisions and get them done, whereas women give birth. Or the things that women make traditionally – textiles, food, domestic items – aren’t as valued as those of men: they are craft, not art; tools, not technology.

Feminism hasn’t always done as well as it might in trying to redress the neglect of ‘women’s things’: having diagnosed the culture/nature dualism, it has often wanted to choose one side of the divide rather than to dissolve it. So you have a disembodiedly intellectual kind of feminism that is dismissive of activities such as cooking or embroidery, versus the spiritual feminism saturated in the imagery of the natural, untouched by the social – moon, sea, soil, etc, speaking of ‘technology’ as the evil tool of patriarchy that has subjugated women and the earth. Or feminist reclamation of traditional female crafts has tended to romanticise them as being closer to the natural and part of women’s birth-giving capacities, rather than part of the general human project of negotiating the world through tools and objects that are useful and beautiful.

The more recent wave of feminist interest in domestic culture, of which Kate Davies is exemplary, has been more critically sophisticated and informed, though this does stand in a sharp contrast to a lot of the ‘back to the kitchen’ character of the domestic craft blogs and online communities, which represent a return to traditional values. Or making things by hand becomes an extension of fashion culture, with emphasis on brands, luxury fibres and fabrics; yarn being irresistible, like chocolate or new shoes, ‘my long-suffering boyfriend puts up with my yarn habit’ (I don’t mean to sound critical – I talk like this myself). Which brings us back to women in particular feeling guilty about caring about ‘things’: the capitalist materialism and consumerism that is the scourge of western culture is presented differently for men than for women. The ‘male’ kind of materialism – cars, gadgets, etc. – is macho, functional and ground-breaking, whereas women’s – clothes, interiors, etc. - is silly and frivolous.

Each chapter of Michele Roberts’s novel Daughters of the House is entitled after an object in that house. This has elements of sacramentality, of the pleasure and beauty in material things that characterises a lot of her writing. But it is also ambivalent – ‘emphasis on thingyness’ in one character is representative of superficiality, but rejection of it for the sake of the spiritual proves to be inauthentic for another. The objects hold beauty and a sense of belonging, but they are also imbued with the dark secrets of the house and its story. This reminds me that things, the objects in my life that are so dear to me and yet also a source of unease, are not sacred or frivolous in themselves, rather they take on the nature of their context, of the perceptions and stories of the people who use and look at them. And it is that I want to explore in the posts to follow.

Swimming Reindeer

2010-01-22T23:39:00.006Z

So far I'm really loving the British Museum/BBC's 'History of the World in 100 Objects' - it's engaging and intriguing in all sorts of ways. I was actually very moved by the 'swimming reindeer' installment, with this beautiful Ice Age sculpture that I'd never seen before.

Whilst listening to the programme I imagined I felt a doorway open to thirteen thousand years ago, to the incredible quiet and harsh cold, to someone sitting by a river, watching the play of light of the water, and the reindeer in mating season. Thinking like this, about the artistic impulse and the human experience of nature, led my thoughts to religion, and so I wasn't surprised when Rowan Williams started talking. He's at his theological best when talking about art, spirituality and the world around us, and here's some quotes from the transcript (the italics are mine):

What I think you see in the art of this period is human beings trying to enter fully into the flow of life around them, so that they become part of the whole process of animal life that's going on around them, in a way which I think isn't just about managing the animal world, or guaranteeing them success in hunting or whatever. I think it's more than that. It's really a desire to get inside and almost to be at home in the world at a deeper level, and I think that that's actually a very deeply religious impulse, to be at home in the world. We tend to identify religion with not being at home in the world sometimes, as if the real stuff were elsewhere in heaven; and yet actually if you look at religious origins, if you look at a lot of the mainstream themes in the great world religions, it's the other way round - it's how to live here and now and how to be part of that flow of life.

At the beginning, of course, you can't really pull apart religion and art can you? Art is sacred because it is taking you to this space where you're not just doing the subject/object arm's-length approach to nature, it takes you to a new place and that's a religious activity. [...]
I don't think that primitive human beings just had a ready-made word in their heads that sounded like 'God', and they immediately knew what it was. They were discovering how to be human in a world that was much more complicated because of their intelligence, and because of the new environmental challenges they were working with, and slowly the world almost reshapes itself. With that, and in your identification with the processes of the world, you begin to understand or intuit what in the 'Old Testament' is called 'wisdom', a kind of principle of cohesion or cohesiveness underlying it all, and you identify that eventually with the mind of God.

Yes.

Woodland Sampler Tam

2010-01-14T23:15:00.005Z

Due to the snow and general oh-no-it's-icy!-chaos, I stayed in Whitstable for the Christmas-New Year holidays a wee bit longer than planned. This meant that I ran out of Satisfying Knitting (i.e. stuff that takes less than six months to finish...) but also that I had a chance to pay a visit to Whitstable's new luxurious local yarn store.

The new shop (Buzz Yarns, I think) is a welcome addition to Whitstable's new collection of chic and cheerful, twee and bohemian little shops. They have a reasonable selection at the standard prices. But the shop is small, the staff slightly unfriendly and imposing, and so I guilt-purchased a couple of balls of Louisa Harding Thistle, just so I didn't feel like I was getting in their way (and I do want to support the shop, as I want it to stay open, however charmless the staff). I bought that particular yarn because it felt nice under pressure, and had balls in suitable colours for making something in Fair Isle that would knit up nice and quick.

The result... I made a tam based on a number of free patterns available on Ravelry, with intimations of wood or park land - birds, acorns, squirrels.

It's a lovely hat, but I probably wouldn't but the yarn again, as it was far too expensive for what it is.

2009 in Books

2010-01-03T11:49:00.004Z

I said in my last post that my happiness is inversely proportional to my knitting; the same could also be said about my reading fiction for the love of it. Since I started knitting, I haven't read for pleasure nearly as much as I used to - this may also have something to do with how studying a humanities subject at uni really does kill off a lot of the joy in ruminating over words, plus I suppose that undergrad social life took a lot of my leisure reading time. It might also be that with the increasingly centrality of the internet in daily life, the book-reading part of my brain can be sapped by the more instant gratification reading of blogs, online magazines and certain social-networking sites.

Whatever the cause, the decline in my reading of novels is something that has troubled me over the last few years. I only read roughly only twenty novels in 2005, about the same in 2006, and just under thirty in 2007, a few more than that in 2008. But there has been some improvement: in 2009 I read 46 works of fiction. Admittedly about a quarter of these pertained to my PhD in some direct way, but the distinction between reading for pleasure and reading academically is becoming increasingly less clear-cut for me (nor do I mean to suggest that I don't enjoy reading academically: doing a PhD would be pretty ill-advised were that the case).

Anyway, of those 46 books, I revisited a few favourites that I've read before, like Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace and Lionel Shriver's We Need to Talk About Kevin (my favourite novel of the decade); I reread Atwood's Oryx and Crake by way of revision for The Year of the Flood. I first read Oryx and Crake in 2003, when it was published, and was unsettled how even more prescient its dystopian predictions seem only seven years later.

I decided to finish Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, which meant going back to the first two books eight years since I first read them. My experience of Northern Lights and The Subtle Knife was really different this time round, having done a theology degree and now possessing a very different spirituality from the evangelical teenager that closed The Subtle Knife in tears, really hurt and upset by such a conception of religion, and of God. I never forgot its lesson though, in the power of literature and narrative to lure us in and then shake our core beliefs. When I read His Dark Materials the second time round, I didn't find a Dawkins-esque anti-faith between its pages, but an almost pantheistic spirituality, concerned with the magic that infuses the universe(s). There are quite a lot of parallels with the mythic images in Michele Roberts's The Wild Girl, in Pullman's appropriation of gnostic themes, in how God, 'the Authority,' is a usurper, a demiurge rather than creator. I was a little disappointed by The Amber Spyglass: I loved a lot of its magical details, but found the plotting a bit slack. The sentiment of the last page is lovely, but far more didactic than CS Lewis's Narnia, which Pullman openly despises.

Books I read for the first time last year included memoirs by both of the novelists I'm doing my PhD on: Michele Roberts's Paper Houses and Sara Maitland's A Book of Silence: both lovely and fascinating, both about vocation: the former to writing, the latter to silence. Novels I'd looked forward to reading were Shriver's The Post-Birthday World and PD James's The Private Patient, neither of which disappointed, but didn't surpass their earlier work. Maria McCann's As Meat Loves Salt and Zoe Heller's The Believers were both utterly absorbing novels about utterly reprehensible people, and Margaret Forster's Have the Men Had Enough? and Lloyd Jones's Mister Pip were two books that I chose to read at random and both moved me and opened my eyes to aspects of the world that I don't give enough thought to.

There's a lot of novels that I want to read this coming year, and looking back on my year of reading has convinced me that reading for pleasure and expansion of mind and soul is definitely worth the discipline of putting aside the knitting needles and shutting down the laptop.

2009 Knittings

2010-01-03T02:49:00.007Z

The more discontented I am with my self and my life, the more I knit. So it's probably a good sign that I produced slightly less knitting in 2009 than in 2008 (which was a troublingly productive year). I made a fair few lovely garments in the last year, however, including my Phyllo Yoked Pullover in Airedale Aran from Texere Yarns, the Owls jumper, a skirt constructed from a spiral, a camisole knitted from handspun wool, a variation on Maude and a hobbity hoodie that took for-ever but which I wear all the time now. And this enormous shawl for my mum's 50th birthday:

I also made some much-loved accessories, like these mitred-square mitts from hand-dyed small-holder angora yarn, an entrelac scarf from Mirasol and Manos del Uruguay yarn, and most recently these gorgeous mittens, adapted from a Knitty sock pattern:

In 2009 I moved into a lovely little flat by myself, and so I spent time making things for my new home - a long-term work in progress is this granny sqaure blanket:

Hanging on the walls of my flat are a wreath of knitted leaves and a lace jewelery frame; I also treasure my hot-water bottle cover and sheepy tea cosy.

The transition from 2009 to 2010 doesn't just signify the start of a new year of knitting - it's also the end of a decade. I started knitting in 2001, at the beginning of the noughties, and for me knitting has characterised the last decade of my life, and the person that I have become in those ten years, in the shift from teenager to adult. I can't imagine who I'd be now if I didn't knit!

Christianity Then and Now

2009-11-26T01:25:00.004Z

I highly recommend the History of Christianity series with Diarmuid Maculloch on the BBC at the moment. It's a very engaging, broad survey of Christianity through the ages, and is suitable for those who know nothing about about it, and offering jogs of memory and intriguing new details to those who know a little more. So far two of the programmes have focused on the non-western churches - the Syriac tradition and the Orthodox church - of which most people in the UK are woefully ignorant.

I took the survery linked to on the programme's site, on what it means to be a Christian today. It has various questions in various formats, and at the end you can see pie charts of the standard responses by age, gender and location. One question is 'explain what your faith means to you.' It was interesting to try to summarise something so complicated, that should form the basis of my academic work but is often relagated to the background. I might not agree with what I wrote later (even five minutes later!), but here it is:

My Christian faith is as big a part of my identity as my gender or race. Being a Christian is who I am, but I don't have an easy or unproblematic relationship with my religion. My feminism and my sexuality mean that I am always wrestling with my scriptural and church tradition: however this is often a creative tension. The joy and sense of completion I gain from relationship with God - however unstable my definition of God may be ! - is inexpressibly valuable to me. I try to hold on to the loving example of Jesus Christ in my political commitments and my personal moral behaviour.

Pleasures and Frustrations

2009-11-25T19:03:00.003Z

Next Sunday will be the first Sunday in Advent, which means, to my permanently trimestered mind, that it is Nearly the End of Term. And I don't feel that I have generated a lot of material since September: most of my energies have been devoted to the frustrating task of redrafting work in the hope of publication. I have two pieces that at least look like articles suitable for sending to academic journals (one of which I have, in fact, submitted) but I'm left feeling a bit glum, probably because all this painstaking fiddling with references will have to be done again, because in all likelihood I'll get rejection after rejection. I don't mean to be pessimistic: it's just that scholarly journals usually only publish proven scholars (i.e. with PhDs and jobs), and it's especially difficult because my work straddles gender studies, theology and literature, and isn't entirely at home anywhere.

But anyway, I have been cheering myself up knitting Christmas decorations (not hanging them up yet, but putting them in a box as I finish them).

Making silly, useless little things out of cheap and colourful acrylic reminds me of when I first started knitting, and the strange gifts I would make for my friends and family. Nowadays I mostly knit for myself, using natural fibres, but there's still a part of me that takes great delight in the 'bazaar knits' of people like Jean Greenhowe, and buys booties and egg cosies in charity shops, just because somebody ought to.

Remembrance Sunday

2009-11-08T16:57:00.005Z

In church this morning I was extremely moved by our acts of remembrance. This surprised me: on my way to the service I was angrily ruminating on how, due to the nationalistic overtones and inherent conservatism of the poppy business, and despair at all the war that is still going on - expressed perfectly in this Guardian column - perhaps I should personally opt out of the annual national remembrance charade. But we held silence, and watched two short films about Henry Allingham and Harry Patch, the last remaining British WWI veterans, who died this year, and I was glad that I had entered into the spirit of the thing.

Yet I became even more convinced that there is not enough attention given to the anger at the futility of war and the political leaders that the veterans themselves have voiced. This Radiohead song, in tribute to Harry Patch, and based on his own words, is a beautiful example of that quiet rage. It's worth clicking the link to hear the music, but here are the lyrics:

Harry Patch (In memory of)

I am the only one that got through
The others died where ever they fell
It was an ambush
They came up from all sides
Give your leaders each a gun and then let them fight it out themselves
I've seen devils coming up from the ground
I've seen hell upon this earth
The next will be chemical but they will never learn

It's in the tradition of all that brilliant and furious trench poetry we learn so much of at school. Yet in our acts of remembrance, we're still parroting 'that old lie', talking about gratitude for freedoms won and 'no greater love' and that godawful 'age shall not weary them' poem, rather than the ones that protest that war is not noble, but brutal and ugly and (in the case of WWI, and those currently being fought in the Middle East) tragically, utterly pointless.

As Meat Loves Salt, by Maria McCann

2009-11-05T12:18:00.001Z

Lionel Shriver recommends this novel in the back of The Post-Birthday World, which was how I came across it. Apt, because, as in Shriver's novels, the reader has to contend with a narrator that one feels sympathy for when sympathy is the last thing their actions call for. As Meat Loves Salt is the story of Jacob Cullen: rapist, murderer, not very witty, not very bright. And still, right through all 532 densely worded pages, I felt for him.

Of all the books on Shriver's recommended list, this was the one I most wanted to read, being just cup of tea: a queer romance, set during Civil War and the radical movements of the time. And it is full of fascinating details of the period, and Jacob moves from being a servant to the landed gentry, to a soldier in the New Model Army, to a printer publishing radical pamphlets in London, to a Diggers' commune trying to work the common land, to finally setting off on a voyage to the New World. He moves though many of the facets of this singular period in British history: but isn't particularly interested in any of them, or what they mean. From the moment of meeting him, Jacob's only interest is Christopher Ferris, the idealist that Jacob follows through all of his projects and plans.

Ferris is as good a man as Jacob is bad, and for that reason lacks a certain realism. Though we only see him through Jacob's blinkered eyes. Perhaps this is why it is hard to understand Ferris's longstanding loyalty to Jacob, other than sexual attraction. The event that finally severs their relationship, and ultimately and indirectly leads to their ruin, is horrible to read, and seems to come from nowhere, but really ever since they met it has been leading up to this, ever since very early on when the reader suddenly discovers that their seemingly naive narrator is actually a monster.

The Voice that Jacob hears doesn't redeem him, nor his grief at the consequences of his actions: it never translates into remorse. What kept me wishing him well throughout the course of the novel was the strength of McCann's writing, which submerges the reader into the mindsight of her creation.

As Meat Loves Salt is worth reading as a detailed and convincing historical novel: it is even more valuable as a testament to moral terror.

A great poem I found, whilst looking for something else

2009-11-02T17:06:00.001Z

psalm

I am not lyric any more
I will not play the harp
for your pleasure

I will not make a joyful
noise to you, neither
will I lament

for I know you drink
lamentation, too,
like wine

so I dully repeat
you hurt me
I hate you

I pull my eyes away from the hills
I will not kill for you
I will never love you again

unless you ask me

- Alicia Suskin Ostriker

Praying Like a Woman, by Nicola Slee

2009-11-01T00:12:00.002Z

I’ve had this book of prayers for about a year, but it has only been recently that I felt any compulsion to write about it. I suppose this is because of the conflicts brought about by my recent decision to renew my commitment to my faith, and to Christianity, by becoming confirmed in the Methodist Church. The sense of belonging and a quiet sort of grace has been lovely, but I still struggle with what I believe in and find it hard to achieve any sort of rhythm in prayer or meditation. I love thinking and writing about a concept of the divine that is murky, slippery and unutterable, but I’m Protestant, not raised in the negative way. I want a God I can talk to. Which is where the poem-prayers in this book have been a blessing.

I bought this book because I love the title, but I didn’t have high hopes for it. Whilst I’d come across Nicola Slee before (many academic years ago now, in Ann Loades’s Feminist Theology reader) I didn’t know a great deal about her, and I think I was expecting quite a comforting, woman-affirming collection of prayers that would probably mention the sacredness of having your period, a meditation on meeting Jesus at the well, a bit of feminist anger at women’s undervalued role in the church, but nothing that you’d turn to in the hope of articulating that deep howl of pain and rage in the middle of the dark dark night.

What I didn’t expect was the loss in having a hysterectomy, anger at friendships gone rotten, the bestial delights of choosing to be hairy, real, profound rage at the Bible’s texts of terror, and a sense of a God that will not be pinned down, that hovers on the edges of experience whilst at the same time being all-encompassing and overwhelming in both presence and absence.

I have an abiding love for the prayers written by Janet Morley, whose All Desires Known collection is the definitive collection of prayers informed by feminist theology: they are beautiful and rooted in ideas of justice. But Slee’s writing is shot through with anger and anguish, which, sometimes, is what a woman needs when she comes to pray.

Aspirational Blog-reading

2009-10-30T17:18:00.006Z

Prompted by the discussions on Karie's blog here and here.

I think we can all tell what stage we are at in life by what blogs we read to aspire to, that we read because we enjoy wallowing in envy: blogs by teenagers and students whose lives flitter from one gig/party/essay to the next, all the while with perfectly messy looking hair and boots that look lived in but not scruffy, no longer do it for me. I shrug, that's one class of inadequacy that I've graduated from.

No, the aspirational blogs that I read and feel envious are one's that are wholesomely artistic and intellectual, like needled and The Domestic Soundscape - published academics, beautiful patterns, photography, lovely walks, allotments! And these are wonderful women, but I have to remind myself that their blogs just aren't bringing up all the imperfect things in their lives.

But I am sitting here in a lovely clean flat in a lovely part of a lovely city. having just swept and scrubbed whilst listening to my music as loudly as I want, surrounded by all my books and handmade things, with a ball of dough proofing in the bread-bowl. Anyone peering into my window would think I had a nice, tidy life, to match my nice tidy self - something that just isn't who I am, however much I have to be grateful for.

Righteous Anger?: On 'Question Time'

2009-10-23T22:38:00.004+01:00

I wasn't sure whether to watch Thursday night's infamous Question Time, because there's actually nothing interesting about anything that man has to say. But all the same I nursed my hangover with Iplayer this afternoon. The whole thing made me feel a bit dirty. I agree with David Sexton, that, although Griffin is an odious individual, I started to pity him, as I don't enjoy seeing anyone being humiliated. This is down either to stereotypical English politeness or my tendency to empathy: both of which render me morally weak as I just want to smooth things over and make everyone happy.

But even my own squeamishness doesn't fully account for my discomfort: it was a very weird edition of the programme, with Jack Straw getting cheered, David Dimbleby allowing the panelists to talk on for a length of time, and the panel and audience being permitted a level of vitriol and personal attack far beyond the norm. I feel the same way: the man and what he stands for makes me feel sick, but what happened last night was the politicians and white middle-class members of the audience (in the studio and at home) being able to feel Jolly Good about themselves as they are not remotely racist, or homophobic, etc. Which enables us not to talk truthfully about why people voted for the BNP and why they exist in the first place.

It is not as simple as 'oh, the UK not a racist nation, people weren't voting for the BNP for racist reasons.' For a start, that is simply not true: this is a racist nation, as all sorts of educational and economic disparities amongst ethnicities will attest to. We are less racist than some other nations and we are much less racist than we used to be, but we are still profoundly aware of race, but horribly awkward in talking about it. For over twenty years academic writing in the humanities often has to begin with 'I am a white heterosexual middle-class woman/man', as if saying that at the start lets you off the hook about what it means to be white, a heterosexual, and middle-class, and a man. In fact, it's often just a longer way of saying 'normal.'

The people with privilege and power always think as if what they are is the norm, and it takes a real effort of will not just to smile as 'the Other' and talk about alterity, rather than listening to them and trying to think seriously about what it is like to be them. Which is actually incredibly difficult, and I don't always find easy or enjoyable to do myself. It is much easier to find an Other that it is socially acceptable to demonise, and that it why white left-leaning middle class people like me do enjoy vilifying the BNP, because in hating them we don't have to worry about the small-minded and hateful things we'd find were we to carefully examine the dark parts of our own souls. We like to hold Griffin up as a monster, the immigrants hardworking and grateful to be in this marvelous country, the uneducated men in the north of England who vote for the BNP all tragically misguided, and ourselves as magnaminous in our embracing of diversity. Oh and the politicians greedy liars, apart from when they're having a go at Nick Griffin, then they're okay. Because heaven forbid that we have to admit that we are all sometimes motivated by selfishness, vanity, greed, simple thoughtlessness, in which we fail so spectucularly in loving our neighbour that we have to cover it up by pouring hate on people we can confidently say are worse than we are.

So. I suppose that my prayer is that rather than hating the Ross-Brands (remember all the fuss about that?), bankers, Jan Moirs, expenses-cheating politicians, and Nick Griffins of this world, I will try to tackle the ways in which I am disrespectful, greedy, gossipy, advantage-taking and xenophobic.

Now I'm going to toddle off to watch Have I Got News for You to laugh at politicians and how evil they are...

That would be an ecumenical matter

2009-10-21T22:48:00.003+01:00

Although it came from horrible circumstances and hateful writing, and a lot of it was down to the joy of scapegoating, the whole Jan Moir thing made me feel warm on the inside that so many people were outraged on behalf of gay people, that attitudes really have changed.

Then the bloody Pope goes and spoils it all by reminding me how much Christianity basically really doesn't like women and non-heterosexuals. To the extent that they'll break with so many other doctrines just to provide a home for these poor vicars who really can't abide women having any power in their church, and they'll even take their wives. How wonderful that, across age-old denominational barriers, people can be brought together by a nice dollop of misogyny and heterosexism.

Angela Carter and Recent Vampire Romance

2009-10-13T12:23:00.003+01:00

Absolutely shed-loads has been written about the vampire as a symbol of repressed sexuality in the Victorian age, and the vampiric text is a good supporting example of Foucault’s thesis that this period actually heralded a proliferation of discourses about sexuality, for what is more blatantly sexual than a vampire?

When I think about the representations of vampires in the fiction, film and television of last few years, since Buffy ended, the phrase ‘we are all Victorians now’ seems more true than ever. Twilight, True Blood and the latest incarnation, The Vampire Diaries, all stick to the same Gothic formula of vulnerable, beautiful young woman both protected and threatened by the yearning devotion of her male vampire suitor, who is strong, reserved, slightly tortured.

Whilst Buffy both subverted and fell prey to these stereotypes (which is why the ‘what would Buffy do?’ remix vid with Twilight is a bit too simple), I would have hoped that the central narratives of popular vampire fiction would go further than Buffy did in breaking away from patriarchal and heterosexist depictions of romantic and sexual relationships.

True Blood is obviously a lot more complicated and interesting than the other two examples – not only is it aimed at adults rather than teenagers, but it also uses the vampire plot to look at racism, homophobia and violence in society at large, whilst playing around with ideas about humanity and sexuality. But, despite their quirks, the main characters Sookie and Bill still conform to the sexist stereotypes of traditional vampire romances. The relationship of two minor characters, a female vampire and a male human, doesn’t do as much as it could to subvert these conventions.

The way that these recent vampire texts have stayed with Victorian notions of sexual desire and romantic love suggest to me, sadly, that we haven’t got as far as we might in thinking these things differently. But any kind of feminist reworking of the vampire image is fraught with difficulty - is it ‘good feminism’ to write about female vampires, when mythic presentation of monstrous women has been so damaging? Why bother with the fantasy/horror genre at all, when it’s shot through with really nasty misogyny?

A few days ago I listened to Angela Carter’s ‘Vampirella’ radio play, which, like all her work, is in some parts radical, some parts funny, and some parts really rather shocking. The script is available here. She was never a writer that feminism can grab hold of and claim for its own, and the same goes for this piece. The female is ultimately passive, and subject to the male’s greater rational faculty amidst her terrible and powerful desire. But in queering the gender roles of the typical vampire narrative in unexpected ways, rather than simply reversing them, her revisioning is a more profound questioning of the roles and conventions of gender and of genre. Twenty years on, looking at today’s vampire tales, I wish that her legacy had gone further.

Nature in Glasgow

2009-10-11T15:57:00.003+01:00

Whenever I spend any time in the country I often moan about how I'll never be able to live rurally all the time, when I love the peace and the space and the scenery, and I have to live in a city. But I do live in a lovely part of a lovely city, with all sorts of easy opportunities for quiet, and beauty, and wildlife. As well as the parkland and trees along the River Kelvin (which I love, and walk along most days, but never seem to be able to photograph) there is the North Kelvin Meadow:

and Possil Marsh Nature Reserve, just off the Forth and Clyde canal on the way to Bishopriggs. Although there's pylons, high-rises in the distance and the sound of traffic from the busy A road, it 's a strangely serene spot, with plenty of birds, wooded areas and lovely grasses. And deer!:

Turnitoff

2009-10-02T15:30:00.004+01:00

My department has decided that this academic year they will start using the Turnitin program, and all undergraduate essays will have to go through this process. I’m really troubled by this news (although I’m commenting not on on my department’s decision in particular, no doubt due to complicated factors I know nothing about, but the concept in general).

Starting out on a career in academia is often scary and depressing – with little hope of a secure job for a decade, if one’s lucky. I don’t want the holy grail of a teaching post to be characterized by teaching students that I assume by default to be cheating. I suppose that it’s arguable that Turnitin allows teachers to teach rather than police, but I also don’t think it’s right or fair that all students’ work handed in to their university also becomes the property of some LLC.

Just so I can’t be accused of plagiarism here: the drawbacks discussed above are mentioned in Turnitin’s Wikipedia entry (the site that probably has a lot to do with such software being deemed necessary). Though I put my own slant on them and wrote them in my own words.

The ‘in my own words’ bit also bothers me. Turnitin flags up even correctly cited quotations, and this will mean that students will have to paraphrase most ,if not all, of the concepts they are discussing. To a certain extent and in some circumstances this is good practice; but it becaomes problematic when looking at any kind of philosophical theory: insistence on paraphrasing rather than quotation is to ignore postmodern arguments that language is opaque, not some doorway providing direct access to conceptual meaning. Instead the words that the theorist has chosen are important and in many ways part of the theory itself.

No doubt those last sentences are very similar to one (or thousands) that others have written: when we write, and think, we cannot always hold in our minds who said what exactly. Rather knowledge and words and ideas swirl around in our heads, not staying still long enough to be pinned down like butterflies and identified precisely where they came from. Or else we have absorbed them, they have become part of us, and we cannot possibly say 'that thought was mine, and mine alone, though that thought belonged to Whoever et al.' Not to mention the simultaneous occurrence of ideas (and sentences!) where the writers had no contact with the other’s work.

Of course, the difficulties in drawing the line between theft of intellectual property and the collaborative nature of knowledge are common to all scholarship and human creative endeavours. That is why I think that it is a mistake to allow a computer program to make judgements that depend on the subtleties of wisdom and experience.

It would be impossible to paraphrase the following translation of Hélène Cixous, poetically describing the difficulties of creating with words. So I’m just going to quote it:

How could we come all the way from our over-furnished memories and our museums of words to the garden of beginnings and rustlings?

This is our problem as writers. We who must paint with brushes all sticky with words. We who must swim in language as if it were pure and transparent, though it is troubled by phrases already heard a thousand times. We who must clear a new path with each thought through thickets of clichés. We who are threatened at every metaphor, as I am at this moment, with false steps and false words.

from Coming to Writing and Other Essays, p.114

There's nothing on

2009-09-26T22:42:00.002+01:00

Recently I’ve been in something of a whirlwind of self-improvement: I stopped smoking, I’m trying to eat healthily and do regular moderate exercise (i.e. walking and cycling – nothing too polyester-laden). It keeps coming into my head that the next logical step is to give up television.

Like most people of my generation, my teenage years were spent amidst all sorts of aural and visual amusements – music, headphones, radio, TV, internet. Often all at the same time. Once I took up knitting the hours I spent watching television were no longer wasted hours, instead I was ‘making things’, with the background sights and sounds of all sorts of dreadful programmes there merely as a kind of anchor to reality (if I knit in silence I seem to go into an ultimately unpleasant trance-like state).

Then, with the advent of online video streaming – both legal and illegal – I seem to have stopped watching much telly at all actually on a television set, and instead have become more discerning in what I choose to watch, on my laptop. I enjoy being able to watch one episode after another and another of ‘gritty’ US shows like Oz and The Wire, and good quality escapism like Battlestar Galactica and True Blood, and slightly classier soaps such as Big Love and Brothers and Sisters. On the legal side of things, I watch mostly documentaries on BBC iPlayer, and the occasional one is really worth watching (the Scottish season on BBC4 and the recent poetry season, for example). Whilst the unfavourable comparison of British drama and comedy with that of America has been well-documented, I do love Doctor Who and Torchwood, and Being Human was pretty good too. The BBC never seems to do good comedy, but for that we have 4oD, for Peep Show and The IT Crowd.

But I’m starting to feel like I’ve watched everything that is worth watching. As TV is mostly a background for knitting etc., in the past I’ve not been too bothered about watching things I don’t much like (for example I think I’ve seen every episode of Supernatural, The Tudors and the L Word, but think all three are total rubbish) but recently when I try to find a new programme to watch, my patience levels are waning. Such as the supposedly acclaimed Californication. Sexist juvenile twaddle. Or Carnivale. I didn’t get it and I didn’t care. The Sopranos. Heretically, I didn’t like it. Etc.

So, as I don’t really enjoy TV anymore, I’m wondering if – what with my afore-mentioned self-improvement kick - I should make a feature of it, like some Sunday supplement column or Channel 4 documentary, and try and have a whole year without TV, says, 2010.

The idea brings up all sorts of questions.
- What effect would not watching moving pictures for a certain amount of time have on my brain?
- Would it drastically affect the way I interact with the world around me? Or is the internet so all-pervasive now that not watching TV would probably not make much difference: it’s the internet that makes me skim read everything and have a short attention span; the internet that distracts me from more productive pursuits, not TV.
- Should I include films? Is film, even when watched on a TV, such a different medium that it doesn’t count?
- Even if I listened to audio books and the radio when knitting, without the escapist, ‘taking one out of oneself’ element of TV, would I go a bit mad?
- Could I survive a whole year without watching any Buffy (seriously)?
- I’ve paid my TV licence, and I’d resent the waste.
- What about the things I learn (and promptly forget) from documentaries, and more importantly the different worldviews TV subjects me to? I suppose that I would just have to replace these with the radio, internet, print media and books.

I think that this desire I have to ‘give up’ television in such a dramatic style probably comes from my irritation with my current inability to concentrate (even on knitting projects), and how relatively few books I’ve read for pleasure in the last few years. That’s partly due to discovering the joys of making things, partly due to the distractions of the internet, and also the fact that when you read books for what is for all intents and purposes your job, you just don’t want to look at any more words on a page. But when I take a long train journey and have read a whole novel by the time I arrive, I remember the utter delight of being absorbed in the prose, the characters and the story, without taking notes and drawing parallels and making comparisons.

And so I think what I want is not to ‘give up’ TV, when I’ve given up so much recently (stopping smoking probably has a lot to do with my poor concentration and commitment levels) but to ‘take up’ reading again.

The problem is finding a way to knit and read at the same time...