Fyrewitch's Knitting Adventures

Blogtober?

October seems to be the month that people adopt as their own. I don't know what it is about October that makes this happen. Is it because is starts with a vowel and has more than two syllables (Blogust just sounds wrong). Is it the Virgo energy morphing into Libran energy, the desire to serve morphing into the energy of of getting out there and relating to others (which then ends in the Scorpio need to go underground). Or is it just that it's taken us all 9 months to get organised, and the close proximity of December makes us realise that we've actually achieved very little this year, and we should probably get a wriggle on and do something constructive.

At any rate, I've seen October spoken of as both Socktober and Blogtober. As much as I would love to dedicate the month to and endless array of socks, my current crafting schedule won't allow it, which leads me to contemplate Blogtober as more realistic.

Dare I try to blog every day? The minutea of my life aren't actually that interesting, so I will probably turn to lots of philosophising and pontificating. Dear Reader, if you aren't up for that sort of crap, I suggest you check back in November, when the madness has ended.

I received my latest Amazon order yesterday. Bless Amazon, you have to love a service that allows you to buy books and have them shipped for a fraction of the cost that it is to purchase them off the shelf in this country.

I received my copies of The Knitting Way and Mindful Knitting, both focusing on Knitting as a spiritual practise. How perfect!  I've started on the first, which has thus far spoken lots about mathematics and the beauty of maths in nature. I hate maths and recoil from it, so fortunately there are some nice patterns in there as well. Although the patterns are all in Americanese, so I'll have to go find out what a size 8 needle actually is, and convert all the inches etc before they make any sense to me. Why do I knit again??

There are little sections in the book by the secondary writer called Spaces between the Loops. The text itself is interesting enough, but I love the title. In knitting, we always think about what we are creating - the stitches, how they are formed, the yarn that we use. We don't generally think about the negative space between them - the space in the loops that traps the air, which is part of what makes knitting so effective. In art negative space is a big thing. It helps you to see the proper shape of the object you are drawing, without actually looking at the object itself.

What other negative spaces are there in our lives that exist but that we ignore? What helps us shape our lives to the point that we no longer pay attention to it. The space around us? The air we breathe? The clutter filling our homes? Is the stuff we don't look at hindering or helping us?

Hmm, I have the sudden urge to declutter.

Blog-This - What's on your bedside table?

I've recently started following the Blog This site, which is a site specifically targeting Aussie Bloggers. One of the recent challenges that I missed was the above title, and I love books so much that I feel the need to pass comment.

I love books. Prior to my divorce I had about 1000 of them. Moving to a much smaller house meant I had to cull my collection by about two thirds. 5 years later and I still miss them. A friend of mine laughingly says that whenever I gain a new interest, my book collection increases.

When I was at uni, my favourite place to hang out was the library. Any library. During my studies at QUT I would do weekend "library crawls" where I would start at Kelvin Grove campus, walk to Gardens Point, then jump back on the train and hit the Carseldine library. The undergrad library at the University of Queensland was my favourite though. The books smelled awesome and there were just so many, on every topic you could possibly imagine. I would stand in awe and gaze at the books, wandering up and down the aisles, gently touching the old covers, thinking about all the stuff I hadn't yet learned.

During the holiday periods, while everyone else was drinking and partying, I would load up on as many books as I was allowed to take home and spend the time reading. My favourite holiday period was one where I took all the fiction from the existentialists that I could find - Simone de Beauvoir (one of my heroes), Jean-Paul Satre, Albert Camus - and buried myself in their world. From de Beauvoir's depressive immortal man in All Men are Mortal to their tales about the resistance during the second World War, I found their words and worlds fascinating.

I don't actually have a bedside table. I tried that, but it just wasn't big enough. I actually have a bedside bookcase, and it's full to overflowing.  It contains books about all the things I love - knitting, astrology, tarot, Wicca, Buddhism. I think there's even some fiction in there - Neil Gaiman, Robert Rankin and Terry Pratchett. Since my daughter has come along, I find it difficult to get any decent reading done. I tend to pick up a book and read a chapter or so on whatever I'm thinking about at the time prior to bed. Pema Chodron inspires me, Erin Sullivan helps me to nut out planetary relationships, Rachel Pollack and Dione Fortune assist me on my seemingly never-ending quest to learn about the Qabbalah, and Robert Rankin makes me laugh.

Books are like old friends. I find that picking them up and delving into them can take me back to the time that I bought it, or back to the state of mind and feelings that I had when I first read it. Whenever I read Bram Stoker's Dracula, I am transported back to my first reading of the book at the age of 18 - sitting in my bedroom at my parents in a rocking chair, knees up to my chin, with Mozart's Requim Mass blaring and adding to the ambiance and totally freaking me out. It was wonderful!

I am trying to pass on my love of reading to my daughter. At the age of 7 she is very keen to read by herself and is finally asking me to read to her. I've packed most of my books away to make room for hers. At the moment it's lots of Doctor Seuss and Disney stuff, but I look forward to seeing where her tastes end up.

The Host

                                                         

I haven't finished the Twilight series yet, but whilst waiting for an appointment, I dropped into my local book store and The Host caught my eye. The description on the back caught my imagination and I snapped it up.

Earth has been taken over by a group of aliens who call themselves Souls. They insert themselves into their host bodies and then continue living on in the lifestyle of the planet.

The Souls have never experienced a species that fought back. Wanderer is inserted into Melanie, one of the last of the resistance. But Melanie won't just fade away as her other hosts have. Wanderer submits to the pressure placed on her by her host mind and goes to find the man she loves ... with interesting and unexpected results.

As a person who is interested in what happens inside people's heads, this book was fascinating - what would happen if you had two people in there wanting disparate things?

Meyer creates a fascinating internal world as Wanderer learns more about the species her people have taken over and starts to wonder at her own right to live the way she does.

I really enjoyed this book, much more than the Twilight books. Towards the end I literally couldn't put it down. Meyer poses and deals with some really interesting moral and ethical dilemmas in a very unique way. Read it, it rocks!

The Reader

I've just finished The Reader. I would give it a four out of five, although in saying that I enjoyed it in the same way I would a philosophy text rather than as a work of fiction. The fiction I like normally has more adjectives in it. What is it about the Germans and their dislike of description? That aside, it is very thought provoking, which in my view marks it as a successful piece of literature. I'm going to issue a spoiler alert as well, as I'm going to talk about things you may not wish to know if you're going to read the book yourself.

Michael Berg, at the age of 15, has a relationship with the 36 year old Hannah. She asks about his school work, which leads to a tradition of him reading to her, until one day, she mysteriously disappears.

The next time Michael sees Hannah it is as a defendant in a war crimes trial. She is accused of having been a prison guard during the war who allowed a large group of women and girls to burn to death in a church.

The book asks questions about how tolerant post World War 2 Gemans were of the Nazis, and whether or not all Germans who knew what was going on in the concentrations camps but turned their backs were not as guilty as those perpetrating the crimes. When it is revealed that Hannah was a guard at Auschwitz, Michael wonders why she isn't being tried for the crimes that occurred there.

The women who were killed were on a death march through the country side. They stopped this particular night in a small town. The women and girls were locked in the church while the guards took beds elsewhere. Bombs were dropped, setting the church, and other buildings on fire, and the doors were not opened to let the prisoners out.  The other female guards pin the blame for this directly on Hannah, whose reasoning seemed to be that it was more humane to let them burn to death than to continue marching them through the country and allowing them to die slowly.

Hannah is decreed by the judge as being more guilty than the other guards she was with, yet you also are left to wonder at just how guilty the judge himself is - one of the points made by the book is that many Nazis rose to high levels in the legal system. Most of the guilt is applied to her due to a false report which was lodged about the incident. There are sufficient clues in the text indicating that Hannah is illiterate, yet she testifies that she wrote this report.

Hannah is sentenced to a long term of imprisonment, and whilst she is incarcerated, Michael records himself reading and sends her the tapes. He also questions his own guilt due to his feelings for Hannah.

During her time in prison, Hannah learns how to read, and then asks for books about the concentration camps. It seems as though this gives her a better understanding of the horrors she was involved in.

How guilty is guilty when it comes to these complex situations? Is it enough to silently stand by and shake your head? Or to declare you don't know what's going on and enquire no further? And, more importantly, where can we apply these questions to our society right now?