Asymmetry January 26, 2007
Hems of your sweater uneven? 
Not to worry. It seems to be an “in” thing again. According to the latest from Berroco, anyway. This sweater is from a new book of theirs, Yin and Yang. I like it best of all the sweaters in the book, though doubt I’ll ever make it. Just not my thing. I like asymmetry, don’t get me wrong, do it all the time. I just don’t like to wear things that have uneven hems. I go around trying to straighten them constantly. 
On a completely different note, I got an announcement from Amazon about a recent publication. It’s The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period by William St Clair. Rob Hume of the Philological Quarterly says,
One of the most important scholarly books I have ever read. As a contribution to book history and reading history, this study would be hard to surpass. I hope that every scholar in these fields as well as those in English literature 1590-1890 will find a copy, engage seriously with it, and try to see that his or her local academic library scrapes up the money to invest in one.
I don’t know about you, but I think it sounds interesting. Not something I’d delve into lightly, as the book is nearly eight hundred pages long, but all the same, I wouldn’t mind reading it. The original hardcover copies are going for one hundred forty dollars on Amazon right now, making the new softcover version seem like a steal at just forty.
Life would be so much more interesting, in some ways (in a lot of ways, actually), if I could spend more time studying things like this that present themselves to me, and less time working. Wouldn’t that be nice? Time to indulge the mind, explore various avenues of thought, learn new things, knit and stitch more of the day—you should have known that would be part of it—of course, having someone like Jeeves around to take care of little things like keeping the place clean, preparing meals, certainly wouldn’t hurt. Ah well.
Jan January 27
I know what you mean about spring styles. Lots of asymmetry. I don’t make them anymore because I made one once and everyone thought I couldn’t knit straight. Pittsburgh is not hip. Not even a little bit. So to save myself I swore no more uneven hems no matter how cool. But I still do like them.