I have to confess that I got a little seduced by Brooklyntweed's frequent praise of the garter stitch. He goes on and on about how rhythmic and soothing it is to knit in garter stitch (knit every row, as opposed to knit and purl subsequent rows for you non-knitters). One person's comfort is apparently another person's torture. I've never really done anything in garter stich other than this jacket, and I didn't realize how much harder it is to correct than regular stockinette knitting, and how impossible it is to measure. Impossible, that is, unless you actually count the rows that are formed by the stitch pattern. Lo and behold, you actually can count them, which I discovered this morning. So now all the misshapen work is ripped out, but I'm too wary to start right in again. Again, sigh. I so wanted to have this thing done. Feels like I've been working on it forever.
On the up side of things, yesterday I finished off some major adminstrative stuff at work, which freed me up to start thinking about my next conference paper, which is going to be on Henrik Ibsen's Når vi døde vågner. Here's a sketch of the first act that Ibsen made in his manuscript:
I actually managed to bang out about four pages! The conference isn't until the end of April, but we're reading that play in my "space and place in literature" seminar this coming week, and I wanted to present a preliminary version of the conference paper to the students on Wednesday. I've really been focusing on the nuts and bolts of literary scholarship and publishing, and I wanted to give them a good model for an academic presentation.
3 comments:
I'm not so keen on garter stitch either - as much because I don't love the result. Though I do get the soothing aspect of it - of course, you can get that just as well by knitting stockinette in the round.
Good on you for getting a head start on a paper you don't HAVE to do until April - way to go! I should do that more often :)
You wouldn't believe how much more enjoyable conference presentations are when one presents a thoroughly worked out idea!
I used to get so anxious about conference presentations (feeling like a fraud, like the topic was lame, etc.) that doing them really early seemed like the best strategy for me. I actually try to write them as if they were an article first, then cut them down to conference length. That makes it so much easier to revise for submission to a journal.
Some of the conferences I attend require full paper submissions rather than the rather too easy abstract, and I much prefer those more stringent conferences - both because I actually work on my paper and end up with a publishable result and a conference presentation that's got some meat to it, and because the other presentations are good. On the other hand, I have sometimes been able to use the abstract-only conferences as great sounding boards for new ideas - but it's way too easy to over-commit when all you have to do to submit a paper proposal is write 500 words. It's easy to make something sound good in 500 words.
I admire your self-discipline and hereby plan to follow suite in future :)
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