trøstestrikking

After four days of knitting I'm done with the plain gray garter stitch shawl. I knitted until I ran out of yarn, so there were 231 stitches instead of 215 across the top when I bound off...

It remains to be seen whether I actually wear a shawl, but all in all I'm happy with such a simple little project.

Påvirket tilstand

Lessee here, had a glass of wine, sho I'm a wee bit fuzzy... had a fabulous evening on the town along with two lovely friends from grad school (you know who you are...). Just wanted to get a quick update in before I go to bed.

I had trouble picking up the stitches around the body of the Whisper Cardigan on Sunday. Which is to say that I was too cocky to bother to count how many stitches I had picked up. When I got about 2 inches into the 3-inch ribbing band I realized that I probably had too few. I counted and I was almost 100 stitches short! Aghast at my knitting hubris, I ripped it all out and hid it in a drawer while I lick my wounds.

To console myself I started knitting the plainest possible shawl, a garter stitch triangle in gray Rauma Alpakka Inca. For some ridiculous reason, I had to get a pattern as I was sure I wasn't going to be able to do it. The pattern is as follows:

• Cast on 2 stitches.
• Knit every row, increasing one stitch at the next to the last stitch of each row.
• Continue until it's big enough.
• Cast off.

For this I paid 40 crowns? (actually I initially bought the booklet for some of the other patterns) I know there are dozens (hundreds?) of simple shawl patterns available for free on the internet, including the very popular Karius and Baktus shawls, but somehow I needed it written out in a format that was familiar to me (like a Raumagarn pattern). It's irritating to be so dense, but screwing up the Whisper Cardigan so royally really has me questioning my knitting acumen.

I also couldn't resist the big 40% off sale on Garnstudio yarns. It seemed foolish not to stock up if they had anything decent, so I squeezed in a visit to Tjorven on Monday, since I had to go to campus anyway. I bought a motherlode of two yarns (14 skeins of each, since I didn't have a pattern in mind for either).

Merino Super Fine (DK weight) in "Brownmix":

I didn't realize that the Merino was actually superwash. It has a much better texture than the Karisma that I used back in January, though, so I think this will work better.

Silke-Tweed (sport weight) in "Gray Green":

Tuesday I had a day of ridiculous meetings with a professor from China who wants to establish closer contact and exchange with the University of Oslo. It was frustrating for all sorts of reasons, but mostly because yet again someone is proposing to study Nordic literature in English. The de-Norwegianification of Ibsen through the Ibsen Studies all-English MA program here in Oslo is bad enough already...

Today I spent much of the day with my Mom sightseeing (first tried to write site-seeing) in Oslo. We had lunch at the yummy Café Celsius, tried to go to the Museum for Contemporary Art (it was closed in preparation for the opening of a new exhibit tomorrow), went to the Architecture Museum to see the Snøhetta exhibition, went to the Opera House to climb around, walked most of Karl Johan, then stopped into Husfliden to check out the Spælsau yarns there.

I discovered much to my amazement that Rauma has always had a spælsau knitting yarn--it's only recently that I've become aware of the wonders of spælsau (a very hairy Norwegian breed of sheep), and I though one could only buy weaving yarn (single ply). I'm so excited! I want to use spælsau for everything now, as it apparently wears like iron, and really isn't all that much more expensive. Plus the colors they had were lovely. I didn't buy any but was sorely tempted. Had I not bought all that Garnstudio stuff I probably would have. Sorry all you soft yarn people out there. I like mine hard as nails!

After that I dropped my Mom off at the ferry and went up to campus to work for a couple of hours (on the Volvo Lastvagnar article--good progress there!) before meeting my old buddies for dinner. What a good day, and how nice to come home to a sleeping son and groggy husband (KE has a nasty cold).

Bonus tidbit: on the way from Café Tullin back toward the palace I walked by a medical supply store that looked like the kind of place that might sell glass specimen jars for my buttons!

Vårstell

I know everyone else in the northern hemisphere has been working in their yards and are well underway with spring activities, but we've been a little slow. Yesterday we finally went to a local nursery and bought a lot of great stuff for both indoors and outdoors. It was a bit rainy, so we didn't really get a chance to plant or do much in they yard afterwards, but today was a glorious day so we finally feel like we're getting somewhere. We got a lot done and took a walk down to Hellviktangen to play in the tidepools. We also started moving a few boxes of things into the other unit, mostly to create more room in our storage room (we still can't close the door!). And I got a lot of knitting done on the Whisper cardigan. It was a lovely day. Here are some snapshots.

KE cleaning up one of the flower beds and adding bark. He's a happy camper. I'm glad I married an avid gardener!

Here's another bed. KE split and transplanted a bleeding heart. I think it looks great with all the tulips that the renters planted.

E had a lot of fun finding out what was inside the boxes we moved. He found all sorts of stuff and got a little silly...
Here's what will be our kitchen window once we get moved in. We bought the two geranium plants on sale.We also bought the white pots with a little row of beading, which I think are quite pretty. White is good since we don't know whether the flowers will be red, pink, or white. I'm very curious to see what color they end up being!

And finally a shot of the Whisper cardigan in progress. I'm done with the upper part (sleeves and back) and am now picking up nearly 300 stitches around the opening for the collar and rest of the body.

I had trouble casting off the second sleeve loosely enough. I ended up having to do it over again with a much larger needle and it's now a little better, but still not very good. Maybe the miracle of blocking will help?

A room of one's own, take 2

A while back I wrote about wanting to get my own little "roterom" set up. It still hasn't happened,* but while looking at Be*mused's quilting blog, I couldn't help notice that she too has that same aqua color on her walls that every one else seems to have in their crafting rooms. Be*mused's blog is really great. She is one of those impressively perfectionistic craftspeople who put the rest of us to shame. Her Flickr set of Latvian (and Latvian-inspired) mittens is to die for.

The other day I took my Mom to Ikea. We bought a storage unit for E's toys and a rug with roads that he can drive on. I also looked at bookcases with glass doors, since that's what I want for my "roterom," but couldn't make a decision. For one thing, they are too tall to fit in the back of the car.

The only thing that I've accomplished for the room is the typesetter tray. KE kindly pulled it out of the attic for me, I cleaned it up and filled it up with "all" my thread. Turns out I don't have very much at all, once it's on display instead of stuffed in a bag:

That looks okay, I guess, but look at the whole tray:

How the heck am I going to fill that all up? I was thinking of getting small clear glass (or plastic) jars (about the size of an old film container, I think maybe they're called specimen glasses?) for my buttons. I could sort them by color and the like, which appeals to my compulsive personality. Problem is I have no idea where to get them. So for now, the typesetter tray is hanging on the wall in the living room looking very lopsided. Not the aethetic experience I was hoping for.

* Why haven't I set up my craft room? Well, because even though our renters have moved out we still haven't taken over the whole house. We are having a heck of a time figuring out how to connect the two units. And even if we knew what we wanted to do, we can't get carpenters to come before August at the earliest. Plus, having my Mom visiting for the next three weeks means that we couldn't really do anything now anyway. We keep going back and forth between the two units, constantly forgetting things on the "wrong" side. Very frustrating. Realistically, it may not be until next summer that we can get the work done to turn the duplex into a single-family dwelling. Argh!!!

Maidager

Lots to report!

1. Eurovision Song Contest: Much to my surprise, Norway actually won the entire competition. It was quite a smashing victory, with the highest point sum ever scored. I'm still a bit perplexed as to why that particular song appealed so broadly, but whatever, it was fun to watch all the hoopla.

2. Syttende mai: Sunday was the Norwegian constitution day, and we had a lovely time. We watched and marched in the local children's parade, went to festivities at the local Steiner school (we took the opportunity to check out the atmosphere there, rather than at the regular school, since we're considering sending E there when he starts school in a couple of years), and then went to a really nice party at E's best friend A's house. We met and talked with a whole bunch of people. The weather was spectactular, and they heated up their hot tub (with a wood stove) for the kids to play in. Very nice. My favorite snapshot from the day was this woman with a national costume and dredlocks:


3. Sweater number six for the year is done (the reknit of sweater number two), and I'm very happy with the result:


4. I've started on sweater number seven, the "Whisper Cardigan" from Interweave Knits Spring 2009 issue. I'm using the Knitpicks Alpaca Cloud yarn that I ordered without knowing what I was going to do with it right before we moved. It's nice to find an appropriate project, since I'm still not quite there on the whole lace knitting thing. Interested, but just not ready to dive into a lace shawl yet. Of course my friend T just emailed me a really wonderful pattern for a garter stitch laceweight shawl with a lace ruffle that I'm seriously considering making... Here's the first sleeve for the Whisper:


5. Archives! Today I went to the Norwegian National Theatre archives for the first time ever. It was great. I found all sorts of relevant stuff in the material for the seven Når vi døde vågner productions that they've staged. I'm starting to see my article on the productions take shape, and an end is definitely in sight.

6. Yesterday I had a really long day, with interviewing two candidates for a PhD position here and doing an hour-and-a-half MA exam for a student back in the States by phone. In between I got a start on the paper for the NorLit conference on Erlend Loe's Volvo Lastvagnar.

So, all in all there's a lot going on right now. E continues to develop and change with leaps and bounds. Still very stubborn, very needy, but gaining lots of independence.

Melodi Grand Prix

Just a quickie to say that my Mom is visiting from the states (yay!), that I finished one of the book reviews, and that I'm almost done with my reknit sweater. Should finish seaming and crocheting the edges tomorrow It will need a thorough wash and block before I can wear it though. Very exciting, as I really like the fit so far.

So we've now watched both semi-finals of the Eurovision Song Contest (Melodi Grand Prix in Norway for some reason). At some point I'm going to have to write an essay about it. As an American, I find it simply one of the strangest phenomena on earth. I think that Europeans must have a somewhat tortured relationship to popular music, especially since the US has been so incredibly dominant throughout the whole postwar period. This contest appears to me to be an annual shaming ritual in which each country desperately wants to be perceived as cool by the others. It's all about who has worse taste than you. On Facebook one of my friends was commenting on what a giant cultural divide there is between former Warsaw Pact countries and the rest of Europe. As a Western European he refers to the East Bloc as Badtastestan, which is actually kind of fitting, given the incredibly vulgar entries from Hungary and Ukraina. Yet all five of the Nordic countries made it through to the finals, which is kind of interesting too.

My favorites so far: Moldova and Portugal. Stay tuned for a full report after Saturday night's grand finale.

Skriveri

This is going to be an extremely long and probably excruciatingly boring post about my academic writing, so for those who have no interest in such things I am posting a picture of our yard taken from our patio door. It is lovely out right now, with cherry trees in bloom. It had just stopped raining when I took the snapshot:

You can see why I love it here, and why the spring makes slogging through such long dark winters worthwhile. And now onto the (pseudo-) erudition:

A couple of weeks back I listed the work projects I have hanging over me, and now I thought it would be a good time to update and revise the list. A couple of new things have come up, so I need to sort it out. Here's the edited list:

• revise Erlend Loe article [YES! revisions complete, article resubmitted to Norsk litterær årbok, and now waiting for proofs]
  
• revise conference paper on Ibsen's Når vi døde vågner (When We Dead Awaken) and expand into a journal article [YES! revision complete, paper delivered, expansion underway; got one really good suggestion for a reference at the conference]
  
• review two different books on Ibsen [NO! still languishing... all of us who have outstanding reviews were severely reprimanded at the conference; ah, the guilt]
  
• write something (anything!) that will count as a beginning on the cabin book so that I'm not a total fraud for having this stipend [YES! somehow I managed to start thinking about the first chapter, which will be about 7 Maurits C. Hansen short stories that were collected under the title "Skizzerede Nationale Fortællinger"; I'm very excited about my theoretical approach and about the idea of reading them all together as one unit, rather than only focusing on the one story that tends to get anthologized. It was even fun working with texts in Gothic Script, which I otherwise never do. For some reason, the stories-which are all romances-are viewed by most scholars as not nationalistic, despite the fact that cultural theorists have identified the family romance as a key metaphor in "foundational" national narratives for quite some time now.]
  
• write 2 or 3 articles on early modern texts so that I can claim expertise in that area (if a permanent job opens up here that will in all likelihood be one of the areas they're looking to cover - in that sense it was very fortuitous that I was able to teach the early modern course this term!) [NO! nothing happening on this front; too many other things going on]
  

So, that's pretty good I guess. Unfortunately, I just realized that I have a very important deadline coming up way too soon. I am going to give a paper on "intermedial" strategies in Erlend Loe's novel Volvo Lastvagnar at the NorLit 2009 conference ("Codex and Code: Aesthetics, Language and Politics in an Age of Digital Media") in Stockholm in August. I hadn't realized that I need to submit the complete paper (not just an abstract) by 6 June! I have a bunch written, but it's in Norwegian and I have been asked to present in English. I started re-reading and marking the novel while on my trip, and I have a ton of new ideas. I actually think this paper is going to be a fairly easy one to crank out. The only hitch is that my mother is going to be visiting between now and that due date and I want to spend as much time with her as possible while she's here.

I have a cool idea for what to do with my 5-10 minutes of presentation time at the actual conference (everyone who attends the session is expected to have read all the papers in advance, then each gives a brief intro before extended discussion of her or his paper). I can't give it away here, but suffice it to say that my plan is very "intermedial" and involves Rage Against the Machine.

The other new project that just appeared is an invitation to contribute to a new and very innovative history of Nordic literature. The second volume of the history will focus on topography, which is of course right up my alley. Here's the description I got via email:

Within the topographical volume we have chosen to organize our discussion of place into scapes and practices. The scapes deal with various places and kinds of places, the practices with different uses of place.

The scape section is divided into four main sections: landscapes, waterscapes, lightscapes, and cityscapes plus two additional sections: wordscapes and cyberscapes. The practice section consists of sixteen articles grouped into four interrelated rubrics that describe human interaction with place: traversing, dwelling, conquering and sacralizing. In the scape section, each writer is asked to write an essay that deals with a specific place, or a specific kind of place, with the aim of creating a cluster of different perspectives on a particular scape. In the practice section, each writer is asked to explore the ways in which a particular activity is depicted within Nordic literature, broadly conceived to include various sorts of writings over the course of centuries.

I'm delighted to have been asked to write one of the "practice" essays, but worry about finding the time to do something so broad at the same time as everything else I have going on. It seems like a huge job to consolidate such a broad historical and geographic span into an essay of under twenty pages. We're talking 13th century sagas to 21st century texts and Iceland to Finland. Ack! At the same time I really should be involved in the project. I'm giving myself a couple of days to think it over.

Ekstase!

I am beside myself with joy over the discovery of Zotero, the free bibliographic software that is an add-on to the Mozilla Firefox internet browser. Someone mentioned it to me at the SASS conference and it piqued my curiosity. I just checked it out this afternoon and it has blown me away. I have known about Endnote for a few years, but never felt it was worth investigating, even though some early-adapter colleagues raved. I don't know enough to compare the two, having never looked at Endnote, but Zotero does so much more than I ever imagined that I don't see myself bothering to investigate whether Endnote actually does even more.

With the add-on installed, you can instantaneously add any bibliographic citation from, say, an online library catalog to your own personal library database with the click of one discrete icon. You can sync it with a free zotero.org account so that you can access your database from any computer. You can create and import bibliographies into, say, a Microsoft Word document. You can format the bibliography in any one of several citation styles (MLA, Chicago, Harvard, to mention the one I most frequently use). You can add notes to entries. It is just so freaking cool that I can hardly stand it. I'm so glad I looked into this now, at the beginning of my new book project, rather than at the end of the process, especially since this is an unwieldly, interdisciplinary project that will have a gargantuan bibliography.

Okay. Nerd rant over. But really, everyone doing academic work should start using this immediately!

Den grønnkledde

I do not have an obsession with the color green. The following images prove nothing. First off, an update on the re-knitting project. I got a lot of knitting done on the cardigan on the way over to the US:
So far I'm really happy with how it's going. Just a little more on the collar, then the two sleeves to knit and a crochet border along the front edges. Should be easy. Then there's the yarn I bought in Madison. The first photograph was so bad that I took some more snapshots. Here's the Prism Lace Wool (or is that Wool Lace?):
Here you can see that there's some variation in the color, which I really like. Not garish, but not flat either. Then there's the Rowan Kidsilk Haze:
And just to prove that I'm a wild and crazy gal who can really function outside her comfort zone, here's a completely different color, the charcoal gray Lamb's Pride Worsted:
And I feel no shame. I love all these colors senselessly, even though to most people they're ridiculously boring. Still trying to figure out exactly what I'm going to make once the green cardigan is done, and really looking forward to these next projects.

The SASS banquet turned out to be incredibly fun. My friends and I all danced wildly for hours. We even got in a little slam-dancing for old time's sake. I think the new crop of graduate students thought we were pathetic, middle-aged freaks (true), but that's their problem. The utterly uninhibited dancing is definitely the best thing about the entire conference.

Konferanserapport

Still in Madison, with only the conference banquet to go before the long journey back home tomorrow evening. It was a good conference with some pretty interesting papers. I attended and/or participated in two Ibsen panels, two Hamsun panels, and an interdisciplinary panel on Nordic landscapes. My paper on Når vi døde vågner went okay. One of the really good Ibsen scholars came up to me afterward with a book reference that I absolutely should have known about but didn't. I was of course very grateful that he didn't call me out on it in a confrontational and public way.

I haven't been sleeping very well, and thus haven't been socializing as much as I should. I've also had some distressing news about publication of my Cora Sandel book, so that's been eating at me a bit. But all in all it has been fun to be here, and the weather has been lovely. One of the nicest surprises has been so many people here who I went to grad school with, including one who dropped out of the field a decade ago. It was really delightful to reconnect with people from so long ago.

One of them is a fellow knitter, so she came with me to the Lakeside Fibers sale. It was pretty good. I had foolishly had some quite specific things in mind, which of course didn't pan out. Here's what I did end up buying:

Sorry for the lousy photograph. It's taken with the camera on my MacBookPro, using the Photo Booth program. The details are as follows:

• 3 skeins of Rowan Kidsilk Haze in color number 588 (Drab) for a total of 687 yards
• 6 skeins of Brown Sheep Lamb's Pride Worsted in color M06 (Deep) for a total of 1140 yards
• 1 skein of Prism Lace Wool in color 310 (Olive) for a total of 1460 yards. I haven't seen anyone raving about this yarn yet on Ravelry, but it is really lovely.
• plus a copy of Elizabeth Zimmermann's Knitter's Almanac just because I really wanted to have at least one book by this iconic writer.

The grand total was $106.69 including sales tax. That's just under 720 NOK, which seems pretty good for that much yarn (enough for a cardigan and two, perhaps three shawls of some kind). It was fun to go with someone else, as our color palettes were completely opposite: while I have charcoal gray, olive drab, and a lichen green, my friend bought lipstick red, hot pink, and white (but she also bought a skein of the Prism Lace Wool in a beautiful variegated dark gray, which I also easily could have gone for).