Many of you have left thoughtful replies to my review of Jane Brocket's knitting book. I have also received a few mails and tweets. Thank you all. Some of you wondered I made no mention of "Brocket-gate" - i.e. the mainstream media and blogosphere response to Ms Brocket's The Gentle Art of Domesticity - and whether or not I was aware of it. Yes, I was aware of the response to The Gentle Art of Domesticity but I did not think this response particularly relevant to The Gentle Art of Knitting. I could write a long and boring paragraph about how I read books (I'm one of those girls who went to university and lost her intellectual innocence to literary theory) but suffice to say that I tend to focus on the book itself rather than any outrage surrounding its author.
And so I approached this new Jane Brocket book as I would any other knitting book: did I think it useful? did I find the patterns interesting? did it inspire me? did it teach me anything new? I hope I answered those questions in my review.
Some linkage: + Women of the Vortex. MARVELLOUS pictorial evidence of daring lady painters of a young 20th century. I find Vorticism endlessly exciting. I wish I could go to Tate Britain and shout about machines, speed and modernist epistemology. BLAST! + A Knitted Garden. This totally made my morning when I first saw it. + Modern day Hollywood has nothing on the stars of the Big Studios years. Clark Gable & the Scandal That Wasn't is an excellent read. + Speaking of entertaining reads, this review of "Rushed to The Altar" from Smart Bitches, Trashy Books had me howling with laughter. The review is definitely not for the faint-hearted and it is NSFW, but it is also hillarious. + It is a good thing I did not have my own webspace back in 1996, because I would definitely have set up an early prototype of My Daguerreotype Boyfriend. + Neil Patrick Harris' opening number at this year's Tony Awards = possibly the best 6 minutes of 2011 so far?
I have finished no less than three projects this week, so there will be plenty more knitting content over the next few days, but I'm also trying to work out a response to China Mieville's Embassytown which does not involve me muttering about Martian poetry. Cross your fingers hard.