Knitting: Dragonslayer

Waaaay back in January I made this dragon from Knitty. The pattern calls her Norberta, but I made her in purple with green spines and I thought she looked more like a Hortense, so that's what I called her. Unfortunately, she turned out too loose -- so loose that her stuffing stuck out of the holes in her head. Trouble is, I'm an arch-anthropomorphizer, so I can neither destroy nor discard anything with which I have endowed a personality. And I had already named her Hortense. So she sat in the corner with no face for months, waiting for me to either come to terms with her flaws or harden my heart sufficiently to do what needed to be done.

Last weekend, I decided my heart was hard enough. Sort of. I took out Hortense, stood her up on the sofa with my yarn cutter, and explained that she had no quality of life there in the corner with no face, and it was time to undergo surgery that would make things better for both of us. I had to reassure her very emphatically that I would knit her again even better in order to make the first cut. At least she couldn't look at me reproachfully because she had no face.

So I took her apart. It was awful. There was a point of black despair when I thought I was going to end up with a bunch of two-inch scraps of yarn. My husband, seeing how het up I was, thought he would make me feel better by telling me I was a dragonslayer now. It made me cry instead. But in the end, all was well. I managed to salvage most of the yarn and now that I'm using 4s instead of 6s, I don't need as much anyway. I've got her back, belly and spines done, and now I just have to work on the legs and wings.

But it was a very eventful time.

Misc: Fun on the Subway

Graffito at the 2nd Avenue F station:

-RIP-

-died waiting for train-

Reading: The Brontë Myth

The Brontë Myth by Lucasta Miller is a lit-crit examination not of the Brontës' work, but of the carefully crafted story of their lives, starting with the biographical sketch Charlotte wrote after Emily and Anne died, and reflected by her own accounts to literary London. Charlotte's account was the one on which Elizabeth Gaskell based her Life of Charlotte Brontë, and between the two of them they created an indelible image of the poor tubercular sisters trapped in a bleak country parsonage at the mercy of their abusive father and reprobate brother and surviving as long as they did only through the purifying power of their imaginations before dying pitiably young. We learn this story along with Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights in school. According to Miller it's largely nonsense.

Charlotte could hardly be blamed for bending the truth to salvage her own and her sisters' maidenly reputations by making their isolated Yorkshire upbringing an excuse for their "coarse" subject matter. Contemporary critics used "coarse" in every other sentence when discussing Ellis, Acton and Currer Bell; I was heartily sick of it before I was halfway through The Brontë Myth so I can only imagine what Charlotte thought about it at the time. The trouble with Charlotte's filter, as Miller points out, is that it obscures the work itself by presenting it as having been done almost involuntarily, an inevitable response to the sisters' mythical suffering and divorced from any craftsmanship or talent they may have possessed. Emily is especially cheated by this treatment, being presented as some sort of faucet through which her novel pours without ever touching the sides.

I've always been more a fan of Charlotte's than the rest, just because when I studied Jane Eyre in ninth grade I was powerfully influenced by the idea of two strong individuals meeting across the class divide, whereas when I studied Wuthering Heights in tenth grade I was kind of disgusted by everyone's inability to have an identity of their damn own. "I am Heathcliff." What the heck kind of thing is that to say? But my favorite part of The Brontë Myth turned out to be its revelation of the historical Emily -- that is to say, its revelation that the historical Emily is unknowable, a Rorschach blot for generations of projectionists.

Apparently the real Emily left almost no record of her life, outside two maddeningly elliptical "diary papers" and pieces of a few letters. Her juvenilia (the tales of Gondal, invented with her sister Anne) are gone, believed destroyed by Charlotte after her death. She had no known friends, and her only documented interactions with people outside her own family depict her physically fleeing from them. I'm no particular misanthrope, but that's the kind of writer I only wish I had the courage to be.

Misc: Sick again, but now well

The reason it's been awhile, for the two of you who may have noticed, is that I spent the last bit of February and almost all of March on a bad bacterial infection.

Oh, those halcyon days when I got the flu on Saturday and was back at work by Wednesday. This damn infection had me out of work for two full weeks, twelve days of which were spent with temperatures over 100. I had two five-day courses of Zithromax, which shook me by the guts, and experienced ramifications which I will spare you except to say that they fascinated my gynecologist, and your gynecologist is someone you pretty much always want to bore stupid unless you're at the same cocktail party or something. That GYN appointment, by the way, was such a surrealist satire of a Woody Allen movie I'm trying to figure out a way to turn it into an article. It might as well be good for something.

We were supposed to go to California in the middle of March, but even if I had been able to totter onto a plane, I had hosed through all my paid leave being sick, so we had to reschedule for May. I'm almost back up to speed except that I'm still sleeping ten hours a night and I haven't been able to make it back to hapkido class, in which I ironically earned an orange belt the very night before I got sick.