old times' sake

 So I wrote yesterday about tracking down what's left of woolworks.org and looking at a few of the patterns on there, and I saved the Leaves of Grass socks (as a .pdf file for posterity, even though it's just the plain old typewriter font and has minimal formatting and no pictures). I printed a copy and realized that I wanted to start them - for old times' sake, remembering the old Woolworks era, the early days when I was knitting again. (And yes: "The past times weren't better, you were just younger and had fewer responsibilities," and yes, that's true of this, 1997 was a year when I was still a student, I was living with my parents, I had relatively little that was expected of me and less to worry about)

I even found a couple balls of old Socka Cotton (Actually a wool-cotton blend; most plain cotton is either harsh on the feet or won't stretch enough). Not the color the pattern author (Marilyn Roberts, "The Knitting Curmudgeon) used, but very close to it - a sort of speckled green and grey-green.

And because I can't quite leave well enough alone, instead of doing the cuff in just plain ribbing - as the pattern was written - I decided to do 1 1/4" of ribbing and then do the rest of the leg in the lace pattern so I can see it better.

I'm not very far yet - just short of one repeat - but you can see the leaves starting to emerge.

This is about two evenings' work; I did most of the ribbing last night and started the patterned part tonight. 

***

Some reading stuff. I hit the "somewhat-sympathetic character dies" (Well, the second one, actually - the first was much earlier) part in Wives and Daughters. Hopefully that's the only other one; then again, 200 years ago people DID die more randomly and of fewer clear cut things than now. (This death was some kind of "heart thing" - presumably something congenital the person had). I am drawing close to the end and not sure whether to go with the somewhat comic fantasy-romance Legends and Lattes next, or to reread Dracula (I got a nice copy earlier this summer), or what.

I did read a short story mentioned on Ask Metafilter. (Looking at it again, I see it's from 1976; I had thought it was more recent, I am not familiar with the author.)

It was published in The Atlantic and you either need a subscription, or not to have used up your allotted free articles to read it (it was my last for.....I guess the month? Maybe the year? But it was worth it.)

The story is called "Smokers."

It's basically a prep-school story; it feels Salingerish to me, but there's also perhaps a bit of "The Secret History" to it (but no weird Dionysian stuff and no murder). But oddly enough, even though my own prep-school experience was different in many ways (I'm female, I went to a co-ed school, I was a day student, it was in the 1980s instead of the vaguely 1950s-feeling time (trains) of the story), it still felt very familiar - the whole trying to figure out what your deal was and what your classmates' deals were, and that one kid who affects a weird hat* or some other kind of oddity of dress to try to stand out. And just all the insecurity and posturing and trying to get in good with the popular or rich kids when you weren't, and the vague melancholy that underlaid all of that. 

And yes, smoking was illegal at my prep school. Part of it was we were all under 18 (And I *think* it was illegal for under-18s to have cigarettes? Maybe? I don't know, I never smoked) but also they did point out to us once (after someone got caught, but I think they didn't get expelled as it was a first offense) that a lot of the buildings were VERY old and were basically firetraps (though that may have been played up to scare people, I'm sure there were laws about just how fire-unsafe a building could be)

 (*Embarrassingly to me now, that was me. I found a deerstalker hat somewhere and insisted on wearing it in the winters. But there is a certain insecure/fearing-fading-into-the-background strain in some teenagers that lead them to do silly and somewhat pretentious things for attention) 

I also ran across a reprint of this article on short novels. A lot of them are familiar, and I've read a number of them (Animal Farm, and Hound of the Baskervilles**, and The Postman Always Rings Twice, and L'Etranger (which I read in both French and English), and The Awakening***, and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and Wide Sargasso Sea, and Ethan Frome and Clockwork Orange, and Their Eyes were Watching God, and Great Gatsby, and Breakfast at Tiffany's***.....

(*and don't write it off as "genre," I probably enjoyed it as much as any on this list)

(**Which I did NOT enjoy, and the consensus of the women in my high school English class - where we read it - was that the protagonist was annoying and ungrateful for all the good things she had in her life)

(*** which made me cry when I read it. The ending, I mean. It's different from the movie which I saw a few years after I read the book; there's more of a sense of pathos you get from the novel)

But there are several on there - some of the international ones in translation, and a few of the science fiction/fantasy ones that I haven't read, that I would like to read some time, so I'm saving it to refer to when I am looking for a short book or two to read.