Today I want to start a mini series of posts based on my undergraduate dissertation topic: the gender binary in 1920s-30s Europe and America. ‘Gender Binary’ here is defined as the classification of gender into two distinct opposites – masculine and feminine. So we might as well dive in with a little introduction to the context and then briefly introduce the artists I’ll be delighting you with.
“All the world’s a stage, and all men and women merely players in it.”
– As you like it, Act II, Scene VII.
The 1920s -1930s across Europe and America was an era of great change in gender dynamics. This was especially so in France, as arguably the French Revolution of the eighteenth century influenced the rise of first wave feminism that manifested itself in the suffrage of the nineteenth-century. Women gained greater economic independence in the interwar period as many working-class women…
If there is anything that would greatly improve my life it would be the ability to read and knit at the same time. But alas. Still I have had great fun making this scarf.
It is only a little bit Doctor Who.
It is a beginner’s garter stitch scarf (this means that every row is knitted with the knit stitch) in its most basic form. I made it using 7mm needles and two strands of DK yarn so it is very quick to knit, and comes out wonderfully soft and chunky. I just picked all my favourite colours from my stash and alternated them with two rows of grey. The scarf is 35 stitches across and as long as I can stretch from my fingers to my toes (a very scientific method).
The only think that makes it a little bit special is the way I started each row. Normally, if you’re just knitting each row, you will end up with a bumpy edge. But what I did instead was slip the first stitch (putting it on to the other needle without knitting it) then put my yarn over and knit the rest of the row as usual. I’ve taken some hopefully helpful pictures to demonstrate.
Slip the first stitch onto your needle.Take your yarn to the back (through the middle of your two needles).Behold your gloriously straight edge!
One of my favourite things about knitting is that when you start a new project you never know where your life will have taken you by the time you finish it. Each project is a beautifully stitched journal entry. For example, when I started this scarf I was unemployed, but now I work in a call centre…
From the outside Matt Haig’s How to Stop Time seems like a trashy romance. And while I am partial to the occasional trashy romance How to Stop Time had far more depth than its slightly bizarre cover suggested. The novel centres around a protagonist with a rare genetic condition, he ages at a much slower rate than those around him. Rather than see this as a gift, Tom Hazard lives a deeply unhappy life, forced to watch those he loves age without him, and constantly having to uproot his life to avoid his neighbour’s suspicion. As a history graduate, I loved the way he dabbles on the edge of history, playing the lute for Shakespeare and the piano for Jazz-age Parisians, witnessing it but not truly a part of it.
Tea: Twinning’s Peppermint, because I’ve been feeling anxious and it’s good for the butterflies in my stomach.
By writing from the perspective of a quadracentenarian (I may have invented that word) Haig is able to include some rather amusing jabs at society: “Many of us have every material thing we need, so the job of marketing is now to tie the economy to our emotions, to make us feel like we need more by making us want things we never needed before…No one I knew in the 1600s wanted to find their inner billionaire. They just wanted to live to adolescence and avoid body lice.” As a running theme throughout the book, it serves to remind us how lucky we are to be alive, and in a time with flushing toilets! The book smoothly combines the philosophical points about aging so slowly you outlive all those around you, and the emotional toil that this takes (especially when coupled with being accused of witchcraft in the middle ages) with an underlying excitement as the reader comes to discover the depressing details of the long and often unhappy life of Tom Hazard as well as the shady organisation his mysterious sponsor Heimlich runs.
It is a fun book and a thought provoking one that reminds us that life is precious and finite and how important it is to spend it with the people we love. Spanning four hundred years and travelling around the world it is at its heart a story that we can all relate to, about learning what to do with the time that has been given to us, whether it’s four hundred years or forty. It was the first book I finished this year and a book about making the most of life seemed an apt way to begin 2019.
Hi there! I am a recent (ish) graduate, flitting between various soul destroying jobs and attempting to pursue my dream of becoming a Librarian. I love books, I have an extensive collection of cardigans. It is meant to be! It just hasn’t quite happened yet.
Anyway, join me as I review the books I read this year, attempt to make sense of life and drink lots and lots of tea.
“A library is like an island in the middle of a vast sea of ignorance, particularly if the library is very tall and the surrounding area has been flooded” – Lemony Snickett.
A Book and a Cuppa 