Yarn Along: Mushroom Sweater Progress and Man of War

Linking up with Ginny for Yarn Along today.

Mushroom sweater progress!  I've been knitting a lot in the afternoons and evenings, so I finished the first sleeve and am making the first set of increases to the second now. 

I just finished reading Charlie Schroeder's Man of War, which was an excellent light read.  In it, Schroeder details his year of going around to various reenactor groups and joining in, with the intent to learn some history, understand why people do it in the first place, and possibly have some fun in the process.  I'm a member of a WW2 reenactment group, so I found this book particularly interesting.  As a result of his year, Schroeder becomes a history geek, so his story is liberally sprinkled with various random history tidbits that I personally found fascinating.  My own desire to study history and get involved in reenactment is in part to "put myself there", and imagine myself in the past.  I think at the heart of reenacting is a desire for old-fashioned story telling, and a thirst for history in the sense of knowing ourselves.  I've always said that history is the story we tell ourselves about ourselves in order to understand ourselves.  (And indeed, one of the reenactors Schroeder encounters along the way notes this same sentiment.)  We cannot possibly understand where we are going if we don't first understand where we've been.

I also finished Cheap last week, and I have a lot of things to say about it, but mostly I found I myself frustrated with the overly diagnostic tone of the book.  She spends a lot of time establishing why things are rotten in the state of Denmark, so to speak, but aside from a highly idealistic pie-in-the-sky exposition at the end of one of the chapters, there is little in the way of prescription.  There must be more we as consumers can do to foster craftsmanship, quality mid-range goods, community relationships on an economic level and so on.  Somehow we have to get away from the attitude that everything is disposable, and nothing is worth anything, but I don't have a solution to that one.  Some of it is in the syntax of how we speak about things--language is powerful at shaping ideas, and I think that overcoming the barrage of messages about value/worth/price are going to be difficult in the extreme.  I'm still thinking about the conclusions I want to draw from the book, and may write something up soon.