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Let Us Now Praise Famous Women,* one in particular.

The Opinionated Knitter arrived yesterday, and I immediately sat down in a heap with the pups in the late afternoon sunlight to leaf through the pages. As I turned the last few pages over, I found I had tears running down my face. The indefinably fatigued weltschmerz of the past few months, of worry about the war, the world, the environment, committments, of getting older, has lifted through a vehicle I couldn't have imagined: the journal entries and newsletters of Elizabeth Zimmermann.

Many of us are too young or too geographically remote to have known EZ in person; we merely adored her through her work in Knitter's Almanac, Knitting Without Tears, Knitting Around, Knitting Workshop, and, of course, the biannual Wool Gathering. I freely admit to being an EZ-idolator—her EPS, her common sense, her ingeniously engineered designs, her writing style—but even I was unprepared for how moving and sweet and funny and lovely this new posthumous book is. For one thing, readers hear the history of the (pre-Wool Gathering) newsletters, the collecting of the schoolhouses that became Schoolhouse Press, her thoughts on design and hundreds of other things in her voice, and her personality seems to rise right up off of the pages. The affectiveness of this book is such that The Great Knitter sits down right beside you, casually chatting philosophy and knitting, and being as dear a friend and mentor as we never met. What a polite and generous woman, and what an intense pleasure to meet her through these notes and newsletters. Her public persona in the newsletter seems very much the same as her private persona in the journal entries. I think we won't see the likes of Elizabeth Zimmermann again in our knitting lives.

About the book, you've read, no doubt, that it contains 42 designs and the newsletters. These are wonderful additions to anyone's knitting library. The unique and embracing bits are the "new" articles and stories from EZ's notebooks. We're living in a knitting-revival that has produced hundreds of new books and a few zines that all announce how hip knitting is, as if our time invented knitting with a little help from Deb Stoller. But for a motorcycle-riding, schoolhouse-collecting, fishing, rambling, painting, outdoor-loving, true Romanticist (in the early 19th century sense), we really need look no further than the author of these newsletters and "digressions" from 1958-1968. She wasn't a Beat Poet, but of the era—it's easy to imagine her hanging out with Kerouac, with her knitting as her slam-poetry. This is a collection of a body of work by a sensitive, thoughtful, creative, imaginative woman, gathered lovingly together by a daughter. It's a lovely book, moving and kind, in a time that very often feels out of control to me. We needed this book. I'm happy to have it. Woofs! and a big SNAP.

In other news, I've ripped back Violets by the River to begin again, this time working only from the charts. I don't know what made me think I could keep up with line-by-line directions at this point in my life! Thank heavens for knitting charts and symbols. The pups are happy because we had some sunshine yesterday, and Little Jack seems to be thriving on his thyroid meds.

So! We wish you a merry Tuesday. And we wish you the opportunity to study The Opinionated Knitter in person. It's as much a primer on how to live a creative, satisfying life as it is a book about knitting.

Cheers!

* We pinched the title of this blog entry from James Agee's book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a masterpiece on social justice written during the Depression Era in the US.