Two new socks have been completed recently. Memorial sock 1, and reading sock 1. An explosion in the self-inflicted reading list has caused a change of knitting plans. Kunegunde is patiently waiting for attention, which she is not receiving. Instead the sock yarn from the indiscretion earlier this month is rapidly becoming simple stockinette socks. Why? Because I can read while I'm knitting them. I can't read books or articles and an intarsia chart at the same time.I was innocently reading an article on early music writing in Europe when suddenly, a mess of new articles I thought I should read started popping out of the footnotes. It snowballed. Each new article generates several more that I should read; it feels like it's out of control. There must, however, be an end because earlier this week I went to the library for some early German neumes and ran into the local med-ren musicology prof. He was sitting in the library leisurely reading an article, as though he hadn't another care in the world. He had evidently caught up. Never mind that he entered musicology at least 30 years before I did and therefore not only was present for many of the important moments on my reading list (like the St. Martial Polyphony arguments), but also had a smaller corpus to read through before he could simply keep up with recent publications.
