Yesterday, I picked up a copy of that annual fashion bible, the September issue of Vogue. Yeah!!! Not that I dress like anyone featured in that publication. I buy it for the photography. It's sort of the Playboy of women's magazines---seldom purchased for the articles. It took me a few hours to work my way through the magazine, which is approximately the same thickness as my phone book, and enjoyed most of it. One of the sittings was quite bad, but it's hard to function at 100% all the time.
I'd been waiting the release of the Vogue brick ever since I picked up the September issue of W magazine in New York. It was different from their usual tack, and interesting timing on their part. The issue featured a fairly large portfolio of images of Kate Moss, by a collection of varied by immensely talented artists. The daguerrotypes (or maybe they were ambrotypes, I don't recall and I ought to) by Chuck Close were really unflattering and quite compelling.

Other items recently read:
The New Yorker (toujours)
Atlantic Monthly
Smithsonian Magazine (AM and Smithsonian were thematically similar. AM featured an article on the popularity of the Founding Fathers, and Smithsonian a fascinating article about Benjamin Franklin. Did you know that one of his sons was the Royal Governor of New Jersey and that they had a falling out over the Revolution? That and so much more...)
Readers Digest
The Barbary Plague (I wanted this to be more like Devil in the White City, which had more suspense. Suppose it's hard to be suspenseful about the bubonic plague. A fascinating but slow read).
A History of Hand Knitting
American Photo

I decided to rip out the Zodiac camisole in progress, since I'd made such a mess of the waist shaping. Also, I'm not so worried about running out of yarn since I made my trip to Arcadia Knitting. They're so damn cool! I'm going to make a contrasting border and straps at the neck in red cotton. It's pretty spiffy with the teal of the body, though yellow would also have made a sharp contrast. Too Swedish perhaps...especially since I have an aversion to the color yellow. I used to have one to the color orange, but I'm working it out with my new Chinese shoes.
I'm going to the unemployment office. Did you know that one of the standards for adult literacy is whether or not the subject can understand and correctly fill out unmployment forms? What does that say about our country? What if I turn out to be "illiterate" after years of voracious reading habits?!