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Completed	December 2010
Title	Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog
Author	Dylan Thomas
Published	1940
Quote	"We talked to her some more about windows, but she only smiled and undid her wool, and once she put the blunt end of the long needle in her ear."
Review	What don't we love about knitting references in literature? And what don't we love about Dylan Thomas? Boy, was he blessed with a command of language. I just love the way he writes. It is never boring. He is so clever, the way he twists words. He describes the most everyday things in such interesting ways, such as this: "The pigsties were at the far end of the yard. We walked towards them, Gwilym dressed in minister's black, though it was a weekday morning, and me in a serge suit with a darned bottom, past three hens scrabbling the muddy cobbles and a collie with one eye, sleeping with it open. The ramshackle outhouses had tumbling, rotten roofs, jagged holes in their sides, broken shutters, and peeling white-wash; rusty screws ripped out from the dangling, crooked boards; the lean cat of the night before sat snugly between the splintered jaws of bottles, cleaning its face, on the tip of the rubbish pile that rose triangular and smelling sweet and strong to the level of the riddled cart-house roof. There was nowhere like that farm-yard in all the slapdash county, nowhere so poor and grand and dirty as that square of mud and rubbish and bad wood and falling stone, where a bucketful of old and bedraggled hens scratched and laid small eggs. A duck quacked out of the trough in one deserted sty. Now a young man and a curly boy stood staring and sniffing over a wall at a sow, with its tits on the mud, giving suck." Note to self: Must take a train to Wales and walk Thomas' trail and raise a pint of ale to him in Swansea.

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