Blogorrhea Junior

Packrattery

There's a fine line, I've discovered, between junk and art supplies. Pack rats collect junk, artists collect art supplies, right? Sure. Simple enough. Pack rats are the kind of people who say, "Oh, but I might need that someday," about bits of string, old newspapers, and styrofoam trays from their hamburger. And before you know it, you've got the Collyer Brothers in an apartment. Artists, by contrast, are the kind of people who say, "Oh, but I might be able to use that in a piece of art someday," about bits of string, old newspapers, and styrofoam trays from their hamburger. And before you know it, you've got the Collyer Brothers in a studio.

Except, damned if that string and newspapers don't go into making paper and the styrofoam trays are great for pouring glue or paint into. So, often, junk  is in the eye of the beholder. One person's trash is an artist's treasure, truly.

The "is it junk or is it art supplies?" conundrum has been a perrenial problem for one of my artist pals who shall remain nameless (doubtless, she'll recognize herself). I can't say I've been unsympathetic to it but her ex-girlfriend, a musican, was. GK's studio spaces, when she's had one, have been small and packed with both shelving and computer equipment, making the work space negligible. She collects tools, too, having worked in metalsmithing, painting, and multimedia as well as graphic arts and book and paper making. To say nothing of the raw materials. I can't tell you how many times I've called her up and said, "Hey, do you have a couple of X or a little bit of Y that I could use?" to keep from buying whatever it is in bulk when I only need a couple pieces. "Oh, sure. I'll pack it up and we'll meet for drinks," is inevitably her response. On top of this, she collects objects of a certain color, which decorate—nay, festoon—every available surface or spot on the wall. I'm perrenially fascinated by her studio, a kid in the proverbial candy shop. It's a giant cabinet of curiosities.

As I said, I'm sympathetic to her space woes, having some of my own, though my collection of junk, er, art supplies, doesn't begin to approach GK's. When I was moving from Brooklyn to the Bronx, I made the mistake of ditching a lot of stuff that I wish I had now. Sounds like any good packrat, doesn' it? Among other things, I had an entire attorney's bookcase full of LPs, though I long ago gave my turntable to my parents. I never dreamed when I dumped my vinyl that I'd be sorry. And here's why:

These are some of Natalie LeBlanc's LP books, which are making me smack my head in "wish I'd thought of that!/I coulda had a V8" style. I'm totally in love with these and could just see some of my old records making really fantastic bookcovers. Instead, they were abandoned on the street for the scavengers, who have no doubt (and this is my only consolation) resold them to would-be samplers, mashers up (mashers? no, that doesn't seem right. What's the plural of someone who makes mash-ups?), and would-be djs who need records to scratch.

That said, where the heck would I store them? I mean, I got rid of them because I didn't have anywhere to put them. And that's the recurring problem. I mean, who'da thunk I'd finally make use of those half-dozen microscope slides I made in my freshman year histology lab in college? That was (shudder) nearly 30 years ago. It was only nostalgia for my abandoned scientific career that made me keep them—that, and they didn't take up very much space.

I have a feeling the problem is only going to get worse as I make more and more books. Already, I've got a sack of old subway tokens, all kinds of single beads and buttons, weird tools, and bits and bobs that look completely useless to the normal human eye but that may someday make something possibly half as cool as the LP books. I can only hope it happens before people start talking about that Kottner broad, did you see all the crap she had in her apartment? . . .

Doin' It For Ourselves

Damn, now I've got two fangrrrls baiting me. Bad enough BN Buffy Fan Jennifer taunts me about my fanfic habit, but now I've got Alyson, author of the forthcoming Will the Vampire People Please Leave the Lobby?, taunting me on the phone the other night, and I haven't even met her face to face yet. (I just know we're gonna be friends.) And what a taunt too. "Hi!" I says when Jen puts me on the phone with her while they were having dinner together in LA. "Lee, there's this site you have to go to called Fanlib.com," she says without preamble, as though it were the most urgent thing in the world.

Only because it is. I mean, from a certain point of view, as Obi-Wan would say. And that's because these geniuses (with $3M of venture capital, no less), as Alyson pointed out with appropriate outrage, have started an open archive for fanfic in which they reserve the right to profit from your ideas, edit your fic (see Part II) and for the privilege, you must indemnify them against any copyright infringement lawsuits (ditto). As I said in an earlier post about the new Spiderman action figure, WTF?! I'm not sure whether to laugh in their faces or fart in their general direction. Maybe both, in that order.

One of the (many) things that makes this interesting to me is that it follows serendipitously on the heels of several discussions of fanboys' loathing of fanfic over on Feminist SF-The Blog! (a blog, btw, that any woman interested in SF, feminism, comics, and some damn fine pop culture analysis should read on a regular basis). Oddly Fanlib.com's founders are all male and don't seem to have any prior experience with fanfic, which is a largely female endeavor. There had been an ongoing discussion (here, here, and here) about male privilege and female fanfic (specifically slash), i.e., the insistence of many fanboys that only they have the right to define what is a "legitimate" response to their favorite media, and to define the rules of the community. (The old, "you're not doing that right" ploy, designed to denigrate women's approaches and ways of thinking.)

The root of my mixed reaction to Fanlib.com's unmitigated gall (sneer? rage? sneer? rage? Hmm, which first?) lies in their condescending tone and the underlying theme of exploitation that runs through their business model. (Not that exploitation is anything new in business models.) They've completely missed the point of fanfic centered around a community of female writers and readers. Sure we like our strokes from our own fans, but we mostly like reading each other's really good fics, helping other writers improve, writing our own, and talking about our characters with each other: why they do what they do, what they haven't done something we think they should have, where their canonical writers were inconsistent, which way we think the story arc should bend. More importantly, the discussion is from our point of view, which is often distinctly different from the fanboys'. It's fascinating to see how much this infuriates some of them. As Lucy Gillam points out over on the Fanfic Symposium,

The vast, vast, vast majority of institutions, spaces, and subcultures privilege male interests, but because male is the default in this culture, such interests are very often considered ungendered. As a result, we only really notice when something privileges female interests. . . . The second result of the invisibility of male privilege is that a lack of male privilege is taken as active oppression, as male-bashing or bias towards women. It is not enough that the mere presence of something which actively aims at women and women's interests is taken as oppressing men; simply not catering to men's interests is perceived as oppression.

Like fanfic. The grrlz have made a space for themselves, defined by themselves, run as they like, and the boyz would like to step in and not just play, but actually take over.

Fanlib.com is a blatant attempt to redefine the community and its purpose in their own image, and to co-opt the work of a largely female community. Telesilla, who used to post in my fandom (where are you? Sniff!) deconstructs the dastardliness here with a particular thoroughness. When called on their ulterior motives, they've reacted with a whiny defensiveness by spamming female fans' LJs. Truwest, who also posts pretty frequently in my fandom, sums up the problem with the concept pretty neatly, here. The beauty of her post is that she's also a techie and plays both the geek girl and "overemotional male" card to hilarious reverse-sexism effect. and Yonmei, over at Feminsit SF--The Blog! really lets them have it for their sudden epiphany about fanfic.

What really frosts my cupcake is that the guys of Fanlib.com are trying to make a quick buck on the backs of women who do this for love. We've always understood that there's no money to be made in this endeavor; we're in it for the fun and the comraderie. I sometimes think some of us are in it for the love of subverting male culture, too, but that's another story. Put in bald terms, Fanlib.com is an invitation to voluntary servitude. Yes, you can back out any time you like, but why would you let someone else do as they will with your work for profit that does not accrue to you, when the only advantage they offer is something you can already get elsewhere with no strings attached? Sam Johnson said that only a blockhead writes for any reason but money, which exemplifies the attitude of Fanlib.com's creators. But at least Johnson was talking about money paid to the writer, not to the "publisher."

Do they think we're stupid? Apparently, yes. They usually do. And there will always be some newbies who fall for their scam the way new writers fall for the Poetry.com schtick. The difference this time, happily, is that we do not need them. Fanfic may make us poor, but it is not a sweatshop.

Lo, I hear the voices of millions of women whose work, whether created out of love or necessity, has been sold with little or no profit to them throughout history, crying out to me. "For Pete's sake! Not again!" they cry, with a collective historical eye-roll. And I say unto the Boyz of Fanlib.com, in the words of Our Lady Aretha and Sister Annie (with a nod to Brother Dave),

Sisters are doin' it for themselves.
Standin' on their own two feet.
And ringin' on their own bells.
Sisters are doin' it for themselves.

So take your fanfic archive and stuff it, boyz. We run our own websites, servers, and archives; swap our stories on CD-ROMs, print them up in 4-color zines, post them on forums and mailing lists we've set up and organized ourselves. We are an undetectable underground. And we've been doing this for years, decades, without you. We're not in it for the money, but we're sure not gonna let you get rich off of us. We're playin' by our own rules.

*Again, all praise to the nameless TPM fan who made the background of my icon.

New Vocabulary Word: Blook

I love the way language, especially English, develops new terms to express new ideas. I just learned a new(ish) term today, via The International Journal of the Book's blog: blook. What's the difference between a blog and a blook?  Well, blooks resemble books in some manner, either by having a continuous coherent narrative (a serialized story) or by mimicking the form of books in the physical world. A blog can turn into a blook but it's probably a one-way trip. For instance, if my friend Jennifer decided to publish pieces of her excellent blog, Cocktail Party Physics, as a physical collection of essays (something I think would be an excellent idea at some point), that would be a blook. There's even a quite nice prize for "books based on blogs or other websites, including webcomics."

I'm glad to see webcomics included in the mix, being a particular fan of many of them myself. Among my favorites: Dicebox, Girl Genius, Sluggy Freelance, Nothing Better. The web has been a great medium for comics, and it's great to see some of the really excellent work that's out there have a chance to see print, though I'm not sure that brings it a wider audience. There's still something about having a physical book in your hand that makes it seem like you've "made it." I think that has something to do with the fact that it's a collaborative, collective effort that involves validation of your work by professionals (although increasingly that means "marketing people," sadly). After all, any schmoe with some rudimentary knowledge of HTML can launch a website (witness mine) or self-publish, but professionally published books cost money and time and effort by a lot of people, so they have to think you actually have some talent to publish you. (Obviously, I'm not addressing the plethora of really bad books that get publish just as potboilers to feed both author and publishing company. But that's another post.)

I wonder if the flag book I'm planning would qualify as a blook? The pictures for it are digital (no text yet, if at all) and live on my Flickr account, from where they were made into Moo cards and will be put together by me. If so, that would make it an artist's blook. Maybe that's a whole new genre itself. Cool!

The Republic of Letters, and the Invisible College

I like the title of this show because it seems to me that making books, whether you write them or make them as objects, makes you part of a republic of letters, or a sort of Invisible College. Book artists and writers seem to form a sort of secret society, like the old medieval guilds, which is not surprising, since bookbinding and printing were both guild trades. Wish I was in New Zealand to see this particular exhibit. Thanks to the internets though, I can at least view the pictures. And worth the effort it is, too. (Thanks to Rag & Bone for this.)

The Republic of Letters
Percy Thomson Gallery
Stratford, New Zealand
June 16 to July 15, 2007

But here's an exhibit a little closer to home (or at least on the same continent) that focuses on that space where scrapbooking (like making blank journals) elides into artist's books. This interests me for obvious reasons (since I did the Highfield's anniversary scrapbook), and because I use a lot of the materials of scrapbooking in my own books (from Deanna's Artist, Emerging, where you'll also find some great links for artists' resources).

Beyond the Scrapbook
Tarrant County College
The Art Corridor II
Southeast Campus, Arlington, Texas
May 7 - June 15, 2007
Reception
Monday, June 4, 4:30 - 6:30 pm
Artist's books by Joy Christiansen, Brett Dyer, Hannah Frieser, Allison Gillies, Danielle Grove, Alison Hahn, Jana Perez, and Deanna Wood
Curated by Deanna Wood

A while ago, I set up some Google alerts for "artist's books" and "book arts." Not all of them apply, but now and then something good turns up, and I've found quite a few nice blogs this way, too (check the blog roll at right).  Here's a couple links you might find useful.

• The Canadian Bookbinders and Book Artists Guild is looking for artist's books for a juried exhibition. Submission deadline is June 30th.
• Brian sawyer's list of useful DIY bookbinding links.
• Colophon Book Shop is having a 50% off sale on books about books (thanks to Fade Theory for the heads-up) through June 15 (my birthday! How perfect!)
• Cloth, Paper, Scissors Magazine, which I found on the newstand at Sheds & Commoner. I bought it mostly for the vendors, but it also has some good technique and product articles which are great for someone like me who hasn't played in the art box in a long time.
• Chicago Area Book Arts Workshops: “What is a Book Worth.” 10 a.m.-5 p.m. May 27. Send e-mail to steadley@uiuc.edu for more information, location and cost. Library and Information Science, Univeristy of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
• And the International Society of Altered Book Artists.

While I'm at it, I might as well mention the people I buy a lot of stuff from in the course of making my own books.

Paper & Book Board

Kate's Papier has already had a mention, but I don't buy a lot of stuff from them because they are, not to put too fine a point on it, pricey. And since they opened their store on the Upper East Side, they've been catering more to the high-end stationery crowd than to artists. One of my favorite local (NYC) paper suppliers is New York Central Art Supply. It's hard to believe they can cram so much fabulous paper in such a small space. Go during the week, if you can; on the weekends, it's a mosh pit. They have a new online paper catalog now too. And If you're a member of the Center for Book Arts, they give you a discount! For envelopes, portfolios, printer and text paper, I go to Paper Presentation on Printer's Row (18th St. between 5th & 6th Aves.) Because I'm a complete clod with sharp objects like knives, I buy my bookboard precut, when possible, from Hollanders. Their prices are eminently reasonable, especially compared to trips to the emergency room. When I'm just doing a mock-up, I'll buy a piece or two from A. I.  Friedman, also on printer's row. They're cheaper than Sam Flax and have a great fine art supply section as well.

Book Binder's Tools

I've got two main sources for these, Talas and Volcano Arts. If Talas doesn't have it, it doesn't exist. And Volcano Arts is likely to have lots of stuff you didn't know you needed.

Stuff

That indeterminate category for the things you never thought you'd need, like, oh, microscope slides or mailers, jewelry findings, metal mesh, radiator cover grill, eyelets, bottle caps, etc. Here's the places I look first, when I can't find it on ebay.

• Oriental Trading Company, for decorative brads and eyelets.
• MantoFev, for, uh, well, not the usual stuff.
• Anima Designs, for some truly interesting internaional bits & pieces.
• Joggles.com, for more interesting stuff. I like their charms, especially.

Momma, Don't Let Your Girls Grow Up to Be Superhero Love Interests

Cuz all you'll do is their laundry (and them, presumably). Once again, it's brought forcefully home to me that misogyny is not only alive and well, but still thriving, and being happily passed on to the next generation. I'm a little late to this party, but I just have to say WTF?! Whose brilliant idea was this piece of crap "action" figure?

And it only gets worse in surroundsound.

Fortunately, it's been brilliantly counteracted by Logansrogue, who not only drew up the bitchin' prototype of Peter Parker in a posing pouch (say that fast five times) washing out MJ's lingerie, but had the ovaries to post it on the Marvel blog (from which it was summarily deleted. Chickenshits). Go read her post for the whole delicious guerrilla counteraction, with the sketch.

The topic has been pretty well worked over already, and really, it all seems so obvious. Why isn't it? Why does it have to be pointed out that this is not cute or funny or sexy, but demeaning? Why is this concept so hard to grasp? Because the obtuseness of producing something like this makes men seem either stupid or willfully ignorant. Or worse, that you just really don't care what we think. As one commenter on the Girl Wonder forum wrote, it may look sexy to you, but "the only thing I can think of is 'She's presenting like a mandrill!'" Repeat after me, boyz: Portraying women performing subservient acts in a sexually enticing pose is not flattering and it won't get you a date, let alone laid. Does this illustration from Logansrogue help get the point across?

Not so funny now that it's Bend Over Spidey, is it? All I can add is, Rock On, Logansrogue. And don't you idiots at Sideshow (and Marvel) have mothers, wives, daughters? And why haven't the former two whacked you upside the head for the sake of the latter? Is this the kind of image you want to give your adolescent girls? Is this what you really think of your wives? Ya'll could learn a thing or two from Joss Whedon.

I have, sadly, bought my last action figure from you jerks, which is too bad, cuz your Obi & Qui rock. This is just too egregious to let slide. Can you spell boycott? Or in this case, girlcott, mofos. Oh wait, you might take that last a little too literally. My bad.

Update: This just gets better and better, actually, or worse and worse, depending on your viewpoint.  Here's the perpetrator, er, artist, Adam Hughes, on the MJ figure's genesis:

Also, if it was Mary Jane doing the laundry, there would’ve been suds everywhere, and I would’ve done a better job of doing it, so there would be no question – that would be Mary Jane doing the laundry. I thought it was a kind of cute, funny, “discovery” moment with a classic pin-up feel. That’s pretty much all I was shooting for. Yeah, she’s sexy, yeah, she’s dressed like a sexy chick…but look at her history – that’s how she’s been portrayed for years, even when she’s not doing chores. Mary Jane is a bit of a bimbo. She’s been a supermodel and a dancer, an actress and a model…so I gave her a cute, sexy moment.

1. If she's not doing the laundry, what is she doing? Just posing with Spidey's wet duds? Oh please. No woman thinks housework, espcially hand laundry, is arousing or sexy.
2. So the "Classic pin-up feel" makes it somehow excuseable? What part of "objectification" does he not understand?
3. MJ is really a bimbo, so it's okay to objectify her? Model, dancer, actress, they're not serious careers. She's just playing around. Isn't that cute?

Dimwit. And I'm being nice.

Foredge Paintings and Other Curiosities

The first time I saw this mentioned was in a novel called The Grand Complication, by Allen Kurzweil, which was full of bibliophilic curiosities. Foredge paintings are invisible unless a book's pages are fanned in a particular way. I ran across this video on Rag & Bone, then found a couple more on YouTube. Wow, these are amazing.  I'd never seen one of these in action before. Rag & Bone's post (in May 2007; there's no permalink, for some reason) has a more extensive explanation of how it's done. Check it out. I can't ever see doing this myself, since it's not the kind of bindings I aspire to, but wow, anyway. If you like beautiful books, it's hard not to like these.

In the same book, Kurzweil mentions something called a girdle book, which, despite my many years of servitude in the Middle Ages, I had never heard of, either. As I was reading the novel, this post turned up on one of my favorite blogs, Bibliodyssey, with a picture of a girdle book, which I have shamelessly gacked and post here for your erudition. But go look at the post, since it has all kinds of fabulous links, not to mention how amazing the blog is.

Girdle books were originally breviaries attached to the belt (in midievalese, the girdle) of a monk so they could meditate on words of wisdom at down moments between singing the hours, illuminating books, digging in the garden, cooking, cleaning, eating, swiving (whoops, cynical me!), and sleeping. The protagonist in Kurzweil's book carries one around for taking miscellaneous notes and collecting words he likes (he's a nerdy librarian, and no, that's not redundant. Nobody likes a wiseass.)  There's a rockin' exhibit of contemporary girdle books here, which has made me think this is something I might like to make at some point.  Anybody know of any patterns or instructions for these?

One Story

Heh, ran across this  on Your Friendly Neighborhood Book Dragon and I have to say I've never seen anything that so clearly illustrates the the concept of archetypes and tropes. Very often, no matter what we write in fiction, we're telling the same stories over and over again, with new characters, new settings, and gussied-up plots, but it's all the same, stripped down to its essentials. Here, Luke Skywalker's narrative becomes a palimpsest for Harry Potter's, but actually Luke's story is already old, old, old, as Joseph Campbell could tell you. We've got a basic coming-of-age story, with a quest narrative thrown in, embellished with—in one case—special effects in space, and—in the other—special effects in an alternate reality, i.e., future technology and magic respectively. The details change, while the basic story remains the same.

So the next time you think, "damn, somebody's already written that," don't let it bother you. The only thing that's new under the sun in writing, whether fiction or non-fiction, is your voice and the way you tell the story.

Dark, Tight Spaces

If you've been following along for a while, you'll know that I moved a while back from a teeny tiny studio/1 bedroom (Ha! in the realtor's dreams!) in Brooklyn to a much roomier real one bedroom in the Bronx. Though I somehow managed to make the covers for about 20 copies of Stories From the Ruins on my big kitchen table in Brooklyn, it was a far from ideal work space. 

Now that I've set up shop (literally) in the Bronx, it works just fine, though. But it's not my kitchen table anymore. I've also got more storage, more room in general, and more room to spread out. But it doesn't take much for table or workspace to become cluttered and unworkable. For one thing, about a square foot and a half of it is occupied permanently by my book press. Another square foot is eaten up by lamps and pots of tools: brushes, pens, sharp things. (You can see pics here, if you're a more visual kinda person.) Once I get all my tools out for one project, that eats up even more working space on the table. And since I've usually got more than one project going at a time, I've got to figure out where to store all the stuff for those projects while I'm actively working on one of the others. Not to mention where to store the finished product.

The old space had one thing going for it: lots of light, and I miss that now. My table is smack in front of the window, but it's a northern exposure and doesn't get the kind of light I got in Brooklyn, with the windows front and back, facing east and west.

So lately I've been dreaming of bigger spaces again.  I'm not quite ready to make that change yet, and I'm not sure the press will ever give me enough income or notoriety to make that leap. There's at least a couple of years of hard work ahead of me, making books and marketing, before I can think of looking for a semi-industrial space with a concrete floor that will take the weight of a letter press big enough to set books (as opposed to a tabletop press). So in the meanwhile, I have a space problem.

To alleviate it, I've started to accumulate stacks of boxes in which my projects can be contained,  before and/or after they're finished. I bought two collapsible boxes in Barcelona (yeah, I know; weird souvenir) that have really come in handy. But what I really need is cabinets and flat files. Of course, I don't have any room for any more cabinets or a flat file either. The flat file, especially, is starting to become a dire necessity. Paper storage is reaching critical mass, between when I've got for the covers of the Ruins yet and what I've picked up for new projects. Most of it fits in the portfolio case, but that's getting pretty full now, and some of it is just too big.

Like the five sheets I just bought at Kate's on Wednesday, when I discovered the tale end of their moving sale. Apparently their Soho store is moving from the Broadway location to Spring Street, into the ill-fated Kate's Home location. Damn I wish I'd known about this a lot sooner! Why am I not on some kind of mailing list from them? Because they don't have one. Why is that?

Anyway, I found on the 5-sheets-for-$6 table some huge, tissue-weight, off-white watermarked paper that I think will do nicely as title paper for Carlos's book, chopped up in little bits and mounted on slides. But where do I store it in the meanwhile? Well, for right now, most of it is residing in an Ice Tube I bought a while back from New York Central Art Supply. And one sheet, tightly rolled, resides on the table, waiting for me to build the mock-up of Carlos's book.

Because, while the second edition of Border & Frontier is finally done, I'm now working on Jen's invitations. That means my rotary paper cutter is taking up space on the table too (and fat lot of good it's doing! I'm really coming to hate vellum. How can I need a new blade already? The thing's brand new.)

But I did get the interior text and backing sheets cut to size today, though they're going to need hand-trimming anyway. And I discovered that I bought cover weight parchment the other day, not text weight. (Not the first time I've done that.) So I guess not only is my workspace dark and tight, but my head was in a dark, tight spot when I bought the paper, too. I read the other day that low-ceilinged spaces inhibit creativity, so I'm blaming it on the workspace.

Altered Books

I've been grappling with the concept of altered books for a while now, inspired especially by Karen's Whimsy's reliquaries. Initially, I admit I found the whole idea abhorrent. You did what to that book? AAAIIIIIEEEE! You can't be a book lover and not find the prospect of ripping, folding, painting, cutting, gluing, burning (shudder) and just generally defacing a book horrific, even if it results in art. It makes me a little faint just to think about it.

On the other hand, there's a sort of transgressive appeal to it, too.  Remember all those textbooks your friends were fined for in high school after doodling in the margins and shredding the covers (of course, I was never fined but we all know people who were).  Didn't you secretly have just one text you would have loved to wreck? I'd have gladly macerated my Algebra II text by the end of the year. It's a wonder I didn't. This impulse may in fact have led, years later, to a minor plot to collect disused algebra texts from school depositories and secondhand shops to use as end papers in a now-defunct project. (Oh the subtle workings of the Unconscious!) There's a project going on over at Wreck This Journal that's something like this, but with the blank pages of a journal, the ultimate goal being experimental in nature.

Well, it seems the altered book form has been kicked up to the next level.  I ran across this little movie by Alex Itin (below) on the site if:book, a blog which concerns itself with the future of the book. We've had hypertext, hypertext become paper novels, and ebooks, and now we have the motion picture altered e-book, which combines the text of Moby Dick with bits of Orson Welles dialogue and clips and a rock and roll soundtrack:

,

which started out looking very much like a loose-leaf altered book:

. It's a weird cross between an animated story adapted from a book, a flip book, and an altered book. Using the actual text of the story as its backdrop makes the whole piece a sort of meta text was well: story creates images, images create story. A chicken or egg loop of causality.

Maybe that's how I need to approach altered books in general: taking one completed form and using it not just as a matrix for another art form, but as a comment on the original. The altered books I seem to like best operate this way. Others seem to be collages or sculptural objects at best or uber-scrap books at worst. As collage, many of them seem to be so similar as to be indistinguishable in style. They use many of the same elements: ephemera and scrap booking materials. As sculptural objects that's less true because the artists seem to be bolder about altering the actual shape of the book as well as its pages. At the latter level, there's a very fine line, I think, between an artist's book and an altered book.

For instance, the book I'm building for Carlos, the body is as fragile as the thought that holds it in place, is going to have some sculptural elements to it, and some altered text elements as well. We'd talked about printing the text backwards and having mirrors in the cover to facilitate the reading, but that looks like it's not going to be feasible at this point. So I've been thinking about other ways to distort the text and still leave it readable, and also ways to put the title on the cover. We've settled on papers for the cover, one of which (a rusty red Nepalese paper) will be glued tight to the boards and the other (a Thai fabric backed, which is partially made of gauze) will only be glued around the edges to make it a little looser. Carlos & I had talked about using some kind of "found" object in the book, but we'd been stumped as to what to use.

I had a brainstorm Saturday night and woke up thinking about microscope slides. As it happens, I've got eight prepared histology slides left over from a lab in college, and e-bay (have I mentioned how much I love e-bay lately?) has some nice inexpensive collections of prepared histology/anatomy slides for not very much too. I've decided to build little pocket drawers into the covers that the slides will pull out of (on both the English and Spanish covers). And to keep that theme, I'm going to buy blank microscope slides, "mount" a very fine tissue paper on them, and stamp the title on it (I think I'll have to have stamps custom made). I think I'm going to use four slides because there are these great chipboard mailers they mount in quite nicely. I'll cover them in the Nepalese paper, and inset the mailer in the cover, and hold it closed with a strip of artificial sinew and a bone clasp (which I've been dying to use).

And the text itself will be pamphlet sewn and then just a little mutilated, somehow. Cut, run partially through the shredder, overlaid, watermarked, splattered, maybe overpainted with masking fluid and watercolors. I dunno. All that stuff. The latter technique is one I picked up from looking at altered books, so I feel indebted to the form there. So it's not entirely impossible that the two forms feed into each other.  This is one of the things I like about both altered books and artist's books: the kinds of materials and techniques seem to be pretty much limitless. Or limited only by one's imagination.

I hope mine keeps expanding like this. I like it.