Blogorrhea Junior

Eating Out, Eating In

Apparently, I am still not completely home yet, at least in my head. Even though I'm busy making books, looking for clients, paying bills, and all that other stuff one does at home, I'm mentally abroad somewhere. It's like I'm not over the high of being in Barcelona. It hasn't yet gotten into my dreamlife, the way London did, but I expect it will, simply because it's such a supremely beautiful and somewhat magical place. To make up for the fact I'm back in New York, I'm simultaneously reading two travel books, one of which I'd loaded onto my PDA on the way over and didn't get to, and one I picked up afterwards. Both revolve around Italy, but one, Frances Mayes's A Year in the World, also has some side trips to Spain, to give me just a little whiff of the culture I enjoyed so much. The second book, The Lady in the Palazzo by Marlena de Blasi, is a wholly Italian book, an expatriate's book, in fact, but both of them have such dead-on observations about travel, and why some of us travel the way we do, that I feel I've sort of extended my trip by finding kindred souls.

Originally, I intended to write here about the vicarious kind of traveling we do through books and the dreaming about it, and why we do it, but I've discovered myself focusing not just on travel, but on food, too. Both Mayes and de Blasi write a lot about food in the places they live or visit (Mayes also has a house in Tuscany of Under the Tuscan Sun fame) and realize that it defines a culture almost as much as (maybe more than) the art and language. Indeed, in many cases, food shapes the language.

Mayes talks about "the realization that worlds you'd love vibrantly exist outside your ignorance of them. The vitality of many lives you know nothing about." The people we observe in our travels are not on vacation; they are just living their lives; going to work, shopping, picking up the kids, cooking, going to the movies, eating at their favorite local restaurant. It's the differences in the pace and attitude, customs and cuisine that makes them attractive, if not magical, in comparison to ours. Especially from the people who seem to be enjoying themselves in their daily lives so much more than we do. This was certainly true of the Spaniards I met, who never seemed to be in too much of a hurry to enjoy anything, especially food, a state of mind I could definitely get used to. Mayes advises, "I prefer to think of the end of exploring as an invitation to return to my origins and transform them." As good advice as you could ask for.

Mayes also writes about that mysterious moment when some place you've traveled to becomes home, whether you have a drop of that culture in your blood or not.  I didn't feel that happen in Spain the way I did in England and Scotland, where my bloodlines run, but I'm a little afraid it might happen in Italy, and that I might wind up like Marlena de Blasi, unexpectedly married to an Italian man and living as an expat, in the middle of my life's journey. There are definitely worse things, I have to say, especially the way de Blasi's painted it. She's thoroughly immersed herself in the culture, to the extent that she can observe of other foreigners, "When an outsider is scandalized by the comportment of another society, it is because he measures it against his own set of cultural expectations—often idealized—as though his own were universal." Italian society and its way of doing things maddens her at times, but she doesn't judge it. It's just the way it is in Italy and with Italians. And what a bounty of friendship she reaps in return, even from the tight-knit, feudal society of Orvieto. And the way she wheedles herself into their hearts? By cooking for them, and eating their food. She eats handmade "illegal" cheese in a field with the two shepherds who made it. She borrows a restaurant kitchen to test recipes for a book in exchange for baking bread for the cook and her clientele too. She makes the circuit of local food festivals and farmers markets, and cultivates relationships with the local growers and butchers.

In this spirit, I'm adding a third book to this ramble, Barbara Kingsolver's new Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, which is not a travel book at all, but a book about staying home. It is also very much about food (and very funny), as both of the previous books are, too. (You'll find bookstore links to all three of them in my Headcandy sidebar. the Kingsolver link here is to the book's website, which has recipes.) One of the reasons real travelers travel is to experience other cultures, and a huge part of any culture is the food. It's one of the things I was looking forward to most when I went to Spain. I eat pretty well here in NYC, where I can sample many of the cuisines the world has to offer. But nothing ever tastes like it does on its native soil. Both Mayes and de Blasi (who has been a professional chef and now guides food tours in Italy) making cooking and eating a big part of writing about their experiences as travelers and expats, so well that they often made my mouth water. Kingsolver brings it home to her farm in Virginia and ties it tightly to her own farm and the farms within a 50 mile radius, in a year of eating only what her farm or others nearby produce throughout the year. The purpose is to try to reduce her family's carbon footprint in buying foodstuffs trucked in from all over the world at unseasonal times of year.

This is an admirable goal, but difficult if you don't live on a farm yourself, farmers markets or no. When possible, I prefer to buy locally myself, just because it tastes so much better, but I'm not averse to buying things out of season once in a while. I don't think this is the best way to reduce our carbon footprint, for one thing, and it's idealistic to think that agribusiness will be brought to its knees only by buying locally. What I'm afraid will do it is the very real specter of famine Monsanto et al are plotting for us all in their genetic engineering of crops which do not reseed themselves (like the domestic turkeys Kingsolver talks about which are too stupid and too fat to mate naturally). Hopes of a food monopoly will then, I'm afraid, shatter in armed rebellion to grab land they can grow something edible on. Quibbles aside, there is so much delight and pleasure in gardening and eating in this book that it's a joy to read.

Threaded through all three of these books are panegyrics to farmers markets—common enough parts of life in Europe but ridiculously scarce here in the States where monoculture, agribusiness, and supermarkets rule. Even in Michigan, an ostensibly agricultural state, in the Great White North we were starved for fresh veggies even in the summer months, unless we discovered a local kitchen gardener or farmer who had a sideline in veggies from his main crops of sugar beets, soy beans, and field (feed) corn. My chief delights when I was a kid were fresh kohlrabi, carrots, apples, and sweet corn, bought out of the field or from roadside stands. The rest of the year it was canned LeSeur peas, spinach, and spuds. And I was in absolute heaven when invited to dinner at Mel's house, where her Mom had the greenest thumb around and taught me to eat fresh and lightly steamed beet greens with a little cider vinegar (and the occasional somewhat bleached spider). For a couple of years, we had our own little kitchen garden, with carrots and spicy nasturtiums and I discovered how cool it was to eat flowers! When I moved to New York twenty years ago, I was awestruck by the Union Square Greenmarket in all its midsummer glory. (This seems like a good place to add the Schmap of New York City markets featuring one of my photographs of the Union Square Greenmarket.)

Then I saw the Boqueria in Barcelona.

For some reason I can't fathom, I didn't take pictures there, even when I'd gone back on a weekday when it was less crowded, but there's a good description here. And it's just one of several permanent covered markets throughout the city. But no wonder it's a tourist attraction. There, you're reminded of how truly beautiful food is, and how integral to a country's culture. Being able to see the raw ingredients of what people cook gives you a window into the culture that just eating in a restaurant doesn't. You can tell, just from the markets, that Spain cares about good food, not just in its restaurants, but at home as well. The sheer variety of foodstuffs is breathtaking: dairy and eggs, seafood, fruits and vegetables, herbs and spices, meat and poultry, sausages, cheese, bread, pasta, olive oil, dried fruits and nuts. It's basically an open-air, covered supermarket, where nothing is packaged and everything is trucked in fresh daily, in season, and everything that's processed is what we call artisinal. (Oh, and those olives I was raving about? They're manzanillas, though they don't taste quite the same here. I suspect I've only had the ones from California.)

And why is there nothing like this in New York City? Why can't Bronx Terminal Market be like this? Why can't we turn other derelict spaces into something that feeds the city, rather than turning them into condos? All these people here have to eat. Why shouldn't we all eat well? Instead, we live in a culture where food is not only merely sustenance but often an agent of evil. And this is why, Kingsolver says, America does not have its own foodways. A visit to the farmers markets here won't tell you very much. I suspect this is why some of us flee to other countries where the Big Mac is not welcome and slow food is a way of life. So I guess it's no wonder I'm not quite home yet. I guess the next best thing to do is go to the kitchen and cook.

Steampunk Geekery

I'm letting my geek flag fly again, though some of this has to do only peripherally with books.  Rag and Bone Blog has once again come up with one of the coolest things evah. This time it's a steampunk book clasp that I would duplicate in a heartbeat if I knew how to solder. Check out the video. What I like about this is is that it's not only so majorly geeky but it keeps your pen handy too.

I have kind of a weakness for steampunk gadgets, though I adore high tech, too. I love the look of early Industrial Revolution gadgets, something that probably goes back to my earliest awareness of design in objects: my grandfather's Machine Age stapler, which looked like this. You can buy these a number of places now that retro is in, but for years they were unloved, despite their inherent sleekness. I love the button on top, especially.

One of my all-time favorite pieces of steampunk comes courtesy of Author and Futurist William Gibson, from his blog.  It's a steampunk laptop that I covet in my heart. It's a Japanese construct, and you can find it here (with description in Japanese too, sadly; any translators out there?). And then there's this lovely keyboard mod, too, over on Steampunk Workshop:

There's something of an aesthetic (and philosophical) backlash against the too-slick and the often downright ugly in high tech (especially computers, which I've ranted about before). There's also, as evidenced by the burgeoning DIY movement, an interest in the homemade, which steampunk speaks to as well. But steampunk, at its best, is often elegant, using materials like brass and bakelite and marble, rather than our ubiquitous plastic. When I started making real money, I took a vow of plastic abstinence. There would be no more plastic in my house, e.g., no more plastic milk crates, storage containers, furniture. Wood or glass or metal or nothing. Despite its relative indestructability, it doesn't age well, unless it's something like bakelite, and it's hard as hell to clean, after a while, and it's not biodegradable.  Plastic is bad. Leather, however, is also good, especially when its wrapped around something that looks like a book but actually isn't, like this steampunk optical scanner. 

Whatever the appeal is, it's showing up everywhere. It's one of the things I love about the Foglios' Girl Genius comic: it's a totally steampunk aesthetic.  Just look at the clanks. That's really what steampunk is all about: handmade science; the Victorian Age without the doilies. Steampunk is kinda factory life before OSHA, too. Letterpress printing on a Vandercook can be pretty steampunk. It's not for sissies.

Renegade Craft Fair, Williamsburg

I was tempted to file this under "travel," too, but that seemed catty. There are three Renegade Craft Fairs a year, one in Brooklyn and two in Chicago. I schlepped out to the one in Williamsburg last Sunday (no DSL, nothing better to do, not bitter) but was mildly disappointed, though I did buy things. Hot, hot, hot day, which is why I didn't stay long and didn't take pictures. There are some good pics over at Design Sponge, though. Have a look.

I could feel my scalp and arms frying as I walked around the derelict (which is not too kind a word) McCarren pool, looking for stuff that didn't look like anything else. It's a good-sized fair, with a couple hundred vendors and would probably be worth doing next year, when I've got enough stock. I used to go to craft fairs with utter delight, awed by the originality and talent. Now there seems to be darn little that really blows my skirt up, and I don't think it's because I'm jaded.  There's a sameness to the styles and graphics that I find boring. This is especially true of the paper crafts. The cards are cutesy and retro with a 1950s/60s modern look that I've never liked, even when it was new. When it's not that, there seems to be an obsession with birds and old wallpaper patterns. (UPDATE: Apparently I'm not the only one who has noticed this.) Even the letterpress work was not all that interesting and hard to differentiate from each other. You'd think in a craft that's being revived people would be doing more interesting things with it. Maybe they are, and I'm just not seeing them. Substudio was an exception to this rule. Their cards and prints are very cool. SP Stationers Group was also doing some fun things. I liked their coasters, especially. And so was Jerzebel with their cards.

There was nobody doing what I'm doing, which is good news. But there was only one standout bookmaker, The Black Spot Books, whose journals and bindings were really spectacular. If I'd been in the market for blank books, I'd have been hard-pressed to choose one. I also chatted with more of the folks from Booklyn, who had a booth there.  They're putting out a cool little die cut chapbook series which includes one by Angelo Verga, who runs the Cornelia Street Cafe reading series. So of course I had to buy one of those. I love Angelo's poems, and these were all New York poems.

Other vendors who caught my eye: Anna Built's stained glass and jewelry; Bright Lights Little City's wacky paper umbrella spheres; Camille Hempel's jewelry; Dyslexic Press's advertising subversions; Erica Weiner's bug jewelry; Fernworks;  Rebound Designs fabulous bags; and Twigs & Heather's natural design jewelry. All in all, I think if it'd hadn't been so hot, I'd have lingered more and found more that I liked.

So what did I end up buying, besides the chapbook? A little pot by Kim Westad (just the small one, not that whole kit and caboodle):

And two prints by Jaime Zollars:

Not Dead Yet

Nope, just without DSL since Saturday morning when Earthlink and I had a misunderstanding about an order. I've been trying to put in a landline again, to facilitate my editorial business, and it turns out that the Capital of the World is not equally well-wired everywhere.  I live in a 1930s building that's only recently had its electric wiring updated. Somehow, they neglected to upgrade the phone wiring at the same time, so I still have a single line that can be split for separate phone numbers or dial-up, but not for DSL and phone.  Oy.

So I've discovered I"m going to have to spring for a cable modem (poor me!), which is only complicated because Earthlink doesn't have an agreement with my cable provider, and—you don't really want to read the rest of this saga, do you? I mean, the upshot is that everything will stay pretty much the same until August, when I'll have a cable modem and a landline. Through the genius of Earthlink, I'll still be able to keep all my addresses and web space, even though my ISP will probably be Optimum, so nothing will change there either. But it's been four or five days of doing the headless chicken dance, and then four days without DSL, when I dashed to Starbucks to check my mail on the laptop.

As I said before, Oy.

Anyway, I'm back up now, finally. So if you haven't heard from in a bit, this is why. Stay tuned for more substantive posts when I'm done wading through the swamp of backlogged mail.

It's All About the Book—A Seminar

I attended a seminar at Brooklyn College Library last week called It's All About the Book, but I've delayed writing about it while I thought the program. It always takes me a little while to digest things. All in all, I think I was a little disappointed, though it was a well-invested $15, just from a networking perspective. Not that it wasn't good, but I didn't learn much I didn't already know. What surprised me was how new it seemed to the audience, which was mostly librarians.

The program started off with Jason Epstein, one of the founders of the New York Review of Books and whose Book Business: Publishing: Past, Present, and Future was an industry expose of the way conglomerates have changed publishing. Epstein is very much a grand old man of publishing, in every way, and he had some incisive and far-thinking things to say about POD publishing, which he and a partner are implementing as I write this. There will soon be a POD printer (called the Espresso Book Machine) installed as a demo/experiment at the New York Public Library (main branch at 42nd Street, I believe), where it will churn out perfect-bound paperbacks, well, on demand. There are already Espresso Book Machines in Washington DC at the World Bank and in the library at Alexandria, Egypt.

It's interesting to see a former publisher advocating for this cheap and easy kind of publishing that will virtually eliminate distributors and warehousing and make bookstores, well, who knows what? The beauty of it is, like the web, in the rapid and easy dissemination of knowledge. Books are still, apparently, most people's preferred reference materials and to make all books available to anyone who can read them has been the goal of librarians everywhere. How it will change both libraries and bookstore culture is hard to say at this point. I don't particularly fear for the fate of either, but I fear for the fate of browsing as both recreation and a way of making new discoveries. Dr. Em has told me she prefers to browse Amazon and B&N online already, but I find that a cold and unhelpful experience, unless I'm looking for something specific or in a specific topic. I like bookstores and libraries.

The geek aspect of it is the machines, which are really gigantic copiers. There's so much most of these machines can already do that I'm not surprised about the direction they're taking. I know Stinkos, who have virtually cornered the college coursepack market, was talking about copier machines like this as far back as the 90s. The prototypes are huge, unsurprisingly, but will get smaller and aim to fit cozily in an unused corner near an internet and power port. 

I'm all for it. It disseminates information (and pleasure, in the case of fiction) cheaply and easily. It makes self publishing easier, and bypasses the books-as-business aspect, unless you're willing to be your own marketer. This seems to me a more democratic way to make sure literature sinks or swims on its own merits. M.J. Rose's story is the ur-example of this, but Walt Whitman was there way before her. Which makes a nice segue into the next presenter, who started off talking about Whitman's ever-evolving Leaves of Grass editions.

Next up was Ben Vershbow, of the Institute for the Future of the Book, a geeky thinktank located in Williamsburg (where else?). I've been reading their blog, if:book, for a while now and there's always something thought-provoking on it. One of the things they're interested in is the networked book. This doesn't refer to hypertext, though it includes it, but rather (so far) the sharing of knowledge in the construction of a book, in a blog-like format, The writer posts sections of his work and commenters redact, rewrite, correct, suggest, and comment on it line by line or sometimes word by word. It's like an electronic version of Talmudic scholarship on secular topics. One of the books this was done for was McKenzie Wark's Gamer Theory, and you can see how that worked, here. The structure would also work really well for comment-heavy blogs, I think (something Ben pointed out too), with comments in the sidebars, rather than at the bottom.

What's cool about this interactive kind of research and writing project is that the glosses are often as interesting as the main topic itself. The activity of reading the book/blog becomes almost like reading a cross-referenced encyclopedia, or a wiki, where you can jump from subject to subject through hyperlinks. Also interesting to me was that the readers/commenters seemed to take the publishing of the book as the definitive end of the discussion, as though, perhaps, everything useful had been said now. This struck me as really odd. Books have always seemed just a jumping off point, a congealed moment of research that, with a little intellectual heat applied by the reader, goes running off in other directions almost immediately. Are there readers who give books more authority than I do? Perhaps so. I always think of them as the start or part of a conversation that, God willing, will never end, only keep changing. And if course, if your book is already online, in hypertext, it could grow indefinitely, in a wiki-like way.

After lunch was the part I'd really come for, and that was the presentation on books as art. Brooklyn College Library has a really great display of artist's books right now, curated by Maddy Rosenberg, who curated a similar show at Proteus Gowanus. Maddy gave us a tour through the show she put together and talked about some of the books she chose. Sasha Chavchavadze, the founder of Proteus Gowanus was there also to talk about how the gallery, which is a multidisciplinary, multimedia cooperative space, works. What's nice about it, and a contrast to most galleries and museums, is that the books and other objects on display are all touchable, which can be crucial for really "getting" an artist's book. Most of them don't display well. They need to be picked up and thumbed through because they are, after all, books.

We also got a nice overview of the Brooklyn Museum's collection of artist's books from Deirdre Lawrence, their principal librarian and curator. I definitely have to get out there to see some of them. They've got a huge collection. And by the time Felice Tebbe of Booklyn (not Brooklyn) had shown some of their artist's books, I was sorry I'd ever left Brooklyn (not Booklyn). There's a lot of book art going on in the borough. I think I'm going to need to find a way to get back there.

There was a mildly heated discussion about what, exactly, constitutes a book, with at least one of the librarians protesting that some of the pieces in the show weren't strictly books, as such. The general feeling among the curators seems to be "whatever the artists want to call a book," while some of the librarians seem opposed to that loose a definition, without offering anything to replace it. When you consider how many different forms "books" have taken over their history, I don't see much sense in putting too confining a definition on them. But then, I would say that.

Is a display constructed of discarded and recycled packing paper and natural objects, fashioned to look like an underseascape a book? Or is it art? Or is it both? What about delicate babydoll dresses printed with lines from some of the more gruesome fairy tales? Or what about these "accessorized" vintage wedding dresses by CazLove (thanks again to Rag and Bone Blog)? I think my own definition of an artist's book, though clearly evolving, would be an object that utilizes one or more of the traditional skills (printing, calligraphy, illustration, illumination, fine binding) or materials (paper, vellum, papyrus, ink, metal leaf, paint, leather) associated with books that tells a story or imparts information. That's a really imperfect definition, and leaves out several books that I really admire, like the one I posted about recently by Judith Hoffman. The telling a story part is really important to me though, less so than the materials or the form. Take it as a personal definition. A working personal definition, subject to future modification.

So it was a thought-provoking little conference in its own way, and well-worth going to. If nothing else, it sparked an awful long blog post.

Lord of the Bookbinders

Okay, even though these are not the kind of bindings I aspire to, this guy makes me feel like a rank (as in stinking) amateur. Fine bookbinding is in a class by itself, as far as I'm concerned, and it's one I'm never going to reach, out of lack of ambition. I remember speaking to one incredibly talented book maker at a show once who confessed that her beautiful, sculptural books with their creative bindings were thought up so she wouldn't have to glue anything.  I'm the same, except with sewing (though I've decided want to learn Coptic stich).

Anyway, these remarkable bindings from Philip Smith rock my world on at least two different levels. They are not only extraordinarily beautiful, but they're bindings for some of my favorite books, Tolkien's Lord of the Rings.

First we have the Eye of Sauron:

Then Gandalf at the Bridge in the Mines of Moria:

Finally, my favorite, Sam and Shelob:

What could be better than to have your favorite books in such amazing bindings? It almost makes me want to take apart my water-stained, second edition hardcovers and rebind them. If I could do work like this, I would. I've lusted after the big red single volume for a long time, but it pales in comparison, as does the official, leatherbound 50th Anniversary edition. It's nice to see something like LotR, which was disparaged for so long, treated with this kind of respect.

You can see more of Philip Smith's amazing work here (gacked shamelessly from the wonderful Rag and Bone Blog, which manages to scoop all the amazing news in the book arts world):

Philip Smith: Extraordinary Bindings From an Englishman
Exhibition open until July 11, 2007
Multnomah County Central Library
801 S.W. 10th Avenue, Portland, OR
Phone: 503.988.5123
Website: http://www.multcolib.org

Details At Multnomah County Library
More at The Society Of Bookbinders
Indepth Interview

Process

I've just about got the materials assembled for the mock-up of Carlos's book, The Body is as Fragile as the Thought that Holds it in Place. I've been combing the web and my favorite paper and art stores (as well as ebay) for paper and "schtuff"with which to build it. Sometimes I've been looking for inspiration in my browsing, and sometimes I know exactly what I'm looking for. What I'm finding particularly interesting right now is the process.

I've discovered, or am discovering, that I make art in much the same way that I write. (There's a big surprise!) When I'm writing, especially poems, I start with a line or an image I want to explore and turn it inside-out, looking at all the permutations and stretching the metaphor into a theme, as far as I can before it turns precious. Most important is to move beyond the obvious, which makes the metaphor richer.

I seem to be doing the same thing with The Body, which is about the fragility of both the body itself and of the ways that we live, about how our lives can turn inside-out in a moment through both extraordinary events and in the general common course of life. The obvious thing would have been to make the book in the shape of a body or corpse, but that's too easy. Instead, I see it as a set of specimens, fragmented and in tight focus. The papers I've picked reflect both wounding and the healing process. The underlayer and endsheets are a sort of glossy, bloody red like a fresh scab, covered outside with another, looser layer of paper made partially of gauze. The linen thread I'm going use to sew the signatures with is also a sort of dried-blood maroon, though I'd contemplated getting surgeon's silk (too expensive and too fine), but that's a bit too literal too, I think.

I'm also a big believer in letting my subconscious and unconscious mind work on ideas, especially when I get stuck. Carlos and I had talked about using found objects in the books but were stymied as to what they would be. I was thinking bits of bone, or bone game counters and just kept kept bumping up against the impracticality problem (which was also a factor with the mirrors we'd talked about too). Then one morning, when I was half awake, I started thinking about microscope slides. Blank, they're a pretty common scrapbooker's material, sometimes called "memory glass" and used in pairs bound with metallic tape, with an image sandwiched between them. But what I woke up thinking of was prepared microscope specimen slides, preferably human histology slides, stained and mounted and labeled appropriately. Weirdly enough, I have some, from a set I made in the histology lab during my freshman year of college, although some of mine are mouse histology. So I've been pursuing those on e-bay. Biologists out there, take note, if you're cleaning out your labs!

This is one of the parts I enjoy most about making things: the hunt for materials. It's a process similar to what goes on in writing when I find myself reading all around the subject I'm writing about and collecting talismanic things that either reflect what I've written or get written into the story I'm working on. By the happy happenstance of selective attention, things often crop up at just right time, like these unglazed ceramic hands from Anima Designs that I'll be affixing to the cover. As Carlos says, they're both "delicately tender and slightly creepy – a good juxtaposition." I'd been looking for hand or body beads or small figurines and found another set of metallic charms that I was also drawn to for their detail, though they don't come in pairs and the palms have numbers illustrating the lines for palmistry, which wasn't quite what I was thinking of. They're still kinda cool and I'll probably use them in something else.

I've been thinking of several different ways of approaching the title and some of it depends on the whether or not I can get hold of enough histology slides or if I have to fall back on blank ones. If I can get enough prepared slides for both the cover and the inside pockets, I'll print the title on slide labels and affix them on the other side of the specimen. If I can't get enough slides, I've been thinking of writing the title in masking fluid and "staining" a sheet of paper, then cutting the words out and mounting them on four separate slides. Either way, I'll mount them all in quad slide mailers, which will then be inset into the cover and closed with a  bone closure and faux sinew. The slides on the inside will be mounted in single mailers and closed the same way.

Then there's the text. I wanted a font that would mimic official forms, like birth and death certificates, so I'm using P22's Typewriter font for the text. I like its imperfections, too, like it's an old, banged up typewriter. Carlos and I were also drawn to using graffiti in the book. I'm not sure what his reasons are, but to me it says something about needing to leave some kind of mark in life because we never know when we'll leave it. It's a cry for recognition, as well as a rebellious act. Carlos has been photographing the graffiti in Buenos Aires for a while, and I'm going to use some of his images, both as watermarks faded into the background and on vellum overlays. I can't believe I'm working with vellum again, after how much trouble it gave me on Border & Frontier, but I wanted to have sheets that I could mutilate too that weren't text and that would hold up even after being torn or cut. So some of the vellum will be partially shredded, ripped, held together with butterfly "bandages," maybe even scorched a little. It's going to be white or pale yellow vellum I think, something that echoes membranes. So the book becomes a body or a portion of one, rather than just looking like one.

Oh gosh. I think I've just written a rough draft of an artist's statement. How weird is that?

Mistakes, Happy Accidents, and Winging It

Much as I love making stuff, you'd never know it to hear me when I'm in full production mode. I am very much my father's daughter then, and the vocabulary is his, too. Dad was an Air Force Master Sergeant, so that'll give you some idea of how many letters the words I'm usin' have. Part of the problem is that I'm perfectionist and I want everything to look just so. The other part of the problem is that I'm just a little clutzy, especially with sharp things, and just a little—okay a lot—impatient. I'm easily annoyed when things don't go the way they should and when tools don't work as they should. Espcially tools!  I have a lot of patience with people ( except myself), but dumb (in every sense of the word) objects, not so much. Combine this with the fact that I don't quite know what I'm doing yet, and every project is a blue air ( as opposed to blue sky) adventure.

Take these !#$%^ cards I'm making right now. I love them. They're fun and bright and goofy (as you'll see when I finally post the pictures). But I'm using Stardream cardstock for the accordion spines and on a good chunk of them, I scored the fold lines too hard, making the paper split. D'oh! I'm my father's daughter in this, too. The light touch is not in us. The last card this happened to, the covers were already glued to it when it split, which occasioned much cussing and an attempt to patch it artistically with some sturdy handmade paper scraps. Turns out this works pretty well, and looks kinda cool too, so I'll probably use it if it happens again. When it happens again. Because it will. Sigh.

But I've learned a lesson about scoring and a lesson about failure and mistakes. I've never been very good at messing up and living with it, but I'm good at problem-solving and improvising. Sometimes the improvisations work, sometimes they don't. But I'm also learning to let go of that need to have everything just so. I am, after all, making hand-made, one-of-a-kind objects. Even in an edition, each book varies just a little from the others because the only thing machine-done is the printing and the cutting of the boards. Sometimes accidents lead to interesting effects. I'm probably reinventing the wheel very often (yes, I do know about kozo paper, but don't have any on hand right now. Another lesson.) but the lesson, at least, stays learned this way. And it's all an adventure. Even if the air does turn blue rather often.

Hearteningly, I see I am not the only person struggling with this. I think Lea has a really great attitude about mistakes and the creative process too. One of the things that working with your hands can teach you is how little control you really have. Despite your best intentions or sometimes because of them, things will happen that you didn't expect. Sometimes the results are good, sometimes they just result in more work. So it's best to build that into your schedule, and surrender to it when it happens. Cussin' about it won't help, neither will calling yourself names. You're only an idiot if you don't learn from that mistake. So that's my new goal: surrender to the mistake and learn from it.

Objects in the Picture are Closer than They Appear

Okay, I'm not sure how I feel about this (courtesy of the excellent blog, Phantasmaphile).  On the one hand, it's a fun art survey, a nice teaching tool, and a fabulous piece of mighty morphing power animation. It's just that it makes me go all Guerrilla Girls when I see that many women as objects of the artist's eye, when I know 99.9% of the painters were male (I think I spotted one or two pieces by women, but I'd have to slow-mo it to be sure). I can't quite put my finger on why this makes me so uncomfortable and I've watched it several times now. Take a peek yerself:

Perhaps it's the concentration of one subject that makes the "male gaze" interpretations stand out, the way the faces change from serious to coquettish, from matron to vixen, madonna to whore. And the deconstruction of features as styles progress into Cubism and Modernism is disturbing too. The animation gives that even more violence than it has when seen in a still image. The absence of anything but white women is an obvious problem too, though not surprising in a survey of Western art.

And yet, the portraits are all beautiful and I'd look at them all, happily, for hours. I see the faces of my friends here. I see expressions I've caught in the mirror. I see the ideals of beauty shift and change remarkably through the centuries.

But there's still the whiff of commodity, not in the art itself, but in the women it portrays. And that's disturbing, because it could be me.

Owning It

As the result of various book and design projects I've done in the last several months, I've had a bunch of my friends and various strangers on the Internet tell me that the stuff I'm producing is beautiful. This makes me all squirmy because I haven't yet truly come to think of myself as a book artist or (certainly not) a designer, yet. I know it says that on my website, and over there on the sidebar you can see some of the stuff I've done, but I don't feel I own the title "book artist" yet, the way I own "writer" or "poet." I haven't got nearly enough of a track record in this field, having only made a few books at this point. And I don't feel like I've mastered the craft, or even its rudiments. I am, in fact, very much a beginner, a dilettante.

And boy do I feel that way when I look at other people's work. Especially people like Judith Hoffman. I ran across her blog on one of the Google alerts I have set up, and then went to her site. She works in both metal and paper, making jewelry and books, as well as jewel-like books. One piecein particular completely knocked my socks off, for several reasons. Like many artist's books, it stretches the definition of "book" but without actually straining it. There isn't any text in this book (and not much in her other books), but it tells a story, regardless, through both symbolism and design. She's obviously a master craftsman, as well. Go take a look at the rest of the photos for this book, The Fish Who Swims In the Sky, and you'll see what I mean. And browse the rest of her site, too. It's well worth a visit.

Judith's books  are all not only amazingly beautiful, but have that extra indefinable something that makes you go, "oh yeah, that's art." It's that last quality I'm not sure about in my own work. Part of it has something to do with imagination, which I've often admired in my friend Marcia as well. I'm awed at the quality and quantity of ideas people I think of as artists produce. Part of it is harder to define, as per a conversation Jen and I had over the weekend (and touched on in an earlier post at her blog) about the difference between scientific imaging (which can be extraordinarily beautiful) and art that references scientific data, like Nash Hyon's. The example I used was the difference between the Hooke's drawings of his micrographic observations and Leonardo's anatomical studies. They're both beautiful—Hooke's in the precise detail, Leonardo's in the flow of line—but only Leonardo's feel like art. What makes them art is harder to define, at least for me. Then there was the loaded conversation started over on the Art Biz Blog on the same topic.

There's a measure of innate talent in making art too, I believe, in the way I believe there's a measure of talent in fine writers. It's true that you can teach just about anyone to write serviceably well or the skills of drawing or painting or other techniques of art, but what elevates the mere practitioner to the artist is more than just a level of skill. It's a sense of beauty, imagination, and personal vision wrapped up in emotion. That's as close as I can get to defining it. And I don't yet know if my work has or will have or can have that quality, whatever it is. I guess I'll just have to keep learning and making more books and find out. At some point, I hope I'll be able to look at a piece or a group of pieces and say, "yeah, I'm a book artist" and own it the way I own my poetry and fiction. And in the meanwhile, at least I've given some pleasure and brought some beauty to somebody.