Sperm Donor

Got your attention, huh?

The past few months I've been working on my artist book skills...and they haven't come easily.  I've wanted to make books about a lot of things lately: living in morocco, infertility, changing family dynamics, good books I've read, pictures I've taken, dogs and husbands I love, Moroccan rug prints, the list goes on and on.  But whenever I sit down to tell a story that is personal I'm completely bereft of ideas and enthusiasm.  I don't know if I'm afraid my technical skills won't live up to my emotional attachment to these ideas or what, but It took me 8 months to get halfway through a book about our trip to Portugal last year but then I hated it and dismantled it for parts.

So, Max and I have been pulling prompts from a grocery sack the last few weeks.  He has to write about them and I have to create a book around the prompt.  The first one we drew said "A Golf Caddy Learns a Dark Secret".  Since my reading and thinking habits trend non-fiction I immediately hit the google to research golf scandals and the like - thinking I'd take my inspiration from real life.  (Max wrote a delightful piece of fiction.  Our brains work very differently.)

I came across this crazy story about a caddy who claimed he was seduced by his golfer solely for the purpose of getting pregnant.  He later sued her saying he was an "unwitting sperm donor".  Close enough for me.  I know it's a super weird thing to make a book about, but for some reason it worked for me and I was able to try a few new techniques I'd been wanting to experiment with.

The design and construction are really simple - mostly I wanted to see if I could finish a task and stick to a theme.  Telling a story I had no personal attachment to was a really great exercise.  It let me step back and see what worked and what didn't and how to construct an idea using mostly images.  I think after a few more goes I'll be ready to tell my own stories.      

"Sperm Donor" 

 Accordion Fold  

Paper: Arches Cold Press, Ingres

Matte Medium Image Transfers 

  Text taken verbatim from newspaper clippings

Raven's Foot Binding

I've been carving out some great studio time lately and I've even FINISHED some books.   Last night I finished my first Raven's Foot Binding.

Raven's Foot, like a Coptic binding, features exposed stitches and hinges on the outside of the book instead of hidden away beneath glue and book cloth and other sundry junk.  But instead of knotting the threads together along the spine like a Coptic binding, you wrap them around a core which later becomes the "Raven's Foot" on the outsides of the cover.

I had to restart this book a few times to get the tension just right on the wrapping.  I'm still not 100% satisfied with the consistency of stitches along the spine, but that's why you practice.  Doy.  (Have I been watching My So Called Life on Hulu?  Maybe...)
 

18 cover holes, four signatures, two covers
and a wooden drawing  mannequin's foot.  

You have to sew on a little sewing frame which can make
things a bit wonky if your text block and the frame aren't properly weighted...as mine were not.  

And Blamo.  Waiting for the fly pages to dry on the inside.  

And thar she is.  The sewing holes got a bit stretched out
after sewing and un-sewing a few times, but you sew and you learn.    

One Good Shame Deserves Another

I'm still here! I'm still a librarian and I still read!

 To pay penance for my blog slacking, here is something shameful I keep on my laptop to remind me not to get too smarmy.  I wrote it my first year of library school.

 "My husband is convinced that the e-book will catch on and change the face of books forever, but I just don’t buy it. I am very enthusiastic about using technology in the library, but e-books - I just can't see them re-inventing the library."

 Actually, the best part about this is that before I read this note in my own handwriting, I read a short article written in 2008 wherein the author stated all the reasons why e-readers wouldn't catch on.

 "What an idiot" I say to myself...and then read my own astute agreement with the article.

 Wah wah. (like grown ups in Charlie Brown)

Book Review: American Pastoral

 

American Pastoral: Phillip Roth: Vintage: Fiction: 432

Roth's landmark novel takes on the insurmountable task of capturing what it means to be American through the lens of the turbulent sixties and seventies.  What Roth arrives at is not a bulleted list of characteristics and flashpoints (a seemingly American way to understand the world) but the reality that both personal and national identity are products of our perception and personal experience anyway. 

America represents tyrannical fascism and morally bankrupt violence to Seymour Levov's weather-underground-vietnam-war-protesting daughter but for himself, a Jewish business man in search of the American dream, it means freedom, industry, and wealth.   

For me, a good book asks more questions than it answers.  Nothing interests me less than a work of fiction that says "here is what the world is and how you should understand it".* **  Roth's book is the anti that book.  For some that's frustrating, but to explore the shifting paradigm of American identity during this time and how it caused us to question the construction of identity itself, it's perfect.  But make no mistake, this novel isn't about a twenty year period in America's history - it's about narrative and national identity.   It's about all the stuff that came before 1968 and what will come after it. 

I have been thinking a lot about what it means to have honest relationships with other people.  Trying to really understand them for who they are and not for what you'd like them to be or who you imagine them to be because that's the kind of person you fancy yourself having a relationship with.  It's a hard thing to be really know someone and have your interaction be true - have it be about their reality and not your perception of yourself.  How much harder, then, is it to understand a national identity, to form a relationship with it, when it is composed of such diverse people and experiences?  




*Interesting...that's probably why I don't really like fantasy...hhmm

** But I do love non-fiction.  That's the kind of "this is the world" I'm into :)