Thursday, May 14, 2009

Always time for bed

Today was rough b/c I had gotten to bed so late, but I managed to type up labels, get dressed, get out the door to print the labels down the hill, and then do the long commute to COEX to meet Hyejin at the Seoul Int'l Book Fair. I never knew that the fair is dominated by commercial bookstores and publishers, with a portion of book arts booths.

I had completely forgotten about it even though I had it written into my book, but Hyejin and I had made a date to go together, and then she asked why none of my books were at the Columbia booth. Alumni hadn't been notified, but I threw in two today and we took care of some missing labels and dangerous placement of books (as well as moving a table so people could actually get to the books and not trip over cords). I was shocked at how thrown together it was; if I had known, I could have helped out. Then again, I would have been cranky b/c I am overloaded, so it likely would have been another thing to do. But it's good to finally have a sense of how this event runs. I ran into a bunch of people I met early in my grant period, all in the Korean book arts circles, as well as some new people. I may have roped myself into English editing after giving someone a big lecture about how Korean book arts publications need to get their English translations straightened out. Me and my big mouth.

Columbia peeps swept prizes again this year, which in some ways looks sketchy and in others makes sense: there are very few programs that make students consider every aspect of the book and then how to integrate them. As cranky as I was in the program, it turns out solid work. Though I have NO idea what it has morphed into lately, it helped get me this far. I was on the warpath today, ready to find a book arts association in Europe that has not returned a piece to me and has ignored my requests to do so, but I don't think they showed up. So I caught up w/the curator at Gallery Andante for a while, ran thru (it was too much stuff; I couldn't take it in), and then we lunched before I headed home for a serious nap.

I found out today that my HD only has about 11 gigs left of space. WTF. I started to clean things out and I suspect that my sudden launch into using iMovie is one culprit. Then I got tired at about May 2006 and give up for now. My aunt is back home from the hospital and recovery seems to be going well. So I might take an early night.

2 comments:

melissa said...

Hey, don't feel bad - some faculty weren't notified about this year's fair, either. I certainly wasn't. But, I recognize a number of books from my class in your photos!

aimee said...

Ha - it's not even that I feel badly about not knowing about it - just that I feel *embarrassed* about how the booth looks!