In search of some kind of balance

Based on Keri Smith's Artist's Survival Kit, I made a little comic last night. Today I had the fun task of heading to FedEx to play w/the copy machine and churn out, FINALLY, the zine edition of "My Snow," a story that Caron wrote and shared with me in Ithaca last fall. I wish I had finished it earlier, but apparently it's still snowing in parts of the world so as soon as I get them stapled tomorrow, they will be ready to blanket the world.

I was able to run out into the world today after holing up for a while at home to prep for the next round of classes and workshops, rest, recover, and finish the 3rd season of FNL (if you don't know, don't ask. I'm not proud of the habit, but I like to think it could be much worse). I finally got to a place where I felt like I could look at everything I have to do and not feel completely overwhelmed. I could look at it and say, "That's a lot, but I can do it all." I also addressed a few things that I was stuck on (like, not being able to work at home b/c I don't have a surface to work on), and acknowledged some other things (like, I have a hard time being creative if I don't feel safe from harm, and I also have a hard time when loved ones are clearly not safe from harm. Which is why I CANNOT wait until Ben leaves Afghanistan for good. The first is partly why I have so few photographs from my new home; I don't think it's a good idea here to pull out a camera. The second is why war sucks ass*).

*As Colum McCann says in Let the Great World Spin (which Ben mailed to me in Cali from Afghanistan once he finished reading it): "The only thing you need to know about war, son, is: Don't go."

Real exquisite

OMG! The most beautiful book showed up on top of the mailbox today. I saw the mailman, different from the usual carrier, as he struggled to figure out how to put the little square box in/on/around the mailbox. He finally closed the lid on top of the regular mail and balanced it on top. I knew what it was, so I ran out as soon as he left, and WHAT A GIFT. Velma is amazing! It is the perfect book, and perfect timing. I love being surrounded by books like this right now. Gratitude!

Press reunion

It's been a while, but I felt good doing a print run on each of the two presses to start our relationships. They're bigger than what I used to work with, but not in a bad way. I like that I get to use new Vandercook models from what I was trained on. It's like meeting more and more family members over time.

I figured this was apt for tonight's full moon, which I will likely not see, b/c I have amazing amounts of tiny loose ends to tie. But at least my veggies are roasting in the (very hot) oven. I met w/a librarian today and was paid a huge compliment when she said, "you're very organized." I feel like a million pieces of paper held together by nothing but will, about to open the door to a hurricane.

Arrived

[Velma books. The best kind of books are Velma books!] I don't know how I am keeping my eyes open right now. That's how I felt for the majority of the day. The flight yesterday was only slightly delayed, though it felt interminable. I paced a lot and did jumping jacks in the back when the flight attendants weren't looking. My TV screen wouldn't turn off so that made me crazy. But I'm here, not unpacked, but at least oriented and almost done with paperwork. I rode the bus there and back (and leaped off right in time on the return based on sheer luck/instinct - the route doesn't come back on the same road), which was fine except a terrible DOUBLE ching-chonging of an Asian woman by a very mean man. I felt complicit b/c I didn't clock him, but it wasn't really an option.

Campus is ridiculously lush and beautiful. Makes me realize that higher ed does a LOT to provide idyllic bubbles for their students. The downside is leaving the gates and entering the real world outside, which is not so pretty at all, and wondering if this is the best way. Now I get a few days off to sort out my luggage, paperwork, and jet lag. I managed groceries tonight, so I am fed. The basics! That's all I can cover right now.

White on white

For most of the day, the river was completely shrouded in white. Now, I look up and suddenly it has returned to view, albeit not completely. I love it, the albino version of the cliffs and water and sky. A good deal of my energy today has been sapped by recognition of my own mistakes and weaknesses, so it was a good day to finish reading Barbara Kingsolver's Small Wonder.

Not only for, "If you ever want to know what it sounds like when the universe goes "Ha! Ha!," just put a tidy plan on your calendar."

Or, for, "I remembered my Japanese friend's insistence on forgiveness as the highest satisfaction, and I understood it really for the first time: What a rich wisdom it would be, an how much more bountiful a harvest, to gain pleasure not from achieving personal perfection but from understanding the inevitability of imperfection and pardoning those who also fall short of it."

But for this:

Charles Darwin himself was a religious man, blessed with an extraordinary patience for observing nature's details, as well as the longevity and brilliance to put it all together. In his years of studying animate life he noticed four things, which any of us could notice today if we looked hard enough. They are:

1. Every organism produces more seeds or offspring than will actually survive to adulthood.

2. There is variation among these seeds or offspring.

3. Traits are passed down from one generation to the next.

4. In each generation the survivors succeed--that is, they survive--because they possess some advantage over the ones that don't succeed, and because they survive, they will pass that advantage on to the next generation. Over time, therefore, the incidence of that trait will increase in the population.

Bingo: the greatest, simplest, most elegant logical construct ever to dawn across our curiosity about the workings of natural life. It is inarguable, and it explains everything.

New old

The resolution hoisted upon me by my elders and everyone who has known me, ever, is to cut down on my worry. So yesterday, I hauled out the Singer, one of my oldest friends. As part of my battle with stress, I pulled out almost all of my book and paper making tools and samples and whatnot for my move (instead of worrying about how much luggage I'd have, I dragged all the suitcases out of storage and dumped everything into them to gauge volume and weight). In my papermaking bin was a pile of red cotton scraps. I had used them to couch paper I made in Mexico in 2007. I loved that red dress but cut it to scraps after someone dissed it. After Mexico, I used pellon for couching b/c it dried faster on the road. When I found the reds yesterday, I decided to re-make a book that I had made in 1999 (I can't remember what happened to it. I think I gave it away). That up there is page two.

Another "don't stress me" tactic was to take up all the scraps of Velma's paper that were left from making binding samples and piece them together. They had been sitting in neat piles at the corner of my cutting mat on my table and were making me crazy, b/c they hadn't been turned into books or paper or moved onto their next step. Now I have a big piece of pieced paper. And less stress.

New truths

[Myung Mi Kim on reading.] Last night I brought Ching-In my old syllabus and process exercises from a creative writing class I took in my very first semester of college. She was amazed at how rigorous and challenging the assignments were, and I remember how hard it was. But I never thought it should be any other way. I wish I hadn't been ashamed of my own writing and hesitant to be nurtured and mentored, since the other students around me seemed so horrified by the difficulty of our material, and how could a visiting professor be so demanding? Now that I think of it, it was a great gift to start school and have a teacher who looked like me, Korean.

[Myung Mi Kim on writing.] I've been up for unspeakably late nights, not partying, but reading. I am a total addict: I have to finish books quickly. Last night, after the requisite new year's eve party w/overly loud music (though I did cross paths with my dear friend's only son, and that was a funny coincidence), I came home and stayed up to finish Intuition. I still have to type up notes for that and for India Flint's Eco Colour (one of those "if I had a stable home base, I'd buy" books. It's VERY good, smart, and beautiful. Plus she is a dyer who loves and appreciates language!), and then I can hopefully relax into Dillard and Kingsolver, since those are essays. I don't have to hurtle quite as hard.

I did my new year's bowing to the elders and received sage advice. Now, how to transform that into daily practice? I'll start by reading and writing.

Old lies

I've been behaving badly, staying up until 3am reading books, getting up in the morning and finishing books, reading books at all my meals, reading in dim light, reading until my eyes go all blurry. But I can't help it! They are so delicious. Though today or last night I caught, finally, the passage that I had wondered about for years, since the mid-90s. I had been involved with a boy who was very dramatic and wrote beautifully (both in terms of his composition and his handwriting--dangerous traits, I came to realize too late) and had terrible posture and treated women badly. In one of his dramatic letters from his first ever trip abroad, he wrote about the mountains, and about how Annie Dillard said that you could throw your anger at a mountain and it would not throw it back. I see the passage now, and he paraphrased it horribly (she wasn't talking about anger) and completely skewed my idea of her writing back when I was all too impressionable. The funny thing is that I can see all my youth's folly now, but I'm not that much further along in current folly. At least all of my citations are bibliographically correct, and with the proper pagination. I don't like to paraphrase and only do it when I have to (which is a lot) and always worry that I got it wrong.

Then again, I suppose we are all entitled to our own misreadings and misunderstandings. Better to think for ourselves than not.

A sure thing

Today I tried to stay off the computer once the library opened. Hooray for that, after holiday and blizzard closings! I came home with ten books and ripped into half today. I laughed and laughed at Nikki Giovanni's brilliant Sacred Cows...and Other Edibles and was completely distraught by Joe Sacco's Footnotes in Gaza. I also got wonderful things in the mail: the perfect book gifts from Velma, and the new issue of Hand Papermaking Magazine that includes an article I wrote about my research in Korea and how I am trying to share it with a wider audience online.

From Sacred Cows, I enjoyed this (but miss the typewriter days b/c there is MORE room for procrastination now that the keyboard can access all sorts of other things besides paper. Actually, keyboards these days can access everything else in the world, it seems, but paper):

I think, by the way, that every intended writer should learn to type. Most of us have a poor handwriting, and thinking on a typewriter is different from thinking on a yellow pad. The sooner you can think on a keyboard, the less room you have for procrastination. And all writers are great procrastinators!

But mostly was heartened by this: "I would hope each and every woman who ever thought she wanted to write would at least give it a try."

A good day to work from home

Lots of snow, lots of wind, a great day to be without a commute.

p.s. - West Elm reprinted a HAND/EYE article on me, changing up the design.

It's true about the zoo

Bad dream about blood gushing out of my head + broken gel pen that I pliered apart.

I am feeling a sad about my grand experiment this month, which I'm failing miserably at. Yesterday, I re-read this from Annie Dillard's The Writing Life:

I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as with a dying friend. During visiting hours, I enter its room with dread and sympathy for its many disorders. I hold its hand and hope it will get better.

This tender relationship can change in a twinkling. If you skip a visit or two, a work in progress will turn on you.

A work in progress quickly becomes feral. It reverts to a wild state overnight. It is barely domesticated, a mustang on which you one day fastened a halter, but which now you cannot catch. It is a lion you cage in your study. As the work grows, it gets harder to control; it is a lion growing in strength. You must visit it every day and reassert your mastery over it. If you skip a day, you are, quite rightly, afraid to open the door to its room. You enter its room with bravura, holding a chair at the thing and shouting, "Simba!"

She's so right it's scary. But for the clawing I will get soon when I re-enter the cage, it was worth today's break to watch "Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work" and "Exit Through the Gift Shop." And, embarrassingly, I got so self-involved that I forgot to say, send good vibes in the direction of the deployed, around the world in a cold, windy patch of desert. I wish they got to celebrate their holy days differently.

A big puffy joy

I just mailed a mini-model (it looks like a normal one that accidently was guillotined. But that's not what happened) of one of my favorite bindings of this bunch to Velma. I got some longer paper in the completely wrong grain direction to do the slipcases, but these are the willing sacrifices I make when it's the only stuff I can get locally, immediately. On the way to the post office, I passed one of those blow-up lawn decorations: JOY in red. That's my today!

Sixteen books later,

I can finally breathe easier (last night I had some kind of strange panic attack in bed) now that all of these models are done. Tomorrow I'll scrounge for big paper to practice slipcases and then, DONE! And back to computer work (boo). An update of my comings and goings has been posted on IAKA's blog.

Velma's stash of paper lasted me through the entire book, but I had to do some piecing near the end that would have horrified purists. You can see the most innocuous evidence here. The last book was much more obvious, made from no less than 9 scraps. Now I have to figure out what to do with all these trimmings!