Reading books + writing words = making art

The artwork of Diane Samuels is based on how reading has shaped her life. For instance, this piece contains the first line of over 1700 books in her personal library -

Do go to her website and have a look at the photo there - a click on the image enlarges it and you can move it around on your screen. 

"First Lines is comprised of 1,740 small rectangles of handmade paper. On each Samuels has painted, drawn, collaged, and then hand-transcribed the first line of one of 1,740 books in her library. The 1,740 rectangles form a map of the world and a map of the books that have shaped her understanding of the world." (via)

The very last "first line" - Call me Ishmael -  segues into another large work, 47 feet long in fact, the size of a small sperm whale. On it she's written the text of Moby Dick, each page of the book as a horizontal row.

Here (via instagram; carlow_gallery) she is working on it -

And also via instagram, here she is with the finished piece and in the background, Scheherazade, a hand transcription in microscript, on 10,000 fragments of painted papers -

There is much more on her website. To finish here, this work (via instagram; carlow_gallery) doesn't seem to be on her website -

A two-part interview from 2014 is here.

Things found in books

Charles Dickens' annotations to his text, for one of his public readings. The book sits on a reading lecturn that he designed - he was particular about all those little details.

St Matthias Freidhof

The cemetery is perhaps best known for the graves of the Brothers Grimm, and two of Wilhelm's sons -

This headstone intrigued me - the red is leaf-like shapes cast in resin. Hedwig Dohm (1831-1919) was a feminist and author - her influential books were written in the 1870s. One of her five children became the mother-in-law of the writer Thomas Mann.

A lovely, leafy place, the cemetery had other surprises.

It was a surprise to come across a bit of contemporary art - Parla Memento Hedera, a "klang-installation" by Christian Find, using interviews with and readings from the works of people buried here. Inside the little greenhouse, almost hidden by the ivy (hedera), is information on each, with a button to activate the sound.

One was artist, poet, thinker and activist Helga Goetze; another is the Afro-German poet, educator and activist May Ayim.

The Red Room at UCL

UCL Scandinavian Studies has transformed the North Lodge at the Gower Street entrance to the college

into a "red room" as a venue for talks to mark the centenary of the death of  August Strindberg (1849-1912) - author and so much more besides. Various events are listed on the website.

Today Sarah Wingate Gray talked about "The Poetics of the Library".  I've often quoted the saying: "Once a librarian, always a librarian"; although I haven't worked as a librarian for some decades, I'm still interested in the organisation, preservation, and sharing of books, information, and knowledge - but more so, I was interested to hear about the current climate of librarianship, especially about user participation in libraries, about their needs and desires, conversations in communities, the "reality" of fictional others, transmissibility, SoLoMo (social, local, mobile) libraries - and not yet knowingly needed knowledge.

Ranganathan - how could I have forgotten S.R. Ranganathan and his five laws of library science (1931)? (He happens to have studied at UCL, what's more.)

1. Books are for use.
2. Every reader his [or her] book.
3. Every book its reader.
4. Save the time of the reader.
5. The library is a growing organism.

This next list, from my notes on the talk, is of unusual libraries:
- The Library of Lost Books
- Wildgoose Memorial Library
- Chicago Underground Library
- Mile High Reference Desk
- Occupy Wall Street Library
- Boston A to Z
- Street Books

Also to mention : the Epilogue documentary on the future of print; Let Them Sing It For You (the demo needs Quicktime to play); and, the idea that poems endure as presences - they become a companion spirit (doesn't that make you want to memorise a few?)

Sarah brought along a travelling poetry library, which included a book of erasure poetry I've seen on the internet, Jen Bervin's Nets -

How marvellous to hold "the real thing" and flip through it, stopping when something catches your eye! I was very excited about this wonderful surprise.

The Itinerant Poetry Library will be at the Red Room 3pm-6pm on Thursday - which happens to be National Poetry Day.

The North Lodge is a small and very pleasant space; it contains a "Strindberg resource" that mixes old and new materials -

Visitors are encouraged to type something -

or to sit in a comfy armchair and annotate copies of The Red Room (1879), Strindberg's most famous novel -

or read the other materials in the suitcase. I did read a bit of the novel - it conveniently opened to a page introducing two characters making, or trying to make, a living from art according to their temperaments (after all, Strindberg was a painter as well as a writer). The annotation will have to wait for another day; I couldn't quite bring myself to "deface" the book, even though it's "allowed" here...

On the wall, for those (like me) who should know a bit more about this famous person, are engaging bits of information -

 And outside, all the excitement of the first week of the new university year is going on -

Galley proofs

Erasure - and replacement - are very visible on galley proofs, something that has disappeared with electronic publishing. Here's an example of one of Philip Roth's galleys -

Roth was asked about the last phase of writing a novel being a “crisis” in which he turns against the material and hates the work. He said that there's always this crisis, with every book: 'Months of looking at the manuscript and saying, “This is wrong—but what’s wrong?” I ask myself, “If this book were a dream, it would be a dream of what?” But when I’m asking this I’m also trying to believe in what I’ve written, to forget that it’s writing and to say, “This has taken place,” even if it hasn’t. The idea is to perceive your invention as a reality that can be understood as a dream. The idea is to turn flesh and blood into literary characters and literary characters; into flesh and blood.'

When you got to the galley proof stage, the book was almost out of your hands - the agony almost over. In the 'old days', after the manuscript went to the publisher, there would be a hiatus before the author got galley proofs - a time to step back from the MS a bit, and then a chance to make changes on the proof, perhaps at both galley and page proof stages. Nowadays, when the electronic MS is delivered, the author has pretty well seen the last of it.

Then and now, there comes a point when you just have to let go. Not so easy sometimes ... possibly harder than getting started?

Meeting Montaigne

"If you belittle yourself, you are believed; if you praise yourself, you are disbelieved."


That comes from Michel de Montaigne, the man who invented "the essay". I first read him in my late 30s - when old enough to appreciate his insights.


Yesterday I picked up a small book to read while travelling and it turned out to be The Consolations of Philosophy by Alain de Botton. Opening it midway, I found myself reading about Montaigne's 17-month journey in 1580-1 through France, Germany, Switzerland, Italy,  encountering different practices in different places and viewing them with an open mind: "I enter into discussion and argument with great freedom and ease, inasmuch as opinion finds me in a bad soil to penetrate and take deep root in. No propositions astonish me, no belief offends me, whatever contrast it offers to my own. There is no fancy so frivolous and so extravagant that it does not seem to me quite suitable to the production of the human mind."


He re-wrote his Essays several times, and didn't worry about contradicting himself. (Your thoughts change over time, right?) Here's his annotated copy of the 1588 edition, the last one printed during his lifetime -

The revised edition was published posthumously. Montaigne wanted to write "as long as there is ink and paper in the world", and kept amending the Essays right up till his death in 1592. First published in English in 1603, they exist in many editions -

Downloadable versions are available via Project Gutenberg. 

The writer's art

By Fernando Vicente; from http://boek861.blog.com.es/

Last week at college

Last week of the autumn term, that is ... first week of December. On the Wednesday morning Karen and I met in the studio and did some "making" -

I had a yen to make a folder, rather like this one -

For the final "lecture" session in the hall at the Wilsons Road site, people from all the MA pathways mixed and mingled in groups that set out to define and report back on a task.

With groups in each corner of the gloomy hall, it was a bit of a madhouse. The group I was in moved to a table in the hallway and collaborated on a story/picture, representing ... what, exactly? Some people were uncomfortable with the "we don't really know what we're doing, but let's make something happen" idea of it, but others were more than happy to plunge right in -

In the short time available, it was starting to come together - and Lynn's presentation really brought the story together - even though we had made it without knowing what it was. The other groups had interesting outcomes too.

Afterwards, the graphic design group's term's work was displayed in the hall, and they had baked goods for sale towards the cost of their show catalogue -

Plus a chance to chat to the people we'd just met, over a glass of wine. Then it was out into the winter sunset  -

However - even though the next week was "officially" Reading Week - taken at the end of term, before the holidays, rather than sometime in November in mid-term - we had a special lecture from Audrey Niffenegger, who showed and talked about her graphic work, and its relation to her writing. I took no photos, but did make a few notes in the darkness of the hall: how she was influenced by Aubrey Beardsley's work, and her admiration of German printmaker Horst Janssen; her appreciation for the high-school art teacher who gave her extra help to learn printmaking; the advantages of teaching printmaking ("you get to work on this huge range of problems"); Henry Darger and his "Vivian girls";  crows painted onto gold leaf background ("Elysian Fields"); how comforting it is to have a huge body of work; and, if I read my writing right, this quote: "it's always fuzzy at the beginning". Do check out her website; the FAQs are enlightening!

Reading matter

You'd expect the London Review Cake Shop to have a copy of the magazine lying around. I leafed through it idly while savouring a chocolate swirl biscuit and decided I had to buy a copy.

Alan Bennett wanders through the libraries of his youth, with many an entrancing anecdote. Of the reference room in the library at Leeds, where he gleaned the smattering of culture that he claims got him a scholarship to Oxford, he says:

"It had glamour, too, for me and getting in first a nine one morning I felt, opening my books, as I had when a small boy at Armley Baths and I had been first in there, the one to whom it fell to break the immaculate stillness of the water, shatter the straight lines tiled on the bottom of the bath and set the day on its way."

In his earlier life as a medieval historian he spent time in the Round Room of the Public Record Office at Chancery Lane:

"The Memoranda Rolls on which I spent much of my time were long thin swatches of parchment about five feet long and one foot wide and written on both sides. Thus to turn the page required the co-operation and forbearance of most of the other readers at the table, and what would sometimes look like the cast of the Mad Hatter's tea party struggling to put wallpaper up was just me trying to turn over. A side effect of reading these unwieldy documents was that one was straightaway propelled into quite an intimate relationship with readers alongside and among those I got to know in this way as the historian Cecil Woodham-Smith.

"The author of The Great Hunger, an account of the Irish Famine, and The Reason Why, about the events leading up to the Charge of the Light Brigade, Cecil was a frail woman with a tiny bird-like skull, looking more like Elizabeth I (in later life) than Edith Sitwell ever did (and minus her sheet metal earrings). Irish, she had a Firbankian wit and a lovely turn of phrase. 'Do you know the Atlantic at all?' she once asked me and I put the line into Habeas Corpus and got a big laugh on it. From a grand Irish family she was quite snobbish; talking of someone she said: 'Then he married a Mitford ... but that's a stage everybody goes through.' Even the most ordinary remark would be given her own particular twist and she could be quite camp. Conversation had once turned, as conversations will, to fork-lift trucks. Feeling that industrial machinery might be remote from Cecil's sphere of interest I said: 'Do you know what a fork-lift truck is?' She looked at me in her best Annie Walker manner. 'I do. To my cost.'"

Also, in a letter Tim Parks wonders whether a character's inner monologue can be nuanced, if his speech is stumbling, "poor with words", and points out that in The Empty Family, stories about Pakistani immigrants to Barcelona, Colm Toibin uses "close description of movement and body language, dialogue and narrative details to suggest a rich inner life". He concludes: "The temptation for the novelist, who lives so much in language, is to imagine that all thought is expressed in words, words like his or her own, and indeed that word-driven consciousness is somehow superior. Perhaps the real achievement when evoking the inner life of a character who thinks of himself as 'poor with words' would be to suggest how rich he is without them."

But it was the article on Outsider Art by Terry Castle that led me to buy the magazine, and very interesting it was. To sum it up: "What draws me in ... is the promise - the colourful, bobbing lure - of meaning itself. ... Yet precisely what draws me in ... is precisely what shuts me out."

A while back I was given a year's sub to LRB and did try to "keep up" - it's fortnightly - but even the boring-looking articles turned out to be so very interesting, and I fell farther and farther behind, pages-turned-back copies with scarcely time to gather dust before another joined the pile beside the bed. One issue contained Bridget Riley's article on her use of repetitious drawing, which got me thinking about another aspect of drawing-as-a-tool. When the subscription ran out, though, I was rather relieved!

Another delight in this issue was Eliot Weinberger's "The Cloud Bookcase" - all titles are of actual books by "ancient chinese" authors. Among them are many mysteries, revealed in annotations; you can read them all on the LRB website.

(Not to be confused with Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec's Cloud Bookcase or Dripta Roy's Dream Bookshelf.)

An un-writing of sorts

I haven't quite figured out how Kristin Prevallet arrived at the words that described each page - read about it here. The project (Merge) started when she found a copy of Samuel Beckett's The Unnamable sitting on a trash can outside a library, and dropped india ink on four of the pages ... letting the wind direct the flow of the ink. Or rather, she turned the pages so the wind could blow the ink along. A collaboration with the wind ... good ....

Un-writing

One of Austin Kleon's "newspaper blackout poems" - see more on his blog http://www.austinkleon.com. And see other people's blackout poems here.

Whodunnit, doc?

Back in 1990 I did a roundup of medical mystery stories for the BMJ (the readable version is here). If you're a mystery addict with a medical bent, here's the list of mysteries involving medical personnel in some way:

Sarah Paretsky, Bitter Medicine, 1987

Francis Iles, Malice Aforethought, 1931

Agatha Christie, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, 1926

Margaret Millar, Taste of Fears, 1950

Stella Shepherd, Murderous Remedy, 1989

B M Gill, Suspect, 1981

Robin Cook, Outbreak, 1987

Leah Ruth Robinson, Blood Run, 1988

J B Priestley, Salt is Leaving, 1966

H Zachary, Murder in White, 1981

Jonathan Latimer, Murder in the Madhouse, 1935

June Thomson, Shadow of a Doubt, 1981

P D James, Shroud for a Nightingale, 1973

Edward Candy, Bones of Contention, 1954

Christina Brand, Green for Danger, 1943

Lawrie Reznek, The Medicine Men, 1990

Robin Cook, Brain, 1985

and of course, Dr Watson in the Sherlock Holmes books....

Since 1990, what further medical mysteries - ?? Patricia Cornwell, and ... ?

Trying

Middle age is a good time to start reading Montaigne. He (1533-1592) was middle aged when he wrote his Essays (1580), and more than four centuries later they give a picture of someone who could very well be alive today. Not only did he start a whole new form of literature, but could he have been the world's first blogger? He kept revising his thoughts, throwing in the new ones regardless of contradictions.

A series of essays on his Essays, available on the Guardian website, includes this passage:

"More editions came out, and he left annotated copies for a vast posthumous one. He seems to have amazed even himself: "Who does not see that I have taken a road along which I shall go, without stopping and without effort, as long as there is ink and paper in the world?"

"He preferred not to repent of choices he had made either in literature or in life. His past selves each had their own voice, even if the new Montaigne no longer understood them. Thus, within a paragraph or two of the Essays, we may meet Montaigne as a young man, then as an old man with one foot in the grave, and then again as a middle-aged mayor bowed down by responsibilities. We may listen to him complaining of impotence; a moment later we see him young and lusty and bent on seduction. "I do not portray being", he wrote; "I portray passing. Not the passing from one age to another … but from day to day, from minute to minute." His let his thoughts lie where they fell."

By middle age, you expect your personality to be pretty much formed, but Montaigne didn't view things this way. The writing continued to re-form his personality; by examining himself and his world, he was forced to live differently.

And so it goes with blogging: "I know what I think when I hear myself speak".

Sunny Sunday afternoon

With the sun streaming in on a frosty Sunday, it was a pleasure to sit in my "weekend studio" and work on books.

The text project for reading week (last week) started with a visit to the "Medicine Man" exhibit at the Wellcome Collection - with the task of finding three different objects that you feel can be related. On Friday I spent quite a while looking at objects and taking notes (not drawing...) and found myself drawn to amulets and reliquaries of various sorts - objects that offered the hope of protection - and speculating about the belief systems behind them in cultures without western medicine (which after all is basically another belief system). Magical instruments - and community rituals that validate and reinforce the belief about their efficacy.

"Write continuously for three minutes in response to each of the objects" - on Sunday, looking at my notes I chose objects almost a random, but the three did have that commonality of being protective. "You might decide to change the normal way in which you write" - ok, let's try that ...

Then, find the parts of the writing you like and intend to continue to use. These words and phrases become objects in your visual-textual "gallery" - to be used on the page "in groups across a sequence of pages to hint at the network of relations that you identified when you began".
Though I also wrote about a17th century amulet against Lilith and a Victorian lampoon of "universal vegetable pills", most of my words came from writing about a reliquary bundle from Gabon (in times of great danger everyone in the village would get out their reliquaries, containing bones from ancestors, to amplify the ancestors' protection).

I picked up some scraps of paper that were lying nearby - and the book wrote itself - which may or may not be a good thing! I'm not happy with the final page and will revisit the rest later, both in terms of the words used and their layout on the page. There are suggestions in the brief for websites dealing with visual, sound, and concrete poetry.

Part 2 of the project starts with choosing an object from the exhibition that suggests a potential book form. I'm using the "Goa stone" - an object I'd never heard of - bezoar (hairballs) considered so precious, so curative, that they were kept in elaborate containers -

This photo comes from here. Bezoar stone is a calcified concretion found in the stomachs of some animals, and was prized for its supposed medicinal properties as well as being believed to act as an antidote to poison. The scarcity of bezoar stones by the 17th century led a group of Portuguese Jesuits working in Goa to come up with a man-made version. These so called 'Goa Stones' were a mixture of bezoar as well as other precious objects believed to have curative powers (narwhal tusk, amethyst, ruby, emerald, coral and pearl), but mainly clay, silt, resin, shells, and musk. In an age before the birth of modern medicine the wealthy had absolute faith in their ability to ward off everything from assassination attempts to depression. Until the beginning of the 18th century, when medical authorities began to debunk the belief in these stones, they could sell for more then their weight in gold and were often contained in splendidly ornate cases.

I started with the idea of making a round book, out of newspaper (to reference the mud and other ordinary, unlovely things used to make the stones), and of cutting out some of the positive or commendatory words on the pages to decorate the case for the "stone". Cutting the newspaper into squares was a revelation - I wanted text, or at least black-and-white, both sides, but found very few of the squares worked that way - indeed most had neither text nor black-and-white; rather, they had coloured advertisements.

The folded edge, cut off, looked promising - it sewed together into a chunky 3D shape - so I cut circles out of the other folded edges, punched a couple of holes in each, and set to make a (5cm) "round book" - which had an interesting transitional phase -

before a little reconfiguration, and some needleweaving, made it into a ball. (In fact it could easily be a xmas ornament!)
The rest of the task for part 2 is to produce a text that could be stored in the chosen form. Part of my "form" would be the case for the "stone" ... I'm not sure whether the ball would contain the text, or the case would be the surface for the text. There are many possibilities - and we are to "try to find a way of combining words and phrases from your found material alongside and within your own text." When developing the book form, we are asked to consider how the use of materials would change the use of text, and whether the text produced could/should be edited in light of this.

Some writers to research (most are new to me) are Gertrude Stein; John Cage, Jackson Mac Low (I'm glad to find his 9 Light Poems), Hannah Weiner (inventor of a new form that she called large-sheet poetry); Ronald Johnson ("ARK" took him 20 years to write, but he made a modest living writing cookbooks); William Burroughs and Brian Gysin (both part of the "Tangier Beats"); Kenny Goldsmith (creator of UbuWeb); Kristin Prevallet (poems made from found fragments, news stories, etc); Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (video works that use performance and text to explore interactions of language, meaning, and memory); Juliana Spahr; Susan Howe. The links here are the result of very brief research - there's lots to come back to.

More wise words

As yet another heap of papers gets sorted, more bon mots emerge, gleaned from radio and reading, jotted on scraps of paper. Some no longer resonate, others still appeal ...

In a recent interview, Ai Wei Wei said - "Life is never guaranteed to be safe so we'd better use it while we're still in the good condition". As he's renowned for his outspokenness in China, he lives close to the edge of "the good condition", and has been under house arrest for several weeks, to prevent him gathering people at his studio to protest its impending demolition. (More photos of his work are here.)

These quotes date back to 2002 -

"When you get your mind out of the way, you do the business" - Joe Strummer, lead singer of The Clash

"My wish now is that more of my works will be born but not consciously created" - Shoji Hamada

Advice from Sheila - "Don't let people live rent-free in your head."

And finally, Flaubert: "To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost."

Flower project

The site with the first few blossoms - hardly noticeable from the street -Flowers looking cheery in the afternoon sunshine -
It's a different story in the rain -
The wind adds another challenging factor - unless the flowers are sturdily made (ie with many folds) they tend to blow apart (ie unfold). A sheet of soggy paper was lying on the steps as I came home - its wet weight had caused it to drop like a stone.

This morning I've been folding daisies. The first one took 15 minutes but you do get faster. While folding, I've been listening to Mark Twain's autobiography on the iPlayer (Book of the Week, BBC radio 4) - excellent, amusing - what a writer, so quotable! The first episode is available for another three days, the next episodes for successively longer.