February 2009 – Page 2 – Green Chair Press Blog

Giveaway: Winter Is…

Here in Northern California, February is always the coldest, wettest, most winter-y month. We certainly need all the rain we can get this year, as we’ll probably have water rationing by summer. To celebrate the last week of very wet stormy weather, I’m giving away a copy of my book Winter along with an instruction sheet for making the crown and blizzard binding (Winter uses the crown version of the binding). To enter the drawing, just put a comment on this post about what you like (or don’t like) about winter by Wednesday February 25. I’ll pick a random name and announce the winner on Thursday February 26.

In Cahoots Press

Macy Chadwick is a fellow letterpress printer and book artist here in the Bay Area. She calls her press “In Cahoots” and she’s recently put up a website with photos of her work. I first got to know Macy when she wrote about her playful long-distance collaborations with her friend Lisa Hasegawa for Ampersand. They work on joint books for one hour a week and mail the results back and forth. (You can read the article here and see photos of some of their books here.) Macy has a new book, and wouldn’t you know, it’s got a map theme! Called The Topography of Home, it’s letterpress printed and the pages have cutouts inserted with silk paper that’s been stenciled. The book is to the left with a detail below.

Jane Austin and Zombies, Oh My!

I’m not quite sure who would want to see this movie or read these books — but then again I’m not the audience for the “Twilight” books and I definitely haven’t seen enough “Buffy” reruns — what do you think?

From The New York Times (Dave Itzkoff):

For some viewers, the idea of another Jane Austen-inspired period drama is sufficiently monstrous, but a coming film project seeks to update the formula with actual monsters, Variety reported. The movie “Pride and Predator” … will juxtapose brooding aristocrats with a brutal alien that lands in 1800s-era Britain, attacking residents and leaving them with neither sense nor sensibility. The film, to be produced by Elton John’s Rocket Pictures, is the latest work to mix the hoary costume genre with elements of horror. A book called “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies,” credited to Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith and published by Quirk Books, will combine the Austen novel with “all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie mayhem.” And a coming novel by Michael Thomas Ford called “Jane Bites Back” depicts the 19th-century author as a frustrated vampire, taking revenge on those who have made money from her work.

Book Collecting: Pulp Painting

Klage by Hesse, printed by John Gerard At the Codex Book Fair last week, I stopped by book binder John DeMerritt’s table to say hi and admire his wife Nora’s new book. We started talking about paper, and John said to be sure to look at the pulp painted papers made by John Gerard at the table across from him. I was immediately entranced by the beautiful papers and bought the chapbook on the left. It’s very simply made — an accordion text block with a letterpress printed poem is pamphlet sewn into the covers, but it shows off the paper so well!
To make a pulp painting, specially prepared pulps are applied to a freshly made sheet of handmade paper, sometimes with the aid of stencils, sometimes freehand, so that when it all dries, the finished sheet of paper fully incorporates the image. Several years ago, we had an article in the Ampersand about Claire Van Vliet’s large pulp painted broadsides — you can see two of them online: What evaluation we make of a particular stretch of land… and this glorious one called A Scribe of Kloster Eibingen with pulp painting, letterpress and silkscreen.
I seem to be in a poetry reading mood recently — the Hesse poem in my new acquisition is in German, but I found a translation online by Joseph Knecht:

Lament
by Hermann Hesse

No permanence is ours; we are a wave
That flows to fit whatever form it finds:
Through day or night, cathedral or the cave
We pass forever, craving form that binds.

Mold after mold we fill and never rest,
We find no home where joy or grief runs deep.
We move, we are the everlasting guest.
No field nor plow is ours; we do not reap.

What God would make of us remains unknown:
He plays; we are the clay to his desire.
Plastic and mute, we neither laugh nor groan;
He kneads, but never gives us to the fire.

To stiffen to stone, to persevere!
We long forever for the right to stay.
But all that ever stays with us is fear,
And we shall never rest upon our way.

I saw a number of books with map themes at the Codex Book Fair last week. But my best treat was at lunch before the fair, when my friend Sharon produced 2 books to show me: You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination by Katharine Harmon and The Atlas of Experience by Louise Van Swaaij & Jean Klare.
In You Are Here, Harmon says “maps intrigue us, perhaps none more than those that ignore mapping conventions” and then asks what makes a map an accurate depiction of the world and does accuracy matter? She answers with essays, quotations, poems and, yes, lots of maps. She’s built “an idiosyncratic collection of maps that transcend the norm, either because of the mapmaker’s personal viewpoint, or sense of humor, or ingenuity, or all of the above. These are maps of the imagination, as all maps are, only more so.” There are hours and hours of looking to be done with this book, but at the bottom of this post is one Sharon especially pointed out to me: “Shan map relating to a border dispute between (British) Burma and China along the Nam Mao River”. You can read an excerpt from the book and see a dozen or so maps in this article from Duke Magazine.
The Atlas of Experience is written and drawn by 2 Dutch cartographers using traditionally map-making conventions, but charting such “lands” as Secrets, Knowledge, Bad Habits, Home, Boredom, Mountains of Work, and Haute Cuisine. Each map is accompanied with quotes and commentary.

Poetry and Valentine’s Day

Several years ago, in a fit of self-improvement, I subscribed to Poetry Magazine. They were having a 1/2-off sale, so I figured for $17, how could I go wrong? There’s not just poetry, but commentary, many letters to the editor, and even artwork (and the font face and layout are beautiful.) Granted some of the poetry and the nitpicking in the letters are unintelligible to me, but every issue has at least one thing I read and return to again.
The Feb 2009 issue has a section of collages by Tony Fitzpatrick (see on the right). Fitzpatrick is both a collage artist and poet, and he often includes his poetry in his artwork. The introduction to the collages in Poetry quotes Fitzpatrick:

“We love in poetry but, unfortunately, we live in prose. Sometimes the two are not congruent. What we remember of love is usually a fiction. What we aspire to is haiku: short, sweet, perfect.”

The Poetry Magazine website has a selection of love poems celebrating Valentine’s Day both to read and listen to. From the current issue, my favorite is a very black love poem, an anti-Valentine, if you will, by Kim Addonizio called Weaponry. But more in keeping with the spirit of the day is this one, by Stephen Dunn

Connubial

Because with alarming accuracy
she’d been identifying patterns
I was unaware of—this tic, that
tendency, like the way I’ve mastered
the language of intimacy
in order to conceal how I felt—

I knew I was in danger
of being terribly understood.