Titles Matter

This is a cautionary tale. Consider carefully what you title your works. You don't want to jinx yourself.

I mentioned in my last post that there was a story behind my 2008 entry to We Love Your Books. The theme for that show was "Re:" Any kind of subject based around a "re" word was suitable. I, in my questionable wisdom, chose to make a book object entitled Returned to Sender. This, for something that was going to require international shipping. You see the problem?

The book object itself was about bills. The full title was Returned to Sender (I Wish My Bills Could Be). It was an accordion of miniature parody bill envelopes, with nested flags cut through them of a finger pointing them back into the mailbox. To complement the American-style mailbox, I decided to portray the culture from this side of the Atlantic with my billing selections. One envelope, for instance, is from

"Gigantica American Hospital."

I finished my piece and mailed it off to arrive well before the deadline. There was also

an optional group component that I decided to do as well, but I didn't get that done as quickly as the book. Since I didn't want to delay the important item, I mailed the book first. The optional group contribution, a paper-engineered tag, followed a few days later.

The book should have taken no more than a week and a half to get there. But more than two weeks later, it still hadn't arrived. I received a puzzled email from one of the curators wondering if perhaps I'd misunderstood something? They'd received the little tag, but where was the book? I was mildly panicked at this point, but figured it was probably just sitting in customs. Hold tight, and they'll release it soon.

But the book still did not arrive. The deadline for submissions came and went. The book could not be traced. It had vanished in the mail.

Then one day nearly a month later my husband went to our post office box. There was a package pickup slip for us. When he went to the window, the box containing Returned to Sender was brought out and handed to him.

Forty-five minutes of intense head scratching, computerized database checking, measuring, and postal formula analyzing followed... yet nobody could figure out why the box had mysteriously been returned. It had been properly packed. They were sure it had the right postage on it. Customs declaration was perfect.

The postmistress came out and joined the others scrutinizing the returned item. They all stayed past closing. Finally, someone found an obscure formula that stated if a parcel fell above a certain measurement in its circumference, regardless of its weight or other dimensions, it would belong to another, more costly mailing class. My box, they figured out, measured just slightly over this size. The people at our post office were flabbergasted. Apparently, some bureaucrat with a tape measure at the main sorting office in San Francisco had ascertained that my box was ever-so-slightly technically a teeny weeny bit above the official cutoff size, and had placed it aside in a pile for three weeks. Then, finally, it was returned for insufficient postage. At least this was all they could figure. They had never before seen anything like it.

My husband was an angel. He couldn't get in touch with me and didn't know what to do, so he wound up having it turned back around to England at an exorbitant express mail price (a bit ironic, seeing as the subject of the piece is bills). It still arrived before the show opened, but too late to get its picture included on the website with the other entries. (However, you can download a catalogue of the show and you will see it there.)

At any rate, the moral of this story, artists and artisans, is choose your titles carefully. Otherwise, they might come back to haunt you.

(Photos: Robin Robin Photography)

Are We Our Own Worst Enemies?

Earlier this year, I decided to send something to the We Love Your Books show that was to take place, this time around, in Milton Keynes. I'd already been in two previous ones. Each year a theme is set (last year's turned out to be a bit problematic—I will write about that in another post). The set topic this time was "Closure." For a long while I'd had a line running in my head that I knew needed to be turned into a book, and this was the time. A friend had said to me, after I'd told him about a traumatic part of my life, that "That's the sort of thing...it's like, closure is for books. It's not for a situation like that."

Unfortunately, by the time I started acting on my impulse, the deadline was growing close, and I was in the middle of getting ready to fly out of town for a medical appointment (not a sign that things are going well...). Other deadlines were looming, mayhem was erupting (but when doesn't it?)... But I decided I just had to do this. So, in a burst of inspiration, I laid out the pages for a case-bound book in InDesign, did up the covers, bound it...The thing was, I wasn't intending for it to actually be read. What I like about We Love Your Books is the emphasis on "altered and experimental." I glued and sculpted my book so that it never closes. The pages are permanently pushed up and glued into place. But in the midst of figuring this all out and gluing and sculpting, the pages that were to function as end pages wound up crooked and not evenly placed. I could sort of fudge it—it was, after all, meant to look like an open book, and so the pages weren't going to look straight. But I was mortified. If I'd had the time, I would've done it over. I anguished over it. Maybe I shouldn't send it....but I want to be in the show... I packed it up and sent it. The book itself had been somewhat therapeutic to make, in its way. I decided, given the topic of "closure," I was going to let this one go. And so it went into the mail. If the curators gasped in disgust when they unpacked it, they just wouldn't show it. But then I'd had sender's remorse. It just wasn't good enough. I'm embarrassing myself....

And so imagine my surprise when I got an email the other day from one of the curators. A bookbinding supply place had sponsored an award for the show, and here were the two winners plus six shortlisted pieces. And I was on the shortlist. 

Are we our own worst enemies?

Pictures of the show and opening were posted online.

Fairy Tales and Paper Cuttings

I've long had a soft spot for Hans Christian Andersen. He was a depressive who lived with very bad teeth at a time when dentistry wasn't exactly what it is now. He lived in constant pain. He never really fit in wherever he was, and didn't particularly care much for his home town. This wasn't someone who wrote cheery stories, by and large. He was also something of a visionary. He once wrote about how he imagined the world in the year 2000, when Americans will fly to Europe in great airships with wings. They will telegraph their hotel reservations ahead, and come with guide books that will tell them what to see. And flying will be such a fast mode of transportation that the airships will be crowded and the people will be able to come see all the sights in a week before flying home again. He wrote this in the mid 19th C.

But in addition to writing, he was an obsessive paper cutter. He also made collages out of scraps, some of which look as modern as a Schwitters. According to the Odense City Museum:

To Hans Christian Andersen paper was not meant to be media for the written word only. Paper—it seems—represented the basis for his imaginative expressing. Throughout his life Hans Christian Andersen was an addict to paper. He wrote on it, he drew on it—and he used it

to cut in. Like the ancient expression that the form and art was hidden in the stone, only to be revealed by the sculptor, the poet used his material—the paper—to engrave, or rather to carve out his ideas with ink. And more radically he used his unexpected monstrous scissors to cut out the most elegant figures. (Odense City Museum)

The museum site has some pictures of his scherrenschnitte-style papercuttings, as well as his famous collage/decoupage screen. I also found this charming little paper rocking chair. Delightful, no?

And just to end on an appropriately surreal note, during my searches I discovered that the Irish Museum of Modern Art once had an exhibit called Cut-outs and Cut-ups: Hans Christian Andersen and William Seward Burroughs (yes, that William Burroughs).

Candy Anyone?

Here's another one from the upcoming show. Actually, it's 40 blank notepads in a glass candy jar. Some are little sewn pamphlet affairs, and others are matchbooks stapled together. All have on the cover a scanned copy of a genuine pharmacy label from what looks to be about the 30s (?). They make for some fascinating reading. Over-the-counter arsenic anyone? How about some "Sedatole"? Seeing as Sedatole consisted of not much more than alcohol and codeine, I'm sure it did the trick.

My favorite, though, is the label for denatured alcohol, which is, we are warned, a "violent poison." It was meant "to be used for art, mechanical and burning purposes only." I'm trying to envision what sorts of art purposes I could use it for.

At any rate, the scans came out great. I'm being conceptual and calling this display Would You Like Some Candy?

For I Have Bound a Copy of Jeoffry...

Our book arts guild is having a show next month at an antiquarian and used bookstore, Eureka Books. It should be a wild mix of things. My contribution is going to include a bottle of Codex (see below), but I've also made a few flutter books and some notepads.

One of the flutter books is a copy of Jubilate Agno, or rather Fragment B of Jubilate Agno, better known as Christopher Smart's poem about his cat Jeoffry.

Jubilate Agno in its entirety was a long religious piece Smart composed while he was living in a private Georgian insane asylum called Mr. Potter's Madhouse.

Pictures of some of the other things for the show will be coming soon.