Four of a Kind... Pages

I thot I'd try posting pages from my journal for awhile, since some people seem to find them interesting. They may find it less interesting if I post more, because, frankly I tend to publish only the pages that seem interesting, and now you'll get all the pages and they may seem boring. But, hey, I can stop anytime. So here goes!

I've just started a new journal, as you know. Here are the first few pages...

 

So, there you go... Three and a half images. I scanned them at slightly different resolutions. Some people like to just get the general look of things, others want to read the journal closely. 

I'll figure it out!

Ephemera...

I love ephemera! All those weird little things that one finds on the street or just in the course of everyday living... Stamps, playing cards, business cards, photos, tea envelopes, chocolate wrappers, theater tickets, flyers... The list is endless!

Over the years it's all found its way into my journals and has caused the 'V' effect I mention in Saturday's posting about Transformer... The way I get around this in my hand bound journals is to bind in a waste signature of a single folded sheet of cover stock every other signature. I use cover stock cut to the same sheet size as my regular pages, but when I come to them, I cut them out. They hold space at the spine of the book for all the stuff I paste in. Here's one from Crazily Paisley:

You can see the ephemera: a card, a tea envelope, and, tucked into it, a chocolate wrapper from a Bliss chocolate. Here's a side view:

This is just cheap card stock. The one here is an off-white because that's what I had on hand when I bound the book. Since the paper I use, Schiller, is a white-white, I usually try to use white cover stock, but sometimes I'm in a hurry to bind a journal and the paper store isn't open.

Another thing to notice is what's holding the playing card into the book: it's an address label. I carry a bunch of these in the back pocket/envelope in my book, so I can stick stuff into the book right away and not have it fall out. If I think I want to attach it in some other way, I'll put it in the pocket/envelope until I get home and have time to deal with it. Here's a picture of the pocket from Four of a Kind:

When I print the endsheets, like I did for this journal, it's easy to make the pocket match the papers... You just print another and cut the pocket/envelope out of that.

These latest bindings all have either eight or nine signatures of paper pages - four sheets to a signature... Which, when folded and thought of front and back, mean sixteen pages to a signature. Right now a journal this size is lasting me a bit over two months. My old, larger journals usually lasted for six months or more! Looks like I'm going to need to build more shelves to house all these guys!

A few pages from Flying Cloud...

Roz wrote a comment about wanting to see more of the inside pages of my journal. Most of them are visually fairly boring, I think... A tidge of calligraphy, a spot of color, but mostly blah blah about my life and the universe. Here is a fairly typical page:

I always get excited about sunshine. I like numbers. I write about other people's lives as well as my own... Sometimes carefully, in code, but not usually, so I have to block the names out here.

I don't normally use background color on my pages, but Ricë gave me some Peerless Water Colors a few years back and I love their saturation and purity. While we were having some dreary days, I painted several pages to give myself some color. Here are ten pages in a row:

 

 I write about dreams frequently, if the imagery interests me...

I love japonica and one of the colors in the Peerless set is Japonica Red... Hence my feeble attempts to draw a japonica blossom.

White Flower Oil, mentioned in the pages above is a Chinese analgesic balm that saved my body this winter. I tore my rotator cuff (muscle only!) on the tree lot this year, and it helped get me over the pain....

 Ricë and I talk on the phone about all sorts of things. We noted that the sun rises later in Midland than it does here in Austin. They are way west and a bit north of us, which accounts for that, but we had fun trying to be mathematical and figure out what was due to what...

There's a lot of discussion about money in these pages. That's mostly because it was tax time - property and state sales tax - and I had to come up with a chunk of change.

Here's another page with some typical illustrations for my journal in general...

 

You can't really tell it from the picture but the little swirls and the centers of the letters have marks done with glitter pens. I'm sure if medieval monks had had glitter pens available, they would have used them. They are just plain fun...

ps. I like glitter crayons, too!

The last three journals...

The last three journals: Crazily Paisley, Flying Cloud, Four of a Kind...

OK, so it's been forever since I've posted. Forever enough that I've got three journals you haven't seen. These are a new thing for me, in a way, yet in another way, they're a very old thing... They are small journals, bound with artists canvas, much like the journal that got me started into bookbinding... Transformer, from 1993. This journal...

The very plain Transformer, which never got painted...

I bought it at Whole Foods and loved it... I never painted it, though, and it started to come out of its covers after being carried in my backpack for seven months. These photos show some of the damage:

The one on the left shows the split at the hinge. The reason it split is visible in the next photo... I pack too much ephemera into my journals, which causes that 'V' effect. It's kind of like your journal has gained ten pounds and it's still trying to fit into its favorite shirt, its cover... Because I still like to paste ephemera into my journals, I now make journals to accommodate the extra 'weight.'

Here's the first of the new journals. They're all split-board bindings. The covers are all painted before the boards are covered.

Crazily Paisley!

This was an experiment in using day glow paints, which is why the book is glowing. I airbrushed the background, the green part. The endsheets are also day glow, just stripes painted on paper.

Rear endsheet, showing pocket....

Endsheets of Flying Cloud, that's her, the clipper ship.

The next journal was Flying Cloud... I've always loved clouds... My Dad and I used to stop when we saw a really cool cloud when I was a kid. More recently, when we went to the beach, we stayed at a house that had a set of coffee mugs with pictures of clipper ships on them, among them the Cutty Sark and Flying Cloud. Flying Cloud was the fastest clipper ship in her day, and held the speed record for traveling from New York City to San Francisco for 136 years. Even more amazing was that the navigator on that record-breaking sail was a woman, Eleanor Creesy, wife of the Captain, Josiah Perkins Creesy.

My latest journal is Four of a Kind. I found a ten of hearts on the ground on one of my recent walks and got fascinated with doing images of cards. Ah ha, you're probably saying, there are only THREE cards on the cover. The fourth card is on the endsheets... I used a beaded headband on this cover. I think they're really lovely.

I'm really having fun with the hand painted covers. The journals are pretty tiny for me. I'm doing the pages nine out of sheets of Hahnemühle Schiller: each sheet is about 11 1/2 x 8 1/8 inches, more or less, so the page is half that. I have trouble writing in columns in these journals... But I do it anyway.

Pages from Flying Cloud...

New Journal!

I started a new journal today! Actually, I don't think any of y'all have seen my old journal, since I started it when I was at the cabin this summer, and I don't have any 'real' internet access there. OK, I do have dial up, but you just can't upload files of any size using dial up these days; it times out too quickly.

I made this book cloth by painting cotton fabric.

First off, here's a picture of my last journal, which ended up being titled Cap'n Midnight's Museum for Exceptionally Intelligent People. The title came from an essay in Joseph Mitchell's Up in the Old Hotel about Captain Charlie's Museum for Intelligent People. I don't remember which story it is; you should just read them all; they're wonderful. It had one less signature than I usually put in my journals: eight instead of nine. I'm trying to downsize and lighten my journals, once again, to lighten the load that I carry.

A few of my favorite things: Kenny inspecting my journal, and my cup of coffee.

Here's the new journal, titled Crazily Paisley. It's the brightest journal I've ever had, and possibly the brightest one ever made. It glows in the dark... Well, it glows in the dark if you have a black light, anyway. I was hoping to marble end sheets for it with day glo paint, but they were just too transparent to really see, except with the black light. I ended up painting stripes on paper instead.

Yipes, stripes!

This journal is even smaller than Cap'n Midnight whose pages were 7 1/8" wide by 8 1/2" high. Crazily's pages are 77% smaller: only 5 3/4" wide by 8 1/8" high. It's very hard to get two columns in unless I concentrate on writing really tiny.

To protect this journal - and the last - I'm carrying them in a plastic baggie in my purse. (Thanks, Roz, for that tip!) I feel somewhat odd about this, because the idea is to make semi-indestructible journals. There is some kind of a varnish you can put over day glo paint to protect it, but for now I'll use the plastic baggie. As you can see from looking at the top of the pages, there are two sheets of black cover stock in the journal for me to color on. I like coloring on them with my NeoColor watercolor crayons. Here's a paean to Pierce Bros Fogbuster coffee and non-electric coffee grinders.

The electricity went out at the cabin for over a week this summer after Hurricane Irene swept through the Catskills. I can live without lights - especially if I have one of those little headlamps - but I cannot live without coffee. So I had to beg and borrow a hand crank grinder. Then I found one at the flea market in Woodstock, a real beauty and capable of grinding for espresso makers, little Bialetti Mokas.

I'm typing this from my new iPhone...

When the iPhone first came out, I held off from buying one for several months... At least three, anyway. I lost my cell phone in May, right as I was getting ready to go to the beach with my Dad and his wife on what I called the 'Fogies Trips.' Dad and Ginger and two other couples - and sometimes a couple of other people - would rent a house on Bald Head Island for a week. Dad was in a wheelchair and needed help doing stuff, so I would go along as his 'nurse.'

I was really upset when I lost that phone. I knew the iPhone was being launched in another month and I really wanted one even though I'd never seen one. No one had. All I really knew was that they played music. I mentioned this when I went to the AT&T store, and the lady who helped me said that lots of phones played music, and wasn't I just being silly to want an overpriced phone. Who knew then what an iPhone really was?

I happily bought a Razr phone, which played music and connected to the web and did email, if you didn't mind hitting a key three times to get a 'C.' So, when the iPhone launched at the end of June, I put my hands over my eyes and went around saying 'Nyah, Nyah, Nyah, Nyah, Nyah," like a PC person.

It wasn't until I went over to my friend Clark's house right before I left for the cabin that summer that I saw my first iPhone. I played with his phone the whole time I was there and drove from his house to the AT&T store and bought one. It was a completely different animal from the Razr... Completely! Evolutionary speaking, it was a new species, or maybe even a kingdom!

My first iPhone's screen cracked after a year, but it still worked. I got the 3G eventually. Im not slavish about it. I buy the new one when my old one craps out and I'm eligible for an upgrade. I didn't get the 4 when it came out because of reception issues. I was eligible, but I waited. And then, two weeks ago, it rained.

Now if you don't live in Texas, you may not know that it hasn't really rained here in a really, really long time. Months, really. Johnson grass was growing in my backyard and the soil was too dry to pull it out. So the morning after it rained I went out into the dewy grass with my cup of tea and my iPhone to weed. Because the ground was really wet, I didn't want to place my phone down on it, so I very carefully balanced it atop my mug of tea. Ahhh, I hear you gasp. Sadly, you are so prescient. Indeed, my iPhone dunked itself in that mug of tea.

I tried to order the new iPhone online, but the wait was already backed up. Since I still had my old Razr, I went straight over to AT&T and had a SIM card put in it so I'd have a phone for the duration. I mentioned the long wait to the AT&T kid and he said, "Oh we'll have plenty of them in stock; just come to the store on Friday the 14th!" And that's where I was just after 9am Friday... In line at the AT&T store.

It only took me an hour to get inside. There I talked with the Director of Sales for Central Texas. I told him and my sales rep the tea story. They thot it was very funny. I said, "That's nothing; my daughter dropped hers in a White Russian!" (Laugh.) "Then she got her replacement phone and dropped IT in a White Russian. That's when I told here she had a drinking problem!"

So I have the new phone. Frankly, I wasn't expecting much, so I've been completely blown away by it... Sure, sure the camera is awesome (or at least more awesome than the old one.) It's new and shiny. But it was the feature most hyped - Siri - that I expected the least out of. I had the Siri app on my old phone and it was coolish, but not integrated into the phone itself. Now it is and...

It has a sense of humor!

The folks at Apple took the time to think about and program these things into their personal assistant. They anticipate their audience.

It's not that I'm smart, or even that my phone is smart.

It's that the people who make my phone are smart...

RIP Steve Jobs

If it weren't for Steve Jobs, you wouldn't be reading this, because I wouldn't be typing this.

Many, many years ago, perhaps back in 1970, I took a computer course in college. It was actually a 'computer graphics' course. That's in those little quote marks because to do computer graphics in the early 70s you first had to learn how to program. So I was also taking a course in Fortran and flow charting as well. I can't remember if they were the same course; I think they were, but it was very, very long ago, and it was very, very painful.

The object of the computer graphics course was to write a program that drew a little tetrahedron - on a CalComp plotter - that could send the tetrahedron spinning across an XY grid. This would be drawn in black on that white weird paper with the perforated edges. Not only did one have to write the program - which frankly was beyond me - but one had to punch the little cards that were used to tell an IBM 360 to tell the CalComp plotter what do do. It involved hundreds of cards, at least in my memory.

I not only proved completely incapable of writing the program, I couldn't, for the life of me, punch the damn cards right. This was not surprising, really, as I didn't know how to type at the time. It took every ounce of conniving, wheedling and ingenuity I possessed to copy someone else's cards and take them over to the basement of some science building where the 360 resided. And there, walking in the through the doors, I bumped into somebody. My cards flew into the air and came down like leaves around me. Lovely disordered leaves, floating all about, unnumbered and so impossible to reorder. I had to borrow another student's cards and run them to get the little drawing of the little tetrahedron poised on one edge of the little grid getting ready to jump forward into the future.

This was NOT cheating, at least not in our department, the Design Department. We were being trained to be generalists who interacted among specialists, and I, along with several others in the CG class had quickly figured out that computer graphics was a specialty... And not one any of us were going to be taking up anytime soon. As generalists, it was our job to find out who could do things and to get them to do it, so running someone else's cards was a perfectly viable solution to the problem. A few people in the class were able to write to the program. Many of us could not, and so we formed a club - the only club I officially belonged to in college - called the Fraternal Order of Computer Fuck Ups, better known by its acronym: FOCFU (pronounced FOCK PHU). We took a solemn vow not to touch a computer until they could talk to us.

All thru the 70s, I waited.

In the early 80s, I waited.

I had told the FOCFU story to many people, people who seemed to be able to use IBMS to do things, but, even though doing things no longer involved those stupid cards, it still involved programming... Or at least writing 'commands,' which is not my style.

It's not like I was holding my breath or anything. Frankly those computers, with their black screens with the green or blue or amber monospaced fonts didn't interest me in the least. They didn't SPEAK to me.

Then one day, I think in the spring of 1984, my friend John Salik came over to my house. He said, "I have something for you. I have a computer that will talk to you." And he put a Mac 128 down on the table and started to leave the room. "But, John," I said, "I don't know how to use it!"

"You'll figure it out," he said and walked out of the house.

How hard could it be? It only had one button on it. I pushed the button and a black and white, low-res screen came up with two icons on it: a word program and a paint program. Of course at the time, it wasn't a low-res screen, and I didn't know those little things were icons. I used the weird little thingy attached to it by a cord to move a pointer around the screen - the mouse, as I later found out it was called - and touched one of the little icons.

When John came back an hour later I was painting happily away.

A computer had talked to me. Thank you, Steve Jobs.

The first computer I got was not that one, but a used Mac 512. The second was the only non-Apple computer I've ever had, an Atari Mega STE. It was great, actually, because it could switch between Apple and Mac platforms and had a great desktop publishing program. The next computer I got was the iMac in August of 1998, one of the Bondi Blue ones. I got the iMac G3 in tangerine a year later, and have been hooked ever since.

They talk to me. In my own language.

No punch cards, all love.