Printing

Oh, this is such a beautiful blog. I think I want to be a printer.



We were at John Rylands last Christmas and they had a demonstration of a huge old printing press. We all got to use it to make really beautiful pictures.


I think the process is just so great, even for the simple single-picture things like in the video below:



I love this video, it's interesting even aside from the subject matter, it's really old but it has a sort of pre-powerpoint section which made me smile:



The type of letterpress that I'm really interested in is this, with all the lovely coins and furniture etc:



I really really want to work here:



Or maybe here, where they even cast their own type:

Pottery Corner

I've just interviewed for a job at Pottery Corner in Chorlton. I've wanted to go in and paint a pot there for a while so I'd love to work there. It's just part time, which is good for me at the moment, since I'm still doing my dissertation.

Aside from that, I've finished the four scarves I'm putting in the John Rylands Library on Deansgate. I'll put photos of them on here as soon as the weather is nice enough for me to snap them in natural light.

Bewilderbliss and now on to other things

Bewilderbliss issue #2 is out now, after a lot of work, so now I'll be free to get back to the rest of my life. At the moment that seems to include being dragged by Lucy into falling in love with the L-Word, struggling to write my novel (took me all morning to do 1000 words, though I feel that they were good) and finally getting to do the felting to go into the John Rylands Deansgate giftshop.

I'm really pleased with how Bewilderbliss is going, issue #2 is turning out to be even better and more popular than issue #1. I even got to do an interview with Jackie Kay, who was great - really supportive of the project, she not only did the interview, but she set the theme of the issue and put a poem into it.

I think that now I just want to get away for a while, at the moment there's always some e-mail to write or more usually something to feel guilty for not having got done yet. I think that soon I will go spend some time in a caravan in the woods and take nothing but a pen and paper, and books obviously, because other people write better than me. I have just started Deliverance and it is really good, but I think I'll have to get it done before I go to the woods, since I dont want a repeat of the fear I had last time when I was there and read The Road. I think that when you stay alone in a field enclosed by woods where nobody can hear you scream, you really dont want to read anything scary.

Another treasury

I've been busy making some new earrings to be sold in the John Rylands giftshop. But in the meantime, things are ticking along on Etsy. I've been included in another treasury. It's full of beautiful cobalt blue items. Have a look.

I have been posting, but not here

This is not an excuse for neglecting my blog, but I have been posting to the new blog I have with the beautiful girl.

Though, in fact, I'm a post behind on that as well. But I have got in 5 posts this week, which is uncommonly good for me, and quite distracting.


As for other things I've been doing (in a list because it's that sort of mood):

I learned how to do some Scottish country dancing. It was at a party, I was drunk and won't be doing it again. I was not good.

I've been asked to sell my felt in the lovely gift shop of John Rylands Deansgate.

I've made a big to-do list to stave off the mental breakdown that came scarily close earlier this week.

I took a break from the excessively long We were the Mulvaneys to read I, Robot. The second of those was better, but did have some really really awful snippets of prose sometimes. It's interesting that even though it's incredibly dated (since lots of the 'future' is now in the past and we still don't have robots with positronic brains of hyperdrives to travel to the far reaches of the universe) lots of the issues it raises are still very interesting. I didn't realise it would be lots of short stories, but I liked it, I enjoyed the suspense of each story and I loved the ending of the whole thing. Read it.

I've cleaned the entire house. Don't know what's come over me. My dad's away and I tend to let the house get really messy when he is, but not this time. Weird.

I've booked my tickets to get to London for the Elaine Feinstein book launch next week.

I've been reading lots of stuff in the archives at John Rylands. I've been reading up on the past of Madagascar, there were lots of English missionaries there is the first half of the 19th century. They had some very funny ideas about primitive natives. But they are often useful as well - it's good to see the changes in the country, makes me feel a part of it and hopefully it will help me figure out the plot points missing in my novel.

Penelope Shuttle

I'm still working away in the archives. I'm really loving it, especially today when I was cataloguing lots of issues of Elaine Feinstein's magazine from the 50s/60s: Prospect. It is my new favourite magazine, it had such great stuff in it, I wish I lived in a time full of that sort of stuff.

In the same box as the copies of Prospect was an issue of another magazine of the same era called Bananas. It's quite a rubbish name I think, and very misleading in that way because the work it contains is powerful and incredible. Bananas is one of those things that makes me entirely rethink the way I connect people in my head - associate editors include Elaine Feinstein, JG Ballard and Angela Carter. I can't quite imagine how they came to work on the same magazine.

The issue of Bananas I was reading was 'The Russian Issue', which contained too much good stuff to mention. I will just describe two absolutely great things I found in it:
- Marina Tsvetaeva's letters to Pasternak. He famously lost her letters (which were part of a rather unusual correspondence between those two and Rilke, none of whom really knew each other in real life, but they were very intimate in their letters), but thankfully she had drafts of them. The few letters that were in Bananas were beautiful and have made me desperate to get the full book of their correspondence. One part was just so wonderful I had to write it down:
'My dear Pasternak,
My favourite mode of communication is in the world beyond: a dream, to see somebody in a dream.
My second favourite is correspondence. A letter is, as a form of other-worldly communication, less perfect than a dream, but the rules are the same.
Neither can be ordered. We dream and write not as we want, but as they want. A letter has to be written; a dream has to be seen.'
She goes on to say that for this reason he should never feel guilty if he's slow in his response.
- A story by Ted Hughes (which seemed to have nothing to do with the Russian theme of the issue) called 'The Head'. It starts out with a line about his mad wife and I thought it was autobiographical, but then it went on to describe a trip to the woods with very scary results that are definitely fictional. It's not the sort of story I'd go looking for, but I loved it, perhaps even more because it surprised me and sucked me in despite me not really looking for it.

The other wonderful thing that happened today was that Penelope Shuttle came to visit the library. Strangely enough, I had just been reading an advert for a novel of hers in the issue of Bananas that dated all the way back to 1978. She had heard about the sonnet exhibition and wanted to visit it. And since she is a friend of Elaine Feinstein's, Stella thought that she might be interested in seeing the archive I'm working on and talking to me about it. Penelope Shuttle has the most wonderful presence, and it was almost like a part of the archive had gathered up its strength and appeared in corporeal form. It wasn't just that which was pleasing though, meeting Penelope Shuttle was wonderful in itself. She was so genuinely interested in everything I was doing and she asked just the right questions to make me feel comfortable and knowledgeable.

I can't believe that my work with the archive finishes on Friday. I really don't want to leave. Though now I'm a reader at the John Rylands I don't really have to leave, I can come and go as I please and read all the lovely archives every single day.


Oh, also, in my researchy travels I found this interesting interview with Elaine Feinstein conducted by Michael Schmidt, if you want to know more about Elaine. If you want to know more about Michael then you'll have to google him because he has just done too much interesting stuff to mention.

Tired eyes and book-smelling fingers

I spent my first day in the archives of the John Rylands today. I got to go into the super-secret store room where I passed stacks tantalisingly labelled Victor Hugo, LP Hartley, Carcanet....and on and on it went. The Elaine Feinstein section contains 174 boxes. Today I catalogued about half of one of them!
That half of one box contained letters from Beckett, Ginsberg, Pinter, Octavio Paz, Lawrence Ferlinghetti.......

It's harder than you'd think to read other people's letters, it's like listening to half a conversation. It was so rewarding though. I feel totally inspired. Also, I was the only person in the library reading room laughing - I felt awful for disturbing people but Ginsberg was to blame. His letters are crazy wonderful.


Finally, I reviewed one of the Orange Prize shortlisted books recently. My review is on the Manchester Review website.

Library-geek

I went to the John Rylands library last week to organise my work with the Elaine Feinstein archive. It was really exciting and I feel like I can do something good with it. I don't know why I never thought of archiving before, it involves organising papers and making notes and lots of stationary. Those are all things I secretly love. I'm also really interested in how people create archives and how different it is to creating a scientific taxonomy.
I'll be writing a lot more about this, and hopefully a lot more clearly, once I've seen the part of the archive I'm working on tomorrow.

So now I feel much more confident about that I've got something else to be nervous of. I'm interviewing Jackie Kay on Thursday for Bewilderbliss. Jackie is really supportive of new writers - she's even written a piece for the magazine and set the theme of the upcoming issue. I've met her a few times before and I know she's really nice, but I'm still worried that I'll have nothing interesting to ask her. Maybe I'll have to have a dig in the archives to see if I can find anything relevant that will make me seem knowledgeable.