Category: Uncategorized

You know you’ve been working with digital imagery for too long when you look up at the moon and think “I can see some banding around that. It’s over-compressed.” Then you realise, no this is life, not a JPEG.

And this from the “Wow, that’s really not what I read at first” department.

So this afternoon, in-between sorting out some Strategic Coach projects, I picked up supplies for the bookbinding class and outlined what I’m going to teach (their heads will be ‘sploding from the information). And my staples were delivered — though an hour and a half after they were supposed to be. I hate waiting for delivery stuff. It starts with “Should I get in the shower?” and peaks at “#%$!! I want to get out of the house and do some work!”

Anyway, the staples fit in my enormous magical stapler, and with this new method I bound the first ten chapters of Finitude in, seriously, less than five minutes. It’s amazingly fast, much more durable, and even cleaner-looking than the other method. (The other two novels, though, are just too fat to bind this way.) This is more or less the same method used by the guy in this YouTube video.

So I’ve decided that on Sunday a) I’m going to teach three different types of binding, and b) for the reading session I’m going to read the first section of the first chapter of my new book. This is what authors are supposed to do, isn’t it?, read a sneak-peek from their newest thing while pimping the book you can buy now.

Then this evening I went to the opening of The Edinburgh Independent Radical Book Fair, where I heard a pair of women from the Middle East talk about their experiences of the place as women. I know, it sounds heavy and dreary, but it was wonderful. One of them, Haifa Zangana, is from Iraq. She is the first person I’ve seen in life since the occupation who’s from there, and there’s something chilling about it, imagining this person subjected to that, but she’s just this smart, lit-up woman. She was ‘in conversation with’, or basically interviewing onstage, writer Nawal El Saadawi. Saadawi was like a grandmother from a Latin American magical realist novel, except she’s from Egypt. She just glowed, and spoke with joy, passion, and conviction. Yet she’s been persecuted, banned, and threatened for years because of her writings.

The only part where she lost me was when she drifted (in response to a question from an audience member) from female genital mutilation to circumcision. Now, sure, I agree that it’s a strange thing to do, and I laughed very loud, turning heads, when she mentioned the bit in the Old Testament in which God promises Abraham a patch of land in exchange for his children being circumcised; “I don’t get the connection,” Saadawi said.

Anyway, she was a doctor, she never performed them, always thought it bizarre. Fair enough. And I daresay it is a weird practice that’s not justifiable in a modern world. (She took issue with it as a defense against AIDS in Africa, which I don’t know about. I’ve read about epithelial cells and blah blah blah, but I don’t know enough about the science and it’s not my area.)

Where the discussion loses me is when people — especially people without a penis — start talking about how horribly mangled and psychologically wounded the circumcised are, as well as being completely sexually dysfunctional because they can’t possibly feel anything with a member that’s so ruined as to be insensate (I exaggerate — but not by much).

You know what? I’m fine. My wang and I get along fine. In fact, it works so well it’s a constant source of distraction. It’s amazing I’ve accomplished anything in this life.

The only psychologically-damaging thing is having strangers talk with revulsion about some part of your anatomy. It’s something that, as a homophile, I’m very careful not to do about women. Too many gay men say things like “Eeeew, minge!” Really, it’s totally out of my experience, and how hateful to talk about my sister humans that way. No, I don’t want to have sex with them, but that’s about me. How horrible to characterise some part of another’s body that way. What’s especially weird is when it comes from people who are supposedly humanitarian and politically, empathetically switched-on. Say whatever you want about the future of this medical practice, but keep my willy out of it!

Anyway, it was just two bad minutes or so out of an otherwise brilliant talk. It’s just a topic that, ahem, arises from time to time over here (not so much in Canada, where just about my whole generation is “cut”), and it always seems to be the un-cut or penisless who are most adamant about it.

Is it bad form, just before you’re about to make a public appearance, to spend 4/5 of a blog post talking about your “junk”?

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I have a lot on the go this week — the two biggest things (in addition to my paid work) are studying for my “Life in the UK” immigration test next week and preparing to give this bookbinding lesson on Sunday.

But I’ve forbidden myself to use the word “busy”. There’s kind of a cult of busy, as if being busy has a virtue to it, and you don’t even have to produce anything to be busy. It’s just a way to keep people at arm’s length and justify worrying.

No, instead I’m up to a lot this week, but there’s time for it all. The trick is just for me to do one thing at a time, and not get caught in the mental rapids of thinking ahead to all the other things. No, just this thing, now.

I’ve got a big stapler. It arrived yesterday. But it came without staples. Ugh. So I ordered some, and those should arrive this morning.

“Procedural Living”, I shall call this — which is, I suppose, like saying “Falling forward while moving your feet in succession” when you mean “walking”.

This really belongs as an addendum to the introductory “Do-It-Yourself Book Press” article I wrote for No Media Kings, but for some reason I’m having trouble submitting forms on that site. So, hopefully people looking there will end up seeing this here:

I’m about to give a bookbinding tutorial next weekend, so I’ve gone back and revisited my process and looked up some info, so here’s some updated material.

First, a great YouTube video of one fella’s perfect-binding process (using low-budget materials, but with very nice results):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcwwQDIlCKE

And now I must bow before a far superior effort and move out of frame: I found a website offering a book about perfect-binding at home, and it contains nearly everything I’ve learned over the past two years and then some. Three caveats about it, before I give you the URL:

1. It’s a commercial product and costs $49. But I would very happily pay that to go back in time and hand that to myself, sparing me from a lot of trial and error. As it is, I picked up a few new ideas from it. So it’s $49 for an e-book, but I still think it’s well worth it.
2. The website is one of those hellacious late-night infomercial-types that uses many fonts, many large fonts, and promises you absolute salvation through “super-secret reports”. You will feel as if you had a bath in Coca-Cola after looking at it.
3. For such an incredibly detailed and useful guide (the author even includes ISO and North American paper sizes for every example), I’m amazed that no one spent half an hour grammar- and spell-checking the thing. As someone who writes copy for a living, I had to keep suspending judgment to accept that the content was still of excellent quality.

Okay, here’s the site: Easy Bookbinding.

Finally, for my self-publishing friends in the UK, here are some pieces of information about officially registering your book:

• Where do I get my ISBN?
  http://www.nbdrs.com/isbn_sernew.htm
• Where do I get my CIP data? (The Cataloguing-in-Publication information for the inside of your book.)
  http://www.bl.uk/services/bibliographic/cip.html
• Facts about legal deposit (the National Library requests that all UK publishers submit one copy of their work for archiving):
  http://www.bl.uk/about/policies/legaldeposit.html

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I want to focus inwardly lately. I’m deleting all the RSS news feeds I usually follow, and just sticking with the ones by my friends and the ones that regularly contain inspiring ideas.

I’m sick of the news. I do feel like I should stay connected with the Scottish news, but it’s done so badly. Every day, the same few story templates are used over and over:

• Crazed motorist hits man/mother and child.
• Dog bites man/boy.
• Man/boy hurts dog.
• Man kills wife.
• Nurse (policeman, other trusted figure) kills unsuspecting client.
• Innocent person mugged/knifed/shot/abducted while minding his/her own business. If it’s a child, they will be referred to familiarly (“Little Rudy”, “Little Rebecca”) and be turned into a constantly-visited media cash cow until they recover/are found/die.
• Government has new plan that will make life much better.
• Government plan fails, costs taxpayers millions/billions.
• War in far-off place gets worse. “My son just came back in a box.” We should never make this mistake again.
• Far-off place is acting up and really asking for it.

And always this template is applied with the suggestion that this is some alarming new trend, when this is historically, statistically untrue.

Meanwhile, I’m up to chapter ten of my novel and am completely enamoured of the world I’m exploring in my imagination — not because it’s a nice place, because it’s not particularly, but because I’m constantly amazed that anything I need for the book, anything I might hope to find, is already in there.

I find myself focusing on books, movies, and ideas with fantastic themes — and they’re out there to be found right now. Maybe this is a reaction to how badly the world sucks at the moment… That is, as a story we’re telling ourselves through the collective apparatus that is our media.

I went to see the limp remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers the other night. It’s pretty bad when the world the invading aliens make seems better than the brutal “normal” state the characters are fighting to restore because “this is what makes us human”. I kept thinking, “Nicole, honey, just go to sleep. The aliens are right.”

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p>Tonight I worked on the bookbinding tutorial I’m presenting on the 28th. While gathering ideas, I think I may have discovered the next advancement in my own process. Last year I was surprised by the hunger for this material, so this year I hope to give away even more useful ideas to help people publish themselves. I want to make more aliens.

Since I’ve been critical of the city in the past for being behind the times in terms of waste disposal, let me now be equally congratulatory: In the past year, the City Council has started introducing great programs like kerbside recycling collection. There were still some things we had to walk quite a ways to get rid of, but the other day Patrick noticed that the city has just put packaging and paper recycling bins out on the bridge near our house. Yay!

~

This afternoon, after I’d finished my Strategic Coach writing, I had my dinner at the mosque kitchen in town (mmm, curried chickpea and goopy spinach on rice), then I paid a visit to the Museum of Scotland. I’m working on Chapter Ten of Finitude and am gathering ideas, and, as I suspected, the museum was a great resource for inspiration.

While I was there, I met this guy, who is apparently a protector-god of books and museums (saving them from fire, bugs, and other such destruction). It seemed appropriate to include him here:

This book is taking me into unfamiliar territory. It’s scary, but exciting. The more I challenge my subconscious to provide me with creative material, the more I find is waiting there inside me.

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“The Monster” — a duplicator used to print the poetry magazine Migrant.

I tucked into writing Chapter Nine over the weekend, and I have the day off today for Canadian Thanksgiving, so I’m heading out to finish it off now.

I also went to a small book fair at the Scottish Poetry Library on Saturday. It was great to see all these little operations with their various self-published books, which ranged from tiny, thread-bound pamphlets to big blocks bound between pieces of wood.
One speaker, Duncan Glen, talked about his history as a publisher, working with various methods from handset letterpress to gestetners, offset litho… If there was a way to print, he tried it, getting covered in jellied inks in the process. Much of the Scots poet Hugh McDiarmid’s work is known because Duncan put it out there.

I got up the nerve to show another audience member one of my books after he mentioned that he’s been doing book designs for major publishers for years. He loved it, and complimented me on my typography, the cover, and even the weight and dimensions of it. (This was especially gratifying in a twisted way because he now does cover designs for a local press that rejected my manuscript; actually, they didn’t just reject it, they sent back the hand-bound partial manuscript package I made with some kind of accounting notes scribbled on it. But had they not rejected it, my skills would never have evolved to the point of being able to make these perfect-bound books myself.

He encouraged me to show the speaker one of my books. I hestitated, thinking he might feel the ease of this new-fangled computer design was an abomination. But no, he was astounded that I could do such a thing at home. He, too, commented on my typography, the cover, and the format, saying it was a real quality product. That was a real boost.

When I attended the show two years ago, I showed one of my early efforts (the aforementioned partial manuscript package, which had a tear-off response card, a tiny envelope for postage, etc. incorporated into it) to a local book artist, and she tore into it, telling me how I got the warp of the cover-boards wrong, this was off, that wasn’t right, and what I should do is take her £800 weekend bookbinding course.

This year, I left the show having impressed venerable, award-winning book designers, and feeling like I should be a presenter, not an audience member — if these publishers, let alone the attendees, don’t know that it’s possible to reach this level with a DIY publishing effort. I swear, as soon as I finish this next book, I’m going to grab the self-promotion steer by the horns and finally learn how to do it once and for all.

In this vein, let me mention that I’m doing another presentation at this year’s Radical Book Fair. Here are the details:

Want to Publish Your Own Book? with HAMISH MACDONALD at the 11th Edinburgh Independent Radical Book Fair

Writer and micropress publisher HAMISH MACDONALD takes you through the basics of producing books from home — not sending out manuscripts or navigating print-on-demand websites, but truly making your own books.

By the end of the session, you will have made a perfect-bound book and gained the know-how to put yourself into print without spending lots of money or asking anyone for permission!

• Sunday 28 October 2007 at 3.00PM

• Venue
  Out of the Blue Drill Hall
  30-38 Dalmeny Street
  Edinburgh
  EH6 8RG
  Scotland
  UK

• Admission Free! Donations welcome!

• All Welcome!

• Cafe and Bar Open!

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I spent much of last week up in Guisachen, near Inverness. FlatmatePatrick had been up there for nearly a fortnight, and I’d had my own hermit-holiday just having the house to myself, poring over books, making books, and letting all sorts of crazy mental winds in through the window. Very good for me.

But my birthday was this weekend, and it seemed only fitting to go up and join the Friday Gang for a few days’ R&R in the Scottish countryside. Chris and I took the train, which was a lovely ride, and it was great to have time to chat and read. I’m growing increasingly fond of trains and less happy about the rude processing air travel has become.

Chris and Liz took lots of pictures, which I’m sure they’ll post soon. This is good because they like taking pictures and are way better at it than I am, so not only do I get the pleasure of their company, my travels also end up being well-documented.

What did we do? Eat, drink, sleep, read, wander, drive. The best beer ever is made up there, and the Highland countryside there is a beautiful expanse of rolling greenery and heather. Between that backdrop and the few little towns we visited, with their wee stone buildings, lock-system waterways, beachfronts, and boiled candy shops, I felt like I’d spent some good time being where I am. It gets so easy sometimes to just operate in the rut of everyday interactions and business, but whenever I have these getaways, or even just walk through Edinburgh with my eyes open, I’m reminded how much I love it here.

Yesterday we went to a community called Findhorn. Patrick mentioned it in passing, and I was curious to see this little “sustainable” village. I expected grubby caravans and hippy lean-tos, but instead got enchanted by the place, where people with sharp minds, free spirits, and deep commitments have come together to create the kind of world they’d like to see.

The others indulged me and we went on a tour — when the guide said it would last about an hour, I was conscious of the travel-time that would use up, but we went, and pretty soon I think we were all intrigued by the project.

The houses are remarkable, for starters. They’re all designed to be as efficient as possible, but instead of being a compromise, many of them use their special features to ask questions about what a home is supposed to be and answer them in charming and inviting ways. We visited two homes on the tour.

One was actually made from an old whisky vat, a huge wooden barrel held together by an iron band. Its occupant was an elderly woman in a chair who was recuperating from an illness, but held court with a charming wit and warmth from her seat while we all tromped through her house with our shoes in our hands. The house was on four levels, arranged like a nautilus shell. Out back was a garden with woven wooden fences; a little tree teemed with apples, flowers grew in corners here and there, the sky opened to reveal the first stretch of blue in days, and while I watched a red and black butterfly with shiny silken wings landed on a bush. The overall effect was surreal, super-natural, like a scene out of Tolkien — a setting tended to by creatures aligned with nature, part of it, instead of standing in opposition to it.

The next house belonged to a watercolourist. It was more modern, with lots of big windows looking out on fields, hills, and the sea beyond. It was bright and cozy and practical, and apparently very efficient to live in, but the real inspiration here was this man’s work: he took average scenes from around Scotland and rendered them in washes and strokes, injecting bright gradients of colour that you know aren’t there in reality, yet somehow capture the life in these scenes.

The arts are a central feature in the community, which naturally appealed to me. The theatre, which seems to be a hub for many of their activities, is a beautifully-designed space with a honeycomb wooden roof (great acoustics!) and lovely painted backdrops with vague, rough swatches of colour that unmistakeably capture the Scottish countryside — one with heathery browns and purples, the other with beach-sky colours.

The tour concluded with a visit to “The Living Machine” — Findhorn’s answer to the sewage generated by its inhabitants. We walked into the greenhouse and I remembered a cub-scout trip I once took to the Windsor, Ontario water treatment plant, which was a subterrainian journey to see enormous, stinking vats with central stirring mechanisms clotted with all manner of unspeakable things. This greenhouse, by contrast, had a hot, close atmosphere, but just smelled of plants and heavy swamp life. A series of big green plastic drums about eight feet across sprouted ferns, shoots, flowers, and tiny surface greenery. Each handled a different stage of the filtering process, and by the last vat the water was completely uncontaminated, comparable to city bath-water.

Everything about the place spoke of a committed listening, as opposed to the imposition of will. The design of the homes, the workings of the input (food, energy) and output (creative products, waste) is all inspired by patterns in nature. In chatting to our guide afterward, I got a deep sense of the practical difference it makes to operate this way, that people really do get along better in this sort of scheme where harmony is a cherished virtue, as opposed to being slammed together with no higher motives but our own individual self-interest (which we were thrown into by a society that had already pre-decided the palette of available commercial possibilities, and set about from our beginnings to inspire a longing for those offerings).

It’s easy to leave the future unplanned so it remains unthreatening and undemanding. I found myself a little afraid at Findhorn, though, because it felt like a little piece of destiny fell into place there. I want to live there or someplace like it. For a long time I’ve felt at odds with the waste and the unconsciousness I live in the midst of, and experience in myself. This, by contrast, seemed the one place I’ve ever been where I could imagine living completely in accordance with what I know to be true and right for me.

So it was a great birthday, first because of the generosity and amiable company of my friends, then because of the inspiring trip to this place and across the landscape of this country.

Nice to sleep in my own big bed last night, though.

I’ve been doodling my whole life. I couldn’t guess how many felt-tip pens I’ve gone through because they ran dry or — more often — because the felt-tip got mushed by my… enthusiasm. (Gorilla-grip, whatever you’d like to call it.)

At some point I heard about drafting pens, but someone, somewhere told me that you had to hold them at a perpendicular angle to the page. Given how close I put my face to the paper when I draw, I would poke out my eyes, not to mention that it’s an uncomfortable way to doodle.

Well, I took the plunge and bought a pair of Rotring Isograph pens (0.3cm and 0.5cm)… holy heck! These things are great! The line quality is perfect and consistent. Even better, they’re refillable.

Friends often make fun of my obsession with “line quality” when looking at illustrations — in other words, the strength and clarity of the strokes used in the drawing. I suppose it’s a matter of personal preference, but I love a smooth, dark line, and tend not to like sketchy drawings with scarecrow-stuffing edges to them.

And nothing appeals to Hamishes like finding a better way to do his creative stuff.

~

This afternoon I was in a coffeeshop taking notes for an article, and the place gradually transformed into my personal hell: the George Heriot School let out and the place filled with rambunctious tots and their oblivious mothers. To cap it off, the cafe put on the reggae album I hate so much, yet all their franchises play. And the cafe I was in yesterday had the music up to a record shop level.

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p>Today is a local holiday, so the library was closed. And I do like working in coffeeshops (concentrating at home is nearly impossible). But I have to find one that has the following qualities:

• It’s comfortable. No steel chairs or glass tables. Sofas are nice for reading, but I do need a table most of the time.
• No schools nearby. Tykes Formula One-ing around the cafe annoy me almost as much as pods of screeching teenage girls.
• It’s okay to stay forever and not feel like the owners are hovering over you. (The nice thing with the chains is that the baristas really don’t care how long you’re there; it won’t affect them financially. The only problem is that they do get antsy to leave and start mopping under your feet and stacking chairs about an hour before closing.)
• Very quiet music or, preferably, no music at all. They’re happy being a good cafe, and aren’t trying to get into CD sales. Likewise, no televisions.
• Decent atmosphere, with corners to tuck yourself away in so people aren’t always brushing past.
• Experienced staff, or people who can at least listen and have a clue, and who don’t consider customers an interruption.
• Open before noon and after six. I’d like to find someplace I can go during the week, on the weekend, or at night.
• Serves FairTrade coffee.

Anybody local know of a place that fits at least a few of these criteria?

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p>I know: this list officially marks me out as old and cranky.

I just received an e-mail from an independent publisher, Pygmalion Books, called “Open letter to radical book distributors everywhere concerning the nature of the ISBN”. In it, the author more or less equates ISBN — the International Standard Book Number, the classification system by which commercially-sold books are catalogued — with a mark borne by those who have sold themselves to Mammon.

I’m mentioned in the letter as a proponent of DIY publishing, although I come across as something of a naif:

Even within the more developed understandings of “indie” or “DIY” production, the ISBN remains an important cultural element for success. This can be seen in determined expressions of indie culture, for instance, in the attitude of self-publishing aficionado, Hamish MacDonald. In a feature article written for fellow indie middleman, Jim Munroe (who is self-described as “a novelist who left HarperCollins to showcase and propagate indie press alternatives to Rupert Murdoch-style consolidation), MacDonald states that “getting your own ISBN helps bookstores keep track of your book. It also feels damned cool when you get it, ’cause it means you’ve produced an officially real book!”

Spellbound by the domination of his conceptual opposite, the insignificant citizen trades in his hard done by, oh-so a posteriori indie scruples for a brief concerted lapse of consciousness (“no one will notice”); for a momentary fascination with the lime lit idea of becoming a recognized entity of official production. But now, immediately transposed into a varnished practice that is anything but independent, a recent admonition of Adorno and Horkheimer only gains in clarity: “under monopoly all mass culture is identical, and the lines of its artificial framework begin to show through … culture now impresses the same stamp on everything.”

Those who would seek a certain social independence or a “do it yourself” ethic in the face of monopolist alternatives often seem either oblivious or oxymoronically insouciant to the looming presence of the ISO-commercial monopoly serving to govern distribution, in the final analysis gentrifying its outreach far away from any independent social manifestation.

[See the full text here.]

The argument in the full letter kind of crawls up its own arse, which is reflected in the use of tortured language instead of plain English, as above. It’s annoyingly academic, like that group on Facebook who are petitioning to have a third sex added to the list of choices — the kind of discussion that only occurs in certain oxygenless environments. The open letter concludes with no call to action, and the author admits having been too bored to research how this might be applied. So I’m not sure what to do with it.

I do agree that commercial publishing stinks. But for independents to criticise each other for not being independent enough is hardly the way to create an alternative. This is the classic downfall of committees and radicalists: start by fighting an enemy, then divide into splinter groups and fight themselves.

Personally, I hardly feel limited by ISBN. On the contrary, it allows anyone anywhere to find my books, and order them through an independent bookshop like Word*Power (who have my latest in stock again, I might add). In terms of populist sellouts, I’m more offended by the existence of a Paris Hilton biography than I am by the way it’s catalogued. I don’t believe the fact that your creative act can be found reduces it to mass culture, especially when the ISBN system is open to everyone. My work exists in that system equally, along with every other book in production, with no distinctions made between them. Me, Hemingway, the Qu’ran, and Dr Seuss — we’re all in there.

I’m hardly put out by being included in the message. Hell, I’m thrilled: this person knows that I exist and am doing this work. I’m grateful for any new readers who might find my stories because of this message, and sincerely hope that the link in the letter to my original article on producing your own books might lead individuals to go ahead and do their own thing, rather than waiting for some commercial publishing business to give them permission.

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p>I don’t argue that there might be a better system for disseminating culture than the marketplace. I just don’t have the time or the interest to create it. I’m busy writing.

Dammit. The spam-filter thing turned out to be no good. (It just took all the spam and wrapped it in an e-mail asking “Do you want this?” Not helpful or time-saving.)

Last night I got together with The Friday Gang, and we went to Anita’s to make little cakes in various shapes, ’cause it’s her birthday tomorrow. I like that getting together with my friends just to talk is activity enough for us. I’ve been lucky with the number of neat people who’ve found their way into my life.

But not everyone’s Friday nights are like this. On the walk home, I passed:

• A drunk yob performing for his friends by throwing a big black plastic cover of a bin over the fence of Princes Street Gardens, which then rolled into the road, making a bus swerve. I would guess from the mess on the ground that he got covered in lovely cigarette water from the ashtray on the top.
• A group of four girls fighting — scratching, yelling, punching, and swinging handbags — while one’s boyfriend tried to keep them apart.
• A couple dressed up for the night, him in smart casual clothes, her tall and skinny in a form-fitting black dress complemented with a shawl and unbelievably high heels. They ran across Princes Street, and she tripped over the island in the middle of the road, falling spread-eagle onto the ground. I’m not sure if her face made contact with the tarmac, but her knees and hands did in a way that made me suck breath through my teeth and say “Oooh”.

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p>All of these people, along with the elderly gentleman swaying back and forth while leaning on a bus shelter, were drunk as lords. Now, I don’t have a problem with drinking; I can’t deny that there have been times it’s been fun to have a big social time with a buzz-on. But all of these adults are going to be bringing scrapes and bruises back to their regular, conscious lives. In fact, with the number of people I see running in front of taxis and buses, getting into fights, and vomiting because they’ve drunk to a level of being poisoned, it’s really quite amazing that any of them survives a Friday night.