The desert was full of men who earned their living based on the ease with which they could penetrate to the Soul of the World. They were known as seers, and they were held in fear by women and the elderly. Tribesmen were also wary of consulting them, because it would be impossible to be effective in battle if one knew that he was fated to die. The tribesmen preferred the tast of battle, and the thrill of not knowing what the outcome would be; the future was already written by Allah, and what he had written was always for the good of man. So the tribesmen lived only for the present, because the present was full of surprises, and they had to be aware of many things: Where was the enemy’s sword? Where was his horse? What kind of blow should one deliver next in order to remain alive? The camel driver was not a fighter and he had consulted with seers. Many of them had been right about what they said, while some had been wrong. Then, one day, the oldest seer he had ever sought out (and the one most to be feared) had asked why the camel driver was so interested in the future.
“Well… so I can do things,” he had responded. “And so I can change those things that I don’t want to happen.”
“But then they wouldn’t be a part of your future,” the seer had said.
“Well, maybe I just want to know the future so I can prepare myself for what’s coming.” “If good things are coming, they will be a pleasant surprise,” said the seer. “If bad things are, and you know in advance, you will suffer greatly before they even occur.”
“I want to know about the future because I’m a man,” the camel driver had said to the seer. “And men always live their lives based on the future.”
The seer was a specialist in the casting of twigs; he threw them on the ground, and made interpretations based on how they fell. That day, he didn’t make a cast. He wrapped the twigs in a piece of cloth and put them back in his bag.
“I make my living forecasting the future for people,” he said. “I know the science of the twigs, and I know how to use them to penetrate to the place where all is written. There, I can read the past, discover what has already been forgotten, and understand the omens that are here in the present.
“When people consult me, it’s not that I’m reading the future; I am guessing at the future. The future belongs to god, and it is only he who reveals it, under extraordinary circumstances. How do I guess at the future? Based on the omens of the present. The secret is here in the present. If you pay attention to the present, you can improve upon it. And, if you improve upon the present, what comes later will also be better. Forget about the future, and live each day according to the teachings, confident that God loves his children. Each day, in itself, brings with it an eternity.”

The Interior Castle – Saint Teresa of Avila, trans. Maribai Starr

The Archimedes Codex – William Noel and Reviel Netz
check!

Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers – Robert Sapolsky

The Return of Merlin – Deepak Chopra

The God Theory – Bernard Haisch

Jerusalem – Karen Armstrong

COPTIC

This coptic binding secures all the signatures to each other at each of the stitching sites. It lays very flat when open. The interior is a solid red line from the first site to the last. By treating the cover like a signature – it is double-layered – the knots of the thread can be hidden within the cover. On this example, I began the thread on the second site from the bottom, which left the long red stitch running between the final two sites. This could easily be avoided.

LONG STITCH

The long stitch binding wraps around the ends of the signatures and spine, which secures the signatures in their place (with regards to the spine), rather than securing them to each other. This can be done using a separate thread for each signature, or with one long thread, as I have done here. The knot should be on the interior, but I judged where to tie it badly. This book contains seven signatures, and the stitches for neighboring signatures alternate. The same alternating pattern appears on the interiors of the signatures, which I find somewhat distracting. This book does not lay as flat as the coptic when open, but a flexible spine allows the signatures to stagger themselves nicely. A thin, sharp thread such as this will probably cause the signatures to rip at the seems over time, but a nicer binding would use a thicker, waxed or twine thread.

KEYHOLE BINDING

I saw this binding on a piece my professor brought into class, and began this whole process to replicate it — it is my favorite. I adapted the long stitch by placing the holes differently, and working with two signatures at a time to avoid the alternating pattern exhibited by the long stitch binding above. This stitch runs from the top edge down to just above center, and from just below center down to the bottom edge, leaving a small white space in the center. It behaves quite like the long stitch (as I have noted, it is really just a variation). After improvising this binding, I found instructions online (which is where I found the name “keyhole binding” – I have no idea if this is accurate) which were almost exactly what I had done, but they worked with only one signature at a time. I think my variation has a little more character on the end sections, with more criss-crossing of the threads.

It took a lot of googling to find the instruction I was looking for. Here are some of the more helpful sites I used to learn these stitches: Coptic , Long stitch , Keyhole.

I’ve also drawn my own step-by-step illustrations (I find visual instructions much more helpful than primarily verbal ones), which are in the gallery below:

As with all art movements, Artist’s Books need a driving philosophy. Turner seems to suggest that the Artist’s Book movement was developed from the binding in. As design bookbinders became more and more “self-serving,” their bindings began to dwarf the text, to obscure it… “to the extent that the relationship of the binding to the text inside had completely disappeared.” Perhaps book binders, who manifest the final, physical form of the decreasingly conceptual ‘book’, are the most apt to see the significance of a book in its object rather than its content. Deconstructionism then fits the scene nicely: “To deconstruct is to… retain the shell of a thing while dispensing with its core…” – taken quite literally, keep the binding, dispense the text. Sound familiar?

The implications of this are appealing: “words, text, no longer matter!” Book makers have complete freedom over the exterior and interior of their books. Such possibilities! Timothy Ely produced a book whose contents are utterly inaccessible to anyone – rendering them thus equally and openly accessible to everyone. Keith Smith used his freedom to fill his book with extensive details about itself. Dr. and Mrs. Joe Brown Love made the significant content of their book artifactual rather than textual. Turner becomes fixated on this idea, that content no longer matters, but he emphasizes the relationship that an Artist’s Book has with its viewer/s. Then he becomes convinced that the forte of these books is that they become meaningless. He questions whether it can even be damaging to the integrity of a true Artist’s Book. He begins searching for a definition of the Artist’s Book that excludes meaning, significance, and communication.

In a fascinating publication by Bookways (1993), prominent figures in the Book Arts world anonymously exchange letters, and Turner’s article becomes a main point of contention. (A man under the pseudonym) Joe Beets stands at the opposite end of the spectrum. Turner wants to draw a solid line between text-form books and artist’s books; Joe Beets wants to blur the line between art and artist’s books. Perhaps Turner takes it too far – Beets is right to suggest that if an artist creates a book and calls it art, that it is. But it is art in the form of a book, which is not what Turner is talking about. How, though, can Turner suggest that content impedes a book’s status as an artist’s book, if he wishes to draw a distinction between books that are created as art objects and books that are self-aware artist’s books?

This is a Text-form Book:

This is Book-form Art:

This is Book Art:

Austin:
“It’s not things, it’s philosophers that are simple. You will have heard it said, I expect, that oversimplification is the occupational disease of philosophers, and in a way one might agree with that. But for a sneaking suspicion that it’s their occupation”

How many words is a philosopher allowed before his work is rendered non-simple?

“I remember once when I had been talking… that somebody afterwards said: ‘You know, I haven’t the slightest idea what he means, unless it could be that he simply means what he says.’ Well, that is what I should like to mean.” That is what I should like to mean.

(Austin, John L. “Performative Utterances”)

Autumn, and the trees decide again they don’t
need leaves.
Mothers add more blankets to the bed.
Yellow lights in windows of the junior high
mean that night school is back in session,
tired grown-ups sitting at the plastic desks,
learning to bisect the hypotenuse,
how to say spreadsheet in Japanese.

This week on the televised hearings,
we get to watch our congressmen
nervously pronounce the word homosexual
in public – the committee trying to determine
whether queers are good enough
to pull the triggers
on machines designed to foreclose lives
contrary to the national well-being.

But the congressman can’t
pull the trigger on his own tongue
to fire out the word without
tripping over it — fumbling. stumbling
into the ditch between home and sexual.

You might say his defense industry is troubled,
as if he had a subterranean suspicion
that to say it might mean, just a little,
to become it –
which might be right,

since language uses us
the way that birds use sky,
the way that seeds and viruses
braid themselves into a mammal’s fur
and hitchhike toward the future.

When you say a word,
you enter its vocabulary,
it’s got your home address, your phone number
and weight — it won’t forget,

– the way that parents, who finally
bring themselves to say lesbian,
enter, through that checkpoint,
the country where their daughter lives.

Tonight, all over Washington, senators in mirrors
will practice until they are as fluent
saying homosexual
as they already are at saying Mr. President,
and first-strike option.

Sometimes we think the truth
is the worst thing that could happen
but the truth is not the worst thing that could happen.

Now it is autumn and in stores
the turquoise wading pools
spangled with bright starfishes and shells
are stacked against the walls, on sale,

implying what was costly yesterday
is cheap today, and might be free tomorrow –
All our yearnings, all our fears:
so many seahorses,
galloping through bubbles.

The Clam Lake Papers: A Winter in the North Woods (Edward Lueders)

Woods – Emerson. Papers – Essays.  Clam Lake – Walden Pond. Winter – a long time.

Hmmm… could this be an alternative to Emerson? Writings about nature that I’d find less arduous? I asked around the other employees; none of them had ever heard of the book, let alone noticed it. “Well, never judge a book by its cover…” I thought to myself.

So I bought it.

The book turned out to be nothing less than I could ever have hoped.
An anonymous author breaks into a summer cottage on Clam Lake, and stays there through the winter, musing, writing, and existing, leaving behind just enough traces of the goings-on for the owner to suspect a disturbance – and all of the papers on which he wrote. The owner, Lueders, also a professor, collects, reads and compiles the work into a book which, as revealed upon further investigation, was published in the tiny town of Ellison Bay,WI – not 5 miles from my retail-experience location (sometimes called a store) – by an excentric friend of my grandmother’s, book-store owner and publisher. Was it meant to be? Coincidences – they’re not always meaningful. But I think it was.

Anyway, I tell you this because I plan to make a number of references to the book in the coming posts. And if you happen to hate Emerson, The Clam Lake Papers (now dubbed “CLP”) might be a good alternative for you, too.

Below is an excerpt:

Dear Professor Lueders,
It is obvious that you don’t use your cabin in the winter, and it seems well suited to my current needs, so I am going to assume your indulgence. I am going to use your cabin for a while, while you are not using it. It is not a matter of money. Nothing, eventually, is a matter of money. I don’t have much money at the moment, but that isn’t it. It is just a matter of trying it alone somewhere for a while. I suppose I am breaking a law. I am trespassing. But I am also following a law, one printed on the genes and the nervous system rather than in books.
I have some conscience about using your property, but I have owned things too, and I have let people use them. I have let people use me too, as I must have used them. There are balances, I can assure you.
Anyway, by the time you read this I will be gone. You will see that it is not in me to abuse your cabin or your belongings. It took great ingenuity to get in here, by the way, without doing some violence to your property. But I enjoyed the challenge–you went to such lengths to keep the elements and the likes of me out. Ingenuity I have plenty of. Too much. That’s part of my trouble. it may take more than ingenuity, though, for you to figure out how I got in. I hope you won’t even bother to try. Better just to take me for granted.
I mean no harm. I will use your place, not abuse it. I do not want to thank you for its use, but I thank you all the same. What I mean is, I do not wish to be forgiven. I don’t think I need to be forgiven, but I won’t go into that. If I am right in my motives, I have some business here or, rather, a need to be apart from business anywhere else–to balance out an account or two. If nothing else, I should have myself to myself for a spell, with insulation. The season seems right.
I know already that I will not get rid of you during my stay unless I take over your property rather than just using it, and I won’t do that. Since I will have to accept you this way, maybe it will be easier for you to accept my having been here. No matter. The thing will have been accomplished, and then it won’t make much difference, will it?