Over the past couple of years, I have been spending more and more time on another blog. After my experiences with Everything2, I never intended to join an online community again. But somehow, by accident, I kinda did.

It's owned by the Nielsen Haydens, a couple with deep roots in science fiction and fantasy publishing and fandom. Patrick is a senior editor at Tor Books, and has won a Hugo for his editorial work. Teresa has edited for Tor (and is still a consulting editor, I gather), but is now - among other things - moderator in the recently reopened comment threads at Boing Boing.

The blog, Making Light, is what's got me back into writing sonnets. I've spent a good deal of time there, punning and playing with words, getting to know and like the people. We kick around a lot of topics (the blog subhead is "Language, fraud, folly, truth, knitting, and growing luminous by eating light.") I've hosted them here when the server there went down. And, when there have been quarrels, I've done my best to restore the peace. It's a community of smart folks and good writers. They generally manage to impress me at least once a day.

I guess I must have been impressing right back, somehow, because I've been made a moderator and front page poster there (one of five). I'm very aw-shucks and embarrassed about it, because I'm writing on a site owned by editors, and moderating on the home site of one of the most skilled moderators on the net.

This doesn't mean I'm abandoning Evilrooster Crows - the reasons I haven't posted much here are not to do with Making Light. (They're to do with the difficulty of summing up our experiences of moving to the Netherlands while we're still in the trenches. Sorry.)

But hey - yay me!

• Tops UK size 12, US size 10
• Bottoms don't even try - they never fit
• Shoes UK size 5 1/2 - 6, US size 8 - 9

Please do consult Martin before getting anything, to avoid duplication!

• Japanese drill punch from Hewit's
• Brass roll heating ring from P&S Engraving
• Single letter type holder from P&S Engraving
• Take me to Hewit's and let me spend your money

• Farthing, by Jo Walton
Specials by Scott Westerfield
• Modern Bookbinding, by Alex Vaughn
• A Craftsman's Guide - Edge Decoration by John Mitchell

• Star Trek, the original series box sets
• This is Spinal Tap

• A massage (preferably "Theraputic massage" at the Floatarium
• Dinner out somewhere nice, with childcare
• A jewelry box - preferably wood or leather - with multiple small compartments
• Hair ornaments - hair sticks, clips for extra-thick hair
• Chickens. Everybody needs more chickens.
• A bike. (or anything else from that site for the Third World)

Well, you go to the German Christmas Market, and Munich-resident Kirsty suggests what to order. (Thanks for the tip about the shot of Amaretto in the gluhwein, Kirsty!). You go to the Bucks to escape the lunchtime rush. You go on the giant Ferris wheel by the Scott Monument to see the city. You egg each other on to buy a suit.

And (unless you've just done your ankle in) you go jumping.

Taken 21 December 2005

With flips

Taken 21 December 2005

I've been in love with photography since I was 15 or 16, when I got a 35mm camera (a Pentax ME Super) from my parents along with free run of the darkroom. I spent a year or two exploring the world as seen through a lens, and inhaling vast quantities of extremely interesting chemicals.

One of the things I learned early on is that other people don't see the same things I see. Yes, we both look at a tree and go "Big thing, brown on bottom, green on top." But something in me is also going "Oooh! Oooh! Pattern and regularity of leaves as they grow, shapes of trunks and branches! Wow!" Seriously. For every tree unless I consciously shut it off. I walk through the Botanic Gardens with my mouth open, or smiling irrepressibly, when I go alone. I also get that feeling from a lot of repetitive patterns and textures. (Ask Martin about my reaction to the hobbit cloaks in the Lord of the Rings films.)

But I found, showing my "Oooh! Oooh! Pattern!" shots to other people, that they didn't get the same buzz. My mother once said it looked like I'd just pointed the camera at everything and taken a picture. The two decades since then have been spent, at least in part, trying to find ways to show other people what I see all the time. I do things like choosing a contrasting element against the patterned background, or photographing patterns with other redeeming features, such as good colour saturation.

But the other day, I found a link to a set of photos by professional photographer Jim Brandenburg. Although I'm intrigued by the specific challenge he set himself - 90 days' photography permitting only one exposure a day - what really delighted me is that some of his pictures are ones I would take myself (if I were his technical equal). He can use pattern, and pattern alone, to lead the viewer into the shot. His quaking aspen shot, the Patterns of Branches, and most of all his picture of Norway Pine grove are all part of what I have been trying to capture for twenty years.

I'm not discouraged to have seen these shots - far from it. I'm excited by the chance to learn from them. Maybe I can find other ways to lead people into the world I see, and show them how beautiful it is.

Today, at lunchtime, I made my first attempt at a "pattern" photograph that did not use a contrasting foreground element to focus the viewer.

Taken 20 December 2005

On an unrelated note, I also got my camera to do this ghostly image (entirely untweaked, I promise you!). It's of the disused Scotland Street tunnel, which has one brave plant trying to eke out a single-leaf existence in its shadows.

Taken 20 December 2005

Huh? This educated, enfranchised and employed woman was using feminist as an insult. How does this creature think she got where she is today, if not through the efforts of overemotional, angry, thick-skulled feminists¹ like Abigail Adams, Emily Parkhurst, Susan B. Anthony and Eleanor Roosevelt?

I got to feel smugly superior about my comparative enlightenment for exactly one day. Then I found this basket in the ladies' room of the Capita conference centre, and it made me squirm.

It took me a while to realise why it got at me. It's not the fact that sanitary products are set out for women to use - though the dynamic of being given them as opposed to buying them one's self (even from a vending machine) is already a move from the intense privacy with which we deal with these matters.

It's the fact that they are offered with corporate compliments. If they just left them out for customers to filch, I think I'd be a little easier about it. The implicit attention to menstruation that the sign conveys is, well, embarrassing. (And this blog entry is an attempt to get over that embarassment.)

I hope Fiona is that bit more relaxed about these things when she grows up.

1. Note that "feminist" in this context means one who believes that women should have equal rights to men. The use of "feminist" to mean "man hating freak" is a semantic hijacking.

The reasons I'm not blogging much aren't ones that a questionnaire will address. I'm simply too busy right now. I've committed to a large number of bindings by early August, for Interaction, the World Science Fiction Convention, to be held in Glasgow this year. I bind in spare bits of time, in evenings and weekends, and this time was formerly blogging time. I will answer the questionnaire, but it won't get me blogging much again.

My relationship with books is a little more complex than Rick's. For me, a book is not just a box of words (which is a special enough thing in its own right). I am a bookbinder as well as a reader. Books are things I make, physical structures I love for their own sakes, as well as containers for stories and knowledge. Some of these questions will therefore get two answers, one from me as a reader and one as a binder.

Incipit

1. Total number of books I have owned

Like Rick, I'm going to take this as "total number of books I own."

Over the years, Martin and I have acquired and disposed of thousands of books. At one particular point in this cycle, we concluded that we could not shelve all of our books at once, and moved to a "catalogue and store" approach, with most of our books boxed up in our loft. I have some doubts as to the accuracy of our catalogue with regard to physical location, but the quantity listed is about right.

According to our catalogue, we have 2255 books between us. I would estimate that there are about 45 books on our shelves that are not catalogued, either because they are recent purchases or because they are bookbinding books (I've never got round to cataloguing that collection).

The next question is whether I divide the aggregate total by two, since the books are community property. But we believe that books are shared wealth - we even have a separate budget in our accounting system for book purchases, which do not come out of our personal funds. So I would contend that I own in the region of 2300 books.

2. Last book I bought

The last book that I bought to read was the Penland Book of Handmade Books. It bills itself as a technical book, but most of the things that it describes the makings of are "artists books", which frequently do not really match my definition of a book at all.

The last book that I bought at all was a Folio Society edition of The Hobbit. I have been rebinding a HarperCollins edition of the book (for the Worldcon art show, at which the evilrooster bindery will be an exhibitor), and I bought this one to compare the bindability. I suspect that I will not love it as well as I do the HarperCollins one, but as a binder, I learn by doing.

3. Last book I've read

Atypically, it's a self-help book. (Usually, I'm too contrary for self-help books). My line manager at work recommended that I read Crucial Conversations, by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan and Al Switzer as a book that had had a strong impact on him.

My reaction to the book was mixed. I already do much of what the book recommends, in particular the effort to understand where the other parties in a heated dispute are coming from. It goes on to discuss the ways to find and highlight shared goals between the parties, in order to find common ground. I see these techniques as part of my goal to be a peacemaker, though I don't use the cheesy business-speak acronyms that the book does to describe them.

So on the one hand, the book gives away my trade secrets. If everyone follows it, then one of my key skills becomes a commonplace. On the other hand, I'd love to see a lot of those techniques applied to the American political scene, where the victory of one party over another seems to have superseded the goal of improving the common good.

4. Five books that mean a lot to me

1. The Bible

I value this book both because I am a Christian, and because I am a member of the Western intellectual tradition. I don't blog about my faith (not directly, anyway), and if you don't realise the Bible's influence on Western culture, I can't start explaining it here.

Most of the time, I prefer the New Jerusalem Bible, which is one of the Catholic translations. Part of my preference is because it renders the text in a clear and comprehensible way, and contains all of the "apocrypha" that I want in the book. But my other reason for liking it is that JRR Tolkien was one of the original contributors, and that's just cool.

For the Psalms, Wisdom and the Song of Songs (and, on some days, the Gospel according to John), I find that I turn to the King James Version. Some of the Bible is best read as poetry, not prose, and KJV has never been equalled as a work of art. In short, Shakespeare trumps Tolkien.

And sometimes, when I need to really understand a passage, I go back to the Greek. I have an Oxford University Press edition of the Greek New Testament that is of use at times.

As a binder, I have a standing policy of not rebinding Bibles. They're rarely well-bound, because the majority of them will never be read much, and it would be too expensive to bind a 1500-page book on tissue-thin paper in a durable fashion. Add to that the emotional impact of messing up someone's dearly beloved family heirloom, and you can see why I'm just not keen.

(Having said that, I did do a repair on a colleague's reading Bible, but on the explicit understanding that it might be ugly as long as it preserved the life of the book. He just didn't want to recopy years of marginal notes if he could avoid it.)

2. The Left Hand of Darkness

My parents read me some interesting books when I was a kid. Ursula K. Le Guin's novel was one of them. It's from the 1960's and 1970's trend toward intellectual and philisophical science fiction, and is (in my opinion) the best of the breed. As a meditation on gender, alienation, friendship, and politics, it's always got something to say to me, after over twenty years of rereading. Having a strong plot and good characterisation is a bonus. Therem Harth rem ir Estraven, one of the two main characters, was probably the first literary figure I ever really loved.

Many people don't like the book, particularly ones more rooted in the action and war trends more popular in science fiction now. Takes all kinds, I guess.

I've never bound the book, but if I did, I think I would design a binding showing a night time snow-bound landscape (it takes place on a world gripped by an ice age). The shapes of the land would echo the double curve of a yin-yang symbol, which is an important image in one scene of the book.

The book is also the source of one of my favourite recipies for dealing with problems: When action grows unprofitable, gather information. When information grows uprofitable, sleep.

3. The Secret History

Donna Tartt's first novel describes a Californian Classics student who travels to an East Coast university, where he becomes caught up in the activities of a close-knit clique. Since those activities include a recreation of a Greek bacchanal, which culminates in a murder, his social life gets a bit complicated.

Tartt knows her Classics, and her Classicists. Many of the fine touches of the book ring very true, from the students' spurious pedanticism to their use of fountain pens. The characters have clearly been changed by their knowledge of Classical languages, as I was deeply changed by the study of Latin and Greek. And the author herself shows signs of those same changes, in that the book's plot works equally well in the ancient Greek cosmology as it does in the modern one.

I haven't bound this book either, nor thought deeply about how I would do so.

4. The Collected Poems of Philip Larkin

This was a gift from my friend James, the first Christmas that I knew him. We were both twenty at the time, and the poet's angst and faintly defeatest style suited us. He is the master of taking away almost all that he gives the reader, with lines like this from An Arundel Tomb

...the stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love

Another example of what I mean is from Talking in Bed:

At this unique distance from isolation

It becomes still more difficult to find
Words at once true and kind,
Or not untrue and not unkind.

Although I've grown up since then, some of what Larkin says still works for me. His poem The Importance of Elsewhere is one of my two favourite mediations on being an expatriate. And I often reread No Road, usually as a counterweight to Robert Frost's Mending Wall.

5. The Craft of Bookbinding

This book, by Manly Banister, was the bookbinding book that got me into the craft. It was one of two that Martin gave me one Christmas, and it was the one that convinced me that an amateur with woodworking skills could bind books and make bindery equipment. It also showed the difficult parts of binding, unlike many beginning books, which never get past the "learn this in half a day" level of techniques.

It was only later that I discovered that Manly Banister was a pulp science fiction author and fanzine editor.

5. Tag five people and have them do this on their blog

I'm not comfortable doing this, because it feels like placing an obligation on others. I'll tag one person: Mark, we've already discussed this. Can you put a link in the comments section when you've done it?

If any of my other readers (whoever you are) feel like doing it too, again, put a link in the comments.

Finit

Suddenly, at about 7:00 last night, I started shivering uncontrollably. I was already feeling wintry and depressed, but those are primarily mental effects. This was most decidedly physical.

I simply couldn't get warm. My muscles started to ache, and my joints became sore. By about 7:30, when Fiona was ready for her feed down (time change, you know - she usually feeds down at about 8:30), I was feeling nauseous as well. So I took her into bed with me and fed her, and we lay there in a little pool of warmth while Martin put Alex to bed.

I was hallucinating by that point. I remember listening to them reading Sitting Ducks, in which the line "and suddenly the sky was full of ducks." Suddenly I saw the ducks as being like autumn leaves, as though one could walk through a pile of them and kick them (non-cruelly) into the air in thick clumps, which then separated into individual flying birds. They filled the sky with gold.

After Martin got Alex to bed, he came for Fiona and I went for a hot shower. I shivered as soon as I got out of bed, though I was still fully dressed. Even the scalding hot shower couldn't warm me up. It took a mug of hot broth and a hot water bottle to stop the shivering.

At the same time, Alex was screaming and crying hysterically in his bed, sobbing so hard we couldn't extract from him what, if anything, hurt. He finally settled on it being his ear, and we gave him some Calpol. But I don't think he was actually awake through either of the two iterations of screaming; I don't know if his ear really hurt, or if he dreamed it.

When Alex was finally settled, and Fiona (who had awakened with the racket) was down again, I went to my bed. The shivering had passed off, and I was feeling fevered, so hot that the duvet was uncomfortable, my pyjamas unbearable, and my pillow too warm. I tossed and turned and drifted into a sleep full of fever dreams.

When I woke up this morning, I was fine.

I knew that to get a stick would be to join a subculture I hadn't been a member of before. I'll call us the Tripods.

I'm not a typical member of the tribe. I'm 33, and have been in good health all my life. If this pregnancy hadn't triggered sacroliliac joint dysfuction (translation: my hip joints don't work), I wouldn't expect to need a walking aid for a good 40 years. And I plan to put the cane in the umbrella stand as soon as the baby's born. So I'm an anticipatory Tripod, a temporary Tripod.

So do you get a seat on the bus now that you walk with a stick?

Heck, no. Are you kidding? Even with a bulging belly and a walking stick, I've had exactly one person offer me a seat on a crowded bus.

But at least you can sit in the "elderly and disabled" seats?

Only if I club the young, fit and surly types who can't be arsed to walk one meter further back into the bus first.

But surely the fellow-feeling among the Tripods counts for something? You always see them chatting away on the bus, friendly as anything. Doesn't the cane act as a ticket in?

Perhaps I'm too young, or too perceptibly an interloper. Maybe my cane is too classy. But I suspect that the fellow-feeling we see among the elderly on the bus, even among strangers, is more generational than based on ability.

Do you use your cane all the time, or only when you're in pain?

Well, things usually start hurting halfway through an expedition or partway through a day. I have to bring the stick along from the start, so it's there when I need it. And actually, I've found that using it from the start means that the pain takes longer to settle in. I wonder how many other Tripods are using their sticks prophylactically, or simply waiting for the pain to start.

So how is it walking with a stick? Does it slow you down?

The mechanics of walking with a stick turn out to be more complicated than I thought. You have to synchronise it with one leg or the other. If neither hurts, then you can alternate which leg you rest. And you can either go "crosswise", holding the stick in the hand opposite the leg you're helping out, or you can "lurch" with the stick right next to the assisted side. I'm always conscious of the eyes of fellow Tripods on me as I make my clumsy way, alternating between supported legs and arm synchronisation styles.

The one thing about a walking stick is that it doesn't slow you down. Quite the opposite. I can get going really fast by using it almost like an oar, pushing me along the pavements. Bipeds beware!

What's the hardest part of walking with a cane?

Walking with a cane, an umbrella, a toddler with an umbrella, and a handbag slipping off your shoulder. I wanted to be an octopus that day as well as a Tripod.

What did you do?

I got very wet.

So will you miss it?

Yes, in a funny sort of way. No matter how much people ignored it overtly, they saw the stick as a sign of weakness. Some of the barbarians in our neighbourhood made off comments, it's true. But most of us, no matter how unwilling to show it in public, are protective of the frail. It comes out in hundred tiny things: a door held open even after I had my hand on it, a little extra space in a crowded shop, an extra small smile on a shop assistant even in the pre-Christmas shopping.

And there was never more of anything than I could shake a stick at. I have the stick to prove it.

Since Christmas, I have been learning about bookbinding. I have bound the following items; each has been a learning experience in its own right. All but four of them have been hollow-backed case bindings, usually kettlestitched or sewn on tapes.

I have destroyed some of my initial work, particularly the binds of three sections of an English law book I bought used some time ago. Other volumes have been sent to various friends. I only have about a third of the binds I have done in January - February 2002.

Finished Works

1. Cream card notebook sewn on external cords, with embroidered cover.
   Now used as a needle book in my bookbinding kit.
2. Cream Coptic-stitched notebook with gold signature guards
   Still unused.
3. Kettlestitched binding of 1/3 of an English law book, covered in ochre fabric.
   Destroyed.
4. Tape-sewn binding of 1/3 of an English law book, covered in ochre fabric.
   Destroyed.
5. Tape-sewn A6 notebook in cream laid, covered in blue paper.
   Sent to (darsi), a friend from my online community.
6. Flexible-bound 1/3 of an English law book, covered in ochre fabric.
   Destroyed.
7. Binding of editions of "Sirius Moonlight", the fanzine from the St Andrews Science Fiction and Fantasy Society, for Martin's four years at university. Tape sewn, covered in brown paper. I tried to trim the fore edge, but tore the edges as a result. The book was labelled with computer-printed titles on the spine and front cover.
8. Grey leather and black wool quarter bound cover for the "Forma Urbis Romae", a map of ancient Rome. Labelled with a computer-printed title on the cover.
9. Tape-sewn A4 lined notebook, quarter-bound in grey leather and blue fabric, for Martin's role playing game, Edelvain.
10. Tape-sewn A4 lined notebook covered in blue paper to use at work.
11. Tape-sewn A5 blank book with false bands, quarter-bound in grey leather and rose fabric.
    Sent as a gift for my younger sister Kathleen.
12. Tape-sewn A6 blank book with false bands, quarter-bound in grey leather and rose fabric.
    Sent as a surprise to Gritchka, a friend from my online community.
13. Tape-sewn edition of Sherlock Holmes short stories, covered in brown leather with false bands. The endpapers are green marbled paper. I decorated the cover of this book with an outline of Sherlock Holmes, drawn in permanent ink. I then deepened the colour of the leather cover with the application of red-brown shoe polish.
    Currently retained, but may be given to the daughter of a colleague.
14. Tape-sewn A5 blank book of white laid paper, with false bands and red-brown leather cover. Green marbled endpapers. I deepened the colour of the leather with black shoe polish, and added texture by pressing the covers with crumpled aluminum foil.
    Sent to Teiresias, from my online community, as part of a Secret Santa arrangement.
15. Kettlestitched binding of Edgar Allen Poe's humourous stories, covered in leather, with false bands. Blue marbeled endpapers. The cover is made of two colours of leather, in an abstract design loosely based on a vertical arrangement of the letters "EAP". Sized approximately 147mm x 215 mm. (Click on the thumbnail to see a larger version)
    
    
16. Tape-sewn blank book with guards, intended to hold materials and project notes from sewing and bookbinding projects. False bands, plain endpapers, and ribbon ties. Sized approximately 144mm x 213 mm. (Click on the thumbnail to see a larger version)
    
    This project was not entirely a success. The pattern was too interlaced, and too interdependent, and as the leather strips were pasted, they stretched. The result was poor joins at crucial points.
    
    In addition, there was not time to define the false bands well enough before the paste dried, due to the time it took to arrange the pieces of the design. Definitely more of a learning experience than a triumph.

Future Projects

• Re-bind Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, which was bought with a ragged spine and is getting worse
• Two Dorothy L. Sayers mysteries (Strong Poison and The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club)
• An edition of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, currently paper-bound
• An edition of Pride and Prejudicecurrently in flexible covers.