Politics

Doomed to Repeat It

2 Comments

Lessons from history: the Titanic

  1. Engineering can’t prevent disasters. All it can do is make them less likely and make their impacts less severe. Water, in particular, always finds a way in. Plan accordingly.
  2. Everybody gets a seat on the lifeboat. Anything else – like an evacuation plan that only saves people with access to a car – is criminal.

At least when the Titanic sank, rescue was prompt.

That is all I can bear to post about Hurricane Katrina. I know no one from New Orleans, yet the whole affair breaks my heart. I regret that I never saw it in its former glory, but I would trade a lifetime of longing to see it for the lives that were lost.

Bookbinding

The Second Convention

2 Comments

Just back from the Society of Bookbinders biennial convention in Bath. Here are some things I learned there, in roughly chronological order:

  1. Conservators are not conservationists.
  2. The history and decoration of Russia leather.
  3. Chicken feet have much more potential than I ever realised.
  4. Boxmaking.
  5. Don’t bother to make a relevant box for a binding competition unless it will definitely be judged and shown.
  6. Sewn boards binding.
  7. The value of an unexpected lunch partner, and why so many people are fond of Paul Delrue.
  8. Bradel binding.
  9. I really do like the other members of the Scottish region of the Society of Bookbinders.
  10. People value the Bookweb for its confessional side as well as its instructional side.
  11. Never get into a scar competition with someone who was in a car accident. Not even with my burn scars.
  12. When I drink, I talk faster. When some of the people I drink with drink, they think slower. Eventually, communication stops.
  13. Sometimes it doesn’t stop soon enough.
  14. I cannot be an apprentice or have a single mentor at this stage in my binding life.
  15. Another form of onlaying.
  16. Tini Miura would make a magnificent arm-wrestler, if she weren’t so kind.
  17. Ways to alter a bone folder and a paring knife.
  18. I can walk through shoulder-high blackberry bushes because I am able to goose-step like Basil Fawlty.
  19. I want to do more botanical onlay bindings.
  20. Herons make a very peculiar sound when they’re angry.
  21. How to use a slightly punctured plastic bag, a hair rubber band, and a disposable paper bath mat to wick the water from a dripping tap silently down the plughole.
  22. People will buy pretty much anything for a tenner from the back of a white van.
  23. Never be intimidated by someone simply because she seems talented, confident and beautiful. She probably doesn’t realise she is all of these things.
  24. You meet colleagues in the darndest places.
  25. Motor racing has the potential to be interesting, even if it doesn’t interest me.
Bookbinding, Personal

Back from Worldcon

1 Comment

Martin posted a blog entry from our hotel room, in the middle of our attendance at Worldcon. I agree with everything he said. The con was exhausting, busy, and an intense family experience. Both kids wigged out from time to time, but also had some really good moments. I saw people from work, from our St Andrews days, and from previous social groups here in Edinburgh. And like Martin, I only made it to one event – in my case, an informal discussion on the future of the book, both as a concept and as a physical object. It was a great discussion, with plenty of debate and no actual conclusions. I wonder whether I would have enjoyed all the programme events I marked out and subsequently missed as much (I doubt it).

But I wasn’t just at the con as an attendee and a parent. I was also there as a bookbinder, and it was the culmination of three very intense weeks in that world for me.

As I noted in a previous entry, I spent a fortnight doing the binds for the Guests of Honour. This was more difficult than I expected. Not only did it take longer (of course – everything always takes longer than you expect it will), but it was also more emotionally challenging than anticipated. Unlike at work, I had no human contact to speak of. I found myself intensely lonely at times. I also found that when things went wrong, I was less able to keep a positive outlook and to develop alternative solutions to problems that arose.

Then we had a houseguest. Liza Groen Trombi, to whom I hadn’t even spoken for nearly fifteen years, came to stay with us for a weekend. We had been close in middle and high school, but gone our separate ways after that – me to Scotland, her to singing in a band, managing restaurants, and finally working as an editor for Locus. My instinct, when we got back in touch, was that I would like her again, and I invited her to stay when she was coming over for Worldcon. I think that was one of the best decisions I’ve made this year. We spent the entire weekend chatting, and I could easily have spent a week or two more listening to her stories and telling a few of my own. She was patient about the fact that I was still binding (and gave very balanced feedback when things went badly). We rode bikes out to Craigmillar Castle, visited Mary King’s Close, drank whisky, and laughed a lot.

And, finally, the Sutherlands went to Worldcon. I was doing two things at once, as a binder. First off, I was co-ordinating the bindings to go to the Guests of Honour. Most of this involved being ready to meet the Publications manager, Steve Cooper, when he had gaps in his schedule and bindings needed signatures put in, or needed to be delivered to recipients. I got to see a lot of the Secure Storage area at the convention during this phase of things. At the same time, I was entered in the Art Show, hoping to sell some of my bindings.

I had four items entered: Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde, The Hobbit, Frankenstein, and a copy of the Worldcon Souvenir Book. And throughout the convention, I fretted. I went back and back to the art show, checking to see if anyone bid. I worried every time someone had moved a binding. I fussed at Martin (who has the patience of a saint for not throttling me!), at Liza (ditto), and at the boyfriend of the Art Show director, Pat (see previous comments). Two items got bids – the Hobbit and Frankenstein.

In the meantime, on of the Guests of Honour – Jane Yolen – had to go home early for family medical reasons. We arranged a swift presentation to her, and I got a chance to see her reaction to my book. She seemed to like it. (I will post photos of the presentation when I get them).

Thus matters stood this morning. Due to some significant sleep disruptions (thanks, Fi!), my memories of today are best summarised in list form.

  1. Alex and I, along with much of the Young Adult Fan Activities group, dressed up in masks and goggles and assaulted a panel on the Future of Fandom with inflatable weapons. The point was to remind attendees what the future of fandom really looks like, and perhaps to have a bit of fun on the side. Don’t pity the panel too much – they were forewarned, and forearmed with water pistols.
  2. Neither unsold binding sold during the after-auction sales. I collected them and left the Art Show. Then I rang Steve, the Publications manager, who immediately offered to buy the Souvenir Book binding. I was delighted, not only because I wanted to sell it, but because I wanted him to have it. After all the work he’d done on the book, I reckoned he would like something special. I understand he has all editions of Splitting Infinity now.
  3. The person who bought the Hobbit binding – Pat, who had been a friendly face throughout the con – asked me to sign it as the bookbinder. He then tracked down Alan Lee, the illustrator of that edition (and the designer who created the look for Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films), and got him to sign the book while I was there. So I got to meet Alan Lee, an artist whom I respect greatly, not just because he does beautiful work, but also because he is so single-minded about doing it. We talked a bit about the binding, and exchanged email addresses. I even got a photo, with Fi in as well:
  4. During the closing ceremony for the convention, the co-chairs not only showed the entire audience one of my bindings, they incited them to a round of applause (mostly puzzled, admittedly) for me for doing them.
  5. I said goodbye to Liza – the only relatively down moment of the day. I miss her already.

Now I get to go back to real life. It’s been a good time, rather like being tossed up and down in a blanket while slightly drunk. In other words, I’ve been to Worldcon.

Bookbinding

It’s Alive!

2 Comments

After endless promises and 404 messages, the Evilrooster Bindery has its own sales and display site. Thanks to Martin’s Movable Type wizardry, I can now post photos and descriptions of my bindings in a more customer-oriented site than the Bookweb. (Not that the Bookweb will go away – but I felt the need to differentiate between the face I present to people who might like to buy my books and other binders.)

The driving urgency to get the site up is that we are at Worldcon, I’m in the art show, and I want people to see the same books there that are on display on my site.

Go look! Evilrooster.com awaits. What are you doing reading this?

Personal

Holidays and Secret Identities

1 Comment

Do you think Superman ever took a holiday by just pretending to be Clark Kent all the time?

I’m on holiday for a fortnight, and I’m not going anywhere. (That is not strictly true. I may ride my new bike around, and I have to go to the tannery. But I’m not off to the Azores to sun myself senseless.)

Instead, I’m spending a fortnight pretending to be a bookbinder. Necessity is the mother of this particular intention, because I need to have eight books bound for Worldcon and I only got the sheets on Friday.

I need the break. Work is great – I love my job and the people I work with, but I’ve been getting stressed too easily. I’m fresh out of patience, optimism and gentle tolerance, and have been running on waspish comments and sarcasm.

Time for some solitude, some creativity, and some peace. Time to be the mild-mannered reporter and leave the battles with Lex Luthor for someone else.

Politics

We hold fast…

1 Comment

…to what is important. The more they hit us, the more they try to frighten us, the tighter we hold on to it.

What do we hold so tight?

community
bombs don’t care who you are, but your neighbours do
justice
even if revenge would feel better
freedom
though it expose us to future danger
courage
Britain has been here before
love
even in the face of hate

Peace, dear people.

Politics

I Grow Old, I Grow Old…

3 Comments

…I’ve joined the Establishment.

Yesterday (July 4th) was the day we were all worried about in Edinburgh, the day the anarchists planned (?) to rally in advance of the G8. Being anarchists, of course, they didn’t exactly file for a parade permit.

The Carnival for Full Enjoyment was intended to protest against the capitalist system, wage slavery, and pretty much everything the G8 has ever done. The attendees (can’t use the word organisers; they’re anarchists) suggested some fun things – clowns, acrobatics, and drumming. The gist of the protest – as described – was to demonstrate that there is another way to run the world than the current capitalist doctrine. I’m in full agreement there.

Unfortunately, their proposals for “not this world” didn’t include a lot of group self-control (yeah, yeah, anarchists, said that already), and not all of them were that keen on just enjoying the drumming. Some of them wanted to do the whole smashing and fighting thing. It didn’t come across as a good advertisement for the alternatives to the current system.

The current system was represented, in this little drama, by the police.

Now, the policing strategy in Edinburgh for the G8 has focused on letting people have their say, where they want to say it, if they can do so safely and without collateral damage. They let almost a quarter of a million people dressed in white encircle the city centre1 on Saturday for the Make Poverty History march. Saturday went off peacefully2.

On Monday, the police were using the same approach. I saw the carnival as I went home that afternoon. The police were letting people have their fun, if they could do it safely. Sadly, things turned violent3. The protestors blamed the police for provocation4; the police blamed the protestors for throwing paving stones, benches and staves.

And I believe the police side of the story.

I saw the operation as I passed by, saw the cops using horses and walls of riot shields to control and slow crowd movements, to keep the groups from massing too greatly. I also saw them letting uninvolved civilians get across the public spaces and through the guarded gates, so our lives weren’t too disrupted. I saw them letting the party go on but keeping the mob small. I saw that only a third to a half of the police had riot gear on; the remainder were wearing stab vests and flourescent yellow over their ordinary uniforms. And, of course, they were not carrying guns. I didn’t see the fight begin, but that was what it was like before the trouble started.

And in the aftermath, even pro-protestor sites like Indymedia are struggling to find a lot of photos of police violence, or accounts of serious injury. That’s because there wasn’t much, for all the breathless press reportage about “baton charges” and “pitched battles”. About 40 people were treated at hospital, with broken bones as the worst injuries. This in a confrontation where people were throwing park benches5.

So given the choice between anarchy, with drumming and clowning and no one asking the violent types to cool it down, and the current system, with police who let the peaceful speak and dance, but control the violent, I’m afraid I pick the current system. And that makes me Establishment.

I even stopped to thank a couple of police officers I saw on the street today. They did well.

  1. This is an interesting contrast to the American government’s idea of a “free speech zone” surrounded by barbed wire, miles from anything. Remind me who has a First Amendment?
  2. Peaceful means two arrests, not from the main body of marchers. No injuries beyond blisters and overheating. No violence. That’s an insanely good Saturday in the city, even in ordinary time.
  3. Punches were thrown. Truncheons were swung. Things were thrown at the police. In the shooting people, water cannon, tear gas, and pepper spray league, this was a Sunday school picnic. No one died, was maimed, or was permanently injured. I’ve seen more violent Old Firm games on the telly, and been in more violent riots in Berkeley.
  4. The use of the word provocation is interesting. Most of the protestors would not say that a woman can “provoke” a man to rape her by wearing a short skirt, but they allowed themselves to be “provoked” into violence by a line of men standing around looking like giant bugs.
  5. As one of my colleagues pointed out, the benches in question are donated by private individuals to the city, for the enjoyment of all. They’re often given in memory of loved ones, or in thanksgiving for years of happiness in Edinburgh, or to mark centenaries of civic organisations. Using them as missiles was not the way to win Edinburgh hearts and minds.
Prose

Heisenberg in Love

I’ve had the same conversation with three people lately. These things happen, either because it’s a coincidence or because we all go through these same things at the same times in our lives.

The conversation is about identity. As they get older, my friends have begun to feel fragmented, as though they are more than one person at a time. I know the feeling. And matters of identity have always fascinated me. This is not the first time I’ve thought about this issue.

I wrote this in 1989, but was motivated to dig it out again by the synchronicity of these recent conversations.

When I sat below you on the floor, in that shirt which gives my eyes the colors of a forest and my hair the hints of a fire, unbraiding that hair and playing with the tendrils, watching you with my arboreal eyes, and asked, “Who are you?”, you answered with fifteen minutes of words beginning with “In”. I do not deny that the man you described is yourself.

But what if I had been standing, or sitting on the chair with my feet on the table, or curled up beside you, or stretched out on the bed? What if my shirt had been blue, or black, or a color that turns my eyes to mahogany and my hair to oak? What if I had left my hair in its braid and turned my piece of jade in my hands as I listened, and gazed at it, or at the rain on the window? How would you have begun, and what would you have said? I believe the person you would have shown me would bear little resemblance to the one I heard about.

The problem, of course, is that I actually sat above you on the hammock, swinging slightly, in my white shirt. My brass-tinted hair lay tangled about my shoulders, for I had left it loose all day, and I folded my hands in my lap as I listened. I did, however, look at you with my hazel eyes, and because of that, the man whom you described in twenty-five minutes of discourse beginning with the word “I” is somehow familiar to me.

(Pretentious, yes, but I was nineteen.)

Personal

Good fences make…?

I’m not going to get into the ins and outs of it, but I’m enmeshed in a neighbourhood dispute about the hole in the fence near our house. It may be closed for a time in the near future, between the contracting company’s visit and the vandals’ revenge.

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.

It’s a major inconvenience, and the means by which it may be done a source of deep anger. But I will remember my Frost and try to take the long view.

He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.

And I must remember to be charitable to my opponents. 😉

Edinburgh, a love letter

The Gum Fence, The Final Chapter

7 Comments

Followers of the Gum Fence Saga will recall that in Episode one, your heroine found over three hundred pieces of chewing gum stuck on the points of the wrought iron fence by her employer’s car park. Episode two found our narrator with delusions of grandeur bemused by the activities of said employer’s fence painters, who appeared to have primed over the gum rather than removing it. I’m sure you, dear readers, joined our viewpoint character of very little real significance in wondering what would happen next.

I can now confirm that our most cynical expectations have been confirmed. They painted over the gum.

Taken 19 April 2005

a blog by Abi Sutherland