Maus

Prizes used to be the winning domain of very few people in the world, not toys for savvy publicists and marketing agents to play with that guaranteed franchise success through lucrative licensing deals. The Pulitzer Prize, for instance, meant a lot to me as a young reader, because its status conferred an honorific upon the writer that was like a Michelin star of literary greatness. It meant that an expert panel had agreed upon, and recognized, the strength of the work. This, amongst a group of people that counted rigorous, heated debate as an intrinsic part of the narrative artform.

After I had studied "The Art of the Book" at its chosen institute for Higher Learning, the newest iteration of illustrated narration, the graphic novel, won our discipline's greatest honor. It was no surprise to me as a young apprentice that the first real Art Director I ever worked with had designed the cover for Art Spiegelman's Maus, which I only discovered after he asked me whether or not it should be included in his "book": the portfolio of cover designs that we show prospective clients. I was taken aback for a moment. Are you kidding me? It's so famous, and it's such a great book! What's the question, here? Keep it in there! I didn't see the point of asking.

"Yeah....", he mused to me slowly, in a way I'd learn to find as normal for a mentor leading junior talent through a question, "but, is it still fresh? I designed it sooo many years ago." It was a telling statement about the shortness of memory publishing had recently acquired, as an industry that capitalizes on the new and trendy like a viciously starved dog. But, my former mentor was supposed to be different than the rest of the pack. He'd won many prestigious book awards as the creative lead of a selective literary imprint. This was a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel! Their gold seal meant more than Oprah's Book Club seal-of-approval! This was an award judged by our peers. It meant something. Right?

"Well...", he went on to explain its limited recognition to the university press he was meeting with, that served the needs of younger minds with much less reference material to work with. Why would NYU care about a trade book cover, no matter how famous it was? They were looking for someone who could design for their current curriculum. He got the freelance gig to design their catalog, but he lost respect with me. There was no question in my mind what the better job was, but with his conditions, he was at the office until 10-11 pm anyway, after making a noontime appearance that only the very best divas were afforded for their prize-winning productivity. In his OCD/ADHD-manic world, it was all about NEW! NOW! NEXT! Not old, dead Jews.

Just like the movies that depend so much on our creative output for their industriousness, his idea of freshness was based on a series of serious medical diagnoses that we only had euphemisms for in the public world of 90s America, as we struggled with the sickness of other people's madness behind closed, locked doors. The way he shut out his own storied past became an apt metaphor for the same climate that produced the modern worlds' most horrifying genocide, done with the same efficient penstrokes of so many office workers "just doing their job(s)." It was a perfect example about the banality of evil my father had so often warned me about that lurked in the corporate world, perpetrated daily in office cubicles by a dully unfeeling people frightened only by the threat of a paycheck to pay for their next escapist entertainment.

Maus remains the best true life account I have ever read about the horrors of the Holocaust, told through the fabled cat-and-mouse of Art Spieglman's family history in so many pen strokes, and it is not to be missed. Add this book series to your college curriculum. 
I dare you.

Apothecary Rose

The connection between American publishing and the English houses that supported them were as clear as day to me, as a young apprentice at St. Martin's Press. Editors went on annual buying trips "across the pond" to partake in the comfy literary markets of murder mysteries and tearoom gardens that are so quintessentially British. Excepting for some technical difficulties present in the differences between printing processes, our repackaged series were the house staples we could all rely on. Murder mystery readers are overwhelmingly female, and surprisingly devoted to their fictional, crime-solving heroes; a pat, easy formula that's the perfect armchair read on a chilly autumn night, served with a warm cuppa on the side.

Until a certain female protagonist caught my attention. Because I produced the advance reader copies sent out to reviewers, I usually knew the manuscript well enough to talk about it, and because of the lulls in my work, I actually read most of them, too. We did a bunch of medieval murder mysteries that sought to capitalize on the commercial success of Umberto Eco's "The Name of the Rose". This one began similarly, but with a twist: the prime suspect was also the chief investigator. She was a female apothecary working as a laywoman within abbey walls, tending to the same medicinal garden that produced the deadly herbal used as the murder weapon, found on her shelves. Neat plot twist, right?

I was reminded of my own botanist mother who'd cried foul play over my child's bouquet, picked to cheer her up during one of her many "moods". "Agh!" She dramatically cried out when I presented my flowers to her, at her bedside. "That's 'deadly' nightshade!" Oh? Pretty purple flowers. "Are you trying to poison me?!" Uh, no...but, thanks for the tip. End scene, cut, aaannnd...fade out.

Aside from the theater of her daily undoing, I learned a lot about the power of plants from her. She often knew their Latin names by heart, and if we couldn't readily identify the wildflowers we found, we'd look them up. She knew the trees around us by the shape of their leaves, and the colors they changed in the fall. It was a beauty and magic to me that lengthened into homesickness for the forests of my northern woods. Never would I forget the shape of sunlight slanting through the trees, or the happy yellow of a early spring daffodil.

It's become grounding to me with every move I've made, a steadying process that keeps me down-to-earth in a sea of change; collecting specimens, looking them up, and then pressing them between the pages of books. That is the strength of our collective gifts as a mother and daughter: a knowledge that is straight and true. 
And so very beautiful.

http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/news/2017/09/14/england-to-be-re-dedicated-as-dowry-of-mary/

The Book of Ende

Becoming a female illuminator in the late 20th to early 21st century has been arduous, odd, and ultimately, my raison d'etre thus far. Unlike, say, Impressionism or the Renaissance period, any examples I found of exceptional illuminating were extremely rare, and a female's excellent works rarer still. But, they were there. Back in my apprenticeship, St. Martin's Press had annual editorial buying trips to England, in a reverse production process that had us recalibrating equipment to accommodate film flats done the exact opposite of our photographic process used for plate-making on American presses, but I digress.

Murder mysteries were (and still are) an export with an easy audience here in the States, as any real publishing professional will tell you. Just look at the numbers for Hercule Poirot, Agatha Christie, and the "Dial __ for Murder" series. My mother is particularly enamored with a British show currently airing on PBS about two older women who plan estate gardens and solve murders, in the exact same format every single week, which is the core demographic for any murder mystery audience.

Edward Gorey famously illustrated an opening spot for the introduction to the PBS "Masterpiece Theater" murder mystery series, in a gothic pen-and-ink style that had the 90s graduating classes of RISD's Illustration department completely under his spell: a cool, hermetic character who left New York City after his own career in publishing for Provincetown, to create work reminiscent of the the 1900-1930s Art Nouveau revival, but I digress again. 

At work, we produced a series of murder mysteries by British authors that I still have on my bookshelves, with one stand-out selection: "The Apothecary Rose". Here, we find a female herbalist working in a medieval abbey garden attached to a cloister, who also solves murders most foul. Back then, the weapon of choice was often poison secreted from the abbey garden or her own apothecary shelves, for death-dealing instead of healing. 

The same fictional construct used in murder mysteries was the actual historical context for female illuminators working in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: artists who were either raised in the family business of making books attached to a prestigious monastery, or the nuns working in the scriptorium of their own monasteries. It was uncommonly educated and rare for anyone to read, write, and paint with such skill, but for a woman? Well, that's another story entirely. 

Happy Christmas, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa, to my illuminated readers of 2016.

Poor Richard's Almanack

I didn't know anyone like me growing up, except through books and magazines. My older cousin was married to a graphic designer who designed HBO catalogs in the city back in the 80s (like a weekly "T.V. Guide" for cable), and then hand-painted wooden duck decoys at their home as her "creative outlet". Not exactly what I wanted to do as an adult, but then again, I had no idea how to tell people around me who I was and what I'd become: "sort of like Benjamin Franklin", which would've been met at the dinner table with lots of eye-rolling and violent denials. 

Usually, my brothers just called me "gay" or a "retard", so I spent most of my childhood in my bedroom with my best friends who lived in the books they wrote just for me; that's how it felt. It was warm, intimate, and always understood by me, which helped with the adversity in my childhood home that's also the world we live in. It's never easy to innovate, or "to become", or to be that thing people fear the most: powerful, educated, and righteous. It wouldn't have done me any good to talk about something so rare and special that eludes so many people for so long. Why chase after it?

Luckily, my dad loves history, government, politics, the military, and quotes, which gave me the plug-ins I needed to create space for my work to grow; work that was rough and under-funded so it would seem amateurish, though for the ferocity of the concepts underneath. "Concept is key" is one of his favorite sayings, along with this one attributed to Ben Franklin: "Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise." He and I were the only regular nighttime sleepers awake before dawn to the awesome silence of a tense house so often governed by my mother's manic cleaning sprees and dramatic scenes, especially the evening before another stress-filled holiday that felt more like torture than celebration to us.

Then, we would have an excuse to go hiking in the woods before anyone else in the house woke up with their needs that took precedence over two "morning people" openly disparaged in a dreamy, late-night t.v. world that made chronic insomnia seem like this hip, new thing. Where would we have been without history and a few good quotes to back us up? I still go to bed way before it's considered "cool", to take quiet morning photos of empty streets filled with big dark houses under beautiful Hudson Valley sunrises. 

Wish you were here.

Ms. Haiti

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beauty_pageant# 

Magdala was nerve-wracking for me to be around, a feeling that was soon shared by the entire small family business that hired her. She's tall, smart, pretty, and cultured; in short, she is exactly like every other gainfully-employed woman working in Manhattan and its environs, which caused her an enormous amount of distress. In Queens, she was just another Haitian-American, but something happened to her during her long subway commute into the city. She began to have dreams and visions of her self that she could market and sell to us as her co-workers, which was the exact job description she had, as so many of the marketing/acquisitions/sales staff who function as our support personnel and in-house cheerleaders. She is, to be succinct, a fan of mine, without being a friend or even particularly friendly.

At the time of her hire, she was "engaged" (or "enfianced" in Magdala's irritating patois that was designed to be "exotic") to a short, bland, and rather unattractive French man who's also a single father, which was absurd. She was better-looking than him, and as pretentious as she could be, that tall black girl ain't never gonna be no damn Parisian white girl, knowwhatimsayin'? Too many big white teeth in that large head of hers. She's "bougie" as fuck, fellas, but to so many Euros who drank the waters deeply from our American import t.v. show that now reads like a prolonged tampon commercial about boring yentas living (and sexing) in the city, she was just the ticket he needed to take to New York and our lifestyle here, like a pretty tour guide on his payroll.

His daughter was disastrous for her, too. She was blond, petite, and Euro-pretty, which means she missed her French "maman" the way I miss really good baguettes and appropriately-named croissants livin' in the 'burbs. Oh, well. Ain't nuthin' but a thang, right? Whereas the little Chinese girl of our house bookkeeper spoke broken baby "Engwish" to me and wiggled onto my lap in a record-breaking couple of seconds the first time she ever met me, this carefully-dressed girl of eight or nine spoke haltingly and bristly to a very nervous, buck-toothed, skinny older girl of about 28-34, also over-dressed for her role as part of our sales staff.

She was obsessed with her looks, too, making sure she rushed into my office to tell me "the good news" about her lunchtime experience with a former model's outdoor staff working the line around the block for her t.v. talk show in the nearby studio, asking her to stand in line for hours to try-out for the star's main show about amateur "would-be" models. Again, I was nonplussed as a native New York girl. Well, yeah, sure. You're tall and skinny enough. I mean, that's where it starts nowadays, before attractiveness and beauty. Fit the tiny clothes, first. Them little rich kids in Hollywood diet all the time. Also, how good do you look in pictures? She went into a fretful paranoia right after her initial bout of giddiness, which is not a good sign for any industry, particularly the extra competitive ones. My queries to her were brief and direct, because any really good art director knows I just don't have time for it while I'm on the clock.

She was less sure about her photogenic qualities ("Well, take some pictures. You have a camera, right?"), and her "prominent mole" (honestly, I hadn't noticed) that she felt sure would make her fodder for the people on the show. Well, that and her age. "Oh, they'd just choose me to 'make fun' of me." Yeah, well, if that's your attitude, then modeling isn't for you, because if this little brush-up freaks you out (where it's all about how you look and what doesn't look right), then the actual business of modeling is out because of your sensitivity to perceived criticisms, so I guess publishing was a better choice for you. End of story. I mean, really, where could you go with it? Rehabs are filled with insecure girls waiting for their next big break. Be a scholar!

But, of course, she was massively problematic in our equally competitive book program, questioning her every decision with an infamous defensiveness that was even more offensive when spoken in her hackneyed "Franche" accent that she put on for show. She was a generic drama queen, which is the absolute kiss of death in a town filled with the real deals "trodding the boards" never-so-lightly each and every night. An egotistical diva who doesn't make art...what the fcuk is that? I had no idea what to do with her in our company, and soon my co-workers filed complaint after complaint about her attitude, too. She was snippy and disrespectful, even "on paper" in our in-house emails, and keeping track of the written word is what we do best. Poor thing. She was on a short clock with us.

Within fairly quick succession, she broke up with her "Fiancee" (we weren't impressed enough by her overt "bling", I guess), had a bad affair with an actual good-looking Frenchman with his own media company who soon got his other French (and white) girlfriend pregnant right before Magdala quit our outfit to go work for him in Paris, but she didn't care. She was going to be "a star", baby! With his over-priced "Breakfast at Tiffany" books that were Euro-friendly and arty enough for his snobby coffee-table audience? Yeah, right. 

But, things had been going downhill for awhile. She began showing symptoms of our temperamental publisher's typical firing arc: too many sick days taken without advance notice, eating quickly through his 50/50 health insurance for her bad teeth and multiple gum surgeries brought on by anorexia and bulimia (that raises some red flags, even in New York, as a notorious food town), and then her too-gossipy friendship with our ferociously evil Jewish secretary sealed her fate at the business, forever, all of which I had warned her about during her first few months of employment.

At a company and a town as fucked up as Manhattan, not even a wanna-be media type like the kind who hides months without lunches, punctuated by the occasional fast food binge that's stuffed hurriedly into her mouth for publicity's sake in the company's kitchen (on recommend as a political tactic by the daft-idiot white-blond yenta aggressively manning the front desk) can sneak past us. Yeah, bitch. We know. It didn't work out the way you thought it would. Fantasies can be like that, though: brutal and cruel and quick, kind of the way I imagine most beauty pageants and their contestants are. In real life, I mean. Not theirs. Ours. The real thing. Living a real life is the only true thing we have on this earth, girl. Get some before it's gone.


For Mr. and Mrs. Jay, of "ANTM" fame: yeah, girl,  I saw you scoping me on the down-low while you was underground during my daily subway commute, wit ya reared-back head and "dah-yummmm, 'cuse me!" look on yo' face and your seven foot frame dressed in all black pretending to clutch at invisible pearls. I do know I look that good. And Mr. Jay, ain't nobody incognito at 6'5 with silver-blond hair gelled into spikes walking around Chelsea. That was an "off" day for me visually, BTW. I was on break from the office getting a lunchtime walk after too many years eating at my desk. Feel me? Yeah, you do. I know fellas too scared to approach a lady, even plush "shorties" like me :) Bahaha! Booyah!

Grammar Nazi

The "Judas" Bible in St Mary's Church, Totnes, Devon, UK. This is a copy of the second folio edition of the Authorized Version, printed by Robert Barker, Printer to King James I, in 1613, and given to the church for the use of the Mayor of Totnes. This edition is known as the "Judas" Bible because in Matthew c26 v36 "Judas" appears instead of "Jesus". In this copy the mistake (in red circle) is corrected with a slip of paper pasted over the misprint.[1]"Judas Bible2" by Etan J. Tal - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Commons.

It takes all kinds of people to publish the books that we cherish and pass on to our loved ones, including the good, bad, ugly, and indifferent. I've cataloged all the types I could into my brain as I went about my career, full as it is with the facts needed to produce the most complex yet beautifully simple objects humans make. I was there slugging it out in other people's offices, over other people's problems, because I loved it, which was greeted with the necessary amount of derision intended by someone who just realized that they fucked up by assuming all the real book people of the world were gone. Not so.

In recognition of actual genius, even when it was undetected by the unwashed mousy messes I was often forced to work alongside of (and in the process, often giving them a free education that's priceless just to do my job), I amassed quite an impressive head count. At the end of my tenure working under the guise of various "bosses", and when it became blatantly obvious to an entire industry worldwide that I could outwork even the clever rich white "dons" of Oxford U. in an unbeatable quick time (creating a new record, too: took me only a few scant weeks to supposedly upset the "board" and other "shareholders" who were "in charge of covers", which I found out by sweeping right over the head of their favored pet du jour, a pathetic sell-out of a "Creative Director" who allowed herself to be shipped overseas at their back-and-call whenever they felt like it, by pandering to their lily-white asses through her social media to reflect exactly what they wanted to hear, which isn't exactly like setting the world on fire with originality, but I digress), my fellow co-workers took a devilish glee in recording my "head counts" of those fallen comrades who had unfortunately tried to sell their souls to a bunch of real intellectuals who didn't need them, plush as we were (are) with actual credentials and experience.

Actual know-how is a frightening thing when you have no fucking idea about what you're actually doing, much less caring about it, because as every really dedicated teacher has already found out, it takes a hell of a lot more than a pittance of a salary to become your devoted servant. The gap where your overblown salary sits is filled with our genuine heart, and that's not something you can fake on a mere teacher's salary. Just ask any faithful publishing professional. It's enough to make you blanch white, and what rough sport it is, too.

And so, when I met those adoring fans of mine (sometimes unwashed, because a lack of soap doesn't discriminate between good or bad either) in your office spaces who followed my every move over the company's Ethernet network, or cheered aloud when I pushed through another great cover that was in danger of rejection out of spite, sabotage, or corruption, I felt it, even when I knew my crew of production editors who dared to sail with me on one of my last voyages asea* while awash in ill-gotten money, were doomed to repeat themselves because such is the nature of their gifts: harnessing their fretful compulsiveness in the typo-free artwork you all appreciate.

I couldn't do it, but you sure can. Thanks for that. I realize it takes a lot of nerve to man my chair by forcing turf wars over layouts most people will never see, know about, or give two fucks about how long you sweated over it bro, but you made me look good, even when there was no one around who cared enough to know quality work when they see it. I do. Thanks, D'avi. You're a beautifully crazy kid, man, and I could do with a little less stalking, okay? Now get to work! You have a lot of it to do, you petty-ass motherfucker. Just keep your little turf wars off my fucking margins....ya fuck. I'll see you in "Merry Olde Englande"**. You'll be the so-and-so holding the white gloves.

 

For the production staff at OUP/USA: it was a hell of a ride, wasn't it?

http://global.oup.com/us/companion.websites/9780195393040/book/preface/ 

* Davey's world:   http://www.word-detective.com/2011/08/asea-at-sea/ 

** White gloves:   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindisfarne_Gospels 

The Acne Artist

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ring_%282002_film%29

Believe it or not (and since this is me, you should totally believe me, but if not, there's tons of actual documentation to back up my claims), book publishing attracts a lot of groupies. Educated (for the most part), highly technical groupies, but add-ons nonetheless. They're the type of people hooked on reading, which is usually a bad thing for other types of addiction, but in this case it creates someone who is uniquely over-educated and typically smarter than you, the average person. As James Baldwin once famously said, he didn't mind being born poor, black, and gay because he was a very gifted New Yorker who could work the odds against him. He felt blessed, and he felt that if public school neglected him, he would read every book in the local public library, which would make him very well-educated, and he was right: 

“It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.”― James Baldwin

 

Readers form a synergy between the living and the past that cannot be broken, a rare type of erudition that eludes other types of education out there in the real world. It's been one of the biggest blessings of my life, but not the most compulsive one, because I'm not a compulsive addict. A friendly clerk here at my local library and I like to chat when I check out DVD's, most oftentimes movies, because I don't have cable t.v., nor do I go to the cinema very much. She sees me here and now, which led her to ask me, one of the most educated and well-read people on the planet, if "I ever read" yesterday (too funny), because she doesn't see me do it right underneath her nose. Obviously, right now I am busy writing to you all, which cuts into my other endeavors.

I went on to explain to her that there are people who only know me as a rock star book cover designer, because that was my trade for years. There are other people who wonder why I don't illustrate, photograph, and/or show my fine art in galleries anymore, because I am obviously busy being a publisher who utlizies all of those skills daily to publish for all of you, but compulsive people with learning disorders don't easily understand that. They simply don't get how I could, say, be at one time in my past, one of the best female Mixed Martial Artists in the world (and the only one in my age group), who gradually stopped training because of injury, a lack of time, and available funds, but that's exactly what happened with me. My parents are still baffled that I wasn't a professional ballerina, because I could have done that for living, too.

No, gifted people suffer from the same life conditions as you do, just with way less time: there's not a lot of it for extremely talented people with genius level IQ's, which means you don't know how many different facets I have, which is also why I don't run out of things to write about, speak to you about, or make art about...ever. There's just a lot more of you than me. I am just one, as you are many. Book publishing is the same as the general public, which was the market I designed for: "Adult Trade" (although I designed for other markets, too), items of general interest for the general public, which means I know just about everything. It's weird, but it's a function of my trade. I've read every type of book there is several times over, as well those in my head that I haven't made, yet, which means you are my forever audience.

We do have specialists within our workflow as a production queue with some very dull technical aspects, so badly repetitive to a mind like mine that I transcend lower level jobs in a year or less, which is also typical for me: to catapult past people who have been laboring for years under just one of two types of conditions in the workplace. It's excruciating for me to be around them as I must be for them, although I cross through their viciously defended territories often enough to make it very uncomfortable for someone who is basically a human typewriter in this modern age. It's not a good fit, but I already knew that, it's just that I don't have the time to school each and every one of you individually, that's what I write it down here: for reference's sake. 

Same thing as my attention-getting design work at some commercial business: I'm there to do that specific trade (which encompasses more skill sets than you'll ever have), but obviously I don't have time to show you all of my G-d-given gifts, which makes me seem almost like divinity to the people who worship at the altar of book-making: I am their "Great One", The Maestro who always gets it right, even if you don't get it at the time. They publish my supposed "rejections" for years afterwards, too, which makes me seem like some magical golden goose who keeps producing even after my physical presence has long gone from their doorways. It's unnerving, and that's my life: to outlast all of you, as a final legacy that's my gift to the world.

It's created some absolutely havoc-wreaking dynamics on what can be a compulsive response to life, if you have disordered people manning the lead positions at the top who hate change like they can't see the germs on their clothes. In the industry, we have staffers who do one small chunk of the book process over and over again, without ever gaining any type of perspective or overview about the entire life-cycle of a book from concept to bound book, which often makes me the only one sitting at your round table meeting who knows what the fuck is going on, above and beyond your wonky V.P. widget of a human being, which is why the best of us "graduate" from a set industry to strike out on our own, which is why you are also now reading me, instead of the other way around. Oh, I've checked out a few books here, but it's really only if you can out-write or out-think me, which is highly improbable.

Occasionally we get "art fags" so disordered that they run screaming from our industry like we just set them on fire, which we have; a horrible state of affairs if your mind is already more jumbled than you can sort out. Making books is somewhat like making a really good movie: there's "money people" who produce, accountants who keep track of the books, managers who tend to the budget, and then there's the content-makers and content-generators at the top of the pyramid that include me, the editor, and our publisher, with or without some rich white "ladies who lunch" on the board joining us in meetings against our will because they're bored, thus forcing their boring presence upon skillful people like us, because we're truly exciting to be around.

We have a whole crew of onlookers we carry financially on the backs of our labors: secretaries, guys working the mail-room, that cool dude from IT...you get my point. They see a tiny portion of our labor, because that's what we have time for. You: fix my computer, NOW. You: how much time do we have in the schedule? None? Ah, that's what I thought, and yeah, no money either. That's how it goes at the top; it just gets harder and harder to perform under ever-changing heights of extremes that you can't handle, which leads to freak-outs that are so weird, I have to tell you about them. We attract kooks like magnets, ones who seek to impress others with their "creative"-ish jobs that drive them horribly mad because they can't do it.

BinBin was one such creature. Because she can't hack a real artistic life, she designs the same thing day after day after day, and when she finally complains about the monotony, someone like me tosses her a cover off the back-list with a tiny print run of no real consequence for her to design, which she fails at abysmally, thus sending her right back to the bottom of the workflow where she belongs. Oh, she hates us as much as she hates herself, and that's the weirdest part: BinBin telegraphed her Chinese hatred of the "White Man's" English language art-form by deliberately rubbing Vaseline all over face every evening before passing out in a drunk stupor, because she used her pus-filled acne to torture us with at face-to-face meetings, in the final irony of it. She isn't a real artist. No, her real artistry is using her body as a performance piece to hurt the people around her, because her father is an alcoholic who's a better artist than her as a professional musician, and she can't fucking handle that.

So, instead of working towards getting better, she decided to freak us all out by grossing us out, and that is her real genre: that of a gross-out artist, like the kid in your class who makes "boogie art" from his picked nose, or graffiti on the desk with his leftover chewing gum. It's offensive, but so what? There was nothing else to her besides the acne that she can or cannot clean up according to her not-so-very-hidden agenda tied to her worsening emotional state from her own incompetence and arrogance. Instead, she chose to spend her days playing weird head games with her hard-working co-workers, people who deeply love the printed word and the romantic poetry of the English language. She thanked us for allowing her to apprentice in our great trade by passing around horrible nude photos of herself through the company's in-house email network (stupid, too, like those ten "certificate" programs she has listed on her resume, with not one real art or design school degree), mugging her gross face at all of our productive meetings as a spite for her lack.

Don't forget history, people. Hitler was a failed artist before he became the anti-Christ, not the other way around. Be warned during this time of transition about the real horrors that exist in the world, while ignoring the fake distractions around you that mean nothing. The next great evil might just be the person sitting next to you who processes the same dull paperwork every day, in this rich character study about the banality of evil that's from me to you during this wicked Halloween season. Beware the techno-geek who seeks to harm you through your screen, because I hear what she has is catching....boo at you!

http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/riseofhitler/art.htm

Leatherbound

Pressed leaf from a Ginkgo biloba tree.

As a publisher, I have books of all shapes, sizes, types, languages, and purposes. Most are for reading, but I am media-independent as a creator, which means I do not experience biases based on other people's preferences. 

A junior staff member from a small family business I worked at years ago was horrified to discover that my priceless going away gift, presented to a homesick Midwestern admin, was actually a one-of-a-kind art piece crafted from a hollowed out duplicate of a hardcover classic that's been in print for hundreds of years.  

A gift of a leather bound journal for whatever I want. Thanks, Jang!

Yeah, I know. It's why neither former female employee (not the gift getter, nor the assistant) works in publishing anymore. They don't understand that a book is more than text communication; it's also an art object. The very essence behind my success lies in my ability to transcend individual intentions (which are probably wrong) to ascertain real value, make something from it, and present it to all of you. That does not mean the people around me necessarily "get it", or see worth right away, because they can't. My job is to see.

I use bound materials the way any artist uses any medium in a serious way: by pushing it further than you ever could, and that's what keeps it so fun and fresh. Plus, I really enjoy the feeling of "shock and awe" on your faces that rings in "frontiering". Hey, parents get bored, too! Have fun this weekend and go make something, will ya?


"For those who fight for it, 
life has a flavor that the sheltered will never know."
- from the movie, Sucker Punch.

The Gift

Early morning delivery.

On Christmas Eve Day, I opened the door early morning to what I first thought was a Christmas present, then I thought it was a freebie sample that I ordered online, but when I bent down to pick it up, I saw the label. Oh. It's from a small indie publisher that I designed for in the past, a rich kid imprint paid for by his also-rich daddy, a guy who cashed out by selling his imprint years ago. They probably use the son's company as a tax shelter for the earnings from that sale, which renders their product indifferent, like so many widgets that exist only to serve their obscured financial purpose, not worth the paper they're printed on. And so the gift was actually my own work mailed back to me in bound book form, certainly not a new experience for me. How...well, not a gift.

I quickly took a look at the work I did for them on the cheap, unsurprised by its' poor quality. One book had been case stamped on the spine incorrectly (upside down, actually; a major production error that's a firing offense in major league houses), which I noticed by removing the jacket I designed, because I always inspect books for their quality. The other book contains some inane drivel about an arrogant British wanker who hates the yoga retreat he's attending, and (surprise, surprise), probably has epiphanies later on down the road, read: further along in the book. Ho hum. A real pager turner, not worth my time. It's not exactly prize-winning stuff, but that's the whole point; they position themselves deliberately on the bottom of the pile, to mine the marketing niche as low-end producers, probably wanting to escape notice so The Tax Man doesn't come a-calling. Huh. I know that game, too.

It's embarrassing, but people do this kind of stuff ALL the time. Every day, actually. They take a real vocation and turn it to shit, then piss and moan about the cost, which is exactly what they did to me when I worked for them. It was beneath me, and by them time they shamefacedly told me they were flat broke, (the first and only time their "publisher" deigned to speak to me in person), and besides, like, they could totally use my desk space for one of his six or seven pretty boy "assistants" (nudge, nudge, wink, wink), I think they thought they were lashing out at me for being a major talent who stooped to their level for shekels because they had me in a vulnerable position financially, which is about as far from the truth as we are from the sun; another light that will forever fail to reach them, because they just don't get it on every level, and that includes way existentially, man.

As they continue to play their petty games with one another at their inept labors today, I couldn't help but reflect on my time there, in the early morning light, Christmas Eve morning, looking at these books that could have been so beautiful, and I thought that when they had the real deal right beneath their gazes, they refused to see true worth. They took the hefty gifts I gave them, and they turned their backs on them, because they know they aren't worth the price of the ticket. I thought about how sad that was for them, but that they were no longer my flock to tend to. They are now someone else's poor problem.

I wish you peace on this 26th day in December during our continued Christmas season, as we recall the journey of The Three Magi who came bearing gifts for our Lord and Savior, a baby born lowly in a manger, because His parents were turned away from the inn at Bethlehem, and Amen for that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_Magi.

More cheap, shoddy goods, just in time for Christmas! How thoughtful.

The Grasshopper

Grasshopper at dawn.

When I was growing up, my parents repeated a handful of fables to us as moral lessons routinely, but my father more than most. He loves slogans, sayings, homilies, quotes, and clichés, so much so, he puts his favorite ones on mugs, plaques, t-shirts, whatever.

But no matter how many times he repeated the story of the grasshopper and the ant, the moral of the story was always the same: be like the ant, not the grasshopper. It became so well-worn with time, that now all he has to do is repeat the shorthand version of it, as we say it back to him with our eyes rolling: "Be the ant, not the grasshopper." That's training for you!

And, of course, I took to children's literature like a future publisher takes to books, which means I absorbed it like it was my second skin, so tightly woven with my own personal history, that it has become intertwined with the fabric of who I am through the daily practice of it.

Grasshopper in morning light.

Now, as it grows colder and darker, the fruits of our labor take on even greater importance. Those of us from northern climates know that particularly, down to our very DNA: work hard, because winter is coming. Our animals fatten up every August and September, because that's exactly what every snow dog I've ever had does instinctively.

It was just one of the many things I thought about this morning when I first saw this lingering grasshopper in the dark light of dawn, because I was already up at 6:30 a.m., (before the alarm I set the night prior goes off, because I've trained myself to do that, so as not to disturb the rest of the household), placing our county receptacles by the curb for recycling pick up. Work, work, work, and then work some more, and always give back. That's what real communities do to make it through the tough times. À bientôt!
   

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ant_and_the_Grasshopper

 

Reading

Ah, that "Q" is perfection. Well done!

I've been a reader for so long, I don't actually remember when I couldn't read. I know I was a very early reader, about 2 or 3 years old, and so was my oldest brother. My mother said he taught himself to read The New York Times so he could check the Mets score, and that certainly may be true. 

I know I attended a pre-K reading class for toddlers at the local library, because I begged my parents to take me to school so I could read, and that was the closest they could find to nursery school before 
I went to an actual school, during the brief year we lived in rural Pennsylvania after leaving the city, before settling down in the Hudson River region.

Discovery and a new chapter.

It's hard for me to describe an experience I do so fluently; it's almost a subconscious thing at this point. I take in information so quickly visually, that I see things way before the lay person can. I've likened in to being an expert swimmer dipping and swirling through the clearest, warmest tropical waters (and I am that, too). Reading is a feeling so sensuous and fluid, few hobbies can replicate that kind of pleasure for me, and I know the same is true for other hardcore readers. 
We occasionally speak between nose dives.

Oh, I've designed flaps like this before.

Few hobbies create the kind of erudition and experience that bibliophiles have, with the exceptions of medical fields and clergy. 
We empathize immediately with the writer, because as soon as we read words, we're right there with the author. Some of us are so adept at it, we work at it professionally through publishing and media. Unlike a purely visual artist, I am also a writer and reader: the harmonious blend of a variety of highly skilled sets that transcend majors taught at the leading universities.

Lots of decorative elements and ink coverage. Some gaps in typesetting.

And so it is that I can talk with ease to an advanced physicist at their level, because I read their words when I design books for the students majoring in their curriculum. I sing along perfectly to Ella Fitzgerald while I riff through a series of graphics that vibe off one another, like a flutist times himself to a jazz pianist, either in the planned syncopation of an orchestration or the more advanced styling of an abstract expressionist who goes off on a tangent. 

To find someone who can follow along like that is the rarest of the rare, and just like the books we collect, so too are the odd ducks of the creative world who finally find their intellectual homes within the great literary houses of the world: those weird combinations of dancer, musician, photographer, model, writer, reader, designer, engineer, artist, and muse, because we are all of those things, and so much more. Open a book, and come find us. We'll be there between the vanilla-scented pages of a hundred year old volume and the near-constant flickering of a computer screen. See you soon.

An Illuminator's Bible

My first "real" Bible.

My parents gave me a New American Bible (St. Joseph's Edition) by the Catholic Book Publishing Company of New York, printed in 1972, as a gift for receiving my first Holy Communion. My mom hand wrote my personal information on the presentation page in her perfect Catholic schoolgirl script, a relic from both of our youths: I was just a little girl, and she was a very young and relatively inexperienced mother by today's standards, way before my history presented itself to me in the form of a vocation, and her Multiple Sclerosis set in to give her hand bad tremors. Years later, my Malamute puppy would pick out a few of my books off the lowest bookshelves to mouth on while I was away at work, cutting his puppy teeth on them by soothing himself with my oldest and strongest scents. 

I'd come home for lunch in the middle of the day on my little purple motor scooter, to walk him so he could go to the bathroom while he was potty training, changing his wee wee pads, steam vacuuming up doggie doo doo, and picking up books strewn about the living room floor, or piled up in his doggie bed rat's nest, along with chew toys and my oldest clothing items, like a sweatshirt from college days he got out of the bedroom closet's laundry basket: "Doing a little bit of light reading, eh, Ted?" He had pulled out the oldest books I had in my collection by the corners that stuck out from the shelf, like my high school yearbook and this red bound bible, dogeared time capsules of my life up until now. Life; it goes by so quickly.  

Enjoy it as much as you can.

Lawn Perfection

When I was a kid, I once complained to my mom about boredom during a particularly slow summer, because I grew up with kids who weren't exactly on my level, which always left me wondering what to do next. Naturally, I developed an enormous amount of entertainments while alone. In response to my "whining", my mom ordered me to the basement for a big, white, plastic bucket to pick out every dandelion in the backyard with my little next door neighbor, because she didn't want "weeds" in "her" lawn. She would also suggest we do laundry, wash dishes, fold clothes, and other horrors when we hinted at boredom, so I learned industrious, productive habits early on.

We did that for awhile, then became actually bored, after exhausting every avenue available to us through this venue: we decorated ourselves with flower crowns and garlands, then went indoors and pretended to be Greek Goddesses, wrapping ourselves in bedsheets, giggling in the guest bedroom downstairs, doing playacting that I sourced from the books on the shelf. Finally my mom came downstairs to see what all the commotion was about, to find me and my friend jumping up and down on the bed, grabbing each other when we fell down, laughing over the stupid romantic phrases adults used in soap operas, like "Darling, I'm yours!", pretending all the world was a stage.

I still do that, and I still appreciate a really nice yard, even ones with hundreds of wildflowers one might consider a "weed" in passing, as I still love hammy, over-dramatic, bad acting for sport; life lessons learned in childhood, now made into art. Such is the life.
 

The DNA of Our XYZ: RISD by Design

Natural instincts, and other magical gifts.

Being a RISD grad (pronounced RIZZ-DEE) is like dropping the Harvard bomb into casual conversation at a cocktail party: the music stops with a sudden scratch of a needle across a record (you remember those, right?), like the person opposite you has just spied spinach caught conspicuously between your front teeth, as is now deciding whether or not to tell you the truth about your appearance based on your relatively new, and brief, acquittance. How to proceed? Alarm, dread, surprise, or maybe a kind of slow-creeping dawn of recognition widens their eyes, and those are just the people who know the truth about who we are.

I do not (nor have I ever) resemble a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, just like I don't resemble the stereotypical, movie version of an artiste, or the square-framed, shy, passive-aggressive, arrogant, know-it-all book designer, like your average, working class, boogie-down New Yawker, or your typically self-righteous Catholic girl, though I am, in fact, all of those things: an artist, a book designer, a native New Yorker, a person of faith, and that's just scratching the surface. Like my ethnicity, the story of who I am is not the Dummy Guide to the Self or a CliffNotes version of reality, though I am far from pretentiously complex, nor purposely difficult to pin down, like some pompous hipster living high on the hog in Williamsburg (look it up).

Nature, and also, design.

Through time, I found myself to be exactly who I think I am, and that my experience at RISD was exactly what it was supposed to be: hard, brutally hard, and not something I would ever contemplate doing again, because my purpose was (and is) to go out in the world to share my work and my vision as a leader in the world, and as a woman of the world. It was a "one of a kind" type of thing, just like my time as a student was.

I now see my time there as something akin to the cinematic version of the combined Harry Potter books: a magical sort of place that doesn't actively seek out students (nor should they, because RISD has the lowest acceptance rate in the world), but simply draws to it the beautiful and gifted like another type of magnet, that Sorting Hat of Potter fame. As much as I didn't "fit" in (and who would, at such an extraordinary place?!), I found over time that I am exactly what they wait for at RISD: a type of intellect that can cross barriers, jumping lightly over divides to make previously unseen connections, building almost impossibly beautiful bridges seemingly out of thin air.

Human animals, and other topics of interest.

Because, just like one of my professors admitted, we are this era's Leonardo da Vinci's (and every era's ever after), as we always have been, and we always will be: not easy, not trendy, not "alternative" for the sake of a short term sale, but rather to become enduring, lasting, classic, innovative, a type of forever that's also human and achievable. It's kinda like being the stuff that books are made of: once bound and sewn by hand, then printed on paper by a press with movable type, and now rendered into a computer programming language for the Digital Age. Yeah, like that.  Come, see for yourself.  http://issuu.com/risd/docs/risdxyz_spring2014_final_single_pag#

Revolutions in the making, and other brilliant feats of typesetting.