On 10th January I’ll be leading a class at the amazing Morgan Library and Musuem, featuring bookbinding techniques and some rubber-stampy action (as above…):

“Your New Year in a Book — New Year’s resolutions, anyone? We can help! In this workshop, book artist Andrew Eason will lead families in the making of a twelve-page book. With an array of stamps and unusual craft material, children and their adults will divide their books into four seasons and allow space for goals to be attained throughout the year.”

I’m not sure the 12-pages part is strictly correct, but books there will be!

Earlier today – 10th November, 2015 –  I was appointed Head of Adult and Young Adult services at Plainfield Public Library in New Jersey. This is going to mean a lot of changes in my habits over the last year – I have been largely employed on a freelance basis for over a year now, and I will need to reacclimatise to full time working.

The truth of the matter is that this represents a set of new challenges for me. I’m looking forward to it, and I want to try to make certain I do the best job I can of it. I hope that I will also have the chance to help create opportunities for others too; whether in the traditional library spheres of reading, literacy, research and the world of the written word, or in its expanded universe of the book arts, visual culture, and culture as a whole (very much including digital media). I couldn’t be more excited about it all, and I want to bring all my enthusiasm, energy and commitment to my new role; at the same time, I want to steer towards synergies with my own practices and experiences, taking the chance to create book arts opportunities when I can, and building relationships and networks along the way.

Back in November 2013, my wife Linda Eason (née Moody) passed away, and I was left behind to mourn and to try to build a new life. One of the things Linda left me with was the knowledge of having been loved so well that it made it easier for me to move on and make my life anew. In fact, when I gave a eulogy at Linda’s funeral, I referred to the instructions she’d left to use all her best crockery- and not to struggle with the fact that this would inevitably mean its wear and tear and that, eventually, it would break. I knew she meant for me to do the same with the other things she’d left in my life – the things you cannot see.

After some time had passed, I felt I needed to go and be somewhere new for a while, and I had always wanted to explore the possibilities my dual US/UK citizenship offered, so I made arrangements to go and stay with a friend in New York for a few months. And, as sometimes happens, having gone to find myself, I found someone else, instead. This someone is Sandy, with whom I have started a new life here in New Jersey.

Just recently I found new employment here in NJ that will mean I am able to sustain this new life into the future. I’ll write another post about that in a moment, but just for now I wanted to acknowledge where I’ve come from, and what I feel it is I’m doing now.

I’ve also been mulling over in my mind how I will mark the anniversary of Linda’s death, which falls in a few days time. I was struck by a Herman Hesse poem (one that is in fact included with “The Glass Bead Game”, one of my favourite books),  that seemed to speak to me of much of what I’ve come to know, and (though I believe I’ll repeat it later) it seems right to include it here, too. Where Hesse writes of a “magic force” I might interject that I feel the support and encouragement of a benevolent memory within me as well.  –

Stages

As every flower fades and as all youth

Departs, so life at every stage,

So every virtue, so our grasp of truth,

Blooms in its day and may not last forever.

Since life may summon us at every age

Be ready, heart, for parting, new endeavor,

Be ready bravely and without remorse

To find new light that old ties cannot give.

In all beginnings dwells a magic force

For guarding us and helping us to live.

Serenely let us move to distant places

And let no sentiments of home detain us.

The Cosmic Spirit seeks not to restrain us

But lifts us stage by stage to wider spaces.

If we accept a home of our own making,

Familiar habit makes for indolence.

We must prepare for parting and leave-taking

Or else remain the slaves of permanence.

Even the hour of our death may send

Us speeding on to fresh and newer spaces,

And life may summon us to newer races.

So be it, heart: bid farewell without end.

Sandy and I are driving down to Philadelphia for the weekend today, with the intention of seeing some art, having a nosh, and chasing down some sort of delicious gin-and-tonic type drink. Looks like a decent day for it…

Where the snow is cold, the coffee is hot, the welcome warm and the hangover cunningly held at bay with contraptions made out of bacon.

In central park today just before sundown. Felt very calming.

I went to see a comedy show last night at Bell House in Brooklyn. For $25 I got to see a few comics I’d only previously imagined seeing on Netflix (or I suppose I could quite likely see them all in Edinburgh once a year!)

That stripy object in the gloom is Reggie Watts.

As well as him I got to see Cameron Esposito, Jim Gaffigan, Rhea Butcher, James Adomian, and Eliot Glazer. It was great. Now mother has a little bit of a head.

I’m at the center for international photography at the Salgado exhibit. Salgado is a bit of a star and I do enjoy his work, and this retrospective didn’t change that. But oddly enough I, found myself wondering more, not less, what his work is actually doing. It’s not really documentary photography. It has too rich a mixture of indexical, faux-objective elements with others that are much more about the beauty of the print and which are really subjective, even polemical in intent. The work is very beautiful, romantic and compelling and textured, but a bit evasive about its real intent. Which one can be in no doubt is in support of S’s global ecological viewpoint. That he makes work which speaks about this in poetic ways is not really hard to see, but I wonder about the degree of manipulation and the extent to which it is simply presented as the natural drama of landscape. Still more when he is taking pictures of people. The unnamed (usually) subjects are depicted in support of a personal project, a personal thesis. They are not portraits, nor are they studies with an avowedly “objective” intent. They are a little problematic in that sense. They are framed in the same intensely personal point of view Salgado deploys in his landscapes, with their sometimes tilted horizons, hand toning, and smashed spatial relationships when he crops an extreme zoom.

Yet I am pressed, finding things to object to. There is no “innocent” eye, after all, and Salgado makes no mystery about the song his work is singing. Maybe it is enough to realise simply that this is made work, not the elemental projection it might seem, and enjoy its great beauty and technique for the subjectively expressive output it is.

Thought it was about time I did the proper tourist bit today. So I took a tour bus, then visited top ‘o the rock at 30 Rockefeller Plaza. I took a whole load of photos while I was about it. I also took a few on my phone which I’ll upload later.

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Went downtown to Katz’s Deli and the Mercury Lounge, stopping once again at the Met Museum on the way down. I also obtained a $40 haircut from a taciturn Russian  gent in midtown.  A characteristically Russian haircut, too. Details within…

I decided to go an alternative route downtown which involved going uptown to the Yankees Stadium, thennnnn downtown. In this picture I have inadvertently captured another trio of sightseers doing their thing, too.

Caught the 4 train down to 68th Street and the Met. Some pictures of that…

This crusty looking fire helmet looks like it belongs on a performance artist’s noggin.

Speaking of noggins…

I discovered the panorama stitcher on my phone. Kling-klang the image to engorgify it.

It’s a pretty awesome museum.

Then it was haircut time in midtown (thought I’d walk a few blocks before I got back on the train.)

And off to Katz’s. Kind of a landmark Deli and a bit of trap with some $11 cheese sandwiches on sale. I did buy a $14 corned beef sandwich, but, hey, I’m a tourist. It’s okay. There were a lot of French people there for some reason.

I did take a picture of my sandwich in profile, but it was 2 inches thick and not for viewing by minors.

On the way down E Houston St, I passed an outdoor supplies place and purchased a tiny compass because I keep getting turned around when exiting stations. Roll your eyes all you want, gridsters.Then on to the Mercury Lounge and a double bill show of Jarrod Dickinson and Larkin Poe.

That’s a Dobro. I bopped around and grinned all over the place, it was great.