A tremendously busy few days. I’ve been pulling together a new lecture for my forthcoming visit to the US, so I’ve been running around finding examples and apposite qutes and trying to put together a structure for the talk. I’m stopping now, on my fourth version of it, now in a somewhat modular form so that I can strip parts of it out easily to fit different audiences. I think it hangs together alright. It’s a bit of a departure from the lectures I’ve given previously, inasmuch as this lays out something of the critical context of the work and uses pieces of my own work to illustrate that, rather than the other way around. Having said that, the modular construction of the work I’ve produced for this means that the section where I’m analysing my own work could be a freestanding talk on its own. My most pressing anxiety, such as it is, is that I have too much material. I think it wil necessarily be a case of cherry-picking the best material out and talking about it. I’ve devised the content to be easily editable like this, so it shouldn’t present too big a problem.

I’ve also been assembling the materials for my upcoming Guerrilla Bookbinding (!) course at Spike Island printmakers, swiping the last necessary handful of stirrers from Starbucks to be reincarnated as the rods in piano-hinge bindings. It’s all ready now, apart from  the photocopied handouts which I’m hoping to do at Spike on Friday and the loan of a bunch of artists books which I am  arranging to get from Sarah Bodman. Seems okay, really.

I’ve also been painting a number of Elizabethan Portraits in Chinese ink. This will be for the Head and Shoulders  exhibition at  Ale & Porter in Bradford on Avon and is going alright. I’ve maybe 3 good pictures for the show now. I need to decide about framing tomorrow, and perhaps produce one or two more rapid studies.

Some reading carries on, of course. I have a sort of mini literature review to carry out on the books specifically abut artists’ books, which is going alright. I’m only covering a few of the bright lights in this particular incarnation, but my general angle is a criticism  of the lack of a heuristic explanation of why artists choose to make books (as opposed to a histotrical situation, where artists have the opportunity and are asked about their methods of exploiting the opportunity.) For myself, I’ve always wanted to be a bit evangelistic about the tremendous sense of liberty that the framing power of book art has given me. At the time it was a release from a terrible sense of too-wide horizons, and a too limited sense of what I was allowed to do in generating an oeuvre that had no useful boundaries to help me see projects, areas of interest. Books gave me permission to differentiate projects: to differentiate solutions to particular areas of research and interest.

I’ve nearly finished the graphics work I’ve been doing for Bristol City council- som e library guiding. The last few edits should go through before I go to the US.

I’ve produced a new version of my song “Sweeetness and Light” on Garage Band, using the condenser mic from my mp3 player. It flattens out and distorts and stuff, but it’s amusing enough in its own way. With some care, I could end up with some useful materialto use in films. On which topic…

The recent Librarian’s books workshop has left me fizzing with ideas to produce a book that combines a celebration of the library’s centenary with a somewhat darker side. It should be popular with Bristol Library service too, who are looking for ways to mark the centenary that won’t break the bank. If only they had a decent exhibition space, I’d push for us to show the librarian’s books show at the central library in Bristol. Anyway, I’ve a series of research photos I’m going to use to start using to make some drawings and paintings of the library in a ruined state in another hundred years ( a faulty vision, I hope, but one to keep us on our toes, perhaps, as regards the preservation of the institution itself). Lots of drawn vegetation and ruined ceilings. I’m not planning a fully-animated fim for it, more of an essay on the rostrum camera, like la jeteé. Some overlays of vegetal patterning. Some sort of secondary narrative would seem apposite. Perhaps I could invent or discover some personage that could haunt the ruins in a meaningful way?