Non-Linear Time

I'm learning to make digital stories from my poems. I have just finished my first attempt and proudly posted it on You Tube. Have a look! Its only 44 seconds long.



I made Non-Linear Time using Windows Movie Maker, the software that came bundled with my laptop. It's very easy to use, but with limited flexibility, which is why I've gone for a very simple little film. Anything fancier could only have been cheesy.

The images are of some letterpress printing I did back in the early days at Te Kowhai Print Trust in 2007. I was going to make an artist's book of my poem, Two Kinds of Time, but my ambitious experimental approach outstripped my letterpress skills at the time and after printing these pages I got frustrated and went onto other, easier projects. But I've hung onto the printed pieces of tissue, thinking that one day I would go back to making Two Kinds of Time.

Two Kinds of Time actually does have a book existence. I was inspired to write the poem a few years ago when Tim Jones first mentioned that he was going to be editing an anthology called Voyagers: Science Fiction Poetry from New Zealand. After a long wait Voyagers, edited by Mark Pirie and Tim Jones, is finally out on Amazon right now and will be available in NZ early June. But for some reason Two Kinds of Time is one of those poems that has kept nagging at me for concretization*.

So, last week, inspired by the digital storytelling course I am taking through Artmakers and impatient to be doing more than I could in that context, I thought I'd try to make a little film on my own. I've developed a storyboard and worked on images for the whole poem, but it's a demanding project to squeeze into a busy life and I've decided to do a George Lucas and start in the middle of my story. Eventually I hope to make parts one and three of Two Kinds of Time (Linear Time and When You Sleep) but for now, I have released Non-Linear Time on its own.

*There are a few nagging poems waiting in the wings, they know who they are!

Hermes Baby

Making a zine is an excuse to use my Hermes Baby, the prettiest typewriter in the world. When I first learned to type nearly 30 years ago, I could touchtype on a manual typewriter. Now my fingers are weakened from decades of fluttering across computer keyboards. I no longer have the strength in any but thumb and index fingers to striking a blow that will take an impression from a faded old ribbon. The Hermes Baby reduces me to hunt and pecking.

It also does mysterious and eccentric things like occasionally, with no warning, refuse to go past the middle of the page. If I'm paying more attention to the keyboard than the paper on the platen (as I generally am with the Hermes) then I end up overtyping until there is a ragged black hole in the centre of of the page.

Its proving very difficult to get a new ribbon for the Hermes Baby. Not because its an unusual kind of spool. Unlike the pre-USB digital age of universal incompatibility, most manual typewriters all seem to be designed for the same universal ribbon spool. Its just that they aren't stocked anywhere, at least not in New Zealand.

Happy Bus (my soon-to-be-launched zine) is not entirely typewritten, otherwise publication would be a much more distant prospect than it is. The text will be a mixture of wordprocessing, typewriting and hand printing. There's a bit of paper engineering going on with it too. And these little gold elephant stickers, punched out of old labels picked up in an op shop.


Don't forget to enter this month's giveaway to win a handmade blank book. Tell me three songs that make you feel happy and you will go in the draw.

Hot Foil Hands

I've been printing bookmarks again. These bookmarks are for the Centre for Fine Print (University of West England Bristol)'s Bookmarks VI. I narrowly missed out on contributing to Bookmarks V last year, so I'm getting in early this year! The requirement is to produce an edition of 100 signed and numbered bookmarks which will be distributed internationally through art galleries. I am using it as an opportunity to try a new fount, a new machine and some paper I haven't printed on before.

The paper I'm using is old nautical charts which I picked up in an op shop a few years ago. The charts are fascimiles of mostly nineteenth, some early twentieth century, etchings which were offset printed a few decades ago on gorgeous, heavy, smooth paper. I assume they've been made redundant by GIS and other electronic navigational technology. I chose the charts with the thickest paper to cut up into bookmarks (now, don't get all precious on me about cutting up old charts, they are common as muck in this yachties' town). The charts started out as approaches to harbours in Newfoundland, Cote du Norde, Scotland and New York but now as 19x6cm strips most of the bookmarks are anonymous in isolation.

The fount I'm using is Rockwell, which is a bit of a gothic style type, slightly Old Western (as in cowboys) looking, but relatively fine in its serifs. It's old-fashioned looking, yet quite clean and sharp. Te Kowhai has Rockwell in 3 or 4 sizes, most of which appear to have been hardly used- if the pristine shiny state of the type is anything to go by. I'm using the 24pt which is bold enough to be legible when overprinted on even the busiest slip of chart. The text on the plain white back is in 18pt Rockwell with my favourite ornament, the pointing hand.

The new machine is Jim's hot foil press, which is the tiniest printing press I have ever used. It looks like a cross between a sewing machine and a microscope. We spent hours playing with it on Friday afternoon, trying a dozen types of printing surfaces (paper, vinyl, leather) at different temperatures to see what it could do. What it does best is print a brilliant gold foil with a mirror surface and intricate detail onto glossy smooth surface. In comparison, any matt or textured material takes only a dull and patchy print like unpolished brass. Sadly my beautiful charts are not glossy enough to do the gold foil justice, but happily my clear vinyl bumper stickers work a treat. So today I printed a hundred tiny golden hands onto sticker paper, which I will cut out individually and and stick on the front of the bookmarks, thus satisfying my persistent desire to make things as fiddly and complicated as possible.

Samples of hot foil on different materials.

39 weeks

A week out from the opening and it's feeling a lot like the end of a pregnancy: emotional, exhausted, irrational, scared, excited, inevitable, on the brink... If I pulled a tarot card right now it would probably be the Tower. I feel like my judgment is unreliable, yet I have been impulsively making some major decisions.

For example, I bought a printing press this week. Since I don't have anywhere of my own to put a ton of dirty old cast iron, Neil said I could move it into Te Kowhai Print Trust. I didn't have time to check with anyone else, so I'm hoping no-one gets cross with me. A couple of members came by today to see for themselves the rumoured new press, and seemed to agree that my impulsive rescue from the scrappers fate was a good idea.


Here it is coming off the truck shrouded in baby blue. Shifting it a dozen blocks across town was a major logistical exercise involving joists and hoists and a big truck and a hand truck and the fork lift pictured above. The man on the left was the amazingly good humoured truck driver who responded to each new challenge with equanimity. The fork lift driver never cracked a smile.



The Chandler and Price Old Style (C&P) is fitted with an relatively recent electric motor which is surplus to my requirements (I like letterpress because it is slow). The C&P makes the Arab look very small and clean in comparison, but once the belt and motor attachments (visible as the white hose and the wheel on the far right, above, and the small wheel at the back, below) are removed, it should be much more sleek and balanced looking. Machines in those days were designed to be elegant as well as indestructible.



Don't worry, I won't be abandoning my beloved Arab for the new big boy in my life, even if he does have a brake (the Arab requires skill, strength and sheer nerve to try and stop mid flow). As the C&P has been used exclusively for die cutting for at least 13 years, I will probably stick to cutting on the C&P and keep printing on the Arab, at least for a while. But eventually I will put the rollers back on and let the C&P have a print run and see how it goes

Meantime I look forward to researching its provenance (Murray thinks it was part of the Northern Advocate plant -our local daily paper- and apparently they have very good archives) . I haven't managed to exactly date this model yet but the Old Style was made 1884-1912 (after that C&P made New Style recognisable by their straight spokes instead of the curvacious ones like mine has).

Die cutting with the Arab and Advisors

Is there no end to the marvelous talents of the Arab press? On Friday I finally got to try die cutting, and it was as successful and easy as one could hope for. Die cutting is where a shaped blade is set into the chase and used to cut paper in the same way that the press prints- instead of ink marks on the paper you get crisp clean cuts.

I've been working towards this new trick for a few months. The most time consuming thing was figuring out how to get a platen sleeve to protect the platen from the sharp blade of the die. Many conversations with the various chaps who are my loose and informal advisory board eventually emboldened me to commission a sleeve from a metal work company in town.

I don't know if my advisory board fully appreciate what a cultural leap it was for me to get a part machined to my specifications. I can't think of anyone in my family or any woman of my acquaintance who has ever done such a thing. When I ventured to the industrial area of town and picked up the finished platen sleeve from a grungy workshop on Port Road I felt the kind of trepidation that I feel visiting a foreign country. The satisfaction of seeing how sweetly the sleeve fits the Arab was like that of completing a successful negotiation in pidgin and sign language in a foreign market. For extra affirmation, my advisory board members have all been very impressed with the sleeve and it is still so new and shiny that even a casual passerby would have to think it rather special.

Then the ever generous Murray Inder gave me a couple of oval die forms that he doesn't need anymore so the Arab's first cuts (in this phase of its career anyway) were egg shapes. When I come to a particular die cutting project (and there's one coming right up) I can either borrow a die, if Murray has a suitable one, or get one made any shape I want. But the ovals were just right for figuring out how to do it.

The rollers have to come off the press when you are die cutting (otherwise the rollers would get shredded by the blades) so that was to be my next thing to figure out. But then David Golding showed up on Friday morning, having made a beautiful new (oak?) tray for the Arab (the old tray was broken and even an old repair job had broken long before I ever saw it). David is one of several retired printers who contacted me after the Arab and I featured on the front page of the paper a few weeks ago, and he is fantastically helpful. He offered to take the Arab's rollers away and clean them properly (apparently they are too shiny to hold ink properly) while I had a go at die cutting.

He also explained why the die forms were covered in rubber. In my ignorance I had imagined the rubber was a removable protection to stop the blades getting damaged in storage. But no, the rubber provides a springy resistance so the paper doesn't stick to the die form but is pushed back to the platen after it's cut. Lucky he told me that before I started trying to get to rubber off!

With all the necessary elements in place I set about my usual trial and error approach to extending my printing skills. There was nothing about die cutting in my new bible, General Printing, a 1950s text book that my dad gave me recently but common sense goes a long way in printing. My recent lessons in make ready (placing bits of paper behind different parts of the form or platen to ensure an even pressure) were fresh in my mind so I was able to progress steadily towards cutting a complete egg in one kiss of the die to the paper. My number one coach, Jim Morrison, showed up just as I achieved this so I was able to show off to him.

We spent a happy few hours fine tuning the lays and make ready to produce lots of lovely creamy eggs.

Press Calls

I was walking home from the farmer's market early yesterday morning, laden with bags of produce, pockets stuffed full of ATM card, change, glasses case, keys, hanky, chalk and cellphone. This last item chimed to let me know a text had arrived so I juggled my bags around and groped through my pockets to find the phone.

Delightfully, and disconcertingly, instead of the screen telling me 'you have a message from...' there was this photograph of the Arab press:
At that moment, immersed in the mundane pleasures of my daily life beyond printing, it felt like a siren call from a sweetheart.

Obviously the crowded pocket environment had pushed buttons at random, setting up the phone to send the photo (taken a while ago) as a message, which I wasn't aware of until a friend sent me a text.

But on the other hand, if I can use my imagination to create the reality I want and use reality to manifest my creative vision, why wouldn't the press be calling me?

New Look

Don't be frightened, it's still the same blog, just a different outfit.

Giddy with the illusion of techno-competence created by simply carrying a 3G phone around, I dared to jump up to Beta-Blogger and play with Bibliophilia's layout after leaving it untouched for the past 22 months and 362 posts. I will no doubt keep fiddling with it now that it's so much easier to do (no more laborious HTML manipulations, just button clicking fun).

I wanted a look that is easy on the eye, but also fresh and cheerful. Did I get it right for your browser? Let me know.

Telecom brick to Vodaphone 3G

As I sit here in front of the laptop trying to decide what to write about I am making myself sick with a bag of jellybeans that I received in the mail from Telecom. They sent them as a reward for having stuck out my 24 months on a mobile phone plan and as a bribe to make me upgrade to a fancy new phone and a fancy new plan.

Now, the fact is that at this point in my life I don't actually have an address. All my mail is forwarded to me from Kapiti to 'poste restante' in Whangarei where I collect it a couple times a week. I've gotten used to the hair raising side effects of being address-less such as receiving bills the day they are due, but sadly for Telecom, their marketing was too late to have even a chance at tempting me. I have already been seduced by the Vodaphone ads offering to give me a 3G phone in exchange for my Telecom brick.

When I first saw the ads I didn't know what a 3G phone was and when I found out I didn't really care. Something to do with internet connection but only for townies- there is no 3G coverage at the non-address where I stay right now. What I got excited about was the camera on the phone- not as good as the borrowed ones that have been illustrating Bibliophilia for the past year or so but better than the little credit card phone that long-term readers may remember from Purua.

So I was tempted enough to do some more reasearch about the contract I would have to sign with the the big V... turned out that I would be able to cut at least $12 a month off my cellphone payments and with no penalty for abandoning the big T. Where's the catch I'm thinking... there must be a catch.

So I Googled for reviews of the give-away phone. And sure enough there is a catch... as 3G phones go this one is the bottom end of the market. The most trenchant criticism of its 3Gness seems that it has a ridiculously small memory for a device that can hold, play, send, receive and manipulate photos, videos and music; and no capacity to add extra memory. There was also some criticism of its more fundamental functions such as too quiet ringing and speaking volume and keys lagging or being overly sensitive. These latter problems seem to have been more or less resolved* in the year since the phone came on the market (it's role in the market being as a free (or discounted) gift or an entry level 3G). By the time I'd read a hundred reviews from the UK*** I'd decided they were all completely unreliable anyway, probably written by juniors in marketing companies to promote their own products or undermine the opposition's.

I did a bit more research such as I texting a few fancy-phone-owning-friends friends who all said they preferred the other brand but were uniformly excited that I might be stepping up to the fancy-phone circle of pxters. Finally I went down to the local Vodaphone shop on a Saturday morning and there amongst a crowd of teenagers I asked all the stupid questions I could think of while testing all the functions I could understand (some tiny proportion of the phone's potential).

Satisfied that the volume issues and camera were up to my meager standards, I decided I had nothing much to lose except the continuity of my telephone number**. I handed over my old phone, with some trepidation to part from my reliable 24/7 companion device of more than two years. I asked the bored young woman serving me not to send my old phone to the knackers until I was satisfied my new phone wasn't a disaster. She humoured me, and promised to do her best despite company policy to get rid of the trade-in the same day.

So I suddenly find myself the somewhat pleased owner of a far fancier phone than I thought I would carry this decade. My techno naitivity means that this first week with the phone has been equal parts frustrating and satisfying. Challenges have included

• entering all my contacts by hand as Telecom don't have SIM cards so no way to transfer a hundred or so names and numbers electronically
  
• one of those circular software installation experiences ultimately resolved by ignoring the phone folder on my laptop for several days and then finding it all works perfectly.
  
• tearing my hair out until Kate accidentally figured out how to work the camera
  
• forcing myself to learn to use predictive text (I didn't realise how many Maori words I use in casual texting conversation- they all have to be spelled out)
• realising after quite a few messages exactly what the difference is between MMS and SMS
• struggling with a new way of navigating commands so frequently losing texts instead of sending them
• etc
  

But it's getting easier now and one of these days I will figure out how to post text or photos straight from the phone onto this blog. In the meantime, here's first phone-photo, thanks to Kate. (The flowers at the top are all my own work).

* New phone owners are advised to remove the clear plastic sheet from the speakers to facilitate improved volume.
**Email me if you want my new phone number and if you are not a complete stranger or weirdo stalker aquaintance I will give it to you.
*** Sample review: Me got 1 or 2 tings 2 say bout dis ere fone it be gettin massif respect ratins from me coz it be so sick da fone got one respecetable camra n also 1 respectable vidyo recorder coz da piacture quality is so gangsta, me wud recomend dis fone 2 anyone yo massif respect n pease out