Berry Imperative

Just quickly as I have to get back to my white chocolate lamingtons* (150 down, 100 to go). I fully expected to dream about lamingtons last night but instead I dreamed about long lines of fresh berries, moving past as on a conveyer belt, in ra colourful mixture stretching into the distance with a strong sense of imperative/obligation/priority about them. Maybe you had to be there but it makes sense to me as I have to harvest (and deal with) nearly a kilo of raspberries every couple of days, not to mention the hateful gooseberries.

* Cubes of sponge cake dipped in melted white chocolate and cream then rolled in coconut. Sticky, tricky, pretty and delicious... and oh so many to do...

Gooseberry Foolishness

While helping to pick 60+ kg of gooseberries over a couple of hours that went from sweltering heat to pouring rain, I came to the conclusion that the gooseberry bush is an exceptionally evil form of plant life. It appears so generous offering up branches laden with green berries but those branches are also spiked with needle sharp spines as long as my fingers. And when you do extract the pale green veiny fruit (not a pretty berry, imho) from its thorny lair, it tastes mild and bland: not quite sweet and not quite tart. But a caterer will pay good money for them so we turned our hands into pincushions (I'm going to have to try and avoid cutting tomatoes until all the little holes heal up).

Now that's finished I'm dealing with a couple of kilos of split and otherwise less-than-caterer-quality fruit. There's a pot of chutney bubbling on the stove, permeating the house with the aroma of malt vinegar. And later I'll stew the rest to make gooseberry tarts. I'd like to try a gooseberry fool, just because it's one of the best food names I've never experienced, but do you know how much cream is involved? I'd have to have a dinner party to justify that kind of dish, and I just can't be bothered. At least gooseberry tarts are freezable and portable.

Twins

My friend Margot was born on the same day of the same year as me. Even if we don't see eachother from one year to the next, we always meet up on our birthday. It's an annual marvel to see the parallel themes in our lives, and the different ways that we deal with them.

I'm the Danny Devito and she's the Arnold Schwarzteneger, but only in height! Look at me stretching myself as tall as possible, and her slouching down to try and meet me... and we still aren't even close to the same level!

Maria Pia's Trattoria

I'm catching up on emails so this is just a short post, about one of the best restaurant meals ever! This is my daughter Louise, me and Maria Pia at Maria Pia's Trattoria where Louise works and where she took me for dinner on my birthday. Maria Pia is from Puglia in Italy and is an advocate of Slow Food and the traditional regional foods she grew up with. It is Maria Pia's practice, and pleasure, to mingle with the guests at her restaurant and she is a vivacious character who reminds me of my Aunt Laura.

We had buffalo mozzarella from Italy with wonderfully flavoured tomato slices, and pugliese olives (so tiny, so good) to start with. Then I had groper on a bed of kale (my favourite green vege) and fennel (which I hadn't tried before and expected to be more highly flavoured) with a delicious salsa verde on top. Both Louise and I consider dessert to be the most important part of the meal and we arranged to sample little bits of several different desserts including a chocolate cake (too rich even for me, by that stage) and a tiramisu (too much coffee for me) and two delicious desserts that I can't remember the names of... one was sort of like berry trifle but Italian and one was a light kind of panna cotta, very subtle and refreshing. I had to be rolled out to the car after all that oh so goodness.

Birthday reflections

Today I turn 39, which strikes me as a particularly satisfying number, so I am expecting a particularly satisfying year ahead of me.

What an amazing, dramatic year 38 has been! I knew that I wanted a different life from the one that had been dragging me through the swamps of despair for far too long. I just didn't know exactly what I wanted to be living instead, except that it be far from the peculiar loneliness of being in a crowd. So, I set off down a path away from what was wrong, trusting that somewhere along the journey I would eventually find and recognise a better life that wasn't visible from my starting point.

In the past year my daughter left home and I bought a car, started blogging, quit the bureaucracy, left the city, moved to the other end of the Island and an isolated cattle farm, became a full-time artist, took up yoga, fell in love, moved South to my sweetheart's rural hinterland, applied to do a doctorate, took up gardening, and just the other day started working as a casual cook in a cafe*.

This time last year I could not have imagined being where I am now, yet right now there is no need to imagine anything different than this. The whole year has seen a steady improvement of my mental, emotional, physical, spiritual health. I needed to step into the unknown and spend so much time alone up North, but when something (and someone) even better came along I was able to move onwards. Life is good and getting better. I'm starting to believe that there might not be any limits to the amount of happiness available for me as I follow my bliss. Roll on the satisfactions of 39!

* Yes, yes, I'm aware that I am revealing some new information in this summary and some of you will want more details. Patience, dear reader, let me share it in my own good time.

Temporarily disabled

For some weird reason, possibly involving inadvertant spam opening and viral exposure (but more likely related to the "authentication and browsing problems being experienced by some customers" according to the recorded message I finally accessed after several attempts to navigate my way through the labrynthine voice recognition computer technology on the Clear Help Line), I am unable to do anything with my email at the moment.

Thank G-d I can still blog. And browse. And text. I'm not sure if the email weirdness is related to the weirdness that occurred when I tried to comment on someone else's blog, but I think it is. (Zydeco Fish, I'm the one appearing as a string of unintelligible code)

I spent the morning feeling depressed and ineffectual about my email absence. But then when it stopped raining I went out in the garden and weeded cauliflowers, tomatoes, silverbeet and garlic. And planted lavender, catnip and peas. And sewed up the many huge holes in the raspberry net which looked like some giant raptor has shredded it and eaten most of the raspberries. Any way it didn't take long before I started feeling good, even without email.

It's a funny thing, that I enjoy solitude really a lot, but when the solitude was exacerbated by no email, then it was too much and I felt lonesome. Not any more though, its hard to feel that lonesome with five chickens and two dogs wanting to be fed.

Feedback Please!

This is my new favourite ingredient... a zuccini flower. After years of reading about eating them, I finally tried it, mmm mmm. The first night I stuffed them with a mixture of breadcrumbs, zuccini, tomato, pesto and olives and roasted them. The second night I stuffed them with brocolli, feta and parmesan. Both were good, but the first was better.

Eating flowers is a delightful activity, the literal consumption of beauty. Usually I put flowers (borage, nasturtium) on salads so that they are not only a colourful accent, but add a soft, delicate texture. I am watching the artichokes in the garden closely, looking forward to dipping their fleshy petals in garlic butter.

What do you think?

Given that a lot of my time and attention at the moment is preoccupied with gardening and cooking and playing house this is what I am drawn to blog about most days. I've been thinking about starting a new blog, not to replace this one but as a venue for my more domestic musings, leaving this blog to be mostly about books and art. This would probably mean less frequent posts on Bibliophilia, as there simply isn't time for me to keep up a full regime of posting to two blogs. To help me make up my mind I would like to know what you, dear reader, think I should do. I see two options:

1. Focus only on Bibliophilia as a personal blog, with no inhibitions about many, even the majority, of posts sharing my daily thoughts and activities in the garden and kitchen, as well as the studio. This would mean posts would be at least as frequent, and possibly more frequent than they are now.

2. Start a second blog (tentatively titled 'Kapiti Cook's Garden) which would be entirely, or mostly, about gardening, cooking and other domestic activities. Maintain Bibliophilia as a book arts oriented blog. This would mean dividing my posting energy between two blogs and each would receive fewer posts than just one.

To comment on this burning issue, click on the "# Comments" link underneath this post. Do you find domestic posts dull and would prefer them to be excluded from this blog? Or do you just enjoy Bibliophilia and don't mind what I write about?

I'd especially like to hear from regular readers (including those who read without usually commenting) and from other bloggers- is this an issue you have considered for yourself?

Bay-in-a-box or Slinky Maps

I am very excited to have finished these two pieces. One is Quebec Harbour and one is Dublin Bay, both are nautical charts (1970s reprints of 1860s charts), the real things with little notes from the Captain jotted here and there. Printed on wonderful heavy creamy paper with an energetic spring to it.

I have exploited the spring by making a 'meander' out of each map so that folded up they make a tight cubic shape full of coiled energy. When you open the handmade box covered with the rest of the map the meander springs out (just like in the photo) and if you are holding the box high enough, it slithers right out like a slinky. Remember those big floppy spring toys that would take the stairs one at a time? Just like that. If you want to, you can unfold the meander and lay it out flat and see the chart in all it's Victorian etched beauty.

These are fun to make and fun to play with but I haven't done any for a few months because of the Twilight Zone of my metal rulers. I have four long metal rulers, straight edges (supposedly) of either 60 or 100cm length. (I also have a cute baby 15cm rule which is my favourite because it hasn't entered the Twilight Zone (yet, touch wood)). Every single one of these rulers has warped, some within days of entering my studio. Most of my work is small scale and so a fraction of a milimetre's warping is neither here nor there, but these meanders depend on long cuts that have to be perfectly straight and at perfect right angles. After wrecking a couple of maps I gave up trying.

Then the other day I audited my metal ruler collection and discovered that each has one side which is not warped. The three 60cm rulers have straight inch sides and warped centimeter sides. 100 cm rule is straight on the cm side, which is my measurement of preference.* I carefully marked every warped edge in my collection with an indelible red X, took a deep breath and started cutting a meander with a reliable straight edge. It worked! There's no stopping me now.

If you would like to buy Dublin-Bay-In-A-Box or Quebec-Harbour-In-A-Box or want to commission Your-Favourite-Place-In-A-Box, just send me an email via my website and your wish is my command (contents of my map collection permitting). These are $45 each, which in NZ included P&P. What a bargain!

*I think mine was the first year of New Zealand school children to be taught only metrics and not imperial measurements so I am totally lost when it comes to inches and their silly fractions. Yet most how-to-make-books books come from North America and are full of 6/32" type measures which I have to convert to milimetres cos that's just ridiculous to be working in 32nds of an inch when there are perfectly good milimetres available.

Raspberries

I don't want to gloat or anything, especially to apartment and northern hemisphere dwellers, but today I went out into the sunny garden, picked a handful of raspberries and ate them: warm, sweet, juicy and flavourful.

As soon as the birdnet went on, they started to redden (well, were able to continue to redden without molestation from thrushes and starlings). The birds are still getting a few that are too close to the net for safety and a few birds get under the net and alternate panic with gorging until they find there way out. But most of the raspberries are going to make it. And I am going to make raspberry jam.

What happens to shelves after the books are gone

Books away

It's amazing how easy, and enjoyable, it was to finish organising my studio once I decided to pack away my reading books. Letting go of my desire to have all my books visible on shelves was the most difficult bit! That set me to thinking about the nature of books as a preferred interior decorating accessory.

Artist's books, of the kind I make, are generally designed to be viewed as works of art. But most books, other than large format 'coffee table' books, are designed to attract bookstore browsers but not really for display at home, where once read, will be seen only as a spine. Yet I, like so many people I know, really like the look of a row of book spines.

My favourite looking kind of bookshelves are actually:

• a couple of shelves build over a doorway, or above the stairs
• glass fronted wooden book cases (perfect for displaying artist's books)
• an entire wall of floor to ceiling shelves
• shelves made out of books

NB None of the above are currently in my life.

There are people who's decorators will buy books by the foot just so they can look literary without having to go to all the trouble of reading. Then there are people who compulsively buy books, read them (or plan to), and obsessively keep them forever on view so that they and their guests never forget how well-read they are.

Books make wonderful insulation, if you get enough of them lined up against a wall. But despite this I don't own many books, compared to:

• how many I read (2-6 per week, almost all borrowed)
• how many I have owned (I rarely buy books except on sale or second hand, but I gladly receive book gifts and handmedowns and one way and another I have temporarily owned hundreds more than now)
  
• many of my most dearly beloved friends and family
• most bibiophiles.

Why such restraint?
1. I sell them because despite my best efforts, I have led a transient life, and even four or five cartons of books is a heavy load to schlep around.
2. I sell them because a really good second hand book shop will give you double the credit that they offer in cash, and that's credit you can spend buying more books at a ratio of about 4 old ones to 1 new one, which still means a 75% reduction in the number of books to be schlepped.
3. I give them away. The books I love most and know I will want to read again soon or often I keep. Books that I love second-most and want to share make great presents that don't require me coming up with fresh cash.

Thus my remaining collection of books contains no dross. Every book I own has been assessed for potential discarding once or twice a year, and so remains with me through positive choice, not inertia. I love my books. I love my collections of favourite SF novelists (Lois McMaster Bujold, Kim Stanley Robinson, Mary Doria Russell), my ancient, tattered poetry books, my few large format art books and my many Judaica and spirituality books which are added to on every trip to New York.

These books tell you more about what kind of person I am than the clothes I wear or the house I live in or the car I drive. They, and perhaps my CD collection, are the consumer purchases most congruent with my self-perception and the image I want to project.

With my books packed in boxes how will you know who I am? How will I know?

It's a hard life, I tell you

Right now the hardest thing about making books is that outside the sun is shining, the birds are singing and the garden is beckoning (particularly the raspberries and gooseberries under their romantic shrouds of bird net). Inside my new studio it is cold and dark and chaotic and crowded. I haven't finished unpacking from moving my Paekakariki studio, mostly because I ran out of places to put things, so that right now every flat surface including the floor, my work table, and the daybed is covered with boxes, which I have to shuffle about if I want to do yoga, make books or lie down.

I have been avoiding dealing with this problem for most of the past week, instead just moving the boxes around as necessary, but it is disheartening, and I have stalled on four projects (including the increasingly overdue anniversary present). But here's the plan. Right now I'm going to go outside and open the glasshouse so the tomatoes can breathe. Then I am going to plant flowers and corn. In the late afternoon, when this room gets a slither of sun, I will come back inside and spend the duration of the sun-slither's passage Sorting Out This Mess. I fear this may require packing away most of my reading books (all the novels, art and spiritual books) leaving only necessary reference books. But doing so will free up two whole shelves which I can then fill with tools and materials and works in progress.

Then, I think, I hope, I must, find it easier to over come the sun's siren song and stay inside to work.

Bradlands

Brad McGann is a New Zealand film maker best known for the feature, In My Father's Den. This dark and brooding film is about a man returning to his hometown and encountering friends and family he has not seen since he was a teenager, including his ex-girlfriend who now has a teenaged daughter of her own.

Brad and I were friends as teenagers, then lost touch after I became a young mother and he went away to Melbourne and film school. We found each other again a few years ago with a chance meeting on the streets of Wellington. Brad was in the middle of the long process of writing the script for In My Father's Den. We picked up our friendship and Brad spent some quality time with me and my teenage daughter over the next year or two, mostly reading and talking about the draft script (he is very single minded). The demands of directing, post production and then promoting the film have meant we haven't seen so much of Brad lately.

I was saddened to hear this week that he is battling secondary cancer (ie the cancer has spread from the original site). But I am very happy that his friends in the film world are rallying round to raise money for the treatment he needs (and which cannot be publicly funded). Brad is one of the most sweet, gentle, ethereal men I have ever met. He is hugely talented, as his films to date show. He should have the chance to live a long and healthy life making great films. If you are in Auckland on 2 December please consider attending Bradlands, the fundraiser (which sounds like a fantastic evening of movies- and the incredible list of items on auction includes an unlimited free pass the the Auckland Film Festival for 20 years!). If you can't attend, but want to support this good cause, the link includes information about making a donation.

Happy Ruby Anniversary Martha and Norman

In this day and age it is a rare couple who not only persist with 40 years of marriage but still genuinely love and respect each other. I am very proud to be one of the children of such a marriage.

On Thanksgiving Day 1965 Martha and Norman were married in St Louis, Missouri. Martha wore a white silk pseudo-double-breasted mini dress with rhinestone buttons, a satin bow with small veil and satin kitten-heeled slingback shoes. Norman wore a suit. Both look radiantly happy in the black and white photographs.

By their first anniversary, they had moved to Winnepeg, Mannitoba, Canada, and were awaiting my immanent birth. Martha wore an orange knit dress for Halloween, and I poked her bellybutton out like the stem of a giant pumpkin. No one remembers what Norman wore. (Before my mother's influence Norman was apparently reknowned for his startling dress 'sense' and unusual colour combinations but thankfully by the time I attained fashion consciousness he was more or less under colour-control).

My brother followed 18 months later (he had some cute clothes including a mini-baseball suit), and another international emigration to New Zealand soon after, and over the years mum and dad celebrated their anniversary in many different countries. Today they are lunching at the Willowglen in the Waikato. If you see them there, please offer your congratulations.

PS As today is not only this auspicious anniversary, but also International Buy Nothing Day, I am not buying them a gift, though I believe they deserve no less than their weight in rubies. Instead I am making a very special custom-made gift, which is still in production and thus will arrive late, in the grand family tradition of Very Belated Gift Giving.

Body Books

I've been making more copies of two old favourites: B**b Book and C*ck Book. Both use a playful tumbling block structure which means the books move unconventionally in your hands. They are fun to play with...not only for the structure but also because the B**b Book contains 39 synonyms for bre@sts and line drawings of many different pairs of them. The C*ck Book contains as many synonyms for pen!s and line drawings of diverse sets of tackle.

These books are not pornographic, or even very erotic, though I fear just describing them here may mean my blog is banned from some people's work computers (hence the funky spelling). They are a celebration of the diverse beauty of our human bodies. The B**b Book was originally created in response to an outbreak of fear and loathing directed towards breasts as toxic or unsightly unless perky and globular. I made the C*ck Book as a companion piece to celebrate an organ which is rarely seen in art ...especially en masse and looking as soft and cute as in this work.

These books make great gifts for that hard-to-buy-for chap or chappess in your life. They seem to provoke universal laughter, facination and a desire to share the fun. They can be purchased separately for the special blog-reader's price of $25 (inc postage in NZ*) or as a bargain-rate pair ($45 inc NZ post). Send me an email thru the website or post a comment here, and before you know it, you'll be expanding your vocabulary.

*International readers, you can also get a great deal which will be individually negotiated, based on today's exchange rate and postage costs.