Bookend Weekends
May. 18th, 2015 10:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tetsabLast weekend a running joke of my existence finally came to an end. I finally -- after god knows how many years of ill-timed travel, forgetfulness, other invasive occasions, etc. -- made it to the Toronto Comic Arts Festival (as absolutely nobody calls it but I call it now so non-Torontonians know what the heck I'm talking about when I say I finally made it to TCAF).
It is 2 days of wandering around the Toronto Reference Library looking at beautiful art and and expression and feeling almost cosily enveloped by fellow generalized weridoes and, ergo, feeling like much less of a generalized weirdo. What I didn't realize until after the fact (I only went Saturday due to having to then head to Pickering right after for Mother's Day Stuff) was that it's not just 2 days of Toronto Reference Library at this point... it has spread out and there are talks and showings at surrounding locations too (which I will officially be Ready For Next Time, assuming the I Always Miss TCAF joke is definitively wrapped). This means that my whole experience was just wandering around what was in the library proper with a small notebook writing away titles that captured me. And, in this specific case it really was about *titles* that captured me 'cause I'd also already decided before I went that I was pretty much going to just judge books by their cover and zero in on something I'd like based on no more than that.
(I did cheat a little and read the blurbs of some select titles I knew I wouldn't buy that day, but wanted to learn more about for The Notebook, since that wasn't part of the game. If I already knew I wasn't going to get it that day it didn't thwart my game of picking at least one [independent, modest] title on cover alone).
In the end the comic I got surprised even me... it was a title originally written in Japanese (and actually reads manga style), which is the 20th issue in the series, called Yocchi's Forgetfulness. I may post a couple of pages from it some point. I have a huge amount of affection for it at this point and really feel like my random picking paid off better than expected (and the author signed it and drew a Very Cute picture of the Yocchi character holding a fat cat. Ha).
But that wasn't the only thing I got 'cause when I saw Drawn & Quarterly was selling a comic I'd meant to pick up for ages (It's a Good Life, If You Don't Weaken) I couldn't resist (probably more on that later, though). And the bonus Not The Only Thing I Got was the one thing I'd actually planned to get beforehand which was a button that speaks strongly to my Friendly Robot side).
The last thing I was tempted by (and, really tempted by, I went by the booth twice) was 'Three Wordless Graphic Narratives' Written in Wood. This book, if you return just to my game of the cover, seems absolutely built for me: wood as medium is very important to me, Tom Thomson really matters to me, a story titled a Book of Hours speaks to me (due to my affection for the devotional artifacts), and Conrad Black interests the heck out of me (in no small part for the very unexpected reason that he was convicted in part for not respecting Records [records in the info/archival sense...]). But the problem was the story that was actually behind the Book of Hours title. It's a "9/11 story" and I have just such a strong reactiveness against that that it ends up overwhelming all the other pluses, which is both a surprising and a rather significant shame.
Very interestingly though is that the way it's framed on the site I link to ("tells the mundane yet meaningful way in which the people in the World Trade Center spent their last hours before...") turns me around on it and for a moment leaves me feeling like if I'd read that there then I would have gotten it. But then I read the rest of the way the book is framed on that site and wish that it was back to the wordless. Not at all resolved on this one yet. It'll probably just take one more fortuitous encounter with it before I'm likely to give up and test my reactiveness against the work itself.
So that was last weekend. Creativity. Now we have this weekend (it's a long weekend here). Destruction.
I've spent the last couple of days working in the garden, but by working in the garden I mean... turning dirt over. I'd planned to do this for a long time and I was concerned about how it would go for me and not surprisingly the thing I expected may concern me (death, destruction) did. As I turned the dirt over and took things up and tossed them to the side I turned over phrases in my head, phrases that if strung together would have made an organic (pun intended) poem. And, interestingly, by the time I'm trying to capture them now I find most of them have been turned over into dirt (darkness) themselves and this seems fitting. I'll pay attention the next time I'm out turning to see if they come back.
But that won't be for A While at this point since, um, next weekend and the one after that I'll Kinda Sorta be in England (so, short notice, but if there's anything going on in the lower 3rd of it over that span then I might try to make it there if a train goes thataway. Otherwise I'll be doing what I mostly planned to do, which is sitting in my aunt's house drinking cup after cup of the tea that tastes like non-home-home).
It is 2 days of wandering around the Toronto Reference Library looking at beautiful art and and expression and feeling almost cosily enveloped by fellow generalized weridoes and, ergo, feeling like much less of a generalized weirdo. What I didn't realize until after the fact (I only went Saturday due to having to then head to Pickering right after for Mother's Day Stuff) was that it's not just 2 days of Toronto Reference Library at this point... it has spread out and there are talks and showings at surrounding locations too (which I will officially be Ready For Next Time, assuming the I Always Miss TCAF joke is definitively wrapped). This means that my whole experience was just wandering around what was in the library proper with a small notebook writing away titles that captured me. And, in this specific case it really was about *titles* that captured me 'cause I'd also already decided before I went that I was pretty much going to just judge books by their cover and zero in on something I'd like based on no more than that.
(I did cheat a little and read the blurbs of some select titles I knew I wouldn't buy that day, but wanted to learn more about for The Notebook, since that wasn't part of the game. If I already knew I wasn't going to get it that day it didn't thwart my game of picking at least one [independent, modest] title on cover alone).
In the end the comic I got surprised even me... it was a title originally written in Japanese (and actually reads manga style), which is the 20th issue in the series, called Yocchi's Forgetfulness. I may post a couple of pages from it some point. I have a huge amount of affection for it at this point and really feel like my random picking paid off better than expected (and the author signed it and drew a Very Cute picture of the Yocchi character holding a fat cat. Ha).
But that wasn't the only thing I got 'cause when I saw Drawn & Quarterly was selling a comic I'd meant to pick up for ages (It's a Good Life, If You Don't Weaken) I couldn't resist (probably more on that later, though). And the bonus Not The Only Thing I Got was the one thing I'd actually planned to get beforehand which was a button that speaks strongly to my Friendly Robot side).
The last thing I was tempted by (and, really tempted by, I went by the booth twice) was 'Three Wordless Graphic Narratives' Written in Wood. This book, if you return just to my game of the cover, seems absolutely built for me: wood as medium is very important to me, Tom Thomson really matters to me, a story titled a Book of Hours speaks to me (due to my affection for the devotional artifacts), and Conrad Black interests the heck out of me (in no small part for the very unexpected reason that he was convicted in part for not respecting Records [records in the info/archival sense...]). But the problem was the story that was actually behind the Book of Hours title. It's a "9/11 story" and I have just such a strong reactiveness against that that it ends up overwhelming all the other pluses, which is both a surprising and a rather significant shame.
Very interestingly though is that the way it's framed on the site I link to ("tells the mundane yet meaningful way in which the people in the World Trade Center spent their last hours before...") turns me around on it and for a moment leaves me feeling like if I'd read that there then I would have gotten it. But then I read the rest of the way the book is framed on that site and wish that it was back to the wordless. Not at all resolved on this one yet. It'll probably just take one more fortuitous encounter with it before I'm likely to give up and test my reactiveness against the work itself.
So that was last weekend. Creativity. Now we have this weekend (it's a long weekend here). Destruction.
I've spent the last couple of days working in the garden, but by working in the garden I mean... turning dirt over. I'd planned to do this for a long time and I was concerned about how it would go for me and not surprisingly the thing I expected may concern me (death, destruction) did. As I turned the dirt over and took things up and tossed them to the side I turned over phrases in my head, phrases that if strung together would have made an organic (pun intended) poem. And, interestingly, by the time I'm trying to capture them now I find most of them have been turned over into dirt (darkness) themselves and this seems fitting. I'll pay attention the next time I'm out turning to see if they come back.
But that won't be for A While at this point since, um, next weekend and the one after that I'll Kinda Sorta be in England (so, short notice, but if there's anything going on in the lower 3rd of it over that span then I might try to make it there if a train goes thataway. Otherwise I'll be doing what I mostly planned to do, which is sitting in my aunt's house drinking cup after cup of the tea that tastes like non-home-home).