I have spent the morning trawling the Arts Full Text database; from the ‘Notebooks’ category, to ‘Reading and Books’, and thence to things about binding, I’ve been remembering that thrill of quiet, sparse, precise, personal times in libraries, with books and a notebook. Nicholson Baker wrote about transcribing to commonplaces (which is pretty much what I see this blog to be). Then an essay about reading aloud caught my attention, and I wondered where my final, aborted, art school woodwork project would be now, had I ever finished it. It was going to be a lectern, not large, but heavy, and built with old wood and all treenailed joints (even the dovetails were pinned through; I can’t remember why). A thing to own only if one never wished to move house again, I think.

In reading these writings about reading, and they were mostly a half dozen pages or so, I missed a thing from books: pages. I like turning pages, strange as that may sound: each page turned is a milestone (or, really, more like a yard-stone, if such a thing has ever existed; maybe in Huysmans’ journeys to the grog cabinet in Là-Bas they did), and forms some sort of ‘meta-rest’ — a pause in reading never intended by the author, but imposed by the printer; a gap resolved only from the book-ness of the text. On a screen there is no such thing—try reading a Project Gutenberg text on-screen, and you quickly get disoriented by the endless down, the ‘single page’ that has turned a book, a codex, into a perverse scroll that is longer than any that ever kept at Alexandria. I’ve heard that some of these so-called eBooks solve this problem by necessitating some sort of swiping gesture along the device’s margin to turn the page, but I doubt it’s the same. I love turning to a long-shut page in an old book and feeling the binding adjust and fold and present the folio, the sewing showing sometimes, and the hollow back opening smoothly. Running one’s finger down the fold, to confirm that this is where I’m reading, that though there may be much past and much to come, this page is now. (Of course, these remarks rarely hold true for a perfect-bound book: but maybe some people get satisfaction from breaking the backs of these wretched modern bricks, or in not being able to open them properly. I don’t know.)

Now it’s lunchtime, and I’m going to walk through the rain to find some lunch somewhere. With luck, a place in which reading will fit. I’m reading a novel by William Gibson at the moment, so maybe the rotten ‘mall’ will do, as at least there I’ll be out of the rain (and out of the office; I’m not particularly enamored with this place at the moment, and am thinking of quitting).

So, with that bit of excitement out of the way, I’m left pondering the far-off hills and wishing that I could be in the workshop, at my bench, and writing in ink and not at a keyboard. The computer-reality is basically two-dimensional: we, the IT people, strive to make everything the same. Documents can never show age; photos must be as bright forever as they day they were taken; we care only for content, and never for context or media. A rotten state of affairs! I want my pages to yellow and my photos to fade! A world in which nothing is old gives us nothing at all — despite what Wikipedia would have us believe.

But I wont go on about that. I can’t bear to think about it, not here, in this place.

This office has begun to pall my spirits, now the novelties of The Commute and Being A Man have worn thin. I just want to run! (Well, run for a little ways, and then sit and sew my shirt, or write in my Moleskine…). I can’t dream about my workshop.

Also, I’ve been back in the workshop — getting it ready, at any rate, to be a workshop. That’s a bit exciting.

But enough for now, I must get to the coop.

Of course, that was in the sheltered bubble of the art school, and it was coming out of that and finding no similar space elsewhere that turned me to geek school last year—seeking the same solace, with different materials. But can code and computers really do for me what wood and words did once? I doubt it.

I have my bike, which I like at the moment; and woodwork which I will one day return to; and mostly and day-to-day I have this funny old world of computing. (Which latter I find so tedious today that I’m not sure why I’m writing this.) I like the order within each of these three things and know that that’s much of what draws me to them; I hate their order too, because in these times when I need it most I can get none of it. I know, academically, that it’s there, but I can feel nothing. Sadly, without the guidance instantiated by these activities I become lost sometimes. What’ll I do?

In case you didn’t get it, this post is pure procrastination.

It seems that I can’t walk the line. I fall to one side of it, only to take pleasure in using the tools of the other side. I say I want to be completely with one branch of the dichotomy — technology these days — but can’t do so without yearning for the other. It rips me apart. I just wonder whether the divide is less consuming from one side or the other.

What I was going to say was that I want to get back to a workbench, and keep a journal of my work, probably on the web. Maybe even that I want to go and make furniture with my dad in WA, who knows?

In fact, fuck this!! I don’t want to be miserable about this! That’s not why I sat down to write. It’s too jolly cold here, that’s the problem, and I haven’t had my customary tipple of sherry yet.

I want to go home. I want to live with my friends in a nice house, and go to work in a furniture workshop with my dad. I’ve been away too long.

It might be time for another beer.  That’s something that I’d touch on before, though: drinking.  It’s a thing that releases me from all this hideous worry about What To Do, whether programming is The Thing for me, and I like getting pissed for that reason.  I like it because when I’m a bit drunmk, out of myself somewhat, I feel oh so fucking drawn to making, to walking and being with the world and nature.  I want to hug the wood, hug the night and the day and shout and sing and in any whay I can be an idle singer of an empty day!…  That’d be the thing.  Being here, Canberra, being at uni, these things don’t do it really.  Not really I thinmk…

The book and a table are precisely what I have now: “The Quakers and Quietism” by Pamela M. Oliver (1972, thesis for an MA in History), and the deserted Menzies basement. Lovely.

I am begining to feel a little guilty for not being in the workshop. I know that I don’t want to be, which is nice. I am also a bit hungary due to not having had a very large breakfast. I am very much enjoying this book and learning a lot about 17^th Century Friends.

“Henceforth I shall not try to change people’s minds but inform them of my stand only. I shall forgive all, for everything. I shall not err from the Truth as I see it.”

Do I really think I’m going to sit here all week reading this?! As if!

Firstly (or lastly if one is to be chronological), I am working on the catalogue for the workshop exhibition. I am learning heaps about InDesign (especially its faults!) which is rather exciting. It does not do signature imposition of pages by itself, so this afternoon has seen me scrabbling around the web looking for a script that will. I found one (at ScriptBuilders.net) and so I think tomorrow will be fun.

It is strange that I am focusing more on the web/technological side of my proposal at the moment, given that it is a minor part of what I will be doing next year. I feel like I want to get it sorted though: get the encylopaedia working and also a couple of other things that I have been considering recently. I will be making a reading log to keep track of what I read, a project management script with which to track all of my ideas about things to make and write etc. I also have been doing some work with the style (CSS) of my site. I am constantly thinking about what I want to do next year and how I will go about it, working on a ‘manifesto’ or ‘modi operandi’ thingy… hmm… more thought needed…

I was on 2XXFM yesterday (Thursday) talking about the Walking With Water project that I did earlier this year. I’ll put the MP3 of it up soon.

– I really am rather excited about all this!!!

[UPDATE 2007-06-12: After nearly four years, here's the MP3.]

I have been working on the encyclopaedia code for the last few days (because I didn’t go to the Major’s Creek Folk Festival) and it is now nearing test data entry stage. I still have a lot of work to do with the stylesheet of course — I’m no graphic artist!

This strange, apparently discordant, confluence of the high-tech web world and slow, intuitive woodworking that I am embarking on is a thing which is going to require great concentration on my behalf. It’s a matter of balance, and I know how easy it is going to be to lean more to one side than another. To spend so much time coding that I throw my hands up in disgust and want to never look at another computer. Or to force myself to continue with cutting a joint past when I can see why I’m doing it, and inevitably stuff it up.