recovery.

I’m back in town after spending the weekend at the Pyramid Atlantic book arts fair and conference. I took no photos this weekend, thus the picture of wigs will be taking the place of photos of happy shining booksellers. Impressions of the conference include the following:

1. Less hot than the NY Art Book Fair.

2. Why is Silver Springs, Maryland a great place to eat Burmese food? 

3. Why is the book arts field so incredibly split along gender lines? 

4. And when am I going to stop being so incredibly irritated by that? 

5. Jana Harper gave a fantastic talk about walking and pace and how it relates to artist books. About how the pace of reading is like the pace of walking, about the conflation of past and present and future time periods that can take place in a walking tour. Great stuff. 

6. Which was followed by another talk about driving and the artist book, which my boss attended (we switched off, because we have learned how to share), which according to him was much more macho and incoherently theoretical. Which I enjoyed hearing, as it supports my bias in favor of walking versus driving.

7. I picked the book I’d like to buy myself for Christmas, though I sadly will have to wait until i have some actual cash in hand. Darn economic crisis. 

8. Where do people go and what do they do when they are done with their MFA? There was a whole section of younger artists in an upstairs section this year, which I thought was great.  I need to spend more time aggressively recruiting. 

9. Silver Springs has an outdoor mall in the middle of ‘downtown’, which my boss insists is just like much of LA. It’s strange to walk through what looks like a shopping center full of chain stores, but which does actually play the role of a town plaza, that serves as a social center in the evening, that has people walking and interacting in public together, which isn’t what I would expect in the middle of what otherwise looks like a whole lot of sprawl. It’s a funny little urban space. 

10. In the middle of which is: Moby Dick: House of Kabob. I should have taken a photo of that, if nothing else. 

11. I got a good chunk of holiday knitting done during table-sitting. I’m terrible at pretending to be friendly for long periods of time. Thank god for knitting.