Weekend Edition

Mrs.5000 is Famous!

This week marked the publication of the long-awaited (in certain circles) 500 Handmade Books, from Lark Books. It's reasonably priced, it offers a vast number of lovely and amazing things to look at, and it is a great introduction to the current creative ferment in the book arts.

And, perhaps more to the point, it features:

• two (2) pieces by the lovely, erudite, and frighteningly talented Mrs.5000!



• two (2) pieces by the (if I may) lovely, erudite, and frighteningly talented L&TM5K blog vice-dork, Fingerstothebone!



• one (1) series (Pamela Paulrud's Book Stones), a piece from which I happen to own!

If you were to purchase 500 Handmade Books, or to obtain it from your local library, you would be feasting your eyes on such work as Mrs.5000's The Winter Palace.

Note, of course, that both Mrs.5000 and Fingertothebone go by their alternative "street" names in the bookarts world.

Speaking of Books

The Reading List project never sleeps, of course. With My Name is Red crossed off the list, I decided to mix things up by selecting two (2) new titles to work on more or less simultaneously. Using random numbers offered up by L&TM5K blog Dork G and others, the two titles selected were Dominion, a treatise on human-animal relations nominated by Rex Parker in the non-fiction category, and Beowulf.


Feeling that Beowulf is in its true essence a text that one studies in school (it was probably written specifically with that role in mind by prescient medieval pedants) I tried to enlist an English-lit type from among the readership to ASSIGN me Beowulf -- to set deadlines, make me answer specific essay questions, and so on -- but she declined on the basis that she had never herself read the poem. Idealistic of her, I thought. If any of you other English-lit types want to leap into the breach, I'm sure you will find me an attentive and motivated student, more than capable of adequately paraphrasing all that I glean from the Wiki. Otherwise, I'll assign myself the damn thing.

Note: while searching for this Beowulf image, I stumbled onto the small but enthusiastic realm of Beowulf porn. The famous Rule 34, which states that "if you can think of it, there is already internet porn about it," is truly as close as we can come to an axiom of human behavior.


The Looming Content Crisis

Yesterday, while you were out celebrating national independence, I killed off the Forgotten Lands project. Plus, we're running out of Classical Wednesdays. Guess I better get to watching some Great Movies...