Salon of Spices

Mills alum, Banner administrator, and all-around nice guy Mahmud Rahman is reading tonight in Oakland.

Salon of Spices: South Asian Writers in Performance
Barnes & Noble, Jack London Square
Sat Feb 25th, 7 pm

Reading & discussion, with Pireeni Sundaralingam, Wajahat Ali, Shailja Patel, Mahmud Rahman, and others.

Should be fun.

a week of good readings

I just got home from seeing Geraldine Monk and Alan Halsey read to an intimate gathering in the Mills Hall Living Room. It really did feel like a living room reading. Very fantastic work. They are a husband-and-wife pair of poets out from the U.K. and the force behind West House Books. Halsey's work blends activism and history and sound and imagery and place. He read from a collaboration called Danse Macabre that dealt with letterpress and printing and death. Monk read mostly from Escafeld Hangings, which is more or less about the town of Sheffield and its most famous resident, Mary Queen of Scots.

almost perfect

I made my first broadside on Friday. I printed the first poem from Valley/Ridge. The broadside is 10" x 22" horizontally aligned, with brown ink on cream paper. It took about four hours, including an hour to clean the press after, to make 25 copies. It really is quite nice, though I'm sure I'll hear all about its flaws at the critique on Wednesday. Of course, after I finished, and keep in mind that it was a fair amount of work and rather expensive paper, I noticed a misspelled word in the colophon: Eucalytus Press, not Eucalyptus Press. This is the colophon I had to set three times before I found a typeface that looked good, so I guess it's understandable that it had a mistake. I'm hoping it isn't widely noticed, since there's no fixing it, and I'm not making more.

frustration!

Today was a very frustrating day at the book arts studio. I set the colophon (the block of text that describes the typefaces, paper, and other details about the printing) twice in two different type sizes and discovered it was still too big. This took about four hours. I still don't have a colophon, and I'll need to break down the stuff I've already done, and I just couldn't seem to make it look good. Two hours after class got out, having wasted the previous four hours, I just decided to leave and try to work on it later this week. Possibly Wednesday I'll have the time, if I skip going to the gym.