Books and their Binding

 I have two habits, both bad, when it comes to my projects. The first, and probably the most annoying, is that of announcing I will do a thing, then it never happening. Some of you will probably have realised by now that the second volume of Albian Dreams has slipped into this category. Ditto definitely the anthology of my criticism I was going to put together, and most probably the idea of making a YouTube video of my essay about what I'm going to refer to here as that Todd Field movie to save myself the hassle of looking up how to do that bloody accent over the 'a' on here again. Chalk it up to my ADHD, I guess. 

But running that habit close in terms of annoyance is a similar but slightly different one, probably also a result of the aforementioned neuroatypicality, which is that of not announcing something I'm actively working on but assuming I have at some point, such that I wind up, as I did in my last entry, offhandedly referring to a project I have not only never openly announced on here, but have not in fact even alluded to. 

Which brings us to stuckfearkarma. 

stuckfearkarma is my newest poetry pamphlet, and the first pamphlet since names and songs of women which I have chosen not to publish through Kindle Direct Publishing, because I am increasingly unhappy about having any association with Jeff Bezos and the rest of his creepy fascist chums. It's true that KDP is an extremely convenient platform, but frankly I'm sick of using platforms associated with a class of people who are, on a daily basis, making the planet harder and harder to live on with their bloated egos and their TESCREAL bullshit. I think the moment that finally made me decide that I want to start transitioning my publishing output, such as it is, away from this deeply spiritually bald man was the moment when he decided to boorishly pop a bottle of champagne to cut off William Shatner's ruminations on his extremely high atmosphere (emphatically not 'space') flight: 

Here was a man, Shatner, whose defining work as an actor is inextricably linked with sci-fi dreams of space colonisation confronting, in real time, the deep depression he felt on looking down at our fragile planet from a point of our atmosphere on the very border of space. I don't think it's hyperbolic to describe what Shatner is dealing with here as cosmic horror. It is notoriously the case with him that what he says when out of character is usually at best wrong-headed and at worst utterly repellent but here, for the first time in years, it seemed he had something genuinely interesting, even revelatory, to say. 

And because the richest man in the world couldn't stand the fact that for a few short minutes he wasn't the centre of attention, he barged into frame and started spraying fizzy plonk around like he'd won a fucking grand prix. 

Wanker. 

In fact, more than just a wanker. Let's face it: Jeff Bezos is a cunt. 

And it has been a long-standing principle of mine that I don't work with cunts. I won't be on the same bill as them. I won't be published by them. I won't be friends or make nice with them. It's harmed my career in many ways, but I'd rather stick by my principles than sell out for success. And things have reached a point where I feel I have to apply that principle to the platform I have self-published most of my work on for the past decade. 

So stuckfearkarma will be self-published in a much more old-fashioned way. And as I was considering that, another thought struck me: what if, as well as publishing it, I bound every copy myself? What if I celebrated this change by making a genuinely handmade object? 

So I learned bookbinding. 

Which, for what I wanted to do, turned out to be a bit of a faff. Because in order to learn all the techniques, I had to make two hardback notebooks before I could learn what I needed to do to hand-bind the pamphlets, which is basically just a simple bit of sewing. 

Although to be honest, I've never been that great at sewing, either. 

Still, I learned a lot. Not just how to passably sew up some fascicles but hammering out spines, enrobing boards in fabric, and lettering both by hand and machine. I'm not going to be volunteering for any restoration projects any time soon, but I'm grateful for the experience. And, despite my cackhandedness and my long covid making some of the tasks involved physically exhausting, I think the final products - at least of this apprentice work - looked pretty good in the end. 

That being said - I don't know if I will go with my original plan of manually binding the pamphlets. stuckfearkarma will still come out - but I may just get it printed in the traditional fashion. I might even just have it stapled. What with moving and various other things I have a lot on my plate at the moment, and I simply don't feel I can spare the time to sit my ass down and sew up dozens of spines. And besides, there's one other little matter to deal with before the pamphlet comes out.

Which is that I am publishing The Author Has Been Tweeting, the graphic poem I've been working on for the past few weeks, as a zine. So GET HYPE for that!