I don't have any fancy plans for this blog. Mostly I just want to get myself posting a little something at least once a week, just to keep my creative juices flowing. This shouldn't be as intense as my Morocco blog, though--more like the little notes I used to post on DeviantArt and FaceBook.
On that note...let's begin!
Yesterday was full of books. You might not think that's remarkable, since I am interning at a university press, but I don't usually handle many physical books myself. (More on that later.) However, last week kicked off an office-wide Spring cleaning spree that resulted in a tower of to-be-donated old computers and piles of broken office organizers, crumbling and outdated encyclopedias, bags of trash from the backs of desk drawers, and paper--lots and lots of paper. Wish I'd been there the day they brought in the "industrial shredder."
With cleanliness restored, it was time to zero in on more specific tasks. Yesterday, one unfortunate but brave and determined young employee recruited four interns to help him perform a monumental task: organize the conference room library!
Since part of our mission was to ensure that a copy of every book published in the last five years was present, I'm guessing the library had been neglected about that long...though I might have just as easily guessed that from the amount of dust! Four of us worked on putting new books onto the shelves in alphabetical order while the fifth cleared a section at a time to clean the shelves. Once the books were put away, we got lists of books that should be present and noted which ones were missing. I put together the final list of missing books--over four hundred--and we started an office-wide treasure. I didn't get too far before quittin' time, but I'm guessing there will still be work to do on Monday.
The wordy goodness continued when I met up with Dad at the Museum of Modern Art after work. I got a membership to the MOMA last year that I've been taking advantage of here and there before and after interviews, but this was the first time I got to bring a guest. After seeing the big square of pollen, we decided to target the special exhibits, one of which focused on Dieter Roth, whose artistic experiments often involved books and, to some extent, language. No wonder I found it so interesting! The big hit was definitely the Literaturwurst, which the artist made by following a traditional recipe for sausage...but replacing the meat with ground up books!There was also an interesting stamp project that looked a bit more like a book. Roth made a stamp for every letter of the alphabet - just random pictures, nothing to indicate whether or not they represented a letter or a sound. One was a heart, one the outline of a bicyclist, one an odd goblin-like face, and so on. His intention was that anyone who used the stamps would give each one a value for each of the four ways it could be positioned--right side up, upside down, or on either side. How you stamped them would then indicate the kind of sentence you might form. So the two hearts in the photo below, for instance, could mean four different things. If we said the words were "four" for the side ways heart and "cat" for the upside down one, you might have a sentence that said something about four cats. But if you turned it 45 degrees clockwise, you'd have an upside down heart and a sideways heart facing the other direction, which would mean something entirely different--the four would be involved, but it could be in a very different way. It's a bit hard to explain. Sorry I couldn't find any bigger images. Anyway, it sounded like a great class activity for an early grammar lesson--have each child design a stamp, assign the stamps random words, and have children stamp combinations. Then pass them around and have the children come up with sentences based on the words. They would all be quite different--and probably fun! But you'd be able to point out that without rules of grammar and spelling, you leave so much work for your reader to do in order to grasp the fact of what you're saying that they can't focus on understanding what you're saying. If nothing else, it'd be a fun craft/creative exercise.
I also thought of a great art/oral history project. First, make the modern art and put it in an exhibit. Hide microphones and record the varied reactions of visitors, then do something with the words. Wouldn't that be fun? It could certainly make a great installation. Hmm, maybe if the publishing thing doesn't work out I should pursue a career as an artist...
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