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 ’ve
still got a stack of Issue 2.2, well, stacks of pieces of 2.2 waiting
to be bound, and it’s already time to write this again. Am I that slow?
I guess I must be. No matter. I guess the point is that I’m still binding,
not so much what, just that I am. We’re now in our third year—just beginning
in perceptual terms, but close to the end of the third in actual, since
there was an Issue 0, the prototype of the idea (of which there are
only three copies, I’ve got one and Richard has one and so does Aaron,
and you can have mine if you want to give me thousands and thousands
of dollars for it!). We go to press in just a couple of weeks
[1] so I’ve got to get this written.[If that’s true then you went
to press a month and a half ago. Where are the Sporks, mister? You’ve
got to get this written so it can be proofed and out of the way so when
all the other contributors—and yes,I am pissed that you pulled
my piece—start sending in their proofs you won’t have to worry
about your section. That is what you should have said. That is, if you
absolutely had to say anything about it at all. It is not important
when you wrote this. I understand that you don’t know all the details
about the binding involved until you actually start doing it, but that’s
why you do prototypes, which I know you have done for this issue.]
I’ve usually got some idea of what kind
of things I want to talk about, what sort of irrelevant details are
just so absolutely pertinent at that moment, all the ephemera concatenated
into a scrawled whole (hole) dashed off at the last minute, usually
on my porch, the beginnings of it a bunch of semi-incoherent notes jotted
during the day at work, but usually it ends with the sky starting to
pink and with me realizing I’ve got to wind it up somehow before
I have to go back to work a couple of hours from then. The sun starts
coming up and I start talking about binding. But honestly, this time,
it feels just a little forced. I’m sitting here, planning to be spontaneous
about whatever’s been rolling about in my head, and that seems somewhat
dishonest. [The reason it feels dishonest
is because it is. Yes, you did write this all at once, but you planned
the talk about planning to be spontaneous. I’m sure you languished for
minutes over whether or not to cut this paragraph, and then had
a little chat with yourself about how if you’re going to be honest,
even when you’re lying, then you have to leave it as it is, warts and
all, a big invisible (SIC) known only to you following every sentence.]
Sam, the guy who runs Projekt (goth-darkwave-ethereal
record label) sent out an e-mail a while back, in which he went on about
how hard it is to do what he does. And then a few weeks ago I
got another e-mail from the guy who runs 555 (indie record label, Boyracer
and all those good folk) saying they’re going on indefinite hiatus because
it’s just so hard and nobody’s doing business like they did in
the good old days and blah blah blah… Things they started, things they
loved, things they nurtured and then turned around and whined about
how difficult it all is, like it’s someone else’s fault. I mention those
now (there’ve been so many others, but those bothered me the most) because
I realized I was one foot and three toes on that same road myself. I’m
not going to do that. I knew what I was getting into, I said, to those
who said what I wanted was impossible, “I’m going to do it anyway,”
and so that’s what I’ll say again. We are beautiful, we are wonderful,
we are the best there is. We are the best not just because of what we
do, but why we do it. We do it because it’s not impossible. We do it
to show you how to do it, we do it so you’ll do it too. We do it because
it should be done. You should do it too. Maybe you’ll be the best there
is, just like us. [2]
Last week, I was standing in a classroom
at our community college, up at the front, there to talk to a bunch
of writing students about publishing and Vibrant Local Literary Scenes
and such, and something just kind of turned over, both in my head and
my stomach. [Okay, you big liar, I know for a fact that this is completely
untrue. One: this was written a full two weeks before you went
to talk to the students. Two: you didn’t talk to just one class, you
went to three. Three: I have a friend in the third writing class you
spoke to, and not only were you not the callous ass you filled four
pages here describing, you were kind, you were encouraging. You did
not tell them that the best they could ever hope to aspire to is the
level of hack. You did not tell them that cabinetry is a noble profession,
you did not give them the number of the HR people for the telemarketers
upstairs from the lab where you work. The real question here is why
were you planning on going in like that? What did you really hope to
accomplish by beating them all down? Do they pose a threat to you? Have
they done anything to you besides maybe one of them sending you a submission
you didn’t like? Are you mad at them because they’re in school and you
never got to go because you couldn't ever afford it, because by the
time it occurred to you that maybe it would have been a good idea to
get some education you were too scared, too unsure of yourself to pit
your unquantified, atrophied intellect against their fresher, younger,
better-fed ones? (Is that a low blow? I don’t know. Is it unfair to
use personal knowledge and experience like this? I guess to be a good
editor it would help to have that kind of insight. Hey baby, this is
for your own good. It’s for the best, really.) And what, in the end,
happened that made you say what you did? I’ll bet it was stage fright.
No, I bet it was something else. I’m going to say that you got up in
front of the students and remembered how you always wanted to be a teacher,
and that thing that turned over in your stomach was your conscience,
lashed along with your early dreams to an anchor and then buried and
forgotten up to that exact point. You told that last class that they
were the reason that Spork was made. For them,
those kids like you, who didn’t understand or really even want to understand
how it all worked, and didn’t have access anyway… Who had voices of
their own but nobody listening to them. I don’t understand this pose
at all. The hard one I mean. Is it so difficult to just shrug and say
that you wanted to go your own way, without attaching some big battle
cry to it? And finally, how does it serve your high-falutin’ ideal about
creating a new system, a new school, outside the existing systems and
schools, when you present yourself to those very people with whom you
want to build this system/school as a complete jerk that nobody could
ever work with? I have cut out the aforementioned four pages. I left
the end of the last paragraph, because I like it.] And I
also meant the part about disregarding the comments of assholes like
me. I just get to say what I want because I have this space in which
to say it. You can have it too. And how great would that be if there
were journals out there set up for the express purpose of discrediting
and vilifying me? That would kick fourteen-hundred and thirty-eight
kinds of ass. Man, if there was an I-Hate-Drew club, I’d pay my dues,
I’d chair the meetings myself. I’d even bring cookies.[3]
, [4], [5]
In the last issue, I said we were going
to do some big simultaneous publishing thing. We haven’t done it yet,
but we’re working on it. The response so far has been small, but still
there. I’m thinking we should probably have our shit together by 3.2.
Just an update. I was overly simplistic in my original formulation,
and way too optimistic. I knew, on some level, that it was a whole lot
more difficult than just doing it, but I’m still approaching it, on
some other level, as though it really is that easy. That’s how things
get done, isn’t it?
Okay, I’m going to do this before sunrise.
The book, this book:
Through the issues we’ve done thus far,
I’ve experimented with a few binding methods, and a couple different
ways to cover the books, [6] and with 3.1 I’ve decided to
do a little blending of the [Hey look, it just breaks off!
You’re so damned clever. You with your ranting against cleverness, you’re
so clever yourself. Yes, I’ll acknowledge that this is probably exactly
how it happened, that you were writing and then what follows below happened,
and you just switched gears, maybe even intending to go back and work
in a comfortable segue. But you didn’t. You just broke it and you didn’t
fix it later. That, my dear, is clever. Clever in a really boring way.
Now, here, I wasn’t going to talk about it, I’d set myself some boundaries,
I was going to respect at least one part of your pose, but I can’t do
it. Why are you doing this? Not the magazine, I’m not saying why the
magazine. I’m saying this thing you do to your writing. Drew, you are
a damned fine writer, but you go to exfuckingtraordinary lengths
to hide it here. You’ve written two novels that I’ve read—and they aren’t
awful, like you love to say they are, they’re just first drafts.
They’re unfinished, is what they are. I know that you don’t have much
time, but they don’t need much work. I love your stories, I love your
poetry. Your friends have nothing but praise for you, but you won’t
ever submit your work to anyone, won’t show your work to anyone but
just a very few people. You’re not afraid of rejection. I don’t think
you’d even understand it if you were rejected. So what is it? I’m not
saying that what you write for Spork
is bad, not saying that at all, since it’s not, not really, not really
at all. I’m saying it’s just not you, not what you’re capable of. I’d
call it lazy if I didn’t know how much work you put into it. Again,
your incomprehensible pose. If it served a purpose I’d support you in
it, but it’s time you were outed before you do yourself some irreparable
harm.]
Okay, so it’s 2 in the morning and just
a couple of seconds ago a motorcycle did some extreme acceleration that
got punctuated by impact, finished off with a surprisingly long cascading
trill of a shower of plastic and metal parts. Yeah, it’s close. It’s
2 so it’s quiet. Quiet so I could hear it all in the still, thin and
cooling air. Now it’s been as long as it took me to write those sentences
and nothing’s happened. There’s a fire station right up the street.
Somebody should be responding now. I’ve seen a couple of motorcycle
accidents in my time, so there’s probably not much to do, but there
should be somebody, there should at least be a siren or something. Fuck,
I go a mile over the speed limit and Adams 1 through 36 are there in
seconds, scribbling fines happily… [See?
That was really nice. I like that a lot. You’re not putting as much
effort into it as you used to do. Maybe I will call you lazy. And I
didn’t mention it there, but in your second paragraph you really didn’t
try at all.] Hang on, this shouldn’t take too long.
Miracle of paper: Ten minutes later:
I knew right where to look, but there wasn’t any motorcycle. It’s not
like trying to figure out whether those cracks I hear every night are
fireworks or guns, this was real specific. I circled the area and on
my second pass saw remnants on the street. Hunks of parts, bits of plastic,
a couple of puddles of something rainbow-surfaced on the asphalt. Something
happened, but I couldn’t see what.
I pulled a U and looked. Maybe the guy
flipped the median after hitting the back of a truck or something, and
the truck sped off but the guy and his bike were on the island or the
other side… and then I saw in a parking lot across the street, right
about even with the parts and puddles, a group of kids standing around
a few modified imports. Acuras and stuff. The ones that have those mufflers
to make them sound like motorcycles. I pulled around again and saw that
sure enough one of them was smashed all to hell, and another was kinda
beat up around the hindquarters. Drag racing. Gone bad for them this
time. They got the cars off the road pretty quick and I guess they’re
still trying to figure out what to do before the Adams show up. I was
going to cut around again and offer what assistance I could, but cruising,
as I was, en el Paseo del Muerte, I figured they’d want no help
from the likes of me. That’s my car right now, el Paseo del Muerte.
Got it free. Got rid of the Volvo, gave it to the brother-in-law, got
rid of the Nissan, got a big, new sedan with a huge warranty that covers
everything so I don’t have to worry, so Andrea doesn’t have to work
her magic of electrical tape and twist ties (which brought the Volvo
back from the dead, I’ll have you know, which did what the dealership
mechanics said couldn’t be done), so when it breaks, as it must, there’s
a crew set aside specifically for us, and even if they never fix it,
they give us another car just like ours (or better) so it doesn’t even
matter. El Paseo del Muerte’s getting all the personality upgrades,
we’re not going to bother getting attached to the new one. They always
end up hurting us, it’s just how it is. It doesn’t even have a name.
We’re not going to get attached. So long as it does its job and doesn’t
complain, we’re going to get along just fine. All I have to do is figure
out how to pay for it.
Insert a comfortable segue here… [There
you go, being clever again. Lazy and clever. Maybe cleverly lazy.]
I had a Peugeot, back in ’91,
a diesel, automatic. Looked like a Saab, you know the type. Slug on
wheels. So my then-girlfriend’s [“Then-girlfriend”? “THEN-GIRLFRIEND”?!? That’s all
you say about her? That’s the billing she gets? Five fucking years
of your life and you just call her the “THEN-GIRLFRIEND”? I know it’s
not like she and I were exactly friends or anything—and I don’t know
what’s worse, that you cheated on her with me, or that you then turned
around and cheated on me with her—but I think that if you’ve got the
balls to even mention her in such a way that she—and not just her, but
a whole lot of people in SoCal—can easily recognize her, you owe it
to her to give her something better than “THEN-GIRLFRIEND”. And I just
said all that fucking nice stuff to you, I just said I loved your fucking
work, I just said… God, Drew, you are such an asshole.] stepfather,
M——he was an electrician and I helped out on jobs, fending off housewives
while trying to install new outlets in their bungalows built in the
30s when nobody would ever need more than one outlet in a room—M—
and I, we dropped out the engine, threw in a Chevy small block and a
manual transmission, replaced the fuel system, and basically made it
the Slug from Hell. We were going to redo the differential, but then
M— got murdered. (That was later, and that’s a whole other story.)
I couldn’t beat you off the line, but I wasn’t trying to. I had it in
the upper thousands, and if you gave me at least a quarter mile you
were fucking toast. You had to have nitro, you had to have something.
You couldn’t have stock, and you couldn’t have pussed out on your heads
or cams, since we hadn’t. We got the stuff free—part of the whole other
story, yeah, drugs were involved—so we got the best available. We carved
out a scoop for the blower in the slanted hood (and if we didn’t care
whether or not it looked like a Peugeot anymore we would have put it
right up top, but as it was we routed it off to the side and then to
the front, giving up some performance, but not much; the Chevy block
sat further back than the Peugeot’s engine so we had room for the intake
up front), had to reconfigure the interior somewhat to accommodate the
new soul, and we never did get around to reupholstering or anything—the
dash was held on with drywall screws… the thing wasn’t street legal
anymore, not by a long shot, so I had to make friends with a mechanic
who’d overlook the illegality and smog it for me so I could get it registered.
Again, drugs. I was just 19 then, so I couldn’t buy him a few beers,
but I was able to get him fifty bucks of coke pretty easy. I didn’t
even have to go through M——he wouldn’t have approved anyway, seeing
how I was dating his stepdaughter and all [Still
you say nothing about her. Make her so peripheral, make her unimportant.
Why do you mention her at all in this? It’s not important that the M—
guy was her stepfather. He’s just some guy you worked with. That’s all
you need to say. You place her in here, and then incompletely. That
makes me think you’re doing it on purpose, like you’re trying to convince
yourself of something. Trying to rewrite your history in a place where
most people won’t know any better. I was going to just cut it out, it
pissed me off so much, but I left it in because now I’d rather yell
at you in front of everyone and watch you get really quiet and just
stare at your feet because you never know what to say to anyone when
you’ve made them angry at you. Let everyone in the room call me a bitch,
but at least the ”THEN-GIRLFRIEND”, if she ever even sees this, can
know that at least someone said something, know that you didn’t get
all the way away with it. This is not me saying that it would matter
that much to her now, especially considering who it is saying it, this
is me saying it because it’s important to me. You just talk about the
car, for God’s sake. You are not allowed to talk about her again, not
like that. If you want to talk about her, you do it right, you give
her the space she earned by putting up with your bullshit for five years.].
We even retreaded some tires and put four inches of slick in the middle
in case I had to race. We were such cheaters. I didn’t get to race much,
[Which was
fortunate for you, wasn’t it? Your nasty slug caught fire the first
time you took it out, then blew its hoses, then threw its belts, then
blew its rear tires, then dumped the dashboard in your lap and sent
you (slowly) into a wall. You only really opened it up twice. It was
a neat idea, I’ll give you that, but I won’t let you pretend like it
ever really worked all the way.] nobody wanted to be seen
going up against my little European car—everybody was still domestic
there, everyone still laughing at the then-laughable Nissans and Hondas—and
then one day while I was out with the girlfriend, M— traded my Peugeot
for a camper-trailer. Like it was his or something. And then he got
murdered. They found him out in the desert, beaten and poisoned and
left to die. Dead when they found him. Oh, I didn’t do it. Not me. That’s
just the order of events. Yes, drugs were involved. All I wanted was
a car. He still owed me for four months of electrical work at $42.50
an hour, 40 hours a week (that’s what he charged for me, on top of his
$85 an hour rate).[7] [I’m
finding it hard to understand why I’m so angry at you—am I afraid for
my own billing? That if someone who occupied so great a space in your
history gets shunted off to the side so easily, that I’ll be erased
completely? We all like to think we’re special, did that ever occur
to you? Even if we don’t head the list of thank-yous, we still like
to think that the time was not entirely wasted. Maybe that was all about
me. “Miracle of paper:” the next day: No. That wasn’t all about
me. I thought, for just the tiniest of moments, of going back and reworking
my blowup, but I’ve got a deadline on this, I don’t have the months
to sit and pick away at this and then say it was all slammed down à
la Kerouac on a single sellotaped roll in some stupid bennyfueled spurt
(lie: it was careful and slow, he was careful and slow, that jerk Jack—I
thought it was common knowledge by now, but every wave of incoming college
freshmen has its coterie buying into the myth). I do have to do this
quickly. I do have to have this done in just a couple of days. You,
my supposed fellow anti-Beat, talking the talk but then striking the
Beat pose when it suits you.]
Oh, binding. Anyway, I’ve been
stepping up the difficulty with each issue, and I’m thinking that’s
not the way to go. 2.1 was the most difficult of all, seeing how we
had to completely cover the boards, then sew through not just the text
block itself, but the hinges of the covers too. What the hell was I
thinking? I’m thinking now that I’m a moron. [No argument here. Different
reason, of course, but no less true. Drew, honey, dearest doll, baby,
we all love your self-indulgent ramblings, but you said it yourself
at the beginning of this one that you recognized that you were doing
it consciously now, no longer just getting distracted and wandering
away from the point of your section. You could have at least begun this
one with talk of binding, then rambled off as usual. Maybe you’d like
to try that next time, hm?]
The first three issues were
all a kind of modified-perfect binding. I originally used a hacksaw
to make angled cuts along the spine (one book at a time!), then graduated
to a 3.5” circular saw and a press-box I made myself, with the kind
assistance of Brian Arnold and his plasma cutter and various torches,
that holds up to 15 text blocks, cutting as many blocks in probably
1/30th of the time it took me to load and cut just one the
old way. Issues 2.1 and 2.2 were all drilled, 2.1 with 4 holes, then
the first half of 2.2 with seven and the second half with just four,
after I realized that the extra holes weren’t doing anything for me
or my drill or the books. And when I drill them, I can only do two at
a time. Slow slow work, not a problem unless you’re making hundreds
of books. Which, in fact, we are.
So this issue is bound old-school style.
Since, you know, improvements and upgrades sometimes aren’t either.
No matter how many people we got in here to do the binding on the more
complicated issues, it just never quite worked out. [This might be a good place
to mention those people. The ones I know of: Sommer Browning helped
with issue 2.1, Kaylee Hammonds helped on 2.1, Amy Harrington also on
2.1, and then Rachel Simon, she’s been there a while too, how about
you give them some credit and thanks? I think Rachel bound as many copies
of 2.2 as you did. This isn’t really a solo project anymore. I know
you never intended for it to be, but you’ve consistently forgotten to
mention the people who sometimes will come in at 5 or 6 in the morning
to make the books with you. Here, I’ll say it for you: Thank you Sommer,
Kaylee, Amy, Rachel and any others I don’t know about. Spork
is forever in your debt, and maybe someday Drew’ll see fit to offer
some kind of tangible thanks. And no, Drew, I’m not going to help you
make this issue. Maybe if I were in it, maybe if I hadn’t been promised
x number of pages and then told at the last minute, when I’d
already worked for months to get the piece ready for you, that there
simply wasn’t any room—and is that unprofessional? I don’t know, I don’t
do this sort of thing myself, but something about it doesn’t really
seem all that right. I know we’re pals and all, in a way, but I’m not
as understanding as you seem to think I am. Tell you what we’re going
to do, how you’re going to make it up to me: Once upon a time you waltzed
into Plush, sat down at my table while Becky and I were having a conversation
that—I know, I know, it’s unbelievable—didn’t have anything to do with
you, and you said, “You know what would be really neat? To serialize
your book, to just publish like thirty pages at a time, and not like
groups or sections, but just thirty pages, and if there’s a sentence
that finishes on page 31 then they gotta wait till the next section
to find out how it ends… we could mail it out, we could, I don’t know,
but it would be really neat.” That’s what you’re going to do.
You’re going to make it available. Maybe you can do a subscription thing,
mail it to the people that want it. I’ll leave that up to you. You’ll
do that binding you did when you played with the idea, the simple stitch
with the plain covers that you just tape shut and write the address
on. I wouldn’t even know about it if you didn’t show it to me and Becky
that night, but you did, and that’s what I want. Now it’s written, so
it must be true, right? You have to do it. I’ll give you some time to
get this issue going, but then you are going to do my book just like
we talked about, right? Yes sir, damn straight, damn skippy, you bet
you will. Oh, I cut a couple of paragraphs that didn’t have anything
to do with binding, and weren’t as interesting as your bits in past
issues. We lost a couple of footnotes too, but they weren’t all that
interesting either. I like when you talk about your daughters. The thought
of you having two daughters—you’ve got to know where I’m going, how
they say guys like you are given daughters as a punishment for being
guys like you. I’ve seen you with Trillian and it gives me the nicest
little giggles when I think about what a wreck you’re going to be when
your beautiful little girls aren’t little girls anymore.
We’ll
take it up again at:] Some of
you may have noticed that half of the covers for 2.2 were plexiglas,
and half of them were raw bookboard with a crude block print on the
front that said, simply, spork 2.2. The reason for that, as stated
on the back inside cover of the bookboard ones, was that the plexi got
really expensive. The original quoted price was wrong, with the actual
price being almost three times that, but still workable, but then the
manufacturer stopped making it,
[8] replacing it with a higher-quality product that, while, sure
it was better, was twice as expensive as the stuff I needed. The stuff
I wanted, I mean, since I needed the replacement product just as much.
The manufacturer didn’t understand what I was talking about when I said
I was using it to make books. I said, I’m using it for the covers of
books, and they said, What sort of book has plexiglas pages? It went
on for a while, and I’m not going to put in the whole conversation.
I’m getting frustrated all over again. It also forced me to rely on
my friend Bear to do the cutting, and though he was always great about
it, I was never able to purchase enough of the plexiglas at one time
so we could do the cutting in just one or two days, and I didn’t want
to keep bugging him to cut just one or two sheets at a time for six
months. I’ve got nothing to offer but my thanks, and, well, my thanks
don’t pay your rent. Sometimes it might buy you coffee or a beer, or
maybe lunch, but that’s not really enough.
What I ended up doing was just moving
ahead and doing what I was planning to do for issue 3.1, this issue.
I didn’t think I’d make as many as I did, else I would have cut a better
block for the cover, but things happened the way they did and that’s
how it all went down and that’s what I did. Made a bunch of them.
This time I’ve got my helpful assistant
Rachael working with me on it. Up to this point I’ve been pretty grabby
and selfish, doing most of the interesting work myself—granted, it’s
all been difficult stuff that I couldn’t afford to make any mistakes
on, since I didn’t have any replacement pieces, meaning that no matter
what happened to each book it had to go out, and I didn’t want anybody
to feel bad if something got screwed up. I’d rather take the blame…
but that’s not interesting for people. I guess you’d get really good
at one thing, and so long as I had some future wax-off thing
for you it might serve a good end… but that wasn’t how it was going.
So Rachael and I are both cutting blocks for the cover print for 3.1.
We’re cutting the same image, it’s just two different people doing it,
since, you know, that’s pretty cool. We don’t have a press, so the way
we print the covers is to ink the block, put it face-down on a piece
of board on the floor and then jump on it. We’re using mounted linoleum,
so there’s no worry that we’re going to wreck them. The mounting stuff
also serves to distribute our weight more evenly too. We’re going to
use whatever inks we’ve got on hand, which is 4 different colors, I’m
thinking, not really sure, and Rachael and I cut all the spines (the
cloth parts of the spines that hold the three pieces of the covers together)
out of all the different kinds of linen bookcloth in the studio, meaning
we’ve got lots of different colors of those too. 5 colors cloth, 4 colors
ink, equals 20 possible combinations. That’s right, isn’t it? Jeez,
even simple math confuses me. [It
does when you’re drunk anyway, like you were when you wrote this.]
Here’s a quick recap of the
binding process for this issue: The printed pages are gathered into
groups of five sheets (20 pages) and folded. The folded groups (signatures)
are collated and the art product inserted (randomly this time, we didn’t
set aside a section for it, Richard just wanted to insert it wherever…
that sounds like a pain, sounds like extra work, but I did simplify
the rest of the process, so why not ratchet up the difficulty for consistency’s
sake?), the endpapers put on the ends (where they go), and then set
aside. This whole thing is the text block. Then we’ll take some number
of text blocks, 10-15, and place them in the press box with a piece
of bookboard between each block. The box will be tightened, but not
so tight that the pages become more dense than wood, and Rachael or
I will take the little Black and Decker cordless circular saw and make
4 one-half-inch deep cuts perpendicular to the spines of the blocks.
PVA (polyvinyl acetate, glue product) will then be forced into the cuts,
followed by some cord, which Rachael or myself will violently encourage
deep into the cuts with this big paint scraper thing I’ve got in the
studio. The cord will be followed by more glue, then maybe some glue
all over the spines, to keep them together, and then the whole mess
will be removed from the box and each individual text block will be
cut from the rest with a razor or something. They are then set aside,
if the covers aren’t yet made, or put right into the covers if they
are. Let’s assume they’re not.
For the covers, we have cut bookboard
into pieces measuring eight and thirteen sixteenths inches by six and
five eighths inches for the fronts and backs, and smaller strips measuring
eight and thirteen sixteenths by three quarters of an inch for the spines.
The spines are pasted in the center of a four by eleven inch piece of
book cloth, with the cover boards pasted three quarters of an inch on
either side. The top and bottom of the cloth are folded over and pasted
down and then the thing’s set aside to dry.
Okay, now there are blocks and covers.
The endpapers may or may not have been trimmed on one side of the fold
to line up with the book cloth on the inside of the spine. I don’t know
yet. It’ll look better if we do it that way, but… okay, so we take covers,
lay them in front of us, then throw down some glue. No, we don’t do
that. We glue the part of the endpaper that meets the cover, then glue
one side in, press it down. Then flip the book over—it’s a book now,
you know—and apply glue to the endpaper there and press it closed. And
there’s a spork. All finished and beautiful. Complete, I mean,
since we didn’t do any finishing work on the cut edges of the boards
or where the cloth meets the board. It’s all rough, and we like it like
that. [All
that was fine. See how I didn’t say anything? I’ll say again that I
think for future sections you should just focus on the binding, and
then when you wander, let it come from something in the process that
sets you off. We’re getting kind of long here, and don’t think I didn’t
consider cutting out your entire section and then telling you there
just wasn’t room for it in this issue, So sorry. But I didn’t
do that. I only cut maybe five and a half pages total. Maybe seven or
eight, since you did lose a lot of footnotes. Something else you should
know, I’ll give credit where it’s due: I talked this over with Jason,
I showed him what I wrote, worried a bit to him that maybe all my yelling
and screaming wasn’t entirely appropriate (more truthfully that it made
me look like an unreasoning, whining bitch), but Jason said, once he
got up off the floor where he’d fallen from laughing so hard, that it’s
perfect just as it is. He said I shouldn’t worry. I’m getting what I
want out of it anyway, so I won’t. I’ve decided to cut your last five
paragraphs, they just reeked of resolution, and I know how you hate
resolution, and apropos of editing in the style of Drew, I’ve just removed
them. Final note to people who haven’t had the supreme pleasure
of being edited by Drew: his process is conversational (one-sided, of
course), focusing less on the bits and pieces of a thing and more on
what the hell do you think you’re doing anyway, why you’re bothering
at all, often wondering who hurt you so very badly at some point to
make you say something like you did… don’t get me wrong, I’m not bashing
the process, it’s effective as hell. It’s just blunt, radical, a kind
of surgery without prep or anesthesia. And not always necessary. He’ll
cut out entire sections, rewrite others—always saying with the rewrites,
“Maybe something like this, huh? That’s what you were trying to do,
right?” and knowing no such thing. “Well, you asked…” And that’s right.
I did. It’s just that he sometimes gets a little proprietary over things
he’s edited, will get quietly pissy if you don’t take his advice. “How
can you know what’s best for this? You wrote it.” A statement I simultaneously
understand and don’t. Often with short stories his commentary will exceed
the length of the piece he’s supposed to be editing. In the interest
of conservation of remaining space, I didn’t include my rewrites, since
it’s best to have the original sitting alongside and there’s no room
for that. I have cut liberally, and sometimes vindictively, but I did
not reach my goal of having more words in Drew’s piece than he did.
And that’s that. I’ve chopped you up and I’m happy. I’m not mad at you
anymore. Don’t forget my book, don’t forget what you said you’d do.
I expect to see something on your site about it right away. I’ve got
the first four sections ready, so you just call me and I’ll get them
to you. It’ll be one of those things for Spork Press. Oh, I cut that
out. Yeah, Drew and Richard are working on books by single authors too.
The first three are books of poetry. Then there’s going to be a novel,
other than mine, but I don’t know whose it is. Probably you don’t either,
and are just pretending like you do. Maybe you’d like to give me a crack
at Methylchloroisothiazolinone,
I could edit it for you. I still think it’s quite good, just sloppy.
The main problem would be solved by just introducing your big metaphor,
that way you won’t have to worry that you buried it too deep for anyone
to figure out. And you did bury it too deep. So deep it’s in some other
book altogether, on some other shelf in some other store on another
continent where they don’t speak your language. Like Richard said, you
need to give your readers handholds. It can be done. It’d take a lot
of work, but I’m four serials ahead right now, so I’ve got time. You
let me know.
Cheers, baby.
Beth Toëner]
NON BET-BREAKING END NOTE:
Imagine yourself coming in to the studio, all ready to bind. Imagine
doing steps one through, oh, say, four in the process, and then discovering
that step five doesn’t work, because there were some flaws in the assumptions
made about the earlier steps. Those flaws centering mainly around the
idea that it would all come off without a hitch. Those assumptions based
upon previous experience, said experience gained in Issues 1.1 through
1.3, where the same binding was employed. Imagine yourself, behind schedule,
all afire to get things going, having suddenly to figure out just what
the hell you’re going to do. What you hold in your hands is the product
of all that imagining on my part. The talk of the box and the saw needs
to be discarded from the above, and talk of each copy having four holes
drilled through the cover and block, and then a nice quick stitch run
between the spine and the front and back covers inserted. I’m actually
happy that it happened, since the binding this way is not only better,
but more interesting, more fun, and more aesthetically pleasing than
what had previously been intended for this issue. It uses no glue, which
I like, and allows the books to open more freely—albeit still not laying
flat, which is something I cannot accomplish on our time and money budget
of pretty much nothing—and have, I’m thinking, a satisfying sort of
pull that you just don’t get when adhesives are involved. Some may cry
foul at my adding to the section, clearly against the stated rules of
the bet involved in this issues section, but I’m thinking not, since
it’s at the end, and what’s more, it’s absolutely necessary, as the
above does not apply to the final product. So cry if you must, but I’m
not painting anybody’s anything. I do wish that I’d written a more complete
section, wish I’d taken the whole thing seriously, but I can’t do anything
about it now. I hope you enjoyed this. The issue, I’m saying.
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