What I’m Reading: Jack Kerouac

I’ve just begun reading Jack Kerouacs infamous On the Road. I had heard of it but never knew he actually wrote it as a scroll!” Jack threaded a huge roll of paper into his typewriter and wrote the single 175,000-word paragraph that became On The Road. The more than 100-foot scroll was written in three weeks but was not published for seven years.”

Forutantly, I have from my local library a published volume that is presented as “the original scroll”. It’s in book form but is still breathtaking.I was utterly absorbed in the first hundred pages before I knew it.In compliment to the gorgeous writing Jack writes it is just so refreshing to read something that is not molded by the demands of the literary industries fetish for mass production style ad nausem. The work reads as a comprehensive mind flow.It has typos and no paragraphs and is just gorgeous. It saddens me I’m already over 30 before I could have the experience to read something like that and more it seems like such a travesty that this edition of the original scroll came 50 years after he originally wrote it and it took five years for Jack to take the original scroll and have it edited into the more generic literary forms in order for it to origiinally be published.Just think of all the other beautiful works he could have created if he had not had to become a slave to the demands of the prevailing literay styles having to obsess on the mechanics of the form and could have just let it be as exactly as he originally wrote it!The very industry that seeks genuine authentic writers bliss is the very machination killing it.Having created a scroll I relish the phsycial reality of what Jack created…and working on my own writing i know the bliss of just writing and the tedious if not all out debilitating exercise of having to work on the mind numbing mechanics of structure of the written form that so often detracts from me creating more as I fixate on fixing my writing into the prevailing norms of acceptable style.
sigh.
Bless you Jack Kerouac

Handmade Book with feather

As Mantras go: How I learned to say Thank You in more languages

This little postcard is a thankyou card. I keep it right where  I see it everyday and from it I have learned  more ways to give thanks. I also know how to say thank you in Mandarin

I often repeat all the ways I know to give THANKS out loud like a mantra especially when something good happens and then I add on enthusiastically, “The only other way I know how to say thanks is to say more please!” which I learned from a wonderful movie is a good way of hopefully inviting the wonderful to keep blessing me.

Handmade book: Never Said

This is a single small book I made for a long poem called Never Said.

Thirsty

The words are from poet Rumi…and the image is a creation of layered images. I put the layered image face inside the lion mouth and put an image of Devi Durga and her lion in the background.I also put the background on and the shadow and both of the crescent moons representing the Devi in the sky.

Cooking Dumplings

Actually, this is more of the design I helped create for the Kyoto Journal for the story “A Sort of Deadline” by Kelly Luce. I worked as an intern for the journal and incredibly the editor John most amazingly let me do  alot of the layout and images for the story. Of course it goes without saying, no matter what I did John no doubt made it all look better.Thanks John!!!
ps.. the hand is mine…and yes I do make dumplings or Jiaozi.

Ki

This is one of the images I designed for the Kyoto Journal as part of the imagery for a great story by Kelly Luce titled:A Sort of Deadline.
It’s meaning is Ki or fire/energy or like Chi in mandarin.

Handmade Book. Japanese Pillow book

The idea for this book is inspired by Japanese pillow books, the diaries kept under pillows.Only, I wanted to be more literal so I made the book stuffed with cotton so it is fairly plush to hold AND although the pictures display western style starting with the blue butterfly cover the book could also be used eastern style beginning with the red cover. Additionally, there are small turquoise beads along the threaded seam of the bindings.

Handmadebook close up

I made this book as a holder for a collection of my loose leaf poetry.

Handmade books I made