Filed under: Amazon, Bipolar, Connections, Faith healing, Flu, Predictions, Religion, Science, Science Fiction, Wales, Writing stuff | Tags: blogging, Communion of Dreams, Darnell Sidwell, fire-flu, free, Her Final Year, jim downey, John Bourke, Kindle, Llangelynnin, memoir, promotion, Science Fiction, St. Cybi's Well, travel, Wales, writing
With a little luck, this week I’ll finish up another chapter, one I have been slogging away on for FAR too long. As is plainly clear to anyone who even casually reads this blog, I am not one of those writers who is able to just jump in and dash off page after page of text. I spend days thinking through scenes, how they integrate into the overall story. I’ll spend hours researching stuff which seems just completely tangential to the narrative, because I want everything to actually fit together properly. And I’ll often labor over a couple hundred words of text, trying to capture just the right tone. Whether I accomplish those goals in the end is another matter altogether.
So, for me at least, and for most of the time, writing is just hard work. And as I have noted both here and in personal communications, there are times I fear I have lost my way completely. That I am fooling myself to think that anyone will ever have the slightest interest in plowing through all that text. I’ve felt that way a lot over the last year. Gah.
And then, there are days like yesterday.
When, in about 90 minutes, about 1200 words just flowed out of me and onto the screen. When months of set-up and research all came together. Here’s a bit of that:
The back doors of the van were open, and there, cradled by her mother, was a little girl, about 8 years old. Her rich Indian coloration couldn’t hide the fact that there was already a blueish hue to the skin of her face and hands. With no hesitation, Megan stepped forward, glanced at the mother, and asked “how long has she had this color? The cyanosis?”
“Not long,” she said, in a plain Midwestern American accent. “Maybe 15 minutes.”
Megan looked to Darnell. “They didn’t give us any oxygen. About the only thing we have which might help are A.C.E. inhibitors, and I have no idea where those are in the crates they loaded. And they take too long to really work.”
Darnell studied her face, then turned to Joey. He started to say “I’m not sure …”
“Dar, wait,” said Megan. She looked at the girl, then at her parents. “There may be something else we can do.”
“What?” asked both Darnell and Joey, at the same time.
“Llangelynnin isn’t far,” said Megan.
“We passed through there just half a mile or so back,” said the girl’s mother. “But there’s not much there.”
“Not the town. The old church, up in the hills above. It’s about two kilometers,” replied Megan, looking from face to face. “It was a place of healing. Particularly for healing children.”
And the next bit, which I wrote today? It went back and referenced something I had planted in a scene 11 chapters ago. And which ties in to a critical scene in Communion of Dreams that I wrote about a decade ago. Even better, all of that was intentional — pieces of a much larger puzzle, finally falling into place.
Writing a novel is just brutal hard work. At least it is for me, most of the time.
But I no longer feel like I have lost my way.
Jim Downey
PS: Communion of Dreams will be available for free download this Tuesday, like it is on the first of each month. Likewise Her Final Year.
Filed under: Book Conservation, General Musings, Mark Twain, Religion | Tags: blogging, book conservation, bookbinding, Christian, faith, grace, Innocents Abroad, Islam, jim downey, Legacy Bookbindery, literature, Mark Twain, religion, writing
I wrote this back around 1993, and had it up on my archive site. Yesterday I had reason to look it up, and first looked here, figuring that at some point I must have reposted it. But a search didn’t turn it up, and I thought that I should correct that oversight.
It’s interesting to now look back to it, and to see how little my attitude/approach to the subject has changed with another 23 years of book conservation experience.
Jim Downey
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Mark Twain, in his early work Innocents Abroad, described how Christian craftsmen were given special dispensation to enter mosques in the Holy Land in order to install or repair the clocks which called the faithful to prayer. Sometimes I feel like those clockmakers, and wonder how they reconciled their non-belief in Islam with the service they provided that faith. Did they feel the grace of Allah’s touch in their craftsmanship, or in the heartfelt thanks and blessings they received from the faithful?
I am a book conservator in private practice in the Midwest, and a significant number of the books I work on are religious texts, usually but not exclusively bibles. While I am a deeply spiritual person, largely in the Christian tradition, I do not consider myself to be a person of faith, and I have doubts about the existence of a single divine entity by whatever name. Still, I respect the religions of others, and am comfortable working on the books that deeply religious people bring to me.
Repair of holy scripture is an odd thing for an agnostic to do. My friends of faith say that it is part of my path of spiritual growth, perhaps the way I will be led to discovery and belief. Perhaps. But I consider it more that I am keeping faith with my clients. A bible, particularly a personal bible which is used for daily prayer and inspiration, is probably more private and revealing than a diary. I can tell from the way the binding is broken, from the wear on the pages, from the passages highlighted or notes made, what is important to the owner, what their innermost fears and hopes are. I suspect that often I know more about these things than they do themselves. I am a therapist of paper and glue.
These books are precious, not in a monetary sense, but in a personal one. I can see it in their eyes when they bring the bible to me, asking me if it can be repaired, worried less about the cost than the time it will be absent from their lives. The repair of these books is usually simple and straightforward, just an hour or two of labor. I can fit this work in between larger projects, and get the bible back to the owner in a matter of just a few days. This news usually comes as a relief. But almost always the owner is still hesitant let go of the book, hands slowly passing it over as they search my face for a clue as to whether they can trust me with this part of themselves. Just as a veterinarian receives a beloved animal who needs treatment with gentleness and grace, out of concern for the owner as much as for the pet, I receive their bibles as a sacred trust.
And when they come for their bibles, I am sometimes embarrassed. Embarrassed because of the praise, the occasional blessings, and the overflowing joy they feel. It is times like this that I feel that my hands are not really my own, my craftsmanship and skill not something that I can take pride in, but a rare gift that comes from outside of myself. And I am grateful, whatever the source, for this touch of grace that enters my life.
Filed under: Book Conservation, Humor | Tags: blogging, book conservation, bookbinding, bookbinding techniques, folio, humor, jim downey, Legacy Bookbindery, mystery, recto, section, technology, verso, Wikipedia
Been a while since I posted about book conservation. But I thought I would share a little mystery I came upon recently in my work.
First, a simple lesson in bookbinding history, with some terms used in the profession …
When books are sewn together, that sewing goes through a group of sheets which are folded in half. Each folded sheet is called a folio. The group — whether it is a single folio or multiple folios — is called a section (also a signature, a gathering, or a quire). Most books consist of many different sections, all sewn together in a particular sequence, in order to keep the pages in the correct order. The number of folios in each section can vary greatly, but it was common for it to be 2 or 4 folios until fairly recently (8 folios per section is common now).
To make it a little easier to keep everything straight and in the right order, printers developed some common practices (or conventions). Numbering the pages seems like an obvious way to do this, but page numbering conventions are surprisingly convoluted and confusing. So they came up with some other tricks for the bookbinders to follow. One was to give each section a letter designation. And another was to have a number combined with that letter designation, so the bookbinder would be able to make sure that they had all the folios for a given section. And just to be extra certain, for a long time printers would place at the very bottom of the printing on each page the start of the word on the *next* page.
Here are three images which show this, from a 1744 book awaiting my attention:
OK, look at the right-hand page (called recto), at the bottom of the print. See the capital letter E? That shows that this was the start of the new section. And if you look in the same line as that E, you’ll see the word “and”.
Take a look at the next image:
Note there on the top of the left page (called verso) the print starts with the word “and”. Look at the bottom of that page, and you can see the word “will”, which is the first word on the top of the next page. Got it?
Also, look at the bottom of the recto page, and you’ll see “E2”, meaning that this is the second folio of the section. And there, off to the far right, is the word “which”.
Next image:
See? The first word on the top of the verso page is “which”, and the page numbering is sequential. At the bottom of that page is the word “faid” (which is actually the word “said”, using an f in place of a long s), and that is the same word on the top of the recto page. The page numbering is again sequential in going to the recto page. But look — there’s no section and folio marking at the bottom of the recto page. That means that this book has sections of just two folios. And if you look at the gutter of the book in this image, you can see the original sewing: the two discolored bits of thread at the top and bottom of the book.
Simple, right? Yup, and this was the way that almost everyone in Europe printed books for about 300 years. (There’s a lot more interesting history connected with this, but for now we’ll just leave it at that.)
OK, let’s take a look at one final image:
This is from a different book. A bible. One printed sometime around 1644 in German.
Look at the bottom of the text there on the recto, in the lower right of the image. See the section and folio marks? It’s a lower case “e” for the section, and then “iiij.” So this should be the fourth folio of section “e”, right?
But look at the gutter of the book, there on the left hand side of the image. That’s the sewing of the book. In fact, if you look carefully, you can see that there is the original sewing thread, and then brighter sewing thread, where I have added new thread to strengthen these first few sections of the book.
What gives?
I don’t know. It’s a mystery to me. This book has three-folio sections, but it is marked as though it should be four folios per section. That’s through the whole book (well, according to my random examination of multiple sections … I haven’t examined every one, since this is a big ol’ bible).
It really threw me at first, because the book came to me with a number of loose pages front and back. Initially I thought that there must be a lot of missing pages (there are a couple), but I started using the other printing conventions of the starting part of a word, and was able to clearly establish that I did indeed have most of the pages. Then I went and checked some of the intact sections of the book, and saw this weird mystery.
Why on earth the printer did this, I can only guess. And that guess is that he did it to make someone think that there were more printed pages in the whole text than there actually are, since a casual examination using the normal printing conventions would suggest that there should be 25% more folios than are really there. Is this a case of some unscrupulous printer ripping off the church or whoever paid for the work? Maybe.
But that’s just a guess.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Babylon 5, Brave New World, Civil Rights, Failure, Gene Roddenberry, J. Michael Straczynski, JMS, Predictions, Science Fiction, Star Trek, tech | Tags: ars technica, Babylon 5, blogging, David Kravets, Delvon King, jim downey, predictions, Robert Nalley, Science Fiction, Star Trek, technology
One of the oldest Science Fiction tropes is the development of technology intended to enforce compliance through pain. Two notable examples: the ‘shock collars’ used on members of the Enterprise crew in The Gamesters of Triskelion and the ‘pain givers‘ first depicted in the Babylon 5 episode The Parliament of Dreams.
In both cases, and typically through most of the SF I can think of, this is meant to be a cautionary tale, to show how even a nominally benign or at least non-lethal technology can be perverted. The lesson is that the intentional infliction of pain is itself a bad thing, whether or not it actually causes real corporeal damage.
So, naturally, we have drawn exactly the wrong lesson:
Judge pleads guilty to ordering defendant to be shocked with 50,000 volts
A Maryland judge who ordered a deputy to remotely shock a defendant with a 50,000-volt charge pleaded guilty (PDF) to a misdemeanor civil rights violation in federal court Monday, and he faces a maximum of one year in prison when sentenced later this year.
* * *
The deputy sheriff walked over to where Victim I was standing and pulled a chair away to clear a place for Victim I to fall to the floor. At this point, Victim I stopped speaking. The deputy sheriff then activated the stun-cuff, which administered an electric shock to Victim I for approximately five seconds. The electric shock caused Victim I to fall to the ground and scream in pain. Nalley recessed the proceedings.
* * *
The authorities are increasingly using stun cuffs, which are about the size of a deck of cards, at detention centers and courthouses. They are made by various companies and cost around $1,900 for a device and transmitter. Some models can shock at 80,000 volts.
Oops.
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 