November has, so far, felt like a large number of small spiders. This is neither good nor bad, but I began the month with a sleepless night, and I don't get the sense that many other people will reach the end of this month and think 'Ah, now, that was restful'. Which months are the restful months anyway? This is of course in part to do with politics and world-endings, but there is also an odd, mouth-pressed-shut urgency in everything that I cannot put my finger on, let alone hope to capture. To combat this, I've laid down some ambitions for the next four weeks:
1. Look at the trees themselves, and not just at the reflections of trees
2. Do not try to answer all the questions
3. Stay low to the ground
4. Do not cross one leg over the other when working
5. Look everybody in the eye
6. Commit some beautiful things to memory
WORK-RELATED NEWS:
I recently received my author copies of both the German and the Japanese editions of Eating the Sun. The German edition, published by Editions Michael Fischer, is slightly taller in height, more slender-seeming, and contains a sun-yellow bookmark that caused some obscene excitementon my part, as I didn't know they had made the decision to give the book such a permanent stitched-in loveliness. It also means that if, like me, you regularly use dried-out leaves as bookmarks, you don't have to worry about leaving windows open while reading and losing your plant-based bookmarks to the weather. The Japanese edition, published by Sogensha, is unexpected underneath its dust jacket, and impeccable in terms of the inside lettering being given the same feeling as the original (if anyone can locate the book on the Sogensha website, do let me know—I do not speak Japanese and am therefore at something like a loss).
In December I will be in Rome for the Più libri più liberi book fair, speaking on (most likely) Saturday the 7th about Eating the Sun, published in Italy under the title Piccolo libro illustrato dell'universo. I attended this book fair several years ago to talk about Lost in Translation, and it is an astonishingly lovely weekend of the written word.
A new book proposal was sent in recent days to my editor, and so now I wait, unbearably.
A NOTE:
A small selection of illustrations from Eating the Sun are now available as prints, and as per usual I'm doing a thorough job of letting people know that this is the case (by which I mean this is the first time I've mentioned it).
It isn't my desire to declare anything flashy or loud, but the illustrations are considerably more breath-taking when given larger dimensions—although I'm delighted with how they are reproduced in the books, the giclée printing and the careful (obsessive) selection of a paper type gives the colours more life than I thought possible, and I'm pleased enough to allow use of the word chuffed.
THIS WEEK I FELL IN LOVE WITH:
These made-with-scissors-and-glue collages by Irina and Silviu Szekely.
The end.
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