I've been working hard over the weekend, teaching Japanese and Coptic bookbinding at (the beautifully renovated) Megalo, so I had to pack a weekend's worth of downtime into last night's fanfic-ish Lost in Austen. Combined with a couple of stiff G&Ts, it did very well as a mini-break, apart from the fact that I spent a small amount of time before dropping off to sleep wondering if Mr Darcy would still love Amanda Price when her fake auburn hair developed a major root-line.
Today I did more Coptic binding with my art school students before traipsing them over to the Menzies Library to view some more of the Petr Herel collection of artists' books. This is an archive of many of the books and print folios made during the 20-odd years of the Graphic Investigations Workshop under the careful and philosophical Czech eye of Petr Herel. It's an under-valued and under-used little gem in the ANU library collections, and fully able to be accessed by appointment. I think I'm the only person to use it, so I try to take a group of students at least twice a year, and even if they're revisiting with me, they still come away delighted. The link above is to a poor archival website; if you'd like to browse the actual records, click here.
In other news, entries are coming in for my upcoming exhibition Books to Hold or Let Go, a group exhibition of various bindings of my latest fine press book (I'm planning to write a few things about this really soon, once I've got my slate a bit clearer). I'm trying to keep up with things on my website, and should have even more images later in the week. I can't believe we're already halfway through March; the exhibition opens on May 14, which is really not that far away...
6 comments:
I loved Lost in Austen! But you're right about that hair.
I loved it too, I'm such a sucker for portal fiction. I especially loved their take on Mr Collins.
I'd like to think that Amanda can knock on the door whenever she needs dye/paracetemol/tampons and Lizzie would oblige.
One of my students stayed back to tell me about lost in Austen, but since I don't do telly I didn't se it.
That exhib sounds wonderful. And such a nice idea too!
I my ideal life I just sit around doing prints. And eating. Eating a lot.
I'm stretched pretty thin too, sadly, only i metaphor, not in body.
I have to say I thought Mr Collins was ridiculous in the show. He looked like a vampiric pedophile*. And what was with the red hanky he kept fluttering about? Totally OTT, and don't get me started on his brothers.
* Somewhat ironically, the actor playing him was the same bloke who played John Knightley in the 1996 TV version of Emma. The telly people really shouldn't allow that kind of character cross-dressing.
Ooh, there was LOTS of cross-pollination in that show, people who had been in various Austen remakes.
I guess the thing that got me with Collins was the finger-sniffing. I knew someone who did that, and it really is off-putting. The brothers! That was an absolute flight of fancy, wasn't it?
The finger-sniffing you could argue fit the character's furtive nature, but the flamboyance of the hanky and the malevolent vibe about him in the early scenes were totally at odds with Austen's depiction of him as an irredeemably repressed and unctuous character.
The LOL part of it for me was discovering that Mr Bennet's first name was "Claude". Oh, and the pool scene, which you just knew they weren't going to pass up. Oh, and Lizzie going macrobiotic ["The Appliances!"]. Quite entertaining on the whole, really.
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