Bookworm

I was going to ask my father to help me move my adopted recliner chair into my bedroom which I saved from hard rubbish collection, but he's got a sore knee as well as a sore back. All that doesn't help the fact that there's a tiny little gate between my house and driveway that I think was dismantled when we moved into this house to get our furniture inside. In terms of having a soft and comfy chair to sit back into and get some reading down, things don't look so prosperous on that avenue.

My diary for 2012 was made from a recycled Little Golden Book- I bought Bambi in the end deciding against 'Barbie and the Scavenger Hunt'. I've never had a cool looking diary and while I often forget to write in it and refer to it religiously like a bible I still enjoyed taking it with me to my university information session and jotting down notes at the back. There's a whole heap of incomprehensive jargon as well as subject codes at the back and some notes about them from yesterday.

While there are several bookcases in my house, none of them look as cool as this wall bookcase spelling out the word 'read'. I have seen invisible hanging books attached to walls but nothing that really measures up to this frame and all the books contained within it. The bookcases at my parent's house are full of model engineering books belonging to my father and are crammed full of them. There's even books lying horizontally on the vertically stacked ones. I think the shelves would be sinking and dipping by now, if they weren't help up by more books crammed in the shelf underneath them.

I love the small bookcase in my room- while the middle shelf is occupied by my basketball trophies to make room on my desk, the top shelf is full of magazines such as Vogue, Frankie and Russh and the Kodak Encyclopedia of photography. I feel really cut about Kodak filing for bankruptcy, I remember my father showing me his Kodak Brownie, a gift from one of his sister's and his name written on a band aid in the handwriting of my grandmother who's been long dead. There's charm and nostalgia for me and the brand and I do hope to stock up on film as little mementos of a great age that has come to a halt thanks to the digital age.

I myself own the complete illustrated works of Lewis Carrol, although I'm willing to bet that my copy was a lot cheaper than this. For one thing my copy isn't a hard cover copy and has a pink cover with illustrations that seem to be in water colour and I bought my copy from Aldi, a discount supermarket who were also selling complete works of Shakespeare and also other classic novels. In retrospect I really should have stocked up on classic literature at the time but I've barely made a dent into my book yet. At $14 AUD, it was a good bargain though and unexpected.

The great thing about borrowing books and magazines from the library is that they often have lots of copies of Vogue from before I got my subscription and that the time limit of a loan pushes me on to read the book before I have to return it. I find that when I own a copy of a book or magazine that I seldom do read it, except for the day of purchase when I can't wait to pour my eyes over its contents. I'd really love to find my way around all those magazines piled high- I've got my eye on a few copies of Lula on eBay as well as Oyster magazine and a runway collection look from Vogue Paris of 2011's runway shows. So much literature, so little motivation to read it sadly enough.

I'd love to curl up in a chair in my room and sit with a good book for hours on end but the book I'm reading at the moment is a little more difficult than I had reckoned. It's a novel by Terry Pratchett called 'Making Money' and is a Discworld novel. He's most famous for writing 'The Hogfather' which was made into a film and has written about thirty of forty novels about Discworld, a world parallel to our own. There's witches and wizards, gnomes and clay monsters called golems and the city of Ankh-Morpork is run by a tyrant. I thoroughly enjoy all his novels but this one isn't as easy to get into initially as the rest. There's a lot of quick scenes and not enough background information to understand the beginning with ease in my opinion.

I love the artwork quality of old books, the hand sewn pages and material covers and even leather bound books kept safe from the elements. The collection shown here of gold gilt books that look like they could fall apart in your hands is an amazing way to decorate. It suggests worldly experiences and knowledge as well as intelligence and intellect.

In the weeks leading up to my rescue of the old red recliner I had a real inclination and fetish for vintage looking furniture, especially nurse stools and armchairs. There's something very comforting about upholstery as well as tapestry and worn out leather and the way it's sort of been squashed to fit around a person. When getting stuck into a good book being comfortable is essential and while lying in bed is one of my usual favourite spots, I would like to keep the two activities, sleeping and reading separate. Supposedly it makes it harder to sleep at night and you should only use your bedroom to sleep and nothing else.

Handmade books

For the first time in my life I have a very cool diary but I haven't really used it at all and that's sort of depressing really. I've been very busy typing at the speed of light as my mother would say and cataloguing gorgeous brands, jewellery and fashion on my blog to fully take up the written arts again. Occasionally when suffering writer's block I'll set about scrawling notes in a book given to me on my birthday last year and then type those up properly but that's as far as things have gotten when it comes to writing things out.

Still, it would be nice to be able to write things out in my own hand writing and put together clippings from magazines as well as photographs. For my boyfriend, I filled in a book from Listography, 'My Love Life in Lists' and that was about one hundred and fifty pages to fill out but some of them weren't applicable. I have to fill in some more the next time I see him but I should write down some vague notes in my diary to jog my memory when I do have the chance to write in his book for him. That's about the most writing I've done this Summer, neatly and with effort.

I had aimed to accomplish so much this Summer as I do every year and though I always fall short, I accomplish something in some small way. I had meant to learn to roughly do water colour and write in cool fonts but that had never come to fruition really. There's still time though and not all hope has been lost. It will just be a little more difficult since I'll now be preparing to head off to university in the next few weeks as well.

The diary I had purchased for this year was from a company called Rebound books and they take old Little Golden books and splice them open, insert diary dates and spiral bound them to make into diaries. I got one mainly to keep up to date with university and since nothing really spectacular has happened this year so far I haven't had much to write in it sadly. There's quite a few blank pages so I suppose I should do rough drawings and sketches of things I blogged about during the week, or print out excerpts of my blog and stick it in with the date. I'm not too sure how much effort I can be bothered with writing the same things out twice, but at least it might give a little flavour to my diary and make it special. I want it to be thick and jam-packed full of stuff. If I had any sense, I would lock myself in my room and read through magazines and clip stuff out of them as well as try badly to draw things from my blog from a frozen screen.

I'm very tempted to turn the blank pages of my diary into something like this- while I doubt I will be graced with the good luck to find as many lovely looking magazine clippings as this if my family were to finally upgrade to a better printer than I could print out extracts here and there of this blog and do up the pages myself. I'm digging the pink and purple painted pages and the rough hand drawn borders, it's all very home made and sweet. I have been dedicating a lot of my time to writing online so I can share it with others who have the same opinion as me, but I can't help but feel that I'm missing the all important process of writing things for myself and in secret and getting to hug a diary close to my chest at night. I was never the kind of girly girl who wrote all her thoughts in secret under the torch of her bed sheets and the crushes of her names and what happened daily, but I wish I had been. Or that I could become that girl now.

While writing in three-dimensional clunky blocks isn't difficult, I can never really bring myself to finish writing say, a diary or writing in a notebook. I always give up halfway through because I have a change of heart and no longer agree with my ideas in it anymore or I hate my handwriting. When I first write in a book everything looks so neat and cute but as I get further into it I get lazy and careless. At least with an online journal the presentation is the same and remains in the same, neat font all the way through no matter how tired and worn out I feel.

This year I'm in half the mind to take on an additional TAFE course or an adult learning class on either an Asian language, Japanese perhaps or a photography course so I can actually hone my craft. It would be a lot of fun to learn how to write characters in an Asian language and when I see the advertisement for Apple iPads I always feel a pang of poverty. I would love to learn things as I go through the year and devote my spare diary pages to learning a foreign language. I think that should be my next task when I next go to the library.

YSL Arty Ovale rings.

Your Crowning Glory

I was left feeling very inspired after seeing 'Where the Wild Things Are' movie- which i felt represented the perspective of an outsider and the difficulties of maintaining a relationship. A key motif of the film was the symbol of a crown used to enforce order and something that empowered the key protagonist, Max. It's interesting the kinds of crowns you get, Alice in Wonderland by Walt Disney features a small crown for the overbearing Red Queen while her husband had a large crown. I guess the choice was to mismatch them and make them look more as a couple and give a sense of unity to the wedded duo. Still, as you can see you can have tall or shallow crowns and all manner of spiked arrangements, even for the simple paper crown or crown crafted from cardboard.

One of the things I most like forward to about creating some space to take photographs is to find some cosy, fluffy grey jumpers or jumpsuits and do my own little 'Where the Wild Things Are' shoot and create a crown made of metallic gold cardboard. I'm sure if I did more searching I would find some toy scepters from the time in which I was into princesses and dress ups but it wouldn't be as much fun and wouldn't really suit the crown I would wear. Also, I am fairly certain in the movie there was no ruby gem in the middle of Max's sceptre.

Not only reserved for the most noble of bloodlines, crowns can also be worn by everyone's drunk and dorkiest uncle at Christmas day dinner after pulling apart a few bon bons and telling several bad jokes. The theory behind why bad jokes are told is that it turns everyone in the room against the joke in all its awfulness and that they are all joined together in their hatred against the corny pun. Therefore a sense of unity is created- so I have heard on intelligent quiz shows.

 

I am proud to be able to identify the runway show and season which this gob-smacking photograph came from. Emulating and imitating the classical Grecian/ Roman wales came many long and flowing dresses that were all red carpet worthy as well as gold tinted make up and props such as this crown used to mimic the life-giving sun. The collection was from Jean Paul Gaultier and was part of the Spring/ Summer collection in 2007. How do I know for sure? When first getting an interest in Vogue and magazines I borrowed a copy which contained a runway report of that season and neatly plucked it from it's bindings using a very sharp pair of scissors. It's the closest I've come to thievery and I proudly display my trophy above my bed using blue tack to keep it in prime position for when I sit up in the mornings. Mind you, I haven't had a lot of strength or motivation to sit up in bed, I do end up lying about for about an hour and a half or so though.

 

I leave you with Australian model Abbey Lee Kershaw in her earlier days minus the peroxide blond hair and sporting the iconic wolf costume and crown that Max from the popular children's picture book 'Where the Wild Things Are' is depicted wearing. If she ever did command I kingdom I would gladly join in an attempt to be adopted and taken under her wing.