For me, the last week or two have turned out to be a time for harvesting some of the fruits planted during lockdown, if I can get away with using such a hackneyed agricultural metaphor. Since the first indications that something unusually unpleasant was heading our way back in the early months of last year, like everyone else I've been spending a lot more time at home than usual. More untypically, perhaps, I've been able to put this time to good creative use, although there have been many hours of staring out of the window, too; the two are not necessarily unconnected, of course.
Now that I look back, I discover that during this period I have managed to accumulate at least four substantial and coherent bodies of work that can now be assembled into book sequences, plus a whole lot of stuff that has no obvious connection with anything else as yet. For obvious reasons, fresh photography as such has had to take a back seat to the sort of digital imaging that can be made by playing around with what is already in the bag. Some of this stuff has turned out pretty well, too, I think. It would be nice to get an exhibition somewhere, sometime, if only to get a sense of what other people might make of it all, but I have to grudgingly accept that 67-year-old, white, heterosexual, cis-gendered men are not where the smart crowd are looking for inspiration these days. Too bad.
I yam what I yam, as Popeye used to say
[1].
To my surprise, I have already received copies of the little Framework "booklet" I produced using Zno, which is much quicker than I had expected, and I'm bowled over by their quality and impact: they are superbly well-made, and a real pleasure to look at and to handle. Quite apart from the printing, which is spot on, I particularly like the thick pages and the way they fold out flat like a child's board-book, as well as the very tactile quality of the covers. So I thought: what else do I have that would suit that format? It took a while before I remembered one of these lockdown projects I had all but forgotten about, despite the intensity of my engagement with it at the time: the set of illustrations to William Blake's "Proverbs of Hell" that I was making back in November 2020. But it took just one very rainy afternoon to put together a selection of twenty paired illustrations (out of eighty or so) and assemble them into a slightly larger 8" square "layflat" booklet of ten double spreads. It's easy enough to do, using the downloadable templates that Zno provide. Here are some sample pages:
Blake is not as fashionable now, I suspect, as he was back in the 1960s and 70s. Even then, most people, myself included, engaged with him at a fairly superficial level as a sort of honorary stoner, a freak
avant la lettre, a prophet of counter-culture. "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom"... Far out! "Every thing possible to be believ'd is an image of truth"... Right on! There was an obvious convergence of some of Blake's more vatic utterances with the aphoristic graffiti of May '68 in Paris:
sous les pavés, la plage! has a definite Blakean ring to it.
But a deeper engagement reveals a mind that is both profoundly strange and original – disturbingly so in places – but also very much of its time, one which channels certain currents in "outsider" thought into a complex and radical personal belief-system that seems to reach back through the revolutionary ideas then emanating from France and America to a persistent, dissident strand in English popular social and religious thought; the Levellers and Diggers of the English Revolution come to mind, or even the 14th century Lollards and the
Vision of Piers Plowman. The
Songs of Innocence and of Experience will always be Blake's "greatest hit", but of all his work I still find
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell the most compelling – with its "Proverbs of Hell", "Memorable Fancies", and sly, provocative wit – nearly 50 years since
first encountering it.
So, yeah, just some pictures by some old white bloke about some other crazy dead white bloke. Big deal, boomer; don't call us, we'll call you. On the other hand, as WB says, "Listen to the fool's reproach! It is a kingly title!"
In the end, I liked what I had done with the Zno booklet well enough to duplicate it as a Blurb 7" square paperback – an ordinary "perfect bound" book, though, not their layflat option, which is prohibitively expensive – which you can see here:
I've kept it as cheap as possible, but can do nothing about Blurb's exorbitant shipping prices: I do wish they'd realise what a deal-breaker these are, especially when the price of the item and the cost of shipping it are nearly the same. If, on the other hand, you might like a copy of the Zno version this will have to be bought direct from me, and you'll need to get in touch ASAP: some proof copies of this are now on order, and I'm thinking I may limit the edition to twenty-five copies only.
DWMs: WB top left
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