Sunday 2/3/08 – At Eastern Connecticut State University, we gathered to celebrate the life of Alexander “Sandy” Taylor and his life around literature, community, and family. I knew the community and the vision of Curbstone Press was vast. Sandy’s vitality was far reaching, and his intesnisty was something that touched me directly. The interns and the people involved with the press all know his gracious humor, his sincereity and his gift of teaching. I was happy to see Judy, Bob and the others who make Curbstone run from day to day. Personally, I remember the machines. We don’t publish like they did at Curbstone. We have “on demand” publishing, desktop publishing, and vanity press – along side traditional big publishing monsters. But at Curbstone, binding books, making cataolgs, and using the infamous “folding machine” gave me the sense that making books was a physcial endeavour. I remember carrying cases and cases of Always Running from the truck, to the basement for stock and remember the physcial exhaustion/exhilaration of moving real books. We weren’t seeing elecrtonic numbers and stats, they were there - in the basement.
I had two favorite machines. First, the heavy duty stapler in the basement. The machine works on a coil of wire that acuatlly cut the wire into a staple. It was pedal operated and you placed the broucher onto the metal triangle and (carefully) stapled. There was something very exciting about making a broucher, folding the sheets, and stapling them all together – and seeing them on the tables of the book fairs and events. Now, we ship it off to Staples, we send it off to the printer, and we get it back finished. Nothing is better than the physcial act of making something. Curbstone emodied the intleectual art and the physcial act of creation.
The other machine that impressed me was the automated folding machine. I remember watching the video with more warnings than instructions. Speciffically, this machine could mangle your fingers with one break in concentration, and more importantly, never – ever! where a tie while using this machine. The vision of the tie going in, pulling your face into the feeder is nightmarish. So, I took on the folding machine as my pet project – and in the time I was there I became mildly proficient at using it. It was loud and offensive to those nearby. You had to calculate a 10-15% destroy rate – for when it jammed it jammed in an evil way. You could fold things in half, fold things in quaters, tri-fold, side folds, all the folds you could possibly think of as you befriended that machine. I still have dreams of the folding machine.
At the memorial service, I thought about all the physcial things we did. And how it was infused with the intellectual, and creative literature that was piled around us. Everyone once in a while a writer would show up and we would have lunch with them and talk openly about the books, upcoming projects, and the world that brought them there. I knew Sandy was poet, an editor, a father, and a teacher. But, I was not exposed to his poetry all that much. I remember a few broadsides of his work floating around. And they were impressive. At the event Sunday, I was able to purchase a copy of Sandy’s work titled Dreaming at the Gates of Fury and capture his creative side, his dreams and his visions. It will allow me to see the intimate side of this creative fury. That creative life was there among the machines, the newsletters, the boxes of books, in the kitchen, on top of the refridarator, behind the postage meter. In the end, his creative life was the thing I couldn’t see completly, the visions that I couldn’t understand, the poetry that came in bits and peieces, that will now be so clear in my understand of Sandy Taylor. He will be missed.
RS
