"I can't sit at the high tables -- it makes me angry"

[larryhammer]

Books bought this past week include:

• the next two volumes of Marmalade Boy
  
• the next two volumes of Tuxedo Gin
  
• Pierre Louÿs's Songs of Bilitis
  
• Robert Lang's Origami Design Secrets
  
• a collection of Inuit folktales
  
• a collection of George Crabbe

A set of acquisitions that actually makes my head hurt. Not for the genre clashes, though they are mighty -- but because I've started working through Lang's magnum opus. It is, essentially, a course in training yourself to be an advanced origami folder. I'm up to the (early) chapter on splitting points, and struggling with the instructions on figuring out how turn a flap into five toes. I managed splitting one into four points, though I don't yet have it down to a reproducible set of steps. The actual model instructions are works of beauty, which start easy but by chapter three are already taxing my digital ingenuity. Especially the hummingbird with a white throat and a curved, uncreased belly.

The doofiness of romance manga is something of a relief from this. The fin de siecle pseudo-poetry, however, is just weird.

---L.

Comments

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

I'd love to see that hummingbird... and I would have said you're already an advanced origami folder!

[larryhammer]

The hummer is one of those gracefully proportioned models where even the slightest asymmetry shows up really badly. Its chin keeps trying to poke out the left side of its face. Also, it probably needs to be wet-folded, because the way the tensions are, it was already partial unsprung by a few hours later.

Practice, he said.

---L.

[larryhammer]

And I'm more of an intermediate-advanced folder, at least now.

---L.