Ephemera

Growing up in Madrid in the 60s we traded these things called cromos—cards that could be stuck in an album, but only across the top, so you could lift them up and learn all about the item depicted in the image. I don’t even remember what the theme was (probably the natural world), just how Desirable they were, huge swaps going on in the playground with giant stacks of cards, shady deals and so on.

I must be the last person on earth to hear about Artist Trading Cards, which were started by a Swiss artist in 1996. The idea is to hand make an edition of twenty cards or so and send it in, and you’ll get fifteen different ones back. This is a strictly non-commercial unjuried art show, part of Copy Left, intending to get artists to meet each other at Events and subvert the corporate hold on art. At least that’s the impression I get from a random look at the Gallery.

There is no such Event anywhere near here soon, but I might send in a set to Sister Trading Cards. I make such things often in any case: for me it’s part of recycling what’s lying around. Having it make sense on a 3.5” x 2.5” card is a new challenge.

Different Paths

I’ve been taking an online calligraphy class, my first. Roman Majuscules. The ones on the Trajan Column, beautifully proportioned and fiendishly difficult to do well—the basics are easy but everything, EVERYTHING is in the nuance, the subtleties. It requires a lot of practice.

The time I have to practice is early in the morning. This is also the time when I might be writing or meditating, and in practice it ends up being the time when I everyone else’s blog over several cups of tea. And get ready for work, having eaten breakfast. And taken a shower. And am late for work. And so on.

Meditation’s not easy for me; I am easily distracted and the thought of a week of Zen practice, let alone longer, is inconceivable (Lorianne has my admiration no just because she wrote a 50,000-word novel in the month of November…). All the uncomfortable sitting, thoughts whizzing through my brain…. Yet this morning as I patiently dipped the pen in the ink, strove for the 30 degree pen angle (but 60 degree on the verticals of the “N,” 20 degrees on the “Q’s” tail and the upper diagonal of the “K,” 0 degrees on the diagonal of the “Z,” I pondered on what a meditative exercise it was. Family groups, organized widest to narrowest; then the alphabet; then abecedarian sentences (I gravitate mostly to those in Latin, like “Trans zephyrique globum scandunt tua facta per axem,” which nonetheless leaves out “K” and “W” as well as “V” which should replace the “U”). Finally, I decided to try Michael Nagler’s suggestion of the prayer of St. Francis.

There is no way to write these letters quickly. They build stroke upon stroke, over time, and the space between the strokes is as important as the shape of the letterform. They get absorbed, penetrate the psyche. It’s pure concentration: pure present.

Lorianne says a Trappist monk once told her Catholicism had lost sight of its contemplative roots. I’d like to think the invention of the printing press had a tiny part in that….

Since this photo gives a rough sense of what the rest of the house looks like, and the reasons I find to avoiding doing housework, this will serve as an Ecotone Wiki entry—this time it’s Housekeeping and Place.

Davis SketchCrawl

We spent part of the day today participating in the worldwide SketchCrawl. After warming up with a few kitty sketches, we went out to breakfast at Caf Bernardo, where we sketched the pancakes, waffles, other patrons, and the condiments, as in Pica’s sketch at left.

We then went back home, walked to the creek, hoping to see salmon but no luck, and then walked on to Pica’s office, where we sketched horses and ground squirrels: my sketch is at right.

We finished up our sketching outings at Mishka’s, where we enjoyed hot chocolate and tea.

Rivers

qb of Frizzy Logic went to meet Natalie of Blaugustine and bought a picture this week. There are tantalizing glimpses of them, not quite straight-on. I was mesmerized by their accounts and images of this encounter, and by Natalie’s art.

The next day I got a note from another artist friend in the UK, Brian Pike. We knew each other back when he was a graduate student in philosophy at Cambridge and I wasn’t. His topic was enthralling, though: human color perception. I argued that different cultures had a different sense of color. He didn’t think so: he said if I asked a Yanomami indian to point out their reddest red, it probably would be pretty close to mine. oh, I said. (I said this a lot when I lived in Cambridge.)

His route to becoming an artist was complicated, but I for one am so glad he did.

From the hauntingly spare images of lonely houses on Yorkshire moors to monkeys in Tamil Nadu, whose texture is only whispered across the continents at 72 dpi, I want to go buy a picture, too. I want to show up on his doorstep and have a cup of tea and plunge my face into these images that remind me of something I can’t quite remember. He says Paul Klee is the most important artist of the 20th century. Not Kandinsky, I’d say? There would be chocolate biscuits.

(I guess I’m pining for Yorkshire. People who know what Yorkshire’s like in November will probably think I’m nuts, though Coup de Vent seems not to mind.)

Brian’s art has kept us in touch, I think. And I wonder how many other friends I had who could have done something this but chose other, perhaps easier, ways, with whom I have now lost all contact. Like with Natalie and qb, the images jump, shortcircuting language. I love words. But I love breathing through my eyes, too, having this other river that flows through my soul.

Sketch Until You Crawl

That is the idea behind the first World Wide SketchCrawl. On Sunday November 21 spend the entire day in a sketching marathon. (From Danny Gregory.)

And if you need to find something to write with for this endeavor, have a look at Glenn’s Pen Page, with information about pens, pen stores, companies, and ink.

Letters to Anywhere

The second workshop we took yesterday was entitled “Letters to Anywhere,” an intriguing title we never seemed quite to cover in the class…

We DID all have to write to someone whose face appeared on a postcard, of which there were many, or imagine the person on the postcard writing to someone else on a different postcard (and on and on; you get the gist). We constructed different envelope models for correspondence, things you can actually put in the mail. I liked Karen’s insistence on the ephemeral, on eschewing the sacred archival that we may have learned elsewhere. Have fun, she says. And SHARE it. It doesn’t have to last; it has to get mailed.

Ideas that came up on the drive home: Write a letter to a place. Write a LOVE letter to a place. Write a letter to yourself at a younger (or older) age. Write to a fictional character in your place, or a place you know well.

It strikes me that this blog is an ongoing letter to anywhere, actually: it’s certainly a letter to many places at once. So, anywhere: how are you? I am fine. Wish you were here…

Landscape In Brown Paper Stock

We packed up Nellie and set off early in the morning for our workshop today at the San Francisco Center for the Book. SFCB is in a convenient part of San Francisco: close enough to the freeway to reach it quickly provided you have a map, but far enough from downtown so that there’s no problem parking. Our teacher, Karen Holden, is a poet as well as a book artist, and we did several writing exercises in addition to making a couple of quick books. She believes in letting the outside world flow into one’s writing as easily as possible. In our first exercise she primed this by randomly mentioning phrases to incorporate into the middle of a free writing exercise. Here’s a bit from mine:

The river sits under the fog, cleaning the air with thoughts floated up by fish. The field is a brown book, the furrows lines of type upon which is written the leavings of the plow.

We then made a landscape book, bound together with a simple stitch. Pica of course makes books like this all the time, but I’m much newer at such things, and found it to be a lot of fun. Above is my little California landscape book: our instructor gave us wonderful paper to work with.

Multiples of Monoprints

In preparing for our Sense of Place workshop in San Francisco tomorrow, I’ve been going through all my potential “items for collage.” I came across some monoprints I did in 2001 or 2002; lots of dark renditions of Grendel sneaking up on feasting vikings, I now see. (I was reading Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf at the time.) Lots of abstract monoprints also—I scanned some today and printed them to use as possible book covers.

Since I don’t know what exactly we’ll be doing, it’s hard to plan what to bring. I’m bringing far too much.

In baseball news, the first game of the World Series was won by the Red Sox tonight, but they are clearly not going to make it easy on themselves (or us). They blew an early 7-2 lead and the game was tied at 9 going into the ninth inning. Mark Bellhorn’s two-run homer took care of business, but this is cutting it way too fine (and running through an entire pitching staff every game).

Auto Mechanics With Fine Binding

So I’m taking this auto maintenance class, which is sort of silly because I have a sparkling engine, inside and out. But Nicole calls up from North Carolina and asks if Phil and Phillip are taking the class—she’s one of the more-than-once crowd, as are they. Yes, I say. Well, she says, Phil is a book restorer. You should talk.

So while other people roll around the filthy floor of a high school shop changing their oil, Phil and I go into the intricacies of hand-tooled leather, the Bay Area book arts scene in the 60s, and the lamentable lack of a letterpress in Davis. This was the last place I’d expect to have a conversation like this; it beats talking about the Red Sox and their performance tonight…

Writing Words

I’ve been working on a display for the UC Davis Campus Community Book Project which kicks off next Monday with recollections about the Rodney King beatings and riots in Los Angeles following the acquittal of the police officers who were caught in an act of horrific brutality on a neighbor’s video. The display brings together many voices, too, remembering that time.

It would have been very easy to do all this on a page layout program (I use Adobe InDesign) but I’ve been writing them out, longhand. In different longhands, actually. It has made the process much more meaningful for me as I struggle to understand different points of view, to come to terms with my privilege as a white person. There’s a meditative element in doing calligraphy. I slow way down, something I’m generally not very good at. It opens many doors.

This task is miniscule compared to the calligraphic event of the century (actually, of the half-millennium): the St. John’s Bible, which is currently underway by a team of calligraphers and illuminators under the direction of Donald Jackson, the scribe royal. Jackson came up with a new hand for this 7-volume project, a kind of loose Carolingian-foundational with an Italic edge, excellent for doing long patches of text (which, obviously, the Bible is). His team of world-class calligraphers has been working at his scriptorium in Monmouth, just over the Welsh border, since 2000; they’ve completed volume three. I’ve been studying this hand a bit and while I can’t claim to have mastered it yet, it’s definitely working even in its very imperfect form.

Of particular interest to me is that a local natural history illustrator, Chris Tomlin, has included Minnesota flora and fauna in this version (St. John’s Benedictine Monastery is in Minnesota). This is a bible of place. I’m eager to see it—looks like a trip to Minnesota is in my future at some point.

Donald Jackson urges people to get out their pens and write passages of the bible out in longhand in order to come to a closer understanding of the beautiful words. Having spent a mere weekend doing this, although they’re different words, I’m starting to get it. Perhaps this is why writers of graffiti feel such power?