22 January 04
Abecedarian Fun
An abecedarian sentence, also known as a pangram, is one that contains every letter of the alphabet, such as “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” They are favorite things of calligraphers and typographers, and have a long history. (According to Marc Drogin’s Medieval Calligraphy, an eighth-century one is Te canit adcelebratque polus rex gazifer hymnis [The hymn, oh treasure-bearing king, sings of you, and the pole also honors you.]). When I practice my calligraphy, I often write “Mad brother Jarvis was quickly axed for crazy praying.”
Now it is easier than ever to come up with one, thanks to Mark Simonson’s Pangrammer Helper. My favorite sentence in the thread discussing this tool on Typographica is “Vexed, George W. Bush just zooms like crazy puffs with no I.Q.”.
21 January 04
Peace Through Drawing
Butuki was kind enough to comment on my sketches of the scissor-tailed flycatcher and wondered what my field notebooks looked like… alas, I have none. I should, I think.
Or at the very least I should draw birds more often.
I once took an illustration class where one of the assignments was to illustrate a collective noun (pride of lions, murder of crows, etc.). I chose skein of snow geese, and spent the next three weeks seeking out reference material from which to draw these beautiful birds. Photos. Bird videos I stuck on “pause.” Stuffed specimens in the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology. No live birds, sadly; this would be an easy task in Davis in the winter, but not in Cambridge. Yet there was plenty of material from which to draw.
I will never, now, misidentify a Ross’s goose for a snow goose. Why? Because I learned that bird, inhaled it, almost, by drawing it. It doesn’t matter that the sketches, most of them, weren’t very good; it’s the act of seeing that makes the difference. Looking as hard as that at the scissor-tailed flycatcher has made me commune with it in a different way than looking at it through binoculars, and certainly with photographing it. It was like a meditation.
The best part? Since that time on Monday morning I’ve been on a kind of high. I think I should listen to this voice that speaks of the healing power of being with birds long enough to do, say, thirty sketches. They don’t have to be large, they don’t have to be finished, and they certainly don’t have to be any good. I just have to show up with a pencil and sketchbook.
24 December 03
Pen Fetish
I have often felt frustrated when going to stationery stores in the United States. It seems they are full of junk and contain very poor, mediocre selections of, well, stationery. Lots of rotten pens, some of which end up costing quite a bit. I won’t go so far as to blame the decline of Western civilization on the abandonment of the fountain pen, but I do cling obstinately to my belief that the world would be a better place if people WROTE better—and for this the fountain pen is the ideal tool. (Of course it would be better if they wrote at all, but that’s another piece.) I’m bleating in the wilderness, on this, to a world of keyboardists; to a world where children can routinely get to be almost adults without being able to read cursive; to a world of the ballpoint superseded by the rollerball superseded by the next miserable effort. Baaah, baaah.
Spain has, on the other hand, no shortage of good stationery stores—tiny closet-type spaces packed to the ceilings with unknown treasures in boxes. My guess is that this is one unintended but excellent result of the Napoleonic invasion of 1808 (the French REALLY know stationery: whoever has not had the sybaritic pleasure writing in fountain pen on Clairefontaine paper, papier velouté [velveted paper], should definitely try it; it will cure all manner of woes, aches, pains, and even warts).
Anyway, there was this tiny closet stationer downstairs from the apartment with the Oxford Spanish Dictionary which kept Numenius so busy for hours (we now own a copy, and a splendid thing it is too). We popped in to see what they might have in the way of fountain pens.
I don’t want something fancy. I don’t want laqueur, mother of pearl, bakelite, ebony; I don’t want a venetian glass dip pen which looks elegant on a female executive’s desk but can’t write for toffee; I don’t want a collector’s item to be stored in a vault or even just a drawer. I want something that can WRITE, by golly. It’s all in the nib, the nib, the nib. The rest of the pen is simply a vehicle to hold the nib; to facilitate smooth, even transfer of ink to the nib; and to permit the hand to HOLD the nib (balance is the next thing I look for; good pens are designed to be balanced when the cap is on the body, and to write best like this).
A happy curiosity: the RETRACTABLE fountain pen, made by Stypen (French, bien sûr). I bought one immediately. We went back a few days later and bought one for Numenius. It made writing in our travel journal a pure joy; we did lots of sketches on buses stuck in traffic; and, of course, we made sure to remove the cartridges before getting on the plane home to avoid the dreaded blue-black menstruation, where ink gets all over everything you ever owned and everyone else’s too.
I keep this pen in my pocket all the time; it fits into even the smallest pockets. It’s my current favorite. Good, fine nib. Great balance. Great price: 12 Euros.
Postscript: some readers in England read this post and did some research (thanks Clare and Alan). The Stypen-Up is available at a fabulous shop in Brighton called Pen to Paper. The fact that this pen takes small standard cartridges means that there are many colors of ink from which to choose.
I am contacting these people to see if they ship to the United States…
Further postscript, January 23, 2004: The fabulous Pendemonium, based in Iowa, stocks the pens, the inks, and the paper, along with a huge number of collectibles. They seem to be out of stock of several items but are very prompt in responding to inquiries; even though they’re at the Philadelphia Pen Show this week I heard back the same day. I have bought pens from them before but didn’t realize they ran to what in France is a typical supermarket brand…
27 November 03
More Fun With Fonts
I’ve gotten through most of the task of digitizing Pica’s Roman hand to turn it into a font. A few of the glyphs still need some work, as well as working on the character metrics—a task mostly completed, but some of the kerning pairs do need help. It’s quite a treat to see samples of the font printed out in Adobe InDesign.
I can’t get very far in playing with fonts without pondering TeX and friends. TeX is a markup language for typesetting that dates back twenty years or so. It excels at mathematical typesetting, which isn’t really of interest to me, but more importantly, it compels you to separate the writing process from the formatting process. These are distinct activities, and I find that it is easier to write documents in a text editor, embedding appropriate markup for section breaks etc., rather than in a word processor, which commingles the formatting with the actual words. (For a rant on the perils of WYSIWYG word processors, see here)
TeX gets arcane, which is why outside of the communities of physicists, mathematicians, and computer scientists it gets little use, but I couldn’t see writing a longer document using anything else. (My dissertation was written using LaTeX, which is its the most popular macro package.) Installing brand new postscript fonts into a TeX remains something I need to learn how to do. (It’s still probably easier than the general problem of managing fonts on Linux, however).
I’m imagining making fonts from my uncial hand, with lots of variant glyphs for letters, like long and short e’s. Typesetting with the variant forms, including many different ligatures, would be quite neat. I’m not sure if it would be easier to use InDesign or TeX for doing that, but not much other software can handle such a task.
25 November 03
From Calligraphy To Font
I have a new project here: turning our calligraphy letterforms into fonts, first Pica’s, then later on my own. The initial motivation is to be able to trace over typeset calligraphic letterforms to aid in designing calligraphy pieces, but there will be lots of other applications as well. To do the font work, I am using PfaEdit, which an impressive open-source outline font editor. It has support for digitizing from a scanned image of a letter, and can call an autotracing program to generate the outline vectors from the image. This evening was my first try at creating a font from Pica’s Roman hand. We’re quite pleased with the initial results.
Typeface design is not for the faint-hearted. There’s lots to learn, and to create a relatively complete font is immense amounts of work. But one begins at the beginning, and sees where that leads.
6 November 03
Doodling with Friends
Some friends just came over to swap cars, have some soup, salad, cheese, bread, and ice cream, and discuss the design of their wedding invitation.
I offered a while ago to do their invitation as a wedding gift. N. had doodled a beautiful asymmetric card with a butterfly clasp and the word “equinox” below it (they are getting married on the spring equinox next year).
There is something so compelling about thinking through design ideas with someone who knows what you’re talking about… it’s like being able to see through someone else’s eyes, see into their head. I am never so energized as on these occasions. It reminds me that I derive my creativity from being around other people rather than in a solitary place away from the world. I have to bounce ideas around with someone else rather than draw away into a safe haven; it makes sitting in a restaurant with a napkin and pen an incredibly productive experience.
Hope to see you in a cafe sometime soon! Bring your pen.
28 October 03
Maggot Art
As Fred from Floyd is showing interest in career possibilities involving decay-loving creepy-crawlies, I should point out a similar opportunity for those of an artistic bent. Rebecca Bullard, a UC Davis graduate student and a forensic entomologist by training, has created a teaching curriculum she terms Maggot Art. By bathing her maggots in non-toxic water-based paint and then letting them crawl on paper, her dipteran collaborators produce trails which can be surprisingly beautiful. The first public exhibition of these paintings will be held in Davis in April 2004, so now is the time to become a pioneer in this art form.
30 September 03
The Complete Peanuts
The complete run of the Peanuts comic strip—all fifty years—is about to be reprinted. The comics publisher Fantagraphics will be issuing these in 25 hardbound volumes, releasing two a year. I am happy to see that the strip will be republished in its entirety: it’s been a significant enough part of American culture that people will enjoy and learn from the complete set for a long time to come. This news is also a reminder that Pica and I should one of these months make an expedition over to the Charles M. Schulz Museum, not too far from here in Santa Rosa.
17 September 03
Arrival of a Painting
Still life is a complicated and often misunderstood genre, but I have great hopes that it is being revived in a very interesting way by artists like Gainor Roberts, which is why I asked her to do a painting for us as a couple. It is my wedding gift to Numenius.
Click on the image at left for a larger view. Every single element in this painting is a private signifier.
9 August 03
Mudpies
A recent entry from Bright Field on Renaissance Man (dated August 7 — there is no permalink) brings to mind my own struggle with breadth and depth. I compare my creative process to the making of mudpies: you roll up your sleeves, get mucky and have fun, and if what comes out of it is interesting or beautiful you give it away; if not, not. And then you move on to the next mudpie.
I wrote a poem about this last year — calligraphed it, rolled it up into a scroll, tied it with a green ribbon, and handed it out to folks in my writing group at the time: a mudpie about mudpies. I like the villanelle form, not widely used in English (but best known in Dylan Thomas’s Do not go gentle into that good night), because it’s like a dance, a song — and very appropriate to the kind of lightness I’m trying to explore. Thomas, of course, was able to plumb the searing depths of human experience with this “light” form — every time I read his villanelle I gasp. Anyway, here’s mine:
Ars Poetica
I yearn for depth, but I’m a butterfly.
I flit from here to there, I breathe it in.
My hands corral my flight: here’s a mudpie.
Mudpies are shaped in ink, or paint, or clay
Or paper, leather, sewn with linen strands—
I yearn for depth, but I’m a butterfly.
If good, or beautiful, they multiply:
Plucked, like August squash, then loved, and given—
My hands corral my flight: here’s a mudpie.
Proboscis searching, reaching for the sky—
The canon, though shot down, gnaws deep within.
I yearn for depth, but I’m a butterfly.
Perhaps the newer gods have a reply:
Express yourself. It’s all the same. Just spin.
My hands corral my flight: here’s a mudpie.
I wander, search, a light-fingered magpie.
I learn the rudiments but don’t dig in.
I yearn for depth, but I’m a butterfly.
My hands corral my flight: here’s a mudpie.