18 December 03
Becoming a Godparent
The reason for our trip to Spain was so that I could become the godmother to the adopted Chinese daughter of my oldest childhood friend. I wasn’t quite sure what this would involve, but whatever it was, I was up for it. I enjoy my niece and nephew immensely-in fact I’m sure they’re both responsible in part for my decision to accept this honor-so we booked our tickets and showed up.
There she was, waiting for us at the airport. She’s the most beautiful baby. (Well, toddler, now; 18 months old.) Looking slightly dazed (we were the latest arrivals in a sea of new faces), Linda beheld these dishevelled Americans and beheld. She did a lot of that.
Her mother, Jennifer, showed the unmistakable sign of motherhood, that is, she produced a Kleenex from her pocket at the required moment.
The ceremony was three days later, in the church in which I was confirmed in 1971. The British Embassy Church of St. George in downtown Madrid, built in the late 1920s, surviving the Spanish Civil War, the decades of Franco’s isolationism, the turbulent 60s, and the tendency to apostasy. Many of the faces in the church were familiar to me; ALL the stained glass windows were.
The time came to go to the back of the church… Linda Katherine Yun was named and cried at all the water poured on her face and looked as adorable as the cherubs in the windows and then managed to get herself locked in with her new parents as the front patio was closed off.
I have a card that tells me of my duties with regard to this new person in my life. To be her spiritual guardian. I hope I am up to the task. It will involve lots of birds. Hope the Anglicans don’t have a problem with that.
Gurgle and babble like a brook, sweet Linda, while the snow of the Swedish forest swirls around your red house; listen for the holy in the wind; be surrounded in love.
(Spring migration starts in March.)
17 December 03
Crossing New Mountains
In our trip to Spain I tried to stay attuned to the physiography of the countryside, noticing the geology and the vegetation. We took the train from Madrid across the Guadarrama Mountains to go on a day trip to vila, and later on went south by car into Andaluca, returning by train. Andaluca, at least the portion east of Cdiz, is quite reminiscent of Southern California: scrubby vegetation, steeply rising and folded sedimentary formations, streamcourses that are dry most of the year but flood during torrential rains. Eucalyptus trees, exotic to both places, are common and add to the resemblance. The photo at left was taken from the train going from Mlaga to Sevilla, passing through the Garganta del Chorro.
16 December 03
Back From Spain
Numenius and I arrived back late last night after almost 24 hours of travelling. Sorry for the blank page on Feathers of Hope for the last few days; we will be working on altering some settings.
I lived in Spain from 1964, when Franco was in full throttle, until 1979, and my parents stayed there another ten years. I haven’t been back for nearly fifteen years. Spain has prospered very obviously from membership in Europe. The infrastructure is unrecognizable, particularly the excellent and inexpensive train network. Building is going on everywhere, barely regulated, at an almost frenzied rate. But otherwise things are much the same: most people still smoke (though black tobacco seems to be going away), party hard, love life.
We were there to attend a baptism, and I’ll be writing more about this (and a lot else) later. For now, I’ll just sit with the smell that greeted us when we exited the terminal building at Madrid-Barajas: hard to define, yet so completely “Spain.” It was astonishing: garlic and tobacco were certainly there, plus the omnipresent smog, but other things too. Really good coffee, for instance (new, and horrifying, arrivals include Starbucks and MacDonald’s…). I might suggest a “Smell of Place” topic to the
Photos to come soon. It’s great to be home, though.
2 December 03
Off On A Journey
We’re headed to Spain tomorrow for a little vacation, and will be back home later in the month. Posting will be sporadic but we’ll try to update the blog when we can.
30 November 03
Empire in Deep Decay
Perhaps it’s because I’ve been spending more time than normal pondering things Roman, as I’ve been working on my Roman caps, but this astonishing rendition by John Ashcroft beats anything those whacky Romans could come up with. (Warning: this is a bandwidth hog and takes a while to load, but is certainly worth the wait.)
It’s just a matter of time before the vandals and visigoths stride triumphantly over the hills. Meanwhile, expect more displays of a society gone mad such as the one above. In case you needed proof.
29 November 03
Blogging For Parrots?
Irene Pepperberg, the animal behaviorist who for twenty-five years has been studying the cognitive abilities of African gray parrots, and is famous for teaching her oldest bird, Alex, how to count as well as the rudiments of reading, has a twenty-month old bird named Arthur who may be getting on the Net soon. Parrots get easily bored and neurotic especially when left alone during day, so Pepperberg’s lab group at MIT came up with the idea of teaching the parrots to surf the web. They ask—“could live interaction with other parrots via the internet relieve stress and boredom caused by social isolation?”
Pica’s sister used to have an African gray parrot named Pavo, short for Pavarotti, who would hang upside down and say “I’m a bat”, and whenever it would snow, he would say “Brrr…it’s penguin weather.”
28 November 03
Mud, Glorious Mud
I went with DocRock of Write Out Loud today to Calistoga for a mud bath. It’s not strictly mud: it’s volcanic ash mixed with peat. Spas are ten a penny in Calistoga, whose name is a combination of Saratoga and California. We chose Dr. Wilkinson’s, where we had both been before.
We got shunted from shower to mud bath to shower to mineral bath to steam room to blanket wrap to massage, where I got my lower left leg worked on for 20 minutes. My achilles tendon is healing well but is still at least twice as wide as the right one.
I wonder how the attendants in these places—almost uniformly Mexican Americans—feel about their mostly Anglo patrons. I wonder whether they ever sneak into the mud themselves (I doubt it). What I don’t wonder, though, is why Degas and Balthus and all the others felt compelled to paint women at the baths: it’s a sumptuous sight, all those glorious bods in complete relaxation. Women focused inward.
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.
26 November 03
Honoring the Dead
Butuki posted a beautiful scratchboard drawing of a raccoon skull. I was trying to find a sketch I once did of a female scarlet tanager that had hit the glass door of my office building in Cambridge, Massachusetts, just moments before I walked in; it was still warm. I can’t find the sketch just now—I’ll add it if it turns up later. What I remember, though, was sketching quickly to somehow capture the essence of what remained of the bird’s life, of its vitality. This was nothing like the careful, ponderous, holy drawing Butuki did, a raccoon he had killed in mercy and returned a year later to honor in this way; my sketch was a scramble. I also wrote a poem from the bird’s point of view. It was something along the lines of “Who Killed Cock Robin.”
It reminds me that I have not been making time for drawing. It is when I am at my most meditative. It’s a good form of prayer, and I’m grateful to be reminded of this.
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.