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.
24 November 03
The Hazard of Being Other
There’s a partially albino American crow around. Its coloring is very odd and quite beautiful: the tips of its wings are pure white, then darken to buff, then brown, and only its head is a pure black. When I saw it out on the field over the weekend I thought it might be some kind of goose, and rushed for the binoculars.
The other crows go after it murderously. They chase it, dive-bomb it, never let it rest. I’m amazed it’s still alive. Why is the odd one such a threat to the others? Why is its mere presence enough to set them off?
I have no idea why the sight of this persecution makes me so sad. It reminds me, perhaps, that cruelty and intolerance are innate. That no matter what we know, an ugly streak can take over and render us merciless; that it takes very little to set this off: the voice of a demagogue, perhaps, or the fear of the unknown. Mostly, I fear the metaphor of this conflict will be-and is now being-used by the powerful to justify their injustices.
I hope this strange crow somehow manages to pull through. The odds of that do not seem high.
23 November 03
Sangreal
I just galloped through Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code, a nonstop-paced thriller that starts with a contemporary murder in the Louvre that quickly leads into the mysteries of the Holy Grail. Brown has taken an actual set of conspiracy theories and has repackaged these in terms of a best-selling thriller. Whatever be the truthfulness of these tales of long-standing secret societies, the heterodoxies they attest to are enthralling, and make for a compelling read.
22 November 03
Russell Crowe as Jack Aubrey
Disclaimer: I’ve read all the Patrick O’Brian Aubrey/Maturin novels at least three times (well, okay, five). The series comprises twenty books. Rachel Jacoff, a Dante scholar at Wellesley, first put me on to them—she thought I’d like them because Stephen (the ship’s surgeon) is a birder. (And lots else, of course.)
My fear about this film when I heard it was being made revolved primarily around the choice of lead roles. Russell Crowe? How could he possibly carry off the role of a British naval captain in the Napoleonic wars, one whose punning is wretched but whose voice can be heard over two miles away, who understands the zeitgest of the lower deck where he was once assigned for stealing tripe (or stowing a girl), and whose most profound weakness is for that timeless English delicacy, the suet pudding?
I’m surprised, almost, to report that he gets it almost perfect. That Peter Weir absolutely understands the interaction between Jack and Stephen (Paul Bettany is an unlikely exquisite choice for this role). That despite the truncated plot, taken from at least five of the novels, it doesn’t matter: it’s all about character anyway. Jane Austen at sea is how someone once described it. There’s very little here in the way of Jane Austen; what the books don’t give you is the noise. I hope they don’t make any more in the series—I fail to see how this could be bettered. As a period piece it has no rivals, in my opinion.
The release coincides nicely for Oscar time and there are sure to be a few nods; I think it will win outright for editing.
21 November 03
Charting The Rocks
Last week’s trip to Bodega Bay afforded me the chance to start doing some geologizing, namely looking at geologic maps for the route from Davis to Bodega Bay. I didn’t have a chance to seek out paper maps (a good index to California geologic maps being here), but did find a couple digital maps, portions of which I printed out. So I am now much more keenly aware of the Sonoma Volcanics (exposed in bits off of Highway 12 on the way to Napa), and the geologic formations on the road from Petaluma to Bodega Bay (which falls on a very recently produced digital map). The break indicated on the map between the late Tertiary Wilson Grove formation (the hills surrounding Valley Ford) and the graywacke of the Franciscan complex to the west just before entering Bodega Bay was quite enlightening to notice on the ground. Keeping track of geologic formations is a whole new way to travel! So off I go to find more maps.
20 November 03
A Trip to the Zoo
With family visiting from far away, where the snow has already fallen this year, an outing in the sunshine involving elephants and tigers seemed in order (well, to the three-year-old among us, at least). We met up in Berkeley yesterday and went to the Oakland Zoo, which is exactly the right scale for small feet. Highlights included a ride on the train and a ride on the ostrich on the carousel. It was sunny and there was no wind, a splendid day topped off by a splendid dinner at a new Indian restaurant on Solano Avenue in Berkeley, Khana Peena. I returned to Davis on the train in the dark while the others drove back to Bodega Bay.
Zoos seem to be best visited around small children who seem to find the most interesting things first. It’s like learning to see again. I’ve never spent much time around a 5-month old giraffe, but they have beautiful markings.
19 November 03
SUV Taphonomy
Yesterday Pica’s family nearly witnessed the fossilization of an SUV. Pica’s sister and family have been visiting Pica’s mother in Bodega Bay, and yesterday they went on an outing to Goat Rock at the mouth of the Russian River to look for sea glass. On the beach there was a film crew making an ad for the latest model of the Lincoln Navigator. But that metal carnosaur of a vehicle had gotten stuck in the sand! There was a huge hullabaloo under way to free the trapped SUV, so alas its fate wasn’t to end up being buried by sediment from the next Russian River flood (a pretty much annual winter event). For some reason I don’t think the final released version of the ad will feature the rescue operation.