4 July 25
Criterium On The Fourth Of July
July is generally the peak sports-watching month in our household: in international football, there is usually either the Euros or the World Cup taking place (in 2025 it is the Women’s Euros), and July is the month for the Tour de France. But there is also a bike race in our town held on the Fourth of July: the Davis Criterium. The riders in this photo are rounding a corner just four blocks from our house.
3 July 25
The Hated Red Pen, Revisited
I’ve been thinking about the pen that I hate and I decided to give it another try. I’ve been watching some of Marc Kompanayets’ videos about pen and ink drawing and thought I’d try with this pen, which has a slightly flexible nib. (Marc is a fanatic about super-flexible nibs, which allow for maximum line variability.)
Hatching, and especially crosshatching, is a skill that takes some time to master. I’d love to be really good at it. Marc’s 10 Essential Cross-hatching Techniques is excellent but he’s particularly adamant about keeping the gauge consistent. You can vary the line length, direction, line strength, and even whether if curved or straight, but if the width between the lines is inconsistent, the effect quickly gets messy. The idea is not to draw attention to the hatching unless this is your goal. His prime example of a brilliant hatcher (in pen and etching) is Rembrandt.
The pen is still fighting me a bit but I’m sure it’s much better for sketching/drawing than writing for me, so I’m going to persevere.
Below is a Rembrandt self-portrait. It’s messy, it’s all over the place, and it’s brilliant. If I could only ever be an eighth as good as this, I’d be so happy.
2 July 25
Uncommon Landscapes
On my twice-daily walks I always carry a small camera in case I spot something worth photographing. But my walks don’t vary much, and lately I feel like I’ve run out of photographic subjects. Or have I?
Not long ago I watched a You Tube video about the photography of Stephen Shore. The video was by an artist named Tatiana Hopper who produces interesting content about the history of photography and filmmaking. It was good to be reminded about the work of Stephen Shore. He was one of the participants in the influential New Topographics exhibition in 1975 which presented photographs of ordinary human-dominated landscapes across the United States, with subjects like industrial parks, gas stations, and housing developments. Shore was the only participant who photographed in color, and he is one of the pioneers of artistic color photography. The photo of his at right was taken in 1974, and was published in his major photo book from 1982, Uncommon Places. It is quite typical of his work: a muted color palette, a strong formal composition, with a sense of detachment from the landscape.
I am clearly quite attracted to this aesthetic, and wonder if it provides a template for photographing the ordinary landscape of this college town. But does an artistic movement from the 1970s still have relevance in 2025, in an age when hundreds of billions of photos have been posted to Instagram? Interestingly enough, between 2014 and 2024 Stephen Shore posted every day on Instagram before deciding after 10 years it was time to move on from the practice. As a general principle, Stephen Shore’s Instagram Photos Are Better Than Yours. There is something about spending decades arranging photos on the ground glass viewfinder of an 8” × 10” view camera that inexorably leads to a heightened sense of composition. Photography is very much a matter of looking closely.
1 July 25
Artificial Intelligence
As I’ve mentioned previously, I’ve been learning German for the past three years, initially through Duolingo and more recently through Lingoda. I’ve taken 46 classes — 46 hours of instruction in group sizes of five students or fewer (and, mostly the average class size has been three). The classes are divided up into the categories of Communication, Reading, Grammar, and Speaking. The level of instruction has been high and I’m glad to say I was today awarded a certificate: I’ve progressed through the beginner level of B2. This means I’m technically now an intermediate intermediate.
This morning’s class was talking about AI, which in German is Kunstliche Intelligenz (or KI). I’m normally the oldest student in the class which I don’t mind, especially since it allows my inner curmudgeon out to howl. I’ve been avoiding taking this particular lesson for weeks because I hate what AI is doing to people’s minds, to the planet, to the political economy, and to political life in general. There were two other students today, both in their early thirties (I’d guess). They use Chat GPT every single day both in their work and in their daily lives. There’s no point in fighting this, is there.
30 June 25
Daily Sketch - Nightshade
This is a pen and wash sketch of some sort of shrubby nightshade that is growing on the north side of our backyard.
29 June 25
The "Right" Fountain Pen
I use fountain pens a lot and have done ever since a boy in my class when I was seven gave me one as a present. (He also gave me a copy of Enid Blyton’s Shadow the Sheep-Dog, which was as much of a vapid tearjerker as Lassie Come Home, at least the film (I never read the book). Hey. We were seven.)
I use the pens pictured here ALL THE TIME. I mean I use the TWSBI Eco for my German lessons (it’s a fine nib and, loaded with Urban Grey, doesn’t show through the paper); I use the gold Pilot Metropolitan for sketching; I use the green Platinum Preppy for my bullet journal, which happens to be green this year. You get the picture. Match the color to the barrel. For some time now I’ve only been using DeAtramentis Document ink, which is a permanent fountain pen ink; this means I could use any one of these pens for pen and wash, though in practice I mostly use brown. But the bottom drawer of the kitchen table has a good collection of these inks, all in different colors.
Since I’m very fond of my Pilot Metropolitans, which are a fantastic pen for the price, I thought I couldn’t go wrong buying a much more expensive Pilot pen (I think it’s the Pilot Custom 74? It’s gone up in price anyway). I hate it. The nib skips and fights me. I’ve cleaned the nib well several times and it still doesn’t want to work properly. This is the red pen second from right, next to the orange Platinum Preppy which at $4.95 is a frikkin’ bargain, superb pen for what you’re paying for it.
I do have… other fountain pens than these. They are empty and in drawers. They might come out to play once in a while but these ones are my staples.
All the pens pictured here were purchased from the inimitable Jet Pens located in San Jose. Best stationery store in the country.
28 June 25
The Jasper Tax
Our neighbor who shares the duplex with us likes to put out peanuts early in the morning for our local scrub jay, whom she’s named Jasper. When she goes off on a trip I have the assignment of placing four peanuts out on the glass table in the front yard. Here is Jasper collecting his first peanut this morning.
27 June 25
A Bookcase by its Cover
One of the most interesting things to do when visiting a friend’s house isn’t to look in their medicine cabinet, a stereotype I’m not sure is founded in reality, but at their bookshelves. We have a lot of books ourselves, which isn’t great in the game of downsizing, but we do refer to a lot of the books on these shelves, often.
The schematic at left shows our nonfiction shelves which reach to the ceiling, and which also include some graphic recording equipment, old sketchbooks and notebooks, and some unwieldy spinning tools. But mostly they are books, mostly reference books. We don’t tend to buy a lot of fiction (except for, lately, comics, usually nonfiction comics though).
I do have a whole section of spinning and knitting books and dvds along with graphic recording books that don’t fit on these shelves which is twitching me up a bit as somewhat untidy…
26 June 25
Daily Sketch - Plum
I’m continuing with portrait format sketches of bits of plants. Here’s an ink and watercolor pencil sketch of a plum on its tree branch in the front yard.
25 June 25
Wordling into Sentences
I’ve been playing Wordle with my sister for a while now. She usually gets the word with one fewer tries than I do. She recently suggested we start playing a game: making sentences of all the words we used in a day’s challenge.
Here are mine from this week:
I will raise a ladle in the glade to the goddess of soup
The grout sprouted raised thrums of fungi
Oddly, there was not enough clout in the phlox to raise a vowel
Raise the quite white to be elite
The hangman was pouty because he had to raise the moldy comfy chair
I find Wordle to be a good thing to do while I’m waiting for the kettle to boil in the morning, not as much of a mental challenge as playing bridge online, but fun nevertheless.