fluidity

from Kenneth Burke's A Grammar of Motives--

"Distinctions, we might say, arise out of a great central moltenness, where all is merged. They have been thrown from a liquid center to the surface, where they have congealed. Let one of these crusted distinctions return to its source, and in this alchemic center it may be remade, again becoming molten liquid, and may again be thrown forth as a new crust, a different distinction" (in Bizzell and Herzberg 1300).

Bizzell (Patricia) and Herzberg (Bruce) are the editors of my giant, fat, rhetorical theory textbook, The Rhetorical Tradition. how they ever corralled all 1673 pages of that thing into a only-slightly-unwieldy and mostly quite readable codex is a mystery our whole class has been puzzling over.

this whole semester I've been fascinated by this idea that everything is in flux. we cannot rightly talk only of things, items, or substances. we must, if we ever want to understand things really, talk about processes. situations. events-in-progress. it's difficult. but I love it, for some reason. nothing ends, or begins, it just changes...

me included.

and now I'm off to volunteer in the letterpress lab for a little bit. and then: more grading. and then: research. and then: perhaps a nap...

lead me

LetterPress - Printing Kahlil Gibran from Callil Capuozzo on Vimeo.

last week, on a tuesday just as lovely as any tuesday in February ever was, this is what I was doing.

only it was here in Texas, not in Rhode Island (if any two states could be more opposite, I do not know how--not that I've ever been to Rhode Island. is it nice there?). and we were not exactly printing poetry. but aside from those technical differences, it was just about the same process. getting all the itty bitty letters to line up. filling in all the gaps (every single weirdly-shaped one. all of them) with leads and spacers and appropriate widths of furniture. tightening the quoin, everso carefully. slathering a sheet of glass with sticky black ink. rolling and rolling and rolling the ink, to get it just exactly right for inking the type... and then the most exciting bit: setting that perfect blank paper down, rolling it under the platen, and letting that press do its simple, heavy work. rolling it back out and peeling that freshly inked page away from the type-block is pretty lovely too. there's a crisp, rippling sound in it. and then you lay that page down gently and scrutinize it for errors.

we found lots of errors. proofing letterpress prints takes ages. getting the balance of the old Washington Press just right takes ages.

but the archaic novelty of it... oh, it's great. one of these days I'll take pictures of our actual letterpress lab on campus. for now, enjoy these semi-random videos that sort of evoke the experience of working in such a place. (the first far more than this last, I confess. but I do love this movie.... love love love.)



this week in 5340, our class is going to be in the lab looking at type and talking about printing presses. such an awesome little class, this has been. I still need to blog about my hand-bound book, sometime. put that on the list. (it's a long list. getting longer. I need to blog more often.)

revise or remix

so for 5371 (Foundations of Tech Comm) and 5387 (Publications Management), I get to write book reviews.

for some reason, the art of the review seems to be an extremely crucial thing to learn as a graduate student. we had to present a review for 5340 (Bibliography) also, though that was a group project, and not written. Dr. Hawkins gave us 7 minutes to talk about an online edition of our choice. my group did the Rossetti Archive.

that was fun. and our presentation went quite well. 7 minutes, 21 seconds. and I even got to talk a bit about the geeky web-design stuff I love so much. cross-browser compatibility, XHTML, javascript. mm. the cool moment was showing this screenshot to a bunch of literature grad students.

yes, I am trying hard to reinforce the idea they've all got about the crazy tech comm people. it's fun.

my other two classes are not lit. classes. they are full of the technical. and I've got six weeks or so--amongst all my other projects and research and essaying--to read and review the following two books.

for Kelli, the 5th edition of Technical Editing, by Carolyn Rude and Angela Eaton. we've read a few articles by Carolyn Rude already, and so much that she says impresses me. Dr. Eaton works here at Texas Tech, which is just a neat connection.

also, I love editing. I think this book will be great. many thanks go to the editors of Communicator, an ISTC journal who sent me this, my very own copy.

for Dr. Still, I've got this. it's called Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age, by Kenneth Goldsmith. he teaches a class all about this at the University of Pennsylvania, apparently. sounds quite fascinating.

this one, I had to request from the far away land of Arizona. U of A was kind enough to lend me this copy all the way til the end of the semester. so nice of them. I've just read the introduction so far. the rest of it, I can already tell, is going to be extremely interesting. (note to self: take a few notes on this stuff for the alien-girl story.)

other news from my little planet of grad school:
-got an A on my 5371 midterm. go me.
-met with Dr. Snead today to talk about the mystery of Hannah Woolley. need to start drafting...
-spent an hour in the Letterpress Lab cleaning out old rusted trays and weighing drawers full of type. so awesome.
-finished editing that index about wine thismorning. learned a lot about grapes. fun fun.

and now, for a semi-irrelevant postscript:
this article and this comic were both published today, the 2nd of November. that is called timeliness. or something. (is tongue-awareness even a thing? really?)

soundtrack sidedishes

Will Smith is getting old.

I noticed this last night, stretched out on somebody else's carpeted floor, watching his performance in the most perplexing and morbid jigsaw puzzle of a film I've ever seen. I spent the first half of Seven Pounds in rather amazed confusion, the second in an almost paralyzing disbelief.

in the middle of this jigsaw awesomely putting itself together, we are invited into Emily's garage. in this shadowy refuge, she works printing letterpress greeting cards and invitations on a couple of old, beat up presses. behind these rare monsters we get glimpses of printing paraphernalia--paper, inks, and pinned up scraps. the idea of this was so lovely to me. I can't envy Emily her heart condition, and I wouldn't want to be looking after an ugly great dane, but I wouldn't mind access to a garage so equipped as hers. it is a relatively minor part of the film, but our hero in the shape of Will Smith spends all night repairing this woman's broken Heidleberg while Muse's cover of Feeling Good rushes around in the background. as I remember that moment now, it seems a little island of calm and normal purpose before the driving perplexity takes over again.

coincidentally, the internet has offered me this not completely irrelevant bit of trivia concerning the woman who plays Emily. Rosario Dawson once appeared in The Chemical Brothers' video for the song Out of Control, which Chris and I included in the first chapter of Starcustard, as the third optional music track--just as the slavekids are attacking the giant slug. how interesting.