my semester is just about over. scraps of grading left, but nothing that will take very much stress. summer is at last welcome to my brain. I am making lists of books and places and projects and goals.
there are forty-five days until my half-birthday.
there are nine more posts after this one, waiting to be written and posted and counted, before there will be one thousand posts here on this blog.
I think it makes sense to post the thousandth one on my half-birthday. as a present to myself.
and that means committing to a new blogpost every five days or so. I can do this. I just spent thirty days posting daily, and before that I usually posted once every seven days anyway. every five days is not so different.
speaking of daily-blogging, friend Patti is blogging every day in May! it's wonderful and cool to see her posts show up way more often in my blog feed. this one from the other day about pictures of book pages made me think not only about the patterns of Patti's noticings and recordings of her noticings, but also about the patterns of all the shapes and textures in those captured pages. the fonts and the weights and the spacings. kerning and leading and alignments and indentations. perhaps that's what I would study if Patti's instagram account was handed to me as a corpus to be researched. hmm.
but I have other things to research! like a recipe from this old magazine that ended up... well, it ended up here, in a blogpost that I wrote almost exactly two years ago. how it ended up there, and what all the mutations that happened along the way might mean in terms of technical communication and digital communities... that is a thing I've been trying to write about. wish me luck.
and just in case you were worried I'd spend all my summer working too hard, I have plenty of things on my list to not research but to make. this shawl. these cookies. some sushi. there will probably also be naps. I have gotten better at naps lately.
and so begins summer 2015: optimistically and bursting with gentle, lovely, semi-adventurous plans.
Showing posts with label letterforms. Show all posts
Showing posts with label letterforms. Show all posts
Friday, May 8
Saturday, October 25
midterm excerpts
fuel coffeeshop. a few Fridays ago.
not pictured: Divining a Digital Future: Mess and Mythology in Ubiquitous Computing, with accompanying notebook and pen.
somebody asked me the other day what mind-mapping software I liked to use.
I muttered and gestured to all the notebooks in my bag. paper, of course. not sure it counts as software, being made of dead trees, but whatever. I map things into my mind using paper. that way I can doodle in the margins or write sideways or crisscross crazily between this note and that note. for example: the first leaf of the blue spiral notebook I've been keeping notes in this semester has some boxes, some circles, a sketch of an envelope, some numbers, some squiggles, an octothorpe, a non-existent email address, one question mark, four arrows, the word ungrateful in all caps, and the advice to Sing in Your Own Voice, followed immediately by the words blue ink in parentheses. on the verso, there is an overwhelming amount of math. I'm pretty sure all of this was written in late 2010 or early 2011, when I was studying for the GRE.
the rest of that blue spiral notebook is now full of notes from this very fall, 2014, my second year at Purdue University. I've had to start a new notebook mid-semester, which I guess is what comes of using one already half-used-up notebook for three different seminars + lectures + practica. because it's midterm-time, and because looking back at these notes might be a useful thing to do as I begin writing proposals and papers and essays and project reports, and because this blog needs more academic nonsense plastered all over it, here are some snippets from it. they don't always transfer very well to this stringent, linear, typographic medium. ah well. I can add hyperlinks to this version though, so that's something.
what does this mean? more money for ____ / quality +
find out the impact ★
agonism / movement
metis / arete / kairos / phusis / hexis
observing with no aim other than
normal/everyday
interaction
why that now
what next
ignoring ≠ not noticing ★
how to become sensible to things that are unremarkable? [doodle of fish under water]
ethnographers must join the fish but also remember what water is
tech separating creative process from production process --> bigger businesses
telegraph typewriter filing cabinet railroad copy paper
definitions need definers (+ attendant power structures)
I keep thinking about SUITS.
disconnects between writing/docs and + real expectations
or impossible to articulate things
beyond expertise
work (n)
work (v)
internal + external articulation
writers not writing.
interesting nod to Kant
"elite" / "male" / "western"
nature + functional historical knowledge (a formalist approach)
chronicle > story > mode: plot, argument, ideology
mystical / sociological / cultural models
unities / Weltanshauung, paradigm
★ sentience ★ consciousness
making of the world
torture - "torque"/twisting
terror - "to tremble"/terrible
useful vagueness!
scripts schema
quantifying "shared knowledge"
rules tacitly learned
instruct > interpret > act > assume > instruct > interpret ....
making the world match the words
digital iterations are quicker
do machine made songs words art get copyrighted?
Taylorism = basic (time) task efficiency -->
Fordism = specialized production
functionalism = prototype prod. line + labor management
art?
passive / normative / or creative / or reactive
could machines cook?
what if actions are our bigger understandings of interlinked systems of interactions all working together? (more philosophically cool)
or we could see interactions as bubbly frothy conglomerations of discrete actions? (more etymologically consistent)
★ ideas precede expression
but we learn names before concepts.....
essence ≠ substance
man = ?
biology?
no immovable boundaries
men make sorts
nature makes qualities/matches
a set of subjects memorizable / polymathical
"tristapaedias"
categories / relationships / authorities
self-evident character of prison
war functioning as if...
prison NOT functioning as if... but pretending to try? <-- a="" br="" does="" how="" media="" play="" role=""> the Last Lecture Randy Pausch
practical advice / ❤ + integrity
"if small faults are to incur such grievous punishments, there can, indeed, be none found sufficiently sever for great crimes." (Edgeworth 245-246)
norms as processes, assumed in forming identities
legible / livable vs unlegible / unlivable lives / spaces
e. exclusion, boundaries exposing limits of constructivism
p 37 - always already material
centering the world symbolically
lack of control = castration
subject
abject
containing multitudes. [I was thinking of Maya Angelou at the time but really, Walt Whitman said this.]
"if the unconscious is the discourse of the Other, the unconscious necessarily exceeds the individual + becomes thinkable as Social + Cultural...
power (opposed to) ornamentation elitist finery
puritan austerity
Com 621 Social Media
Com 605 PW
blending sacred motherhood w/ secular moneymaking
regularity / order / harmony / sense
Beauty Harmony / this sounds like Hume ^
ch 3 Zuern / "what we seek to master is the control of the cultural meaning of the body ... our offering of our bodies to the world as meaningful" p 62
Friday, October 17
intoxicating reasons
last week our readings for Professional Writing Theory included two chapters from a book called Lines: A Brief History. I fell in love with this book, and I want to read the whole thing, even if at the expense of the Hugh Blair and Adam Smith and all the other reading.
Lines seems to be about everything--my favourite topic. there is a section asking why musical notation and alphabetic writing are considered so differently. there are chapters on weaving vs. knitting vs. embroidery. there are illustrations of all sorts, mapping traces and threads. the connections are intoxicating.
last month my podcast-listening included a Radiolab episode called In the Dust of this Planet. it's about a book with the same title, plus a subtitle: Horror of Philosophy Volume 1. its author says something during this podcast that I come back to every now and then. he's talking about his writing process and how he came to finish this book. in the middle of all the research and work, he thought to himself, would I write this book even if no other human being in the world was ever going to read it? his answer was yes.
can I say the same about things I write?
I think so.
I think I am enough of an audience for myself. but then again, maybe my future self counts as separate human being. does that change the question? if no human being, not even my future self, were allowed to go back and read all the writing I'm scraping out of my head onto paper or screen, would I keep writing?
that's not so easy to answer. writing and reading aren't very separable activities anyway. but if they were... and if I weren't only disallowed but also wholly unable to go back and re-read... if all the lines and traces of my own writing forever disappeared into some irretrievable somewhere else...
then what?
if that were the case, would it be so for everyone else? would the function of writing be permanently altered for all of humanity? would we revert to a primarily oral culture, or would we develop some alternative system of recording ideas?
there are a dozen ways to imagine this kind of scenario. what if we all forgot how to read, and the alphabet became a string of curly artistic shapes with no definable meanings? what if there was no such thing as ink or graphite or paint or any other way of making lines on things? what if our hands weren't shaped right for holding pens or stroking keys? what if textless, animated gifs become the one and only medium of communication anyone ever uses?
would I write this even if no human being in the world was ever going to read it?
if a tree falls, or a bird sings, or a kitten meows, in a forest or a cage or a box far far away from any observers... do those things have reasons for existing at all?
this thoughtful little post on change and sadness was written a long time ago. I've blogged every week since then, pretty much. I've been blogging every week since forever. there is a chain (a line, a thread) of checkmarks six years long or more fluttering along behind this silly little blog's march into the future.
but people say blogging is dead.
this one isn't. this internet space is not an irretrievable elsewhere. not yet. my future self, and all your future selves, can keep coming back to my silly little blog.
does that mean it, along with the trees and birds and kittens, has a reason for existing at all?
Lines seems to be about everything--my favourite topic. there is a section asking why musical notation and alphabetic writing are considered so differently. there are chapters on weaving vs. knitting vs. embroidery. there are illustrations of all sorts, mapping traces and threads. the connections are intoxicating.
last month my podcast-listening included a Radiolab episode called In the Dust of this Planet. it's about a book with the same title, plus a subtitle: Horror of Philosophy Volume 1. its author says something during this podcast that I come back to every now and then. he's talking about his writing process and how he came to finish this book. in the middle of all the research and work, he thought to himself, would I write this book even if no other human being in the world was ever going to read it? his answer was yes.
can I say the same about things I write?
I think so.
I think I am enough of an audience for myself. but then again, maybe my future self counts as separate human being. does that change the question? if no human being, not even my future self, were allowed to go back and read all the writing I'm scraping out of my head onto paper or screen, would I keep writing?
that's not so easy to answer. writing and reading aren't very separable activities anyway. but if they were... and if I weren't only disallowed but also wholly unable to go back and re-read... if all the lines and traces of my own writing forever disappeared into some irretrievable somewhere else...
then what?
if that were the case, would it be so for everyone else? would the function of writing be permanently altered for all of humanity? would we revert to a primarily oral culture, or would we develop some alternative system of recording ideas?
there are a dozen ways to imagine this kind of scenario. what if we all forgot how to read, and the alphabet became a string of curly artistic shapes with no definable meanings? what if there was no such thing as ink or graphite or paint or any other way of making lines on things? what if our hands weren't shaped right for holding pens or stroking keys? what if textless, animated gifs become the one and only medium of communication anyone ever uses?
would I write this even if no human being in the world was ever going to read it?
if a tree falls, or a bird sings, or a kitten meows, in a forest or a cage or a box far far away from any observers... do those things have reasons for existing at all?
this thoughtful little post on change and sadness was written a long time ago. I've blogged every week since then, pretty much. I've been blogging every week since forever. there is a chain (a line, a thread) of checkmarks six years long or more fluttering along behind this silly little blog's march into the future.
but people say blogging is dead.
this one isn't. this internet space is not an irretrievable elsewhere. not yet. my future self, and all your future selves, can keep coming back to my silly little blog.
does that mean it, along with the trees and birds and kittens, has a reason for existing at all?
Wednesday, April 24
out of your head, on paper
the semester is just over enough that I can start getting reasonably excited and anxious and breathless about the next one. I am emailing people about registering for Fall classes. I am scrounging around internet classifieds and such for somewhere lovely to live in this new place. I have another shiny, empty .edu email address. my fourth, I think. unless I had one in England? I surely did. but I cannot remember. I suppose it might have been .ac.uk anyhow...
hm. remembering things seems like an important skill. but is it that, or is it knowing which things to remember? knowing which things need to be remembered and finding a good way to remember them... that is difficult. perhaps impossible. and perhaps that is why we invented writing and google.
speaking of writing and google and remembering things, I cannot remember how I came across this guy named Craig Oldham or his art project all about handwritten letters. it was probably through one of those british blogging designer folks I still have in my google reader. Ben Terrett or Russell Davies or someone (and no, Brandon slash any other Doctor Who lovers, not that Russell Davies).
anyways. the link to this handwritten letter project has been sitting here as a thing to be blogged about for months, along with...
thoughts on Roland Barthes + Thomas Jefferson
connections between Shakespeare + The Cardigans' "Lovefool"
discussions of God, syntax, + David Hume
something about Marc Chagall + 2 Corinthians 13:1
...and a few other random lists, memories, and photographs. (maybe I should try for a blogger drafts collection of zero this summer, or something.)
now I am blogging about the handwritten letter art project. yeah. I like it. handwritten things are lovely and I think making space for them in all the non-handwritten parts of our lives is very neat.
it would be cool to embark on my own letter-writing project. one year it was a resolution of mine to write one letter every week. not getting responses made it sort of a sad, short-lived project though.
the 'share this' link Mr. Oldham has included on his page about handwritten letters opens a printable letter form:
isn't that amusing and backwards and perfect?
on the project's about page Mr. Oldham describes his project as part of "a visual narrative on the cultural transition in which we find ourselves." hmm. visuals are cool. transitions are cool too. connecting things and people and ideas and stories... I like it.
and as a completely random post-script, the same artist fellow has apparently created this very, very convoluted and strange but intriguing something else. I'm not sure what to make of it other than those adjectives.
hm. remembering things seems like an important skill. but is it that, or is it knowing which things to remember? knowing which things need to be remembered and finding a good way to remember them... that is difficult. perhaps impossible. and perhaps that is why we invented writing and google.
speaking of writing and google and remembering things, I cannot remember how I came across this guy named Craig Oldham or his art project all about handwritten letters. it was probably through one of those british blogging designer folks I still have in my google reader. Ben Terrett or Russell Davies or someone (and no, Brandon slash any other Doctor Who lovers, not that Russell Davies).
anyways. the link to this handwritten letter project has been sitting here as a thing to be blogged about for months, along with...
thoughts on Roland Barthes + Thomas Jefferson
connections between Shakespeare + The Cardigans' "Lovefool"
discussions of God, syntax, + David Hume
something about Marc Chagall + 2 Corinthians 13:1
...and a few other random lists, memories, and photographs. (maybe I should try for a blogger drafts collection of zero this summer, or something.)
now I am blogging about the handwritten letter art project. yeah. I like it. handwritten things are lovely and I think making space for them in all the non-handwritten parts of our lives is very neat.
it would be cool to embark on my own letter-writing project. one year it was a resolution of mine to write one letter every week. not getting responses made it sort of a sad, short-lived project though.
the 'share this' link Mr. Oldham has included on his page about handwritten letters opens a printable letter form:
on the project's about page Mr. Oldham describes his project as part of "a visual narrative on the cultural transition in which we find ourselves." hmm. visuals are cool. transitions are cool too. connecting things and people and ideas and stories... I like it.
and as a completely random post-script, the same artist fellow has apparently created this very, very convoluted and strange but intriguing something else. I'm not sure what to make of it other than those adjectives.
Wednesday, January 23
edens and angels
there is a segment of Zion National Park called Angels Landing. this is the place I described seven years ago with such pre-emptive longing. all that one-thing-at-a-time intensity. snow-soaked jeans, scraped knuckles, uncertainty and persistence, hovering.
Angels Landing has some great memories attached to it.
I always wonder about its name. if it's supposed to be the landing that belongs to the angels, then why on earth is there no apostrophe there? if it belongs to one lovely angel, you'd want the signs at the park and the notes on the website to say Angel's Landing. or if a large contingent of angels shares this part of southern Utah, Angels' Landing. but we have neither of these.
so if the place doesn't belong to anyone... I can only presume that its name refers to some (perhaps ongoing) event, and that angels visit this ledge of red rock from time to time. there must have been angels landing there. or maybe there still are? or maybe that is just what you'd expect, and everyone is still waiting for the angels to land.
I suppose it's strange of me to think so much about the name of an 8-mile hiking trail.
{ photo borrowed from this kind soul on flickr. }
there is a country music group called Edens Edge that gives my restless brain similar fodder for asking pedantic questions. do we have here an Edge within (and therefore metaphorically possessed by) Eden? why not then call it Eden's Edge? the alternative--what a face-value interpretation of the band's name's orthographic representation gives us, anyway--makes less sense. is there more than one Eden? and if so, how does a plural entity have one edge? is it some kind of border? a precipice? both? I just don't know. does anyone?
perhaps we could directly confront these country musicians and ask them. did they forget the apostrophe in their name? or are they being extra interesting just for pedants like me? does it matter?
Angels Landing has some great memories attached to it.
I always wonder about its name. if it's supposed to be the landing that belongs to the angels, then why on earth is there no apostrophe there? if it belongs to one lovely angel, you'd want the signs at the park and the notes on the website to say Angel's Landing. or if a large contingent of angels shares this part of southern Utah, Angels' Landing. but we have neither of these.
so if the place doesn't belong to anyone... I can only presume that its name refers to some (perhaps ongoing) event, and that angels visit this ledge of red rock from time to time. there must have been angels landing there. or maybe there still are? or maybe that is just what you'd expect, and everyone is still waiting for the angels to land.
I suppose it's strange of me to think so much about the name of an 8-mile hiking trail.
there is a country music group called Edens Edge that gives my restless brain similar fodder for asking pedantic questions. do we have here an Edge within (and therefore metaphorically possessed by) Eden? why not then call it Eden's Edge? the alternative--what a face-value interpretation of the band's name's orthographic representation gives us, anyway--makes less sense. is there more than one Eden? and if so, how does a plural entity have one edge? is it some kind of border? a precipice? both? I just don't know. does anyone?
perhaps we could directly confront these country musicians and ask them. did they forget the apostrophe in their name? or are they being extra interesting just for pedants like me? does it matter?
Tuesday, March 6
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.)
Sunday, November 8
Sunday, October 4
the good news is that my roommate has a lovely, lovely scanner, and as of now I have a supply of new(er) sketches all ready to go. should last me several more weeks.
Thursday, December 21
zyx wv uts rqp
i've taken up, for my extracurricular christmas studying this year, the subject of typography.
somehow i'm not nearly as afraid of type design as i am of open source computer software. it isn't that surprising, i suppose. type design grows a little bit naturally out of my background as a technical writer and my secret otherlife as a wannabe designer. i already knew about serifs and roman faces, baselines and kerning and justification.
i've been reading Jan Tschichold and prowling the web for information on all the basics. counters, bowls, cross-strokes, terminals, descenders, hairlines--so much terminology, i'm never going to remember it all.
this may be the beginning of something. or it may be just another phase.
either way, should be fun.
somehow i'm not nearly as afraid of type design as i am of open source computer software. it isn't that surprising, i suppose. type design grows a little bit naturally out of my background as a technical writer and my secret otherlife as a wannabe designer. i already knew about serifs and roman faces, baselines and kerning and justification.
i've been reading Jan Tschichold and prowling the web for information on all the basics. counters, bowls, cross-strokes, terminals, descenders, hairlines--so much terminology, i'm never going to remember it all.
this may be the beginning of something. or it may be just another phase.either way, should be fun.
Friday, November 3
pull it out of the air
ever since i took that fateful webdesign class and the internet veritably chewed up my life, i've thought a small but persistent little thought, and it wants there to be more handwritten things in life.
the only trouble with handwritten things is they don't scale unless you do something funky and technical with them. i can't show anyone but the girl sitting next to me in church my little sacrament meeting doodles unless i get a scanner, image editing software, or at the very least a copy machine and a lot of envelopes. it's all gotta be so complicated.
that said, i'm glad i've had the experience i've had working with print media. as cool as the web stuff is, print stuff rocks. this is because you have more power. you control what happens to a thing when you print it. you hold it in your hands when it is born onto paper, you put it all together and glaze it with finishing touches before it gets shipped out to your audience. all the variables are in your court.
okay, not quite all the variables. printers are technology just as much as your computer monitor is. you have to deal with paper sizes and weights. there are constraints there too.
life is one big constraint. even with your little ballpoint pen and a ream of blank white 20# text, you've got restraints. you've got the gravity that won't let you write upside-down. you've got the edge of that 20# text. you've got the shape of your hand, the shape of the pen, the elbow of that girl sitting next to you in the way.
life comes in so many media flavors these days. a lot of it we hardly notice. i switch from using a stapler to flipping through a magazine to answering the telephone to clicking through the boring songs on pandora without really thinking about the profound interactive differences there are in each of those actions. there are so many ways to make things happen. i can throw the stapler at the wall. i can write an email to the powers that be and therein describe the finer points of my resignation. i can draw lines on paper. i can carve div tags into cyberspace.
so these people are blending print and web 2.0 technologies in cool ways: moo and 8020 publishing. i like it (yeah, despite my semi-anti-flickr attitude.)
it makes me wonder, what's next?
i'm very glad my curiosity will never die.
the only trouble with handwritten things is they don't scale unless you do something funky and technical with them. i can't show anyone but the girl sitting next to me in church my little sacrament meeting doodles unless i get a scanner, image editing software, or at the very least a copy machine and a lot of envelopes. it's all gotta be so complicated.
that said, i'm glad i've had the experience i've had working with print media. as cool as the web stuff is, print stuff rocks. this is because you have more power. you control what happens to a thing when you print it. you hold it in your hands when it is born onto paper, you put it all together and glaze it with finishing touches before it gets shipped out to your audience. all the variables are in your court.
okay, not quite all the variables. printers are technology just as much as your computer monitor is. you have to deal with paper sizes and weights. there are constraints there too.
life is one big constraint. even with your little ballpoint pen and a ream of blank white 20# text, you've got restraints. you've got the gravity that won't let you write upside-down. you've got the edge of that 20# text. you've got the shape of your hand, the shape of the pen, the elbow of that girl sitting next to you in the way.
life comes in so many media flavors these days. a lot of it we hardly notice. i switch from using a stapler to flipping through a magazine to answering the telephone to clicking through the boring songs on pandora without really thinking about the profound interactive differences there are in each of those actions. there are so many ways to make things happen. i can throw the stapler at the wall. i can write an email to the powers that be and therein describe the finer points of my resignation. i can draw lines on paper. i can carve div tags into cyberspace.
so these people are blending print and web 2.0 technologies in cool ways: moo and 8020 publishing. i like it (yeah, despite my semi-anti-flickr attitude.)
it makes me wonder, what's next?
i'm very glad my curiosity will never die.
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