Gifted
This is the week of receiving gifts, it seems.
When Kirsten Marie visited, she offered to make me some bling out of materials we bought at The Bead Company. I don't wear much jewellery, but I do appreciate handmade things. And so a few weeks later these earrings arrived by post and I think they are very, very pretty. I'm not a Slytherin but I am a sucker for all things green and/or silvery. Thank you, Kirsten Marie!
And then Other Half gave me an abecedarium (of sorts) because he knows I love typography and lettering above most other things in life. And he got me a pop-up abecedarium! It's amazing. You can see how Marion Bataille's ABC3D works in this little YouTube video:
A Beautiful Day
It's going to be a beautiful day so the bluebirds sing.
I have booked myself a short, but much-needed flight home to Denmark in May. I need to spend time with the Danish part of myself, I have decided. Going back is always odd because it invariably ends up being a long series of meet-ups with everybody I have ever known in Denmark. I cannot remember the last time I spent a few hours in Copenhagen just, you know, hanging out with myself. I am not complaining. It just feels strange after having spent fifteen years in Copenhagen and suddenly the way I engage with my city is transformed. I think this is something most expats experience.
Linkage, then:
+ When I read "Glasgow Artist Restores Lost Mural" on the BBC website, I knew exactly who and what they were talking about. Wooh!
+ Cover Versions: "Classic records lost in time and format, remerged as Pelican books."
+ Speaking of which .. Pelican paperbacks. I used to own a lot of them.
+ Art-House Book Trailers. Just as vile as the name suggests.
+ CraftGawker. Look, be inspired, create.
+ This Is Not A Riot: An effective, non-violent response to riot police. (I miss going to demonstrations)
+ The Fall of the Spanish Hapsburgs, or why marrying your first cousin is a bad, bad idea. See also this pictorial guide to the Spanish Hapsburgs. Ouch.
+ As seen everywhere on the web: Uncomfortable plot summaries. To wit: "Groundhog Day: Misanthropic creep exploits space/time anomaly to stalk coworker."
+ And as seen on John's blog: "Over the weekend, sharp-eyed Cassini-watchers on unmannedspaceflight.com noticed a series of way-cool photos on the mission's raw images website." Mindblowingly cool photos.
I finished reading The Time-Traveller's Wife. It was rather "girly". I have also begun yet another knitting project: Geno in duck's-egg-blue milk-cotton. It's rather lovely and very summery.
Free Books? Free Typefaces Too.
Thanks to Kim, I discovered BookMooch yesterday (I'm slow sometimes). The basic idea is that you compile a list of books you like to give away, people who have that book on their wishlist are then given the option to request the book, you send the book to them and you are given points you can spend on your own requests or "mooches".
I signed up around 7.30pm and by 8pm I had already given away my first book. Two hours later another book had been claimed. I'm struggling a bit to find books I want to put on my wishlist - mostly because I have some fantastic secondhand bookshops here - but I'm sure I will cope. It's a great idea and you can even donate towards charity.
If you are on BookMooch too, my username is (unsurprisingly) karie bookish. Get in touch.
- what font are you? I'm Times New Roman - "timesless and classy", apparently, although I prefer my own interpretation of "designed in the 1930s".
- My arty friends Gabi and Phil have set up a blog where they are giving away self-designed typefaces once a week. You might also want to check out Gabi's homepage. She does some very cool stuff (and we are very chuffed to have some of her artwork in our home).
Into the Woods
Yes, I know I said stuff about knitting with grey wool. The phrases "never again", "not in the winter months" and "I need colour!!!!!" may have passed my lips.
But I've changed my mind.
The pattern is Norwegian Woods by Sivia Harding. Earlier this year I knitted a few repeats of it in the gawjuss Old Maiden Aunt silk/merino yarn I have stashed away. I was flippant, made a few too many mistakes and ripped it all out. Now I'm knitting the shawl in Snældan's 1-ply wool (Faroese wool mixed with a touch of Falkland Islands wool - and spun on the Faroe Islands!). I'll blog more about the shawl as it progresses.
As you can see from the photo, it is snowing in Glasgow today. South-east England has had a couple of inches of snow and they are panicking. Silly people (sayeth this Scandinavian gal) For once I don't mind the snow so much and it made for a great photo opportunity this morning. Right now I'm still seeing ginormous snowflakes hurling towards the ground.
A couple of links (because my links folder is bursting at its seams).
+ I really want this t-shirt.
+ Is there anything Barack Obama cannot do? Well, I'm not too hot on his poetry. Dare I say it? I write better poetry than him? I do.
+ Great photos of London from above (thanks, Molly)
+ A bit more heavy-going than I usually get here: We Who Are Left Behind: Poetry as Testimony in Derrida and Celan.
+ Amazing Flickr photo-stream: Lars Daniel. He makes me miss Copenhagen even more.
+ Type as Image. It does wot it sez on teh tin.
Have a lovely day - with or without snow.
Visual Words
In my handwritten note I alluded briefly to the idea of handwriting possessing "presence" and printing having only "absence". In its infancy printing was known as "artificial writing" - the implication being that handwriting = natural, printing = artifice, obviously. I once messed about with ideas concerning printing and how English as a literary language emerged post-Gutenberg (and Gutenberg's cronies now often relegated to footnotes): poets like George Herbert would write poems which use the relative fixity of the printed page etc etc etc. Some people hold forth that the digital age provides an even greater absence between the Scribe and the Word - a form of hyper-absence which forms an even wider gap between word and meaning. I suspect my own hesitation towards e-books must spring from a peculiar awareness of this aporia. I think.
Blah, blah, blah.
And so I came across Des Imagistes: An online version of Ezra Pound's anthology of Imagist poetry dating back to 1914. Contributors include well-known modernists like James Joyce and William Carlos Williams as well as the less-remembered (but equally important) Richard Aldington and F.S. Flint.
The website was created as part of a course at the MIT and the project team explain their choice of design:
This website uses a font stack of "Futura, Tahoma, Arial, sans-serif." Futura was designed between 1924 and 1926 by Paul Renner, and while Renner was not associated with the Bauhaus school of design, Futura is frequently used in connection with Bauhaus-related topics. The Bauhaus school was founded two years after Des Imagistes' publication, and its aesthetics harmonize well with the nature of imagistic poetry
Of course I thought of Typesetting The Waste Land which also explore the intersections of poetry, modernism, typography and the internet. I spotted a typo quite quickly and I am certainly not sure that the designer needed to highlight specific passages ("The Burial of the Dead") or render certain elements in different colours ("A Game of Chess"), but as the design pulls away from both the classic Faber and Faber layout (I'd scan a few lines but as per usual my copy's completely ruined) and the standard anthology versions (wherein its typesetting follows all the other texts and you get footnotes at the bottom of the page), it does strikes me as potentially interesting. I just wish the designer had chosen a less .. interpretative .. layout.
In case this sort of thing tickles your fancy - i.e. modernist poetry and print culture - let me recommend Jerome J. McGann's Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism (and I wouldn't object to getting it for Christmas, sigh).
Comic Sans?
A sans-serif face walks into the street and is hit by a Swiss Modernist truck. The carnage is grotesk... but you know, akzidenz happen.
Typographunnies. Seriously.
Webs We Weave
How badly do I want this uppercase scarf? Pretty badly, I tell you. The scarf led me on a typographic journey of the net which yielded new interesting sites: the & Blog, Bembo's Zoo which is seriously cool, FontStruct which lets you design your own (very basic) typefaces, and, er, The Swedish Furniture Name Generator.
Hey, I can't be all arty and intellectual all the time!
How about A.S. Byatt on textiles, textures and texts, then? It marries all my loves: books, texts, literary theory and, ahem, yarn.
Sleeping Beauty pricks her finger on a spindle, the Lady of Shalott is entwined in thread, Silas Marner is enclosed in his loom - why have spinning and sewing so often been associated with danger and isolation? (..) We think of our lives - and of stories - as spun threads, extended and knitted or interwoven with others into the fabric of communities, or history, or texts.
Brain Bling
How good are you at recognising fonts? I got a measly 24 right out of 34. At least I still know my Helvetica from my Arial. It's all in the curves, baby.
I have actually been watching quite a bit of TV lately. BBC4 is having a rather funky Medieval Season, so I've been lapping up programmes on Thomas Aquinas, Abelard and the aformentioned Stephen Fry & the Gutenberg Press (which was pr0ntastic, incidentally). I get to flap my arms around excitedly and repeatably which is really nice. TV, I forgive you your multitude of sins when you indulge me like this.
Finally, I'd like to thank everybody who asked for my mother. She was discharged from hospital on Tuesday and is back home again. It is a relief.
They Used Wine Presses, You Know
Me mam's apparently doing a bit better. It's slightly strange to be in another country and not being able to rush to the hospital.
Somebody at BBC is my new friend. Stephen Fry & the Gutenberg Press is showing on BBC4 tonight so whoever greenlighted that show gets to be my friend. Yes I'll sit there with popcorn shouting at the telly whenever they say something vaguely incorrect (or get too carried away with the entire 'cultural revolution' - too Eisenstein and not enough Johns for my taste. I just know they'll fly on the wings of the "printing press as agent for change" thing and there are so many problems with that idea..). Oh, my heart be still.
Related-ish: two ways of debasing/defacing/recycling books (delete as appropriate):
+ Nicholas Jones - Book Sculptor
+ How to make a handbag out of a book
I'm not sure I approve.
Fragments
I have my book! I also have dirt on my forehead from when I blacked-out in the middle of a path and somehow avoided the broken glass bits. And in a minute or so I will have a cup of coffee right next to me. Life is so exciting!
Confession: I have a weakness for very silly Ben Stiller films. Dodgeball and Zoolander, particularly tickle my funny bone. So, when I saw the trailer for Tropic Thunder, I felt compelled to spread the news: think Apocalypse Now but with Ben Stiller as an action hero, Steve Coogan as the director and, er, Robert Downey Jr as an Australian Oscar-winning ah-k-tor who takes method acting to extremes .. It'll probably be utterly naff but I like being utterly naff at times. Sue me.
Okay, less naff entertainment: do judge a book by its cover. Aww..