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.

Two typeface links:

• 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).

Monday Linkage

• Bow down to the master: How to Read 462 Books in One Year. I feel like such an underachiever.
• The Book Cover Archive. Exactly what it says on the tin.
• Reason #1 why I'm happy being a crafter: "An evening gown that has champagne taste on a beer budget. Cheap champagne, but champagne nonetheless."
• Reason #2 why I'm happy being a crafter: Steal This Sweater - "stop making scarves; start making trouble."
• Reason #3 why I'm happy being a crafter. I only have the collar to go on my grey jumper and I'm taking the easy option.
• The Axis of Awesome: 4 Chords (youtube link). "The song that proves that all you need to be a pop star is four simple chords." Yes, The Crowdies' "Fall At Your Feet", A-ha's "Take On Me" and, er, Banjo Patterson's "Waltzing Matilda" are all the same song.
• Inauguration Day from Space. "The world’s highest-res Earth-imaging satellite zooms in on President Obama "
• "Cooking doesn't get TAFFA than this!" Yes, it's the Gregg Garbbler (also known as the MasterChef Automated Quote Generator). Will only make sense if you watch BBC's MasterChef (Other Half is a devotee). "God, you've got some big flavours, boy!"
• I recently got invited to Spotify and since I'm on the wrong side of thirty, I immediately began catching up with New Music That Kids Today Like (gosh!). Fleet Foxes are really lovely, Vampire Weekend don't do it for me and Lady Gaga leaves me absolutely cold. I'm so old. Spotify also has a vast collection of 80s Swedish boybands and Russian folk songs. Ask me how I know. Anyhow, I have seven Spotify invites for anybody in the UK, Estonia or Sweden wanting one. Leave a comment (your mail addy won't be published as per usual and I'll mail it to you).

Have a lovely Monday, everybody!

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).

Thoughts of a Dry Brain in a Dry Season.

"It's a shocking piece," [Miles] Hoffman says. "It's still startling to us today when we hear it, but it is not a confusing piece. It's compelling. We're hearing irregular rhythms, we're hearing instruments asked to go to the extremes of their capability, but we're also hearing patterns that we recognize, with pacing, contrast, fascinating harmonies, continuity — all the basic principles of what makes a piece of music work are all there.

I have treated myself to a concert ticket for one of my favourite pieces of classical music: Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring).

I have long been a convert to Modernism - by that I mean, that vast array of strange and deliberately disconcerting art forms which emerged in the Western part of the world around 1908-ish and which petered out towards the end of the 1930s. Shklovsky's definition of остранение (ostranenie or 'defamiliarisation') describes my favourite art works so splendidly: they unsettle the readers/listeners/spectators by forcing them to acknowledge the artifice of art (and thereby making a clean break with the naturalist tradition of art).

Kasimir Malevich's suprematist paintings (not pictured although the image on the left is by Malevich) and Gertrude Stein's marvellous Tender Buttons are great examples: Malevich seeks to figure out how to paint the very act of painting (and how to communicate the unnaturalness of this act to his audience): Stein plays with the building blocks of her trade - grammatical units - and attempts to uncover the act of making meaning. Stravinsky's ballet is not as ambitious and is vastly less subtle in its use of defamiliarisation - but his use of fertility rites ties in well with the Modernist preoccupation with primitivism and anthropology (Picasso, Ezra Pound, TS Eliot). Wwwwroaw.

So, yes, "I can connect / Nothing with nothing. / The broken fingernails of dirty hands / My people humble people who expect / Nothing." I'll be swept away once more.

Paper Cuts and Paper Cuttings

It's been a long day, so I will just point you to some people who do really weird, amazing, and beautiful things with paper and a pair of scissors: + Patrick Gannon - he reminds me of the visceral violence of the Brothers Grimm mixed with the Gothic fairytales of Angela Carter and the more outlandish aspects of Studio Ghibli. Scary and eerie. + Rob Ryan - 1950ish-inspired bright, simple shapes featuring quirky lettering. Poor page layout though (I don't like embedded tables). + Elsita - quite folksy, purposefully naive paper scultptures that remind me of 18th-19thC Russian/Eastern-European folk art. + Peter Callesen - paper installations preoccupied with the classic dichotomies of life/death, culture/nature etc. Stunningly executed.

Enjoy.

Cadder Excursion

The HarperCollins visit was a great success. They marketed the event as a chance to see original Peter Pan artwork and unseen letters from famous authors such as JRR Tolkien and Agatha Christie, but in reality we enjoyed the visit to the cartographic offices much more. We also had a chance to peek into the process of making dictionaries. Very cool, very interesting and very cheap because the on-site bookshop was closed. Boo. The Antonine Wall/the Cadder Fort? Underwhelming as the site was excavated in the 1930s and subsequently turned into a sand quarry during World War II. So we stood in the rain, looked across the Forth and Clyde canal and saw a bunch of trees. However, as the Antonine Wall now has been declared a World Heritage Site, we might get to see something a bit more involving in the future. We did learn that the Roughcastle fort in Falkirk is well-preserved and well worth a visit, so we might head up there at some point.

Finally, we spent some time at Cadder Parish Church which stands in the middle of a forest. There has been a church on site since the mid-12th century and although the church has been rebuilt and refurbished many times since, you could still see the passing of ages in the surroundings. Dave loves his stained glass windows and was thrilled to see stained glass windows featuring World War I tanks. I was more taken in by the graveyard and its odd open iron coffin.. It was used during the 19th c to deter grave robbers (who'd sell fresh bodies to the anatomy schools). You'd simply put the coffin on top of the grave, fill it with stones and just sit in a little waiting house nearby until you heard the unmistakable sound of men trying to remove stones from the iron coffin. The waiting house is still there -- it looks to be a favourite spot for the local foxes.

And what is this? Could this be a sighting of the increasingly common februarii ladius sweaterae? I believe this one is the organic Scottish Gray variant with mother-of-pearl features..

This photo was actually taken a day earlier during our bramble picking adventure. Bramble is the Scottish word for blackberry and we have had quite a few bramble crumbles lately. Yum, yum.