Reading the Past

The economic recession has claimed many victims. The first phase saw people losing jobs, companies going bankrupt and banks folding. Experts say that this first wave is over. Signs of economic growth are visible in the financial sectors. We are now living through the second phase: spending cuts have to be made. This is all very textbook Keynesian economic theory and I recommend reading up on John Maynard Keynes (quite apart from being a significant economist, Keynes was also part of the Bloomsbury group alongside Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster and Lyndham Lewis) if most of the current financial news leaves you confused. Spending cuts hurt. Before Christmas, many of my physicist friends were shocked when spending cuts to the tune of £115m were made in the science research sector. When I graduated from university in Denmark some seven or eight years ago, I saw what huge spending cuts will do to scientific research. It was not pretty. My then-department went from being autonomous with at least six new PhD students every year to being yoked together with five other subjects and get one PhD student every other year. The departmental restructuring made for some interesting cross-pollination, but also for disastrous academic results.

And so I learn that Kings College London may have to shut down its Palaeography department in order to meet budget targets. No restructuring, no "let us marry you to Library Science (however awkward) or maybe History or how about Archaeology?" and no shuffling the cards. I am not just saddened. I am shocked. KCL is the only place in the UK to have a Palaeography department and, I believe, even the only place in Europe.

Palaeography, the study of ancient handwriting, may sound like a very obscure subject - and really it is an obscure subject - but it is also incredibly important to scholars. Printing being a very recent invention, most available written material was done by hand and scholars need to be able to decipher handwriting. You get different writing systems (think Cuneiform), different alphabets (think how different the Phoenician alphabet looks to the Latin alphabet) and then different ways of interpreting the alphabets through writing. Pre-printing, many European kingdoms would have their own way of combining and forming letters - Johanna Drucker is particularly good on this, if you want to read more - and some handwriting is only intelligible to specialists who have studied handwriting traditions of a particular area (South Germany, for instance). So much material is now being made available by library specialists, but now I wonder who will be around to read, understand and disseminate this material.

(If I had know that Palaeography existed as a discipline when I started university, I would have ended up in a very different place to now. As is, most of my knowledge is filtered through print culture, so I apologise for any glaring mistakes)

Linkage

Link dump day! + Europe, Explained: a nice map which summarises it all for confused non-Europeans. + Puppets need puppets too. + Vegetarian-friendly roadkill carpet + The prettiest yarn shop in Denmark? I like my yarn shops over-stuffed, but if you like minimalism.. + Sweden has its own Etsy-like site. + This is a real film: Tiptoes stars Matthew McConaughey as a "normal-sized dwarf", Gary Oldman as his, er, dwarf-sized dwarf brother and Kate Beckinsale as the love interest. Peter Dinkdale features as a a crazy French radical dwarf. I kid you not. + 13 Alien Languages You Can Actually Read. + This is what happens when knitting gets serious. Like, REALLY serious. Sock Summit 2009. Check out the graphics. + Maia Hirasawa: The Worrying Kind. A stunning, stunning cover where I don't think you need to know the original to appreciate it. + Jar Jar Binks salad + British Library's treasures. You could spend an entire afternoon just faffing about (well, I could). + Field Notes. I covet. I covet badly.

Behaving as the Wind Behaves

Let the Right One In was a much better film than book. Everything which was overegging the book-pudding had been removed in the film: neverending subplots, irrelevant and distracting characters, and immense wordiness. The film was sparse, beautifully shot, and intense. While not the masterpiece it has been made out to be, the film was excellent. Also, it is always a joy to see a horror film where the real horror is found in everyday life rather than a supernatural monster. Recommended. (Also: a joy to watch a Swedish film. Swedish is such a beautiful, poetic language and I adored the film's cheeky use of traditional Swedish symbols such as the Tre Kronor towel)

(Also, also:  who plays Oskar's father? I swear he looks familiar but the actor's not listed in any credits I can find?)

Before the obligatory knitting update, a quick print culture geek link. Earliest known dust jacket found at Oxford. I might come back to that and explain why it's very cool.

Knitting, then. I am about 4 inches away from finishing the back of my Geno. I have a sort-of deadline for my cardigan early next month and it looks unlikely that I will make it. A 4-ply lace cardigan on 3mm needles in less than three weeks? I'm knitting like a woman possessed, but I am already behind schedule. Due to the small-ish needle size, my fingers tense up if I knit for more than three hours in a row. Also, yesterday my right shoulder began playing up (to the extent that my back started giving me problems) and while I am not sure if it is knitting-related, it does slow down the progress of Geno. Irritating.

Of course it does not mean I haven't begun pondering the next summer knit and I'm leaning heavily towards Flicker from Rowan Studio 15. Although not in beige.

Title: on the topic of horror.. well.

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:

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).