Calligraphy: foiled!

• January 2nd, 2006 • 1 Comments • reading, type •

I don’t think I have ever been so frustrated trying to self-teach something. Recently I purchased a book on calligraphy so I could figure out how to make my letters a bit more respectable. I pulled out my little flat-tipped markers, and some ink nibs and got to work. The book showed how many strokes each letter was to have, what direction I was supposed to pull the pen and what angle to hold the pen at. After about half an hour of ink spits, wiggly ascenders/descenders and outright stupid-looking letters, I figured out the problem.

I’m left-handed.

Honestly! It dawned on me that I had just spend fifteen dollars on a book that was instantly useless. I’m somewhat ambidextrous, but trying out my right hand didn’t really help matters any; plus my brain started to hurt. I feel like there should’ve been a big disclaimer on the front of the book that said, “WARNING: FOR RIGHT-HANDED PERSONS ONLY.” Despite the fifteen buck setback, I at least have a very valuable question to ask should I ever wish to take a calligraphy course. “Do you teach lefties?”

Presents!

• December 26th, 2005 • 0 Comments • reading, supplies •

Christmas presents were very nice to me this year! After years of trying to convince relatives that office supplies are plenty to keep me satisfied, my future-nephews kindly loaded up a box of markers, sticky notes and glue. Little darlings!

My mother gave me a surprising present. For a few years my RSS feeds have included a page-a-day from Leonardo da Vinci’s Notebooks. Every day a different page is featured, many talking about art techniques. (I understand that da Vinci can be lumped into one of the more “Coffee Table Book” artists, which is a damn shame, because he deserves a closer look.) Each page I find interesting: as da Vinci describes techniques in clear and simple terms concepts I’ve seen book after book for. Example: “Perspective is nothing else than the seeing of an object behind a sheet of glass, smooth and quite transparent, on the surface of which all things may be marked that are behind this glass; these things approach the point of the eye in pyramids, and these pyramids are cut by the said glass.”

Thank you, Captain Obvious.

Ok, ok, that was rude. Perspective really wasn’t so obvious in da Vinci’s time, as evidenced by the large number of bizarre-looking buildings painted “way back when.” It was da Vinci that helped to clear all that up for us, so that perspective is obvious, thank God, and we don’t have to go about figuring complex mathematical formulas to build cubes.

Speaking of obvious, I’ve digressed! Yes yes, I’ve been reading the Notebooks which are a wealth of information. Sadly, as noted on the RSS feed site, while you can get a FREE version of the Notebooks from Project Gutenberg there are no pictures. My wonderful mother gave me a glorious, hardcover version of the notebooks: with pictures!

YEE-HAW!

The DeGolyer Library

• February 7th, 2005 • 0 Comments • reading, texas •

Today was quite productive! As mentioned previously, I’ve been doing docent work for the DeGolyer House at the Dallas Arboretum. Valentine’s Day this year, the docents are having a meeting and it was requested of me to find some love letters between Everette and Nell DeGolyer. Peter Maxson directed me to the The DeGolyer Library at SMU in Dallas, Texas. Whotta day!

First off, I started rummaging through boxes of correspondence between Everette and Nell DeGolyer. The letters begin when both were nineteen years old, and continue until Everette’s untimely death. Of particular interest were the letters written between the young couple before marriage. Only once was my eyebrow raised; the majority of the correspondence was “passionately polite.” The sheer volume of correspondence, business agreements, diaries and other materials was un-BELIEVABLE! Fortunate for me, I was able to see the restricted rooms in the library. Most impressive was a room which I estimate to be approximately 15×15 with ten-foot ceilings. It was entirely filled with shelves containing sorted file boxes filled with papers; many of them belonging to Mr. and Mrs. DeGolyer. Don’t think I am exaggerating: when I say filled, I mean filled. Boxes, from ceiling to floor, wall to wall, with only space for a person to walk between the stacks. IN-credible. I can most accurately equate it to that scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark at the end where they pack the Ark away in a box in a warehouse. The space was smaller, but the voluminous amount of material is most comparable. That room only scraped the surface, by the way. I was most inspired by a card-catalogue created by Everett DeGolyer Jr., which was used in documenting his vast collection of railroad photographs. I will address THAT topic in a later post as my artistic inklings have been revved up again.

Lunch was with Russell Martin, the library’s director, and Ann Peterson, curator of photographs. Both were most gracious (they bought me lunch!) and highly informative. My time in the library was from ten in the morning to three in the afternoon - time I feel was well spent. Honestly I can’t wait to return to continue burrowing through boxes.

* * *

Plunging through so many documents today made me realize how ethereal electronic mediums truly are. I realize that yes, the amount of time spent archiving electronic documents consumes a deal of time and money; not to mention the longer “shelf-life” for electronic documents.

However, take a family starting out in the 21st century. A young couple courting e-mails and instant messages each other. It is incredibly easy to lost/delete all items documenting the beginnings of a relationship. The couple starts a family. Baby photos and videos are done digitally and are never printed out; correspondence between family members and new parents are just as easily lost. Business transactions, personal journals, music collections and so forth are purely digital. In effect, there is no “real” documentation of the family’s existence.

I pondered this upon finding numerous receipts and correspondence between businesses and the like in the DeGolyer files. A physical object helps to solidify a person’s existence in another’s mind. It is the difference between thinking “I love you” about another person and actually saying the words to their face. I wonder, how much more concrete was a relationship like Nell and Everette’s due to their massive amount of letter writing? I noted that in each telegram, note and letter that they always signed out with “Love”.

It has been my experience in email correspondence that there is a severe lack of formalities. Never once has anyone addressed me as “Dear Olivia”; much less thought of using capital letters. It really becomes more of an amorphous conversation in delayed time than a solid collection of thoughts and ideas. The biggest complaint of cyberspace communication I’ve heard is about the lack of communicating emotion. This irks me; people have been communicating emotions to each other for thousands of years through writing; what about writing in cyberspace has changed this? I suggest that it would be an effort to “keep up”. The sense of time when writing an email is rushed. Hurry hurry! Must get this to Bob in marketing ASAP! Cyberspace commands one to do it NOW.

Hmm. . .sounds like a paper in the works here. . .