February is a good month
Feb. 19th, 2007 08:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
philenaAll sorts of interesting things are happening! First, I'm leaving CCI (although, chronologically that will be taking place last) at the end of the month, which is not quite overdue, but pretty close. I don't find my work particularly interesting, and the internship isn't going anywhere. Also, working six days a week is ridiculous, and I have no time to do things that are important to me--like calligraphy, for example, or ice skating. Ice skating I haven't done for years (literally--I haven't skated since the winter of my second year at college), and when Daniel and I were watching the All Star basketball game last night, the Four Continents figure skating championship was on, so we flipped back and forth during commercial breaks. And I didn't know any of these people! Kimmie Meissner's name, for example, I believe I heard once or twice as I lost track of figure skating, but when did she become the U.S. national champion? And Alissa Czisny was charming, but where did she come from? At any rate, the World Championships are March 22-25, and I have no intention of missing them! Friends owning televisions, this means I will be asking favors of you, assuming I can't find a bar where they will be showing them. And even though Oakland and Berkeley have a great many "progressive" drinking establishments, I find it extremely unlikely that they will be progressive enough that they will show figure skating.
Calligraphy also I plan to jump back into as soon as I have some time to myself. On Wednesday there was a book fair at Berkeley (which I went to instead of doing laundry after work), and although most of the books were artists' books, with cutesy avant-garde pretentious text and beautiful bindings, there was one table with a book in beautiful calligraphy, combining poems by Pablo Neruda in English and Spanish with bizarre abstractish paintings. The paintings were paired with abstract swirls of lettering, which did not impress me, although the calligrapher made a good case for the mirroring of the form of the letters with the form of the pictures. Some of the stuff he said was pretty silly* but the actual text that he copied out neatly was just beautiful, and we chatted about the types of pens he used and the difficulty of preparing pens from quills** even though the work that results is so much better, and (when he learned that I'm entirely self-taught) the need for a teacher and the availability of lessons in Berkeley. As it turns out, this fellow, Thomas Ingmire, is something of a hot-shot in the calligraphy world, as I learned when I went to another book fair in San Francisco on Saturday. This one was much bigger, and I was mainly drawn there by the advertised panel that would be discussing "Calligraphy: the State of the Art, the State of the Craft." He ended up being one of the people sitting on the panel, but the actual conversation was so ridiculous that Daniel and I left after ten or fifteen minutes. I mean, really, how is it helpful to hear someone blather on about "When you look at this text, you just feel so much anger, and anger is a feeling that lends patterns to life, and that's really what I find important about the work."?*** Ingmire was not quite as silly, but he mainly talked about a talk he had given somewhere else, and none of it was very interesting.
So I wandered away and spent most of my time in a stall that sold leaves of manuscripts and books of hours. There were signs everywhere reassuring people that all of the leaves were acquired separately, and none of the books were taken apart to be sold in pieces, which was very nice, and the selection was magnificent, including some lovely leaves that were less than $100 (and some that were much, much more). There was a leaf from the Gutenberg bible ($55,000), and a beautiful old bible, about 8.5 X 11 X 2, which weighed 14 pounds because it was printed in gold. There were some lovely old folios from the 12th century, some written in the most beautiful Carolingian minuscule, and, of course, tons and tons of breviaries and pages from books of hours. I thought about asking the fellow running the stall, who was speaking very knowledgeably about everything in it, whether his dealership needed an intern, but then I saw that it was based in Ohio, and decided that that that would probably not be feasible.
Another stall that interested me was the Friends of Calligraphy stall, which is a non-profit in San Francisco that offers classes and workshops, and exhibitions for its members' work, and membership is only $36 annually. Thomas Ingmire, in fact is offering a class in April, which I might even take. It would be the first calligraphy class I've taken, after having practiced it for 10 years! I occasionally have little fantasies about showing this fellow some of my work and having him be amazed by my raw, untutored talent, and taking me as an apprentice, but to be honest, I don't like much of his experimental, modern-type stuff, and it seems that the state of the art and the state of the craft these days don't allow much medieval-style conservatism. For that you go to the Society for Creative Anachronism, take on a phony name, and write (beautifully illuminated) phony patents of nobility. And that's not really what I'm interested in either.
In other news Daniel and I have discovered a few new restaurants. Samovar, in the Yerba Buena gardens, is a lovely little tea place, where you can get all sorts of tea services. Daniel and I went there last weekend for Russian tea service (we sat next to a group of Russians who looked to be having a Japanese tea service), and have plans to go back and inspect the Chinese, Indian, and Japanese tea services. It's a good place to take one's parents when showing them the sights downtown. Another good place to take the parents (or rather, to have the parents take one) is to the Chez Panisse cafe, which is a nice, upscale restaurant, but not as mind-boggling swanky as the actual restaurant downstairs. Daniel and I went for our 3-year anniversary (we went last Monday, but the actual date is February ninth) and it was very jolly.
What is more, this weekend we are going back to Tahoe! I want to go once more before I forget everything I learned in January when I had my lesson, and because it's fun. And I guess that's all I have to say about that. I like skiing!
*"The artist has been working with the same model for 20 years and his paintings are always a real inspiration to me." Since one had to squint and tilt one's head even to see that the form was supposed to be human, I found the idea that the paintings used a model somewhat risible, and my views on calligraphy are a bit too conservative to admit the possibility of using abstract art as inspiration for calligraphy, because the calligraphy that results (as in the case of this artist) is too abstract for me to really consider legitimate.
**He used to teach about a 9-month class in San Francisco, wherein he introduced cutting quills in the beginning, and at the end only about 4% of his students were comfortable using them.
***That's not quite what the woman said, because what she did say made so little sense that I had no general meaning to carry from my ears to my brain to reproduce on this page. So that quote is sort of an amalgam of various sillinesses that came out of her mouth, and the result probably means as much as what she did actually say.
Calligraphy also I plan to jump back into as soon as I have some time to myself. On Wednesday there was a book fair at Berkeley (which I went to instead of doing laundry after work), and although most of the books were artists' books, with cutesy avant-garde pretentious text and beautiful bindings, there was one table with a book in beautiful calligraphy, combining poems by Pablo Neruda in English and Spanish with bizarre abstractish paintings. The paintings were paired with abstract swirls of lettering, which did not impress me, although the calligrapher made a good case for the mirroring of the form of the letters with the form of the pictures. Some of the stuff he said was pretty silly* but the actual text that he copied out neatly was just beautiful, and we chatted about the types of pens he used and the difficulty of preparing pens from quills** even though the work that results is so much better, and (when he learned that I'm entirely self-taught) the need for a teacher and the availability of lessons in Berkeley. As it turns out, this fellow, Thomas Ingmire, is something of a hot-shot in the calligraphy world, as I learned when I went to another book fair in San Francisco on Saturday. This one was much bigger, and I was mainly drawn there by the advertised panel that would be discussing "Calligraphy: the State of the Art, the State of the Craft." He ended up being one of the people sitting on the panel, but the actual conversation was so ridiculous that Daniel and I left after ten or fifteen minutes. I mean, really, how is it helpful to hear someone blather on about "When you look at this text, you just feel so much anger, and anger is a feeling that lends patterns to life, and that's really what I find important about the work."?*** Ingmire was not quite as silly, but he mainly talked about a talk he had given somewhere else, and none of it was very interesting.
So I wandered away and spent most of my time in a stall that sold leaves of manuscripts and books of hours. There were signs everywhere reassuring people that all of the leaves were acquired separately, and none of the books were taken apart to be sold in pieces, which was very nice, and the selection was magnificent, including some lovely leaves that were less than $100 (and some that were much, much more). There was a leaf from the Gutenberg bible ($55,000), and a beautiful old bible, about 8.5 X 11 X 2, which weighed 14 pounds because it was printed in gold. There were some lovely old folios from the 12th century, some written in the most beautiful Carolingian minuscule, and, of course, tons and tons of breviaries and pages from books of hours. I thought about asking the fellow running the stall, who was speaking very knowledgeably about everything in it, whether his dealership needed an intern, but then I saw that it was based in Ohio, and decided that that that would probably not be feasible.
Another stall that interested me was the Friends of Calligraphy stall, which is a non-profit in San Francisco that offers classes and workshops, and exhibitions for its members' work, and membership is only $36 annually. Thomas Ingmire, in fact is offering a class in April, which I might even take. It would be the first calligraphy class I've taken, after having practiced it for 10 years! I occasionally have little fantasies about showing this fellow some of my work and having him be amazed by my raw, untutored talent, and taking me as an apprentice, but to be honest, I don't like much of his experimental, modern-type stuff, and it seems that the state of the art and the state of the craft these days don't allow much medieval-style conservatism. For that you go to the Society for Creative Anachronism, take on a phony name, and write (beautifully illuminated) phony patents of nobility. And that's not really what I'm interested in either.
In other news Daniel and I have discovered a few new restaurants. Samovar, in the Yerba Buena gardens, is a lovely little tea place, where you can get all sorts of tea services. Daniel and I went there last weekend for Russian tea service (we sat next to a group of Russians who looked to be having a Japanese tea service), and have plans to go back and inspect the Chinese, Indian, and Japanese tea services. It's a good place to take one's parents when showing them the sights downtown. Another good place to take the parents (or rather, to have the parents take one) is to the Chez Panisse cafe, which is a nice, upscale restaurant, but not as mind-boggling swanky as the actual restaurant downstairs. Daniel and I went for our 3-year anniversary (we went last Monday, but the actual date is February ninth) and it was very jolly.
What is more, this weekend we are going back to Tahoe! I want to go once more before I forget everything I learned in January when I had my lesson, and because it's fun. And I guess that's all I have to say about that. I like skiing!
*"The artist has been working with the same model for 20 years and his paintings are always a real inspiration to me." Since one had to squint and tilt one's head even to see that the form was supposed to be human, I found the idea that the paintings used a model somewhat risible, and my views on calligraphy are a bit too conservative to admit the possibility of using abstract art as inspiration for calligraphy, because the calligraphy that results (as in the case of this artist) is too abstract for me to really consider legitimate.
**He used to teach about a 9-month class in San Francisco, wherein he introduced cutting quills in the beginning, and at the end only about 4% of his students were comfortable using them.
***That's not quite what the woman said, because what she did say made so little sense that I had no general meaning to carry from my ears to my brain to reproduce on this page. So that quote is sort of an amalgam of various sillinesses that came out of her mouth, and the result probably means as much as what she did actually say.
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no subject
Date: 2007-02-20 01:41 pm (UTC)I went to a huge amazing book fair in Cairo. There were stalls and stalls of used books and I purchased a lot of "racy" novels from the 60s, with names like "A Thief of Love" and "A Girl with a Past", it was so much fun.
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Date: 2007-02-21 02:18 am (UTC)