Sure it’s touristy, but how do you NOT take that shot when it’s right there in front of you?
Typecasting at the Plantin-Moretus Museum
One of them many incredible places we visited during last week’s whistlestop tour of Holland and Belgium was the extraordinary Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp. (Flickr it.) From the world’s two oldest printing presses to the incredible array or original type punches and old books, it’s a mother lode of treasures and treats.
We were guided through the museum in the morning by Guy Hutsebaut, who gave us a great talk about the materials and techniques involved in handcasting metal type.
Ultrasound
Wow, that was a bad idea. I posted a sample image of the typeface I’ve been working on, but I looked at it for a few seconds and realized it looks really, really shitty on screen. It’s slowly — sloooooooooowly — coming together, at least in print, but there’s nothing like a fresh view to send you back to the drawing board. Learning is hard!
(But at least I did really well on my first big essay, so I’m not a total fuck-up.)
Essay Feedback
We’re finally getting feedback on the essays we completed back in January, drawing a long period of uncertainty to a conclusion. I haven’t done any kind of academic writing in quite a long time, and considering the rather modest expectations placed on writing for people in art programs in the States, it might be said that I’ve never done any serious academic writing.
It was hard just to choose a topic for the essay. It was suggested that it should be no less an effort than a dissertation, just restricted to about 4,000 words. that’s more than I’ve written at one time before, but still short enough to demand a pretty tight focus for a topic. I finally settled on an overview of Monotype’s 4-line system for setting math in hot metal, a technique they introduced back in the 50s to try and automate the setting of math a bit more than had been possible before. I knew I wanted to do something about math so I could make a little headway on my dissertation topic, and the more I read back in the Fall the more it seemed that everything happening in the early and mid 20th century came down to Monotype. I had a hunch that whatever Monotype made available had a huge effect on how people expected math to look ever since, so I wanted to see what their type for math was all about.
I started worrying that it would be hard to write enough, but after a lot of research at St. Bride, in Spur H, and in Special Collections, and a couple of invaluable demos of hot-metal equipment (first by David Bolton at the Alembic Press, and then by Mick Stocks here in the department) I began to realize that I easily had enough for a full dissertation and would have to struggle to present it concisely enough for the essay. I would have to explain the basics of hot-metal composition clearly enough to make it clear what was different about the 4-line method, and I would also have to analyze the new version of Times New Roman that was introduced to work with 4-line math. The topic was basically a history, and it was a struggle to find something original to say. It would have been easy enough to make suppositions, but it was a lot herder to arrange the facts in a way that set up a final conclusion.
In the end it turned out well. I certainly wasn’t convinced of that, but Gerry’s feedback started out with: “This was a real pleasure.” He thought there were a couple of details that could have used elaboration (more illustration of how character widths were controlled in the caster, more primary-source reactions from customers who used the 4-line system) but on the whole he though I did a good job of presenting the facts, and he liked that I went beyond just the technical details and concluded some things about the business decisions at play and why Monotype went for an evolutionary solution rather than a revolutionary one. He also said that he was very curious about some ideas I threw in at the end about how digital typesetting took off in other directions, and that’s good, since that’s basically what my dissertation will be all about. “Publishable” was probably the best word that came up during the feedback, which was gratifying.
The whole thing can be read here, if you’re nerdy enough to be curious.
Slip It In
Every now and then certain pieces of music will catch me unawares and hit me with an onslaught of memories that had been packed away for a while. Usually, the culprit will be a song that I had one of the mix tapes I thrived on during high school. Like with most teenagers, I guess, music was a huge part of my life back then. It was a way to choose and declare some kind of identity and tribal association. It was a litmus test to see who was on your wavelength or not. It was a complement to heady adolescent emotion. I spent so many hours listening to music then — on my long commute between Staten Island and the Upper East Side, hanging around with friends listening to each other’s albums, and just hanging out alone in my room (probably sulking or pining away for one thing or another, since I was a teenager). Hearing a random track from that time can dredge up exactly the feel of the moment in the most vivid ways, especially when it takes me back to moments I’d forgotten about.
I’d downloaded a bunch of tracks a while ago without looking at what the batch included, and I’ve been slowly working my way through the bunch while I sit at my desk working at night. So I’m sitting there tonight polishing up a few letters (I’ve got 26 lowercase and 9 uppercase so far, if you’re curious) when Slip It in by Black Flag comes on. Wham! A flood of heady, hormone-fueled teenage memory comes flooding back. Slip It In was on one of the earlier mix tapes — number 4, I think, of the 120 or so I’d made by the time I gave up cassettes in the late 90s — and was probably taped off of WSIA, the college radio station on Staten Island. I listened to this particular mix a lot.
Actually, I listened to Slip It In more than the rest of the mix. In a way that only a closeted homo with a neurotic flair for being a goody-two-shoes can really pull off, I didn’t really tap into my churning hormones until I was well into my teens. By the time I finally discovered the simple, intense pleasures of pulling my own pud, my whole sense of sex and self was already deeply mixed up.
For me, Slip It In was like a thunderclap of sex. The whole pace and tone of the song is about sex, and not the polite kind. My first really intense orgasms came while listening to this song over and over, getting off on the sound and the images I put to them. (And I didn’t even know that Henry Rollins was monster hot yet.) What’s fucked up, though, is that I could imagine what I wanted so intensely without actually realizing it. When I was horny, I would think about all these cute New Wave girls I had crushes on — you, like I was supposed to — but it didn’t take long before my pulse was racing and my dick was throbbing to images of wiry punk rock boys in leather jackets and combat boots. If you want to know how fucked up it is to be in the closet, that’s it: happily jerking off to one thing for years without ever even acknowledging it to yourself. And man, did I know some hot punk rock boys when I was in high school and college. So many wasted opportunities! It would have been a lot easier for me, the girls I dated, and probably everyone all around if I had just been able to figure out why that stuff kept popping into my head when I let myself go all those afternoons in my room.
(You can watch the video here, but it really doesn’t do the song justice. In fact, if I had seen the video back then I doubt the song would have become so erotically charged for me.)
My Time of Night
Unlike Sky Masterson, I’m not much of a night owl. I am a big fan of cities, though, and my favorite time to see a city is the middle of the night. I like the play of shadow and artificial light. I like seeing what spaces designed for lots of people look like when they’re empty. I like the stillness. When you know a city’s rhythms during the day, it’s almost magical to see it at night. Sometimes it’s not a good magic necessarily — sometimes it’s like an evil curse of drunkards and litter — but it’s usually quite lovely.
Through a wacky series of logistical mishaps, I went into London last night but my plans for lodging fell through and I found myself having to kill time until the morning train. (Of course, the joke was on me when I discovered that there are trains running all through the night.) I decided to take a late-night walking tour and look for interesting pictures to take and get a feeling for London’s other side.
Even during the day London’s curious, crazy-quilt layout of tiny streets, back alleys, mews, and side passages leads to a lot of serendipitous discoveries, and they’re even more curious at night. Granted, I avoided the darker alleys and passageways, a little too haunted by visions of Dickensian ruffians in every shadow, but there was still plenty to see. For one thing, the main drags of Soho and the West End are filled with even more stumbling drunks than I’ve ever seen at the same hour in New York. And they all want curry or pasties! Since they mostly seem to stick close to places to get food, taxis, or night buses, though, the streets would be completely empty as soon I turned a corner. Places like Carnaby Street whose shops are thronged during the day were completely desolate. Empty little passages that just look grey during the day glisten a little under the lights at night. It’s lovely.
Lame-O Is My Game-O
I’d made a secret resolution to pick up the pace around here again, but it was a lot easier to keep when I was home alone for a week bored out of my skull. It’s difficult to string together lucid sentences once distractions from visitors (both social and microbial) start using up one’s free cycles.
In a half-hearted effort to get back on the ball, then, I bring you that least inspired of all postings — the “personal answers to 50 generic questions” meme!
Half-Off
I really like it over here. I mean, I like it a lot. Part of it is still the novelty and part of it is how much I like what I’m studying, but there’s also a million little things and big things that have conspired to make these last few months the happiest few in a row I can ever recall having. Life here is good for me — very good, and better than I’d expected — and if any of my contingency plans pan out I’ll be able to make a go of staying over here for a while longer.
The catch, of course, is that is kuh-ray-zay expensive here, even when you stop constantly calculating exchange rates in your head. And I say that as someone living in a relatively cheap town in the UK, and who is used to living in an obscenely expensive city in the US. Perhaps this little sample from a “quiz” urging British tourists to rape and pillage their way across New York will illustrate this point:
Now when you look at that, please remember that a pound is also worth about 2 dollars. So remember to double all those numbers when you do the exchange in your head, and then when your brain shuts down from the horror of it like mine does every day, just try to relax and breathe deeply until the sensation passes.
Luckily, my modest day-to-day life in Reading doesn’t really include any of those expenses. I actually spend next to nothing aside from rent a food when I’m here, but any trips into London immediately make up for the monastic simplicity of the rest of my time. I’ve always joked about how New York you pay a twenty-dollar penalty just for going out your front door, but the joke is a lot less funny when it’s in pounds.
Still, I have so much more to learn before I’m done. And the candy they have here is really, really good.
Twice a Day
Every day I have at least two moments when I long to be carefree and untethered by responsibilities. Most days, of course, have a thousand little obligations, responsibilities, deadlines, or other duties scattered around, but there’s a depressing inevitability about at least two of them that always grinds me down just a little bit, no matter how content I’m feeling otherwise.
Every morning, I worry about breakfast. I don’t particularly like breakfast, and would prefer to just eat whenever I first get hungry on any given day, but I have to eat at least a bowl of cereal or a couple of pieces of toast by 11:00 at the very, very latest so that I have a full stomach before I take my morning medicine. I have to take two pills every morning, and I usually throw in a multivitamin just to be on the safe side. One of those pills is really easy on my system, but one will give me a crampy, acid stomach for the rest of the day if I haven’t eaten anything first. For a while I took that one pill at night instead, but bed-time was usually too long after dinner, and I eventually develop a minor ulcer and an ongoing case of indigestion that just wouldn’t quit. Switching to a morning schedule pretty much cleared up those troubles, so I stick with it.
Every night, I take a second dose of the other pill, the easier one. That one doesn’t really affect my stomach very much, but I need to try and take it about twelve hours after the morning one, just to spread out the dosage as evenly as possible. I’m lucky that today’s drugs give you some wiggle room with the timing, but I still need to do my duty within a certain window of opportunity.
If I can’t get any breakfast, or I forget to take my medicines at the right time, or if I’m away from home and I’ve forgotten to bring my pills with me, it’s better if I skip a dose altogether than start taking my medicine erratically. I’ve never asked how often I could miss a dose before I have reason to worry, because I’m better off worrying every day, just to be safe.
So every day, at least twice a day, I worry how long I can keep this up. All things considered, I’m pretty lucky that such a relatively easy regimen has kept me in such good shape these past six (well, it’s almost six — WOW, it’s almost six) years, and I have no idea when or if I’ll need to switch to something else. Every three months or so I have at least six vials of blood drawn for some tests, and a week or so after that I go for a check-up so my doctor and I can make sure everything is still ship-shape.
If my test results start showing a pattern of changes for the worse, I’ll need to switch medicines until some other combination gets things back on track. My doctor in the UK isn’t used to seeing patients take the combination I’ve been on for the last five years or so, so he’s been pressuring me a bit to switch to something he’s more familiar with. I trust my doctor in New York, though, who has gotten me this far with a minimum of fuss, and he and I both think that if the current treatment has been so successful for me for so long, it doesn’t make much sense to monkey with it. Once you’ve used any one antiviral medicine for a while, you can’t ever go back to it (so I’m told), so I feel a certain pressure to keep as many options open for as long as possible.
So I get up and forage for food every day, whether I want to or not, so I can take my morning pills without any discomfort. Every night I take my evening pill as promptly as I can, to, so I can maintain a regular barrage of medication into my system that will keep my unwelcome tenants from getting used to the regimen and finding new ways to cause trouble.
Every time I take my medicine, I give a passing thought to how lucky I am, all things considered. I responded to treatment quickly, and have actually been healthier than ever before in my life once things settled down. I live in a prosperous western society with easy access to the medicines that keep me going. In the UK I’m even luckier, because I don’t pay a thing for my medicines, while in the US I was paying over 850 bucks a month in insurance premiums and copayments to support my habit. Even those prices were a bargain: the retail value of the pills I take is somewhere in the vicinity of 2,000 dollars a month.
So at least twice a day I think about how my situation is a drain on someone else’s resources, since I’m getting such a good deal (financially speaking). At least twice a day I think about how the clock keeps ticking inside me, wondering when I’ll have to give up the security of a comfortable, predictable treatment plan. At least twice a day I try to think if there’s any likelihood of me needing to have my medicine with me in the next twelve hours, instead of leaving it on the shelf in my room where I always know where to find it. At least twice a day I wish I could just forget about it, and then I remember that there was at least one time when I forgot about vigilance and then ended up in this whole mess in the first place. So at least twice a day I feel a little sorry for myself, and then think it’s my own fault anyway so I should stop whining about it and just count my blessings. Then I sip some water, swallow, and get on with my day.
And that’s at least twice, but usually other things will come up in the course of a day that makes me think about the same things. Granted, I spend a lot more time thinking about comic books and typography and people I love and other things that make me happy, but at least twice a day I wish things were a little easier.
Christmas Stories
Now that my Christmas-killing cold has settled down into a manageable case of congestion, I’m lucid enough to string a few sentences together without needing a nap to recover.
I was waiting for a touch of cold to hit me. I’d gotten through two changes of season without one, so I was convinced I was in for a whopper. Apparently the climate here suits me. Either that or my seasonal colds really have been psychosomatic all along, and there was no need for one since I’ve been supremely happy ever since I got to the UK.
I celebrated the end of term with a brief weekend visit to Bristol to see the good Drs. Paul and Tony, who whisked me off for an afternoon tour of Cardiff to take advantage of the inexplicable burst of sunny weather I’d brought with me. Since I had never seen any episodes of the new Doctor Who series (and I only ever saw a few minutes of the older shows, usually while I waited for Blake’s 7 to be broadcast late at night on public television) or its spin-off, Torchwood, I couldn’t fully appreciate the thrill of being in locations featured prominently on screen, but I at least did my nerdly duty and took pictures:
The gents kindly indoctrinated me into the ways of the Doctor, Captain Jack, and their cronies later that night, so now I have a new avenue for exploring my not-so-inner geek. It figures the Doctor Who franchise would finally grab me once they figured out that cute leading men might be a good idea. If only I had a television.
The end of the term didn’t actually mean the end of work, so it was back for a few more days of productivity after my trip. Hilariously, it seems we’re supposed to have a direction for our typeface designs “locked down” by the time the next term starts in January, and I know I’m not the only one in the group who stills feels a total lack of confidence about being that far along. I guess I’ll have to think about that, too, in between bursts of work on the huge essay I have due the week after classes resume. (Bear in mind, though, that I am totally digging all this type geekery in which I have become so immersed.)
The flatmates and I threw a lovely shindig so we could celebrate the season with our classmates before everyone scattered for Christmas. (I can safely say “Christmas” because we were all raised with that flavor of midwinter gift-giving holiday.) That party set in motion a lovely string of coincidences that led to me hanging out in London a few nights later with some Brazilian and some Belgian pals at a phenomenal Brand New Heavies reunion show.
I have been waiting for over a decade for a chance to see these folks play, and I was relieved that this wasn’t just some half-assed walk through their back catalogue. They were on fucking fire as they funked their way through old singles, gems off their new album, and even an amazing cover of Seven Nation Army. I have never seen a band coax so many white people into dancing so much. When I went back to crash at my friend Tim’s place afterward, he chided me for never mentioning my love of the Heavies when I visited him back in their heyday, because at the time he probably could have arranged for me to meet their drummer via a mutual friend. Sigh.
I was hoping for some quiet down-time in London for the next couple of days, but I wound up walking for hours and hours again, getting to know a bit more of the city. I finally have the bearings to get from certain key locations to others without a map, or without worrying about following a particular route. I also developed magnificent, firm legs and slightly sore arches from all this exploring. The robust condition of my legs was offset by the achey back I developed from sleeping on Tim’s teeny couch for three nights in a row, but in a city that’s even more expensive than New York I was happy to have any lodgings I could afford.
I finally dipped my toe into London’s gay nightlife, as well, tagging along with my pal Jonathan, who can’t go ten feet without running into someone he knows. We spent most of the evening at a pub called the King’s Arms where I felt really young and slim, but yet still invisible since neither of those things count for much in a roomful of bears. Since I don’t really like drinking, smoking, bears, or crowded rooms it was kind of a long night, despite some very enjoyable company. By the time I left I could feel my cold coming on, so the die was cast for Christmas to cast its usual cloud over my spirits.
After a long, long morning of last-minute errands in London and lots of public transportation filled with lots of holiday travelers, I wanted to crawl under a rock with a bottle of cough syrup and a pillow. I was pretty miserable by the time I got back to Reading, so I was double-extra-happy to discover a long-awaited package from Dave that was filled with three months of comic books. Plus the Super Pets!:
Streaky is the only cat I can love. I mean that.
Leave it to my bestest pal to find a way to provide me with exactly what I needed exactly when I needed it most. He’s spooky like that. As I was passing out from exhaustion and illness, at least I knew I would have Krypto and Yorick to keep me company if and when I woke up.