Fine Art Friday

Oven Bird (2004)
Jim Rataczak, American nature artist

Click on the links above to see the featured Fine Art Friday image and to learn more about the artist.

The Oven Bird
by Robert Frost

There is a singer everyone has heard,
Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,
Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.
He says that leaves are old and that for flowers
Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.
He says the early petal-fall is past
When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers
On sunny days a moment overcast;
And comes that other fall we name the fall.
He says the highway dust is over all.
The bird would cease and be as other birds
But that he knows in singing not to sing.
The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.

Commentary on the poem here.

"I got that old feeling...."
Synchronicity
1 : the quality or fact of being synchronous
2 : the coincidental occurrence of events and especially psychic events (as similar thoughts in widely separated persons or a mental image of an unexpected event before it happens) that seem related but are not explained by conventional mechanisms of causality —used especially in the psychology of C. G. Jung

You folks know how much I adore the interconnections -- both intentional and unintentional -- that define my reading, writing, thinking, learning, and teaching. I love the serendipitous route by which I arrive at a film via a book, a short story via a lecture, an author via a museum exhibition, a work of art via a work of music, a poem via a review, and so on. And I love when the reading and learning and exploring "syncs up" -- it's that old feeling, synchronicity. Well, this most recent example just tickled me.

So.

At my daughters' last group riding lesson -- the one at which it was decided that the next logical step for them, especially my youngest, who is, according to her teacher, an exceptionally capable, confident rider (Who knew?), is private lessons (Be still, my checkbook! Or is that just my hand trembling in fear?) -- I was hiding behi-, I mean, I was reading the Winter 2008 issue of Living Bird and the March/April 2008 issue of Birdwatcher's Digest.

(An aside: How lucky am I? The Misses M-mv are now ten and twelve, yet they still enjoy having me read aloud. We arrived at their last group lesson early, so to pass the time while waiting in the arena's lobby, they leaned against me while I softly read from Birdwatcher's Digest: "Mobbing Screech Owls" and "The Lives of Urban Cliff Swallows." Whispered questions and replies, observations, requests for one more article. Ahhhh. Parent-teacher bliss.)

Both Of a Feather (Scott Weidensaul) and The Life of the Skies (Jonathan Rosen) are reviewed in Living Bird. In fact, Feather was also reviewed in the January/February 2008 issue of Digest. They looked perfect, so when we returned home, I promptly added both books to my Amazon wishlist, only to realize that this wasn't the first time I had heard of Rosen. According to Publisher's Weekly:

In this eloquent book, Rosen—a novelist and editorial director of Nextbook, which promotes Jewish culture and literature—meditates on the fact that technology enables us to preserve wildlife and at the same time contributes to its demise. He laments that no sooner had he discovered bird-watching than he realized that nature has become a diminished thing, as Robert Frost put it in his poem The Oven Bird.

Nextbook. Nextbook. Where have I heard...?

M-mv was only three months old when it became one of the finalists in the 2004 Best of Blog Awards (category: "Best Literary/Book Blog"). The winning blog was... Nextbook. (Related M-mv entry here; related Nextbook entry here.) Sort of a neat example of synchronicity and serendipity, eh?

(An aside: It was during that virtual contest that I "met" Magnificent Octopus and The Sheila Variations, two blogs I have recommended to you many times.)

And so you see how this all goes back to my Fine Art Friday selection, right?

Have a reading-thinking-learning-living Friday, folks.

Floss much?

A healthy mouth means a healthy body.

Do you skip your cleanings? (Go at least twice a year.) Do you brush after every meal? (Use a soft-bristle brush.) Do you floss regularly? (Forget and you basically undo any other good oral hygiene habits.)

This should all be familiar advice, but if it's new to you, check out "Your Way to a Healthy Smile" (U.S. News & World Report, February 25, 2008).

The recommended daily allowance

Slings & Arrows, Season One

When you watch a show this good, this brilliant and perfect and perfectly brilliant, you are reminded all over again that television isn't bad for you. It's just that bad television programs give the medium a, well, bad name.

I hooked a slew of you on Jeeves & Wooster in 2006. Let's see how many of you I can hook on Slings & Arrows.

Here's a little taste.

Mr. M-mv and I both adored the first season. Here's hoping the second is as wonderful.

Culled from the archives

Twenty-twothree years ago today, Mr. M-mv gave me an engagement ring. I was surprised about how and when he proposed, yes, but the idea of marriage? No surprises there. He had already told me that we would be getting married. He announced this about two weeks after our first date.

Silly boy.

I can only imagine how annoyed his parents must have been when he declared his intentions to them over supper one early-spring night in 1982. He was a just junior in high school at the time. Our own son is now about the same age Mr. M-mv was then, and if Master arrived home this evening and said, "I'm going to marry so-n-so," why, I think Mr. M-mv might choke on his bowl of oatmeal!

It would be all right, though. The choking, I mean. Like his father was when he was seveneighteen, Master is certified in CPR and first aid.

Heh, heh, heh.

So, yes, I have been by Mr. M-mv's side since March 1982, which means that I have been with him -- and he with me -- for [more than] a quarter of a century.

And there are now five people in our family.

I love that man. Not always as well as he deserves, not always as well as he loves me -- but always I love that man.

Happy anniversary to us, then. May our son grow up to be as good a man as his father. May our daughters find partners who love them as much and as well as their father loves their mother.

And may we live long enough to tell our children's children stories about their parents.

Just finished

Y: The Last Man, Book 1: Unmanned
Y: The Last Man, Book 2: Cycles
Added 2:26.2008: Y: The Last Man, Book 3: One Small Step
Added 2.29.2008: Y: The Last Man, Book 4: Safeword
Added 3.01.2008: Y: The Last Man, Book 5: Ring of Truth
Added 3.01.2008: Y: The Last Man, Book 6: Girl on Girl

Terrifically entertaining! From the editorial reviews posted at Amazon:

From Publishers Weekly:
Yorick Brown is an escape artist; has a fabulous girlfriend who's traveling in Australia; and possesses a genetic make-up that's allowed him to survive a plague that killed every male being on the planet except for him and his pet monkey. Yorick is the last man on earth, and in the resulting chaos, he must find a way to help save the human race. At least that's what the (now all-female) government thinks. Yorick would prefer to find his girlfriend, but it's hard to get a flight halfway around the world when almost all the pilots and mechanics are gone. It's hard enough to drive down the block, since the streets are jammed with the cars of men who were behind the wheel when the instantaneous plague hit. Furthermore, the entire social fabric has gone to hell, with gun-wielding wives of Republican representatives insisting on getting their husbands' seats and tribes of latter-day Amazons claiming males were meant to die. Since Yorick's mother is a congresswoman, he's protected by secret spies. And his escape skills come in handy when he's trapped first by a marauding garbage-woman and then by his mother, as she tries to keep him from doing anything stupid. Meanwhile, who are the mysterious Israeli soldiers who seem so gratified by the situation, and why is Yorick's sister so intent on joining the Amazons? With clean lines and muted colors, Guerra and Marz n invoke a frighteningly believable future; their vision of the surprise and horror to come is so beautifully ordinary, it's entirely convincing-and addictive.

From Booklist:
A mysterious plague has killed every man on earth except Yorick Brown, who was somehow spared. That is the provocative premise of the comics series whose first five issues make up this book. The sole Y-chromosomed survivor is an amiable, headstrong young man, the son of a U.S. congresswoman and, as it happens, an amateur escape artist. He spends most of the story on the run from a tribe of self-styled Amazons bent on eliminating the last vestige of patriarchy. He is also trying, with a bioengineer who may be responsible for the worldwide "gendercide," to figure out why he survived; hoping to reach his girlfriend in Australia; and, of course, contemplating the repopulation of the planet. Rather pedestrian artwork doesn't do much to liven the story, though its straightforwardness imparts deadpan believability to such ramifications as the female secretary of agriculture ascending to the presidency. Fast-paced anyway, the yarn introduces a large number of intriguing characters and plotlines as it lays the groundwork for what promises to be a compelling series.

Yes, I have put the rest of the available books on hold at the library. Good stuff.

Added 2.29.2008: Why I decided to read Y -- Entertainment Weekly review from February 8.

"Rodchenko angles"

Two Tuesday afternoons ago -- the day my youngest fell off her horse for the first time, in fact -- I was hiding behi-, I mean, I was reading the February 7 issue of The Economist. (Aside: So, you all know about the parent who made off with my Sun-Times. Well, no one has ever asked for my Economist, thank goodness, although they do look longingly at my Entertainment Weekly. Of course, I leave the paper in the car now. Why invite trouble, right?)

The article "Pictures and pain" caught my eye because I thought Alexander Rodchenko would make a terrific Fine Art Friday entry. Alas, Friday came and went without a post. Well, check out the article and these links on the Russian photographer: article and exhibit. You'll note that Rodchenko photographed Vladimir Mayakovsky. Longtime M-mv readers may remember my entry on the poet. You know how I love that sort of synchronicity. From the Museum of Modern Art:

Around 1923 Rodchenko acquired a camera to make enlargements and reproductions for his collage and design work, and in April 1924, anticipating further work with Mayakovsky, he made a series of six studio portraits of the poet--his first lasting achievement as a photographer. In 1926 he used two of the pictures in collages for the front and back covers of Mayakovsky's book, Conversation with the Finance Inspector about Poetry.

Catching up
This week, I

■ read what I used to call a "bodice-buster" ... and (GASP!) enjoyed it;

■ welcomed fourteen mourning doves (among other feathered friends) to our feeders;

■ watched the first episode of Slings & Arrows... and loved it;

■ practiced well for the first time in too long;

■ thought hard about working just a little less (and, consequently, eating out a lot less) so that I might practice, sketch, and read much more;

■ cleaned every single nook, drawer, cabinet, shelf, and cranny in this house (except for my daughters' closet -- some doors are better left shut, no?);

■ welcomed Aunt M-mv for a lovely visit;

■ painted pottery; and

■ saw Vantage Point. (It was more entertaining than some would lead you to believe.)


Breaking all of the rules
M-mv is a meme-free zone.

Generally.

That is, generally speaking, I eschew memes and quizzes.

Unless a virtual friend taps me. Then I get a little wishy-washy on the subject of memes and quizzes. [Insert heavy sigh.]

So, this is for Annette, with whom I've a enjoyed exchanging virtual notes for a couple of years now.


The meme
1. Post the rules before you answer the question.

2. List one fact about yourself using each letter of your middle name. If you don't have a middle name, use your maiden name.

3. Tag one person for each letter of your middle name.

All right. Here goes. My middle name is also the first name of both of my grandmothers: Mary.

M
Hmmmm. Mother of three. This is one of three labels I'll cop to when forced to interact with people. 1. I'm a working writer. 2. I'm a wife. 3. I'm a mother -- specifically, I'm "[son's name]'s mom" or "[oldest daughter's name]'s mom," or "[youngest daughter's name]'s mom." Recently I determined that while "working writer" (or, alternately, "paid, professional writer") has largely defined me, "wife" and "mother" have (re)defined my life -- and enlivened my selfhood. I know now that if I were forced to choose (and I have not been), I'd choose "wife" and "mother" over "working writer." This is a realization of life-changing dimensions.

A
I dithered between anal-retentive and Type-A (as in personality). Either or both would appear in a description of yours truly, no question.

R
Shucks. This one is almost too easy. Read. Think. Learn.

Y
It is for Yes! My childhood was defined by the word No! But I wanted my children to experience life's possibilities, not its limitations. So, yes.

Yes, you can.
Yes, we'll try that.
Yes, you can go.
Yes, if you're careful.
Yes, but heed our family rules.
Yes, we'll make that work.
Yes, yes, YES!

It is time for me to "tag" four people, but it's simply not in me. Look, if you enjoy these sorts of things, have at it. Link back to M-mv or send me a message to let me know you participated.

More synchronicity
I nearly forgot to link the most recent N.S. column. Longtime M-mv readers will know why I loved it. For the rest of you, here is my chapbook entry on Miller's classic.

"Come with me, if you want to live."

Did you love Christopher Moore's Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal? (Here's the RDA.) "This clever novel is surely blasphemy to some, but to others it's a coming-of-age story of the highest order." If you are one of those to whom such a novel is blasphemy, then click away right now.

You've been warned.

Final warning.

Now. The rest of you. If Lamb made you laugh until you cried -- or even made you cry until you laughed -- you might find this Terminator parody as funny as I did.

"What are you? A glutton for punishment?"

"Stop! Stop killing Judas!"



"Don't worry. He'll be back."

Music by which to write furiously

"Cast Your Fate to the Wind" (The Vince Guaraldi Trio)

(Aside: I know there is a whole passel of folks out there who think George Winston's Linus & Lucy: The Music of Vince Guaraldi will do, but they're wrong. Quite simply, the original is best.)

I don't think I ever tried to paint the American scene; I'm trying to paint myself.

~ Edward Hopper

Semicolon hosts "The Saturday Review of Books." Consider participating this week.

The twilight of American culture redux

From "Dumb and Dumber: Are Americans Hostile to Knowledge?" (NYT, February 14, 2008):

But now, [Susan Jacoby, author of The Age of American Unreason] said, something different is happening: anti-intellectualism (the attitude that “too much learning can be a dangerous thing”) and anti-rationalism (“the idea that there is no such things as evidence or fact, just opinion”) have fused in a particularly insidious way.

Not only are citizens ignorant about essential scientific, civic and cultural knowledge, she said, but they also don’t think it matters.

[...]

Ms. Jacoby doesn’t expect to revolutionize the nation’s educational system or cause millions of Americans to switch off “American Idol” and pick up Schopenhauer. But she would like to start a conversation about why the United States seems particularly vulnerable to such a virulent strain of anti-intellectualism. After all, “the empire of infotainment doesn’t stop at the American border,” she said, yet students in many other countries consistently outperform American students in science, math and reading on comparative tests.

In part, she lays the blame on a failing educational system. “Although people are going to school more and more years, there’s no evidence that they know more,” she said.

Ms. Jacoby also blames religious fundamentalism’s antipathy toward science, as she grieves over surveys that show that nearly two-thirds of Americans want creationism to be taught along with evolution.

Related entry: From the archives: The monastic preservation of our culture.

Fine Art Friday

"Office at Night" (1940)
Edward Hopper, American (1882-1967)

From "The quiet American" (Chicago Sun-Times, February 15, 2008):

"The beauty of Hopper's work is that he's both a realist and a modernist, using reality but paring it down to its basic geometry," Barter says. "There's never anything extraneous. He's interested in how light defines a subject, how it creates mood, but I don't think he's interested in narrative. When he looks at a couple through a window [as in 'Room in New York'], there's certainly a sense of cinema there, but it's more like a frozen movie still -- a random moment that's plucked out. I don't think he cares a bit about what happens next."

Perhaps. But a surprising number of Hopper's greatest paintings, from "Room in New York" to "Nighthawks," show couples intensely ignoring each other -- accumulating into a kind of ongoing narrative about the difficulty of human connection, especially between men and women. Read that way, they amount to one of the most harrowing portraits of marriage to be found in modern art.

In Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography, author Gail Levin sees many of Hopper's paintings as rooted in the artist's love-hate relationship with his wife, Josephine. It was a study of opposites who stayed together for decades but didn't always attract: Jo Hopper was a vivacious extrovert, social and ambitious, a skilled if never visionary painter stuck in her husband's shadow; Edward Hopper was a dour introvert, taciturn and solitary, a great artist who tended to dismiss his wife's artistic ambitions. Not unexpectedly, their relationship was often fraught with tension that occasionally burst into verbal and even physical violence.

I had seen (and coveted) the Levin bio when we visited the museum shop after our last trip to the Art Institute. It's now on one of my towering TBR piles.

You'll find:

■ interesting commentary on the featured painting here;

■ more about the Hopper exhibit here;

■ an 1987 NYT article about the Hoppers here; and

■ a Hopper bio and gallery of images here.

They do not love that do not show their love.

~ The Two Gentlemen of Verona (Shakespeare)

"The irony of lying is that it’s both normal and abnormal behavior at the same time."

Earlier this week, Lauren Starke, communications manager for New York Media, sent me a note about M-mv favorite Po Bronson's latest article in New York magazine:

Parents consistently rate “honesty” as the trait they most want in their children; yet kids lie early, often, and for all sorts of reasons. In the cover story of this week’s New York magazine, Po Bronson writes about a singular theory for one way this wretched habit develops: Kids are just copying their parents.

From “Why Kids Lie”:

Encouraged to tell so many white lies and hearing so many others, children gradually get comfortable with being disingenuous. Insincerity becomes, literally, a daily occurrence. They learn that honesty only creates conflict, and dishonesty is an easy way to avoid conflict. And while they don’t confuse white-lie situations with lying to cover their misdeeds, they bring this emotional groundwork from one circumstance to the other. It becomes easier, psychologically, to lie to a parent. So if the parent says, “Where did you get these Pokémon cards?! I told you, you’re not allowed to waste your allowance on Pokémon cards!” this may feel to the child very much like a white-lie scenario—he can make his father feel better by telling him the cards were extras from a friend.

"The road to hell is paved with happy plans."

Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy (Eric G. Wilson)

At the behest of well-meaning friends, I have purchased books on how to be happy. I have tried to turn my chronic scowl into a bright smile. I have attempted to become more active, to get away from my dark house and away from my somber books and participate in the world of meaningful action. … I have contemplated getting a dog. I have started eating salads. I have tried to discipline myself in nodding knowingly. … I have undertaken yoga. I have stopped yoga and gone into tai chi. I have thought of going to psychiatrists and getting some drugs. I have quit all of this and then started again and then once more quit. Now I plan to stay quit. The road to hell is paved with happy plans.

Wilson was on NPR earlier this week: "Arguing the Upside of Being Down." This essay may also interest you: In Praise of Melancholy. Subtitled "American culture's overemphasis on happiness misses an essential part of a full life," it ran in The Chronicle of Higher Education last month.

Related entry: Many folks think....

Valentines

The children's services department of the local library distributed tiny bags of bird seed today. A valentine with Aileen Fisher's sweet poem was attached.

I gave a hundred valentines.
A hundred, did I say?
I gave a thousand valentines
One cold and wintry day.

I didn't put my name on them
Or any other words,
Because my valentines were seeds
For February birds.

Speaking of birds...
This just arrived in my emailbox:

The 11th annual Great Backyard Bird Count is coming up this Friday through Monday, February 15-18. There seems to be a lot of “buzz” about it this year, both in the media and among groups that are planning special events around the count. Organizers are hoping to top last year’s record-breaking 81,000 checklists!

If you are counting for Project FeederWatch over the weekend, you can enter the same tallies on the GBBC site and have them do double duty! GBBC organizers are hoping to see where winter finches are this year, to see if the rapidly-expanding Eurasian Collared-Dove has moved into any new provinces or states, and to learn what birds may be lingering farther north than their typical winter ranges.

The rules for counting for the Great Backyard Bird Count are a little different than for FeederWatch. For the Great Backyard Bird Count you can report any birds you see, even those birds flying overhead that don't count for FeederWatch. You can also submit a separate checklist for each locale on every day that you count.

We hope you’ll reach out to your family, friends, neighbors, and co-workers by forwarding this email to them or personally inviting them to “Count for Fun, Count for the Future!” in the 2008 Great Backyard Bird Count.

Thank you!

Fine Art... Monday

From "Armed Robbers Steal 4 Masterworks in Zurich" (NYT, February 12, 2008):

Three thieves, wearing dark clothes and ski masks, walked into the Emile Bührle Foundation, a private collection housed a couple of miles outside of Zurich’s city center, around 4:30 p.m. on Sunday, a short while before the museum was due to close. The collection is considered to be one of the biggest privately owned collections of French impressionists in the world.

While one held a pistol and ordered visitors and staff members to lie on the floor in the main room of the museum, the two other men removed the four paintings from the wall: Monet’s “Poppy Field at Vetheuil,” “Ludovic Lepic and his daughter” by Edgar Degas, Van Gogh’s “Blooming Chestnut Branches,” and Cézanne’s “Boy in the Red Waistcoat.” Their total worth is estimated at $163 million.

Postscript
I saw exactly eleven minutes and twenty-three seconds of the Grammy Awards program last night: the second half of the dueling pianos in "Rhapsody in Blue" and Amy Winehouse's "Rehab." I have a feeling I saw the only eleven minutes and twenty-three seconds I would have enjoyed. How lucky was that?

Speaking of television, with the writers' strike ending, I was wondering when I might expect to see some new "House." This article was helpful.

All right, then. We just made this year's first batch of saltine toffee, so I'm off to eat, teach, and -- a little later -- work/write.

Read. Think. Learn.

Listen.

Enjoy.

"I love having written."

The complete quote (Dorothy Parker, of course):

I hate writing. I love having written.

I actually don't hate writing, but every once in a while, I hate having to write.

(How's that for convoluted?)

In other words, writing on assignment is grand in terms of bylines and paychecks (that is, ego), but it is also, on occasion, a PITA. This weekend, for example, writing feels a little PITA-ish to me. Meh. I'll get over it. Probably right around the time I place the order for my new camera, thinking, Ha! I paid for that puppy!

It is with these thoughts (and some delicious Chinese food), then, that I comfort myself this afternoon. See you on the other side.

Semicolon hosts "The Saturday Review of Books." Consider participating this week.

Life list

We added this fellow yesterday. (More M-mv birding here.)

Please note...

Several M-mv readers have sent messages saying they are having trouble reaching Mental multivitamin this morning. I have removed the offending item (the poll I included in this post). Hit "Refresh" and/or delete your temporary files (Tools > Internet Files > Delete) and all should be fine.

Many thanks for the heads-up!

Tuck this one in the Ayup! file

"Keeping Your Brain Fit: There's plenty you can do to slow the effects of aging. Here's how to keep your thinking and memory sharp."

On the corner of my desk

A few of the (too) many recent acquisitions:

:: Gay-Neck: The Story of a Pigeon (Dhan Gopal Mukerji)

:: Invincible Louisa (Cornelia Meigs)

:: The Cat Who Went to Heaven (Elizabeth Coatsworth)

:: The Shakespeare Wars (Ron Rosenbaum)

:: Pilgrim on the Great Bird Continent (Lyanda Lynn Haupt)

:: The Gold Bug Variations (Richard Powers)

:: American Sign Language Deluxe

And you can get your Read. Think. Learn. mug right here.

Falling faintly through the universeand faintly falling

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

We've recommended it again and again and again and again. If you still haven't read it or if you haven't reread it recently, go now. Read James Joyce's "The Dead."

It beats shoveling.

Again.

Who knew so many people were interested in typography?

Here are a few excerpts from recent email messages.

In a message set in -- you guessed it -- Comic Sans, Jenni writes:

I was disappointed to read in your latest post that Comic Sans is so widely hated. It has always been a favorite of mine. Would I use it for a resume or legal document? Of course not. I prefer Times New Roman or Courier for more serious writing. It's perfectly appropriate for Scout and 4-H newsletters and fliers or event posters, which is the type of writing and printing I seem to do the most of during this stage of my life. Comic Sans is a fun font that also has the advantage of being easy to read -- fun and function.

This typeface analysis as insight into another's psyche seems just barely above astrology. What's your sign? I'm game though. What could this penchant for Comic Sans--in the proper place, mind you--say about me?

[...]

Comic Sans is the typeface equivalent of that name choice. It is perfect in its proper place. Announcing a campout to your Brownie Troop and their parents, but don't feel up to handling 12 little girls running through the woods all on your own? Why, write up all the details in an interesting and engaging manner. Let the parents know what a wonderful bonding experience this will be between them and their daughters. Fill the flier with colorful pictures and put the words in a cheery typeface. Comic Sans if fun, approachable, encouraging, friendly. It says, "You can do this! It will be fun!" Come to think of it, perhaps the IRS should consider printing tax forms and booklets in Comic Sans.

I think I'll have my own bumper sticker made: Save the Comic Sans!

Michelle also defended Comic Sans:

Comic Sans is a very useful font for those who teach young children, simply because of the formation of its letters. The letter a is formed as people hand write the letter a, as is the letter g. I don't use the font in any context other than in my work with young children, but I find it extremely useful when creating materials for my students. They do need to learn to read the typewritten a and g, but it is very helpful to be able to do that separate from learning to handwrite the letters. So while "typography might exist to honor content," it also, in some cases, exists to honor its audience.

Debra had a different view on the 'face, though:

How funny to click over to the un-blog today and find your entry on typography. Comic Sans has been on my mind since you first shuddered at it; I don't recall if the first comment was blog-side or board-side, but it was equally funny. True to the mysterious phenomenon known as familiarity, I now notice a heck-of-a-lot more Comic Sans than I'd like.

I, too, come from the pre-desktop world of printing: manual cropping, typesetting on the dreaded Compugraphic, and pasting up. How quaint it all sounds now! While I haven't the gift that more formally taught artists do, I still recoil when a particularly inelegant font leaps out and slaps me. I was thoroughly tickled to find you typing about this type of type.

Christine notes:

In my previous corporate career I was involved with writing process documentation and memos. The company adopted Arial as the company’s official font and we were all to use it. I had previously not known about Arial and I loved it!

I still love Arial and I love to use it.

Had to laugh on the Comic Sans comment because a former President of a statewide homeschool network used Comic Sans on the website and on all emails and to boot wrote in colors not black. I couldn’t take it. I really had a hard time reading it. And trying to read laws and statutes in that, wow, that was impossible. I finally one time emailed her asking could she change the site and emailed newsletters (with long articles) to a more readable font? I was lambasted by her then, saying that Comic Sans to her is very readable and represented the character she wanted the org to have.

Whatever!

I didn’t know I could set a default font on my computer. I am going to have to check that out. I’d like all my documents to automatically set to Arial.

Finally, according to Carol, the film Helvetica might be worth my time:

I watched Helvetica using the Netflix Instant Watch feature a few weeks ago. I found it an enjoyable and interesting way to spend a cold Sunday afternoon in January. While I wouldn’t hunt the film down, or pay money to see it, watching it on the computer for free was fun.

If you subscribe to Netflix, you might want to consider watching it.

Thanks for the heads-up, Carol. And thank you to my recent correspondents for the encouraging remarks you included with your messages. I appreciate the kind words.

Typography

Last month, I spent several evenings writing about typography for my work. (Yes, I realize I just lost more than half of M-mv's readership in a yawn-click. Ah, well.)

Once upon a time ago, I earned a degree in communications and journalism in a program that required courses in layout and design. I completed my studies in the pre-desktop publishing world, folks: We used tape for column lines. We sent copy to typesetters. We cropped photos with cropping tools and grease pencils. We pasted up with rubber cement. You get the idea.

I grow old . . . I grow old . . .

Although those skills are now obsolete, what I learned about choosing the right typeface and design proved timeless. In fact, as a writer and editor, learning how typeface, layout, and design could develop -- or degrade -- a message would prove invaluable: In a competitive market, an eye for typography and design separates one good writer from the rest.

Anyway, I was pleased when I discovered typography among my assigned topics.
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"Typography exists to honor content," according to Robert Bringhurst, who penned what is widely considered the bible of typography -- The Elements of Typographic Style. Although Bringhust was referring to the design of printed pages, typography also plays a vital role in helping readers of online text to discern message and meaning. Chapter 5 of The Web Style Guide develops this idea, if you're interested.


Ban Comic Sans!
So what message and meaning do we derive from one's choice of typeface? What do we make, for example, of the person who chooses Comic Sans for his email messages? Heh, heh, heh. Believe it or not, this is the subject of a recent news article. From "Typefaces reveal a font of personality traits" (which first appeared in the Sacramento Bee and was reprinted in the St. Louis Daily, January 11, 2008):

"Typefaces are the clothes words wear, and just as we make judgments about people by the clothes they wear, so we make judgments about the information we're reading by the typefaces," typography analyst Caroline Archer told BBC radio recently.

From later in the piece:

Typefaces to avoid, lest you be saddled with a negative adjective: Rockwell Xbold ("rude, coarse, unattractive"), Impact ("plain, rigid, assertive"), Gigi (unstable, rebel, impractical) and Courier New ("dull, unimaginative, plain").

"Those (negative) typeface personalities do translate to the perception of the document," Shaikh maintains.

But, unpopular as they may be, they haven't yet drawn the ire of graphic designers in an organized campaign, a la Comic Sans.

Norris, of Runyon Saltzman Einhorn, says, simply: "I hate it."

Indianapolis designer Dave Combs has taken his hatred a step further by developing the semi-tongue-in-cheek website, bancomicsans.com, which encourages people to download decals to slap on any document or banner that uses the offending typeface.

"These widespread abuses of printed type threaten to erode the very foundations upon which centuries of typographic history are built," Combs writes on his site. "Since the advent of desktop publishing, powerful tools are in the hands of uneducated people unaware of proper font usage."

Microsoft designer Vincent Connare introduced the typeface in 1995. But Combs blames the average user for foisting Comic Sans on us in such inappropriate places as medical forms, governmental signage and resumes.

So, what does your choice of typeface say about you? I've always been an ardent fan of Goudy Old Style, but in a pinch (e.g., in a situation in which only a handful of 'faces are offered), Times Roman will do for a body text. Boring, yes, but generally so much more appropriate than the dreaded Comic Sans, no?


A movie about a typeface? Why not!
From "What's in a Font? " (The Atlantic, January 8, 2008):

A typeface sounds like an unlikely subject for a movie, but passions run high on the subject of Helvetica. To some designers, it represents a kind of transparent beauty, rational and modern. To others, it’s boring, oppressive, and way too corporate. In the movie, graphic designer Paula Scher confesses that she even came to blame Helvetica for the Vietnam War. Hustwit uses the story of Helvetica to tell the story of post World War II graphic design and to demonstrate the eternal aesthetic tension between the expressive and the classic.

Now, as much as I love the subject, I'm not sure I'll be hunting down this film.

The biography of a typeface
If you're the sort who, like me, actually reads that page in the back of a book that narrates the "biography" of the typeface in which the volume is set, you will likely appreciate ABC Typography, a virtual museum.

The recommended daily allowance

Four years ago (!), the RDA was Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City. If you loved that as much as Mr. M-mv and I did, get your hands on a copy of Sin in the Second City.

Subtitled "Madams, Ministers, Playboys, and the Battle for America's Soul," it's every bit as interesting and (with exceptions that the Washington Post's Jonathan Yardley also observed) as neatly written as Devil.

Here's another review, this one from the Seattle Times.

"Well, it's Groundhog Day. Again."

So you already know my recommendation (since I make the same one every year): Groundhog Day.

Phil: What would you do if you were stuck in one place and every day was exactly the same, and nothing that you did mattered?
Ralph: That about sums it up for me.


Phil: Do you know what today is?
Rita: No, what?
Phil: Today is tomorrow. It happened.


Phil: I was in the Virgin Islands once. I met a girl. We ate lobster and drank pina coladas. At sunset we made love like sea otters. That was a pretty good day. Why couldn't I get that day over and over and over?

Fine Art Friday

Cormorant (vol. 5: plate 52)
John Gould (William Hart)

The image linked above first appeared in John Gould's The Birds of Great Britain, which was issued in five parts between 1863 and 1873. It contained more than three hundred fifty colored lithographs. According to this entry from Glasgow University Library's Special Collections:

John Gould has been called the greatest figure in bird illustration after Audubon. Gould was not directly responsible for the illustrations himself, although he supervised their production closely. His talent lay in drawing rough sketches, having an uncanny eye for capturing the characteristics and differences of each species. A keen observer, he had an extraordinary faculty for quickly recording in a rough sketch the characteristics of any bird that he saw. It was from these sketches that his artists made the beautiful finished drawings; these were then redrawn on stone to create the lithographs which were each finished by being hand coloured. Gould searched high and low for subjects for this work on British birds. The vast majority of the plates were sketched from freshly killed specimens; drawings were then made at a later date to be redrawn on stone by William Hart.

Yes, yes. I know that I said I had collected enough material from our recent adventures in the Art Institute to carry me through several Fine Art Friday entries, but this weekend, my work finds me writing about (among other things) cormorants -- which I find a delightful topic for all of the reasons regular M-mv readers can surmise. I just couldn't resist making this funny, awkward bird -- "Like Ducks and Penguins, With Nervous Stomachs" -- the subject of this week's entry.


Ordinary bird
I've recommended Lyanda Lynn Haupt's Rare Encounters with Ordinary Birds several times before, but if you've still managed to resist it, here is yet another exhortation to read it: the chapter "Cormorant Problem."


How neat!
In poking about to offer you some links about Haupt, I learned that she is writing about my favorite bird friend:

In her writing Haupt celebrates the accessibility of birds in your own backyard, no matter, or despite, their ubiquity. She's currently working on the final paragraphs of her first draft of a new book on crows (with a working title of "Crow Planet," it's slated to be published by Little Brown in March 2009).

More about Haupt here (and yes, I just placed an order for her Pilgrim on the Great Bird Continent: The Importance of Everything and Other Lessons from Darwin's Lost Notebooks).

More about cormorants here.

And more about John Gould here.


Cormorant quote

Thence up he flew, and on the tree of life,
The middle tree and highest there that grew,
Sat like a cormorant; yet not true life
Thereby regained, but sat devising death
To them who lived; nor on the virtue thought
Of that life-giving plant, but only used
For prospect, what well used had been the pledge
Of immortality....

~ John Milton, Paradise Lost