Tuesday this week, the Obama’s hosted a “poetry jam” at the White House (silly me, I thought the term was “slam” not “jam.”) John Stewart made fun of the evening — they were trying to be too hip — but I think endorsing spoken word anything is wonderful. You can see a review here.
I’ve been overly busy doing non-book related things for the past couple of weeks, and neglecting my blog. But today I saw a mention of Jessica Hagy’s blog, Indexed, that made me stop for a minute and look. She draws little, seemingly simple maps or graphs or illustrations on index cards to help her understand the world. She says “This site is a little project that lets me make fun of some things and sense of others. I use it to think a little more relationally without resorting to doing actual math.”
If I had to bet, I would say that @, or the at sign, is a recent addition to the symbols we use every day. But this NY Times blog post says I’m wrong. The symbol was first used by an Italian “in a letter written 473 years ago today, on May 4, 1536” (see the picture above). It was used then to indicate an ancient measure of weight or volume. The post is full of fun facts — such as the symbol is called a “snail” by Italians, and “monkey” or “dog” by Slavs.
This month Carol Ann Duffy became the first woman ever named Britain’s poet laureate. According to the NY Times she writes “often mischievous poems dealing with the darkest turmoil and the lightest minutiae of everyday life.” This post is a bit off topic, but I’ve been reading her poems for years, and one of my favorite poems ever is by Duffy — I’ve reprinted it below. You can read more of her poetry in the NY Times article and this article from the BBC.
Valentine
Not a red rose or a satin heart.
I give you an onion.
It is a moon wrapped in brown paper.
It promises light
like the careful undressing of love.
Here.
It will blind you with tears
like a lover.
It will make your reflection
a wobbling photo of grief.
I am trying to be truthful.
Not a cute card or a kissogram.
I give you an onion.
Its fierce kiss will stay on your lips,
possessive and faithful
as we are,
for as long as we are.
Take it.
Its platinum loops shrink to a wedding-ring,
if you like.
Lethal.
Its scent will cling to your fingers,
cling to your knife.
Tonight is the opening for the exhibition Once Upon a Book at SF Center for the Book. It explores the creative process of the work of six children’s book illustrators. The curator, Thacher Hurd, shot video of each illustrator discussing his working methods. The one below is from Chris Raschka. See them all here
Last year, when I learned how to use a laser cutter to make my pop-up book Fall, I wanted to see what else the cutter was good for and settled on cutting out wooden pendants in the shape of symbols or letters. Instead of a-z, I decided on ampersands and interrobangs. I looked at other punctuation and symbols too, including the pilcrow, after reading this post on the typographers Hoefler & Frere-Jones’ blog. (A pilcrow is the editor’s paragraph mark — it’s not really a backwards P, according to Hoefler “in its original form, the mark was an open C crossed by a vertical line or two, a scribal abbreviation for capitulum, the Latin word for ‘chapter.’ “) I cut out a few different pilcrows in several font faces and gave up, either unhappy with the way they looked (too much like a backward P) or the legs were so thin they snapped off…
This morning I ran across one of those wooden pilcrow experiments in a dish I keep on my desk of odd pins and coins, and that led me back to reading Hoefler’s post again. And just as entertaining is his post on ampersands.