Post-Christmastica

I asked my friend,
who paints apartments on weekdays,
washes the dishes in a restaurant on weekends--
all without working permit,
"do you work on Christmas Day?"
"Of course," he said,
"nothing is sacred for us."

Einstein didn't like photographers (he called them "light monkeys")

David Finn. How to look at Photographs.

:-)

I like this nickname. Perhaps because I was born in a year of Monkey, and two my best friends are Monkeys also? In any case, to live in San Francisco and not to take pictures is a crime. Look at this ad in the window of a humble, God's forgotten barber's shop in the middle of SF's nowhere. Look at this typeface! Light monkeys better get busy!

When I lived in Chinatown, I used to watch men -- there were at least two of them -- playing some mysterious instrument (later Ellen said it's called "erhu"). It had two strings, and no frets, like a guitar or a violin would have. I wondered, what notation is used to you write melodies for this instrument? "Put your fingers at about 7/10 of the neck"? Do players memorize melodies by hearing them and then reproduce them by memory, like in times when there was no musical notation?

In any case, once I decided to ask a player what is the name of his instrument. I honestly listened to his performance, paid one dollar, and decided that now we became close enough friends for me to get noisy. I asked "What is the name of this thing?" Maybe the man couldn't speak English at all, it happens, when you live in Chinatown you don't really need English, sometimes we had other customers translating for sale people in stories what we want to buy, maybe there was some other reason, but he didn't answer, instead he put bow in my hand and holding my hand in his touched the strings. Then he let me do it myself. After some practice, I managed to produce a sound distant enough from squeak. We smiled and I left. He still didn't say a word in English.

I am still trying to wrap my mind around this way of naming things.

Billy Collins
Forgetfulness

The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read,
never even heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,
something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember,
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.
It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.

That's a very romantic vision. More likely, going into the kitchen in the morning you'll find a tomato in a microwave. For me, there is even more poetry in this gesture than in Collins' poem, even though it's a wonderful piece.

"I love typography. I sit in theaters and watch every minute of the rolling credits if the font used is well chosen and well displayed. I have a Caslon 540 lower-case "g" pinned to the wall above my Mac instead of swimsuit pics. If you love type, you know what I'm talking about."

Amazon's review for Non-Designer's Type Book

Another type lover is responsible for turning a boring house number into this little masterpiece.

Amazon's concordance

Here it is, for Pinker's "The Language Instinct". Useful, if you have no idea what a book is about. :-)