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I never thought that Courier, the font, is good for anything other than to please your eyes with program listings. I was wrong! In this blog it's an organic element of design. I could hardly believe my eyes... Terrible news is that Trebuchet started its triumphal march across the Blogostan. Apparently WordPress made it a default font in one of its templates. It's probably a good font, but I can't stand it. The lowercase g is particularly loathsome.
Purty plemeni. Part 1.
Dining on the trainCommunism never proclaimed itself incompatible with fine dining, but the two never learnt to coexist peacefully. The Great October Revolution, the Civil War, Stalin's purges changed the environment to benefit lest gastronomically concerned citizens. The last Russian gourmet was seen in 1930s in a Siberia camp, savoring delicious vitamines-rich beverage made out of pine needles. WWII took care of what was left of the national cuisine. After four years of bread-and-water diet the population wasn’t too picky in its choices. One day I was on the train from California to Illinois escorting my girlfriend's mother, who didn't speak any English. Anna (the name is thoroughly changed to conceal identity) prepared for the trip as a well-traveled Russian, which is to say she packed a bag of Chinese noodles that would keep us stuffed all the way to Chicago. You only needed to add some broiled water to the stock. (Later we learnt that the full board was included in the tickets, but it was later.) Now she asked me to go in the lobby to get some kipyatok (the Russian word for broiling water.) Kipyatok is available for free on the Russian railroads since the Civil War, when it was considered the prime cure from typhus. I had some doubts regarding availability of kipyatok on American trains, because I never heard that typhus was widely available in the US either. I went to the lobby and of course, there was no tank with free kipyatok, only a tank with free coffee. "Let's go to the dining car and ask for kipyatok" - suggested Anna. I painted a picture of us in the dining car pouring kipyatok into our cups with noodles... Dining car workers dying from laugh... Us making our way back through five or six wobbling cars... "Why don't we just use coffee?" -- I asked out of despair. She agreed momentarily and didn’t even smile. She was born in the year Hitler invaded Russia. I expected caffeinated noodles to be barely eatable, but they were pretty good. Perhaps railroad coffee doesn't have that much coffee in it. Burda recipesWhen in the prenatal stages of perestroika Burda, the woman magazine, penetrated impenetrable Soviet borders, we learnt that thousands of fruits, vegetables, species and other unclassified forms of food exist we never heard about. Burda's recipes were read like fairy tales. "National Geographic" in your kitchen they were. And they had wonderful pictures too! The only problem with these recipes was you couldn't find anything you could actually cook. There was a joke about how you prepare Burda's food. "Read the first line of the recipe. Now read the last line. Skip everything else." It worked all the time. "Broil one liter of water. ... Add some salt according to your taste." In the same time the Soviet press started to publish more practical recipes of stchi made out of nettle, which plant, unlike cabbage, grown in abundance in any deserted urban park. That was when I started to suspect that social progress in my home country went a bit too far. This topic shall be further explored in the "Purty plemeni. Part 3" entry.
I was flipping through 3D Toons book, and there was a picture that immediately caught my attention. The book presents lots of cute creatures, but this cat stands out. It is a very special cat. I returned to the book to look at the pictures once again, then again, then I searched on the Internet to read all I could find about "Riba" short movie and its creators. Here is the official site, and here is the movie itself. It was created by the students of the Supinfocom Valenciennes 3D school of France. Somehow static pictures impressed me more than animation. I downloaded all the pictures I could find on the site, because I am getting addicted to them. Some linguistic observationsYesterday I was in the "Taste of Russia" restaurant in Woodburn, Oregon, and noticed that in their menu pelmeni are constantly spelled as plimeni. Just recently I read about similar mispronunciation in English: Regional Note: Purty is probably the most common American example of metathesis, a linguistic process in which two adjacent sounds are reversed in order. Metathesis in English often involves the consonant r and a vowel, since the phonetic properties of r are so vowellike. For example, the word third used to be thrid, and bird, brid. By the same process, English pretty often came to be realized as purty in regional speech. Most such words stabilized because of the influence of printing and the resultant standardized spelling, but purty for pretty has survived in regional American dialects. Another observation. Both pirozhki (small pie) and blini (crepes) are grammatically plural in Russian. However, in the "Taste of Russia" menu pirozhki kept their plurality no matter what, "one pirozhki" instead of "one pirozhok", while blini somehow managed to produce perfectly correct singular form: "one blin". I am not trying to insist that all Russian words borrowed into English shall behave well and keep their Russian grammatical forms, but why some do and some don't? Anyway, I like blini more than pirozhki, and in all four words ("pirozhki", "pirozhok", blini, blin) the stress is on the last syllable. StchiI have complicated relationship with Russian food. It didn’t use to be this way. My relationships with food in Russia were simple. I ate it. That’s all. Both my parents worked full time when I was a kid, so the ration for the whole week was usually set on the preceding weekend, when they cooked huge pots of that traditional Russian cabbage soup which has two letters in its name in Russian, and four to seven in English, and that everybody ate the whole week. Stchi. I hated it. I hated broiled cabbage. Another delicatessen was pasta. Huge pots of pasta without any dressing that we shoved into ourselves the next week. Thus was established my attitude toward food: if you are able to swallow it, it's just fine. For some reasons, stchi (that's plural too) weren’t in the "Taste of Russia" menu. The only entry they had in "soups" section was borsch, which basically differs from stchi only because it has beet in it. Still I like borsch better, because the more beet, the less broiled cabbage there is! The "Taste of Russia" place is run by Russian Old-Believers -- I could tell this because females didn't wear pants, only traditional long dresses (platya) and many wore kerchiefs on their heads. Old-Believers abandoned traditional Orthodox religion in the XVII century, in a protest against patriarch Nikon's reforms. I only read about them in history books, but never met in person until I moved to the USA. What do I want to eat?When I moved to the US, I learnt that among other new responsibilities I am now responsible for informing everybody around me regarding what I want to eat. I remember being utterly confused when I first encounter this dilemma. What I want to eat? How am I supposed to know what I want to eat? I never had to think about it. Visiting restaurant isn't a popular activity in Russia, to put it mildly, and most of the time when you aren’t home you are served food without asking what you, Your Excellency, want to eat. When I was on a trip to St. Petersburg, for example, the whole group sat in a hotel's dining-room and everybody was served the same set of dishes. No choice was provided, and it didn't occur to anybody to ask for something else. And if somebody did, what difference would it make? Russian food is something you more survive than enjoy. This topic shall be further explored in the "Purty plemeni. Part 2" entry.
This is good! This is simply good. A web site that features 31 ways to lace shoes. All methods are illustrated with neat pictures, named, classified, rated, described ("only for even pairs of eyelets", neat on top", "messy underneath", etc.) I have no words. This is a work of love. This site demonstrates unlimited capabilities of a creative human spirit that can transform any mundane task into a manifestation of an absolute beauty and elegance. Wow. My repeated returns to Strauss Park make of New York not only the shadow city of so many other cities I've known but a shadow city of itself, reminding me of an earlier new York in my own life, and before that of a New York which existed before I was born and which has nothing to do with me but which I need to see -- in old photographs, for example -- because, as an exile without a past, I like to peek at others' foundations to imagine what mine might look like had I been born here, where mine might be if I were to build here. This is weird. I was -- reading? browsing? how do you call it what you do with comics? -- Robert Crumb's Footsy, a story of his sexual obsession with a girl's foot when he was in high school, when I had a transient, vague feeling that I have some recollection of that time. Of course, I can't have any recollections of American high school life in 1950s. My unconscious seems started to create my own personal mythology out of God knows what, using what I read or watch to fill in lacunas. I read that when we sleep, there is certain mechanism in our brain that protects us from to getting awake. It achieves this by making dreams in which problems that bother us in real life are happily resolved. Similarly, there is some mechanism at work that makes me hallucinate that I have memories of my American childhood. As for my real childhood memories, they became not less real, but irrelevant. I don't have much use for them in defining who I am any more.
Yesterday Temple Grandin was presenting her last book, Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior in Portland. I read the book a few months before, and it's one of the best non-fiction books I read in last years. She is an autistic person, and she said that this often helps her to understand animals, because of certain similarities in how autistic people and animals perceive the world. It's a deeply original book, and I feel very lucky that I could see her in person. One thing I wondered about was: if I didn't know about her autism, would I notice anything strange in her behavior? Now I know the answer: no, I wouldn't. She is such a typical professor (she's an Associate Professor of Animal Science at Colorado State University), if there is such a thing. She talks fast, she talks emotionally, she packs information densily, and she gesticulates a lot. She spent half of time answering questions, and she listened very attentively to the questions and often got emotionally involved with a person she talked to -- nothing close to my stereotype of an autistic person, whom I imagined detached and preoccupied with her own inner stuff. In overall, she appeared energetic, very enthusiastic about her subject and very absorbed with it. Students must adore her. That's what I observed; the book reveals a more complex picture. I have difficulty understanding and having a relationship with people whose primary motivation in life is governed by complex emotions, as my actions are guided by intellect. Her book is a story of a person with a unique combination of strengths and weaknesses, a person with a highly developed intellect and unusual emotional life. Hans Asperger, the German doctor after whom the syndrome is named, states that commonly held assumption of poverty of emotions in autism is inaccurate. However, my strong emotional bonds are tied up with places more than people. To use intellect in attempts to get better understanding of how other people feel is something I can relate to. When you get out of your habitual environment where emotional reactions were self-evident and questioned no more than reflects, you often have no idea why somebody reacted as he did. You have no immediate emotional response, and all you can do is to observe, perhaps to ask questions, and eventually gain some understanding. After that you will learn to have emotional response, which will be based on intellectual constructions. Intellect and emotions aren't necessarily orthogonal. Hrant H. Papazian said that latinization -- "the imposition of Latin alphabetic ideals on other scripts" -- worries him. When I read this, I wasn't quite sure what he means. How do you impose "alphabetic ideals" of one script onto another? Unlike phonetic systems, typographical features of Russian and English never seemed sufficiently orthogonal to me. There is pretty much seamless fusion between the two alphabets. When I switch languages on keyboard, I continue to type in the "same" font (if it is "russified", more about it later).
In truth, the fusion I take as granted is a result of a long process. Professional typographers do think that fusion between Latin and Cyrillic script is the main direction along which the latter develops. To like it or not is another question, and alas, rethorical one. This process was started by Peter the Great. In 1708-1710 he personally supervised the typographic reform, that would simplify the printed forms of the Russian language and bring them closer to Latin (he took Dutch fonts as an etalon). A text in Russian before and after the reform:
Later, Russian typography was mainly influenced by German typographic culture, and finally, after the Revolution of 1917, started to develop completely independently. Practically, it means that most of Russian fonts of that time are "adapted" versions of famous Western species: Century, Cheltenham, Helvetica, etc. The government considered 5-6 fonts more than enough for any publishing activity, so the fonts never proliferate too much in The Soviet Union. Now there are 20 times less Cyrillic fonts than there are Latin. "Russification" or "adaptations" were sometimes made by the creators of the original font, or a company that had copyright -- in this case the local artists complained that ignorant and indifferent foreigners screwed some intricate and vital Cyrillic proportions, which rendered the resulting type virtually unusable. In other cases, the Russian part of the type was drawn by the local talents, which process is described here (Russian) and as the saying goes, if you like laws and sausages, you better never see how either is made. I am not aware of any instance of the reverse process, when some Latin font would be inspired by a Cyrillic original. If you are, let me know. Granted, there are some fonts that are stylized to look like Old Russian, for example, but as I understand the inspiration is the script as such, not a particular type.
The one-directional influence is what bothered Hrant, and he reversed the order in his Armenian font: "... increasingly I become more worried about Latinization – the imposition of Latin alphabetic ideals on other scripts. It’s really nothing short of cultural imperialism, even cultural genocide." Patria comes from Harrier, and Harrier comes from Nour, an Armenian font I drew in Yerevan (on paper) during the summer of 2000, motivated by two things: a wish to apply my understanding of readability to Armenian; and a desire to forestall the rampant Latinization of Armenian.
A curious thing happened though when I took the idea of Nour with me to the ATypI conference in Leipzig: I realized that this would be a great opportunity to give Nour a subordinate Latin “slave”. It would look as Armenian as possible. Payback for all the times it had been the other way around. Sweet revenge. And I drew it. And I liked it, and called it Harrier, after the dog breed – not as a slight – I really love hounds, they’re the newspaper fonts of the dog world. I think Harrier would make for a very interesting book face, with its rigid slant and generous extenders. In a way, Harrier is actually a slanted-Roman, but not the stubborn ideological stuff Morison was preaching.
This is an example of a multiscriptual font. Rumoredly, such fonts were created in the former Soviet Union, where five alphabets were in use: Latin, Cyrillic, Georgian, Armenian and Hebrew. If you wonder why Arabic is absent in this list, that's because to reduce Islam's ideological influence, in 1920-s susceptible nation writing systems were assigned the Latin alphabet, which was replaced by Cyrillic in 1930-s. By 1940s, 21 language changed alphabets twice, and 13 languages three times. Both Latin and Cyrillic alphabets were rather promiscuous in XX century. To design a font that would combine features of two (or more?) scripts looks like an interesting challenge. I enjoy many Latin fonts greatly, and I can only welcome any attempt to transfer their spirit into Cyrillic script. Rather than "cultural genocide", I see this as what Walter Benjamin in his essay "The Task of the Translator" described as one language complementing another up to the one complete language. Michael wrote an entry about his new blog design. I wondered if it's the same man who snapped at me, when all I did was to ask him to choose some visual improvements for his blog at 12.30 at night (like if he has another time when he is available!) But then I figured, that he was still under impression of his encounter with FUDonks personage. Now I understand. On such background my design looks only like a minor offence. If you are reading this, and you don't have access to JavaRanch's "Moderators Only" forum, here is the hidden part of the story. Some time ago, Ernest Friedman-Hill said in MO that to do a book proper justice, he needs at least two copies: one that he would read, and another that he would not read, to compare impressions. All the publishers know that, so he always gets books for review in twos. Now, when he is done with "Ajax in Action", he can send the copy that he didn't read to "the first person to post" here, in MO, "a picture of themselves holding a can or bottle of their favorite household cleaning product." As always with this kind of contests, Michael was the first.
Going even deeper into history... When JavaRanch started to host blogs, I got an idea to do something to Michael's blog. Such a person as Mike can never fit Pebble's standard skin (not that there is anything wrong with the standard skin). I interviewed him (actually several times) about what theme he wants to see, what color he would prefer etc. The theme he wanted resonated with precisely nothing in my tortured soul, and I happened to have particular aversion to the color he chose. I agonized over the design, wondering for myself how is it that professional designers can work with whatever a client wants from them, and on schedule? Are they like professional prostitutes, ready to implement every your wish, while your loved one, I mean somebody who really, genuinely loves you, can do it in one favorite position and only when she feels like it? I love Michael, so a year or two later we still were nowhere. Ernest's idea was a salvation. It promptly occurred to me that the picture of Michael snaking on Comet would produce an interesting effect, in juxtaposition to his "I've been wondering if all the things I've seen were ever real" blogtitle. The night when I played with new additions to my font collection was the night when the head picture was done. Later, Michael asked to paint his eye green, and even though I didn't understand the significance of this act, I obliged. When I attempted to put the pic on his blog, the whole publishing system halted, and Michael lost the text he was typing on the other side of the connection (that's distributed collaboration for you!) He didn't talk to me for two months after that. When I finally recovered, and gathered enough Internet-induced courage to ask Michael if he would mind me to try again, he said that Jess already works on his blog, and he wouldn't mind if she put the picture. (Ok, Ok, I made the last part up.) The truth is Jess did put the picture, and she also painted all the links -- it would take me several more months to make a decision what color the links should be... The rest was mostly reorganizing entries (moving pieces of metadata from bottom to top, from right to left and vice versa) and their appearance. Speaking about appearance, I want to point out two things. First, I changed font to display dates from default Verdana to Georgia. It is generally not recommended to proliferate fonts without reason, the fewer you can live with the better, but in this case I had a reason. There is such thing in typography as non-lining figures (aka "old-style" figures.) Unlike the figures we are used to see in about any computer font, non-lining figures don't fit the same size and grid:
They are recommended to use for numbers inside the text, and indeed if you start to pay attention, figures in books are set in non-lining figures. If you start to pay attention to the sites that aspire to demonstrate professional design (or typography, to be precise), you'll notice that they use non-lining figures too. If you go further, and dig out of their cascades of styling sheets the name of the font they use to display these figures, you'll learn that it is invariantly Georgia. Up to now I don't know any other free and widely used computer font that would support non-lining figures. So I used Georgia to display dates. The last thing was to display entry titles in "small caps" - "small capitals". Small capitals are specially designed letters that resemble capitals in shape, but are smaller, LIKE THESE, so they don't stand out of the normal flow of text. I repeat, they are specially designed, and not every font has them, only the fonts that are designed for professional publishing (consequently, they are more expensive). Unlike with non-lining figures, I don't know any free and widely used computer font that supports them. And if the font doesn't, the rendering software simply takes capitals and reduces their size. This distorts letters proportions, and no professional typographer can see this atrocity without temporary losing consciousness. So it wasn't a good thing for me to do (even though some authoritative publishing sources aren't shy to use them), and I am thinking on replacing it with something more civil.
I have two beds
I was reading an article about hand lettering comics and noticed a familiar object. It was lekalo, a toy I used to play with when I was a kid. My father is a drafter (he is 70 now and still works) and he keeps a set of three lekalas home, in case of kalym -- a side job. I was fascinated by their elegant shapes, none of which was static, they were always in process of becoming another shape. I can recognize the top left one on the picture, but this one I liked lest. My favorite had more sophisticated contours. When I was 8-10, my father used to bring home some machinery parts from his factory and teach me to draw them in three projections. When we started to study drafting in school -- and we had two years of obligatory drafting classes in the Soviet Union, I still have no idea why this subject was so sweet to the communist government -- he checked my each homework because he was afraid that our school's requirements aren't quite up to the industrial standards. No sloppiness was tolerated, so I had to re-draw almost all of my works. I didn't protest, I was flattered by his sudden interest in my studies, and thought that it was my duty to maintain family honor (in other cultures vendetta serves the same goals). Last summer, when I visited my family in Russia, my father confessed that the only thing that let me avoid a career in metallurgy was that no college in my home city offered a program in it. Otherwise there wouldn't be too much talk about what profession was good for me. I have been thinking about One Art poem, how I would express my idea of "loss" visually, and couldn't find words to formulate it. Even though after moving from one continent to another I lost almost everything one can conceivable lose, I don't think of "loss" or feel it. It is in me, but in some other form. A couple days ago I came across another little poem that expresses my idea. Your absence has gone through me Then I found somebody's comment on the Internet: A startling, compelling poem - note the inversion of the usual 'your absence has left a hole in me' imagery. The idea of a 'positive' absence is unusual, but it has a definite *rightness* to it, which Merwin captures brilliantly in his metaphor. Now I have a term to think in: "positive absence". I read about the drafts of One Art and playing with the idea made this picture (I used Manfred Klein's BodoBlackSquares font).
March 5, 2006
[Music] Start wearing purple "I didn't know how decadent Russians could be until I saw Gogol Bordello" "Gogol Bordello" is a NYC musical band, "Ukrainian Gypsy Punk Cabaret", as they call themselves. Whether these are Ukrainian, or Russian, or Gipsy melodies the group performs with such a gaiety, they often sound familiar, prototypical (at the end of Start wearing purple there is a famous theme of "Fried Chicken" Start wearing purple wearing purple My attempt to translate the Russian part: And I swear, having pissed on two fingers, The last word that I lamely translated as "nowhere", is к ебеням in the original, and I have a confession to make. It is a word from the language that is called Russian mat, an obscene language that is used mostly by males. I had to use a "Russian-Russian" dictionary of mat to understand what it means! Literally, the dictionary said, it means "a very distant place", for example "we were lost and went to some ebenyam". Um, I mean literally it has something to do with sexual activity… But Russian mat deserve a separate post, and probably more than one.
Shot March 1 in Portland, Oregon.
March 3, 2006
[Language] [Books] Fading rubber nose "Everything is illuminated": (in)visibility of narrator (Continued from Laugh in a second language.) Another reason why Alex's version of "the language of English" didn't make me laugh, and only rarely made me smile (that's when it occurred to me to translate his verbs and nouns into equally inappropriate Russian analogs), is that I so got used to my friends and my own broken English. I learnt to screen out all language imperfections before they even get a chance to reach the level of consciousness. There are some interesting parallels with the language of comics. Joe Zabel in his entry Poser and Invisible Art notices a similar effect: If you're telling somebody a story, you want them to be paying attention to the story. You don't want them thinking about the pimple on the end of your nose. You don't want them thinking about your appearance at all. For the purposes of telling the story, ideally you should be invisible to them. This is indeed what happened when I was reading Everything is illuminated. By the end of the book Alex's butchered English became invisible. And when the language became invisible, another effect that this book shares with graphic novels emerged. Often comics are a perfect media for most horrendous stories, to which effect Art Spiegelman's Maus is the most famous example. "By stripping down an image to its essential "meaning", an artist can amplify that meaning in a way that realistic art can't", writes Scott McCloud in his "Understanding Comics". The language of Everything is illuminated, the part that is told by Alex, to be precise, is simplified. This is a real effect -- the author didn't make it up -- I often noticed that my friends have a set of favorite words they use whenever they can't think of a more precise alternative. (It took longer to notice that I do the same.) Any idea, complex or not, has to be expressed via the same limited set of "primitives of meaning". In some ways such a finite (as opposed to "real", which bears the illusion of infinity) language is analogous to the visual language of graphic novels. By the end of the book, when I got used to the language, the story turned from a comedy of absurd into a tragedy, and this is when this reduced, value-deprived, "matter-of-fact", hopelessly inadequate language became the most expressive media, second only to silence.
March 2, 2006
[Books] [Humor] Laugh in a second language "Everything is illuminated": a story told in fluid English
I just finished Everything is illuminated, and I can say that it is the second best book I ever read in English. The first was Twelve Stories of Russia by A. J. Perry. "The first" in chronological order, I don't want to compare them and to decide which I like more, I like them both. And there is something similar in them, maybe narrator's voice. It's a voice of a stranger struggling to make sense out of incomprehensible world, sorting it into inadequate categories. The resulting makeshift meaning, while far from perfect or refined, still allows life to continue. The story is told by Alex (Alexander) Perchov, an Ukrainian student, whose fathers works for a travel agency. When a father's client, an American Jew visiting Ukraine, needs an interpreter, the father looks no further than his own son and promptly assigns him the mission. "Alex," he said, "what was the language you studied this year at school?" "The language of English," I told him. "Are you good and fine at it?" he asked me. "I am fluid," I told him. ... "Excellent, Alex. Excellent. You must nullify any plans you possess for the first week of the month of July." It is Alex's "fluid" English, the story is narrated in. When reading it, I wondered if native English speakers would find the text hilarious. Because I did not laugh. Not that I was offended, far from it, I wish I could laugh. I remember reading a detective story written by a Polish author. One of the story's heroes is not a native speaker of Polish. The book was translated into Russian, so don't know how funny it was in original, but I laughed until tears run down my cheeks. And I must admit that when I once received a letter from somebody for whom Russian was a foreign language, I laughed just as hard. I don't think there was any arrogance or feeling of superiority in this laugh, the text was so hilarious that it transcended any human foibles. So I felt frustrated that I can't get a good laugh reading a humor-wise similar story in English. You need much more intimate relationship with a language, for being able to use it for anything besides merely getting a message. Here is a question for you. If you are a native speaker of English, does this scene make you laugh? And if you aren't, I still wonder if it makes you laugh. Alex meets his client for the first time: He must have witnessed the sign I was holding, because he punched me on the shoulder and said, "Alex?" I told him yes. "You're my translator, right?" I asked him to be slow, because I could not understand him. In truth I was manufacturing a brick wall of shits. I attempted to be sedate. "Lesson one. Hello. How are you doing this day?" "What?" "Lesson two. Ok, isn't the weather full of delight?" "You're my translator," he said, manufacturing movements, "yes?" "Yes," I said presenting him my hand. "I am Alexander Perchov. I am your humble translator." To be continued... The LanguageHat digged this little masterpiece out of Google's cache. SAMOVAR LOVE COMPENDIUM I love the word samovar, and I love I love the word samovar, and I love I love the word samovar, and I love I love the word samovar and I love I love the word samovar, and I love |
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