Spent all weekend working on a project that failed. Today’s newsletter almost didn’t happen. It’s hasty and haphzard. When it comes to luster, it’s lacking. But…it’s here…
It’s a fine line between a healthy obsession, and toxicity. Between frustration, drive, spite, desperation, and apathy. Between giving up, falling apart, figuring it out, breaking through, and continually spinning. Relapse, recovery, and sobriety, one or all of the above I’m told comes into play. But, maybe that’s just me...
Everything is made of small things. Electrons. Atoms. Nuts. Bolts. Screws. Prayer beads. Everything carries bits of something else. Nothing arrives fully formed. Everything starts as something other, becomes one thing and then another. Shifts. Changes, and then becomes something different yet again.
Somedays we push, and pull, and pry. Most days we blister and ache. We feel the weight of every failed attempt like sediment. Like coarse conglomerate. Immovable granite and bouldering clay. It's heavy. It's hard to carry. It's hard to move, but even a little bit goes a long way...
We "assemble a life from the usable fragments", Lewis Hyde says. Sacred relics of the wreckage, gathered and connected. We experience the world as wholeness when all our pieces have a space.
You have an affliction. A malady. Everything in the world, all its equipment and armaments, its slings and arrows, its sticks and stones, its words that always hurt you, that break your heart and your bones. Osteogenesis imperfecta. All your inner structures turn brittle, little, and weak.
Better starts with dissatisfaction. A holy discontent. A decided refusal to never relinquish the possibility of what could be to what has been. To never accept the current state of things. It starts with a willing rejection. It starts with a conscientious objection.
You have a condition. A sensitivity. The symptoms are invisible. Whether you were born with it or came to it. Something in your genes or something that happens as you age. Who knows? Who’s to say? It’s a kind of osteopenia. A loss of inner strength. A kind of poverty. You can’t rebuild quickly. A reduction of volume, of mass. An inadequate density.
Super excited about Monday’s newsletter. I made a piece of art for a fellow writer's poem last week, and I “try” to write alittle bit about my creative process in making it and the way collage relates to my creative proces as a whole…I know…it’s kind of a lot…
#TIH#OTD 07 Sep 1559: Death of Robert Estienne (b. 1503), a.k.a. Robertus Stephanus, Parisian printer and Humanist scholar. Printer to the King in Latin, Hebrew, and Greek, he published, inter al., Roman and Greek classics—including 8 editiones principes—extolled for their typographical elegance, and is famous for his Thesaurus linguæ latinæ, often deemed the foundation of modern Latin #lexicography . #BookHistory#typography
I would be very grateful to anyone who could point me to historical articles on the #chicago typographers' strike in 1947-1948 and possibly on the role played by the Vari-Typer in that strike. #typography#strike#history@histodons