The Unkown Portraits is available from Kozyndan’s website, now.

It seems as though I have done something else lately. But I can’t remember. This is a quiet, generative time.

Language is God.

Typography is His body.

The first California rain.
The sensation of the precipice.

Chenelle and I are producing a series of one acts by women. It’s all new work so please! Submit your stuff! And please! Repost on your Internet haunts! The deadline is December 15th. Our Facebook group has all the details.

Sent off the prints for the Greenville Presents show. Very pleased with how they turned out. I do best with juggling many projects, my attention span is terribly short, but invariably that means some never get finished and some slip through my fingers. The ones that slip away cause me a great deal of anxiety. I like faithfulness, I like knowing deeply. Even so, I am learning that not everything ought to be completed. It’s alright to let some things go. But it’s the discernment I am having difficulty with. I’m never sure when to be faithful and see something through and when to release. Maybe that’s a knowledge that comes with age and experience. For now my filter seems to function by piling it all on thick, seeing what has the strongest hold. I’m busy, and I like that.

Now that the weather’s snapped, I am making an extraordinary effort to finish all the books I got half way through this summer. The list is long and disparate: The Virgin Suicides, A Clockwork Orange, Ulysses, Methods of Book Design, In Our Time, The Tempest, Perfume, Early Plays: Eugene O’Neil, The Art of the Visual Book… on and on. It didn’t matter the length of the text; at the half way point it became impossible to read another page.

In the end the only books I finished this season were my third reading of Light in August and A Book of Common Prayer. Reading a Faulkner novel is kin to breathing for me and something about Didon’s Sacramento heritage kept me compelled in the latter.

Despite my backlog, I recently purchased The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You and Virgina Woolf’s selected letters, both of which I am eager to dive into. I’ve been skipping around the Woolf a bit and came across this passage in a letter to her sister, written shortly after she and Leonard acquired their hand press and established The Hogarth Press:

May 22, 1917

Dearest,

We’ve been so absorbed in printing that I am about as much of a farmyard sheep dog as you are. I can hardly tear myself away to go to London, or see anyone. We have just started printing Leonard’s story; I haven’t produced mine yet, but there’s nothing in writing compared with printing.

There’s nothing in writing compared with printing. It is absolutely true. It is difficult to describe how fulfilling printing is when one is also a writer. What it feels like to construct the actual body of the spirit you have made, to move out of the world of concepts and into the world of the physical, and these ultimately the same worlds.

The difficulties of having a studio in San Francisco when I am living in Sacramento are becoming overbearing. I feel as though my work as a printer is regressing because I no longer engage in regular practice as one. I’ve never given much serious thought to owning my own press because of my nomadic ways, but for the first time in my life I feel nested in a single location and the idea of owning a press is starting to make sense. And to be appealing. And exciting.

Jessalyn with long term goals? Heaven help me, I very well may be making them.

I have been doing a lot of writing this past month rather than reading anything about typography, or any actual printing. It’s going well, as well as it can for the winter time. I’ve been meeting a bit with Ed Skoog, who is a writer in residence at the Hugo House here in Seattle. Our meetings have been very encouraging and productive and I’m thankful for the time he’s put into helping me revise older stories.

It’s been difficult to update this journal because there’s nothing to report when I’m intensely writing. I just hole up in my basement apartment and get a little weird and beg my sister to buy me pizza when I’m out of food stamps. I’m working hard on a novella that’s excruciatingly difficult to write (though I should quit saying that, the more I say it’s difficult the more difficult I make it!) and a project that I don’t even want to mention for fear of spoiling but I will say that I’m VERY excited about it.

Printing has not been as prolific as I would have liked this year. Far from it. It’s been difficult to find a studio here in Seattle. Printing more and printing better are serious New Year’s resolutions and this Hatch internship is a good way to start things off. I don’t own a computer so I hope I’m clever enough to find a library or something to access the Internet with while in Tennessee and update this journal while I’m there.

I am not dragging any of my books or prints with me for my month and a half of vagabondage. A route that includes California, North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee and probably Georgia in six weeks demands light luggage. So if you’ve been wanting to buy anything from the site NOW is the time. I won’t be able to mail any orders placed after December 12th until early February!

The proofs for my book arrived last week. They looked great! Save for one glaring error in my biography: I neglected to set the numbers in my birth year as text figures.

As a child I remember distinctly wondering: Are there lower case numbers? What are they called? What do they look like? I read The Elements of Typographic Style* before beginning to set Human Parts of me Want to Eat the Flowers off of Trees, and was ecstatic to find the answer to this old question:

Arabic numerals - known in Arabic as Indian numerals, arqãm hindiyya, because the Arabs obtained them from India - entered the scribal traditional of Europe in the thirteenth century. Before that (and for many purposes afterward) European scribes used roman numbers, written in capitals when they occurred in the midst of other capitals, and in lowercase in the midst of lowercase letters. Typographers have naturally inherited this custom if setting roman numerals so that they harmonize with the words…

When arabic numerals joined the roman alphabet, they too were given both lowercase and uppercase forms. Typographers call the former text figures, hanging figures, lowercase figures, or old-style figures and make a point of using them whenever the surrounding text is set in lowercase letters or small caps. The alternative forms are called titling figures, ranging figures, or lining figures, because they range or align with one another and with the upper case.

The Elements of Typographic Style, Robert Bringhurst

I really wish I could provide some examples of form and appropriate usage, but I don’t think Wordpress has small cap capability. Perhaps I’ll scan some pages to post later.

*A book I highly, highly recommend above all others to anyone interested in book design or typography. It is lucid, poetic, almost metaphysical in its authoritative presentation of the subject.

I’m still working out exactly what I want to use this journal for. When I started the site, I intended for it to be exclusively about letterpress printing and book binding. My letterpress work is enormously important to me, what I do is larger than that. So while this journal will still be primarily be about letterpress, expect a few tidbits about my writing and other projects to crop up now and then.

One thing I’ve been dying to talk about are the classes I’ve been taking at the Northwest Film Forum. I shot a short film at the end of July and editing happens next week. Over the past year I’ve been trying to direct my writing toward being more narrative driven, but I miss creating in a world of pure images. Film has proven, naturally, to be an excellent vehicle for me to return to that state of mind. And it’s so nice to be experimenting in a field outside of my expertise and to create something more playful, with less pressure. When the editing is done I’m sure I’ll YouTube the thing, so stay tuned (ho ho!).

I hate Virginia Woolf.

We have the same birthday. We are both writers. We are both printers. We both tend toward hysteria, madness, and being kind of faggy. I feel like I’m in this weird cosmic competition with her for the individuality of my soul. Everything I want to do Virginia Woolf has already done. I actually don’t know if I like or dislike her novels because I go into them with such a rotten attitude and never finish.

Les, though, once told us about a dream Virginia had, that has always given me a tickle, in which she saw herself as a case of pied type (when type is “pied” it means it has been spilled), to which Clara retorted, “She would.”

Teachers of Literature are apt to think up such problems as “What is this author’s purpose?” or still worse “What is the guy trying to say?” Now, I happen to be the kind of author who in starting to work on a book has no other purpose than to get rid of that book and who, when asked to explain its origin and growth, has to rely on such ancient terms as Interreaction of Inspiration and Combination-which, I admit, sounds like a conjurer explaining one trick by performing another.

On a Book Entitled Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov

I have read Lolita at least three times and have somehow always skipped the afterward. If you have not read this essay you really ought to, regardless of the novel.