Well speak of the Devil! I’ve been accepted to Hatch Show Print’s winter internship program. I’ll be in Nashville for the month of January, working in the shop. Thrilled!

I am headed to Paris today, loosely in conjunction with Human Parts of Me Want to Eat the Flowers off of Trees being a part of the Colette show. This journal will be on holiday until I return on November 2nd.

Lastly, Jessica Hallock sweetly interviewed me about Human Parts of Me. Transcript below.

Jessica Hallock: Meat comes up frequently in Human Parts of Me…. What significance does the eating or handling of meat have for you, & also what significance the fine line between living vessel & lifeless carcass?

Jessalyn Wakefield: I grew up eating wild game. My family, at times, also raised and slaughtered our own animals. We lived out in the middle of nowhere, the dogs were always bringing home dead and rotting things. So carcasses were fairly omnipresent in my childhood. Even so, there was always reverence and fascination with a slaughter, or with my father bringing home something from hunting, or even the dogs dragging half rotted deer down the road that just never left me and hasn’t left me to this day. The significance is, I suppose, in the fascination and reverence that I experience at the sight of something dead. I cannot wrap my mind around lifelessness. And that by eating meat you take another body and make it part of your own. That eating meat, muscle tissue, specifically feeds your own muscles. That’s an incredibly powerful act to me. Flesh of my flesh.

That fine line between living vessel and lifeless carcass exists for me as Mystery.

JH: Early in the dialogue between the Angel & the Woman in The Waters of Jordan there are motions of voicelessness, of an inability to give voice - characters cutting off, falling silent, long spaces between phrases - that seem remniscient of Beckett, whereas in the stories this voicelessness is expressed more in obscenities, a failure to attend to dialogue, discontinuity in speech, etc. - do you feel this disconnect, or gap, between the voiced & the intended in your own life?

JW: It’s less voiced and the intended, that is, the internal and the external, and more about the internal voice and the internal comprehension of that voice. I feel a constant inability for my self to communicate with its Self. I experience a huge disconnect in understanding what I am thinking and feeling and experiencing, being able to name what is going on internally. I often have inappropriate emotional reactions to situations, or don’t understand why I have the reactions that I do, or don’t know what I am feeling or thinking about a situation at all. My interaction with the external is fairly naive and surface most of the time.

JH: Are the nausea & disgust (or self-loathing) encountered in your stories emblematic of a response to the absurdity of existence, or more a result of a distance from that existence? Or something else entirely?

JW: I think the disgust and the nausea go back to the previous question, having to do with the frustration and perplexity I experience at the closed off nature of my internal life. Experiencing strong reactions and being unable to deal with them because I cannot name them, experiencing a void when I know I should be experiencing a reaction. Etc. It all builds into a sickness, you know?

JH: What is the significance of the animals in the scene?

JW: Need. Submission and humiliation because of need.

Last night I was talking to Rich and he said “That was a nice post you made about Hatch, but I don’t know what you mean, fifteenth century French Renaissance types. Gutenberg didn’t build his press until 1439.”

And I was like “Whatever Rich, I know what I’m talking about, let me pull out A Short History of the Printed Word and prove you wrong.”

And he said “No! No! I don’t want to go there with you!”

Which was just as well, because by that point I had already flipped through the book I realized that the type I was talking about was from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and most of it falls in the Baroque period.

Rich, you are a sharp young man.

I don’t even remember how I first heard about Hatch Show Print. Hatch is such a significant part of American letterpress that it kind of seeps into your consciousness via osmosis if you hang around a studio long enough. As I use letterpress primarily for book making, Hatch is a vibrant reminder of the possibilities of color and space and graphics. And as I am magnetically drawn to French Renaissance typography and fonts, I tend to become mired in a heavy golden dream of the 15th century, to which Hatch also serves as an inspiring wake up call, boldly announcing the goddamn modern *A*M*E*R*I*C*A*N*E*S*S* of printing in these United States.

An exhibit of Hatch Show Print posters just opened here in Seattle at the Experience Music Project - Science Fiction Museum Hall of Fame and I am THRILLED (both to see the exhibit and to actually go inside the EMP - SFM, the name of which always makes me ask Seriously what does that mean???). It’s long running, till July, so you have some time to make a West Coast pilgrimage if you need to. Or if you’re local, you have time to go twice. Or three times. Or four.

(PS Dear Bauhaus, please do not ever, ever, ever again play the instrumental version of the soundtrack to CATS that’s playing right now. Please.)

The small shopkeeper, for instance, is still with us, and though the time has almost come wherein he will have no apparent place, nevertheless his survival is permanent; for nothing can stop small boys from selling one another marbles, and it is that personal dealing which is the root of all trading.

-An Essay on Typography, Eric Gill

There are, then, two world & these twain can never be one flesh. They are not complementary to one another; they are, in the liveliest sense of the words, mortal enemies. On the one hand is the world of mechanised industry claiming to be able to give happiness to men and all the delights of human life- provided we are content to have them in our spare time and do not demand such things in the work by which we earn our livings; a world regulated by the factory whistle and the mechanical time-keeper; a world wherein no man makes the whole of anything, wherein the product is standardised and the man simply a tool, a tooth on a wheel. On the other is the languishing by indestructible world of the small shopkeeper, the small workshop, the studio and the consulting room- a world in which the notion of spare time hardly exists, for the thing is hardly known and very little desired; a world wherein the work is the life & love accompanies it.

-Ibid.

I picked up a copy of An Essay on Typography while at The Strand this summer. I got perhaps a third of the way through it and then misplaced it during the move. Over the past few days of unpacking it surfaced again and I have been alternating it with Sanctuary on my bus ride.

Of Eric Gill’s most well known fonts, Gill Sans is not a font I’ve ever been particularly fond of (a personal prejudiced against san serifs, though I’ve been trying to come around and appreciate them) and I haven’t spent enough time with Perpetua to have an opinion. An Essay on Typography is set in Joanna, a font I had never encountered before. I’ve become quite enamored with Joanna and with her companion italic especially. Gill chose to set the text ragged right rather than justified as a protest against ‘the tyrannical insistence upon equal lengths of lines.’ Not to be colloquial, but the ragged right setting has kind of blown my mind.  As a final endearing typographic touch, he uses the pilcrow to mark his paragraphs rather than line breaks or indentation (and he includes a liberal sprinkling of ampersands).

Gill is continually brilliant and amusing throughout the book, if meandering. It’s less An Essay on Typography and more An Essay on Whatever Eric Gill Should Like to Talk About, and Mostly He Should Like to Talk About Typography. I don’t mind one bit. It’s interesting reading whatever way you cut it. Throughout the book there persists a theme of “two worlds,” that of mechanized industry and that of the humanist craft. Gill’s treatment of this subject sings to me. I’ve marked the pages up with dark underlining and exclamatory stamps of “YES!” Reading this book has, surprisingly, given me a grounded hope in the persistence of the humanness of our existence.

Additionally, I had no idea that Eric Gill had such a dark personal life, but every time I’ve mentioned that I’m reading the book, someone will say something like “Eric Gill! He was a nudist!” or “Eric Gill! He molested his children!” or “Eric Gill! He fucked his dog!” There’s apparently a biography by Fiona MacCarthy that rakes up all his dirt that I’d dearly love to read. Who knew typography could be so perverse?