Linguistic Underpinnings

It’s been awhile since I posted anything here, but I have been busy overwhelming myself in other fields. Mainly all this has done for me is remind me of where my communication and interpretation skills are mostly squirrely. Following a string of misinterpretations between me and a friend I was reminded (and am reminded somewhat regularly) of how often I overlook typos that involve flipped letters or a misplaced sequence of words that can change the meaning of a sentence. I often jump whole words at times in reading and though I feel like my reading speed is average, this quirk points to the fact that it might be quicker if it weren’t for certain tendencies. I was the kid who regularly wrote my name backwards in kindergarten and who still finds reading music to be some sort of hell when it comes to assigning letters in order to make notes meaningful and saying letter sequences to yourself in your head as you attempt to play music. Not fun.

I set out to look for visually based type fonts that are supposed to encourage legibility and here’s what I found:

A site called Dyslexic.com runs through fonts that have been designed for easy readability.

http://www.dyslexic.com/fonts

Beyond those who may have issues with letter sequencing, it’s actually a handy tool for thinking about the font you use ins a web page, running through a string of which fonts people choose and why.

One of the free download-able fonts it points to is Lexia Readable.

http://www.k-type.com/fontlexia.html

This may have been the gem of my explorations simply because it’s free and therefore readily usable to me, and takes readability concerns into account within its design such as the size of ascenders and descenders and the unique visual appearance of words . It’s a pretty cheesy and quirky font on some levels but Dyslexic.com makes this statement which is definitely something true to my reading style:

“The size of the ascenders and descenders of letters (the ‘stems’ on letters like p and b) is important as many dyslexic readers rely on recalling the visual shape of a word due to poor phonological awareness. If ascenders and descenders are too short the shape of the word is more difficult to identify and can make reading slower and less accurate.”

Spacing between words can also cause poor readability and Lexia readable has a nice kerning about it.

The idea of making and sharing fonts is fantastic to me ( I jsut wrote “is to me fantastic”- example A as to how much editing I do) because of what specific needs a particular font can answer to.

My explorations also yielded this page of “picture fonts” which goes totally in the other direction of usability- this stuff is just a whole new language. The site lets you type in a sentence and get it translated into swirlies or flowers or splats, the last of which is perhaps the most abstractly appealing.

http://www.myfonts.com/browse/category/myfonts/picture/

Trying to make an efficient writing tool in nothing new. We’ve been at it for ages (for people who like history):

http://members.aol.com/leonheinz/english-lautbildschrift/geschichte.htm

I imagine that it’s something that will continue to change as the channels of communication change. The most gradual evolutions of writing and printing will be the most accepted I imagine. I do like to think what would happen if society agreed on using the most easy-to-read font, but I think variety will always win out and that’s for the best. We’re still ignoring Esperanto after all, and the brilliance of pigeon languages continues to be overlooked in mainstream media despite our country’s increasing relations with other countries.

Looks like sloppy writing is as close as we can get for now…

http://www.dafont.com/pigeon-snatch.font

Behold I do not give lectures or a little charity, When I give I give myself.

-Walt Whitman

The mind and its relationship to the body have been a steady under-current in my art practice. Recently, I’ve thought about it more. It comes up in the labor of my art-making process and presentation. I try to be physically present now when I show works, and in the (at times passively) performative presentation of my work labor becomes a medium.

The relationship between ideology-the mind, and physical action-the body can be descriptors of class, wealth and power struggles. The subjects of my work often include subtle commentary on the meaning and impact of art in various public and private spaces. Context changes interpretation, and the interpretation of space is necessarily political when it involves the body.

Wealth for me is often associated with an ability to choose whether or not to include the body in one’s labor, and also can be evident in the ability or inability of a person to care for themselves- i.e. being in safe places, having healthcare, being able to eat well and maintain health. Obviously, the lower class is often slotted into labor in which their minds are only useful to the extent that they insure the repetition of some physical task. Because of the power struggles that take place in physical spaces, these are the spaces in which we have conversations concerning freedom and oppression.

When we seek liberation do we seek it from ideas? Do we seek it from an altered relationship between thoughts and the body? Do we seek it from the body, in how we use it or don’t use it? Oppression is ultimately problematic because of what it prevents the body from doing. That is, it creates restrictions that limit the translation from a thought to an action.  Oppression is connected to the body. The constant power struggle in our society is one that involves physical spaces. Theoretical debate could be seen as the starting grounds for matters that are ultimately played out in outward, physical space.

Perhaps what I’m thinking about has to do with exposure- the exposure of the internal to the world of the external- thought to action, the ramifications and the irreconcilable conflicts that arise between the two. There is much that we think and would never say or do. We self-sensor, cooperate with social norms, and make decisions based on learned and taught understandings of logical and illogical behavior.

I think about it when I read Jean Genet, and Walt Whitman. Their writings are filled with conscious and unconscious coming into and departing from internal and external spaces. They each struggle to create a stable space between interior and exterior to navigate new passages between the two. For Genet and Whitman, the interior and exterior over lap- one represents the other, the two battle for dominance, the two lie about one another…they struggle.

For Genet, exterior spaces are submissive to interior rational. The mind flashes, like lightening, and reveals a glimpse of the exterior world. He pauses to notice reality, then carries on with a quick, and ultimately self-serving understanding  of the reality he’s glimpsed. His life is the life of the mind. His characters, criminals and prostitutes, ignore outward appearances and interpretations that would enclose them in a limiting stereotype. Their approach to identity makes them careless and dangerous, but opens a path for them to precede with their beliefs.

“Repudiating the virtues of your world, criminals hopelessly agree to organize a forbidden universe. They agree to live in it. The air there is nauseating: they can breathe it.” -Genet

While multiple descriptions of these persons could be generated by society, the characters maintain the sort of introverted absoluteness of self that can only be justified in a vacuous world. Whether Genet and his character’s beliefs are ultimately self destructive or saintly is open for interpretation by the reader. Genet sees his criminals as desperate but insistent visionaries.  As I read, I wonder who is twisted: the deviant ,as an independent creation of the body of society, or the society which has created the deviant, and attempts to brutally cut it off a part of it’s own body.

In Our Lady of the Flowers, Genet comes and goes from the hallucination of story telling. He breaks from fantastical spaces in the mind where he is free, dangerous, and malleable, to shock the reader to the location the author truly inhabits at the time of writing. In reality, he is physically contained and can’t possibly act on his thoughts. He is in a prison cell, the floors are damp, and his bed smells.

Here, I draw a parallel from his writing to that of Walt Whitman- who travels from place to place, also a vagrant like Genet is in his youth and later, after being finally being freed from prison. Whitman absorbs the people and places he meets and projects onto them previous and potential futures. He seemingly experiences new freedoms through this sort of “body empathy”. This empathy is not limited to people, and Whitman describes in detail strong connection to the places which he travels. He imagines himself becoming more like the people he meets and the places he encounters.  He revels in the acquisition of new territory as he considers, the thoughts and bodies of others. He himself is a questionable character, coming and going like a chameleon from person and place. He feels out the perimeters of interior space as Genet does, writing also with fascination of the criminal.

For both, the unusual ways which they negotiate space seems to have an illegal, promiscuous nature. They are each aware that to break from the norm requires a trespass, and they align themselves with all sorts of other “trespassers” in the criminal world. Each writes of their concern that interior justifications cannot be resolved with exterior spaces, as long as moral reasoning and governing institutions act as the floodgates for what an individual may carry from a thought to an action. Each sees the body as a potential vessel for personal liberation.

Walt Whitman (1819–1892). Leaves of Grass. 1900..

You Felons on Trial in Courts

“Excluded by my birth and tastes from the social order, I was not aware of its diversity. Nothing in the world was irrelevant: the stars on a general’s sleeve, the stock-market quotations, the olive harvest, the style of the judiciary, the wheat exchange, flower-beds. Nothing. This order, fearful and feared, whose details were all inter-related, had a meaning: my exile.”

-Jean Genet

I once was browsing through the Oakland library … I had the day off and was just skimming titles. What does it mean when you go looking for a thing you don’t know you want? I do it regularly. It’s an act of fatalism, and for those who are unwilling to indulge in such practices from time to time I’d give you a little loving slap in the face.

Maybe there were a few things that attracted me to the book I ended up grabbing…

the plastic coating was yellowed and torn

the book was not too big or small- a good week’s worth of free time

the title: “Prisoner of Love”

But why am I thinking of this right now? Perhaps you are someone who’s life is like an open place. You look up and you see the area around you- you are in a field and you can see the path ahead. I would say I live in a more densely wooded area, and I like it that way. Open spaces have their own claustrophobic effect. Unexpected or anticipated actions leave room for chance- a little roulette and a little lottery dressed up in a different suit.

Envision with me, the cabin I grew up playing around in the foothills of the Smokies:

The place is a ramshackle combination of bought, borrowed, or swindled materials.It’s nestled at the fork of two hollows and a creek runs down the right side of the structure. Bats crawl into the salvaged carpet lying in the soon-to-be kitchen, and the porch out back has no railing. I convinced myself I saw a dinosaur once here. Once, a pony stepped on my foot in a hollow down below this cabin. I stifled a scream and limped for a week in silence so my mom wouldn’t keep me from walking so close to it. Our neighbors let a traveling bum stay at their house on a hill nearby- my dad called them crazy.

How would you like to fit this in with what you know now? Maybe you can more easily take the advice Richard Rorty offers, in his book “Philosophy and Social Hope”. He suggests the drive to organize and “piece together” all that’s happening in your life is a futile one. If you have decided that events and thoughts fit together in a smooth and pleasant picture way (think pictures on the front of puzzle boxes) then you might be a little bonkers. Rather, Rorty suggests, you might spend your time concentrating on a few organized and highly developed aspects of your life and come up with something that is a bit less homogenous but ultimately more agreeable to yourself and reality.

In Genet’s “Prisoner of Love”, he recounts time spent with the Fedayeen,( a fragment of the Palestinian Intifada), back in 1987 when their future was still uncertain and potential. Genet draws connections between the Palestinians and American blacks as a people lost in history, and finds himself among kindred spirits. His tone of writing waves from poetic to logical, and he mixes the Fayadeen’s stories of struggle and issolation with stories from his own past; time spent in prisons, on the streets as an orphan, in jail for theft and prostitution. He weighs his understanding and the understanding of others in acute peaks of logic. These pass. They are swept away in the rush of the present.

He recounts guerilla encampments and nighttime raids into Syria and Jordan as though they were the rendezvous of lovers. The Fedayeen seem to inhabit some ideological no-man’s land and Genet adopts the same space. He describes “distant gunfire under the stars” and how it mingles with the songs sung from one group of soldiers to another. I think “Where are we?”, as I read Genet’s writing. If a book is working it’s magic, you are in there with the author…

In his book “Our Lady of the Flowers “, (his first published book, for which he was pulled from prison by the likes of Jean Paul Sartre who couldn’t stand to let a brilliant mind be contained behind bars),Genet divulges a bit of his colliding and mingling dualism that brings together two opposing ideas throughout his life:

“There is a close relationship between flowers and convicts. The fragility and delicacy of the former are of the same nature as the brutal insensitivity of the latter. “

Genet admits (sadly? his delivery is romantic, but dryly logical) that the Fayadeen, years later, will only be remembered as “…brief flashes in a world wrapped up in it’s own smartness.” The soldiers and their families are dear to him- an acute presence in front of him, and then they are dots on a horizon. They trigger memories, but they remain what they are and do not become symbols for something else. A brief flash. A whole group- a whole movement swept up in time, as the author is being swept, relaxed and aware.

I like to think of Genet in all of the places he writes from, a man falling out of time and place and still fixed in it so firmly somehow. Realistic about the present- always a bit detached from it in order to make way for the future. Letting the past become a narrated story which he is born from, but nor responsible to. Genet draws conclusions from time to time, but they remain mutable, in the end we are sure we learned something, but nothing has been decided on- everything has simply been described to us.