I have been enjoying a particularly rousing bout of beating myself up over not writing, lately.

    Which is more than stuff. It is also nonsense, because, for sure, I have not been constructing words lately, but that is largely due to the overwhelming amount of tangible visual art I've been putting together. Also, as a contributing factor, I've been catching up on correspondence. And some light cleaning. And buying clothing. And spending days with old friends.
     You know what the problem is? The problem is that I keep on forgetting to let myself not be machine-made, factory processed. I still hold on to the idea that I need to be actively engaged in every aspect of my life at all points in time. And that's not legit. It's not how anything natural lives. To every season, turn, turn, and all that jazz.
      As long as I remain conscious of my goals as a writerly type (whatever those goals may be, which is a different discussion, and one I don't plan on having for a bit), I think it is okay to let them hibernate with my scarves for a portion of time. Or at least chill with my cardigans. I probably won't wear a scarf until fall, but the cardigans are still making appearances on slightly grayer days. And that's how the large-scale writing is unraveling, currently. Here and there, in between the gusts of sun and the painting and the home ec projects.

Tags: art, beauty, resolutions, summer, writing
Current Location: under clouds
how i feel: resolving
what i hear: the silence of sleeping houseguests

    It is the sort of good I hadn't remembered and hadn't had for a long time. Two stories up from the city street, south windows not yet getting any direct sun in the first hour of the afternoon. The room crowded with careful multitudes of letters and guarded by the thick-oiled beasts of  printing presses. Nothing to do for the next hours but relearn the steps and processes of laying out type, and of printing.

     I think I've started going into rooms differently, sometimes. I let myself stand some, first, before engaging the pieces around me. I looked at things real close. I tried things gently, for once, walking around the room and remembering the separate areas, the niched boxes of auxiliary pieces to the larger technique. I found some reference materials pinned to the wall, and even though they didn't have to do with the steps of the process I was on, I thought about how they would be useful later. I measured things.

    I picked up a composing stick, held the flat metal of it in my hand, and slid the rail to an inchlength just a hair wider than the piece of paper I was going to print. Flicked the rail down, locked it into place, and felt like I might be able to do this, after all. I put the first few strips of leading in, as a base, and felt the tool weigh down my hand a little more, and I thought that the heft was good and familiar. Set down the stick and looked at all the thin drawerfronts, trying to remember all the typefaces and the sizes I had available, and which were what I needed. Counted capital letters to make sure I'd have enough. Finding the one I wanted, I slid the drawer all the way out and settled it up on the desktop, pinning close the map so that I could navigate to the letters making up the idea of the heavy set half-fold invitations I was aiming for. Uppercase on the right, lowercase to the right. Punctuation sprinkled at spots various and throughout.

    I started my fingers at the boxes, expecting to fumble through the letters of the alphabet, to drop and to ding and to get weary and get tired at the complications. But I didn't. Like someone told me, like I didn't expect, the lower light and the calm of each letter after letter, up to the lines and paragraphs of type, spaced with smooth darkened strips of leading, it was good.

     Each string of letters has to take up the same length of stick as the ones above and beneath it. Regimented, centered, else there'll be gaps where pronouns or personal names suddenly bite themselves into snaggletoothed nothingness,  the meaning in undisciplined margins. I had to slip coppers and brass in, thin and thinner slips of metal tucked here and there in the remainder spaces hairlining the type when a row is finished.

    Even when all the letters and spaces were in a solid row, metal staccato city blocks of sans serifs, after that it was still not enough. The rectangular chase frame slides out of the close hug of the press. The words were laid out on cold white marble, and I lowered the frame onto the marble so it fenced them in, and all the spacer type on the outside turned into lead cattle gathering around the wobbly kneed text . Set up what's called "furniture" around the words. The furniture fills up a case with evenly numbered softworn dark blocks of wood, like a child executive's toys. I ran fingers down along the numbers that mean length, and then across, where the different widths come into play. They are meant to move into the space between the frame and the block of type, but as symmetrically as possible, just like when phrases in the composing stick have to be justified properly between the edges of the line. Two blocks taken at a time, fingers as well-meaning but cruel Noah, plucking a pair only to distance them, one on each side of the type.  I added furniture until both the short and the long sides of the rectangle chase had a bridge to the words in the middle. Then there were the keys to turn, gently, but to a firm resistance. Something to hold it all in for when the sheaves of paper snubnosed individually up, glances cast sideways, looking to get inked.

     The furniture, the keys, it's so anyone who comes along, they can pinch the chase with thumb and forefinger at each of its top corners and then raise it all from the marble, hold the words up so that no light comes through, and strands of language that could have been just breaths in cold rooms at any sort of visible best, now they turn into fine-lined but heavy upright walls, and they slide into place onto the form of the press and are held to it, and with the ink and the paper added, and the rollers swiping in teams, alternating across the surface of the ink table and the flat honest faces of the type, the platen holding the paper and kissing up to the type in the sitcom split-second between swipes, making impressions.
 
    If I were to try and say something bigger about this, I would want to say that perhaps I had not known a very particular sort of satisfaction and grace until I picked out and contained the most basic pieces of  the things that I thought had to be said: not just the letters that hit up against the paper, but the counted spaces between words, and the breaths of spacing between sentences, and the expanse of inches on each side of a centered group. Having to think them and then set them and then be careful like a superstition in all of it (because that is how, I think, things like "craft" come about.), and then from all that, knowing that I could put shoulder to the press and print out sheet after sheet in deep machinery sneezes.
     I had forgotten all about that satisfaction because I think I spoiled it by just taking the word "letterpress" as a big idea of a project that needed to be done, of the whole expansive swath of it, the plan and the paper and the print and the machine, the ink, the rollers and the scrapers and the dirty bouquet of pungent gray towels it all cleans up with. I lost the sweetness of the first hours of laying letters, before the flourescents cough on and the presses start their heartbeats for the evening. Picking between two 14 point ampersands held up to each other in a piece of sun, watching the way their pear curves move across the face, thinking that one looks too dry, tinny and coldsharp, putting it aside, resting the warmer one in small and pleasant place. It is so quiet, it is so good to lay down lines .
    I had lost the settling of the typesetting.

Tags: art, beauty, ideas, ink, iprc, letterpress, letters, press, spring, type
Current Location: cairo, georgia
how i feel: chased/impressionable
what i hear: mountain goats-alpha omega

     If growing older means that I sift myself into a position of admiring and adoring Bjork, than I am much more accepting of maturation, and of whatever newfound patience it is that had me glued to every moving pixel comprising her face onscreen tonight. I'd like to think that I was never given a good enough chance, that I never truly got to see her before, that the screen was never big enough. But perhaps it's that I never sat still and listened. All I know is she got to be larger than life and I was absolutely riveted, and there was her and the orchestra spread out below, and the harpist, and the Greenlandish choir, and she had a thick ostrich of cascaded feathers sweeping around her waist and every time she opened her mouth I held my breath some. I also said her children were all fey changelings, though, so take that as it falls, for some pleased gushing.

Tags: beauty, music, songs
Current Location: top of this mountain
what i hear: three guesses, first two don't count

   I don't know what I think. Not many of the things I was thinking last night managed to place themselves into cohesive words, much less sentences. I'll start with the easy one.

   Big ups to YACHT. and his goodness. Big ap's (apologies, I suppose) to those of you who put his songs on cds for me only to have me sort of shrug and dismiss all of that "electronic" music with only a passing interest. He was a fun time, though, I'll tell you that. A good start to my experiencing of the Halleluwah Festival, since I left work at sevenish and got there just in time to watch him rhythmically spaz out in some sort of sponsored epileptic fit to his own freakin' beats, man, that was a good time. Sort of invigorating, sort of scary.

   Have to say, though, five hours later I was starting to fade, four shots of espresso and two cans of cola be damned. We were sitting on the floor, upstairs in Disjecta's big rambling warehouse maze, and my feet/legs/calves/extremities kept cramping beneath me in awkward positions, but I was so insistant on seeing Vashti Bunyan up close and personal that I tried very hard to ignore all that. The unfortunate side to my dedication was that since I even sat through the last ten (mindnumbing) minutes of Jackie-O Motherfucker (and I had such high hopes, based on their bandname, hopes that were so dash-ed by the late hour and the drone, hence me spending a few seconds a few lines back trying to decide whether "mindnumbing" went after "last" or "ten", and admittedly, I have a low threshold for darkly atmospheric things.), the delay in Vashti's set beginning left me so terribly bored in the head I thought I was going to maybe die a little on the floor, right there.

   Gracious me, though, it was all worth it. There was that moment where the first song began and she was leaning up to the microphone and everyone held their breath, sort of,  because it almost didn't seem possible that the voice we knew was going to be right there in front of  everybody. But it was. I have high hopes for the recording of the show. Look, you can see, right after she takes that small space in the song, that's the moment dot starts crying again because it's the most beautiful innocent thing she can remember.  I realize that I view the Sixties folk scene as some sort of personal battlezone that not enough people escaped from. They either sold out, broke up, killed themselves, or turned bitter (overgeneralization, yes, but it's what it seems to me, at least). All of them except Vashti. She opened the second song, "Just Another Diamond Day", with a statement about how she had written it while looking out of the window on a train, thinking about how lucky she was, and how she was still very lucky.  She has songs about houses, and three-legged dogs, and songs about her children, and winter, and lovers.

Tags: beauty, dreams, music
how i feel: well-soothed

     I suppose that it could be settled, then, that I'm not suited for much beyond padding around these late summer porches with a drink in my hand (and head) and something lightweight maybe with a cinch around my waist, and a few old hardcovers keeping track of the hours by page counts. That when they ask questions in interviews like what's your five year plan, dollface, I've got nothing left to do but smile. The trick is, see, finding if I'm okay with that, or if there's something else I need to put my hand to in the meantime (mean times, like the mean reds, but a smidge of difference stirred in with that coffee) to keep my head in some right place. And maybe that's the trick to everything, but all those "I, I, I's" are beginning to worry me, that's all, and at least I've got youth on my side, but still, even though I am still close with the pillow at night, never an insomniac, sometimes on my way home at night and under trees I will entertain these worries too well, till they're loath to leave.

Tags: angst, beauty, dreams, excerpts, extrasensory powers, thoughts, worth, youth
Current Location: all over this town
how i feel: reasonless
what i hear: Sister I'm A Poet

Some girls, maybe, are too shallow for beauty, and when their boyfriends crane thick necks because of a pretty voice, and when the entire bar falls silent for the same, the shallow girls who are too shallow for beauty are caught unaware by the lack of attention, and in compensation they fill the silences between sweet lyrics with chatter. Their hair needs straightening, they say, chattering in the stillness. Their clothes are simply too much, they add, as the singer keeps on, clear and treble over at the front of the bar. The girls who are too shallow for beauty are used to waiting in enclaves to the side of all the other people who are not their boyfriends. They are used to sitting face to face with the boys who brought them, and they are used to sharing a couple of beers until their people go up on stage, and only then directing attention towards the front, not before. These girls have small pinched faces with expensive surroundings, and as their plucked brows edge up and down with various explanatory statements the girl up at the front of the bar, the girl with the guitar and the beauty, she begins another song and everybody is still watching her. Everyone except the two girls.

Tags: bars, beauty, fall, music

Remember when I was standing on Burnside tonight? High on powdered sugar? And you rode by and oh, you were a lovely sight, on your ten-speed with a cap and matching brown suit, and I don't remember who smiled first but yours was a gorgeous grinning thing and I would stand on street corners more often if boys like you would ride by.

Ah. And thus my evening was completely made.

Tags: beauty, biking, boys, night, summer
how i feel: ..Or If I Just Wanted To
what i hear: Violent Femmes- I Held Her In My Arms

Oh this is just a by the side of the road sort of thing, a brief statement because for once, for the first time in a long time, my house is empty of roomates, and it's just me puttering around pretending I can write or putting away dishes.

So it's the first one of those patchy gray days with clouds alternating with blue sky that we've had in a long while, and I was going to walk down to the grocery store and maybe Powells just for the sake of being alive and taking up space in the world and because I like how my collared shirt and brown sweater looks today, but I was only a block away before I remembered that I had forgotten my phone, so even as I was turning back the first light drops of raining were falling, and by the time I was inside it had turned into a full-fledged brightly lit downpour. All of our windows are still wide open from last week's heat, and I could and can sit on the window seat and watch how the rain puddles into the street and spatters against the car roofs as they drive through. I am very thankful, I decided, to be able to sit on my window seat and go make tea and toast with butter and be able to watch the rain while wearing brown, and have no pressing obligations, no concern about where I will sleep tonight or whether or not my city will be here in the morning. I wish more people could feel the same, because I'm not even sure how deep the ache would be if I had to worry for all of my town and people.

I am so happy that there are people that are happy right now, and that is as close of a thing to a benediction that I can give, and it runs deeper than just the threat of a hurricane's rendered chaos.

For all the other people, for all the people scattered near and far with thoughts of destruction, physical or otherwise, I don't think I can help you except in prayers, and those might be all for now.

Tags: beauty, fathers, mothers, rain
what i hear: violent femmes-all i want

I'm going to marry Sufjan Stevens, but don't tell anyone, okay? The word on the street is that he's tangibly wonderful, tall and liking Jesus.

Here's the deal, and it's that I was fond of the music but enamoured of him, thinking all good thoughts about anyone who could but together pretty songs and then the artwork for Michigan and Seven Swans was swell, and I just decided this thing, that him and I would be, again, as they say, the shit.

Still, I was only fond of the music until the song "John Wayne Gacy" was brought to my attention, and we sped along listening to the words and at first it creeped me out, because no one wants to hear their betrothed singing about the murder of young boys but then I realized how actually Christian he turned it all on the last few lines, about how

"On my best behavior, I am really just like him"

and thus relegating it past the occurance of just an idle serial killer to the motivations behind, a sort of all-absorbing self-centeredness that merely wants what it wants and takes what it can get with no regard for others. So the next day I listened to it over and over on the drive out to Estacada just curving uinder tree shadows and hearing the minor key fall-out of his voice and maybe, just maybe, crying a little.

(The man plays 23 instruments.)

Ever since then, the new album has stuck like glue to me on the good days, giving me a soundtrack of Abraham Lincoln and bone cancer to accompany. The third song, broken into two parts, starts with this brilliant chorally integrated ode to the 1891 Chicago World's Fair (which the book "The Devil In Jersey City" covers in much more detail) (Debut of the Ferris Wheel!), and ends with a visitation by Carl Sandburg which causes our narrator to cry himself to sleep over the fate of our natural resources. Crying himself to sleep. Do you hear that, good friends? His nights are spent on pillows damp with tears because of his worry for the land. E. Gads.

And sometimes he talks about Bible studies, and blouses, and kisses that complicate things.

We like the Sufjan very much. Greetings from Michigan was good, Come On Feel The Illinoise is perhaps better. Seven Swans is most notable to me for its first track, entitled "All The Trees Of The Field Will Clap Their Hands", as well as the cursive writing that fills the liner notes which I had hoped fell as script from his hands but as it turns out didn't.

You know, I'm listening to Michigan again, and I think I appreciate it a lot more too ever since I fell in love with Illinoise.

Pronounciation key:
Sufjan : Soof-yawn.
Stevens : Stee-vinz

Notable Sidenote: In the song “The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades is Out to Get Us!”, Sufjan uses imagery that mirrors a short story I wrote about a year ago. Things likes bee stings and the Palisades, cursive scrawls, love, sleeping, and seeing your own breath. Very odd, that. I'm planning on sending it to him and seeing what he says. Anyways.

Tags: beauty, music, songs, summer, writing
what i hear: Sufjan Stevens- Flint (For The Unemployed And Underpayed)

Ah, it was so pretty, you have no idea. Unless you live here.

What was it, like eightish? And we were walking down to Zach's Shack for a hot dog, and while we were standing on the concrete outside the bright blue building, there were these cracks of lightning just splitting the sky intermittently. In between cartwheels, I was oohing and ahhing because it was so grandiosely beautiful, and all the while I was predicting the upcoming apocolypse emerging from between the gold-lit clouds.

In an odd turn of events, the clerk at Old Navy turned out to be a great prognosticator. He had told us the other week that there was a big earthquake in California, and that they had issued tornado warnings for the Northwest, and he had heard this on the radio. We stepped outside after my friend made her purchase, gazing at the twilight cloudbreaks with trepidation. We were sure we could sense the stillness in the air, and I predicted the upcoming apocolypse. As it turns out, there was a *tsunami* warning. Tsunamis, those big waves that can get caused by earthquakes. Makes much more sense. We laughed it off, but then, last night, there was an actual tornado warning for Clackamas County. See? His slip was foretelling the future, while her skirt just looked good for summer.

SO last night, the sky was all stirred up in big well-lit streaked poofs of epic clouds, and even as we were standing outside the hot dog shack waiting, a rainbow developed, slowly gaining focus, becoming brighter, arcing through the pale dark sky. Lightning was still crackling through, often in the same visual area as the rainbow. When we looked closer, we could see that it was actually a double rainbow, and it had a fainter outside twin.

Hot dogs in hand, we started the four block walk home, just as the rain started. There weren't many cars out, so we strolled down the middle of the street, watching the rain. The sun was still out, and relatively bright, so it lit up every drop of rain for hundreds of feet up in the sky, so you could look up and watch thousands of individual plummeting drops on their way down to splatter on the warm pavement. It was amazing, like nothing I've ever seen really. Up past the tops of the trees, legions of big fat white raindrops hurtling towards us. It was a warm rain, so we didn't mind, and the rainbow grew increasingly brighter, until we got within a half block of home and I saw myshaved head neighbor standing out on her front lawn face turned up to the skies, so I ran up beside her, dripping, and stood there for a while as people came in and out of the video store across the street and you could see people all up and down the block standing out on their front porches, the flashes of lightning echoed by their cameras.

It poured in buckets for a while, and we sat inside and watched cartoons. Later, we walked outside and the sky was cool and clear, with just a light smattering of clouds up high in the sky, and the moon glowing cold and bright.

All the photo really captures is the rainbow. Everywhere else you looked there was so much more.

Tags: beauty, epic, portland, rain, storms
how i feel: Sailing
what i hear: Decemberists-Bridges And Balloons