(Dorothy Day Day II)

    So I was still letting Dorothy Day and The Catholic Worker float in and out of my thinking, because I believe in taking effort to remember new ideas and incorporate them, but sometimes they drift. I was still marveling at the simple idea of this woman walking away from that bar with the poets, and making that conscious decision towards a life of social justice.  But I was also getting cocky again, because I do that. We have these house events, and people show up, and sometimes I wear hats and we all say things to each other that make me feel like I might be only a few steps away from that scene I dote on, the one I pine for, that probably never even existed that much, and even if it could exist again (which it can't), I wouldn't deserve it anyway. But alcohol will be involved, and people, and if I perpetuate the evening into other locales I feel even sharper, so I woke up this morning on not so much sleep but a lot of hatwearing ( a new hat, corduroyed, possibly summerworthy) and looking at people and raising my eyebrows and saying things.

    There is a manager I used to have at a different location, whom I adore. Don't tell her I said that, of course, because I like to keep my affections under at least a gauze of nonchalance. She told me that her and her partner had a friend who would be reading tonight from her book of short stories, and I should come back by the store if I wanted, but she'd understand if I didn't, since I had already worked a full shift and maybe had a limit to the number of hours I could spend in one collection of walls and shelves.  Over my lunch I read a few of her friend's stories, and dug them enough as short fiction that I felt confident showing up as a vocal supporter, versus some author who I might make excuses to avoid out of fears being cornered into admitting I didn't care for their work.  The author stops by with my old manager, and we do a little greeting, I tell her I liked what I read, tell her I'll be there tonight. After she leaves,  I mention my likely later reappearance to a colleague or two, as well, and for all intents, purposes, it seems like it could pan out to a good easy evening with some schmoozing, maybe. And you know how I like the schmooze.

    As I am heading out the door of the store, to go home for a few hours and then come back and listen to the reading, my coworker says  
    "Did you hear about the Guantanamo prisoner?"
    "Oh, shit, no," I say, thinking there is some new notable injustice that I didn't catch the news about.
    "The author is going to dress up like a prisoner from Guantanamo."
     "Tonight?" Some times this guy gets things misunderstood, I think, so I try to clarify. "She has a book of short stories. I read some on my lunch break." This obviously means she wouldn't dress up, to me.
     "Yeah. She just had someone call ahead to make sure it wouldn't be a problem." After he says this, clarification that he's not getting something completely wrong, I take some moments to bob my head and process. He follows up with "So you probably won't want to dress up like a prison guard, or anything."

    I get freaked out, of course. Why is she doing this? What does this have to do with the stories? She seemed normal enough when I shook her hand, right, and she knows my beloved ex-manager, both of them a little older, so this is not your garden variety punk kid rabble rouser I'd roll my eyes at.  She's got an agenda, something to say, bigger than her fictions. The whole way home I start to reconsider attending. Something about putting myself there, in the middle of a volatile idea, scares me. I am not a marcher, or a protester, really.

     I read the New Yorker article on Obama yesterday, and Lord knows I teared up a little, and I have suspicions that I may rejoin society and believe in America again if he gets elected, and I might even contribute some sort of elbow grease to his campaign in hopes of making that election happen, and that is more enthusiasm shown on my part for the political world than I've demonstrated for ages, if ever.  However. I love Obama in his conciliatory intelligence, that he has this possibility of reconciliation tempered with common sense. Protesting, marches, I love that we can do such things, but I rarely (read as: never) take part. There is so much that can go wrong, so much to escalate out of hand. Circumstances can not guarantee that I will feel properly represented by the other participants, and to me there is that fear that they will say something in some manner that will damage the whole idea, and then we'll all be doomed.

    But I go home, and I lay on a blanket in the back yard and read some Wendell Berry and think about going versus not going. And I am reading these lines that remind me that people have to protest, of course they do. We have to be contrary, sometimes, and sometimes loud, and sometimes visceral in our objections to wrongs. And if I am going to be in the presence of someone who will do that, someone in loud orange and that pitch dark of the hood, I should take advantage of this opportunity, because rarely will the setting be structured enough that I could willingly place myself next to that person. So I read Wendell Berry all the way up until I had to leave, and I walked back, arriving a hair enough late that I could still avoid something too alarming, just in case.

    It was amazing. I mean, for me. Not necessarily the biggest act, ever. Not the most overwhelming experience, etcetera. But a time where one normal person, who has taken the time to care about the individual details in a particularly perverse segment of injustices, does one thing in particular, one very visible thing, to get people's attention so they will listen. So she read from her stories. And she answered questions. And she wore an orange jumpsuit, but she was still the person I had met earlier. Besides her stories, though, she told us about the time she's spent in detainment centers. Not the covert ones, especially, not those ones that hide in other countries. The ones that are here, the ones where the run-of-the-mill deportees get sent. This woman, the author, ran away to live in San Andreas, Mexico when she was 19. She lived across the country, and wound up in Los Angeles. She taught for twenty-five years or so, she volunteered, she protested, she wrote. She translates for detainees, smuggles out affidavits sometimes, tells people about these cases that are terrible, about how our laws are set up and how they completely destroy people's lives, in both the exact word of the system and also the twisted word of it. And she talked about her cat, too. And writing, and hotel workers, and Eastern European accents.

    And we went out, afterwards, four of us. Over a perfectly normal table, over perfectly normal drinks, I sat with three women who have lived during decades I couldn't quite pinpoint on a map, one of them in a bright orange jumpsuit, and we talked like mostly typical people. We all shared french fries, and they were gracious, so gracious, to my young exciteability. I off-the-cuff mentioned my road trip, since two of them visited Flannery O' Connor's grave, and that is exactly the sort of thing I would love to see, and through some of their following suggestions I could pick out pieces of their early lives that I wouldn't have had the wherewithal to ask for. We talked about writing, and writers (Dorothy Day, O'Connor, Grace Paley, Eudora Welty, Wendell Berry), and cats. We talked about reactions, about cities, and about political asylum, and sometimes I would get excited and find myself blurting some freshness to these graceful women who listened so well, no matter how much they'd seen or heard already, and then I would calm down and think more, and listen more, myself.

    It used to be that on the way home, at night, if it was dark and I was walking, my head would fill up with these worries I had built out of the night air. I would get lost in my head,  still walking more or less steady, but the sidewalk ahead of me would stretch so far, and I would braid together a panicky upset that could get so big that I would pretty much just freak out to myself until I saw home lights again, and then everything could get pressed down and would go away for a while.  Tonight was different on the walk home, though. Same distance covered, and my head got filled, but it was a different type of fullness. I am still confused, and I have no idea how to piece things together the correct way, but instead of a confusing panicked swirl, it is more like a pile of good things. Like the measure of a math problem pencilled down on paper, like when I do long division for the first time in months, or tally a list of books to buy, and I just accept that I need to place everything next to itself and build the answer up. And math problems, now, they have a satisfaction in the alignment, in placing gleaned figures in the spaces you are pretty sure they need to be at. My head feels like that, kind of. More distressed, of course, to an extent, because these ideas, and the problems, they are current and happening. But to become too manically worried thwarts me into inaction, just sets up night terrors to loom, instead of lifestyles to choose. Thinking about them well, though, and being around the people who believe in living visibly for  more than just the sake of modern artifice, well, shit, that is so needed and clean and productive, and good. Good.

Tags: authors, books, cats, ideas, politics, thoughts
what i hear: Pedro the Lion-Selling Advertising (Making It, Faking It, Breaking It)

    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

Listen up now, listen up. I just might be on to something.

You see, you see, it is just maybe, just might could be that this cold what has found itself lodging in the dee-luxe suite of my nose and sinuses and etcetera head parts, perhaps I am actually, now, bear with me, perhaps I am actually perpetuating it through staying up til wee odd hours and not taking care of myself and go go going everywhere all times.  Isn't it feed a cold and starve a fever? And here I've been doing neither, just pitter pattering and ordering whiskey when I want it, when all of a sudden, waking up late today, it dawns that I am in fact still not well after a week, which is just preposterous.

Tags: ideas, sickness
Current Location: weekedn in western illinois
how i feel: congested

Negligence is a tort which targets an unreasonable breach of duty by one person to another. One well-known case is Donoghue v. Stevenson^[2] where Mrs. Donoghue consumed part of a drink containing a decomposed snail while in a public bar in Paisley, Great Britain. The snail was not visible, as the bottle of ginger beer in which it was contained was opaque. As such neither her friend, who bought it for her, nor the shopkeeper who sold it were aware of its presence. The manufacturer was Mr. Stevenson, whose ginger beer business Mrs. Donoghue sued for her consequent illness. The members of the House of Lords agreed that Mrs. Donoghue had a valid claim, but disagreed as to why such a claim should exist. Lord MacMillan, as above, thought this should be treated as a new product liability case. Lord Atkin argued that the law should recognise a unifying principle that we owe a duty of reasonable care to our neighbour. He quoted the Bible in support of his argument, specifically the general principle that "thou shalt love thy neighbour." Thus, in the world of law, he created the doctrine that we should not harm our neighbours. The elements of negligence are:

• A duty of care


• Breach of that duty


• Breach causing harm in fact


• Breach being a proximate or not too remote a cause, in law

Tags: good things, ideas, links
what i hear: sea urchins-cling film