Well, It Ain't Hot, But It's Off a Press...

Friends, I've been to the land of letterpress printing, and I have to say, it's pretty awesome. For once in my life, I am intensely conscious of not only the amount of work that used to go into printing anything but also the feeling of power you get when you run the press over a matrix full of type that you set and inked yourself and pull a sheet of paper out that has your work all over it in nice, sticky black ink.

It is a process full of love, and it's hard. Our first project for Art of the Printed Book wasn't actually a book at all, but rather a poster. A protest poster, to be precise. Here's mine.

Okay, I'm not protesting anything. Problem is, I couldn't find a pithy way to protest something using only a few words. One of the other things that letterpress printing teaches you is how to conserve your words -- you can't print your message if you haven't got enough letters, and wood type, the type I've used for this poster, is very expensive, so we don't have a lot of it. I was originally going to do "Don't Talk To Me About Your Sparkly Vampires" but we didn't have enough type, so I went with an homage to one of my favorite movies instead.



Dead Poets Society for the win! I had to keep explaining the poster to people, but I guess that just means more people need to watch DPS. Anyway, this project is part of ongoing events here at CSB relating to the Catonsville Nine, a group of Catholic activists who in 1968 walked into the draft office of Catonsville, Maryland and, taking draft records out of the office, staged a 'peaceful protest' by burning the draft records with homemade napalm. I guess someone said they wanted a revolution.

As a further development of this project in Book Arts, our professor brought in Amos Paul Kennedy Jr., a man very widely known in the letterpress world and quite a character in his own right. Go visit his website and buy a poster -- I'm a fan of this one. His slogan -- Put the message in the hands of the people. He does that but printing posters of his own like the one above, and he discusses topics from books to blackness and back again. Pretty awesome, in-your-face kind of guy. So as part of our workshop, we set up and printed a poster evoking the character of 60s protests but still relevant today. Here's what we came up with:

Pretty cool, yeah? Anyway, Writing Essays was canceled today, so, having a whole afternoon free, I went to the print studio and worked on another poster of my own. And I took my camera to document a little bit.

Wood type before I cleaned the ink off from the first run.

Our inking area, where I can mix color and apply ink to the brayers (those roller type things in the middle of the picture.)

Letterpress filled with BOLD and lots of furniture (the spacing material we use to make sure the type doesn't shift when we run the press over it.)

Finished product. The text at the bottom is 48 pt. Caslon Bold metal typeface and 62 pt. Caslon bold metal typeface. In case you were, you know, wondering or anything. Total prep, production, and cleaning time? Four hours.

And that's what I came up with. I had to do two runs through the press because that B in Be and Bold? Same B. Limits of letterpress again. And please don't mention the lack of 's' in Catonsville -- I had an s and second-guessed myself after my prof misspelled it on her class handouts. Typo aside, I'm actually kind of proud of it -- incorporates the Catholic social thought involved, draws the situation into the present, might prompt people to do a little more digging into who the Catonsville Nine were. And it's mostly legible from a distance.

My next out-of-class letterpress project? I'm shooting for calling cards.

Authors on Film

Move over, Roland Barthes, the author ain't dead yet. At least, that's what Hollywood would like us to think. No less than four biopics concerning some of our favorite pen-and-ink men and women are slated to come out in the next few years -- Paul Giametti is playing Philip K. Dick, Sandra Bullock is tentatively going to star and co-produce a film about the woman who wrote Peyton Place, Ioan Gruffudd is hopefully playing Kenneth Grahame, the author of Wind in the Willows, and (perhaps the one generating the most buzz) James McAvoy is going to be starring in a film about Ian Fleming, the man who created James Bond. Having read a little about Fleming as well as all of his original novels, I'm super excited for the Fleming flick.

This isn't a drop of the hat change for Hollywood, either. Helena Bonham Carter is playing Enid Blyton, the famous children's book author, in an upcoming BBC project, and at least two films that I know of dealing with authors came out this past year; Bright Star, about poet John Keats, and The Last Station, based on Jay Parini's novel about Leo Tolstoy. Before that we had Miss Austen Regrets and Becoming Jane, both about the venerable JA, Finding Neverland, about J.M. Barrie, The Edge of Love (Dylan Thomas) Iris (Iris Murdoch) The Hours (kind of about Virginia Woolf) Sylvia (Sylvia Plath and her husband, Ted Hughes) Love and War (Hemingway) Quills (Marquis de Sade) Miss Potter (Beatrix Potter) and Infamous as well as Capote, two films that came out almost at the same time dealing with Truman Capote.

So why do these films come out? Over my winter break I watched Love and War and finally understood why Hemingway was the way he was. It doesn't make me like his misogynistic writing any more than I did before I watched the film (even if he was played by Chris O'Donnell) but I got a fuller sense of him as a person that I wouldn't necessarily have been motivated to find in a biography. Over the last week I also watched The Edge of Love, even though I'm not a huge fan of Dylan Thomas, and Becoming Jane, which I had already seen.

The question "Why make an Author Biopic?" could probably be answered by "Why make a biopic at all?" The answer to that, I think, is the result of my Love and War watching -- we'd like to try and figure out what makes those we consider good and great tick. How was Jane able to write these fantastic love stories? She was conflicted herself about love. Why did Dylan Thomas produce all this wonderful poetry? He was a man with a lot of experiences and a lot of intense emotional things in his life. How did Ernest Hemingway come to hate women so much? He had a bad experience in one of the most difficult times in his life and never got over it.

Obviously the biopic is flawed for this reason -- in attempting to bring out these motivations Hollywood, in its true style, overdoes it sometimes. Jane Austen fans were a little miffed over how their beloved JA got turned into Anne Hatheway for Becoming Jane, who, apart from being too pretty and having a terrible accent, seemed to get far too much romantic attention than humble Jane ever got. (Come on, JA fans, were you expecting better? This is what happens to ALL your Austen adaptations.)

I personally liked Becoming Jane, not only because it was a movie filled with actors who are generally regarded as knowing a great deal about what they're doing (Maggie Smith, Julie Walters, James Cromwell, James McAvoy, Laurence Fox) but because the screen writers worked in elements from some of her novels to show a discerning audience "This might have been where Jane got the idea for..." Maggie Smith's Lady Gresham is Lady Catherine to a T, Rev. Austen's pupil Mr. Warren could be a stand in for Mr. Collins any day of the week, Jane's cousin Elizabeth bears hints of Lady Russell and Lucy Lefroy could be any number of Jane's daftly airheaded, only-out-for-the-manhunt filler characters.

If you're in the market for a movie this weekend, consider checking one of the films I've listend above out from your library or local movie rental place. If they're not profoundly insightful then at least they are an attempt to be both entertaining and educational. You might even be motivated to go out and learn more.

New Year, New Look

I had a little bit of time on my hands over the past few days, and I decided the Village Wordsmithy site could use a little love. A little change is good for us, right? It keeps us on our toes, keeps us from stagnating.


So I've made a new banner. Same title, same slogan...little bit of a different look. I added a Word of the Day feature because let's face it, we could all do with a new word. I've toyed around with a few of my comment features, I've made it so you can email posts to your friends (not that any of you need to do that, but maybe I'll use to harass my friends...)

Anyway, I hope you like the new look. If you've got comments (I can't read your banner) or concerns (This blog sucks, it didn't need any changes) feel free to drop me a message. I think they go straight to my gmail...

Playing with Technology

Have any of you other denizens of the blogging culture out there on the internets ever tried playing with the "NEXT BLOG >>" button in the blogger bar on the top of this page?

Let me tell you, it's actually kind of fun. Chances are if you're reading this blog today for the first time it's because I started following your blog or something and you're wondering how I got there. Wonder no longer! It was, dear, sweet, lost readers, the magic of the Next Blog button. I surfed through the next blogs from this site as well as my Galway Rover site and was amazed at how focused the Village Wordsmithy is when it comes to subject matter. How did I reach that conclusion?

Here's how I think the Next Blog works -- using your tags or your content or a mixture of both the Google gurus sift through the millions of other blogs they're currently hosting to pull out works similar to yours. The Next Blogs on this site bring you to more writers, poets, and, perhaps not surprisingly, more educators.

(On a side note, I'm really, really happy that I'm not the only person who thought of putting students' work online for critique. Some people seem to think this suggestion would incite more internet bullying. I think these people need to give it a chance, since I would argue the anonymity of the internet (and some non-obvious psyeudonyms) might actually enable kids to share more. But whatever.)

The Galway Rover lacks more focus -- hit the next button there and the Google gurus bounce you around travel blogs, personal rants about foreign policy, and, again unsurprisingly, food blogs. (Did I really talk about food that much?)

As Jack Aubrey would say, What a terribly modern age we live in.

Writing in the Margins

When we speak of marginality or marginalized people, we're referring to those groups who for whatever reason (race, ethnicity, sexual orientation) aren't given space to express themselves in the political or social spectrum as much as they should be or when they are allowed a chance to speak, participate in political process or vocalize their ideas aren't given legitimacy as participants.

I'm doing a lot of reading for my education seminar on Human Relations relating to how we better involve those students who are in the margins in our classrooms and how we can give them positive stereotypes to grow into and aspire to. Many of these activities involve self-expression of some kind because young adolescents (the technical term for what we might also call Tweens, the middle-school age group) need a lot of self- expressive, self-reflective activity because this is the stage where children start really developing their sense of who they are and where they fit in the world.

And this, of course, has gotten me thinking about my own writing. When I was stalled over break trying to work more on "A Rose in the Briars" I tried many of my usual techniques for jumpstarting a stalled brain. I watched the movies over again. I reread pertinant passages in the books. I tried to do some photocollages and changed my background several times. I tried (very unsuccessfully) to do some research. And I realized why all this reading and movie watching wasn't helping me.

When we write fanfiction, we are "Writing in the Margins," bringing out characters that the author could have written in but didn't. These characters exist in possibility but for reasons of brevity or a lack of appeal to a wide audience don't make it into the narrative. (There's a technical term for this, but I can't recall what it is.) Jasper Fforde, one of my favorite authors, brings characters like these into his books by literally putting them in the margins when they have footnoterphone conversations. Thursday overhears two extras from Anna Karenina discussing AK's affair with Alexei Vronskey on her footnoterphone -- marginalized characters being pulled into the narrative.

I can't find the characters I'm writing by reading the original material because they're not there, and if they are, they're in the background, very faintly. Fanfiction has a long history of trying to include the marginalized populations, particularly when it comes to sexual preference -- anyone who's familiar with the origins of widely recognized fanfiction in the 70s is familiar with the concept of slash coming from the notation Kirk/Spock, a widely practiced pairing in the Star Trek fandom.

In the case of A Rose in the Briars, as it is in most of my work, my marginalized population is women. There aren't many female characters in Lord of the Rings, and there isn't a lot written about the ones that are there. Add to this the additional problem that most of the women who are mentioned can't come into my story for reasons of rationality and geography, and therein lies my dilemma. But I think I've finally gotten over it by realizing this is an opportunity for me to break some new ground in LOTR. For instance, last night I wrote several pages about Rhoswen and her friend Faeldes preparing the body of Faeldes' husband for burial. It's a very emotional passage, but a female-centric one. It's women's work, and it allows Rhoswen space to both face what she might one day have to do, deal with the war-heavy context of Gondor and show off some things Tolkien never really talks about; the daily lives of women, how death is received at home, and what princesses do when they're not gracing high tables at feasts and fighting off Witch Kings.

If only bringing marginalized students in my classroom was this easy.

Safe and Sound At School Again

I had the amazing and somewhat predictable revelation yesterday as I was paying my social calls (yes, I pay social calls, so very 19th century of me) that I am now AN UPPERCLASSMAN. Well, Upperclasswoman, really, but we can argue for inclusive language later. One of my friends is a Residence Assistant (RA) in one of the sophomore dorms and I went to go visit her. On my way, I had to walk through the building I lived in last year, and I realized, as I was walking the same route I usually had to walk to get to my friends' rooms last year, that I was a Junior, and that, theoretically speaking, I did not belong in this building.

It was WILD.

So I'm back at the always beautiful Saint Ben's, getting ready for my first day of classes. I've got a lot of good ones this semester, and hopefully the things I'm studying will contribute a lot to the content of this blog. Today I have Mid-Level Literature and Language Pedagogy, which is a big and complicated name for a class in which they are going to teach me how to teach English (very exciting, very scary at the same time) and Writing Essays, a class where they will...teach me how to write essays. That one kind of explains itself.

Hopefully Pedagogy will supply me with a lot of interesting topics on how english is being taught today and how online literacy is changing the face of reading in our society, a topic which this blog and this blogger are uniquely positioned to describe. And Writing Essays, one hopes, will also help this blog pull itself together in the way of cohesive points and arguments.

Tomorrow I have only one class during the day, the class I am taking to fulfill my art requirement. While this blog pulls me forward further into the electronic age, the age when the demise of newsprint and hard copy seems to be on every publisher's mind, my art class will pull me back. It is called Art of the Printed Book, and I will be setting type, inking presses, researching the history of print and cutting woodblocks to my heart's content all semester long. I'm super excited and I hope that between those three classes, my night class, and my 10 hours a week at the library I'll be able to keep myself occupied.

If not -- well, you'll be seeing a lot more posts on this blog. I've got some good ideas in the days to come, including my theory on why I have writer's block and a review of some biopics about famous writing types!