2023
|
“The hand speaks to the brain as surely as the brain speaks to the hand.”
Robertson Davies, What’s Bred in the Bone In a Guardian article on British novelist Alex Preston, who’s composing his next novel entirely in longhand, the interviewer himself says that using a pen and notebook keeps him in touch with the craft of writing. “It’s a deep-felt, uninterrupted connection between thought and language which technology seems to short circuit.” Canadian journalist, Andrew Coyne agrees: “Text on a computer is definitely corrigible: We commit to nothing, either in words or sentence structure…Handwriting, to the contrary, forces us to make an investment. It inclines us thus to compose the sentence in our heads first – and the other sort of sentence you can compose and keep in your head is likely to be shorter and clearer than otherwise.” Military historian Nathan Greenfield says part of the joy of using a fountain pen is that it’s a beautiful object, but also that it gives him a feel for language. …With a pen and ink you’re your own software. And, an added bonus, there’s no metadata; no one tracks your notebooks.” Ted Bishop: The Social Life of Ink - Culture, Wonder, and Our Relationship with the Written Word, Viking/Penguin, 2014, p. 298-9. January 29 |
|
|
Thinking about editing and corrections and lots of paper
“The printing process involves more than just reformatting a manuscript with the goal of generating a large number of copies to circulate through time and space. It also encompasses a text’s transition into a sphere of error correction and heightened claims to truth. Printing involves press proofs, preliminary corrections, and thorough reviews. The inevitability of printing errors is not eliminated by the ability to print an improved, revised edition of a book, but it is kept in check. … Modern authors are their own editors even before they approve their manuscripts for publication. When Erasmus of Rotterdam described the printed book as an object that permitted, and demanded, a theoretically endless sequence of corrections and revisions, he was not referring to printing alone. Correcting misprints is the job of the printer and typesetter, but factual errors or imperfect verses are corrected in the manuscript itself. In other words, this is the job of the author. In a letter from 1651, Guez de Balzac wrote that in the course of abridging, editing, and reworking a single satire he has used up ‘une demy rame de papier,’ or half a ream. Taken literally, this would have been 250 sheets of paper.” Lothar Müller: White Magic – The Age of Paper, translated by Jessica Spengler, Polity Press, 2014. January 24 |
From the Office of Correction: A Guide to Proofing from the 17th Century
In 1677 in England, Jospeh Moxon (1627 - 1691) published a how-to guide for printers. Here are the pages from his Mechanik Exercsies, Or The Doctrine of Handy-Works in which he explains how a printer needs to "proof" a page before the final printing stage. He reminds would-be printers/editors that they are financially responsible for errors: "For if by neglect a Heap is spoiled, he is obliged to make Reparation."
To browse this remarkably detailed how-to guide to printing, here is a link to its page on the Internet Archive:
https://archive.org/details/mechanickexercis00moxo/
(January 13)
In 1677 in England, Jospeh Moxon (1627 - 1691) published a how-to guide for printers. Here are the pages from his Mechanik Exercsies, Or The Doctrine of Handy-Works in which he explains how a printer needs to "proof" a page before the final printing stage. He reminds would-be printers/editors that they are financially responsible for errors: "For if by neglect a Heap is spoiled, he is obliged to make Reparation."
To browse this remarkably detailed how-to guide to printing, here is a link to its page on the Internet Archive:
https://archive.org/details/mechanickexercis00moxo/
(January 13)
|
|
Craft: Editing
"I always wanted to be unseen and unheard, which is what editors should be."
In an interview with National Public Radio's Terry Gross, the American editor Robert Gottlieb stresses "service" as the central role of the editor. Famous for editing works by John le Carré, Joseph Heller, and Toni Morrison, he said, "I feel as an editor, it's my job to make the case that I need to make and then it's his job to eventually agree or disagree. You know, I never cease explaining or telling young people who want to be editors, it's a service job. Our job is to serve the word, serve the author, serve the text. It's not our book, it's not my book. It's his book or her book. But it's a very gratifying job. And I love the editing process. I love it as an editor. And since I've done a lot of writing myself, to my astonishment, I love being edited because it's the process that I like. I don't care whether I'm the editor or the editee. It's fun and it's interesting to see how you can make something that you believe is good even better."
Here's a link to the NPR's Fresh Air interview: https://www.npr.org/2023/01/03/1146641641/robert-gottlieb-caro-power-broker-turn-every-page-lizzie-gottlieb
(January 8)
"I always wanted to be unseen and unheard, which is what editors should be."
In an interview with National Public Radio's Terry Gross, the American editor Robert Gottlieb stresses "service" as the central role of the editor. Famous for editing works by John le Carré, Joseph Heller, and Toni Morrison, he said, "I feel as an editor, it's my job to make the case that I need to make and then it's his job to eventually agree or disagree. You know, I never cease explaining or telling young people who want to be editors, it's a service job. Our job is to serve the word, serve the author, serve the text. It's not our book, it's not my book. It's his book or her book. But it's a very gratifying job. And I love the editing process. I love it as an editor. And since I've done a lot of writing myself, to my astonishment, I love being edited because it's the process that I like. I don't care whether I'm the editor or the editee. It's fun and it's interesting to see how you can make something that you believe is good even better."
Here's a link to the NPR's Fresh Air interview: https://www.npr.org/2023/01/03/1146641641/robert-gottlieb-caro-power-broker-turn-every-page-lizzie-gottlieb
(January 8)
Craft: Anne Campbell on Writing
The Deck God
I sit on my deck today
circling in on God
from behind my studio watch grass reach up; shoots
rest on one another leaning forward they bend
in places where elk nest lay their great goodies down
today
beginning is
full of cloud but warmed beyond hope touched
by this gift my soul is making (concrete) words whole
(#8: Banff Poems in Soul to Touch, Hagios Press, Regina, 2009, p.66.)
Anne Campbell (1938 - 2022), writer and long-time arts and
cultural heritage advocate passed away peacefully on October 20th, 2022,
(January 7) in the Palliative Care Unit, Pasqua Hospital, Regina.
The Deck God
I sit on my deck today
circling in on God
from behind my studio watch grass reach up; shoots
rest on one another leaning forward they bend
in places where elk nest lay their great goodies down
today
beginning is
full of cloud but warmed beyond hope touched
by this gift my soul is making (concrete) words whole
(#8: Banff Poems in Soul to Touch, Hagios Press, Regina, 2009, p.66.)
Anne Campbell (1938 - 2022), writer and long-time arts and
cultural heritage advocate passed away peacefully on October 20th, 2022,
(January 7) in the Palliative Care Unit, Pasqua Hospital, Regina.
|
Craft: Setting the tone before a scene of conflict
The shadows are lengthening. Across the stripped crests of the elms, beyond the curtain of a row of poplars, white house fronts and blue roofs sparkle in the level light. Hardly anyone is about. Jean can hear the creak of wheels ploughing through the mud of a sunken road, but the cart itself is invisible. Etched upon the horizon, a grey horse and a bay are drawing a plough across a gently undulating expanse of stubble, the soft brown clods rising soundlessley beside the gleaming share. A belated puddle shines amongst the tree-trunks, where, overhead, abandoned nests crouch like big black spiders in their web of leafless boughs. The ploughman has reached the end of the field; slowly he swings his horses round and starts a new furrow. The grey horse, now coming toward Jean, conceals both the plough and the bay horse, and seems to be advancing by itself. The wind drops. The creak of cart-wheels has died away. The dead leaves cease rustling. All is still... From Jean Barois, the 1913 novel by the 1937 Nobel Prize for Literature recipient, Roger Martin du Gard. First English edition translated by Suart Gilbert and published by the Viking Press in 1949. (p. 77) (January 5) |
Winter Shades of White
"Under a dark sky walking by the river...There all was sad-coloured and the colour caught the eye, red and blue and stones in the river beaches brought out by patches of white-blue snow, that is, snow quite white and dead but yet it seems as if some blue or lilac screen masked it somewhere between it and the eye: I have often noticed it. The swells and hillocks of the river sands and fields were sketched and gilded out by frill upon frill of snow...Where the snow lies as in a field the demasking of white light and silvery shade may be watched indeed till brightness and glare is all lost in a perplexity of shadow and in the whitest of things the senes of white is lost, but at a shorter gaze I see two degrees in it - the darker, facing the sky, and the lighter in the tiny cliffs or scarps where the snow is broken or raised into ridges, these catching the sun perhaps or at all event directly hitting the eye and gilded with an arch brightness, like the sweat in the moist hollow between the the eyebrows and the eyelids on a hot day..."
Gerard Manley Hopkins, Journal entry, Winter, 1872.
The Major Works, Oxford World's Classics, 1986, p. 214.
(January 1)
"Under a dark sky walking by the river...There all was sad-coloured and the colour caught the eye, red and blue and stones in the river beaches brought out by patches of white-blue snow, that is, snow quite white and dead but yet it seems as if some blue or lilac screen masked it somewhere between it and the eye: I have often noticed it. The swells and hillocks of the river sands and fields were sketched and gilded out by frill upon frill of snow...Where the snow lies as in a field the demasking of white light and silvery shade may be watched indeed till brightness and glare is all lost in a perplexity of shadow and in the whitest of things the senes of white is lost, but at a shorter gaze I see two degrees in it - the darker, facing the sky, and the lighter in the tiny cliffs or scarps where the snow is broken or raised into ridges, these catching the sun perhaps or at all event directly hitting the eye and gilded with an arch brightness, like the sweat in the moist hollow between the the eyebrows and the eyelids on a hot day..."
Gerard Manley Hopkins, Journal entry, Winter, 1872.
The Major Works, Oxford World's Classics, 1986, p. 214.
(January 1)