The most-overlooked art

11.2 SERIFED TEXT FACES

Albertina ....The forms are quiet and alert, the width economical, and the axis is that of the humanist hand. The crisp italic, with its subtly elliptical dots, slopes at a modest 5 degrees. There is a full range of weights.

Alcuin A strong and graceful Carolingian face....As a genuine Carolingian, Alcuin is rooted in handwritten scripts that predate by 600 years the separation of roman and italic.

Bodoni ...Giambattista Bodoni of Parma, one of the most prolific of type designers, is also the nearest typographic counterpart to Byron and Liszt. That is to say, he is typography's arch-romantic.

Caslon ...There is not much doubt that Caslon was the first great English typecutter, and in the English-speaking world his type has long possessed the semilegendary, unexciting status of the pipe and slippers, good used car and favorite chair.


--From The Elements of Typographic Style, by Robert Bringhurst
Library of Barrel, a Manhattan company

Ugliness as consolation

Grow up in Detroit and you understand the way of all things. Early on, you are put on close relations with entropy. As we rose out of the highway trough, we could see the condemned houses, many burned, as well as the stark beauty of all the vacant lots, gray and frozen. Once-elegant apartment buildings stood next to scrapyards, and where there had been furriers and move palaces there were now blood banks and methadone clinics and Mother Waddles Perpetual Mission. Returning to Detroit from bright climes usually depressed me. But now I welcomed it. The blight eased the pain of my father’s death, making it seem like a general state of affairs. At least the city didn’t mock my grief by being sparkling or winsome. 


From Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides
Library of Kim, feminist scholar
New Haven, Connecticut

The best description of a crack cocaine rush I've ever read

"I called it the terminator, that crack cocaine, because it didn't have any physical hold on you. it's a mental hold, a psychological hold; you don't physically need it. It hits a portion of the brain that has never experienced this sensation before. And when it's awakened, you can't put it to sleep. I'm serious. It's ability that you didn't know you possessed. Now you can become a fast thinker, you're motivated to do this, that, and the other. This is only an allure, because this portion of the brain is not functioning on that level, but it's being stimulated at that level for fifteen or twenty minutes, and then it's really a crash. Oh, no, no, no, no. The brain wants to go back there. All right? It wants to feel that sensation again, and it will make you forget sleep, food, clothes, anything that you normally would do. It just slams that shut. You have to go THERE! It's worse than a physical addiction....It stripped me totally of who I was. It held my spirit in bondage, begging to come out, and it couldn't. It arrested every part of my life and then began to terminate it. I no longer existed. It did."

--Leary Brock, quoted in The Working Poor: Invisible in America (2004), by David K. Shipler 
Heights Books 
Brooklyn, New York

Haiti, site of the only successful slave revolt in the Americas

Such was the staggering global significance of the only successful slave revolt ever mounted in the Americas. As a direct result of what the Haitian revolutionaries did to free themselves, France lost two-thirds of its world trade income. Napoleon Bonaparte, with uncharacteristic despair, declared France done with empire, and a financially strapped French government offered to sell the Louisiana territory to the United States for the bargain price of $15 million. ...It is not overstating to suggest that across the globe the Haitian revolutionaries with their magnificent victory had, to paraphrase Martinican writer Frantz Fanon, "set afoot" a new black woman, man, child.

From An Unbroken Agony: Haiti, from Revolution to the Kidnapping of a President (2007), by Randall Robinson 
Bass Library, Yale University
New Haven, CT 


More about Haiti: Mountains Beyond Mountains, by Tracy Kidder. That account of Paul Farmer's quixotic and successful quest to create a clinic from nothing in the Haitian outback transformed the way I look at my own responsibilities. I read it this spring and haven't been the same since.

The beauty of jargon: medicine

SPORTS, GAMES, AND TOYS
...A racket nail (sometimes in the French ongle en raquette) is a broad, flat thumbnail that results from a congenitally short, wide distal phalanx of the thumb. A more obscure game reference is the so-called battledore placenta--one in which the umbilical cord originates from the edge rather than from the center. Battledore was an ancestor of badminton and played with a shuttlecock and paddle (the battledore) not unlike the type used to put pizzas in the oven. The term ping-pong infection aptly describes the phenomenon of sexual partners repeatedly exchanging an infectious agent back and forth. A ping-pong ball fracture is a depressed fracture of the skull, like a dented ball which has lost its usefulness for play.



From The Words of Medicine: Sources, Meanings, and Delights (2001), by Robert Fortuine.
Medical Historical Library at the Yale School of Medicine
New Haven, Connecticut


I've written about silly medical words as well. Their ubiquity can be downright distracting for some of us who use it regularly.

Dates to contemplate: Prague

6th century: Establishment of Slavic tribes near Prague.
880: Castle built on the heights of the Vltava by Boivoj, and shortly thereafter a second castle at Vysehrad. These two fortresses centralized the population.
1172: Construction of the first stone bridge, Judith Bridge, which brings together the two Vltava banks.
1270: Construction of the Old-New Synagogue.
July 30, 1419: First defenestration, provoked by Hussite demonstrators, which marks the beginning of the Hussite wars that will last until 1437.
1483: Second Prague Defenestration.
1609: Forced by Protestants, the emperor signs royal decrees that establish freedom of worship.
1627: The German language attains equal status to Czech.
1871: The Czech language attains equal status to German. Ten years later a Czech-language university opens.
1948: Prague coup--the Communists take power.
1991: Soviet soldiers leave the country.
2004: The Czech Republic joins the EU.


From Prague: Vision de 1000 ans d'architectures (2005), by Herve Champollion and Catherine Sauvat. Translations and selections mine
Art and Architecture Library (in the renovated Paul Rudolph building), Yale University
New Haven, Connecticut


What is it about Prague that sounds like a fairy tale? Words that seem to go with Prague are magical, medieval, tortuous, narrow, crowded, hidden, secret, spell, whisper, backward, autumn. I am ignorant of Prague, it's true. This is because I'm not sure I could bear to go. It belongs to the developed world now, and as such I expect it to be nibbled at the edges by ugliness. In Prague I would see the claws of the Old-New Synagogue silhouetted against the cloudy sky, and attended by tourists in fanny packs taking pictures. I would walk narrow cobbled streets lined with ugly cars. I would round a corner and discover a place to buy T-shirts and ice cream. I myself, in my boy-short hair and carrying a messenger bag, would jar the place as well. Some kinds of beauty are best imagined rather than experienced. I don't want to see Prague as it appears in an airline magazine, complete with short bulleted lists of Where to Stay and What to Do. My Prague, or so I imagine, disappeared around the time Kafka died.

Home in 17th-century Hungary

"In areas where timber was scarce, many families still lived in hovels sunk into the ground; thus in Debrecen in the late seventeenth century, 336 underground serf's hovels were counted....smoke seemed to be rising straight from the ground...members of the family had one dugout room each; here they lived with children and servants alike....An English traveller, Edward Brown, [noted that] upon seeing the travellers, 'the poor Christians fled to their burrows, like rabbits.' However, when Brown lit a torch and entered the abodes, he was [surprised], for the dwellings were much better inside than he expected: they were divided into rooms and neatly furnished."

From A Cultural History of Hungary: From the Beginnings to the Eighteenth Century (1999), Laszlo Kosa, ed.
Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University
New Haven, Connecticut

Needless to say, Hungarians no longer live underground. (Their underground metro is another matter. I rode it in 1999 and learned that one does not throw away one's ticket prior to exiting the station, or one might find one will not be exiting the station.) Some architects are interested in underground dwellings, though it appears to have remained something of a fringe movement within the profession. This is in spite of--or perhaps because of--the fact that the underground house is beloved of a certain strain of do-it-yourselfer, which touts the energy savings, quietude, and fallout protection of living underground.

I like the idea of living in such a way that my house barely disturbs the landscape, and I love the thought of a roof covered in plant life and spilling on either side of my front door--though any such house would need a lot of skylights to stave off claustrophobia.

There is precedent for such homes, of course. Plenty of mainstream buildings exist largely underground. Witold Rybczynski has critiqued the idea that hiding a building underground does much to hide it--at least the type of building people drive up to and walk near in large numbers.

Is anyone playing with the notion of the underground home within mainstream architecture? Might it be a low-cost housing solution for developing countries, just as it was in poverty-stricken Hungary four hundred years ago?