Pens and then there are pens

A 0.7 pen tip is usable but too large. I'm picky about the pens I write with and prefer a 0.5mm tip. I had been using a Pilot V Ball Grip Extra Fine and like the pen before that and the one before that, I had trouble finding more. Pen companies, like razor blade companies, keep coming out with new things and stop making the one I'm using. So I'm constantly looking for pens. Trying other pens resulted in this: Pilot P-700 Fine—all right, but doesn't have the feel I want and Pilot doesn't show it on the web site, Pilot Precise Grip Extra Fine—adequate, but they seem to dry out quickly and you have to constantly keep the cap on, Uniball Vision Needle Micro—pick of the litter right now, but immediately couldn't find more. Office supply stores didn't have them anymore and the web site only has 0.7mm as the smallest not the 0.5mm. In looking for them online I stumbled on the Pen Addict. He evidently reviews nearly all the fine point pens available.

None of his top five pens were in stores either so I went to Jet Pens on his recommendation and was knocked out. They carry pens I have never seen anywhere before specializing in Japanese pens. I ordered a handful of different pens including some Uniball Signos with tips as small as 0.18mm and some of the Pilot Drawing pens. I don't know who actually writes with a 0.18mm pen, you have to go a little slow with it and keep it upright. I can't write slowly at all and the upright pen position isn't comfortable for me so I need something a little bigger. The drawing pens however are perfect except for one slight drawback which all these pens seem to have, they make a scratchy noise—at least they do for me—which can annoy people around you especially when they're trying to sleep.

Now the question is do I order a dozen or figure these will go out of production soon and order six dozen?

Yes, I have been busy

I really have been busy, with not a lot to show for it yet. I have never been a very organized person so getting organized in order to get things done is a little more difficult than I had thought. It's one thing to say which days are work days and which aren't, but getting that achieved is another task. Things don't fall into place by themselves. I have been researching different software packages—more on this later—to organize things on the computer, but all the non-computer stuff remains kind of messy. Before it was a matter of too many things on my plate, not it is too many things in my imagination. Pragmatic things have to come first even though they are the last things I want to be doing right now. Once they're out of the way I can move forward on more of the creative stuff. Once these were separate activities but now that I'm retired it is all one big rolling monster of things to do. As I have found you can't have hierarchy until you have categorization. Categorization requires structure and structure requires direction, and direction requires. . . well, when I get that sorted out I will let you know. Right now it's too many ideas, too many urgencies. I may sleep in tomorrow to clear my head.

I promise I will have more soon. And no, this won't be one of those "I promise. . ." sites that's 3-4 years old. I often wonder what happened to those folks, but I think I have an idea. As Goethe said: "Life is short, art is long." or something like that. I'm stuck in the short life lane, trying to get into the long art lane.

Okay I'm old

One of the things that many find distressing in elders is that they tend to tell meaningless stories about their past. Well, meaningless to you maybe, not to them. So here's one of mine:

When my brother and I were in college we decided to get a cat. A grad student couple was getting rid of one due to graduation — all white, blue eyed. They had named him "Cotton" but he didn't answer to his name. Turned out, like most white, blue eyed cats, he was deaf. Then my mother got us a white cat she found in the middle of a parking lot in a driving rain. She opened the car door and he jumped in without hesitation. He became "Baby." Later we gave them more elaborate names: Sri Rabindranath Tagore and Norman Mailer.

Baby was so delighted to not be wherever he had been that for several weeks he would get into bed with me at night and start cleaning my beard. Not something you want when trying to fall asleep. When John moved to Wyoming he took both cats so I didn't see them for a few years. When i came to visit Cotton barely looked up from his napping on the couch and Baby took one look at me and flew out the door. I was disappointed until I later went out to get stuff out of my car. On the porch was the head of small yellow-black bird carefully placed in a neat ring of grass clippings. A weird but heartfelt present from him to me. Miss both the guys. Don't miss white cat hair all over everything.

Never sit next to old people on the bus, train, etc. They will begin to tell you their life story in detail. Very important detail.

Green House in progress

Here's an interesting blog on building a green — as in eco — house in Chicago. Looks like an interesting project. Hope it turns into a good resource for others.

Click the title above.

Retirement is a mental state

I was already off from work for the summer so going from working life to retirement seemed simple at first. I just had to clean out my office and go home. In the end I left about half the stuff in my office as resources for the department. There were a lot of things I had collected over the years and used in teaching, but faced with hauling them home I realized I didn't really need them for anything. Teaching was my excuse for getting them and / or keeping them. There were three litho stones, slabs of German limestone, that I got from a fellow student in college circa 1968. I kept them for reasons that were never clear even to me, but when i started teaching design history they were great for show and tell. Now I really have no use for them and no attachment to them after all these years of dragging them from residence to residence. I did keep type matrices for no particular reason other than I might find a future use for them.

In discarding these things I realized that I wasn't truly retired yet, that I was still in a transitionary phase and the transition was in my thinking. My whole way of doing things was changing and this would have large effect on what I was going to do. Even buying supplies has changed. At the office supply store I didn't buy any new notebooks since I don't know what kind I'm going to need now. I was using 6" x 9" ones that I could carry around with me. Now I won't be traveling downtown as much as before so I don't yet know what kind of notebook is going to work best.

This transition has also given me an opportunity to organize things, something I never had sufficient time for before. Discarding some things is part of that but just gathering things together and deciding to keep them and where they should be kept now has become important. I spent this morning sorting out paperclips and staples which seems like a very minor thing but has been an annoyance for years since I keep buying more when I can't find the ones I have. As a result I had multiple boxes of them in different places. When I cleaned out my mother's house I found so many boxes of paperclips it was maddening, but now I think I know why she had so many — she couldn't find them when she needed them so she had some in every room. She also had magnifying glasses in every room, sometimes two or three. It reminded me of sculptor Alexander Calder's answer when asked if fame and fortune had changed his life. He said now he owned two of every tool so he could find them.

There is also going to be a big lack of creative input, no colleagues to regularly chat with, no students with interesting stories, no strange posters appearing on walls and definitely no one with green hair — here in the suburbs its mostly pale ink and violet and confined to young girls. There will more opportunities to visit museums and galleries so I am going to join both the MCA and AIC. I'm also going to buy more art books rather than design books. Art books were an expense I couldn't justify as something I needed like design books. Now the reverse is true. I really need the art books so I can go ahead and buy Stuart Davis' Catalogue Raisonné —three volumes and over 2000 photos.

It will be fall by the time most of this works itself out and I'm interested in seeing what other things are going to change. It won't be like it was and it will be different from most of what has preceded it. I can hardly wait.

Formerly of Columbia College

After my last sabbatical in 2007 I realized I was burned out with teaching and now I have officially resigned. No more whining students, crappy projects, last minute pleas for mercy, etc.

I'm working on two books, one on typographic space and composition, the other on the history of sans serif type. I'm also nearly done with my first OpenType font family which contains an extended set of characters including Greek and Cyrillic and a wide range of Latin. Once that's done I will convert most of my existing fonts over to OpenType with the extended characters sets.

I hope all this brings in a little currency as the price of gin keeps going up. I swear I'd rather eat dog food than drink cheap gin. And I may start a gin related website. I will also have more time to post on the blogs.

Less hysteria, more thought

Here's a response from someone who stepped back from the rhetoric and thought about the AIG situation: Eye on the ball.

Disclaimer: I do have a connection with Mr. Krames. He is the father of my grand children. Doesn't mean he's not a very smart man.