“You are the main trouble with this university”: body-text fonts, pt. 39: ITC Galliard

More Thurber (“University Days,” in My Life and Hard Times):

The typeface is the ubiquitous ITC Galliard, implemented successfully or not depending on the paper, the ink cartridge, the positions of certain celestial bodies, etc. Just look at all those Library of America volumes with their uniform design. In some, the text is beautiful and legible; in others, it’s too dark or too light.

Compare with this sample from Hammett:

Of course the scan quality also affects these samples, but my point is that the print quality varies greatly – even from page to page. I admire Galliard’s letters but never have been tempted to make them the basis of a printable document. Printing body text set in Galliard would be like playing the lottery.

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P.S. regarding the passage in the first sample:

It’s a joke, of course. But as I age, I find myself agreeing rather often with General Littlefield, especially when I use social media. I catch myself thinking that this or that individual pip-squeak is the main trouble with this country (this church, this fanbase, this social class, etc. – and yes, this university, or universities in general).

As far as I can tell, this attitude is indefensible. But the feeling is so strong, it would be illuminating if some philosopher could put together a half-plausible rationalization for it. (Not for scapegoating, which I take to be primarily concerned with types or groups rather than individuals.)

More Arendt

… which I’m sure you were itching to read this morning.

But first, an item of local interest: a graduate of nearby Goshen College is the author of the Library of America’s latest “story of the week.”

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From Origins, chapter 7:

It took the Boers several decades to understand that [British] imperialism was nothing to be afraid of, since it would neither develop the country as Australia and Canada had been developed, nor draw profits from the country at large, being quite content with a high turnover of investments in one specific field [gold mining]. Imperialism therefore was willing to abandon the so-called laws of capitalist production and their egalitarian tendencies, so long as profits from specific investments were safe. This led eventually to the abolition of the law of mere profitableness and South Africa became the first example of a phenomenon that occurs whenever the mob becomes the dominant factor in the alliance between mob and capital.

In one respect, the most important one, the Boers remained the undisputed masters of the country: whenever rational labor and production policies came into conflict with race considerations, the latter won. Profit motives were sacrificed time and again to the demands of a race society, frequently at a terrible price. The rentability of the railroads was destroyed overnight when the government dismissed 17,000 Bantu employees and paid white wages that amounted to 200 per cent more; expenses for municipal government became prohibitive when native municipal employees were replaced with whites; the Color Bar Bill finally excluded all black workers from mechanical jobs and forced industrial enterprise to a tremendous increase of production costs. The race world of the Boers had nobody to fear any more, least of all white labor, whose trade unions complained bitterly that the Color Bar Bill did not go far enough.

The racism described here is race-rule. Boer clans subsisted by forcing native tribes to farm for them. They didn’t want this arrangement upset by the development of industry or bureaucracy. (They got their wish.)

“Mob” in Arendt refers to the agglomeration of misfits: people excluded from the workings of a polity: people fulfilling no communal organizational or economic function. Mere hoarders of wealth; speculators; subsistence farmers; unemployed workers (the individualistic ones, not those moved by solidarity).

As separatist farmers, Boer clans belonged to the mob. So did people involved in the gold rush: investors as well as individual miners. Rich and poor.

Mob-rule occurs when such people use politics to prevent the development of “normal” governance and commerce. For example: Jews

settled down permanently into a unique position for a white group. [Footnote: “Jews constituted roughly one-third of the total immigration to South Africa in the twenties, and … in sharp contrast to all other categories of uitlanders, settled there permanently; their share in the annual emigration is less than a per cent.”] They neither belonged to the “lifeblood” of Africa nor to the “poor white trash.” Instead they started almost immediately to build up those industries and professions which according to South African opinion are “secondary” because they are not connected with gold. Jews became manufacturers of furniture and clothes, shopkeepers and members of the professions, physicians, lawyers, and journalists. In other words, no matter how well they thought they were adjusted to the mob conditions of the country and its race attitude, Jews had broken its most important pattern by introducing into South African economy a factor of normalcy and productivity, with the result that when Mr. Malan introduced into Parliament a bill to expel all Jews from the Union he had the enthusiastic support of all poor whites and of the whole Afrikander population.

The timeless lesson is that it behooves the most speculative and exploitative businessmen – captains of mostly useless industries (extraction of ornamental minerals, space exploration, gambling, luxurious transportation and housing) – to maintain a dysfunctional society: to lord it over desperate, disconnected, disaffected workers and voters. Plodding but sound officials and workers who bring order to chaos are best eliminated. Energetic immigrants who do so are best kept out. You can see how this describes our own moment.

As I read, I’m tempted to draw analogies between past and present, almost to treat Arendt as an oracle. Of course I don’t know enough to judge whether she gets the past right. And the analogies that suggest themselves in certain moods seem farfetched in others. How closely can Obama really be likened to Arendt’s Disraeli? I don’t know.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 80: Cure

I’ve been stumbling across references to mesmerism – in Poe, in William James. Even this month’s E. M. Forster reading, Maurice, touches on hypnotism, mesmerism’s better-regarded cousin.

This is the key difference between the practices, as I understand them. Hypnotism, to be effective, must be welcomed – or at least not resisted – by the subject. In contrast, mesmerism, due to its eerie basis in “animal magnetism,” is supposed to influence even those who resist.

Mesmerism once was widely feared. After the French Revolution,

major politicians and people in power were accused by radicals of practising animal magnetism on the general population.

In his article “Under the Influence: Mesmerism in England,” Roy Porter notes that James Tilly Matthews suggested that the French were infiltrating England via animal magnetism. Matthews believed that “magnetic spies” would invade England and bring it under subjection by transmitting waves of animal magnetism to subdue the government and people. Such an invasion from foreign influences was perceived as a radical threat.

Not everyone objected to being mesmerized. Desperate people welcomed it as a cure. Scientists lent it credibility.

No longer. Now it belongs to history – and to the horror genre.

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The distinction between mesmerism and hypnotism is blurred in the thriller Cure (1997). Subjects are induced to commit murders they wouldn’t ordinarily commit. The question is whether they murder willingly.

How different, really, are you and I from the “monsters” we condemn? This is the theme of many policing stories, and of such cringe-thrillers as Oldboy. Cure belongs to both traditions.

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Bizarre killings plague Japan. The victims are slashed with similar markings. Each killing is done by a different person.

Each killer immediately and remorsefully confesses and is taken into custody. Each killer had never done violence before. Each is baffled.

So are the lead detective, Takabe, and Sakuma, the psychologist he consults.

Even if you manage to hypnotize someone, you can’t change their basic moral sense. A person who thinks murder is evil won’t kill anyone under hypnotic suggestion.

So says Sakuma, a rather naïve figure. His manner conveys that this is the scientific orthodoxy. I don’t know if it is, but the assertion, in this unqualified form, is doubtful. People murder deliberately while believing that murder is wrong; if people act wrongly while aware of their moral beliefs – if their urges aren’t stopped by the safeguard of their own conscious disapproval – why wouldn’t they acquiesce to a hypnotist’s suggestion?

Sakuma’s personal advice to Takabe is better. Don’t let the investigation consume you, he urges; look after yourself. Not all is well with Takabe, whose wife is psychologically disturbed. His own smooth façade has started to crack.

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The investigators learn that a young drifter has been seen near every crime. They track him down. He appears to have severe amnesia.

The scenes with the drifter are, to me, the movie’s most absorbing ones. Do-gooders take him in, try to help him. Police question him. Or, rather, he questions his questioners. Where am I? Who am I? Then, after a half-dozen questions, the sequence resets: Where am I? The drifter is quiet, laconic, apparently uninterested. His failure to supply answers suggests insolence as much as memory loss. As his questioners’ frustration mounts, he imposes his own rhythm on the interrogations. Then, he flips the questions back on the questioners. Who are you? He asks about their lives, their homes. He plants suggestions. In short, he hypnotizes, or mesmerizes. I don’t know how realistic this is. I’ve not seen conversations like this in life, or in any movie. But they’re fascinating; their rhythm is … hypnotic. They’re worth the price of admission.

There are dreamlike locations, too: an empty, wintry beach; an abandoned, old, wooden dormitory; the bowels of hospitals and prisons. There are hallucinatory sequences (the halluciations are Takabe’s).

Here is a long video about Cure’s unsettling techniques – an exposition of how movies use ordinary sights and sounds to subtly re-tune our emotions.

Don’t watch it now if you plan to see this movie; do if you don’t.

November’s poem

Having reissued Kurt Vonnegut’s novels, the Library of America has been emailing me various writers’ declarations about Vonnegut.

This is by a Millennial writer, Ron Currie, Jr.:

People who knock Vonnegut often claim that his writing is adored by young adults, but that those same fans eventually grow out of him. The implication is that his work, if truly admired only by kids, is not to be taken seriously. But this misses the point. The point is that in his writing Kurt maintained, with great effort, the idealism most of us slough off. We call this self-degradation wisdom, or experience. And as is so often the case when we perceive a shortcoming in someone else, further reflection reveals that the deficiency is our own.

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A few years ago, some highschoolers wrote to Vonnegut. He replied. They framed his letter and posted it online, and it made the rounds. (Enlarge the image by opening it in a new tab and then clicking on it.)

Did the letter inspire inner creativity? It certainly inspired the highschoolers to turn it into a display piece.

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I am reminded of nothing so much as this passage by Tom Wolfe.

What about the idea of a permanent work of art at all, or even a visible one? Wasn’t that the most basic of all assumptions of the Old Order – that art was eternal and was composed of objects that could be passed from generation to generation, like Columbus’s bones? Out of that objection came Conceptual Art.

[§] The Conceptualists liked to propound the following question. Suppose the greatest artist in the history of the world, impoverished and unknown at the time, had been sitting at a table in the old Automat at Union Square, cadging some free water and hoping to cop a leftover crust of toasted corn muffin or a few abandoned translucent chartreuse waxed beans or some other item of that amazing range of Yellow Food the Automat went in for – and suddenly he got the inspiration for the greatest work of art in the history of the world. Possessing not even so much as a pencil or a burnt match, he dipped his forefinger into the glass of water and began recording this greatest of all inspirations, this high point in the history of man as a sentient being, on a paper napkin, with New York tap water as his paint. In a matter of seconds, of course, the water had diffused through the paper and the grand design vanished, whereupon the greatest artist in the history of the world slumped to the table and died of a broken heart, and the manager came over, and he thought that here was nothing more than a dead wino with a wet napkin. Now, the question is: Would that have been the greatest work of art in the history of the world or not? The Conceptualists would answer: Of course, it was. It’s not permanence and materials, all that Windsor & Newton paint and other crap, that are at the heart of art, but two things only: Genius and the process of creation! Later they decided that Genius might as well take a walk, too.

(The Painted Word, pp. 103–104)

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I re-read Cat’s Cradle – the first of Vonnegut’s books I’ve read twice. I liked it better the first time.

“If you find your life tangled up with somebody else’s life for no very logical reasons,” writes Bokonon, “that person may be a member of your karass.”

At another point in The Books of Bokonon he tells us, “Man created the checkerboard; God created the karass.” By which he means that a karass ignores national, institutional, occupational, familial, and class boundaries.

It is as free-form as an amoeba.

In his “Fifty-third Calypso,” Bokonon invites us to sing along with him:

Oh, a sleeping drunkard

Up in Central Park,

And a lion-hunter

In the jungle dark,

And a Chinese dentist,

And a British queen –

All fit together

In the same machine.

Nice, nice, very nice;

Nice, nice, very nice;

Nice, nice, very nice –

So many different people

In the same device.

I said I liked the book better the first time, but then the first time I didn’t see much idealism in it, only a fantastical bitterness (as in Twain’s Mysterious Stranger, another book I ought to read again). The second time, more of the scenes seemed brightened with something like joy; I wonder if that’s what it was, or if the light was a mirage.

Ecuador 0, Colombia 0; body-text fonts, pt. 20: Wessex

Our shaky goalkeeper, Moisés Ramírez, blocked a penalty kick by Colombia’s Luis Díaz. Good for Moisés! The much-criticized Kevin Rodríguez also played well. The team, as a whole, did not.

We need a different coach.

Other teams are bad enough, we might scrape through to the World Cup. But we’re nothing like pleasing to watch. (Again, I mean the team; some of our individuals are amazing to behold.)

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This is from the introduction to the Library of America’s paperback edition of Helen Eustis’s The Horizontal Man (1946), which I haven’t read but might do (fall isn’t only a good season for reading horror and murder; it also befits the campus novel).

I did recently stare at the typeface for several hours, in Dolores Hitchens’s Sleep with Strangers.

It’s a rare one.

This book is set in 12 point Wessex, conceived by Matthew Butterick and finished at Boston’s Font Bureau in 1993. The typeface was inspired by the “surprising beauty of the wide-bodied italic complement of Caledonia … ”

The typeface reminds me of W.A. Dwiggins’s work more generally (e.g., Electra, New Caledonia, New Winchester).

Butterick, a lawyer and type designer, maintains a website that is perhaps the best free guide for amateur typesetters – that is, for virtually all of us. I say free, although Butterick (reasonably) would like people to give him money or else buy his book or one of his fonts. Wessex, however, doesn’t appear to be for sale; and I’m not sure that if it were, the proceeds would go to Butterick.

R.I.P. Joan Didion

Today, in her honor, I read “The Getty” and “Quiet Days in Malibu” from The White Album. The second item, especially, is moving.

I expect that the Library of America will soon exhibit another piece by Didion as a Story of the Week.

We have a mouse in our mud-room. I saw it dart behind a box. Jasper and Ziva rushed past their food and sniffed at the mouse but didn’t catch it. Later, Karin went into the mud-room and the mouse stared at her with its little brown face. We’d been using the mud-room to store cat food and other non-perishables; now, we must rethink this arrangement.

’Twas the night before Christmas / and all through the house / not a creature was stirring / not even a mouse.

Well, it depends on whether you count the mud-room as a part of the house.

We went to a Christmas Eve party and one of my uncles gave another of his biennial talks about the perils of the hantavirus. Don’t sweep up or vacuum after a mouse, he said. Use a wet cloth. Unlikely as it is that we’ll contract this virus, I figure the advice is worth posting because, who knows, it may save a life. One’s words might do tremendous good down the road. I told this to another of my uncles, who was lamenting that a paper he’d presented had involved a lot of work for a negligible result.

At least I didn’t get beaten up, he said. A group of Caribbean Christian brothers and sisters had been praying and fasting so that that wouldn’t happen.

His paper, which he gave at an evangelical theologians’ conference, argued for racial reparations.

Fictitious history

The air has cooled, what with the arrival of September; and our finances, while tight, are being loosed ever so slightly. This last week, I even bought a new book – The Glory of the Empire by Jean D’Ormesson – the “history” of a fictitious realm.

There is a whiff of Tacitus in its first paragraph:

The Empire never knew peace. First it had to be built, then defended. From the depths of its history there arose the clang of axes, the hiss of javelins, the cries of dying at evening after battle. Neither the forests to the north and east nor the high mountains in the south were proof against attack and invasion. In the great fertile plains at the foot of the volcanoes, massacre succeeded massacre. To the west, the sea too brought its share of dangers: suddenly threatening sails, pirates, surprise assaults at dawn. On the Empire’s borders night never came without its escorts of dread and death. Even within, both in the country and in the towns, interest and passion raised up rival bands to fight for power with violence and arson. The Empire grew up on a foundation of flames and blood. … And peril came not only from men. Unbridled nature exacted a high price … Imagination hardly needed to improve on the horrors of the real.

(The last sentence is like when Agatha Christie has her characters say: “This murder is as shocking as a detective novel, but this is real life.”)

D’Ormesson is commenting on historiography’s patterns and pitfalls. Is there any other sustained work that does so by way of recording the “history” of an imaginary yet this-worldly realm? Le Guin’s Orsinia, perhaps? I’d be grateful to be told.