Body-text fonts, pt. 28: Iowan Old Style

Halftime in Philadelphia: Ecuador 2, Bolivia 0. Ecuador using subs. Some ought to be starters.

Ecuador wearing white. Bolivia wearing very pale green shirts with dark green shorts and stockings. These outfits do not exactly fan the flames of patriotism.

For a while, I listened to a livestream with amateur Bolivian commentary. It sounded like this: We’re una porquería. … Come back, Marcelo Moreno Martins! … Hee, hee, Brazil is going to tie the USA.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

This month’s typeface is Iowan Old Style. Some computers arrive with it installed. Supposedly, it’s one of the “ten most popular text serif fonts, as selected by Identifont users over the past seven days.”

I’ve seen no evidence of this out in the wild. Who, exactly, is using Iowan? Maybe I look in the wrong places.

People should use Iowan. It’s lovely.

I own just one book set in Iowan. Fortunately, it has 600+ pp. – plenty from which to sample.

Here’s the italic:

And the roman:

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 46: Maborosi

Some dialog from Michael Cera’s Youth in Revolt:

I think my favorite film was Tokyo Story. I just think Mizoguchi is a great director.

But wasn’t that by Ozu?

Who can say?

I’m reminded of this joke because I, too, must talk about Ozu without having seen his movies.

Does that matter? I know enough about Ozu to understand that, visually and rhythmically (and also, probably, thematically), Maborosi has the style of an Ozu movie.

I didn’t get so strong a feeling when, a couple of years ago, I watched The Third Murder. That movie introduced me to Maborosi’s director, Hirokazu Kore-eda. Maborosi, more than The Third Murder, must be Ozu-like.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I doubt I’ll review a quieter movie than Maborosi – even if I decide to review Microcosmos (which, I dimly recall, is just footage of insects chewing leaves).

Stuff actually happens in Maborosi, but it barely seems to.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

There’s a wonderful passage in Haruki Murakami’s novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. A man describes a brief but sublime experience involving a single beam of light at the bottom of a well. His life, ever since, has been shadow-like.

Like this unfortunate man, Yumiko, the protagonist of Maborosi, has largely stopped living.

In early scenes, she is gloriously happy with her young husband. Then he dies. It is a baffling death. It seems to be a death full of life, if such a thing can be; at the very least, he dies on his own terms.

The life that is snuffed out is Yumiko’s, even though she’s just twenty years old and has a beautiful infant son.

Yumiko remarries. She moves from Osaka to a remote seaside village. Her son and stepdaughter grow up happily together. Her new husband and inlaws are good people. Yumiko has good moments.

But she is not fully present in her life. The memory of the dead husband draws her away from her surroundings. Usually, this is not explicitly commented upon; but everything suggests it. Action is observed from a distance. The scenery is gloomy to look at; meanwhile, this or that person performs this or that movement in some remote corner of the screen. Foreground becomes background.

Life goes on, but only at the edge of Yumiko’s consciousness.

Meanwhile, this or that supporting character is lured toward death. Some characters die; most don’t. Yumiko can’t understand the attraction of death. That’s why she constantly grieves.

I am going to stop now because the New Year is almost here, and I am about to fall asleep; and besides, there is little more about Maborosi that I could discuss. The richness is in the detail with which daily life, or its negation, is observed.

P.S. Another movie Maborosi reminds me of: Lynne Ramsay’s Morvern Callar.

February fragments

Four weeks after having sprained my ankle, I walk much better; but my ankle still hurts all day long.

Karin drives me to work each morning, what with my being injured; and when my shift ends, I walk home the scenic way, upon a riverside path that’s much less icy than my usual route.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I’ve been trudging through Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy. I just finished Ghosts, the second installment. Some fifteen years ago, I read the first book, City of Glass, and vowed not to again; well, now I have. The second time was better. I suppose it was effective training to have read, in the interim, novels like Murakami’s Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and 1Q84 in which the characters stay holed up for long periods with their thoughts. But in those novels, the long, inactive waits are punctuated with tasteful elevator music and wistful sippings of Cutty Sark. In Auster’s books, the waiting turns the protagonists into bums. Anyway, my objective is to get through the third book in Auster’s trilogy, The Locked Room, so that I can then read Sjöwall & Wahlöö’s Locked Room and write down the same title twice consecutively in my reading journal.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

The kitties have been chasing each other around the apartment all the last hour. Jasper trapped Ziva behind the couch for a while, but Karin coaxed him away.

A literary gathering

Kenny had invited over some Koreans and Japanese. When I walked in, the party was winding down. The revelers were sitting on the floor with their dregs of Asian booze; Lost in Translation was on TV, but nobody was paying attention.

I was an instant hit. “You are very handsome,” said the Asians. (Males, all of them.)

I decided these guys were all right.

“All Americans are very handsome,” said the Asians.

This irked me, for I knew that by “Americans” they meant gringos, not South Americans. But I quietly forgave them.

Soon I had them debating which was better – Korea or Japan. Or rather, I had the Koreans debating against each other. The Japanese wouldn’t debate that issue; to them, the answer was clear enough.

Then I showed them which novel I’d been reading that day: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami. There were grunts of approval all around. “He’s a good writer,” said one of the Koreans. “He describes everything.” “What do you mean, everything?” said his compatriot. “I mean, he describes all the clothes everyone wears,” explained the first Korean.

I hadn’t noticed that, but I’d noticed how Murakami would describe everyone’s food: spaghetti, stir-fry, cheese-and-tomato sandwiches. I really like it when a novelist will do that; it’s a trick I associate with Hemingway. That prosaic sensualist. That glutton.

The first Korean had earned a degree in English literature, but his favorite writer was Yeats. And so tonight I looked at some of Yeats’s poems.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

A Crazed Girl

That crazed girl improvising her music,
Her poetry, dancing upon the shore,
Her soul in division from itself
Climbing, falling she knew not where,
Hiding amid the cargo of a steamship
Her knee-cap broken, that girl I declare
A beautiful lofty thing, or a thing
Heroically lost, heroically found.

No matter what disaster occurred
She stood in desperate music wound
Wound, wound, and she made in her triumph
Where the bales and the baskets lay
No common intelligible sound
But sang, ‘O sea-starved hungry sea.’

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯