“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.)

Justin E. H. Smith’s generation

I am a Scorpio, a Rooster, INTP or INFP (depending on what day of the week I take the quiz), and who-knows-what on the Enneagram. According to current BuzzFeed wisdom, my culinary preferences reveal that the Taylor Swift lyric –

if the story is over, why am I still writing pages?

(from “Death By a Thousand Cuts” – a song I don’t know)

– will describe my love life for the next six months. (Why stop at my love life? Why stop at six months?)

More credibly, perhaps, I was born near the temporal boundary that separates the GenX-ers from the Millennials. I assume it isn’t a sharp boundary. I exhibit characteristics of both groups. Alas, I seem to have been born on the boundary’s twerpier side. I’d rather be an X-er. So it was with some keenness that I tracked down the magazine article “My Generation” by the entertaining philosopher Justin E. H. Smith.

A few paragraphs in, my heart sank. Smith was presenting an inventory of what music he used to listen to and when he used to listen to it.

(I remember when it was more or less obligatory to recite that sort of thing to people. It got tiresome.)

The tediousness of his musical examples aside, Smith’s point is that the X-ers were the last cohort to believe in “art in the fullest sense”:

What is art in the fullest sense? It is impossible to give an answer that will please everyone, but we might say that it is a distillation of the spirit of its time that somehow succeeds in breaking out above its time, speaking to us across the generations in a way that transcends the limitations of its own local idiom and its own myopic present. It is shaped by its historical period but ends up saying something quite general about human suffering, human hopes, perhaps the possibility of human redemption (or not).

(It bears emphasizing: “something quite general” is not quite something universal; I think Smith is deliberately avoiding making a claim about universality. He is interested in pitting himself against those who disavow even the more limited cases of transcendency, e.g., of art that speaks across a number of generations.)

After the X-ers, creators and audiences stopped pursuing, valuing, or even acknowledging transcendency and narrowed their focus to content shamelessly generated for like-minded people. Authenticity, as an aspiration, became a casualty. Nowadays, creators and audiences, lacking any belief in a transcendent anchor to be true to, allow themselves to be pulled along by the strongest current, and everything eventually sinks into the whirlpool of upvotes, of (Smith emphasizes) The Viral, of The Monetized.

Whether or not he’s right about the chronology, Smith does seem to have identified two strikingly opposed ways of thinking, and it does seem that the allegedly newer way (the anti-transcendence tendency) has the upper hand, Zeitgeist-wise. Or so old fogies like myself like to worry.

I continue to read Harry Potter

I keep chipping away, one book each month, 25–50 pp. most days. I’m now reading book 5 of 7 (The Order of the Phoenix). What I like best is the satire of ambition. Children really could profit from this. Look, kid, don’t do like Guilderoy Lockhart. Don’t do like Lucius Malfoy. Or Cornelius Fudge. Or Percy Weasley. And so on. Voldemort isn’t even cool. Look what a pompous windbag he is at the end of book 4. Too many people reach adulthood not having absorbed these simple lessons.

Also, the books are so obviously Christian in spirit, it’s a mystery to me how anyone who’s read them could think the wizards – the good ones, anyway – were batting for Team Satan.

Although I have no desire to get caught up in the spinoffs, fan theories, fan fiction, etc., I did buy two “Harry Potter and philosophy” anthologies to read after I’ve finished the series. Let’s see if the philosophers get Harry Potter right or if they muck it up. I can’t say I’m looking forward to the chapters on metaphysics. How is it possible to apparate (levitate, time-travel, etc.)? How could someone be a man and a dog? How do potions work? So far, there isn’t much to go on in the texts. The really pressing question, for me, is what the Sorting Hat’s basis is for grouping people into these four character-trait clusters – whether these clusters are bogus like those of the Zodiac or whether they really exist (I suppose they could be stipulated to exist just in the world of the story, but that wouldn’t be very interesting); also, why people who belong to supposedly different trait clusters must inhabit different parts of the castle and ceaselessly compete against one another. The best justification I can come up with is based on the utility of some sort of Millian “experiment in living”; but the danger, here, is that the Slytherins will absorb or destroy the other groups no matter what. Anyway, it’s no surprise that so much has been written about the politics of Harry Potter. (The Wikipedia article I’ve just linked to doesn’t even mention the hilarious number of articles about Harry Potter in the National Review, whose writers seem obsessed with the topic.)

Karin’s quiet birthday; a mermaid; return to Puffin Rock

Happy birthday to Karin: treasured wife, adored mother, possessor of immeasurable intrinsic value. Witty, dreamy, pretty, kind.

Somehow, Etsy knows that it’s Karin’s birthday and that I’m married to her.

Here, have some ads in your email.

Thanks, Etsy.

Curiously, a lot of the ads have to do with the Zodiac. But the ads don’t seem to know what Karin’s sign is. I don’t think she’s one for embroideries and wall hangings of Scorpio the scorpion.

It’s not that she doesn’t appreciate kitsch. She bought me this skeleton of a mermaid, for the Halloween season.

Tonight, we watched the final episode of Cat Hospital, and then Karin put on Puffin Rock for Samuel (and for the rest of us; we needed a change from Samuel’s YouTube videos). It’s been many months since Samuel watched this show, which used to be his favorite. He seems to have forgotten a lot of it. He resisted it at first, but now he’s deeply invested in the story. He supplies a running commentary.

Oona is so bad!

No, Sammy, Oona is good.

Oona is good. Mossy is so bad!

No, he’s just silly. And hungry.

Mossy is so silly!

Yes.

So, this bodes well. Lately, he’s been downright distressed when we’ve played his old shows or read his old books. He seems to have intense, nostalgic, none-too-happy reactions to things from his past.

But we need him to come to terms with the past, because soon it’ll be time for Daniel to be exposed to these shows and books.

Last night, I went out to buy milk; when I returned, Daniel had learned to raise himself into a sitting position. Since then, he has been practicing sitting up, and tipping himself over onto the floor. Thunk! His poor little head!