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This came in the form of an email from Bruno Clarke to the SLSA listserv. I’ve loved Margulis and Sagan’s books for years. In her youth, Margulis was married briefly to Carl Sagan, the father of her son, Dorion.

Lynn Margulis was Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Geosciences at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1983, and in 1999 received the Presidential Medal of Science from Bill Clinton. Read the rest of this entry »

"Making Faces" is an unusual documentary about metal type.

review by Brian Charles Clark
4.5 stars out of 5
Directed by Richard Kegler

Jim Rimmer was a British Columbian printer and type designer who cast metal type using the now nearly lost pantographic technique. If that’s all Greek to you (or, if you’re a graphic designer, maybe it’s all greeking to you, too), you need to watch this film by book artist and P22 founder Richard Kegler.

Time was when type was neither virtual nor selectable from a drop-down menu but rather made of tiny bits of metal and set in mirror image, so that when it was inked and pressed against a sheet of paper it read correctly. Time was when “font” meant the whole collection of faces – for instance Times Roman – with italic and bold variations, and in all their myriad sizes.

Change is inevitable, but it’s terrible to think of losing the art of letterpress, that is, of printing with metal type. A letterpressed broadside or chapbook feels and smells very different from a page run through an offset press or a laser printer. If you’ve never experienced letterpress, seek it out: the tactile experience alone could change the way you experience the printed word. Read the rest of this entry »

reviewed by Brian Charles Clark
3.5 star review originally published on Curled Up with a Good DVD

One of Paul Gauguin's Tahiti paintings.

Paul Gauguin was a strange guy who spent his life in search of paradise, which he tacitly but clearly recognized as an illusion. For over a hundred years he’s been considered one of the most important of the French post-impressionist painters but, in his own time, he was a commercial failure.

The predominant subtext of the short film Gauguin: Maker of Myth, is that, in fact, “Mr. Flop City But I Don’t Care Gauguin” very much wanted to be a commercial success. This, says Myth, despite the fact the that he vehemently eschewed the trappings of bourgeois culture and went so far as to call himself “un sauvage,” a savage. This driven man fled as far as possible as it was in his day (which was very far, indeed) from the sources of capital, fame, and “civilization.” Gauguin fled, mind you, but he did so complaining about his poverty every inch of the way. Like James Joyce, he was of a contemporary milieu that found its satisfaction, even joy, in exile.

This lovely short film, produced by the National Gallery of Art, is a vivid and concise introduction to the artistic career of the pivotal and influential Gauguin. Oddly, though, no director or writer is credited; distressing, that. The film is edited by the talented and keen-eyed John Warnock (the photographer, not the CEO of Adobe who announced Photoshop in 1987–unless I’m deeply confused, of course, and the universe is in fact running in a course deeply in tune with the desires of mortal humans). Read the rest of this entry »

Captain, o my captain. Captain Beefheart in Toronto

Don Van Vliet — the iconic experimental musician known as Captain Beefheart — died today due to complications from multiple sclerosis at a hospital in Northern California, according to reports. He was 69.

From 1967 through the early ’80s, Van Vliet released some of the most challenging rock albums ever, which showed off his quirky knack for free-form experimental rhythms, avant-garde melodies, and his gruff, smoky howl.

via Captain Beefheart Dies at 69 | SPIN.com.

From Wikipedia: He began performing with his Captain Beefheart persona in 1964 and joined the original Magic Band in 1965. The group drew acclaim with their first album in 1967 on Buddah Records, Safe as Milk. After being dropped by two consecutive record labels, they signed to Frank Zappa’s newly formed Straight Records. Zappa as producer granted Beefheart the unrestrained artistic freedom to create and release 1969′s Trout Mask Replica, ranked fifty-eighth in Rolling Stone magazine’s 2003 list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.

Captain Beefheart & his Magic Band Live in Cannes, 1968:

The Elements of Style by Sarah Hafner

I just heard that the intensely talented writer Sarah Hafner died last weekend. Some readers may know her through the chapbook of her stories that I published back in the 1990s, Some Girls. Others may know her work from her fabulous novel, the hilarious The Elements of Style.

Space Alien quilt by Sarah Hafner

Still others may have known Sarah in a completely different, but still amazingly creative, capacity. Sarah was a fine designer, and developed a number of quilt designs over the years. I’m lucky enough to own one of her space alien quilts.

Sarah is survived by her husband John, who sent this email to Sarah’s friends:

It is with the greatest sadness that I must tell you my beloved wife, Sarah Hafner, passed away unexpectedly on Saturday, December 4, 2010. She died at Franklin Baystate Medical Center, where she was treated for a rare and sudden intestinal illness. Sarah and I spent more than 14 years of a vibrant life together and had a love filled marriage.

Sarah was a much more interesting person than I could ever be. I simply held up high the pedestal where she could shine.

I hope that you will stop by or call me, from time to time, in this now duller place, and raise a memory high to this star. To remember this bright, artistic, talented, passionately honest, and loving wife of mine, to enjoy her works of creativity and wide range of interests.

Sarah’s body will be cremated this week. We will be sitting shiva–the traditional Jewish week of mourning–each day between the hours of 5 and 7pm, starting this Friday, December 10th and continuing through December 16th.

I only met Sarah once, at a trade show in San Francisco where she was hawking her quilts. Still, we worked together for several years, first on her stories, then again trying to find a publisher for Elements of Style.

I miss her very much.

Maria Prophetissima invented the alembic.

Mary the Jewess or Maria Prophetissima or Miriam the Prophetess or – well, we don’t really know what her name was or when, exactly she lived, and so we call her any number of names, each according to her preference and ideology.

Mary was a chemist, avant le lettre, that is, she was an alchemist. She probably lived in the first century A.D. and probably in Alexandria, but may have thrived as early as the third century B.C. According to Wikipedia’s skimpy entry,

The most concrete mention of her name in the context of alchemy is by Zosimos of Panopolis, who wrote in the 4th century the oldest alchemy books known. The legendary Greek writer Ostanes mentions her as “the daughter of the king of Saba.” In the Alexander book (2d part) of the Persian poet Nezami, Maria, a Syrian princess, visits the court of Alexander the Great, and learns from Aristotle, among other things, the art of making gold. Whatever the epoch of Maria may have been, few doubt her existence.

Mary’s name is preserved in one of the names of the double boiler, well known to every cook: the bain-marie is used when a constant temperature is needed to heat a substance or when something needs to be heated gently. Hollandaise sauce, for instance, is just not possible without Mary’s invention. Read the rest of this entry »

The great folk singer and American Utah Phillips died in his sleep Friday night at the age of 73 in his home n Nevada City, Calif. He struggled with heart disease for a long time and, as Chris, a friend of his said,

Utah has caught the westbound, and I am at a great loss.”

Here’s a snip from the family’s obituary:

Phillips served as an Army private during the Korean War, an experience he would later refer to as the turning point of his life. Deeply affected by the devastation and human misery he had witnessed, upon his return to the United States he began drifting, riding freight trains around the country. His struggle would be familiar today, when the difficulties of returning combat veterans are more widely understood, but in the late fifties Phillips was left to work them out for himself. Destitute and drinking, Phillips got off a freight train in Salt Lake City and wound up at the Joe Hill House, a homeless shelter operated by the anarchist Ammon Hennacy, a member of the Catholic Worker movement and associate of Dorothy Day.

Phillips credited Hennacy and other social reformers he referred to as his “elders” with having provided a philosophical framework around which he later constructed songs and stories he intended as a template his audiences could employ to understand their own political and working lives. They were often hilarious, sometimes sad, but never shallow.

“He made me understand that music must be more than cotton candy for the ears,” said John McCutcheon, a nationally-known folksingerand close friend.

In the creation of his performing persona and work, Phillips drew from influences as diverse as Borscht Belt comedian Myron Cohen, folksingers Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, and Country stars Hank Williams and T. Texas Tyler.

Utah ended a letter to his friends at KVMR in Nevada City with these words:

The future? I don’t know. But I have songs in a folder I’ve never paid attention to, and songs inside me waiting for me to bring them out. Through all of it, up and down, it’s the song. It’s always been the song.

For more on Utah, his life, his music, including podcasts and videos, visit utahphillips.org.

I read Mushrooms, Molds, and Miracles: The Strange Realm of Fungi, by Lucy Kavaler, which has been republished in the Authors Guild Back-in-Print series of notable books. I reviewed Mushrooms a while back, and said in part:

Originally published in 1965, Mushrooms, Molds, and Miracles stands as a landmark in popular science writing. There had been field guides to fungi before her, but Kavaler’s book may be the first to broadly and popularly survey those life forms without which Gaia would have no groove.

When originally published, Kavaler’s Mushrooms was described as “fascinating” by Time magazine in a lead review, and as “superb” by the New Haven Register.

I asked Kavaler a few questions via email, about drug plants and using the Web to once again market her book. Here is her reply; the voice of the interviewer is interpolated by Kavaler. Read the rest of this entry »

Heloise & Abelard

review by Brian Charles Clark

Heloise & Abelard: A New Biography
by James Burge
Publisher: HarperSanFrancisco, 2006

For lovers, the story of Abelard and Heloise is a constant reminder that love is a dangerous thing, and that a couple is, as the old saw runs, “a nation of two.” You’d think that the example of Abelard and Heloise (just one of many examples of dangerous lovers and their dangerous loves) would keep couples on the straight and narrow; and maybe it does, but not without a certain frisson that keeps the story alive after 800 years.

To refresh your memory, recall that Abelard was the greatest philosopher of his day. He hailed from Brittany and went to Paris around 1100, ostensibly to teach, but really to argue. If, as the popular imagination has it, Heloise had a body made for love (which, by contemporary accounts, she did), Abelard’s was made for arguing. He was short but wiry, as sinuous as his famed rhetoric. As James Burge demonstrates in his superb biography of a love affair, Abelard quickly conquered his foes in medieval logic and established himself as the philosopher du jour. For a while, he was in the camp of the politically empowered, and it was doing this period that he met Heloise. Read the rest of this entry »

Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land

review by Brian Charles Clark

Lord Byron’s Novel: The Evening Land
John Crowley
William Morrow, 2005

Here’s what we know. In June of 1816, Lord Byron, John Polidori (Byron’s personal physician), Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Godwin (soon to be Mary Shelley) and Claire Claremont all gathered at Byron’s place on the shore of Lake Geneva, Villa Diodati. 1816 was a “year without a summer” because the year before a huge volcanic eruption had sheathed the planet in a blanket of sun-blocking dust. On what must have been one of many dark and stormy nights that summer, the above-named crew sat around a fire and told stories. (See Ken Russell’s 1986 film Gothic for a wonderfully kinky version of the story of that famous night.) It was so much bone-chilling fun that young Mary (she was not quite nineteen at the time) suggested that they all write supernatural stories. And all agreed.

What followed is history: Mary wrote Frankenstein, Or the Modern Prometheus, the grandmother of all science fiction novels. The rest of the Diodati gang went on to fame or obscurity, as the case may be, but none followed up on Mary’s challenge. Or did they? Polidori, in fact, wrote a short novel called The Vampyre, generally credited with being the first tale of blood-sucking in English. But there’s a controversial line of evidence that strongly indicates that Polidori, more than a bit of a blood-sucking sycophant, stole the idea and plot of The Vampyre from Byron. There’s a scrap of a prose manuscript by Byron on that subject, and it seems likely that Byron, before he told Polidori to hit the road, conveyed to his doctor, in great detail, the nitty-gritty of the vampire tale. So Polidori’s novel, this line of reasoning goes, is really “Lord Byron’s novel.” Read the rest of this entry »