Blogs: Moving, Writing, Drawing

In Live-Blogging Parkinson’s: (Re)Learning to Walk by Jeff Howe, I noticed how the movement in the piece paralleled the content nicely. The piece developed a rhythm, where each successive sentences would start out with the same word: “We take it for granted.  We don’t analyze it.  We don’t think about it. We just put one foot in front of the other and go wherever we want…I have always been a walker/runner.  I’ve had no choice” (emphasis added). Such a stylistic choice mirrors and reinforces the conversation Howe is having about walking and running, and the natural rhythm he once felt when engaging in these activities, so natural that his body fell into these patterns with no real conscious thought. I am not sure in this case if I can differentiate whether the approach is information based, action based or character based because it feels like all three, and that all three are closely intertwined. He is surely giving us information on how Parkinson’s disease affects the mobility of a body, but he is doing it almost purely through describing actions and the terrible loss of the before and after. Yet he is also describing himself, specifically, giving us a growing sense of the speaker as a character. This blog met my expectations of what it would be: a short, unified, interesting, personal work that felt meaningful and well-put together.

I think I enjoyed Amy Tan’s “How to Start and End an Email” the best of the three because I feel it does so many things to interact with the reader. First, it is a topic almost anyone can identify with (and certainly if you are reading it on the web), and I have felt myself vaguely anxious about this very subject. I even had a conversation recently with another student about it. Second, it shows that Amy Tan is not some infallible, perfect author who always knows exactly what to write, and she gives us some insight into her personal life with phrases like: “Kisses and hugs. That is not something that came naturally to me until more recently --in the last ten years.  My family did not hug and kiss.  Or maybe you hugged someone if they were leaving for years. But I've adapted.  I hug more often.’” She even writes of wasting time and procrastinating with these emails and her mental wanderings about them, which most any writer can identify with. Her language is pleasantly informal, which makes it inviting to readers, but she never strays into slang.

The third blog, “I Love Typography: an Interview with Kunihiko Okano," I liked least of all. Maybe it was the unexpected form, an interview when the other two seemed more like public journals, although I think I could have gotten over that if the subject matter had been more accessible. I got caught up in much of the jargon that was used. In phrases like “The assignment was to draw letters from a randomly generated TypeCooker recipe” and “When I designed the Latin component of the Japanese typeface, Hiragino UD, I drew it so that the width of the characters remained the same across all weights and styles” I could figure out what he was referring to, but I still felt distanced from his process and his excitement about it because of these unfamiliar technical phrases and words. I did have a strong point of entry in this piece, though: “With Quintet, there are at least thirty different combinations and, if colors are added, the permutations permit almost infinitive possibilities.” For some reason it took this statement (about half way through the interview) for it to finally click in my head that this was a pretty cool, interesting project and a lot of creativity and thought went into it. I think it also gave me a more simple broad way of entering into an understanding of Okano’s vision for the font and why it was a project worth reading about.