Check out this cool design project, where a designer hand-lettered the lyrics to Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues”, similar to the infamous video clip/music video precursor featuring Dylan holding up cards with the lyrics on them, as written by himself, Allen Ginsberg and others.
The designer/artist Leandro Senna says of the project:
Inspired by Bob Dylan’s ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ video, where he flips cards with the lyrics as the song plays, I decided to recreate those cards with handmade type. I ended up doing all the lyrics, and not just some of the words, as Dylan did.
There are 66 cards done in one month during my spare time using only pencil, black tint pens and brushes. The challenge was not to use the computer, no retouching was allowed. Getting a letter wrong meant starting the page over. There are some intentional misspellings and puns on the original song video, so I tried to keep that in a certain way.
Here’s the link to see closeup photos of each individual card, and here’s the link to see the video of these cards flipped through with the song overlaid. Which cards are your favorites?
And of course, if you need a fix, here’s the original video clip with Dylan. 
For about a year I worked at a family-owned bridal boutique run by a woman who communicated her moods via a complicated system of butt pinches, pats, and caresses. The more painful the hand-to-ass interaction, the more pleased she was with my quality of work. A quick, deep-tissue-bruising squeeze meant “Keep it up, girl,” while a swat was equivalent to “Oooh, today is a good day.” A series of pats in quick succession meant she was losing patience. Her palm tracing slow, tender circles on one cheek indicated an imminent death.
Maybe you’re thinking, “Karen, that sounds like sexual harassment,” to which I would counter, “But did it feel like sexual harassment?” And no, no it did not, in the same way that Kevin Bacon’s nude scene in Wild Things might have appeared sexual on the surface, but, well.
And besides, I had other things to worry about. Like the fact that for one month, during all open hours, without interruption, we were required to listen to a smooth-jazz interpretation of “Wind Beneath My Wings.” I’ve provided you with a nice arrangement here. Though not, I think, the exact one we listened to, this one comes paired with a picturesque photograph of telephone wires and a family of ravens tangled in a wind turbine.
Feel free to keep that playing while you read. Eventually you’ll almost forget it’s there. Almost.
Read more »
Is it ok if I take a post to brag on my students?
Their magazine, Scribendi, was recently selected by Graywolf Press as a finalist for the Associated Collegiate Press’ 2012 National Pacemaker Award.
The National Pacemaker Award is one of the most prestigious college media awards. Scribendi is one of seven finalists in its category, judged on content, the quality of writing and editing, art and graphics, layout and design, and overall concept. Winners will be announced Saturday, November 3 at the National College Media Convention in Chicago, Ill., so keep your fingers crossed on my students’ behalf.
Through this yearlong course that doubles as an educational internship, students gain practical, hands-on experience in proofreading, copyediting, typography, graphic design and magazine layout, professional desktop publishing software, fundraising, marketing and distribution, as well as small business management. They come a long way in two semesters. The students sign up from any discipline, which means there’s usually a couple physics majors and pre-med students along with the English and fine arts majors you might expect. They rarely sign up knowing anything about graphic design, InDesign, assessment, editing, or working in an office setting. Read more »
Cover Art, “Asters,” by Sarah Grew
Often I’m at the wrong place at the right time, meaning the right time for something wrong to happen. I’ve had to quit three jobs since moving to Germany. Quitting a job is like breaking up with someone. You want to pretend it’s working or that it can, but a voice keeps calling from an echoey quarry, Quit trying to fool yourself. And how is there always heartbreak? Maybe just mine.
The most recent failed attempt at working is the biggest work failure I’ve had in my work-full life. After teaching for a little over a month, I realized my boss was certifiably nuts—inconsistent, disrespectful, dishonest, and manipulative. I had another job offer and gave my notice (six weeks required, according to my boss, even though I’m not an employee of the language school but a freelancer so they don’t have to give me any benefits).
This is where it gets good. My former boss claimed I had breached my contract twice, though she didn’t tell me what I did that constituted breaches. The contract is in German and it turns out the English “translation” contains completely different information than the binding German one. Somehow she determined that the school didn’t have to pay me for the five weeks of teaching I’d done. Instead, she insisted that I owed the school 200 Euros. Read more »
Logos by Sudhir Kuduchkar
In some fields a person is sitting at work, maybe even enjoying the job and hardly thinking of leaving, when she receives a call from a headhunter. A headhunter may sound violent, but really it is a person who invites the happy worker to interview at another company where she will earn more money, live in a more desirable place, and have a better title.
The question is how do we get our heads hunted?
Of the few people I know who have been tracked down this way, two of them have portfolios on Coroflot. What surprised me when I visited the site for the first time is how many people I know who don’t have work posted there.
Being naïve in the world of design, I imagine there are good reasons for not using the free and heavily traveled space offered on this site. I know many designers who have their own gorgeous websites. But personal websites are often not the first things to come up in Google searches. Love as I might, Google, trust I do not, Google. Read more »
Don't you want to walk down this alley?
As writers, I think it’s important to always try and use words and language in new and surprising ways. I can’t say exactly how to go about this, but you always know when you hear a killer phrase that sounds exactly right, and also sounds like something you’ve never heard before. (Some examples for me are Kafka’s assertion that “A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us” or Li-Young Lee’s description of “the barb / called world, that / tooth-ache, the actual” though there are of course endless others.)
That being said, it seems like everyone’s a writer these days, so maybe using words in new ways isn’t enough. Maybe we need to re-purpose not just language but the things we associate with language. There are people out there making amazing pictures out of library date-stamps and incredibly intricate and beautiful paper sculptures that are left anonymously for others to discover. Other cool people are “poetry bombing” local thrift stores and my only question is: why didn’t I think of that?
It’s probably because I’m not very good at craft-y things, and I’m especially hopeless at visual arts (for more on skills I don’t have, see here), but I’m all about this guerrilla art thing. I don’t know that it can quite be called a movement yet, since these artists aren’t, as far as I know, organized in any way, and most prefer to work alone, but I like the idea of a guerrilla art movement a whole lot. I propose we start one. Who’s with me? We can call it Artsault. (Too obvious? We’ll work on it.) Read more »
“What makes an artist an artist? Artists are the people who have this little weird idea and they act on it, and they keep acting on it, and regardless of the consequence or the outcome, something amazing unfolds.” 
I came across this video on the internet today. A couple, Judith and Richard Lang, make art out of discarded plastic they find at the beach. They go to Keyhole Bay in California and comb the beach for plastic. Then they take what they’ve found home and organize it in boxes so they can use it in sculpture or mixed-media art. They create some truly beautiful pieces and clean up the beach. It’s a beautiful win-win.
This got me thinking about what it is to salvage and collect things in order to use it for something larger or greater than the thing itself. This is like writing, I think. As a nonfiction writer, I observe the world around me and collect data in a notebook and store it for later use, like a topic or a piece of an essay. At least that’s the goal. Something, whether it is a bottle cap found on the ground or a random quote you heard in the line at the grocery store, can meld with another small something and a really interesting connection or product can be made. Collecting is an art and by that I mean that it’s not limited to material things. I’m not condoning hoarding of ideas or things, but we search for something and when we find it, something happens and we can’t let it be lost. If I didn’t carry a notebook, so many ideas, good and bad, would disappear from my memory, lost forever. And as an artist, as a writer, I can’t afford to let that happen.
The Quintessential Sound Changer
I’ve recently been wishing for an umlaut rich keyboard, which made me curious about the history of the umlaut. When I typed that curiosity into Google, the first result was “metal umlaut.” Being a dense and literal person, I expected an entry on welding and metal art.
Once I started reading Metal Umlaut, I no longer needed any other information about the umlaut. This entry on Wikipedia is wholly satisfying. It is such good reading that I want to find out who the author is. It is also “the personal favourite of Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales.”
Here are some of my favorite parts:
A metal umlaut[1] (also known as röck döts)
Umlaut roughly means changed sound or sound shift, as it is composed of um-, “around/changed”, and Laut, “sound”
Lemmy, the lead singer of Motörhead said about the band name’s umlaut, “I only put it in there to look mean.” Read more »
It’s fall. Every fall, I seem to start a new project. True to form, I’m starting a new study tentatively called the Kokinshu Project. My brother recently immigrated to Japan, and while the Bluegrass has deepening connections with Japan (there are many Japanese-owned factories, like Toyota, where I live), I have to admit that I have spent my time studying Latin America, not Asia. So I have been trying to learn about the country the best way I know how: through a literary study. I originally thought that I would just read some poetry and couple poems with photographs that I had taken on various travels, but after giving it more thought, I decided that I would also add a brief commentary to better connect with the literature and this way, maybe anyone stopping by my website would learn something along with me. I also hope to include prose, non-Japanese writing inspired by Japanese style, etc.
Feel free to give me reading recommendations.
2 Comments 
