On literacy, technology, calligraphy
Jul. 15th, 2010 10:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gurdymonkeyNew A&S online magazine out of the Kingdom of Lochac. http://www.sca.org.au/cockatrice/
I will have to go back and attempt to peruse it at my leisure once I have gotten done the things I need to get done this weekend, because the quick look I gave it was quite promising, once I got the massive PDF to open.
However, I don't know what to make of so many busy, dark pages topped off with print. I guess no one on the editorial board stopped to think beyond, "This is going to look cool!"
There are two reasons Wodeford Hall is almost exclusively black print on white pages and extremely basic formatting. (1) I am not a web designer, but I do know you (2) can 't use information you can't read.
I use a program called Frontpage 2003. Go ahead. Laugh. I'll wait.
Done now? Oh, good. For any of my readers who are wondering why the tech-savvy ones are pointing and laughing, Frontpage is a WYSIWYG program, which stands for "What You See Is What You Get." Well, mostly. If you can fumble your way through a word processing document, you can probably design a page with this thing and you don't need to know HTML to do it. Mostly. FP2000 (which is what I had on my old Compaq) used to hiccup on me enough times that I found I sometimes had to look at the HTML code view and see where the formatting went wonky, but it was a means to put my stuff Out There (TM) that mostly worked. FP 2003 (I picked up a used copy for cheap and installed it on this laptop when I bought it) has not had the format glitches that 2000 had, so I'm happy enough with it.
My site is barely a step above plain text with pictures because there are actually still some people out there (my Dear Father among them) , with rudimentary computer know-how and old machines they have no need or desire to trade in for New Shiny Blinky Things! (TM). This was borne out earlier today when someone posted to SCA-West with questions on how to put content up on the New Shiny Blinky Wiki Thingy when one doesn't know where to begin.
My eyes were a lot younger when I started Wodeford Hall back on Geocities. At some point, I want to go back and reformat some of the older pages so font style and size are more consistent.
I started reading Uncovering Heian Japan this week on my lunch hours. I never took literary criticism classes in college, I was majoring in history. This bad boy makes me stagger back from my lunch with brain overload. I can't read the literature in question in the language it was written in. I am a prisoner of translations. Dr. Lamarre discusses the visual effect of the calligraphy and how it plays a part in the poetry of the period. If you have a character that can be taken apart to form two separate characters it's as much a visual play as a play upon the words itself. And yes, I'm describing it badly because I'm still digesting what I read this afternoon. Lamarre's book also picks at the established view which ties into modern Japanese beliefs about their national culture springing from roots in the Heian period, when in fact, China and Japan as we know them now did not even exist. Edges and boundaries of "Chineseness" and "Japaneseness" in the language, culture, and politics are what this book hopes to explore.
My waka aren't waka. I can't write waka because I can't write in modern Japanese, much less classical Japanese or classical Chinese.
Blah blah blah blah blah...
I will have to go back and attempt to peruse it at my leisure once I have gotten done the things I need to get done this weekend, because the quick look I gave it was quite promising, once I got the massive PDF to open.
However, I don't know what to make of so many busy, dark pages topped off with print. I guess no one on the editorial board stopped to think beyond, "This is going to look cool!"
There are two reasons Wodeford Hall is almost exclusively black print on white pages and extremely basic formatting. (1) I am not a web designer, but I do know you (2) can 't use information you can't read.
I use a program called Frontpage 2003. Go ahead. Laugh. I'll wait.
Done now? Oh, good. For any of my readers who are wondering why the tech-savvy ones are pointing and laughing, Frontpage is a WYSIWYG program, which stands for "What You See Is What You Get." Well, mostly. If you can fumble your way through a word processing document, you can probably design a page with this thing and you don't need to know HTML to do it. Mostly. FP2000 (which is what I had on my old Compaq) used to hiccup on me enough times that I found I sometimes had to look at the HTML code view and see where the formatting went wonky, but it was a means to put my stuff Out There (TM) that mostly worked. FP 2003 (I picked up a used copy for cheap and installed it on this laptop when I bought it) has not had the format glitches that 2000 had, so I'm happy enough with it.
My site is barely a step above plain text with pictures because there are actually still some people out there (my Dear Father among them) , with rudimentary computer know-how and old machines they have no need or desire to trade in for New Shiny Blinky Things! (TM). This was borne out earlier today when someone posted to SCA-West with questions on how to put content up on the New Shiny Blinky Wiki Thingy when one doesn't know where to begin.
My eyes were a lot younger when I started Wodeford Hall back on Geocities. At some point, I want to go back and reformat some of the older pages so font style and size are more consistent.
I started reading Uncovering Heian Japan this week on my lunch hours. I never took literary criticism classes in college, I was majoring in history. This bad boy makes me stagger back from my lunch with brain overload. I can't read the literature in question in the language it was written in. I am a prisoner of translations. Dr. Lamarre discusses the visual effect of the calligraphy and how it plays a part in the poetry of the period. If you have a character that can be taken apart to form two separate characters it's as much a visual play as a play upon the words itself. And yes, I'm describing it badly because I'm still digesting what I read this afternoon. Lamarre's book also picks at the established view which ties into modern Japanese beliefs about their national culture springing from roots in the Heian period, when in fact, China and Japan as we know them now did not even exist. Edges and boundaries of "Chineseness" and "Japaneseness" in the language, culture, and politics are what this book hopes to explore.
My waka aren't waka. I can't write waka because I can't write in modern Japanese, much less classical Japanese or classical Chinese.
Blah blah blah blah blah...
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no subject
Date: 2010-07-16 06:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-16 11:48 am (UTC)I have Uncovering Heian Japan and have read it (slowly, because yeah, it's tough going!) I'm not quite sure about his views on calligraphy with poetry. For instance, a lot of poetry was not written using kanji (Chinese characters). Few women used kanji, so how were they supposed to read love poems sent to them by courtiers? They wrote in hiragana, a phonetic alphabet. When you study Japanese, one of the first things you learn is hiragana because it makes pronunciation a lot easier to understand.
For example, look at this page, which is from the Kokin Wakashu. Note that while there are a few kanji thrown in here and there, most of it is written in hiragana. Here's another example. This page is all hiragana.
Even if you look at the earlier collection of poetry, the Manyoshu, which was written using Chinese characters, the writers had to modify the characters somewhat in order to reflect Japanese pronunciation. (That alphabet is called Manyogana: hiragana and katakana are its descendants.)
IMHO, waka is more about sound than appearance. Although appearance is/was important also and certainly part of the entire package.
The composition of waka (tanka or haiku) in English is the use of traditional aesthetics couched in the rich possibilities of our language. Yes, it'll be different in some aspects. That can't be helped. But within the constraints of English, there is still a lot to work with.
So don't sell yourself short!
no subject
Date: 2010-07-16 06:23 pm (UTC)The question is though, *whose* poetry is Uncovering Heian referring to? Even in the context of love poems and that you are right, but would most love poems be written by the men to women? I'd surmised that even if the women were not taught to write, they were taught to read. Or perhaps the author refers to other types of poetry?
no subject
Date: 2010-07-17 02:59 am (UTC)Women of the Heian court were literate - we have surviving poetry, diaries and fiction in vernacular Japanese in "women's writing" or hiragana.
no subject
Date: 2010-07-17 03:02 am (UTC)Thanks.
Calligraphy is definitely about the brush strokes. Most cursive writings are not "readable" except by very few scholars.
no subject
Date: 2010-07-16 01:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-16 03:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-16 06:29 pm (UTC)After more caffeine, I am sure I will remember more - or I can crack open the dictionary :-)
no subject
Date: 2010-07-17 03:01 am (UTC)I really, REALLY should learn how to write my Japanese name properly. Hint, hint....
no subject
Date: 2010-07-17 03:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-17 01:52 pm (UTC)