The bad news is that my laptop died yesterday. The good news is that this may end up giving me more time to read. I finished Alice in Wonderland a few days ago, and I’m still making my way through Jane Eyre, War and Peace and Getting Things Done. And for school I’m enjoying every page of Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style. Mmm. Oh, and I’ve started reading The Problem of Pain. Now I’m off to the library to see if the computer is telling the truth when it says that there’s a copy of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People on the shelves (admittedly an older 1989 edition, but I doubt it’s changed that much between editions).

We’ve been reading Miracles in the C.S. Lewis Society, and although the first few chapters ended up almost devoid of markings, the chapters since then have seen a fair amount of scribbles. Here are some of the quotes I liked:

In chapter 8, Lewis says:

It is therefore inaccurate to define a miracle as something that breaks the laws of Nature. It doesn’t…. If God creates a miraculous spermatozoon in the body of a virgin, it does not proceed to break any laws. The laws at once take it over. Nature is ready. Pregnancy follows, according to all the normal laws, and nine months later a child is born…. Miraculous wine will intoxicate, miraculous conception will lead to pregnancy, inspired books will suffer all the ordinary processes of textual corruption, miraculous bread will be digested. The divine art of miracle is not an art of suspending the pattern to which events conform but of feeding new events into that pattern.

And in chapter 9:

To say that God has created her [Nature] is not to say that she is unreal, but precisely that she is real. Would you make God less creative than Shakespeare or Dickens? What He creates is created in the round: it is far more concrete than Falstaff or Sam Weller.

And in chapter 11:

The ultimate spiritual reality is not vaguer, more inert, more transparent than the images, but more positive, more dynamic, more opaque. Confusion between Spirit and soul (or ‘ghost’) has here done much harm. Ghosts must be pictured, if we are to picture them at all, as shadowy and tenuous, for ghosts are half-men, one element abstracted from a creature that ought to have flesh. But Spirit, if pictured at all, must be pictured in the very opposite way. Neither God nor even the gods are ’shadowy’ in traditional imagination: even the human dead, when glorified in Christ, cease to be ‘ghosts’ and become ’saints’. The difference of atmosphere which even now surrounds the words ‘I saw a ghost’ and the words ‘I saw a saint’ — all the pallor and insubstantiality of the one, all the gold and blue of the other — contains more wisdom than whole libraries of ‘religion’. If we must have a mental picture to symbolise Spirit, we should represent it as something heavier than matter.

Reminds me of Joseph Smith’s teaching that “there is no such thing as immaterial matter. All spirit is matter, but is more fine or pure, and can only be discerned by purer eyes. We cannot see it, but when our bodies are purified, we shall see that it is all matter.”

Finally, from chapter 14:

For God is not merely mending, not simply restoring a status quo. Redeemed humanity is to be something more glorious than unfallen humanity would have been, more glorious than any unfallen race now is (if at this moment the night sky conceals any such). The greater the sin, the greater the mercy: the deeper the death the brighter the rebirth.

Death is, in fact, what some modern people call ‘ambivalent’. It is Satan’s great weapon and also God’s great weapon: it is holy and unholy; our supreme disgrace and our only hope; the thing Christ came to conquer and the means by which He conquered.

At present spirit can retain its foothold against the incessant counter-attacks of Nature (both physiological and psychological) only by perpetual vigilance, and physiological Nature always defeats it in the end. Sooner or later it becomces unable to resist the disintegrating processes at work in the body and death ensues. A little later the Natural organism (for it does not long enjoy its triumph) is similarly conquered by merely physical Nature and returns to the inorganic. But, on the Christian view, this was not always so. The spirit was once not a garrison, maintaining its post with difficulty in a hostile Nature, but was fully ‘at home’ with its organism, like a king in his own country or a rider on his own horse — or better still, as the human part of a Centaur was ‘at home’ with the equine part.

I rather liked the corn-religion part of chapter 14 as well. (I’d describe it, but I’ll leave it to you to read it on your own. That’s half the fun, anyway. ) Eighty pages remain unread and I’m sure there’ll be more quotables to come. We’re reading The Problem of Pain next, by the way.

After being sick for almost a week now, I’ve decided to start doing homework so that I’ll be caught up when I finally do get better. For my History of the Book class, we’ve started reading Robert Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style, which is an amazing book. No typographer should be without it.

And on page 42, I came across this: “No typesetting software should be permitted to compress, expand or letterspace the text automatically and arbitrarily as a means of fitting the copy. Copyfitting problems should be solved by creative design, not fobbed off on the reader and the text nor cast like pearls before machines.” Them’s strong words, there. And I agree. Yesterday when I wrote that auto-PDF post, I originally was dead-set against it and was going to write about why human-crafted is better. But something got the better of me. That something is now gone (whatever it was), and I won’t be casting my lot with any automatically generated PDF crowd any time soon. Book design is an art.

Today I read about the Reading 2.0 conference, and it’s very interesting stuff. For good summaries of the main talks, see Tim O’Reilly’s notes.

On a somewhat related note, I’m wondering about how worthwhile it is to be able to produce PDFs on-the-fly from a text/HTML/XML source. As far as beauty goes, you could get a decent approximation provided that you made sure it did copyfitting and avoided widows and orphans and so on. And that’s possible. It could never have all the charm of a human-designed book, but I suppose it would do — like the utilitarian perfect binding vs. the far more aesthetic sewn binding.

Well, it’s not that bad — just a huge headache, really achy bones, and loss of balance — but it’s keeping me in bed. I’m not sure yet whether I’ll be able to get anything done today or if I’ll have to give in and sleep it all away. I hate wasting a whole day. ~sigh~ But as I don’t have much choice in the matter, I may as well accept my fate.

Why is it that even though I’m a book person, I still find it hard to make time for leisure reading? Schoolwork gets in the way, of course, and I also happen to have a bazillion other projects going on (Riverglen Press does have to do with books, of course, but Beyond doesn’t, and my art/web design projects don’t have anything to do with reading, etc. etc. etc.). But if reading is so important to me, wouldn’t I make it more of a priority? I stole away a few minutes before bed last night to read two or three pages of Jane Eyre (the part where she says genius is self-conscious), and it was good. Reading is so refreshing, especially after spending all day at a computer. (Many hours in front of a monitor make my eyes burn and my brain feel like it got stuck in a dishwasher. Books fix all that, like a beautiful shower of the mind.) Maybe I need to set aside dedicated, sacred reading time each day and make it uninterruptible. Hmm…

It’s done! Translating Scripture is back from the press and I’m pretty impressed with the result — it’s just like it’s supposed to look. Phew! It’s crazy to see the months of work in InDesign come to fruition in a real, physical book I can hold in my hand. Bookmaking is getting even more addicting. (And in my History of the Book class today, we got to see a bunch of the fine printing books in Special Collections. Mmm.) I’ve been thinking about Riverglen Press and I realized that I probably won’t be satisfied only with making PDFs — I have to make real books, too. And so I will, eventually. In the meantime, PDFs will have to suffice. Speaking of which, I wrote a quick Perl script today which takes a Project Gutenberg eBook and fixes it up so InDesign can take it and use it. I just noticed that InDesign can import XML, though, so I’m going to look into that and see if I can give InDesign formatting codes via XML — if I can, then I can change the underscored italics in the ASCII into InDesign italics, all automatically. That’d be nice.

I’ve got to get to bed so this’ll be short, but I started reading War and Peace a couple of days ago (I’ve read the first two chapters so far). Good stuff. I’m sure it’ll be even better once I get into the story, but I’m already liking it. Tolstoy’s amazing. I’m also still reading Jane Eyre (one of these days I need to just set aside four or five hours and finish it) and I’ve started Alice in Wonderland. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness has been tempting me to read it as well, but I figure that three novels at a time is a bit much as it is. (And I’m also reading C.S. Lewis’s Miracles and David Allen’s Getting Things Done, along with Learning Python on the programming end.) And textbooks. My favorite textbooks are The Smithsonian Book of Books and Arthur Henry King’s Arm the Children. Mmm. But now it’s bedtime.

As for Riverglen Press, things are coming along slowly but surely. I’m deciding what font to use for the body text for my Riverglen Classics — probably Garamond Premier Pro or Minion Pro, I think. The main thing now is to learn enough Perl that I can process the Project Gutenberg text into something more usable for InDesign… (And I don’t think it’s all that much Perl, by the way.) With the Pride and Prejudice text, emphasized text is marked by underscores (”It’s _him!_” = “It’s him!“), and I wonder if there’s a way to turn that into something InDesign will automatically read in as italics. Probably not. But it would be nice if there were… Oh well, there aren’t enough of them to make it a huge nuisance. (I hope. )

Yesterday afternoon I took a break and wandered through the language section of the library. They recently moved the books to a different set of shelves, so it was like exploring new territory in a way — very fun. I haven’t spent much time on learning languages since my Old English class last semester came to an end, and it’s a pity. For my major (English Language) I have to take one more Latin class, so I’ll need to brush mine up in order to survive a 300-level class. And my Old English is already fading away, sadly, and so I’ve got to start reading Beowulf. Anyway, back to the bookshelves: I (re-)discovered the Celtic languages section, and suddenly I found myself with an almost irrepressible desire to learn Irish Gaelic and Welsh. Yum. Oh, oh, I forgot to mention that before I got to this section, I meandered through the place the books used to be, and I found that our library has substantial Welsh, Norwegian, and Arabic holdings. Fascinating. So what I think I need to is set aside a certain amount of time each day (10-30 minutes), preferably in the morning, and apply myself rigorously to study. My senior year in high school I woke up at 5 every morning to study Latin for half an hour each day, and it worked. For some reason I find it immensely harder to wake up before 5 now (which usually requires getting to bed by 10 or so, an even harder task, and I don’t even have much of a social life! ). But self-discipline is good, and I am fond of waking up early. There’s nothing quite like the air at dawn — fresh and rich and rejuvenating. Well, it’s almost 11 now and I’ll never start waking up at 5 if I keep staying up this late, so adieu for now.