the diary of antoine roquentin

I don’t know what I’m doing today. I’m supposed to be working, but I can only write couple sentences at a time before I have to take a break. I think it’s because we went out last night and stayed out far too late. I met up with Kelly and Williamsburg, where they had already been drinking for quite a while. We played this trivia game for a while, which was kind of fun. I already had plans to go dancing that night at this place called Happy Ending in Chinatown. It’s a really fun night. We got there and it was the Kelly Clarkson power hour, but thankfully all of the drunk crazy people left and we were there to witness such amazing songs as we are your friends and f*ck the pain away.

I still haven’t quite figured out how to do capitalization in this app. I’m dictating a few sentences at a time and then having it transcribe them. The accuracy is actually kind of amazing. I might start writing far more often on this thing. Anyway, we were dancing and having a great time until about 4 AM, and then we walked over to the Waverley Place diner. I was originally planning to go to French roast, but when the Waverly appeared in front of us, we couldn’t say no to sitting down and food.

It was rather disturbing watching the sunrise happen as we waited for our food. I got this amazing feta omelette and had a couple cups of coffee. Kelly was totally passed out on the table, with Chris taking care of her. I had looked up when their next bus to Philadelphia was, and none of the bus services started running until 630 in the morning. We hobbled on our tired feed into the subway and went up to 34th St. They didn’t quite know where the stoplight, so we walk them over there and gave them their confirmation number. Their cell phones were dead, and they couldn’t look it up themselves. I think it was kind of pointless because if you miss your bus you have to pay again, but I guess it was better for them to have it than to not have it.

I was absolutely exhausted and ready to pass out at any second, so I walked up to 42nd St. and caught the bus home. I fell asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow. Anyway, I should get back to work. It really surprises me that this whole post was dictated on an iPad. I don’t think I’m even going to bother getting up to post it, I just can use the built in WordPress app.

Categories: Ennui

Graduation.

It came, it went.

Facebook has made it almost pointless to post photos on here any more. If you want to see them, go there.

It’s also rather difficult to insert photos, as I’m writing this on my brand new iPad. Or…not.

I must admit, I talked (to use the vernacular) mad shit about the iPad, but I never ruled out getting one. It’s a pretty awesome device, and almost identical to the PADDs used in Star Trek. It’s funny how science fiction becomes consumer electronics.

I’ve been working full-time at the magazine and really enjoying launching the new site. It’s challenging, but I like a challenge. Tomorrow I’m either going to put the finishing touches on it and start writing some news items or I’ll be putting out fires all day. It just depends if I can figure out this issue relating to the message board.

We’ll see.

Kelly is coming up from Philly tomorrow and has invited me out drinking. It should be tons of fun. I wanted to go out and see AUSTRA tonight at Mercury Lounge, but I forgot to buy a ticket. It’s one of those things where I totally thought I had one, then searched through my gmail and was like “oh…ooops.”

My computer is whirring at the foot of the bed transcoding the amazing Videodrome boxed set that Yevgeny gave me into an iPad-compatible video file. It just seems right to have a few movies on my person at all times, and Videodrome is one of them.

Well, it’s almost 1:30. I’m exhausted, but I need to stay up at least a little late tonight. Where normally I’m up all night and sleep all day, I’ve been waking up at around 9 a.m. for work. And I don’t even have a 9 to 5! Weird. Well, I should hit the hay.

Does anyone else have one of these iDevices? I want to try out FaceTime at some point.

One literary-type thing that thrilled me was when I turned on my iPad this morning, a notice popped up that the new New Yorker was ready to download. And the new copy hadn’t even showed up in the mail! I loved that.

The Economist in iPad form is a little more obtuse. There’s so much in there that it’s hard to really find what you want. I like flipping through and finding random articles about Cypriot rebellions and Chinese currency manipulation.

I need sleep.

Categories: Ennui

I’m finished with my B.A.

I passed Book and Mag editing and Human Biology. I’m sure that I passed Critical Writing II. The only wild card is Ethnic American Lit. He usually sends us an e-mail with a grade.

The ceremony is on the 18th. I haven’t really even been going out. I spent the week working for the magazine, not leaving the house. Today I went out on the porch to read for a while, sort of a siesta break in my workday.

I feel like I should be going out, getting drunk, doing crazy stuff. However, I don’t really feel too festive. I guess I did have a ton of fun last weekend when I went to Philly to attend Kelly’s graduation show at her art school. My wrists are hurting or I’d describe it in more detail.

After Philly, I saw this avant-garde theater show by Le Tigre contemporary Emily Roydson called “A Gay Bar Called Everywhere.” It was really amazing. After that, Matt and I went to a good friend’s birthday party. We ended up staying out pretty late and had a really good time. Four words: sangria with mango slices!

When I was in Philly, they let me off in front of the train station. This was really weird because I’d just watched the movie Blow Out which features the station prominently. Anyway, I need to put some creme on my sore wrists and head to bed, as it’s 4 a.m.

Tomorrow I’m going to see some random Richard Gere movie with Yevgeny (he loves his young richard gere), and then it’s off to some douchey venue to see My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult. It’s been years since I’ve seen them, but they always put on a grand show. I saw them years ago at DNA Lounge in San Francisco, and it was a scene. I don’t think I ever wrote about it, but basically there was this crazy fat girl on tons of drugs who was bodyslamming everyone—she got kicked out. Also, Sam put on his leather mask and kicked ass for us so we could enjoy the show. Did I mention this one woman in PVC gloves who was waiting in the middle of the front row when the place was empty. She sauntered over to us. “Do you loooove the Kult,” she intoned. We were like “Yeah, sure.” Crazy lady go away. It was kind of cute though. You could tell for this one night it was 1991 again for her.

I need to sleep. I’ve been getting to bed too late these days.

Categories: Ennui

(still continually evolving) I think I have a mini-crush on the guy I picked for my book. He looks like a Hispanic/Jewish version of Mario’s friend Kyle. Regardless, I find the ability to write elegant, standards-compliant code sexy. (I’ll be redesigning this site from its mass of spaghetti code as soon as I’m done with this pointless book project.)

1. Title and author

Web Typography Unleashed

by Jason Santa Maria

2. Flap or jacket copy

Web Typography Unleashed is the definitive guide to the recent wave of web type innovation. Where web designers were once limited to a handful of fonts, this book teaches how to incorporate the beautiful typography offered by the thousands of the new “web fonts” that modern browsers support. Offering sections on type as it relates to search engine optimization, readability, and communicating brand identity, Web Typography Unleashed provides the amateur and professional designer with a solid reference point for incorporating beautiful and usable typography into their websites.

3. Research competitive market (3 books min).

Fluid Web Typography by Jason Cranford Teague. 2009, New Riders Press. (http://amzn.to/mkpuCr)

Fluid Web Typography has a solid emphasis on typography and has chapters divided up into elements of typographic and visual style: characters, fonts, scale, rhythm, emphasis, grid, and composition. It also includes case studies and examples of excellent and poor uses of typography.

Fluid Web Typography‘s main problem is that it was published in 2009, which predated web type’s heavy adoption throughout the web. It was in March 2008 that Apple released a version of their web browser Safari that supported TrueType and OpenType fonts using the @font-face CSS declaration. Firefox was next to release a version that supported @font-face in June 2008. This feature, which allows designers to use an almost unlimited palette of fonts, was included in Google Chrome for the first time on January, 2010. Despite the feature existing on Firefox alone since 2008, at the time this book was being written it was unclear whether the @font-face method would spread to every vendor or simply exist on Firefox and Safari only. The book recommends, in some places, an abandoned practice called sIFR, where Flash replaces text.

The revolution that Fluid Web Typography predicted in its preface has taken place. Many high-profile websites use advanced typography available through services like Typekit. However, the author could not have determined which services and what practices would eventually become dominant after their debut. From our vantage point in 2011, where web fonts work in every modern browser, Web Typography Unleashed will concrete examples of how major websites revitalized their web presence with typography. In 2009, the current ease-of-use and ubiquity of web fonts was but a hopeful dream.

Web Typography: A Handbook for Designers by Viviana Cordova. Release date: June 2011, Princeton Architectural Press.

This book aims to be a handbook which will, according to the synopsis, “embrace web and print together” as well as “translat[e] programming terms into graphic design terminology.”

Web Typography Unleashed is aimed squarely at design for the web, not print design. While it is true that many design considerations apply in both contexts, such as whitespace and kerning, the methods of applying them are completely different in a Web production environment.

http://amzn.to/lAHt1p

Great Web Typography by Wendy Peck. 2003, Wiley.

This book begins by summarizes principles of working with web type and HTML text. After that, it launches into the rudiments of cascading style sheets, then covers the two ways to use nonstandard typography that are no longer used: text as graphics, and text in Flash. These two methods were both abandoned, for a few reasons, but mainly graphic text takes longer to load, and Flash text won’t show up unless Flash is installed.

This is a very comprehensive and practical guide to type and web design. However, the book is over eight years old and describes techniques and case uses that are no longer applicable, and Web browsers that are no longer used. In 2003, Internet Explorer held 94% market share. Firefox, which is used on around 22 percent of computers in 2010, had but a 2% market share. Apple’s Safari, the first browser that introduced a @font-face declaration that was usable with standard TrueType and OpenType fonts, was not released until five years after the publication of this book.

It succeeds as an account of the early days of the Web, but it fails as a practical how-to guide

http://amzn.to/jiQosX

4. List title, author, copyright, and publisher. Briefly describe content of each, Explain why your proposed book is better

5. Identify and research audience.

The audience for design books is vast. AIGA, the professional association for design, estimates that there are around 180,000 designers practicing in the United States. Two-thirds of those work in the corporate world and one-third in design studios. As the importance of traditional print publication wanes, design is increasingly shifting to Web-enabled platforms, which are the focus of this book.

The World Wide Web Cononsortium (W3C), which works to create web standards like @font-face for the ever-evolving Internet, counts over 300 organizations as members. These include everything from hardware and Web companies like Apple and Yahoo to universities and corporations like Stanford and Pfizer. Nearly every company needs a web presence, and the principles of type design outlined in this book can help them to create a robust online brand.

6. Find an appropriate author and give credentials. Why should he/she write this book?

Jason Santa Maria is the founder of the design studio Mighty, creative director for the web font company Typekit, and a graduate of the MFA Interaction Design program at New York’s School of Visual Arts. He is one of the founders of Typedia, a community website for classification and exploration of type. Santa Maria has also written design articles for design websites A List Apart and 24 Ways, as well as writing on design for his own website. He is the vice president of AIGA/NY, the New York chapter of AIGA, the professional association for design. His design clients include The Chicago Tribune, Miramax Films, The New York Stock Exchange, PBS and The United Nations.

Categories: Ennui

This end of the semester is so close but so far away. I am realizing this week that I have no idea what to do for my book project. My original idea was to do a book on web typography, but Princeton Architectural Press is printing one that comes out this summer. My teacher said that was the kiss of death, but what subject isn’t done to death?

Let’s take stock of everything I have to do in order to graduate:

1. 1-2 page paper for Critical Writing
2. 7-ish page project for Book and Magazine Editing
3. 4-6 page paper for Ethnic American Literature

After next week, all I have to do is study for my final in Human Biology. I keep racking my brain for some assignment that I’m forgetting, but I can’t think of one. Tomorrow we’re going down to my aunt’s house to see Alexis’ performance in some kind of school event. I went last year and remember it to be a bunch of preteen girls gyrating to Katy Perry and Lady Gaga. I hope this is something a little more—wholesome.

I did a bunch of work for the magazine today so that I would be as caught up as possible until finals are over. There were so many e-mails piled up. I just want school to be over with so I can actually get some work done for the magazine. I was looking into iPad publishing, and it’s a very expensive endeavor. I think we are probably just going to have to go with an iPad-enabled version of our website. Oh, I actually met someone in real life who subscribes to the magazine! It’s this girl that’s in my human bio class who I walk home after class sometime (she lives in Heritage too).

I’m feeling a little lost tonight. For some reason I’m dead set on watching Claire Denis’ White Material, but it’s already 2 a.m. I really should hit the hay. I’ve been reading Roland Barthes’ Mythologies to try to get some inspiration for my critical writing piece, which should be a re-imagining of some kind of historical or cultural narrative. Well, I do have my bookshelf near me. What could I do? Dante’s la Divina Commedia seems like great fodder. Unfortunately, on skimming it, the language is too abstruse. I should reread the assignment. Hmm.

Beatrice on Dante

[Editor's note: Beatrice Portinari was Dante Algiheri's "muse," despite his only meeting her twice: once when she was eight years old and once when she was in her twenties. The following are selections from Beatrice's diary, only recently made available by Italian authorities for translation into modern English.]

I know he says I’m his muse and all that, but I hardly even know the guy. He knew my dad and all from the bank. You know Florentines—they talk a big game about supporting art, literature, and sculpture, but at the end of the day, it’s all about the bottom line. My dad and all the nobles would go upstairs to his study to drink wine and talk investments. Us kids would have to fend for ourselves on what was supposed to be a party. I must have been eight or so at the time, because I remember seeing him [Dante] hiding behind one of the chairs in the dining hall. His father must have been upstairs drinking with Dad, because he was just standing there like a doorman while his mother went on and on to my mom about some bolt of silk she’d bought.

Dante. You wanted to know about Dante. So he’s hiding behind the chair, and then comes out and introduces himself. He was different, you know? There was something kind of off about him, like he was looking right through me. I mean, I know, in the poem he’s waxing poetic about my soul and all that, but really, when I was there, it looked like he was looking through my clothes. You know I married Simone dei Bardi. He’s not a fantastic guy, but Daddy hooked me up with him anyway. He’s got to protect the banking dynasty, you know. They were probably talking about divvying me up along with all their stock certificates and ledger books.

So I’m standing there, nine years old, and Dante is there undressing me with his eyes! The whole affair just turned my stomach. Simone is such a gentleman by comparison. I know, the name isn’t exactly the most manly, but his family has a formidable position. I think you’re starting to see why this whole muse business is more clever marketing than anything. I’m not as much a woman as a living statue for him to use in his work. I guess I could find it flattering if his poetry wasn’t so disturbingly personal. Am I really the “queen of glory?” Who can live up to this kind of rhetoric? Simone was far more down-to-earth. Sure, he doesn’t compose volumes of poetry dedicated to my otherworldly beauty, but at least he has the decency to treat me like a lady. Dante never saw me after a night when I can’t sleep, that’s for sure, or he would think twice about putting me on a pedestal.

So there we were on that day in [12]’98, and he is still staring straight at me. The minutes were getting longer and longer. I tried to do something with my hair, hoping he’d find something else interesting (men always have such short attention spans, after all), but he just kept staring. How rude! Thankfully, the maid came in from the kitchen to collect the dinner dishes, and I was able to sneak over to my secret hiding spot under the stairs. And to think, for the rest of my life, it’s Dante’s muse this, Dante’s muse that. Really! I’m a married woman. How awkward is it when we’re strolling through the Piazza and I see somebody reading those poems and I’m not “dressed in the whitest of white.” Can’t I just go to church and pray on a whim and not be this vision of perfection?

I really don’t understand why the Florentines go nuts over this guy. I say “hi” to him one time and he writes about how I’m naked sleeping in some man’s arms? No thanks. Let’s not even talk about when Simone bought La Vita Nuova. Dante, in all of his wisdom, should have come up with a more accurate title: Non Mi Guardano, Mi.

***

A good start? I think it’s time to hit the hay.

Categories: Ennui