Right Reading  received the following e-mail (slightly edited) from Jag Bhalla.

Hello Tom

I discovered your blog via Twitter and was very impressed by your chucklesome publishing world ‘devils dictionary’.

Also as a lover of language play, thought you might enjoy the following:

a) On “language addiction (its our most ubiquitous mind altering drug) and the thrill of the novel (semantic ambush).” http://bit.ly/m6DQ5 (National Post Canada)

b) A new National Geographic book – called “I’m Not Hanging Noodles on your Ears” which is the Russian idiom that is the equivalent of our ‘I’m not pulling your leg’.

The book is primarily intended as an amusing gift book. To which end it features over 1000 idioms from 10 languages, plus illustrations by a New Yorker cartoonist. The majority of the idioms have not been exposed before in English (other than in bilingual dictionaries). It also contains lighthearted essays on related linguistics, psychology, anthropology and neuroscience.

Mr. Bhalla also provides the following examples from his book of idioms:

To live like a maggot in bacon – German – to live in luxury
Squeezer of limes – Hindi – self invited guest, idler
To reheat cabbage – Italian – rekindle an old flame
Like fingernail and dirt – Mex. Span – well suited
Bang your butt on the ground – French – to die laughing
To make tea with your navel – Japanese – laughable
Swallowed like a postman’s sock – Col. Span – in love
Plucked like a chicken – Yiddish – exhausted
To bite the elbow – Russian – to cry over spilt milk
Belch smoke from 7 head orifices – Chinese – furious
Ant milker – Arabic – miser, tight wad
Give it to someone with cheese – Spanish – to deceive

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Mailbag: A book of idioms

A study by a research team appointed by the European Commission finds that multililngualism may benefit brains in a variety of ways:

• learning in general
• complex thinking and creativity
• mental flexibility
• interpersonal and communication skills
• delay of age-related mental diminishment

“It is obvious that enhanced memory can have a profound impact on cognitive function,” says David Marsh, specialized planner at the Continuing Professional Development Centre of Jyväskylä University, who coordinated the international research team behind the study. ” This may be one reason why the multilingual shows superior performance in handling complex and demanding problem-solving tasks when compared to monolinguals. They seem to be able to have an advantage in handling certain thinking processes.”

Apparently learning a language as a discreet subject does not work as effectively as embedding second-language learning into other subjects. The methodology of the study is unclear to me, but I haven’t read the whole report.

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Image from Nature magazine

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Better brains through foreign-language learning

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Sarah Palin

Khoi Vinh and Allan Cole recently released an interesting Wordpress theme called Basic Maths. Like Vinh’s own blog, Subtraction (which the new theme somewhat resembles), Basic Maths aggressively foregrounds the underlying design grid. In fact, you can even hit a shortcut key combination to superimpose the grid over the blog as you’re working on it.

It’s great that the authors have done so much to bring a grid design system to the web. In addition, they have enabled single-click color control, a clever approach to category and tag display, and a thoughtful archives page. I like the style sheet that enables a large number of different image sizes and placements, all oriented to the grid.

What isn’t entirely to my taste at both Subtraction and Basic Maths, however, is the very heavy reliance on rules to emphasize the grid. I guess I prefer my grids latent rather than in your face — sometimes these pages look like one of those puzzles where you have to move one match stick to make a different shape.

Still, a disciplined and versatile design with careful typographic functions, well implemented. The authors are selling licenses at the “introductory price” of $45.

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An interesting Wordpress theme

He did a series of experiments where he bummed one group out and cheered another up. “Trained essay raters” determined that the unhappy subjects wrote superior essays.

According to Forgas “mildly negative mood may actually promote a more concrete, accommodative and ultimately more successful communication style.” (Had he been a little more disappointed in the results he would have crafted a better sentence.)

Along the same lines, it has also been found that people do better work on cloudy days than on sunny ones.

Being in a foul temper may also be good for your love life. According to Forgas, “mild negative affect may actually promote a more concrete and more situationally attentive communication style in intimate relationships.”

So wipe that smile off your face.

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Via the Web of Language

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How to improve your writing (and your love life)

Yesterday I showed some ancient inscribed letterforms from Ostia Antica. Today we flash forward some seventeen hundred years to this inscription over a gate in the Vatican complex, which is dated 1831.

I don’t like this one so much. Whoever inscribed these letters was clearly working from typeset models. But the thin lines, right angles, and sharp serifs of the Romantic period are the result of developments in typesetting equipment and papermaking that have nothing to do with letterforms inscribed in stone.

These kinds of incongruities often result when work in one medium is transferred to another without consideration for the essential character of the medium.

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Vatican type

Here is some handsome lettering from ruins at the ancient port city of Ostia, west of Rome. I don’t know what period this fragment dates to, although the age of Hadrian always seems to be a good guess.

For comparison, here’s a sample of the typeface Trajan (the movie font!), designed in 1989 by Carol Twombly for Adobe based on inscriptions on Trajan’s column in Rome. They might just be the effect of the centuries, but I prefer the softer serifs of the inscribed letters in the photo. I also like their less regular vertical axes.

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Classical letterforms from Ostia

There’s nothing new about the rule of thirds — it’s almost a photographic cliche. Still, as a, well, rule of thumb there’s a good deal of sense in it. Let’s have a look.

One of the worst instincts of amateur photographers is to aim the camera directly at the main subject, as if it were game to be bagged. You can see this in society pages, like one in the back of a magazine I’m responsible for (I try to keep the section’s space to a minimum). The photographer’s strategy in these situations is just about always to line the subjects up in a grinning row facing the camera. You can see what I mean in the above image (I’ve replaced the people’s faces with smilies so as not to embarrass anyone, and to highlight the composition).

The rule of thirds says that you’re better off arranging your composition with a main element a third of the way from one of the edges. In effect you imagine your image as composed of nine equal rectangles. Consider this image from the Sentiero degli Dei in the Lattari Mountains above Amalfi.

You can see that the cliff at the left is a third of the way in from the left edge of the photo. (You can also think of each of the nine squares as a section to be balanced in its own right.)

Or look at this photo from the Sentiero della Republica in the same region.

Here you can see that the image is arranged more or less in three horizontal bands.

One more example. This is at Pompeii.

Here the roof and the vertical element of the main building both relate to the thirds.

Now, I don’t follow this slavishly but it’s a good rule of thumb when you’re shooting quickly (like I tend to do since most of my photography is travel photography and I don’t want to spend all day on one shot). Basically it works because you’re moving the main elements of the photo off center. If you wanted to experiment with variations you could also try what you might call the rule of five-eighths.

I won’t go into the unique mathematical qualities of the golden ratio — you could do a search. Suffice it to say that golden rectangles usually look good to most people. Expressed as a mathematical ratio the golden ratio is 1 : 1.618, or from the other perspective .618 : 1. While the golden ratio cannot be exactly reduced to a neat fraction it’s pretty close to 5/8ths, which is .625.

So 2/3rds is .667, while the golden ratio is .618. Therefore, rather than dividing an image into 1/3 and 2/3 parts, you could divide it into parts of approximately three-eighths and five-eighths. In other words, the two parts created by the dividing element would be a little closer in size to each other than with ninths, and your guidelines would be roughly where the red lines are in the following image (taken in the Vatican museums).

Here’s the same image without the lines (yep, you caught me — I’m looking for opportunities to post photos from my recent travels).

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Photography’s rule of thirds

Mark Bromberg of Bellemeade Books writes on the subject of Jonathan Williams, author and publisher of the Jargon Society (we published his The Magpie’s Bagpipe at North Point Press) and generously includes the above scan of a Jargon Society publication, which I take the liberty of sharing.

… I have been a long-time reader and admirer of the late Jonathan Williams and his Jargon Society Press, the website here now run by his friend and collaborator, Thomas Meyer (A selection of 1960s correspondence between Davenport and Williams about publishing, art, and life can be found here).

I thought you might enjoy this cover image of “Elite/Elate Poems” (Jargon, 1975) — with authentic-era coffee stains! — and a BellemeadeBooks post about Mr. Williams from the archives. You will be able to access the entire blog with more timely posts once you are there.

Thanks, Mark!

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Mailbag: Bellemeade Books and Jonathan Williams

I wanted to let you know we just released our 2nd issue, featuring work by Colson Whitehead, Lydia Davis, Stephen O’Connor, Pasha Malla, and Marisa Silver….

We made a trailer for Colson’s story: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSf_4vxWmxg – we are always extremely grateful when you feature our videos on your site.

Sure, why not?

Here’s a blurb:

In our autumn 2009 anthology, Colson Whitehead charts the rise to fame of a truth-telling comedian. Stephen O’Connor transports us to a cabin in the woods, where a young woman attempting to finish her dissertation in solitude becomes increasingly convinced she’s not alone. Pasha Malla follows a young writer as he explores how tragedy influences art—and how life falls short of it. Marisa Silver tells the tale of three sisters who perceive the truth about their parents through the eyes of some unexpected visitors, and Lydia Davis’ solitary narrator acutely details the behavior of three cows who live in a pasture just across the road.

Finally, we are having a party on Oct 28th in NYC with Miho Hatori of Cibo Matto, Michael Cunningham, Jim Shepard, and Martha Colburn…. Details are here: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Electric-Literature/90126328010?ref=ts#/event.php?eid=149127881031&ref=mf

Andy Hunter, Editor in Chief
http://www.electricliterature.com

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Mailbag: Electric Literature 2 (and party)

Recently we stayed in Agerola in the Lattari Mountains overlooking Amalfi. Our place was down a narrow, semi-dirt road that wound around the side of the mountain above the hamlet of San Lazzaro. Twice a day a goatherder would drive his goats down the road. We would hear them coming by the pleasant jingling of their bells, a sound punctuated by the sharp whistles of the herder as he kept the goats on path. This video was taken as we were leaving our house to head out for a walk.

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Goatherding in Agerola

While driving the Via Amalfitano has its motoring excitements as well as its famously spectacular views,

it little compares to the road through Furore for adrenaline-inducing narrow turns (especially exciting when encountering an oncoming bus, which can sometimes require a line of traffic to back partway down the mountain).

You can reach the Costa Amalfitano by way of Sorrento in the north, from which you will arrive at Positano, or from Salerno in the south, which will lead to Amalfi. But there is a less-used (by foreigners) third way, which cuts over the Lattari mountain range, through a tunnel at the top connecting Gragnano and Agerola.

Agerola is a rustic complex of hamlets where one sometimes finds oneself delayed by herds of goats swarming the roadways.

We took a vacation rental in Agerola – it afforded a panoramic view of the valley clear down to the drop-off to the sea. At that point the road plummets to the sea by way of innumerable sharp turns. As a consequence of our location in Agerola we traveled it a number of times.

In the map below, the hairpins switchbacks of this road – a true engineering marvel, with very welcome stone walls on the seaward side – are represented by the intestine-shaped tangle in the middle. Unfortunately, the memory card in my camera got filled up before we reached the most thrilling section of the road; still, this video of the beginning of the uphill climb might give a taste of what it is like to drive this remarkable road.

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Driving from Furore on the Amalfi Coast to Agerola in the Lattari Mountains

1. At the airport, do not wait it the long queues for train tickets. Instead go to the tobacconist’s and get your ticket without waiting.

2. To avoid the Termini Station, take the train to Trastevere (the tobacconist can sell you the ticket and direct you to the correct track), then take the number 8 tram, which will go to the centrally located Piazza Argentina (or you can take the number 3, which ultimately goes all the way to the Villa Borgia, though on a rather roundabout route).

3. If you are in Rome for any length of time, get a three-day or one-week transit pass. This will allow you to hop on and off buses and trams without worrying about having change, deciding whether a short trip is worth a euro, and getting your ticket stamped. Stamp the pass only the first time you use it. It will be good until midnight on the third or seventh day. This pass is also good to go to the ruins outside of town at Ostia Antica, the former port.

4. Consider getting an unlocked cell phone and buying a sim card for it that’s good for Europe. Despite what you might read on Rick Steves’s site, it can be a little bit tedious to do this in Italy, and it might be worth the extra 5 or 10 dollars to buy the car over the internet in advance of traveling.)

5. A good bus connection through the city is the 115 line together with the 116 line. These are small hybrid vehicles that go down narrow cobbled streets in the restricted traffic areas. From the Trastevere the 115 will take you to the Gioncolo terminal. In the parking garage there you can take the elevator or stairs down one level and catch the 116, which will go through town past the Piazza Spagnia to the Villa Borgia. At the place in the garage where the 116 stops there is also an airport terminal–style walkway right town to St. Peter’s

6. Speaking of St. Peter’s, try to avoid approaching on the 64 bus, which is crowded and full of pickpockets. These are often distinguished-looking elderly gentleman in suits and ties who hold newspapers over there arms to conceal their activities.

7. You’re going to feel obligated to visit the Vatican Museums no matter what I say, but be aware that it’s a fairly hellish experience. It’s extremely crowded and not very visitor friendly. The objects labels are poorly designed and placed. There are tour guides barking all around you at every turn. The museums are designed to keep the thundering herd on course along the Long March to the Sistine Chapel, where they will be ferociously shushed by curt guards who will be taking every step to make sure no photos are taken, as this might cut into the gift shop sales. (On the other hand, every square inch is a masterpiece.)

8. But don’t be tempted to skip the Capitoline Museums. They are excellent, and also afford fine views of downtown Rome for the third-floor café and of the forum from the Temple of Veiovis, a relatively recent (and quite amazing) archaeological discovery located off the passage between the two buildings.

9. The best English-language guidebook appears to be the Rough Guide to Rome (we got ours from the public library); it’s quite helpful. But I wouldn’t put too much stock in its restaurant recommendations. Our best meals were all from restaurants that were chance discoveries.

10. Finally, and critically, especially if you are continuing to Napoli and the Amalfi Coast (as we were), try at all costs not to get that infernal song about the moon hitting your eye like a-big a-pizza pie in your head. You will never get rid of the damned thing. Tippy tippy tay, tippy tippy tay, tippy tippy tay, that’s amore.

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Image: Sign on a restaurant in the Trastevere.

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Ten tips for visiting Rome

According to Langenscheidt, “This phrasebook contains all of the most important expressions and words you’ll need for your trip.” In that case, what a trip it will be! Imagine yourself with no knowledge at all of Italian and armed only with phrases such as the following (which I have assembled into a brief narrative, occasionally adding my own punctuation –the ellipses, however, are Langenscheidt’s — but retaining the phrases otherwise unaltered).

Good afternoon. Please help me. The engine sounds funny — I need a pair of pliers. It’s not my fault. It’s your fault. I had the right of way. You cut the corner. You were following too closely. You were going too fast.

I don’t feel well: I feel nauseous, I’m dizzy, I’m from the United States. What is your name? Are you married? Could you repeat that, please? How old are you? Do you have children? What sort of work do you do?

It was a misunderstanding. I need someone to accompany me. I’d like to come with you. May I sit here? I like it very much. This is my address. Shall we meet this evening? I’ll take you home. I’d like to invite you to . . . What does . . . mean? I like that.

What is this called in Italian? It’s very good, thank you — satisfied! Did you like it there? Thank you for inviting me. Thank you for a lovely evening. Will I see you again? Do you mind if I smoke? I have not been vaccinated against . . .

Is there a nice bar around here?

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A universal story

Okay, I guess I’m still a little jetlagged — or maybe just worn out from coming back to an office in crisis mode. Anyway, too tired to do more than post another couple photos (click through for larger versions) from the Sentiero degli Dei — the path of the gods — in the Lattari Mountains overlooking the Amalfi coast.

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The Path of the Gods

This photo was taken from the spectacular trail in the Lattari Mountains overlooking the Amalfi Coast called the Sentiero degli Dei — the path of the gods. A few hours after the photo was taken a fierce storm hit the coast. (Click through for a larger version.)

I’ve just returned from a trip to Rome and the Costa Amalfitano and will return to blogging. I’m processing my photos from the trip and sorting them into smaller and more manageable sets and hope to post them to Flickr over the weekend.

In this blog I try to mostly focus on issues of print and electronic publication, from concept through distribution. But I am likely to be off topic for a bit as I share some Italiana over the next week or so.

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Gathering storm clouds over Amalfi

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Break time

The first post at The Art of American Book Covers, by Richard Minsky, was made on August 26, so this blog is less than a month old. I regret that I don’t remember who directed me to it, but this blog is so rich in knowledge about techniques of book production that it makes me feel like an absolute novice. The blog will apparently focus on fine books of the nineteenth century. The image above is a detail from a book published by L. C. Page, who it seems offered each of their titles in red, white or blue cloth (wow!). Instead of stamping, a white cloth panel was glued onto the red and blue books. Following is a portion of the blog’s commentary related to this detail, but you should check out Minsky’s blog for the full story:

The panel on the 1906 variant is unusual. The white has a blue-ish cast, and blue is showing through the white where it is rubbed; white is showing through the blue where that is rubbed, and white is showing through the gold where rubbed. It appears as though a white cloth onlay was applied to the cover, which was then stamped with blue, then white, and finally with gold. The details show that the cloth for the panel was applied before the stamping, since the blue and gold both overlap the onlay on both variants.

Why would the stamping be done in white if the cloth were white? One possible answer is that by 1906 opaque white inks were available for the stamping that were not prone to flaking and produced a brighter white than the cloth color. That fails to explain why blue would be stamped under the white.

Regarding white stamping on white cloth, when I published Fantastic Tales by I. U. Tarchetti, translated by Larry Venuti, I put black cloth over black boards. My production manager thought I was crazy. Maybe I was. It’s a nice looking book though (the paper jacket is shown; maybe I will take a photo of the cloth cover later on sometime).

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Sites we like: The Art of American Book Covers

Then: Book of Genesis
Now: FLOOD! A true story of heartbreak, heroism, and the will to survive

Then: Moby Dick
Now: Orca Obsession: How the Whaling Industry Is Destroying Our Sea and Sailors

Then: Romeo and Juliet
Now: The Teen Sex and Suicide Epidemic: What You Need to Know to Protect Yourself and Your Family

Then: The Gospel of Matthew
Now: 40 Days and a Mule: How One Man Quit His Job and Became the Boss

And my own contribution:

Then: Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking
Now: Chicken Soup for the Kitchen

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Book titles then and now

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Book vs. Kindle Smackdown