September is always the busiest month for the Alphabets, and the rush began this past weekend with the first of three major public appearances: in the Sterling Hardwoods wood shop on Pine Street as part of the South End Art Hop in Burlington, Vermont. (For the other two events, see the end of this article.) […]
I learn all kinds of things by carving the Alphabets—about various cultures, about writing itself, about spirituality, about physics, about the history of technology. Nothing prepared me, though, for cumaru. A couple of weeks ago I got a commission to carve the chant “Om Mani Padme Hum” in Tibetan, as articulated by the calligrapher Tashi […]
Yes, thanks to the wonderful photography of Tom Way, who even helped me carry the table up the impossibly steep and rickety staircase to his studio, you can finally see the dining table I started more than a year ago. Here’s the story. When I moved into my rather anonymous little townhouse, I promised myself […]
My collaborator and friend Maung Nyeu found a book of Marma proverbs (he himself is of the Marma people in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh) and sent me a scan of one page. This is one of my favorites. It reads: “The body of a frog, but the voice of an ox. Small […]
One of the great delights of this project is being sent a script I’ve been trying to track down for years. One of the greater delights is being sent a script I didn’t even know existed. A month or so ago I got an email from Tazim Kassam, who teaches at Syracuse University. He […]
Struck by an idea–and the almost incurable itch to carve endangered scripts into pieces of beautiful wood–I have invented the Endangered Trivet. Intended to keep food and drink stains off our beautiful cherry table, it’s made of mahogany, and I glued a piece of green pool-table-style felt (what in England is called baize) on the […]
One of the most stunning woods in the world is paduak (pronounced pa-duke, at least in Vermont, and confusingly spelled “padauk” as often as not), an exotic tropical hardwood from central and West Africa and Southeast Asia. In its raw, sanded form it’s a brilliant tigerish orange striped with gold and darker reds and browns. […]
Despite the best efforts of global warming, the second of the four panes of the Endangered Poem Sculpture is now finished, and is leaning against my dining-room wall like a shady character outside the National Museum in Cairo, ready at a moment’s notice to step forward and accost the unwary visitor in half-a-dozen languages. The […]
The first of the four panels that will make up the Endangered Poem Project is now complete! I dragged it out into the winter sunlight (yes, you can tell I’m in Vermont) and shot photos of all five of the alphabets it includes. From top to bottom, they are : …and the newest and perhaps […]
