While we were in Washington, D.C., for the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, we went across town to eat at an Ethiopian restaurant. (Great food, as usual.) Even there, right in our nation’s capital, we spotted some unfamiliar scripts. One is the ribbon-like Ge’ez script; can anyone help me out by identifying the other?
Wow. Even as your intrepid Endangered Alphabets team (Maung Nyeu, our friend and collaborator from the Chittagong Hill Tracts in Bangladesh, calligrapher/printer Jamie Kutner, Cindy Barnes, myself, and invisible back-in-Vermont laser-dude Paul Ledak) are recovering from several weeks of intense exertion and excitement, it’s time to tell you what actually happened down there on the National Mall. […]
After months of feverish, frantic, fanatical planning, the big day arrived and the Alphabets were part of the launch of the annual Smithsonian Folklife Festival on the National Mall in Washington D.C. After that first day I’m too tired to write any more, so for now I’ll just leave you with a photograph….
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 […]
Not long ago, I wanted to present a carving to a filmmaker–something suitable in text and, according to her preference, carved in ebony. I chose the Biblical phrase “and there was light”–the point being that a filmmaker depends on light, and is in a sense a creator of, or in, light. In her particular […]
It has taken almost a year to get the text, but now it has arrived, I can’t afford to rush it. This is my latest endeavor: to make a dining-table for myself, with a Blessing in Balinese carved into the top. The English version reads: Bless this food Bless these people Bless the table […]
I’m not sure I ever expected to see people writing in their own indigenous endangered script, but the all-knowing Chris Miller of Montreal passed me the time that Hector de los Santos has posted on YouTube a video of Hanunuo students in Mindoro, the Philippines, writing in Surat Mangyan. Click on this link: Students on the […]
If I’d had any kind of artistic training, of course, I would have learned this truth back in tenth grade, I suppose. Instead, I’m learning it now, and learning it literally from every angle: it’s all about light. When I’ve already carved the text, I have to have low light falling across the wood so […]
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 […]
After their brief but memorable appearance in Cambridge, the Alphabets rose before dawn and took a taxi to Stansted Airport, where despite a savage attack by Ryanair’s excess baggage fee policy, they cruised down to sunny Barcelona and the Tenth International Conference on the Book. Admittedly, the Alphabets were coming at books and publishing from […]
