An Odessey

It has been a while since I have written on this blog, but I have finally found a way back. I have not fallen out of love with intellectual pursuits, or the absurdities found there; I was just too busy studying for my college classes to keep up with writing for a blog, too. Now that I have graduated, though, I have realized that there are many situations that demand some sort of an outlet. I want to keep learning (it is a problem. But, everyone already knew I was a nerd). So, now that I am out of college, I am trying to read the books that I have told myself I should read in college.

In pursuit of this goal, I recently finished The Odyssey. It was actually a pretty decent read, once I found a translation I liked. I just want to say, though, it reads like a soap opera! Between the Greek gods, who are cattier and more insecure than a lot of the soap opera stars I've seen, and the minor background characters whose only purpose seems to be stirring up trouble, it seems like a classical Greek soap opera!

Also, I thought I was familiar with the basic premise of the story. The monsters he encountered and, once he finally reached home, the troubles he had there. What I did not realize was how little time you actually spend on the travels. We all feel sorry for Odysseus, who spent 20 years searching for his home? I've done a little research (I know, I'm a nerd. Deal with it.) Chronologically, from the opening line to the closing line, the story itself takes no more than 50 days; and more than half of it is with Odysseus at home trying to straighten out the property now that he has been gone for 20 years.

What I appreciated, though, was first of all the background. I like knowing what more modern literature is referencing. It provided some interesting insight into Greek culture. I always find it interesting to see the values other cultures place on certain things. For instance, the Greeks thought it was very important to welcome strangers as guests. You never knew when it might be a god in disguise, so you wanted to make sure that you treated them with great honor and saw to their needs. This continued well into the Middle Ages in Europe, where the Christians were at least supposed to see to the needs of strangers. It was not actually God, they did not think, but God would take the kind actions given to this needy individual as if they were done for Him. Ever since the Renaissance, the cultures I am more familiar with have seemed to put more emphasis on science than on God. It is weird to welcome a stranger, let alone honor him. So, I thought it was interesting to trace trends through the ages.

Next, the Greek idea of honor was very interesting. The whole world had to know you. They had to know that you were physically and mentally the toughest person out there. Everyone had to know your name. That can be a dangerous proposition. If you tell someone your name, they can find you again later, hunt you down. They can call down a curse on you and bring a grudge back to your doorstep. In The Odyssey, though, the danger meant nothing in comparison to gaining the reputation. It was a calculated risk, and one apparently worth taking. That is somewhat different from our culture. Given the same situation, most of us probably would not choose to give our names out if we thought we could be cursed. At the same time, most of us still want our names out there. We want to be on TV and have the world know our name. At least for the thing that we are the most proud of.

It is always strange to me to look at a somewhat foreign culture and be able to find the humanity in it. Not that it is really that challenging to find the humanity there, but it says a lot of interesting things about man when you can see the same desire manifested in completely different ways.

A Study of Social Interaction

Even though I am supposed to be of a purely academic bent, restricting my social commentary to outside observations, I am afraid that I have to break that stricture now.

I really appreciate being on a small college campus where I know many of the faces I see on a daily basis. I like being able to smile and nod at people without them getting suspicious of me. I like the casual conversations I can start with people, or that they start with me.

This was all spurred by somebody asking my friend and me about our project with making vellum. I barely know him, but he knows the person I am working with on the project. He drove us to pick up a few supplies for our project in November, but I have not really seen him since.

I mean, I am sure that the experience probably stands out in his mind...it is not every day that someone asks you for a ride to pick up a pair of calfskins. But he still took interest in the project and the progress we've made. He laughed at us when we told him that our parchment ended up behaving more like cardboard than paper, and he jokingly offered to give us a ride to pick up another calfskin. (At least, he had better be joking, because I am not planning on making any more vellum any time soon!)

But the bottom line is, he remembered who I was, and he made a point of asking about something that is important in my life right now. It was a simple gesture, and it only took a little while, but it has stuck with me enough that I am thinking about it again hours after the fact.

So, while he may have distracted me, however briefly, from my studies of the mysteries of the universe, I suppose I can find it in my heart to forgive him. And, if I talk to him again in another four months, I may even thank him! The personal aspect of the interaction touched me. I think it is worth a break from academia to "study" it further...if there is a non-academic way to study something.

Update on Vellum Making

I am happy to say that we only spent another 10 hours or so to finish two skins. Helpful hint: when they say that you are supposed to wait to scrape them until the hair slips easily, they mean to wait until it slips very easily! The second skin was much easier to work with!

Until we got them in the frames for drying, I didn't realize how big these skins were. We had square 7 foot frames, and we actually had to trim the skins down in order to get them to fit.

We made our frames out of 2x4s, but there are some difficulties with a simple frame. First of all, we found out that you really need to brace the frames, because the vellum is far heavier than you would imagine. Our frames started to fall apart after about a week, and we had to go back in and fix them.

The other problem with our frames was, we could not stretch our vellum tight enough. That is one of the most important steps of the entire process. You are suppossed to stretch it as tight as possible, let it dry for a few days, then wet it completely and tighten the cords even more. If you do this correctly, it pulls all the layers of vellum into alignment and makes it flexible, almost like paper.

To accomplish this, the professionally-made frames are lined with pegs for you to tie the vellum to. When you are ready, you can turn the pegs to pull any excess cord around them. With our frames, we tied the cords around the frame itself, and then tried to hand-tighten them when it was time. It did not really work very well.

Now, parchment is only supposed to be slightly thicker than paper. Ours was much thicker. Because it was so thick and we could not stretch it tight enough, our final product ended up much stiffer than it should have. However, we still learned quite a bit about making parchment. It was a truly fascinating project...if one actually has time to do it. I barely did, but we made it work anyway! I really have a lot more respect for the ancient scribes, now. I mean, I always knew that it was tough, but I never realized just how much work it actually was.

We are not quite finished yet. We still need to sand the parchment down, and we are going to learn how to illuminate texts on it. To me, that was the draw of this project in the first place. I did not realize that it was going to take a random turn to making parchment first, but now I'm kind of glad it did. It is a once in a lifetime experience because, a) it is expensive, and b) I would never do it again...but I am glad that I got a chance to do it once.

Make a Note of It

I learned today how important it is to take good notes in class. There are so many things that I did not realize that we covered in class--things I never remember the teacher talking about.

For instance, in reviewing my notes, I learned that one naval invasion failed because the people had a ship-reek. All I can say is, stinks for them.

I also learned that one of the French kings had to worry about his "bother" rebelling against him. I mean, if I called my brother a bother all the time, he probably wouldn't like me, either.

Who knew that our world has been shaped by events such as these? I mean, I have often heard that fact is stranger than fiction, but I had no idea . . .

Let's just say that my final essay should be filled with some fresh historical perspective!

A Modern Account of Making Parchment (on a Budget)

For a school-related project, I have been working on making vellum. Point of clarification: parchment is a generic term for prepared writing surfaces made from animal skin; vellum is parchment made from calf skins, specifically.

This is not a project for the faint of heart! In my research, I have unearthed very few current accounts of the process, and none that really outlined the amount of work that goes into it.

There are a number of steps that I had not really thought about before beginning this project. For instance, I had not really thought about having to THOROUGHLY rinse the skins before doing anything else. When I say "thoroughly rinse," I mean letting them soak in baths of cold water for only an hour at a time, and changing that water out every hour--even in the middle of the night--for two days.

After this, we put the hides into a slaked lime solution to help us de-hair them. (Just so you know, you are supposed to get all of the extra flesh off before putting the hides in the slaked lime. We know that now, for what it is worth.)

We basically left them alone at that point, only going out to stir them once a day for about a week. We should have stirred them more often, but it is really hard to juggle school and a school project . . . funny that teachers, with all of their education, have not figured that one out yet. (Either that, or they are just sadistic.)

The really fun part about all of this was, we had to dress up every time we wanted to stir them. We wore rubber gloves and goggles, because we decided we really did not want a first hand experience of how slaked lime works.

Once the hair began to slip out easily when we pulled on it with our slippery gloves, we hauled the hides out of the lime and started scraping them. Because we were on a budget, we pulled the hides over some thirty gallon trash cans, and we used knives with duct tape wrapped around the tip of the blade so that we could use it like a two-handled knife. We still got to wear gloves at this stage, because the lime is still active in the hides for a while. It is hard to get it all out, and requires another thorough rinsing, which you only want to do after you are finished scraping it.

Actually, this is very useful, because we ignorant students dumped our slaked lime out as soon as we started scraping. Hides are not easy to de-hair, especially with sharp clunky knives and giant rubber gloves. I've heard that dull blades work better, because they actually scrape instead of slice. With our equipment, the hair stayed on in clumps. There were several times where we had to soak them for a while and try again later.

Being the brilliant parchment makers we are, we tried to dissolve the unwanted portions of the other side of the hide in slaked lime, too. We discovered the reason you remove all you can before the lime bath: if you leave it on, it stains the hide.

Even after the lime bath, though, we still had to scrape everything. The flesh side is really hard to scrape while wearing rubber gloves. For this side, though, it is kind of nice to have a sharp knife, as long as you remember to keep the blade angled away from the hide itself. The part of the skin that you want to preserve is slightly tougher than the rest of it, but it is still very easy to accidentally slice through it.

The main lesson we have learned so far is that scraping hides takes a very long time. We have four hides. There were two of us scraping for almost four hours each, and I put in an additional four or five hours by myself. We have gotten the flesh side semi-presentable on two hides, and we have started de-hairing both of these hides. We probably do not have either hide even half done at this point, though.

With our combined times, we have spent nearly thirteen hours scraping hides, and I do not think that we even have the equivalent of one hide scraped yet. It is definitely time intensive. It is also back-breaking work, and the smell and sight does remain at the back of your mind for days.

That is as far as we have gotten on our project so far. I will probably write more when (and if) we manage to make some more progress.

I think I am starting to realize why there were so few books during the middle ages. Apparently, it took 170 calf skins to make the Gutenberg Bible. Even if some other manuscripts were smaller projects, the amount of work put into even one skin would certainly delay the process. I also think you would only want to record the REALLY important things on vellum.

Calligraphy: An Ancient Art

"Calligraphy" comes from a Greek term meaning "beautiful writing." There are more fonts in calligraphy than there are on your computer. (Random fact: Most computer fonts were actually invented by calligraphers.) It is most often associated with the works of monks in the Middle Ages, but its roots are far deeper than that. Technically, its history traces down from all of the ancient forms of writing, from Egyptian hieroglyphics to Chinese characters to the symbols on the bottom of Phoenician shipping products.

Because of my love for random facts and histories, I took it upon myself to become an expert on the subject. (I took a class about a year ago. Of the thousands of fonts that are out there, I can now do two or three.) I am really not sure how to describe calligraphy. I once heard it called "the dance of the pen." As much as I like the imagery, I am not sure it really gets at the essence of the art. There is so much concentration involved. As my instructor once said, you work on calligraphy in the hope that you can eventually produce something that makes you pause and say "Wow. That is what a letter is supposed to look like."

To an outsider, it may seem like a lot of work for nothing. I do not think so. I have never been able to enjoy a moment of true awe at my own work, but I still feel like I have been able to get inside the beauty of letters. Calligraphy makes letters, words, even entire pages come alive. I have always enjoyed looking at the work of ancient calligraphers. It seems three dimensional in comparison to the world of flat, mechanical print.

Look at the maps on Lord of the Rings, and compare them to the maps we use. We have so much information on ours, but they are flat and lifeless. They are only a tool, used for the sake of gaining information. The maps on Lord of the Rings are alive. Even though they were just made for a story, they have history. There may be less information, but the stuff that is there pulls you in. That is what calligraphy does. It shows you the life inside the letters, and it builds them together until you can finally see the thought they are trying to communicate.

I realize all of this sounds a bit poetic, or eccentric, or . . . something, but studying it really has changed the way that I look at writing. It shouldn't be such a big deal. After all, letters are meant to be in the background. We are supposed to be able to overlook them so that we can pay attention to the information that we need. Still, if I really like a story, I will reread it. The stories that I like the most have more to them that what you see initially. There is something beneath the surface, something deeper, something you don't notice the first time. Each time you return to the story, there is a new discovery to be made.

Calligraphy is like that. In the better fonts, the letters are so clear, well-balanced, and flow together so well that the mind can skip over them straight into the information it needs. But, even after you have the information, there is another level. Unlike most mechanical print, calligraphy is beautiful even if you are not paying attention to the information. Writing with it, I feel like I am continuing an ancient and glorious tradition. Really, calligraphy was the beginning of knowledge--before it, there was no way to record thought. A person could only know what he could personally remember. Calligraphy was invented as a way to preserve knowledge for its own sake. But, at the same time, the information was recorded in a form that was beautiful, just for the sake of being beautiful. It is the only art-form I know that can appeal directly to either the intellect or the imagination. And it is ancient, mysterious, and multi-faceted. What else can an arbitrary academic ask for?

College Students Will Be College Students

Of the many interesting ways to spend a weekend (finishing chores, hiking, watching movies, going to a ballgame, etc), I have found that spectator sports can be by far the most entertaining. My current favorite is "What could possibly go wrong?" On a college campus, there are many opportunities to play this game.

This weekend alone, I have either witnessed or heard of many very well-thought-out activities that, strangely enough, ended poorly. For instance, how were sophomore guys to know that doing chin-ups on a pipe in their dorm room could cause a leak? Also, since the pipe happened to carry water for the sprinklers in their fire alarm system, how were they to guess that it might also set off the fire alarm?

How was a sleepwalker to know that turning in a paper they typed when asleep might, possibly have adverse effects on their GPA?

I was also impressed by the people who decided to throw a party without getting the RAs involved. How were they to know that opening windows and blaring music was not the best way of flying under the radar?

Being the last weekend before finals, this Friday, one genius decided to give us a classic instance of "What could possibly go wrong?" He decided that showing up drunk for classes was perfectly acceptable. Not only that, he decided that that day, of all days, was the perfect time to become an over-achiever. He came, prepared and willing to discuss topics in class. In my physics class, he awed us all by his insight and intelligence when he asked how the flex capacitor from "Back to the Future" worked.

But he did not stop there. One of my friends told me that he attended their class that day, too. He was not enrolled, he had never attended the class throughout the semester, but as my friend said, he was sure there that day, asking questions and taking notes.

I suppose he emerged relatively unscathed, but these incidents all bring to mind some of the practical advice of one of my professors. He would always tell us that there are two kinds of stupid in the world: there are those people who do stupid things, and then there are those people who do the stupid things and let everyone know about them. I guess my professor probably liked spectator sports, too. Maybe that is why he chose to teach on a college campus...