The weather gods apparently
subscribe to the Gregorian calendar.
Friday last was the first of December, and that night we got our first
reasonably sharp chill of the year. I had
been raking leaves off and on in a desultory way for a better part of a month,
but I would estimate that the trees had dropped only about half their load by
Thursday, when the town’s huge leaf-vacuum trucks made what was threatened to
be the last curbside collection of the year.
Since then there has been a continuous blizzard of light gold and pale
red oak leaves carpeting the front lawn.
You would hardly know that I had already removed a small mountain of
them.
But the turning of the calendar
page and its concomitant change in the weather also inspired me to more
satisfying exertions, ones that left me with something to show for my
efforts. For the first time in more
years than I can remember I (1) constructed an Advent wreath before the arrival
of the first —or for that matter second or third—Sunday of the season; and I (2)
printed the Christmas cards. This latter achievement I regard as
particularly spectacular, although we still have the opportunity to face the
full angst of crisis by procrastinating on their preparation for mailing.
Though my study is dominated by
printing presses, type cabinets, a huge composing table, and a paper cutter, it
is mainly an overstuffed library that looks like a set for “Hoarders”. The initial and continuing problem was
negotiating the clutter. I hadn’t done
much serious printing in a while, as perhaps the fact that I did regard this
assignment as “serious printing” might suggest.
It involved quite a lot: the marital squabble about the right line
etching and the search to locate it when decided upon, the composition of some
ten point type despite octogenarian eyesight and fingers, the delicate alignment
and make-ready for some eighty pound stock that had to go three times through
the press, and the tedious imposition of an elegant return address on five
hundred A-6 envelopes with tapered flaps.
But it is amazing how much one can achieve once one resigns oneself to
abandoning all serious work, such as getting a book finished.
I love printing all alone in the
early morning hours “while the city sleeps”—or at least that part of the city
with whom I share my life. The ample
flourescent lighting of my library-pressroom is as bright as a noonday desert
in the largely darkened house and in the greater darkness beyond the
windows. There is a gentle but
business-like hum to the variable speed motor, and the well-oiled
clickity-clack of the Chandler and Price, punctuated decisively by the dull
percussion of platen and type form at the moment of impact. It’s not exactly rocket science, but it still
requires attention and dexterity, even a little skill, to achieve a good
product.
In recent years I have liked to
have a video playing on my computer while I’m printing. I alternate ten or fifteen minute segments
between the old technology and the new.
The episodes of viewing offer refreshment from the more demanding episodes
of printing. For the printing of this
year’s card I had settled upon a Netflix documentary about the life of Joan
Didion—“The Center Will Not Hold”. This
occurred by pure chance, but there is something appropriate about the linkage
of printing and authorship. I am hardly
alone in admiring the quality of Didion’s prose or the remarkable sensibility
that it expresses. She is, after all,
one of the most celebrated of living writers.
But content is also a draw. We
are roughly of an age—she’s a year and a bit older than I—and I myself was
fascinated by many of the cultural events of the Sixties and Seventies about
which she has famously written. Yet what
struck me most forcibly in this video was determined I suppose by the eccentric
circumstances under which I was viewing it.
It’s quite recent, having come out only this year. Many of its scenes show the author in the
last year or two. She has aged
dramatically. In fact I would describe
her as a frail old lady. Her speech is
utterly lucid, crisp, nuanced—finely pointed like her prose. But she has a disconcerting mannerism of
moving both her arms—especially the right one--in front of her while she
talks. It is hard to tell whether this
is a neurological tic or a lifetime habit grown pronounced in old age. I could see no obvious correspondence between
this brachial motion and the content of what she was saying. But it was
strikingly similar to another pattern with which I am quite familiar: the
arm motion required when operating a clam-shell press. One must concentrate intently on feeding the
press with the right hand while constantly ready to disengage the clutch lever
with the left. Failure to do so by half
a second can result in a real mess. What
is called for is less a cooperation between the upper limbs than a competition
between them, or better yet a feigned indifference between them. Jesus had something else in mind when he said
“Do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing”, but he might
have been describing Didion talking or Fleming printing.
