From a Paris Review article on the ambiguous history of counting-out rhymes:

What we do know is that once Eeny Meeny appeared on the scene, it was everywhere. In the fifties and sixties, the formidable husband-and-wife folklorists Iona and Peter Opie recorded hundreds of varieties in England and America, including, to name just a few:

Hana, mana, mona, mike,
Barcelona, bona, strike,
Hare, ware, frown, venac
Harrico, warrico, we, wo, wac

Eena, meena, mina, mo,
Cracka, feena, fina, fo,
Uppa, nootcha, poppa, tootcha,
Ring, ding, dang, doe

Eeny, meeny, mony, my,
Barcelona, stony, sty,
Eggs, butter, cheese, bread,
Stick, stack, stone dead

Jeema, jeema, jima, jo,
Jickamy, jackamy, jory,
Hika, sika, pika, wo,
Jeema, jeema, jima, jo

On constant rotation at bed time in our house is Iona Opie's edition of Mother Goose, with delightful illustrations by Rosemary Wells. What a pleasure to end the day reciting these sing-songy rhymes.

I recall the easy way we slipped into shows in earlier days. Pre-purchasing tickets was something we almost never did: there was always room for one or two more. Though a part of me knew that the Grouper show at Swedish American Hall would “sell out” I also did not want to commit to leaving the house after 8pm on a Friday: the days start early in our house, and that Friday began before 5AM. So when I arrived and the gatekeepers sheepishly turned me away, suggesting I come back in an hour to see if there was room, I wasn’t totally surprised. “Sure,” I said, “I’ll just grab a beer and come back.” But strolling down Market and passing Lucky 13 and Blackbird, the smell of stale beer kept me moving. Across the way stood Aardvark Books and it had been awhile since I browsed there. 9PM and they’re still open, fantastic. The guy behind the counter barely looked up as I entered, and I was immediately attracted to the Staff Picks box with a paperback copy of Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist. I’d never read Whitehead before, and I was drawn in to the first few pages. But the music playing in Aardvark continued to give me pause, a cast recording of Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story, especially “Somewhere” and the lead up to The Rumble.

Earlier in the week I read a few pieces on Ethan Iverson’s Do The Math blog that mention West Side Story in the context of Buddy Rich’s show-off drum virtuosity vs. the devotional music of free jazz players:

A story about Mel Lewis: Mel hated giving lessons, but finally a kid talked him into letting him come by a record session and watch Mel at work. During a break Mel gestured for the kid to sit behind the kit, and said, “Play me a snare roll.” The kid played a good, professional roll. Maybe not as good as the one that starts the movie Whiplash, but still, a good roll. Not easy to do. Mel took his sticks back and said, “See, right there is your problem. You shouldn’t be able to do that. I can’t do that. You gotta quit that shit and start becoming a drummer.” That’s a fun story, but truthfully drummers do need to learn how to roll. Mel himself surely learned to roll at some early point. However the point is clear. At least for Mel Lewis, devotion has precedence over chops. Another way to say it is: After you are good enough to learn your military rudiments, are you good enough to let them take a back seat to feel?

While browsing the stacks, among many posters for various anarchist book fairs, Aardvark proudly displays a poster version of Chris Ware’s Penguin Classics cover of Voltaire’s Candide: Or Optimism. A thoroughly engaging and depressing piece.

Back to Swedish American, and the sleepy gate keepers were surprised and happy to guide me in to hear some music. I entered during Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith’s performance. Enchanting, haunting, bubbling.

And then Grouper. I’d prefer to leave Haunting as a descriptor for her set. She played sitting cross-legged on the floor, Paul Clipson films projected on the wall behind. I recall seeing her in Portland at Holocene in 2008 with a very similar vibe to her set. That rush of hiss and crackle, the sound of her guitar so “live” or “hot” you can hear the jangling of her bracelets through the pickups, the strings so open, so much room between them, but everything reverberating. A dream, surely.

I recently submitted a re-design for Oak Knoll's Antiquarian Catalogue. Oak Knoll is "the world's largest inventory of books about books and bibliography," with a hefty share of titles concerning typography and book design.

I used Robert Slimbach's Minion Pro Condensed with its
proportional ("Old Style") figures, widely spaced small caps for book titles, and a very readable italic for book descriptions:

The page proportion is a standard 2:3 (a perfect fifth, according to Robert Bringhurst's "Page Proportions As Musical Intervals") and I designed a harmonic text block proportion of 3:5 (Bringhurst's major sixth) with margin proportions 1:2 (the octave):

Not a winning design, but an enjoyable exercise and a chance to dig deeply into a treasure-filled catalogue for bibliophiles.

Finished reading Salman Rushdie's Shame, which takes into consideration authorship of history and the play of power & revolution (specifically how one can become the other, and how this vicious cycle feeds on itself) and succeccessfully represents how a character can so embody an emotion: Sufiya Zinobia becomes the pure energy of shame , finally visiting upon Omar Khayyam Shakil---a character who has known no shame, but perhaps deserves to---as a Beast, as Shame incarnate. I was reminded of Marquez' One Hundered Years of Solitude in the way that characters and places seem to exist in both reality and in some imagination or other. Shame seemed less dreamy than hazy, vertigo- or fever-induced.

I think Rushdie was successfully able to talk about power and politics, and specifically how it related to his mother country while still telling a magical tale. He slipped in the politics, in a Brechtian, diegetic-breaking way, and with humor. I enjoyed the way he would weave the tale and then seem to unravel what he had just told, only to show you that a more elaborate, or perhaps farther-to-completed version was being woven right underneath.

Some highlights to come back to at some point:

• Rani's scarves depicting Iskander's exploits
• Bilquis' survivial of the explosion, and hazily coming to in Raza's life
• Haroun's revolutionay spittle from the back of a giant turtle

NAD C320BEE finally set up in the living room. Still need a phono preamp but CDs and iPod running smoothly through. Sound is suprising more natural as is the claim with NAD. All i need now are some speakers to gently allow these musicians/artists to take up residence in house and make their magic.

Reading Harper's this week, an interesting story about a young artist who eventually turns out to be A.Hitler. The protaganist gives him the chance to get in to art school as her dying powers allow. This changes the course of world events... much for the better.

Before that:

• Ellen Lupton's Thinking With Typography.
• Mark Helprin's short stories.
• Design (originally Psychology) of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman.
• Call Of The Wild by Jack London (with more of his stories lined up).
• Turn of the Screw by Henry James.

1. Hadji Murat by Leo Tolstoy
2. ‘The Black Monk’ by Anton Checkhov
3. ‘First Love’ by Turgenev
4. The Queen of Spades by Pushkin
5. A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Solzhenitsyn

Guy Davenport Books and Pamphlets (All)

1963 The Intelligence of Louis Agassiz

1964 Carmina Archilochi The Fragments of Archilochos

1965 Sappho Poems and Fragments

1966 Cydonia Florentia

1980 Archilochos, Sappho, Alkman Three Lyric Poets of the Late Greek Bronze Age

1981 The Mimes of Herondas

1983 Maxims of the Ancient Egyptians

1994 Charles Burchfield's Seasons

1995 7 Greeks

1996 The Logia of Yeshua The Sayings of Jesus (with Benjamin Urrutia)

On Design

Paul Rand by Steven Heller

Paul Rand changed everything. And then he changed it again. Heller's book
outlines his single-minded devotion to "good work" and examines all the
major projects. A love-letter. Of course= we're assuming you already
have Rand's From Lascaux to Brooklyn and A Designers's Art on your shelves.

The Russian Avant Garde Book

A smart and attractive anthology of the work of Aleksandr Rodchenko, Kazimir Malevich and others, we've found this book to be a powerful design stimulant. By MoMA Print and Illustrated Books Curator, Deborha Wye.

Marks of Excellence

The history, beauty and logic of trademarks always inspires. Per Mollerup's big black book follows me home and then back to work, over
and over. It's probably time to get a second copy.

The Typographic Grid

Hans Rudolf Bosshard's beautiful book takes the essentials of organizing type and presents them clearly and conversationally.

FontBook: Digital Typeface Compendium

The yellow one.

The Work of Edward Tufte

Envisioning Information,
Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative and

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Good advice, solid reasoning and spectacularly beautiful bookmaking. Sigh.

Grid Systems in Graphic Design

An understanding of
Josef Muller-Brockmann's Opus is not optional.

Pantone Color Guides

Never, ever on the shelf. Always on someone's desk, most of the time open. Nuff said. Also very helpful, The Process Color Manual.

On Writing

Style: Toward Clarity and Grace

Two really important things.

On Writing Well

If you're a journalist, a businessperson, or the occasional author of
letters, memos, blog entries, and emails, William K. Zinsser's On Writing Well is a book
you should reread every year. The essential work on clear and
interesting non-fiction writing.

The Chicago Manual of Style

The Bible for preparing and editing manuscripts for publication. The 15th edition is now available.

Roget's International Thesaurus

Seasoned newspaper men and elementary English teachers might call it a crutch. But when you get right down to it,
a thesaurus is a reference tool like any other: it can be used effectively or poorly. This is
the one we turn to when we're looking to pin the perfect shade of meaning on the paper.

Elements of Style

If your education was worth anything, you were assigned
Strunk and White's Elements of Style for a class. If you're anything like us, you've misplaced and repurchased it a number of times since.

Webster Third New International Dictionary

Someday we'll own the complete OED. Until then,

this unabridged monster will do just fine.

On Code

HTTP: The Definitive Guide

Comprehensive and surprisingly easy to read.
David Gourley and Brian Totty's volume contains the answers to all those questions about how the web works you shouldn't need to ask.

The PHP Bible

God there are a lot of ugly, thick books in this section of the bookstore, and
this might be the ugliest
of them all. But Tim Converse and Joyce Park have written the clearest
and easiest to navigate primer on PHP. Runner-up in the
ugly-but-effective category goes to
Core PHP Programming by Leon Atkinson.

Cascading Style Sheets

Eric Meyer's
Definitive CSS Guide
is the O'Reilly book with the salmon on the cover. No-nonsense
tutorials with a well-worn index. There are recently a lot of other
titles in this category. You may ignore them without worry. This is it.

Designing With Web Standards

We could have redone our site using CSS without ever looking at
this lovely orange book.
We could have developed our own workarounds and reinvented the proper
structure for a style-sheet. We probably could have even deciphered the
frustrating inconsistencies of "The Box Model" on our own. Thank God we
didn't have to.

Managing and Using MySQL

Kingfisher on the cover. Clear, precise explanations inside.

###Solaris
by Stanislaw Lem

The dream sequence that Kelvin goes through after X-Radiating the ocean is perhaops giving him the ability to understand what it is to be the ocean. Ir what it is to be Rheya, moving from non-existence to existence.