Ramblings and webcomics from LeEMS
Still slowly and surely working on author voices and found a wonderful gem:
I am currently studying how intellectual property laws can be used to protect Traditional Knowledge – because of course I am – but there was something amazing in my lesson the other day: Quipus or talking knots. Quipus were recording devices made of thread or string and knotted to portray meaning and value. Based on a base ten positional system calendar information, taxes, census records, military organization and more could be recorded and read off of something that looks more like a necklace or body ornament. Similar systems were used by the Inca, the ancient Chinese and native Hawaiians.
Posting now on the Drawing Board is my short comic: The Wedding Party. When I had originally added the idea to my lists as something that I needed to draw I was calling it the smile jaw monster comic. Like Nightmare (the 25hour comics day comic) it was inspired by a dream that I had. Nightmare was actually several dreams stitched together. A Trip to Weeki Wachi may have also been inspired by a dream, or a memory that got mixed up with a dream, anyway. All you jungians now have ample material with which to analyze me.
Anyway, go check out The Wedding Party and tell me what you think, or, just enjoy it, you know. It’s up to you.
I know it’s been longer than I let on it would be, but the time has finally come: Levi Levi is posting on Thursdays again!
I’ve drawn rooms and layouts for my house since we bought it. These are the most recent focusing on the garden and what I would like for it to do. Whether it will ever look as planned is yet to be seen. We tend to buy small plants, plant in small groups, and then neglect them a little. We don’t have an irrigation system, so growing a garden is slow going.
The back view of the house (second pic) includes the profile as it would be if the current patio were made into a Florida room (because Florida). And the Florida room would look like this:
The recipe pictured is one from my mother’s recipe box. I have long suspected that it was a recipe for fried green tomatoes that I asked her to write down from a news broadcast one day when we living with my grandmother. She joyfully delivered the recipe to me in shorthand, something I could not read, and refused to translate it. As mean as the interlude sounds, my mother was a wonderful woman, promise. And, though I suspect tomatoes, I’ve really always hoped the recipe was for her fruitcake, since I have yet found no trace of her fruitcake anywhere in her cook books or recipe box.
At some point in my youth I was actually inspired to study shorthand. I am not sure whether it was before or after the tomatoes. I got significantly less far along with it than I did with my short bout of speed reading practice. So the recipe above is still a mystery. I believe it is Gregg shorthand, the U.S. standard at the time my mother would’ve learned, and I have since found a fabulous site dedicated to keeping Greg shorthand alive: Gregg Shorthand site. It includes a Greg Shorthand Dictionary that may help me figure out the recipe above. I’ve also found a translation engine that can translate your text into shorthand. Unfortunately it doesn’t work the other way around.
What I had no concept of when I started investigating a means to translate the recipe is the great history of shorthand and the many ways it has been used. On Tracey Jennings Harding transcription service web site, Harding frequently shares stories of postcards, letters, and other interesting historical ephemera that she’s been hired to translate by people who, like me, can’t read the strange code their predecessors used to record their lives. Harding doesn’t work with Gregg shorthand, as she is fluent in the U.K. standard shorthand style: Pitman, which preceded Gregg in popularity for the English speaking world.
In case you want to follow me along in an exploration of the wartime letters, fan mail, and diaries that have been written in shorthand throughout history, here are some starting points: