handwriting – The Homebound Symphony

September 16, 2023

A letter from François Truffaut to Jean Renoir, telling the old master how much The Rules of the Game meant to him. Truffaut had lovely handwriting, I think, and made use of it in The Wild Child, where we see him, as Dr. Itard, writing in a journal about Victor’s progress, or lack thereof.

Truffaut wrote thousands and thousands of letters; he seems to have found it easier to speak his mind, and heart, in letters than in either phone calls or face-to-face meetings. Had he lived in the Age of Email I am certain that he would have continued to communicate by handwriting.

May 17, 2022

notes

Interesting convo at micro.blog about what people use to take notes. Me?

Handwriting in notebooks (usually Leuchtturm)
Marginal commentary and sticky notes in books
Voice notes in .mp3 format (the plain text of audio)
Plain text notes on the computer

I want my notes to be future-proof and platform-agnostic.

September 23, 2013

hidden imagery in handwriting

In handwriting the brain is mediated by the drawing hand, in typewriting by the fingers hitting the keyboard, in dictation by the idea of a vocal style, in word processing by touching the keyboard and by the screen’s feedback. The fact seems to be that each of these methods produces a different syntactic result from the same brain. Maybe the crucial element in handwriting is that the hand is simultaneously drawing. I know I’m very conscious of hidden imagery in handwriting—a subtext of a rudimentary picture language. Perhaps that tends to enforce more cooperation from the other side of the brain. And perhaps that extra load of right brain suggestions prompts a different succession of words and ideas.

— Ted Hughes, from this highly informative interview in Paris Review, from Ales Kot. (via davepress)

August 17, 2013

Shakespeare’s handwriting

erikkwakkel:

Shakespeare’s handwriting – and why it matters

Studying ancient handwriting is a fascinating thing. To know that the oddly-shaped letters on the page were put there hundreds of years ago by an individual with a life, passions and things to do, can be sensational. Sometimes such ancient handwritten notes can teach us really important things. The page above was written by no other than William Shakespeare. A scholar in Texas compared the document to a handwritten addition in a copy of Thomas Kyd’s play Spanish Tragedy. And what turned out to be the case? The handwriting in the image above is the same as in the added text in Kyd’s play. Moreover, the two share the same spelling pattern. Ergo, the two were written by the same individual – Shakespeare. The newly identified “text” by Shakespeare (an addition of several hundreds of verses) will be included in The Bard’s new addition. It’s extremely satisfying to an expert of old script (as I am) that letter shapes proved vital for this important discovery.

Read all about it in this NYT article.