For this week’s signment I decided to pick materials that would make writing difficult, in addition to emphasizing their materiality.  I was thinking about how often writing utensils fail me ( I usually use cheap, found pens and pencils) and how much I take for granted our ability to write things down with such ease.  Were I a medieval scribe, I’d be lucky to be literate, just so I could have the privilege of slaughtering a pig, scraping and treating its skin, so I could copy the bible or whatever onto it.  Yesterday I yelled at my pencil (yes, out loud) because its lead broke off when I went to write avocados on my grocery list.  In light of the readings we’ve been doing, I felt like a spoiled ingrate.  So, maybe I felt like teaching myself some gratitude.

I decided to write with wine because so much research has gone into the consistencies of lead and ink, and the ease they afford us daily goes largely unappreciated, by me.  I used an eyedropper because I thought a paintbrush would be cheating– too easy.  Wine and eyedroppers are not meant for writing at all.  Droplets are hard to control.  A big juicy plop could arrive when what you’d hoped for was a tiny driblet.   And white cotton handkerchiefs are also unpredictable.  Somehow, wine pigments don’t spread through cotton fibers very predictably at all.  The sentence I wrote is only three words long, due to these constraints.  But it’s in Latin, so I think that counts for something.

p.s.

as I was trying to type this post, my computer or wordpress or the internet or whatever was lagging like a beast.  I absentmindedly yelled at the undecipherable culprit.