A writer of poems, I had long aspired to achieve a species of illuminated text – a poem calligraphically written out in visual typography… specifically in my preferred medium of labour-intensive ANSI or ASCII fonts, a generally graffiti-derived idiom. Steps toward this cyber-concrete-poetry were realized in the All-Stars experiment at Evoke 1999, but more was needed. But the year was 2001, and though there were still textmode fontists to be found in the wild, I lacked sufficient pull with any active artists to compel them to put the hours and sweat needed to make my words pop off the screen with the commission of original logos for my powerful words.
The occasion was Christmas 2001, and now living away from my parents’, I wanted to show my new independence as an artistic adult and make a run of Christmas cards. But I didn’t like the idea of celebrating that consumeristically co-opted clichéd religious occasion Christmas – so concluded I could achieve the same effect more palatably by refashioning them as winter solstice cards… in a sense, taking back the reason for the season. A few words about darkness and rebirth would do the trick – a very short poem by poetry standards, somehow managing to contradict itself in places, but apparently more coherent when viewed atomically in segments. And having it writ large would help to obfuscate its extreme brevity! Finally, I could derive a deeply personally satisfying resonance producing an illuminated manuscript… on the very subject of light itself. (In letters painted from light emerging from a darkened screen!)
But who would make it real? I had no choice: I would have to do it myself. But with no visual or graphic design sensibilities, I could not draw my way out of a paper bag. This project – a prototype, perhaps, for some future undertaking – would have to be tool-assisted. Figlet is and has been for years the premiere ASCII logo generator, but between its various typefaces on offer I was not able to quite satisfy wanting to locate a suitable style for each line’s sensibility. So I was compelled to do something that I was possibly the only person on the planet to do that year: I fired up the classic ANSI art editor TheDraw and loaded up some stock TheDraw .TDF typefaces. The one used here, hilariously entitled “Elite”, had been previously employed in some April Fool’s Packs, but despite being employed ironically elsewhere, here it was genuinely my best option. I inserted a small quantity of gradient shading with the F1-F4 blocks to emphasize that critical word “ALIGHT” with ASCII rays emanating from it (and the cherry on top, a single exclamation mark), then the remainder of the presentation practically filled itself in – dimming “dim” and “responding in kind”, distinguishing “blazing” with a highlight, a few flakes of classic ANSI snowfall (“rain” of that sort added 50 lines or so to countless scrollers circa 1993), and the insertion of a Figlet Inuit character peeking up over the letters.
The blueprints drawn up, the execution was a simple matter of some shopping around. Several copy shops were visited to find one capable of producing nice black blacks for the background, then milling them out in a quantity of maybe a hundred – mostly sent to people on The Everything Mailing Address Registry at everything2.com. Because I was at a point in my life where I couldn’t afford to both make colour copies and send the prints by mail, I saved a few cents by printing in b&w and then adding spot colour to relevant areas with a highlighter pen.
The back of every print had lots of white space for me to write holiday notes to the recipients, and between the notes and addressing and return addressing a hundred envelopes with my tiny, intensely engraved handwriting, I exacerbated a bad case of writer’s cramp (aka “scrivener’s palsy”) which plagued me for years afterward. So this was the start and end of my Christmas card tradition; mailing continued on a small scale with a postcard fiction spree on postcardx.net, and then my muse wandered down different avenues circa 2003.
For those wonderful Google spiders and such human readers who may be in the audience tonight, the eve of the winter solstice some 13 years later, we provide a transcript of the poem’s contents:
when days / grow short / and dim
we must / resist / responding / in kind / instead / setting / ourselves / alight
blazing / brilliant / and tall
bringing / the sun / back
in our own / thoughts / and actions
burn low and long
(and for readers in a seasonal mood, please don’t forget to download our recently-exhumed remastered and re-released music disk, The Bells of Yule, brought 20 years forward from 1994 to save the future… now with four mirrors because demand exceeded our original host’s ability to serve it up!)
