Fetish Screens

My homepage is my signature. My signature carries great visual power on the page; it dominates. It describes: bold, feminine, a little impatient. The bars across the ‘t’s look like an arm outstretched, always seeking, the going. The ‘b’ is contained, enclosed, cacooned, the return, home, the center of the name, the center world.

And yet, the script I chose, the script that best represented me, my handwriting, was an electronic file, a font, and thus electrate. The name of the font is Cutty. Perhaps I subconsciously picked it because of The Cutty Sark, a Scottish clipper ship built in 1869. She was one of the last and the fastest of the tea clippers, which were shortly thereafter discontinued as clippers gave way to steamers. It was also my stepfather’s favorite brand of whisky.

My grandmother loved my handwriting, commented often on its neatness and individuality. She delighted in watching me learn to write, and later kept every piece of writing as I tried on language and style and plot. Stories were framed and hung in the halls of her home, 1016 Fernvale Avenue, the place to which I always returned, like Odysseus, to regale she and my grandfather with grand stories of adventure and danger from the rest of the world, which might as well have been the underworld.

Writing stories by hand gave me great confidence. Learning to write, mastering language and rhetoric was to learn to speak and write magic into the world. Thoughts could become things. There was power in the Word. The hand, writing, has been at the root of all my success and accomplishment. Like Ariadne’s thread, the string of letters, words, sentences, graphs, carries meaning and message and memory back from the now dead to the living and carves the world to come.