Tet, the Vietnamese New Year celebration

Calligraphers work overtime, in studios and on sidewalks, to write New Year greetings. Photo courtesy of Ngoc Chinh. 

January 23 began the celebration of Tet, which lasts longer than a week and takes the full attention of everyone in Vietnam.   
Chúc mừng năm mới!  Best wishes to everyone out there for the Year of the Dragon.

These three traditional sages offer health, prosperity and long life, written in Vietnam's distinctive Thư Pháp script. 

Part of the Dragon is formed here from letters.
Photo courtesy of Song Tran.

  

National Handwriting Day and your grandchildren's handwriting

National Handwriting Day might seem like the perfect day to wring your hands and bemoan the death of penmanship, especially if you're a grandparent who has given up waiting for thank-you notes from grandchildren for the holiday gifts you sent a few weeks ago.

But please: don't just grouse about what they're not doing.  Pick up that pen yourself. 

Whenever I hear complaints from grandparents about how the younger generation don't write to say "thank you," I ask them to think about how many thank you notes those children have ever received in their lives.  How can you expect children to give someone else a treat they've never experienced themselves?

Make it a project sometime this year to send children a thank-you note yourself, prompt and particular and written nicely by hand, for something--anything--they do for you.  Model what you want them to do while you also let them know how it feels to be thanked on paper. 

National Handwriting Day, January 23

National Handwriting Day is the perfect time to close your laptop, dust off your pen, open your box of notecards, and treat some friends to a real note, to only them from only you.  Maybe you could have thanked someone more warmly for a gift, or congratulated a young relative on an achievement, or sent your host a proper "bread-and-butter letter" for hospitality?  Ink on paper is the gold standard for saying thank you in ways that matter. 

A visit to master calligrapher Minh Đức Triều Tâm Ảnh, at his pagoda

Based on short syllables, the Vietnamese language, like Chinese, lends itself easily to comfortable layout on vertical pillars, left below, or on horizontal lintels--the natural wood slab here is a favorite format. 

On my recent trip to Vietnam, I was fortunate to visit Minh Đức Triều Tâm Ảnh, a calligrapher who contributed his work to my book Learn World Calligraphy.  I had written to him using paper and ink, more than a year ago, and had then exchanged email arrangements with one of his students, Tran, who offered to act as translator plus take me to Minh Đức's remote pagoda on his moped.

The 40-minute trek took us over some very muddy, bumpy roads, but the effort was repaid by the absolute beauty and tranquility of the grounds and buildings.  Many hand-lettered signs in the Thu Phap style blended brush techniques with Roman letters--a unique Vietnamese specialty and the reason I'm so interested in the style.  It looks like he was one of its first practitioners, or at least one of its earliest exhibitors, in the Hue Festival 1985. 

Minh Đức spent several hours with me, and sent me off to a simple lunch [the monks' single daily meal] at 11:00.  I'm hoping to follow up on his generous invitation to come back for longer next year. 

A metaphor from days of yore

In today's New York Times, Robert Miller at Workman Publishing is quoted on the topic of nicely printed and bound books, which he feels will be a key characteristic that will help conventional book format to survive the advent of e-books and audio books.  "When people do beautiful books, they're noticed more.  It's like sending a thank-you note written on nice paper when we're in an era of e-mail correspondence." 

You can picture many of his readers nodding yes only because it sounds like something good, because they themselves have not received a handwritten note that they can remember.

Those of you who do still send handwritten words through the mail--there really is something about paper that adds a crucial dimension to what you say.  Paper is part of the picture; look for it, use it, and appreciate it when you read and write.

The article, "Selling Old-Style Books by Their Gilded Covers," is on the front page of Dec 4, 2011.

The calligrapher’s prayer

    Everyone has a ritual for easing into a task.  Runners stretch, Chinese calligraphers grind ink, writers make a cup of coffee.  Calligraphers who write in Arabic have a special prayer to recite--students before they practice, and scribes before they work. 

    I like this prayer.  Every scribe--Muslim or Zen, trained or amateur, ambitious or humble--knows how difficult it is to maintain focus and bring experience to bear on writing well.  God’s help is always needed, and often found. 

Alphabet follows empire VI China

Mao Tse Tung had to maintain a balancing act, drawing on roots from the Chinese past while prying people loose from them.  Historically, the figure of scholar/poet/calligrapher inspired respect; Mao was esteemed for his skill as a calligrapher at the same time he pilloried intellectuals during the Cultural Revolution.  He mandated simplifying the complex characters to aid literacy, or as his detractors insisted, to cut people off from what had been written before the 20th century.

Chinese calligraphers nowadays still copy out Mao's sayings as sacred texts.  His own writing style has been immortalized in a typeface.  (Then again, who would want to be the first to say that the emperor has no clothes?) 

15th-century scholar with long fingernails, a badge of the non-laboring class

Mao Tse Tung