Betraying Gestures #9

gestures of conceptual perfectionism

A friend asked me if I was a perfectionist. I was working on a project called In-flight, a collection of torn-out book pages of in-flight scenes that Betraying Gestures is editing into facsimile flyers. I have to match the paper, the font, and the layout, and I’m not a perfectionist; I’m more of a good enough facsimile maker. My answer was that I was not a perfectionist. She questioned it, though, saying I might be one, and gave me examples—all examples of conceptual overthinking. I replied, “I am a conceptual perfectionist then”. I spent the week thinking about conceptual perfectionism and, in a corner of my mind, bragging about my self-appointed title. I was walking a friend to the bus stop, it was night, we had drunk a couple of glasses of rosé with ice cubes and eaten pasta with cream sauce, when I asked him about Betraying Gestures’ logo. I was returning to a subject we had discussed earlier when I showed him the logo, and he said that what I was showing him was not a logo, but an image. The logo that I showed him, which might not be a logo, is a logo that Betraying Gestures readers should be familiar with: a found image of a Marriott room telephone. I won’t describe the image. I already started last week’s letter with the description of not one but two images. My friend suggested that I use a drawing of my dog as the logo of Betraying Gestures. He remembered Lucian Freud’s drawing of his dog, Pluto, for Bella Freud’s brand. Bella Freud asked her father to write her name; she liked his handwriting and wanted it for the logo of her brand. He drew a little box with his Whippet’s head in the middle and her name on each side of it. Lucian Freud is known to have had a great love for his dogs, Pluto and Eli, both Whippets, which are recurrent in his works. My dog’s name is Eva. As a conceptual perfectionist, I chose Betraying Gestures’ logo rather arbitrarily—there were no other options—that was the only logo Betraying Gestures could have—Betraying Gestures only existed if that was its logo. It is different now, and I can rethink this decision, but I am not willing to not use my found image of the Marriott phone. I do, however, agree that a logo, and especially the logo of a publisher, has to be able to be put on a stamp. I opened the image of the telephone in Photoshop, made a new layer, selected the brush tool, and outlined the image. The logo of the publishing house Knopf is a Borzoi dog. Both Freud’s and Knopf’s dogs are sighthounds. Eva, my dog, is not a sighthound, nor does she have a breed. While we waited for the bus, after drinking rosé with ice cubes and cream sauce pasta, I said to my friend that maybe using the drawing of Eva as Betraying Gestures’ logo was not such a bad idea. I wrote about Eva in Betraying Gestures #1. I wrote that being by myself in a big house made me miss my dog, Eva. At the bus stop, I said that using a drawing of Eva as a logo may not be such a bad idea because there is a story of betrayal in Eva’s story. I adopted Eva seven years ago, in 2016, when I saw an ad for Basset Hounds up for adoption and was drawn to one of the puppies. I called the number in the ad and told the Basset Hound I wanted to adopt. The person on the other side of the line told me that even though they were announced as Basset Hounds, they weren't; they were mixed breeds, possibly with a bit of Basset Hound blood. I said I would adopt her anyway, so I drove 500km on a Sunday afternoon, spent the night in a crappy hotel by the bus station of a small town, and the following day went to pick up the dog that I decided the previous night, over a beer, would be called Eva. I wasn’t very good with dogs, but we became very good partners. I took her everywhere with me, we travelled a lot together, and she became a friend of my friends. Sometimes I travelled by myself, and she stayed with my parents or with one of my sisters. I always went back to her—we were partners. But now I haven’t been back for one and a half years, so maybe having beloved and betrayed Eva as Betraying Gesture’s logo fits my conceptual perfectionism. Also, Betraying Gestures was born from this displacement, which has being apart from Eva as a condition. Betraying Gestures can have more than one logo. Throughout Knops’s centenary existence, there have been more than 150 variations of their logo. I’m going to stamp the outlined Marriott telephone variation on the back of the In-flight facsimiles. One of

the pages I’m making into a facsimile is from Flights, a book that has been extensively mentioned in this newsletter. The page I’m reproducing was ripped from a Fitzcarraldo edition. Fitzcarraldo uses a font exclusively designed for them. I’ve been looking into publishing house logos. I don’t like Fitzcarraldo’s logo. I do, however, like the rules they have, such as only using one font designed especially for them, making fiction books blue and essay books white, and publishing twelve books a year. I chose a font that, for my non-perfectionist eye, is close enough to the one they use, but I had to betray one of Betraying Gestures’ rules, to only use fonts by Carol Twombly. It was a decision that, as in the found image of the Marriott telephone, could find reasons but was mostly an arbitrary decision. And there is no necessary contradiction between an arbitrary and a conceptual decision. Fitzcarraldo was founded when Jacques Testard bought the English-language rights to Second-Hand Time by Svetlana Alexievich for €4000 at the Frankfurt Book Fair. I suppose he had reasons to buy the rights, but the way the story is told makes his decision seem partially arbitrary, like he bought it because it was being offered and because he could afford it. It turned out to be a very good decision, since Svetlana Alexievich later won the Nobel Prize. I’m spending this week at a friend's garden house, taking care of his dog, Bog. The house isn’t exactly outside of the city, but I’m pretending to be in the countryside, where there is time to write what I don’t have to write, read, cook, and work on the accuracy of my conceptual perfectionism. My mom sent me a picture of Eva. I replied, saying how cute she looked and telling her I was with another dog, but asking her not to tell Eva that.