signatures

Least expected incoming Google link today:

“graham harman autograph”

You won’t find one for sale on eBay, I don’t think, but you can have one absolutely free of charge. Just send the desired item to my university address, but please not anything that will require packaging, because that can be a hassle from here. It should be a flat item that fits in an envelope.

I’ve signed about 5 total autographs, lifetime, so they’re not that in demand. But you’re welcome to one.

While we’re on that subject, however, I do have an interesting story about my signature, which is slightly bizarre in form…

One day in Chicago, I was killing time in that Barnes & Noble on Diversey. I happened across a handwriting analysis book, and decided to see what it said about my signature. What it said was roughly as follows:

“This is a person of absolutely no creativity whatosever. You can tell this because he makes all of his letters in exactly the same shape as he learned them in 3rd grade.”

I was infuriated by this verdict. Those who made stylized letters different from those of 3rd grade always struck me as arbitrary rule-breakers at best or affected charlatans at worst. I had always simply assumed that respectable, honest people would make the letters the way they were supposed to be made.

This was in about 1993. I decided then and there to change my bank signature permanently to something well off the beaten path. I’ve seen weirder ones, true, but my signature for the past 18 years has been deliberately strange-ified.

Now the book would probably say: “This is a devious sociopath who cannot be trusted, since he deliberately disfigures each of the letters he learned in 3rd grade, probably as a result of unquenchable rage against existing social mores.” Or something like that.