Tropical Storm Danny

Compared to Hurricane Bill? Worse:



And yet, where was the news coverage? Where were the live reporters and hourly updates? Get your shit together, CBC et al.

And Bill? Danny? What is this, attack of the WASPs? I envy Mexico and their Jimena. But look out, Kevin is coming. Though he seems rather depressed.

What I'm Listening To

Bon Iver, For Emma, Forever Ago. Buy it now.



Read the Pitchfork review here.

Hurricane Bill

The mines are no place for a hurricane, even one as brave as Bill.



Update at 11:37 a.m. Sunday:

Etching and Cross-Hatching

Recently I took a weekend-long etching/intaglio workshop at NSCAD. I made this print:





I love etching! I loved how meditative it was to scrape lines onto a plate. I loved learning about cross-hatching. I loved the process of sketch to plate to acid bath to cleaning to inking to wiping to printing to cleaning, etc. etc. I've been trying to get that old-fashioned, early 20th century feeling in my illustrations as I try to figure out how to illustrate my kids' books. So now I've tried a few more pen and ink cross-hatched drawings. They don't turn out as well as actually etching, but I'm slowly getting the hang of it. Below, some of my drawings.

"We will sample it judiciously!"

"When Olena was a girl, she had called them lie-berries--a fibbing fruit, a story store--and now she had a job in one. She had originally wanted to teach English literature, but when she failed to warm to the graduate study of it, its french-fried theories--a vocabulary of arson!--she'd transferred to library school, where everyone was taught to take care of books, tenderly, as if they were dishes or dolls."

--from Lorrie Moore's "Community Life," Birds of America (1998)