of falling in love with my classes...

This is my first setting for letterpress. We had to take a quote from a William Gass essay, and set it. The teach said nobody had ever chosen this quote before (with great surprise), and I thought, well, shit, it's perfect for a first try.

setting this up by hand, pinching the little metal stamps between my grubbing fingers, watching the skin peel off their tips, centering with metal blocks (em-quads, en-quads, ems, ens, 3-to-the-ems, 4-to-the-ems, 5-to-the-ems, brass, copper, hairline), noticing errors, fixing errors, noticing more errors, picking the font, reading about font, copyfitting font, loving font, breaking the lines, listening to acoustic guitar and shuffling while holding letters, pushing pieces around with tweezers, using magnets to align letters, inking letters, finding more errors...

love it.

The following was for my Surrealism class. We had to illustrate someone else's dream. I sketched and then watercolored at 6:30am while still in bed in my jammies. It was the perfect way to wake up:















Novel writing: good reads, talking about... i love, love, love my classmates and teacher.

Advising: strange, and will make me look at things differently. No overbelieving in what's on the page, no sirree.

Oh, this isn't a class, but it is really: riding the el, I realized I had left my homework back in the apartment. I realized this three stops away from my Logan Square, and decided to hop off the train and head back (i had worked hard on that homework! and it was purposeless to go on without it!). So I jumped train at Damen and ran down the stairs. But running back up the other side of the stairs, I slipped and fell. Very hard. Ignoring the horrendous pain (oh, drama), I continued up, where I noticed that I was already bleeding through my jeans and couldn't move my leg properly. So, while at home getting my belated homework and trying manically to reach someone in the class, I changed my munged clothes and put on a Big Bandaid. In the end, the scratch seems superficial, but the bruise I have is one of my most monsterous of bruises and makes it hard to bend my knee.

I tried to photograph it, but the picture really didn't capture the sheer "purple mountain majesties" of the patella landscape. And if I can't get sympathy out of a photo, then I'm going to have to rely on my prose. Speaking of which, I've got at least 5 "poor things" out of the deal, which makes it well worth the pain, in my book.

Anyhow, gin in hand, I am thinking over the week. This semester, unlike the last, will not coddle me and make me believe again that everything comes around. Instead, it will make me get a groove in and relearn to work, and to fight for what I want, and to challenge my ego.

I'm up for it.

p.s. too much wine + etch-a-sketch = hippy channeling, not really brilliance.