I’m back in DC after a brief trip north to Massachusetts, and in the spirit of being back in town, I decided to document my week in five bullet points, since apparently that method is now the best way to gauge worker productivity.
I learned how to rock a mezzotint plate and how to scrape and burnish an image. Mezzotint has always been among my favorite print methods because it allows for lush blacks and soft modulations in tone, giving a painterly effect. For a few years, I’ve been looking for a workshop, so jumped at the chance to participate in one with Carol Wax, an incredible mezzotint artist who wrote the best overview of the medium. Over a weekend, we turned a 3x4 inch copper plate into a mezzotint and got to look at Carol’s fabulous reference images, showing different materials and techniques as well as ways of combining alternative printmaking methods. Many pastellists also made mezzotints, and pastel can even be applied to mezzotint plates—and was in the eighteenth century—so it is helpful to finally have hands-on experience with the process.
As non-academic reading, I finished Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics by Elle Reeve. I started reading it because my life consists of thinking about the American Revolution for my dissertation, which means approximately 90% of my waking hours. Sometimes I start to deeply empathize with the loyalists and how scary things must have been for them while walking to the metro, or begin crying in the grocery line as I think about how politically involved everyday people were as they formed a resistance. Anyway, Black Pill was a bad choice to make me feel better about any of those concerns, but it does explain how imageboard culture brought us to the current political situation. Fascinating, if deeply depressing.
Some of the poltergeist exhibits in my supernatural museum. In addition to learning how to mezzotint, I started playing Two Point Museum last weekend. The premise is that you’re running a bunch of different museums across a single county, each with a specific theme requiring specialist experts who go on expeditions to acquire new exhibits. Themes range from prehistory and aquariums to botany and science to the supernatural and outer space; I do wish there were an art museum, but it’s fun even without one. The game feels similar to Roller Coaster Tycoon without as many customizable facets. I have quite the collection of poltergeists going in my supernatural museum, so until they all feel less lonely, this game will probably be one of my distractions.
Revolution of America from Ebenezer Sibley’s 1788 A Complete Illustration of the Celestial Science of Astrology (Photo from NYHS) I began to (vaguely!) conceptualize a second project and found some very preliminary related material, which gives an exciting reason (new research!) to finish writing the current project. It has to do with questions of time and belief during the so-called age of reason.
After talking about it for weeks, I decided to launch this newsletter. I’m tired of my only writing practice being dissertation related, and need writing to feel playful again, or at least lower pressure…so here we are! The goal is to write in this space regularly, but the exact shape of that remains to be seen. More on that soon.