Extra! Extra!
| We got two kinds here Those that bleed the blood And those that work to will it –“Criminals,” Uncle Tupelo |
When I lived off of Northside Drive in Atlanta in the late ’80s, I used to drive past a women’s health clinic on the way home from class, and for several weeks (months?) there were anti-abortion protesters camped out on the sidewalk near the clinic: Operation Rescue was a new movement then, Randall Terry its charismatic leader. Terry denounced abortion, birth control, divorce, homosexuality, and the usual assortment of radical right obsessions.
Fast forward to the year 2004: The Washington Post reports that Terry’s son, Jamiel, has written an essay for Out magazine about coming to terms with being gay. Two of Randall Terrry’s daughters have gotten pregnant without being married, and he has traded in his first wife for a younger model.
And still he takes on the air of the righteously indignant, telling whoever will listen about how untrustworthy his children are. This is what hatred and hypocrisy look like.
Jamiel is quoted in the Post: “We were taught that if you saw pain in the world, you should speak out. I knew that because of my name I could get published and help young men and women who are gay and struggling because of their religious upbringing.”
This is really just a “Hey, isn’t this cool?” kind of post, and I guess I’ve had a lot of those lately. Take a look at Joseph Viscomi’s chapter on William Blake’s “Illuminated Printing” techniques.
ìIlluminated Printingî was first published in The Cambridge Companion to William Blake, edited by Morris Eaves, 2003. It is republished here by permission of Cambridge University Press. While the text remains the same, the electronic version has 95 illustrations versus 9 in the printed version. The illustrations demonstrate in detail the stages of both Blakeís relief etching (ìilluminated printingî) and conventional intaglio etching according to the six ìChambersî in the ìPrinting house in Hell,î from Blakeís The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. The comparison of these two methods of etching will help reveal what was borrowed, altered, invented, and radical in Blakeís new mode of graphic production. The illustrations, which are linked to enlargements that have detailed captions, supplement the text but also function autonomously as slide shows on the technical and aesthetic contexts in which illuminated printing was invented, and as tutorials in the production of engravings, etchings, and relief etchings.
Fascinating stuff. Without the Blake Archive, I would not be able to teach Blake the way that I do.
Slate presents a slide-show of artwork created from the results of a homophobic book vandal’s assault on the San Francisco Public Library.