Is It Really 2010?!

I'm trying to get better at carving smaller, more detailed things like this:

I found the inspiration for that in a 1924 geology textbook. I want to say that I picked up the book from the free table at UNM, but I'm not sure whether or not that's a true statement. Somehow this ninety-six year old geology textbook came into my possession and now I am using illustrations from it to practice my carving.

KINDLE-MAS

While redeeming a Christmas Kindle gift certificate from my aunt Char, I found the classics section on the Amazon website and downloaded a bunch of stuff. Many classics are no longer under copyright so you can find them online for free, but Amazon generally charges around 99 cents per novel. As far as I'm concerned, it's easier to download them directly rather than hunting them down online from one of the free sites, saving them to my computer, then transferring them to my Kindle.

The first thing I started to read is a non-fiction slave narrative called The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, which was published in 1789. I actually read it for the first time years ago in an American literature class, but at the time I was not so interested in history or historical writings. I don't know what made me pick it up again, but this time I'm finding it fascinating.

From one of the free sites, I downloaded the collected letters of Mark Twain (just now I'm reading letters from the years he spent as a gold prospector in Nevada during the gold rush). I also found Fanny Hill, a work of early pornography written by John Cleland in 1748. What else? Oh, The Education of Henry Adams, written in 1907, and which I also read years ago in an American lit class.

I'm really loving my Kindle still.

Studio

Despite being sick, Dave and I went off to the studio to get some work done tonight. In addition to the little geology carvings I've been doing, I'm also doing some larger stuff, calaveras and such. I think it will be interesting to work with some underglaze painting on the brown clay and Dia de Los Muertos calaveras lend themselves to that kind of painting.

We'll see, no?