> 171: Gift guide guide, build a frog, notice in order to love the world more
Wizard with an Orb Earring
Hi. Hope you had a good Thanksgiving, should you celebrate such things! Here's some art, ideas, and internet for you:
A guide to gift guides: For gifts in the form of donations in someone's name, a donation to an abortion fund or a local food bank is, imo, a great idea this year. For gifts of the tangible realm, I think good guides are Robin Sloan's, Helen Rosner's, Erica Cerulo and Claire Mazur's, Tim Mazurek's, and the Cup of Jo team's. Generally I also believe you can't go wrong with sending someone food, ice cream, and/or flowers. Just nothing they're allergic to. Museum gift shops, especially MOMA's, are also great. Let's be real: The teens in your life would just like cash. God bless the teens.
"She sat on a bench and watched the leaves fall. It had been nice while it lasted, being a person. Getting turned back into a vessel would be unfortunate. But maybe she would not stay a vessel long. It was a little surprising they thought they had the power to do it."
An audio drawing class from illustrator Wendy McNaughton, who illustrated Salt Fat Acid Heat.
Newsletter Fave Choire Sicha is writing a limited-edition newsletter with dispatches from the Ghislaine Maxwell trial.
"When I read the weather journals of Gerard Manley Hopkins, full of riverine descriptions of cloud architecture, I envied his ebullient noticing, his passionate benevolence toward everything he saw. I started a weather journal, hoping, I wrote, that it 'might make me love the world more.' I remained a melancholic American struggling with Polish grammar, but attention did render the world entrancing. Trips to the post office and supermarket became exhilarating; paying attention to the oddities and ironies of even my dullest routines reminded me that I lived, I perceived and I contained a startling range of feelings: humiliation, pain, self-hatred, yes, but also wonder. Wonder that depended on nothing but my own willingness to find it."
Build a frog and/or type a song.
Hot bots: Holiday Movie and Yassify.
Holy crap, this bookstore.
I’m learning so many different ways to be quiet. There’s how I stand in the lawn, that’s one way. There’s also how I stand in the field across from the street, that’s another way because I’m farther from people and therefore more likely to be alone. There’s how I don’t answer the phone, and how I sometimes like to lie down on the floor in the kitchen and pretend I’m not home when people knock. There’s daytime silent where I stare, and a nighttime silent when I do things. There’s shower silent and bath silent and California silent and Kentucky silent and car silent and then there’s the silence that comes back, a million times bigger than me, sneaks into my bones and wails and wails and wails until I can’t be quiet anymore. That’s how this machine works.
—Ada Limón, "Bright Dead Things"
Like this newsletter? Share the link to subscribe with someone you like. Past issues are here.
Bye,
Laura