fifty-seven: a river in a time of dryness / you fight the long defeat
(Note — sending this a few days later than scheduled, but truly, I felt like 2,000 words of ruminating on politics and personhood and then dropping more...
fifty-six and three quarters: lives outside crisis (the American politics mini-edition)
(Yes! It’s a fraction! This does not get the dignity of a whole number! Down with having to waste brain cycles on this bullshit at all, really!) So as you...
fifty-six-point-five: a question of consent that i'm asking you all to get a real answer
So: My inbox has been rife with very personal processing of American electoral politics and fallout for the past few weeks, most of it fairly invasive and...
fifty-six: (if this is a game, are we cheating? yup.)
(This month’s title from that XKCD strip I linked last issue: a mood which extended, and never a bad one.) We kicked off October around these parts by...
fifty-five: use the edges and value the marginal
This month’s title from a permaculture principles video that was part of my Food Security coursework this summer: a handful of guidelines for growing food...
fifty-four: because people are good / whisper it under your breath
This month’s title track, found one Saturday evening in late July after a week in which the air was thick and noir in an L.A. fashion, a week when the river...
fifty-three: death is coming for us all, but not today
This month’s title from a song I found via Greg Davies’s Desert Island Discs episode and was immediately smitten. It’s more triumphalist that I admit I was...
fifty-two: Toad will now walk on a high wire, and he will not fall down
This month’s title from my new favourite Mastodon quotebot, Frog and Toad, which pulls Frog and Toad Are Friends lines out of context enough that you realize...
fifty-one: better drowned than duffers; if not duffers, won't drown.
I had never actually read Swallows & Amazons before this spring, which means I’d never really encountered this line, which is apparently pretty iconic? I...
fifty: soon enough, work and love will make a man out of you
This month’s title from the constant, drifting soundtrack of April: a Constantines cover from July Talk's Leah Fay and Eamon McGrath, done as a birthday gift...
forty-nine: my love is bigger than your love (sing it!)
(Apologies, folks -- this was meant to go out Friday, and then buttondown scarfed it. Support was quick to help, but it means some of this will be a little...
forty-eight: Yo no soy marinero, soy capitán, soy capitán, soy capitán
(Para bailar La Bamba / se necesita una poca de gracia)I've known this song by heart since I was four years old, and never realized there was a bit that...
forty-seven: abandon normal instruments
I've wanted an Oblique Strategies deck since about the moment I heard of them: divination for artists, yeah, but just the very name makes something stir in...
forty-six-point-five: testing, testing
Just a little. So after some shopping around, I've migrated this circus to Buttondown, and this is our test email.You don't have to do anything -- the...
forty-six: my firm intention is to live forever
This month's title from The Edge of Love (2008), a movie about Dylan Thomas behaving badly. (There are no movies about Dylan Thomas behaving well.) It...
forty-five: when they ask / what do i see / i say a bright white beautiful heaven hanging over me
This month's title from The National, which is unabashedly Dad Rock (seeing them live at Massey was the highest recorded concentration of dads per million...
forty-four: o I dream a highway back to you, love
This month's title from Thanksgiving dinner, which was eaten around midnight (due to working hours and sometimes just taking a long lazy time to cook...
forty-three: widen your moral fantasy / widen your sense of time
This month's title from an article I finally got around to reading late August, on coping with climate everything. It's all the stuff I like in a meal...
forty-two: liquefy me / liquefy these walls
This month's title brought to you by The Rheostatics. It popped into my head for the first time in at least ten years sometime around the Ides of July, and...
forty-one: Harry says: when faced with straitjackets / get bigger.
It's probably intensely recursive to quote from a poem you wrote; borders on wanky, honestly. But this line has been circling my head this month, like...
forty: realists of a larger reality
Good day! This letter is both late (because I was traveling) and long this month, because I am going to dissect a book in full Reviewer Two aspect in a way...
thirty-nine: I got it 'cause I always take the long way home
This lyric showed up last newsletter; for various reasons, it's been promoted to title this month (a temporary gentleman!). It's from (friend to all...
thirty-eight: une immense espérance a traversé la terre
This month's title from the background lyrics of Alt-J's "Hunger of the Pine" and also Alfred de Musset's poem "L'espoir en Dieu" (I love highly literate...
thirty-seven: the falling leaf can't forget the tree
stationery robbery (Not my joke, see reference.) March has been a lot of little picky deadlines all in a row with very little gratification just yet, so I've...
thirty-six: your commitment is yours to make
Greetings from a never-ending month of hard weather: We've had almost a winter storm a week here in Toronto, with a few days between that felt (and smelled)...
thirty-five: not by yourself, and not all at once.
I ended 2022 by duly performing one of the Christmas week rituals: Telling myself I wouldn't spend money on the Steam sale, doing it anyways, and being...
thirty-four: the arc of momentum bends toward justice
So, earlier this month I said I owed you a brief one? Now the holidays have hit, and I owe you a long one. I preemptively apologize for sending this on the...
thirty-three: ripping the work back
There is an upside to Twitter melting slightly; okay, a couple upsides, but I digress. I am on Mastodon now, slightly grudgingly at leahbobet@mstdn.ca, and...
thirty-two: just make sure you get your hours in
For most of October, I've been spending time in a kind of unstructured thinking that's really been forced to the wayside in the past few years: rowing myself...
thirty-one: ambition ecologies
I have two kinds of Septembers. One of them is bright and enterprising, high-energy, the first-day-of-school kind of September. The other kind is a bit more...
thirty: inaction is a weapon of mass destruction
This edition's title brought to you by friend to all community organizers Faithless, who had his head sorted and this whole beat covered in 2004. Everything...
twenty-eight: that yearned desperately to affirm the world rather than negate it
This from Hayao Miyazaki, who is not formally, I found out today, a Living National Treasure, except for how he is. In the quote he's talking about sneaking...
twenty-six: upheaval, punctuated by big deals
Barely time to stick head above water, here in the general calumny. I almost went to Quebec and then didn't, because truck occupations. I almost went to New...
twenty-four: an absolute failure at tonal consistency
Apologies for the gap between the last one and this one. With conditions developing so quickly this fall and winter, it's been hard to know what to say -- or...
twenty-three: then a ploughman said, Speak to us of Work.
Good afternoon from the last great skybound outpost of something-or-other, where we have been beset by it: freelance work, housework, creative work,...
twenty-two: each person, each situation, and each subject in its own way
The title this month comes from Buber's I and Thou--or, as translator Walter Kaufmann rather persuasively argues, I and You, because Du is the informal-...
twenty-one: on immunity
immunity report Sorry: this letter is two weeks late. But the big news around here was that the household got our second vaccine shots the Friday before it...
nineteen: a medley of extemporanea/the clip show episode
Issue nineteen comes to you from the day after my first vaccine shot, which I booked entirely off from every form of toil in case of bad side effects and--is...
eighteen: Artax gets right out of the swamp
I write from within Deadline Mire, so briefly and in short little bursts with much glancing back at the email. March was as busy as I thought it might be,...
seventeen: dressed to suppress all kinds of sorrow
dirtbag shawarma cat The stay-at-home order continues apace here in downtown Toronto; it's been just over 100 days since we went under it, and though it was...
sixteen: 4′33″
Apologies, first, for the delay on this newsletter. (I start all my emails this way now: first off, apologies for the delay.) The world's been an unsettled...
fifteen: the life you want
December rituals are persistent. Not necessarily the widespread holiday ones, but the act of closing things down for a while: the last invoice this year for...
fourteen: big little lives
I wanted this preamble to be about living a bigger life, and how that doesn't necessarily have to get hindered by which four walls you're between. November,...
thirteen: head down, the race is long
We ran out of baseball, so these days, the habit is races. After all the archival races I've watched in the past few months (hey, if you charge me $30 a year...
twelve: apparently not see you in September?
This was technically supposed to go out last Tuesday, but despite the rising case numbers, September is apparently still and always September, which means my...
eleven: free space
"I felt excellent and in a cheerful mood and reluctant to leave free space...as for the so-called psychological barrier that was supposed to be...
ten: the horse latitudes
So that phrase doesn't mean what I thought it did. I'd heard the story about the dead horses, water shortages and scarcity and throwing animals aboard to...
eight: you can be good
and now that you don't have to be perfect Case numbers in Toronto started to drop hard in early June--a wobble and then a cliff. Like, I'm guessing, many...
seven: setting up signals across vast distances
The title this time around is from Muriel Rukeyser's Poem (I lived in the first century of world wars), which was shared in one of the group chats that's...
six: don't the hours grow shorter as the days go by
If I'm counting right, this is about two weeks late. Apologies for that: my health has been a slightly precarious thing over the past month (disclaimer: not...