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...
