a letter from the northern provinces
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thirty-four: the arc of momentum bends toward justice
December 29, 2022
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
December 6, 2022
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
November 1, 2022
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
October 3, 2022
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
September 5, 2022
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
April 25, 2022
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
February 28, 2022
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
December 26, 2021
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.
October 11, 2021
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
August 23, 2021
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
July 19, 2021
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
May 10, 2021
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
April 5, 2021
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
March 8, 2021
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″
February 8, 2021
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 21, 2020
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
November 23, 2020
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
October 26, 2020
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?
September 28, 2020
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
August 31, 2020
"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...
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