You know I love a little story about the unexpected history of an everyday object. I was delighted to read about the development of the image-based aircraft safety card in this Seattle Times story by Lauren Rosenblatt. It combines a little material culture history, a little UX history, and some ardent nerds, which makes a great cocktail. You could also consider it an appetizer for your (my?? one’s???) deep dive into airline safety card history!

There is an incredible array of safety cards produced in countries around the world, but Rosenblatt profiles Washington-based Interaction Research Corporation, which is one of the biggest companies in the field these days. IRC was founded by two psychologists working for an aircraft manufacturer. Airlines provided safety guides on aircrafts as early as the mid-1920s, and the Federal Aviation Administration mandated US airlines’ adoption of printed safety cards in 1965. But the FAA provided few standards for the cards’ design and execution, and there was little sense of how well these tools worked during crashes. Douglas Aircraft asked psychologists Daniel Johnson and Beau Altman to research the effectiveness of passenger safety strategies in actual catastrophic events. They observed that “passengers [who] survived the impact of the crash” were often “unable to safely exit the plane.” Altman and Johnson formed the Interaction Research Corporation in 1971 with the aim of designing more effective safety information cards; IRC also produced the first passenger safety film in 1973.

Though there are still some other companies that make aviation safety cards, IRC dominates the field, producing cards for companies that have included not only commercial airlines, but also the MGM Resorts and Playboy aircraft fleets (!!!!!). IRC also began publishing braille cards in 1990, after over a decade of development.

Rosenblatt’s article describes how IRC designers work to update cards as our habits change; particularly interesting is their effort to communicate visually that mobile power banks shouldn’t go overhead or be charged at your seat: “They found users don’t recognize a black rectangle with a lightning bolt in the middle and four green dots on the side as a power bank. But, adding a charging cord from the bottom of the rectangle increased comprehension to 92%.”

If this isn’t enough for you, try this history of IRC or enthusiast and historian Fons Schaefers’ seven-part history of airline safety cards or Kevin Clayhens’ large archive of examples.

See you soon!

PS: For donations to support Minnesotans facing the ICE occupation, try Stand with Minnesota, which gives you lots of choices. And here’s the Maine Solidarity Fund & the Maine Immigrant Rights’ Coalition.

All of the people I’ve looked up on Wikipedia in the last month: Deni Avdija, Guy Gilchrist, Daniel Sperber, H.G. Wells, Martha Gellhorn, Lillian Leitzel, Tiny Kline, Helen Deutsch, Benjamin Mays, Fritz Fischer, Thurl Ravenscroft, JS Bach, James Coody Johnson, Zoe Rosenberg, Samuel L. Jackson, E. Ethelbert Miller, PT Barnum, August Aichhorn, Noland Arbaugh, Dian Fossey, J. Edgar Hoover, Lucy, John Cade, Swein Forkbeard, J.P. Morgan, Gillian Rose, Sinead O’Connor, David Eberhardt, Paul Gallico, Tana French, Henry Kraus, Billy Bob Thornton, Paul B. Dunbar, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Blanche Bruce, Clarence Darrow, Leopold and Loeb, Johnnie Cochran, James VI and I, Thurgood Marshall, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Kamala Harris, Loretta Lynch, Macbeth, Judas Iscariot, Jefferson Davis, Joaquin Phoenix, Millie Bobby Brown, Simone Biles, Mary Stuart, Mary, Queen of Scots, Stevie Wonder, Zendaya, Billie Eilish, Nadia Comaneci, Clara Barton, Elena Ceausescu, Mikhail Gorbachev, Howard W. French, Eartha Kitt, Charlemagne, William the Conqueror, John Maynard Keynes, David Brooks, John Lewis, Edward Brooke, Babe Ruth, James Cromwell, Hank Aaron, Harry Belafonte, Dmitri Mendeleev, Lil Nas X, François Tosquelles, Jacques Lacan, Stedman Graham, Phil Hellmuth, Julius Erving, Carmelo Anthony, George Gervin

If you’re looking for a good hypothetical with which you can disturb everyone at the holiday table, Laura Jean McKay’s The Animals in That Country (affiliate link) offers a very strong contender: What would it be like if we could understand the language of animals?1 Her answer is equally clear: it would probably be an absolute fucking nightmare, mate.

When we think about the possibility of communicating with animals, we think about specific animals, usually pets we love, and we assume both that it would be positive and that it would produce something like a more human relation with them. Jean, McKay’s narrator, is taken in by this fantasy, too. It’s partly because it allows her some relief in her otherwise dismal life: she lives at the animal safari park her former daughter-in-law runs, where she can’t get promoted to a ranger position, and spends her off time drinking her way into liver failure in her shitty bungalow except on the one day a week she’s allowed to see her granddaughter. Yes, of course she prides herself on what she thinks of as her strong connection to one of the park’s dingoes, Sue. Yes, of course she and her granddaughter spend time planning an elaborate animal sanctuary together.

But when the novel opens, Sue has just bitten Jean in front of the park’s guests—and, more ominously, there’s news of a new, highly infectious flu spreading across the country. Its main symptom: the infected can hear the thoughts of all of the living creatures around them. Jean wants to contract the disease. It’s what she’s always wanted. When her son absconds with her granddaughter, bound for a coastal community where people are drowning themselves over whale song, Jean and Sue pursue them through an apocalyptic landscape where people are being driven crazy by all they can now understand.

This model of human consciousness we impose on animals—my cat will talk to me—is swiftly undercut by the novel, which draws attention to the fact that animal consciousness is actually everywhere. What, you didn’t mean you wanted access to the thoughts of gnats when you fantasized about knowing what your dog thinks??? Even in a world where we bemoan the violence and violent consequences of human dominance, we’re still surrounded by wild consciousness. In McKay’s telling, animal consciousness is obtuse and even hostile—comprehensible, after a fashion, but in ways that suggest that understanding something might not even produce meaning, much less clarity or connection. It can, in fact, make her characters lose their grip on their very human consciousness altogether.

I really loved The Animals in That Country. I’ve been thinking about it since I read it late last year. It’s in the tradition of horror, apocalyptic fiction, and pandemic narratives, but it works with these tropes in ways that were new for me, and it challenges our anthropomorphic fantasies in thought-provoking ways.

See you next year!!!!!!

I can’t stop listening to this song about a shipwreck, and it’s not “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” the song about a shipwreck that most everyone knows.1 Well, one thing that differentiates it is that this song is actually about surviving a shipwreck, and “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” is … not at all about that.

I’m not really into John Darnielle’s band The Mountain Goats, but once in a while something really hits for me.2 The song, “Cold at Night,” is part of their latest record, Through the Fire Across from Peter Balkan, a concept album entirely about a shipwreck. Honestly, concept albums make me kind of itchy, and, as I said, I’m not really “into” The Mountain Goats, but I read this very long profile of Darnielle that ran in GQ last month and, halfway through, the writer quotes this lyric: “The first thing you learn is how strong you can be if you have to / And the next thing you learn is how cold it can get at night.”

Well.

I don’t know, I try not to spend a lot of time thinking about how hard my life has been, both because I have a profound fear, probably instilled by something mean my mother said to me in 1996 or something, of “feeling sorry for myself,” and because it is very overwhelming sometimes. But I first listened to the song, again according to Apple Music, three days before the thirtieth (three-zero, 30) anniversary of my dad’s death, which fell on Thanksgiving (cute, right???) this year. And then, the day before Thanksgiving, one of my older brothers died.3 He was fifty. Once in a while, I am reminded that it is exactly as hard as it has always seemed.

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According to Apple Music, I have now listened to “Cold at Night” 167 times. The number is actually higher, because I have also watched this charming animated video a number of times:

I like the song a lot. It does describe a kind of dilemma that has accompanied a lot of these really awful things that have happened to me: I do get through them, but getting through them is sort of only the beginning of living through them. And the relief of having gotten through them only lasts so long.

I don’t know if I’ll listen to the rest of the album. I’m not sure I need to. There’s a lot right here.

Also seasonally appropriate: the one other Mountain Goats song I know, “This Year,” which was written in 2005. I guess The Mountain Goats really hit for me every twenty years.

Here is a photo of me with my brother. I was probably three or four—look at my mouthful of rickety baby teeth!—and he would have been eleven or twelve. I think you can see in the photo that I was once his favorite person and he was mine.

If you’re celebrating Hanukkah, picture me kindling my Banorah with you. If not, you know, I hope there’s a little light for you somewhere, too. (You can pretend that it’s from my Banorah if you want.)

See you soon.

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You might remember my profound love for things that look like other things (TTLLOT). Since I posted some favorites in 2023, I’ve been saving new candidates in my Notes app and on Instagram, and I decided it was time to share them again.

Ideally, the object mimics the real function or character of the OT. This principle makes me a discerning and rigorous shopper. Jenny Lemons has a LOT of food-themed hair claws, but I like the taco one best because it follows the form—the hair becomes part of the taco filling. You put the pens in the mouth of the whale. You use the hedgehog’s quills to brush (or to better dry your clothing). The bird’s wing lifts. The gyoza is stuffed with stuff. You get it.

Here are my recent favorites. Note that the sizing of the photos is all weird—they are not relative to one another or accurate representations of size.

William Whale pencil case, Donna Wilson Ltd. (U.K. company), $37 USD

Taco hair claw, Jenny Lemons, $24 USD

Hedgehog table brush, Boston General Store, $22 USD

Gyoza pouch, Shibua Stationery (Japanese company), $31 USD

Crane scissors, for personal grooming, Kikkerland, $14 USD, and for sewing, Iris & Stout, $27

Fish nail clippers, set of two, Kikkerland, $8

Hedgehog dryer balls, Kikkerland, $12.50 USD (Kikkerland is very good at this sort of thing)

Mockingbird pouch, Portland Leather Goods, $24

Happy gift-giving! See you soon.

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Last month I heard this great episode of BBC Outlook about an American folk artist I’d not heard of—a musician who goes by Mingering Mike, who recorded over fifty albums between 1968 and 1977, and whose work was discovered by record digger Dori Hadar at a D.C. flea market in the early 2000s, when he found a crate of dozens of Mike’s record albums. And they were all … fake. They were intricately detailed album jackets with fake cardboard records inside. It was all the work of this one guy’s imagination, made at a time of deep loneliness and isolation. Hadar and other record obsessives managed to track down Mike and fill in the story of who he was and where he was when he made all this art. Outlook interviewed Hadar and Mike in September, and the result is fascinating, charming, and fun. (This story is probably not new to some of you—it’s been unfolding in the media since 2003, and I sort of can’t understand how I missed it??)

Hadar and Mike are now collaborators—Mingering Mike’s website includes all of his work, including the acapella recordings Mike made. Mike appeared (in costume; his anonymity remains well-preserved) at the opening of his show at the Smithsonian, and the museum made this great “Meet the Artist” video:

Delightful from start to finish, with plenty of opportunities for deep dives in a variety of directions! Perfect fodder for me and maybe you!

See you soon!

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I began working as a fact-checker two years ago, work I find both fun and pedantically satisfying. One of my gigs is with Parapraxis magazine, founded by my brilliant friend Hannah Zeavin, and today we’re publishing to the site an article that appeared in our Resistance issue earlier this year. (The print issues are beautifully designed by Crisis & a pleasure to read; you can buy Resistance and preorder the forthcoming Romance issue if you’re so inclined.) I loved fact-checking it—I learned so much about the anti-apartheid movement and about jazz—and I wanted to share it with you.

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Francis Gooding’s “Like Deepening Thunder in Our Hearts,” written in part from personal knowledge—his parents knew many of the subjects and collected their work—is a beautiful, elegiac history of the South African jazz musical exile community. Jazz musicians began leaving the country en masse in 1960, typically for the US (e.g., Miriam Makeba, Abdullah Ibrahim) and, for Francis’ purposes in the article, the UK—drawn there in particular because of the African National Congress’s official presence there.

“All of them, in their music, presented a compressed and multiple expression of exile life in all its aspects; the musical sound and sounding of exile was inseparable from the political, physical, and psychical costs of exile,” he writes. “Many of these musicians paid those costs with their health or lives, and many of them came close to doing so.”

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A couple of bonuses: the 1970 ANC propaganda record Gooding quotes in the story & Blue Notes for Mongezi, the album his bandmates recorded a week after he died.

Enjoy—more recommendations to come in the near future.

See you soon!

I greet you with an abundance of recommendations this week!

Last year I watched the BBC series Mr. Loverman—premiering on BritBox on June 4!— which is about the crisis that confronts the titular character when he reaches a late-in-life inflection point and has to decide whether or not to come out to his family and friends—whether, that is, to leave his long-foundering marriage to Carmel and openly inhabit his decades-long relationship with his lover Morris. (Carmel knows that he is unfaithful and has been for years, but doesn’t know—or refuses to know—that he’s gay.) When Carmel returns to Antigua for a family emergency, Barry—Mr. Loverman—spends those days feeling increasing pressure to decide whether or not to live authentically, unable to communicate his sense of crisis until he lashes out at his grandson’s homophobic friends.

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I think I found out about the show because of some music algorithm. Mr. Loverman has a great soundtrack and beautiful scoring by Speakers Corner Quartet, and one day “This Is How We Walk on the Moon” came up in a queue (Apple Music, I think).

I heard it before I knew anything about it, but I was delighted when I realized it’s a cover of a song by the cellist and composer Arthur Russell, a leading light of New York’s avant-garde music scene—and underground disco —for nearly twenty years before his death of an AIDS-related illness in 1992.

Here’s his original version of “Walk on the Moon”:

Russell was incredibly prolific and careened across genres; he left hundreds of recordings behind when he died. But his work was overlooked (some writers have said “forgotten,” but I don’t think that’s true, not least because Philip Glass and David Byrne remained admirers) during the decade after. He’s developed a larger profile through, for example, an album of his dance music and a pop record, both in 2004, a documentary and a biography a few years after that, and then a massive triple LP of covers in 2014. When I explored that album, I listened to José González’s cover, too, which layers horn instrumentals and disco beats for an homage that incorporates so many of Russell’s musical voices.

Music algorithms don’t usually hit that well for me, but this time I ended up on a delightful path of discovery. Let me know if you watch Mr. Loverman!

See you soon!

Have you sniffed any lilacs yet? It’s lilac season and time is running out! I went to Lilacia Park in Lombard, which is a city park specializing in lilacs and tulips. It was originally the private garden of a man named—and I cannot stress this enough—Colonel William Plum and his wife Helen Williams Plum, who brought home two lilac varieties when they visited the gardens of French horticulturist and lilac breeder Victor Lemoine. There are hundreds of lilac varieties. I heard a lady coo “Hello, Beautiful!” to a lilac bush as she leaned in to smell it. The vibe was tight.

I wrote down some of the lilac names, and here they are with some photos. (I did not write down which photos were of which varieties. Maybe next year??)

Asesippi * White Lace * Paul Thirion * Ballbridget * The Bride * Belle de Nancy Andenken an Ludwig Spath * Palibin * Saugeana * President Grevy * James McFarlane

Summer Snow * Marlyensis * Agin Beauty * Adelaide Dunbar * Gladiator * Mount Baker * Tiny Dancer(TM) *Excel * Minuet * Dappled Down

Michel Buchner * Mme. Casimir Perier * Burgundy Queen * Atheline Wilbur * Oliver de Serres * Biala Anna * President Lincoln * Monge * Hedin

Miss Kim * Bloomerang(TM) * Jewel * Bridal Memories * Miss Ellen Willmott Krasavitsa Moskvy (Beauty of Moskow) * Alvan R. Grant * Montainge * Yankee Doodle

See you soon!

I’ve talked before about the music I listen to during therapeutic ketamine treatments. Lately I’ve been listening to this one Zoë Keating track from her 2005 self-produced album. Like, listening to it on repeat.

She uses electronic sampling to build up these incredible compositions, loops layered over each other and added and then taken away. They’re good for kind of zoning out because there’s so much repetition, but also because you can listen in a meditative way and try to follow a particular loop as the sonic field gets more crowded.

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Some of the songs have a dark feel, but not this one. It feels something, my friend Terri said, like being held. My favorite part is when a new loop kicks in around 48 seconds: a rising and then descending pattern of double stops, which are two notes on different strings played together. That’s that kind of broad rasp you hear—the double stops. (I play the cello as an extremely middling hobby. There’s your lore for the day.) There’s just something warm about it that I really like.

I sort of think of myself as someone to whom music isn’t all that important, but that isn’t really true. I just listen to songs I love on endless repeat a lot until they slip into a groove in my brain and free up some other space for thinking.

Anyway, more soon, I hope. Thanks for being here.

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More ketamine jams:

Do you know about the dishwasher guy? This guy Alec Watson has had a YouTube channel called Technology Connections, where he has spent the past decade making detailed videos explaining and critiquing consumer electronics and home appliances. And he is extremely popular. Technology Connections has 2.58 million subscribers.

His playlists (not comprehensive!!!) reveal just hints of the topics he’s taken on: pinball machines, heat pumps, the history of artificial sound, the Beta vs. VHS format wars. But he’s also gone long on LED Christmas lights (hates ‘em, but recently found some that meet his approval), the popcorn button on microwaves, heat pumps, and … dishwashers.

He made two videos about dishwashers a few years ago that were “the length of a feature film,” so he recently made a shorter one—which is still 27 minutes long and has 4.2 million views. I can’t tell you why, exactly, but know that it’s both very soothing and truly compelling. My profound thanks to Terri and Sauce for bringing this into my life.

When you inevitably become a powdered dishwasher soap truther—and you will—let me know.

See you soon!

PS: In response to the very reasonable question “what’s up with this newsletter,” I’m … working on it, in spite of (?) my fractured spine. If you are a paid subscriber, thank you. It makes a very big difference to me. I’d love to send you a copy of “Jail on Wheels.”

I have in the past recommended the songs I listen to on repeat while receiving ketamine treatments. Many favorites seem to have come to me through, like, the Spotify algorithm, which is embarrassing, but in my defense I’ve been gently high when it’s happened. Only rarely do I make the leap to listening to the rest of an artist’s work, but today I wanted to tell you about one of my exceptions: the multi-instrumental finger-style guitarist and composer Yasmin Williams.

Williams got started by playing the video game Guitar Hero 2 as an eighth grader, but quickly moved beyond it—she released an EP of her original songs two years later. One of her trademarks is setting an acoustic guitar in her lap, tuning the strings in harmony, and finger-picking, but she also plays the kalimba (she attaches one to her guitar and plays both at once!), banjo, kora, and harp-guitar, experiments with stringed instrument bows, and wears tap shoes in order to add percussion on some songs. I saw her at the Evanston Folk Festival this year; she’s incredible to watch. (Here’s a video of her playing Beyonce’s “Texas Hold ‘Em” on banjo and bones.1)

Anyway, I first heard “Juvenescence” from Urban Driftwood during a ketamine treatment and thought “what is this beautiful sunshower of a song!” (There is also a song called “Sunshowers” on the album, but it wasn’t the one I heard, I swear.)

“Juvenescence” is also the first song in her NPR Tiny Desk set from 2021, where you can see her disinctive playing style:

All of this is a preamble to sharing a song from her new record Acadia, “Cliffwalk,” which features Dom Flemons, an original member of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, on rhythm bones; he played with her at the Evanston Folk Fest show in August.

I don’t listen to this one during ketamine, but I have listened to it most mornings in lieu of post-election NPR. Strongly recommended.

See you soon!

PS: In response to the very reasonable question “what’s up with this newsletter,” I’m … working on it, in spite of (?) my fractured spine. If you are a paid subscriber, thank you. It makes a very big difference to me. I’d love to send you a copy of “Jail on Wheels.”

In honor of my fractured spine,1 a classic children’s book: Margot Zemach’s Caldecott-winning picture book It Could Always Be Worse, a retelling of a Yiddish folk tale in which a poor man asks his rabbi what he should do about his frustration over his crowded, chaotic one-room house.

My sister ex-wife saw it at the National Yiddish Book Center museum shop years ago & we refer to it often; I sent it to my BBF Amelia’s son for his third birthday.2

One of the best things about diasporic Judaism is our fundamental respect for, and cultural attachment to (no paywall), the kvetch,3 We kvetch, and then our rabbis remind us that it could always be worse. Which, you know, can’t argue with that.

See you soon!

PS: In response to the very reasonable question “what’s up with this newsletter,” I’m … working on it, in spite of (?) my fractured spine. If you are a paid subscriber, thank you. It makes a very big difference to me. I’d love to send you a copy of “Jail on Wheels.”

P.PS. I’ve been informed that the link from last week was messed up! I’ve corrected it!

Can I interest you in a frankly majestic 120-minute playlist consisting solely of covers of “Eleanor Rigby”? My old pal Lola shared this with me years ago—it’s an episode from the radio show Chances With Wolves which I actually haven’t listened to much otherwise. It seems really great and probably of interest to more people than the self-selecting Venn diagram of people with ADHD and people who love a dumb joke flawlessly executed. (I am the latter.)

See you soon!

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PS: In response to the very reasonable question “what’s up with this newsletter,” I’m … working on it. If you are a paid subscriber, thank you. It makes a very big difference to me. I’d love to send you a copy of “Jail on Wheels.”

I read Rita Bullwinkel’s novel Headshot over the weekend and was so dazzled and drawn in that I tried to finish it in one setting. (I finished it in two, whatever.) I just loved it and I think you will, too. Thank you to whoever recommended it to me—I’d forgotten I’d put it on reserve at the library and what it was even about.

The plot is just what the subject line up there says: Headshot takes place over two days at Bob’s Boxing Palace in Reno, Nevada, where eight girls are competing for the Daughters of America Cup. That’s it. That’s the plot.

But it also hardly describes what this book does, which is mine the inner lives of each of these girls as they fight one another, a combination of close third person that narrates what they think and feel in the ring and omniscient third that telescopes out to different places and times and tells us where they’ll go. The physicality is intense and even surprising, especially because I wouldn’t call it—a book about boxing—a violent book: Bullwinkel describes hits as “touches,” a choice that somehow doesn’t detract from the narrative proximity to their bodies. A couple of them are also feral weirdos, which I love. (Rachel is my favorite.) The chapters are also layered with short snippets—jumping back and forth in time, in perspective, intermixed with other observations like this one:

Nobody can ever know what a specific body is good at unless they’re inside it.

Or this:

The desire to please people is the desire to not be singular.

Bullwinkel also does really wonderful work with description. I once read a craft essay Eileen Myles wrote, in which they say “Use your voice like a camera and go,” and that’s what happens here—Bullwinkel’s eye is both unsparing and frames the miraculous and ecstatic in this quotidian setting:

The parents, and the coaches, and the piecemeal off-white, ramshackle chorus of men that the Daughters of America tournament has designated as judges, all of them are dull around the edges in a way that glares compared with the searing radiance of these girl fighters.

I saved so many favorite passages that it would be a little silly to share all of them, but I hope you’ll go find them yourself.

Talk soon!

PS: In response to the very reasonable question “what’s up with this newsletter,” I’m … working on it. If you are a paid subscriber, thank you. It makes a very big difference to me. I’d love to send you a copy of “Jail on Wheels.”

Hello from the Minnesota State Fair, where crop art made with native seeds and grasses has been a fixture for nearly sixty years!!! I spent a lot of time trembling with excitement at the crop art display yesterday and am sharing some of my favorites, some of which are prize winners and all of which are winners of my heart.

Talk soon!

PS: In response to the very reasonable question “what’s up with this newsletter,” I’m … working on it. If you are a paid subscriber, thank you. It makes a very big difference to me. I’d love to send you a copy of “Jail on Wheels.”

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This week, I’m sharing Wendy Brenner’s “Don’t Bleed on the Artwork: Notes from the Afterlife,” an essay about (“about”) her time working at a frame shop in Evanston, Illinois; it ran in the Spring 2024 issue of the Oxford American. She took the job, a kind of apprenticeship, when she moved home to take care of her aging mother.

I actually really wanted to work in a frame shop when I was in graduate school, and I loved her descriptions of the steps involved in framing. The clarity of the process, the physicality of it, the absorption it engenders, and the muscle memory it builds were all part of the appeal to me at a time when nothing seemed as orderly. As she writes,

I work six or seven hours without breaks. I can’t seem to explain this to my friends. Momentum, focus. While I’m cleaning glass, inspecting endlessly for specks of dust or lint, using a marker to cover a flea-sized chip on a frame, time falls away. Everything outside the moment falls away, like a blurred background in an Impressionist landscape. No, I don’t want lunch, no I don’t want to sit down.

The essay’s full of running lists (I love a running list) that mimic the rhythm and flow state of the work.

On the wood stored in the basement:

Ash, oak, pine, eucalyptus, ramin. Finger-jointed wood, wood made of milled scraps. Narrow, wide, flat, scooped, beveled, painted, stained.

Her boss’s biography:

He’s Wolfman Jack, WKRP’s Johnny Fever; he’s Oscar the Grouch with the worst smoker’s cough I’ve ever heard … He’s a rebel, an old hippie, or maybe a young one? A long-hair, not a suit … He loves vintage sci-fi comics and Robert Crumb and Lichtenstein and Dali and Hieronymus Bosch.

The stuff stashed around the work room:

Inside are multitudes of everything: the rainbow of four hundred frame samples on the walls, those upside-down V’s we all recognize; a long side counter covered with tape guns, staple guns, spray bottles, glass gloves, art gloves, rolls of brown kraft paper and plastic bags and hanging wire, labeled and unlabeled drawers of hardware, hangers, screws, tools—and everywhere, littered about the store like ballpoint pens on every surface: razor blades.

On an artist whose work her mother hung in her nursing home room:

In Rodo Boulanger’s work, children are often aloft: riding bicycles or animals, leaping after balloons, sitting on high ledges, their feet always dangling above the ground.

The art that she frames:

Landscapes and dreamscapes, towers, harbors, mountains, forests, icebergs, beloved anonymous houses, beloved anonymous pets, psychedelic visions and graffiti, diplomas, hockey jerseys, vintage bicycle parts, photographs of every possible object or being, doing every possible activity. A little pencil line drawing of Warhol’s famous Absolut vodka bottle, his signature scrawled at the bottom. A dentist’s certificate of appreciation for his work caring for “the oral health of Holocaust survivors.” An orange cartoon brontosaurus riding a tiny scooter through downtown Chicago. A pack of fierce-faced bicyclists racing along a cliff, in an advertisement for the 1953 Tour de France. Director John Waters grinning in his favorite pink Comme des Garçons jacket (“that looks like your aunt’s bedspread with the little balls on it,” he told GQ).

These lists become currents to carry you through the story, and I really admire this strategy. Let me know what you think.

SOME BUSINESS:

Chicagoans, save the date! On Saturday, August 17, I’ll be doing a reading at the Chicago Cultural Center with my friends Marc Fisher and Brett Bloom from Half-Letter Press. I’ll be talking about “Jail on Wheels,” my latest essay on a bizarre midcentury law enforcement experiment, & Marc will be reading from Prisoners’ Inventions, a newly reprinted & expanded “collaboration with our late friend Angelo about the many things he observed during the course of his long incarceration in California.” The event (free!) will be around 4 or 5 PM. More details to come.

PS: In response to the very reasonable question “what’s up with this newsletter,” I’m … working on it. If you are a paid subscriber, thank you. It makes a very big difference to me. I’d love to send you a copy of “Jail on Wheels.”

More filthy commerce: I designed a t-shirt to raise money for Watermelon Relief & another one because I wanted one for myself. (If you don’t want a donation on your behalf and just want the shirt(s), use the code ATCOST at checkout for 20% off.)

As you probably know, the perfect is in fact the enemy of the good for me, so instead of trying to craft the perfect newsletter, I’m collecting the stuff I’ve been saving in Pocket. I think you’ll find something you like here!

1. “In the Cemetery Where Jenni Rivera Is Buried,” Myriam Gurba, Alta Journal: Myriam Gurba on a pivotal time spent in queer spaces and places in Long Beach, California

2. “Losing a Beloved Community,” Eliza Griswold, The New Yorker: an excerpt from a forthcoming book about the collapse of an evangelical left church, Circle of Hope, in Philadelphia

3. “Against Women’s Writing,” Andrea Long Chu, New York: A review of Rachel Cusk’s new novel Parade and a meticulous untangling of Cusk’s—this sounds blunter than it is—ideological project as a novelist.

4. “My Father and the Withering of Liberal Zionism,” Ayelet Waldman, New York: Complex, devastating piece about Waldman’s family history and her recent participation in a Rabbis for Ceasefire protest at the Gaza border.

5. "The Broad Appeal of the Elsa Dress,” Abigail Covington, New York Times (full version here!): A great story about kids’ affinity for the Frozen character Elsa’s dress, which, full disclosure, includes a mention of my family :)

Like I said, I think you’ll find something here to enjoy.

See you soon!

Some related recommendations:

PS: In response to the very reasonable question “what’s up with this newsletter,” I’m … working on it. If you are a paid subscriber, thank you. It makes a very big difference to me. I’d love to send you a copy of my latest essay on a bizarre midcentury law enforcement experiment. (You can also buy it here!)

Many years ago (like eleven???) I heard this interview with yoga teacher Matthew Sanford and I’ve thought about it on and off ever since. I was thinking about it yesterday because today marks two years since I had a double mastectomy for breast cancer treatment.1

Since the surgery, I have tried to understand—as I told someone the other day—what happened to me, and I’m still not sure I know, though the medical narrative is quite clear.2 One of the things that changed, of course, was that I have nerve damage all over my chest, places where the skin has no sensation anymore. This is what I wrote about it:

On the morning of the third day—the second? No, the third—the nerve block wears off. The skin and tissues of my wounded chest seem to hum, to sing: severed nerves fire signals that have nowhere to go. I touch the newly flat plane of my chest gingerly, wanting to learn its dimensions. I can feel spots where fatty tissue was scraped away down to muscle and breastbone. I think, My heart is closer to the surface now.

I am used to my skin touching back, to sensation meeting sensation, but now it only goes one way. If I push and prod the skin folds I can feel tenderness underneath and the firm snaking drainage tubes still in my chest. It’s unsettling, though, this deadened sensation: here my body has lost contact with itself. When the severed nerves stop trying to reach one another a few days later, I will wish that they hadn’t, that they never would. 

Anyway, I was reminded of this interview when I was contemplating my changed body the other day. Sanford became paraplegic after a devastating accident at 13; as an adult he became a yoga teacher.

I’ve always thought about this part in particular:

Know that the places you don’t feel in you are graceful. They’re not loss. They’re not absence. They’re part of your strength, of your fiber; in a piece of wood, it’s not just the grains of wood, it’s the empty space and spaces between the grains of wood that make it strong. It’s both. And so, the world not only gets lighter and easier when you include more of yourself here — you house more space than your mind will ever know …

… [I]t’s work, like everything else. I know — I don’t know more deeply, but differently than most people—how much my body has absorbed and moved towards living, still. So, I look at — I have places, skin on my body, old pressure sores, and old stuff that happened that you can see the skin is struggling to stay and hold. I don’t, [think] “Oh, it’s not holding, dang it.” I feel like, “Man, it’s working as hard as it can.” There’s that type of feeling that I have now. And I didn’t use to have that. But looking at— rather than how your mind-body relationship, or your being, is moving away from life, instead looking at how it’s staying connected to life. 

His book (now out of print, I think) is Waking: A Memoir of Trauma and Transcendence.

See you soon.

More on disability:

PS: In response to the very reasonable question “what’s up with this newsletter,” I’m … working on it. If you are a paid subscriber, thank you. It makes a very big difference to me. I’d love to send you a copy of my latest essay on a bizarre midcentury law enforcement experiment.

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‘Tis the season for Barnes & Noble preorder discounts! If you sign up for the store’s (free) rewards program, you can get 25% off preorders today and tomorrow. I have three recommendations for forthcoming books by friends of mine:

1. Emma Eisenberg, Housemates: A Novel (May)

   Emma’s the author of the nonfiction book The Third Rainbow Girl, and this is her first novel, “a glorious celebration of queer life, and how art and love might save us all.” It’s a queer road trip story about two housemates and artists who head from Philadelphia to rural Pennsylvania, “documenting America through words and photographs … [and] discover[ing] what it means to chase their own ideas and dreams, and to embrace what they are capable of both romantically and artistically.” Emma is coming to Chicago in June!

2. Eiren Caffall, The Mourner’s Bestiary (October)

   My friend and former neighbor’s Whiting Award-winning debut is “a literary memoir braiding together environmental research and the personal journey of generational healing, grief, and chronic illness.” Eiren writes about climate catastrophe and her family’s genetic inheritance of polycystic kidney disease, or PKD. Her essay “Red Tides” is a beautiful preview of this book. She also has a novel about climate catastrophe and living on the roof of the American Museum of Natural History, All the Water in the World, coming out early next year, which you can also preorder.

3. Daniel Lavery, Women’s Hotel (October)

   Danny’s first novel is about the Beidermeier, a fictional 1960s women’s hotel (a poor relation of the Barbizon), with Rona Jaffe and Dawn Powell vibes. A perfect confection. Isn’t this cover great?

Maybe something here will strike your fancy??

See you next week!

P.S. This month I interviewed farmer Chris Newman about his new ebook & his vision for cooperative agriculture.