🔗 THE ART AND HISTORY OF LETTERING COMICS
Todd Klein’s online book exploring little-known aspects of comics: lettering, letterers, logo design and more.
📜 New in the Commonplace Communiqué → 00058 ¶ from Essayism ¶ Brian Dillon
Shall we take dust as the founding metaphor by which to broach the unruly topic of the essay? For sure, it sounds deathly, as though the form is lost to the world, consigned to libraries and anthologies. (As if those are ever really dead.) There have been times – ours is not one of them, I think I will want to say – when the essay has seemed antique and moribund, fit only for the classroom and to become an object of nostalgia for the improving or diverting literature of the past. Essays, ancient or modern, can seem precious in their self-presentation, like things too well made ever to be handled. Touch them however and they are likely to come alive with the sedimented evidence of years; a constellation of glittering motes surrounds the supposedly solid thing, and the essay reveals itself to have been less compact and smooth than thought, but instead unbounded and mobile, a form with ambitions to be unformed. Which is to say – I can’t prove it yet – that the venerable genre of the essay has something to do with the future, with a sense of constant dispersal and coalescence. And for what it’s worth my attachment to them seems of the same conflicted order: I want essays to have some integrity (formally, not morally, speaking), their strands of thought and style and feeling so tightly woven they present a smooth and gleaming surface. And I want all this to unravel in the same moment, in the same work; I want the raggedness, the patchwork, a labyrinth’s-worth of stray threads. You might say I’m torn.
—Brian Dillon
—found in Essayism (2017)
📃 Daily(ish) poem → 00322 ◊ Rain ◊ Jack Gilbert
Rain
Suddenly this defeat.
This rain.
The blues gone gray
and yellow
a terrible amber.
In the cold streets
your warm body.
In whatever room
your warm body.
Among all the people
your absence.
The people who are always
not you.
I have been easy with trees
too long.
Too familiar with mountains.
Joy has been a habit.
Now
suddenly
this rain.
—Jack Gilbert
—found in Views of Jeopardy (1962)
I am a little high. I am finding the first Dune movie hard to follow. Only two data points, but I’m pretty sure they are related.
I don’t disagree with the SCOTUS decision that keeps Trump on state ballots. What is galling is how crudely and shamelessly the conservative justices claim or dispense with originalist interpretation when it suits their political ends.
📃 Daily(ish) poem → 00321 ◊ Olives ◊ A. E. Stallings
Olives
Is love
so evil?
Is Eve? Lo,
love vies,
evolves. I
lose selves,
sylphs of
loose Levi’s,
sieve oil of
vile sloe.
Love sighs,
slives. O
veils of
voile, so
sly, so suave.
O lives,
soil sleeves,
I love so
I solve.
—A. E. Stallings
—found in Olives (2012)
I’m back to Spotify again. I moved to Tidal for a while, but my Spotify family members aren’t interested in switching and I’m not interested in maintaining both plans!
🔗 Things Unexpectedly Named After People
Most of these surprised me…and I suspect many will surprise you too!
I think about me / and what I’ve done / I think about me / and what I’ve become
Aye.
Occasional bewilderment is one thing, continuous shock at what one’s life has become is another. Unexpected is one thing; unexpected and unpleasant another. A disease of unease.
📃
Daily(ish) poem → 00320 ◊ Said the Poet to the Analyst ◊ Anne Sexton
Said the Poet to the Analyst
My business is words. Words are like labels,
or coins, or better, like swarming bees.
I confess I am only broken by the sources of things;
as if words were counted like dead bees in the attic,
unbuckled from their yellow eyes and their dry wings.
I must always forget how one word is able to pick
out another, to manner another, until I have got
something I might have said …
but did not.
Your business is watching my words. But I
admit nothing. I work with my best, for instance,
when I can write my praise for a nickel machine,
that one night in Nevada: telling how the magic jackpot
came clacking three bells out, over the lucky screen.
But if you should say this is something it is not,
then I grow weak, remembering how my hands felt funny
and ridiculous and crowded with all
the believing money.
—Anne Sexton
—found in To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960)
I’ll say it again: BoJack Horseman is a 📺 masterpiece.
Currently reading: Prophet Song by Paul Lynch 📚 – Have to read this one after one of my closest reading pals wrote:
…it’s hard to stop reading. This one is so good: the prose gorgeous, the politics too credible, the emotional noose tightened every page.
Did Not Finish: Hillbilly Elegy by J. D. Vance 📚 – I thought I would try to see what all the fuss was about, despite Vance’s current putridness, but I just couldn’t do it!
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Daily(ish) poem → 00319 ◊ Snow ◊ David Berman
Snow
Walking through a field with my little brother Seth
I pointed to a place where kids had made angels in the snow.
For some reason, I told him that a troop of angels
had been shot and dissolved when they hit the ground.
He asked who had shot them and I said a farmer.
Then we were on the roof of the lake.
The ice looked like a photograph of water.
Why he asked. Why did he shoot them.
I didn’t know where I was going with this.
They were on his property, I said.
When it’s snowing, the outdoors seem like a room.
Today I traded hellos with my neighbor.
Our voices hung close in the new acoustics.
A room with the walls blasted to shreds and falling.
We returned to our shoveling, working side by side in silence.
But why were they on his property, he asked.
—David Berman
—found in Actual Air (1999)
📜 New in the Commonplace Communiqué → 00057 ¶ from January 13, 1857 journal entry ¶ Henry David Thoreau
I am, of course, hopelessly ignorant and unbelieving until some divinity stirs within me. Ninety-nine one hundredths of our lives we are mere hedgers and ditchers, but from time to time we meet with reminders of our destiny. — We hear the kindred vibrations, music! and we put out our dormant feelers into the limits of the universe. We attain to wisdom that passeth understanding. The stable continents undulate. The hard and fixed becomes fluid.
“Unless above himself he can
Erect himself, how poor a thing is man.”When I hear music, I fear no danger. I am invulnerable. I see no foe. I am related to the earliest times, and to the latest.
—Henry David Thoreau
—from January 13, 1857 journal entry
—found in Autumn and Winter: From the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau (1929)
It’s good to be a happy amateur at something. I’ve always struggled with the happy part. I think I’m finally discovering it a little bit in a few arenas: baking and chess. What happy amateur pursuits do you enjoy?
PSA: this La Bendición Natural Bourbon from Bluebeard Coffee Roasters (sadly, I no longer live within a few blocks of their awesome shop) is excellent.
Finished reading: Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe 📚 — I felt so many more feels reading Achebe’s masterpiece this time around than I did when I was 22 or whatever. Legend.