Better Living Through Literature
Words + Projects + Stuff I Like
1. Somehow it’s STILL January but tomorrow is February and Imbolc, the cross-quarter day between the Winter Solstice and the Spring Equinox. We’re halfway; we can do it!
2. Yes I want January to be over but this also has merit: 
3. The Public Domain Review has a new visual search engine that’s super fun to browse. I recommend “Infinite View.”
4. I also recommend looking at a baby capybara (and not the news).
1. If you looked at the devil’s butthole’s executive orders this week like me (oops), you’ll know that our trans friends are already under attack. (And trans people already have a staggering 82% suicide risk.) What can you do right now? Order Girl Scout cookies from a trans or non-binary Girl Scout. There’s a list compiled right here and they ship.
2. Maybe we can go to France and camp out in the cheese room of this restaurant? The Hottest Restaurant in France Is an All-You-Can-Eat Buffet (includes some extremely New Yorker lines such as “The effect is something like a Golden Corral by Auguste Escoffier”).
3. Something cool: Archaeologists Are Finding Dugout Canoes in the American Midwest as Old as the Great Pyramids of Egypt. The urban waterways in the Great Lakes area fascinate me. Imagine having a neighborhood lake!
1. The 48-hour trip that I spent a month sewing things for is coming up this weekend! It’s SUCH a middle-aged lady niche interest trip, too: We’re going to the scent museum and the pinball museum and, of course, Stonemountain Fabrics.
2. Would you like to see lettering from classic jazz albums? How about albums designed by Milton Glaser?
3. America may not make it but hell yeah, imposter syndrome is out! (Also I’m glad to know it’s not just me worrying about getting fired all the time.)
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1. This really nails the January vibe:
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2. This was a lovely little comic: Things to Say to the Person You Are at Night in the Winter.
3. I had no idea: The Strange Reason Nearly Every Film Ends by Saying Itâs Fiction (You Guessed It: Rasputin!)
1. I’m taking a break next week to not post, drink too much coffee, and enjoy Dead Week:
2. I’m prepping for Christmas dinner:
3. I’m bracing for January, with advice from Mike Monteiro:
Hope and optimism will come from helping those that need it. Hope and optimism will come from seeing that our actions, both big and small, can help others. Buy someone a fucking sandwich. Help someone pay their rent. Drive someone to the grocery store. And yes, put your body between their and those that would hurt them. Let people know you are here should they need you.
Help is not coming. Youâre already here. I hope youâre ready. Iâm optimistic you are.
4. And I’m celebrating the Solstice tomorrow! We made it; the sun is coming back. Thank you, sun.
1. Again, I don’t want to go on a watch list, but I thought this take on the online popularity of our boy was right on:
People donât cheer for chaos when they feel like justice is possible. But right now, what options do they have? The Supreme Court is corrupt, for many people voting feels useless, and the people in power are funded by the very corporations theyâre supposed to regulate.
Of course, Mangione gets turned into a meme heroâitâs not him they love; itâs the idea of someone finally fighting back.
Also this meme in that newsletter was pretty great:
Anyway! Just doing intellectual exercises over here, not condoning anything, nope, no siree.
2. This combines Dad Lore and 80s Nostalgia and is just fun to look through–someone posted their dad’s collection of hand-drawn VHS labels on Reddit. The recreation of the “Festival of Claymation” font! 
3. “City of Bend to vandal: Stop putting googly eyes on statues” (click for pictures, amazing).
4. Subtle foreshadowing had me wheezing.
@xran..domx #CapCut subtle foreshadowing.#subtleforeshadowing #subtle #funnyy #funny #pepsi #mentos #pepsiandmentos #fyp #fyp #fypage㡠#foryoupage #viral_video #viral ⏠original sound – your month your…
1. Did I click through The Catalog Blog and want to look at most things? Yes. Is the J. Peterman catalog in there? Of course!
2. Speaking of ephemera, this recipe booklet/story book is astonishing–it rhymes, the art is exquisite and also just plain weird: The Prince of the Gelatin Isles from 1926.
3. I don’t want to get put on a watchlist so I’m not going to share a lot of what I’m seeing about the United Healthcare CEO, but I thought this summary by journalist Taylor Lorenz was good.
“People have very justified hatred toward insurance company CEOs because these executives are responsible for an unfathomable amount of death and suffering. I think itâs good to call out this broken system and the people in power who enable it. Again, not so they can be murdered, but so that we can change the system and start holding people in power accountable for their actions.”
4. OK, I do have to post this though. That last line!
@philiplabesAnd medical violence is always wrong, but only when it flows one way
1. I hope someone’s working on this:
2. Related:
3. Maybe we need 45 minutes of “Resting Place Beside the Soft Fern Stream.”
4. Another good thing: Feeding squirrels peanuts. This is exactly the vibe under the feeder:
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1. Journalist Lyz Lenz wrote about the election last week and I promise it’s funny and not one of the endless “what went wrong” takes, but she also makes a great point. We have work to do regardless.
But as devastating as these next four years will be, the reality is that I live and work in a red state, and the work is not much different despite the results of the election.
Even under a Democratic president, Iowa saw a loss of reproductive rights, an erosion of the social safety net, book bans, loss of rights for LGBTQ people, and the loss of funding for public schools. I still saw the childcare tax credit discontinued and wages stagnate while the cost of living rose.
[…] There are no quick fixes to building a better life. Even if Harris won, Trump voters would still be around, still running our school boards and state legislatures.
This is the work.
2. My old coworker Justin Shiels also posted this last week and it’s been in my head (click through the whole slideshow): 
3. Joy, of course, is not the same as buying things. But my brain is saying what if buying yarn for a rainbow sweater WAS a way to create some joy? Hmm.
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1. I’m trying not to read everyone’s outrage, which keeps throwing gas on my own fire of outrage, but this quote from Kate Manne talking about misogyny is going to live in my head forever:
They donât necessarily want women to go septic and die in parking lots, denied life-saving reproductive care in case it constitutes an abortionâa reality that Trump deliberately and proudly ushered into being. But if thatâs the price of a cheaper tank of gas, or being able to afford a bigger house, or run a more profitable business, then theyâll willingly pay it
2. But enough of that! I’m going to refer to “planting iris” a lot in the future, I think. From Leonard Woolf’s Downhill All The Way: An Autobiography of the Years 1919-1939, via Austin Kleon:
One of the most horrible things at that time was to listen on the wireless to the speeches of Hitlerâthe savage and insane ravings of a vindictive underdog who suddenly saw himself to be all-powerful. We were in Rodmell during the late summer of 1939, and I used to listen to those ranting, raving speeches. One afternoon I was planting in the orchard under an apple-tree iris reticulata, those lovely violet flowers⌠Suddenly I heard Virginiaâs voice calling to me from the sitting room window: âHitler is making a speech.â I shouted back, âI shanât come. Iâm planting iris and they will be flowering long after he is dead.â Last March, twenty-one years after Hitler committed suicide in the bunker, a few of those violet flowers still flowered under the apple-tree in the orchard.
3. This is really the same sentiment as the quote above: 