Dear Reader,
Last night on our walk home from the kid’s preschool we stopped and talked to our next door neighbor. We talked about rude delivery drivers, favorite towns in northern California, our love for this neighborhood that he’s lived in for forty years and we’ve lived in for six. As we talked, the kid jumped around on the sidewalk. At one moment he pointed up at the sky and said to me, “Look, the moon is broken.” It took me a minute to pick out the thin crescent from amidst the sunset clouds. I explained quietly that the moon wasn’t broken, it was just a new moon, at the very beginning of its waxing.
Talking with our neighbor, I did something I’d never done before: I asked for his phone number. Then I texted him my name, so he could add me to his contacts, too. It feels like time to take our loose connections and make them a bit more formal. We all need each other, and we may need each other more in the days and months ahead.
Still: The moon is waxing. A print revival is afoot. Artists are exploring beauty. Teachers are helping children learn. There’s lots to be thankful for. I’m thankful to you, for reading.
– Jasper
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Print’s Moment
Reports of the revival of print media get louder by the day. Soon we’ll have a trend piece in the New York Times and that’s how we’ll know it’s over and we can all go back to our phones. Until then, I thought I would share some notable developments from the artists and writers I follow:
Sarah McColl’s beloved email newsletter, Lost Art, is folding up shop and being reborn as Paper Choir, a 4x / year mailing “of various risograph ephemera (zines, recipes, notecards, illustrated diaries, stickers, collaborative texts, posters, postcards, broadsides, etc.)” Can’t wait to get the first mailing in March!
The poet Annelyse Gelman just sent out a call to her mailing list: “Are you sick of email? Me too. I am doing SNAIL MAIL instead and have written a zine, ART SCHOOL REPORT #1, which I would be happy to send to you for free. It’s about Clown, Internal Family Systems, & other stuff.” (By the way, Annelyse’s website is sooooo good, strong multiverse.plus vibes.)
I just received my first copy of the relatively new and extremely gay poetry magazine & Change. I subscribed after reading Xander Beattie’s interview with publisher Kevin Bertolero. The subscription is just $3 per issue. As Kevin explains,
“That fee covers the cost of printing each issue (usually somewhere around $1.50 per copy), and then $0.10 for the envelope, and $1.36 for the stamp. The format of the issue is actually the way it is (including choice of paper stock) so that each issue will weigh under 3 oz, which means it can be mailed through USPS as a letter.”
Robin Sloan sent three zines through the mail last year. I loved receiving them, these beautiful two-tone risoprints on A3 paper, tri-folded so that they fit in a 6x9” booklet envelope. In December he sent out an issue of his newsletter with links to six new, Bay Area-based print outlets, and explained, “… you have to understand, Bay Area media has felt, at times, shockingly thin. This is an embarrassment of riches.”
The tech journalism website The Verge even published a zine, Content Goblins. I had sticker shock for the shipping ($10.74 on a $20 zine), but went ahead and ordered it. The design is excellent, but the content is more magazine than zine—the articles are simply high-quality The Verge articles. I don’t think I’d buy a second edition.
I have been plotting my own entry into this space, ever since I got a new printer for my birthday back in 2024. Among many experiments over the last 18 months, I made a zine for this year’s holiday card. More to come soon—from me, and apparently from everyone else, too. I say, the more the merrier!
Best Book Covers
Pursuant to making print objects, last year I took on a handful of freelance print design projects: four full-length books, two academic reports, a conference program, and an album jacket. I love print design: I love how this work often puts me into a non-verbal trance state, I love the challenge of presenting someone else’s work in the best way possible, and I love how collaborative the design process can (and I think should) be. I rarely feel too possessive of a specific layout, because the final product, when you’re doing it right, has been arrived at mostly through conversation and consensus.
Anyways, I bring this all up to share that I recently found a new and wonderful resource: the ongoing “Best Book Covers” series written by Emily Temple for Literary Hub. Each year she asks about 50 book designers to share their favorite cover designs of the year, and then she ranks them on the basis of which covers were mentioned the most—and she includes the designer-judges’ comments. So much good stuff.
Police State Glossary
Here are two terms that help me as I try to make sense of The National Political Scene™ in this dark hour:
I. Diversity of Tactics
This concept says that we are all in charge of our own actions and those tactics that we are comfortable with, but we should as much as we can refrain from criticizing the tactics of those with whom we share concerns and goals. For instance, I personally am deeply committed to nonviolence and will not engage in property destruction—but I refuse to spend my voice and energy denouncing the protesters who burned down a police substation in Minneapolis in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. Here’s Malcolm X (via Wikipedia) explaining the reasoning behind diversity of tactics:
Our people have made the mistake of confusing the methods with the objectives. As long as we agree on objectives, we should never fall out with each other just because we believe in different methods or tactics or strategy to reach a common goal.
Imagine if Martin Luther King, Jr. had spent significant time criticizing Malcolm X and the Black Panthers because of their more militant tactics. He would have played right into the hands of the racist, segregationist right. And without more militant actors making King’s nonviolence seem reasonable and like a decent compromise, we might never have had the Civil Rights Acts.
Now look at this headline and framing from the New York Times:
This kind of hand-wringing and scolding of the left plays directly into the hands of the fascists! How in the ever-loving world do you think centrist Democrats might have the chance “to rein in the agency” if not by having this position seem like the reasonable, compromise in contrast to the vehemence and moral clarity of the “Abolish ICE” crowd. This compulsive criticism of the left is itself a bad tactic, and one that takes pressure off of the very agency (ICE) that these “Democratic Critics” are supposedly critical of.
David Graeber has a wonderful explanation the necessity of embracing a diversity of tactics—and the danger of trying to police others’ tactics—in his short essay “Concerning the violent peace-police”:
Successful movements have understood that it’s absolutely essential not to fall into the trap set out by the authorities and spend one’s time condemning and attempting to police other activists. One makes one’s own principles clear. One expresses what solidarity one can with others who share the same struggle, and if one cannot, tries one’s best to ignore or avoid them, but above all, one keeps the focus on the actual source of violence, without doing or saying anything that might seem to justify that violence because of tactical disagreements you have with fellow activists.
II. Police Riot
This term describes a confrontation between police and civilians in which the police are the ones inciting, escalating, and sustaining violence. I learned this term during the George Floyd protests in 2020, and I wrote about it then:
[P]olice have committed many of the signal violent acts of the last week-and-a-half. Perhaps nowhere has this been clearer than when military police gassed and assault[ed] peaceful protesters in D.C.’s Lafayette Square so that our president could have his picture taken holding up a Bible like 12-pound salmon. But here in Los Angeles we have also had incidents of police intentionally ramming protesters with their cars, clubbing peaceful protesters, and even smashing out windows to drag people out of their cars for the crime of driving after curfew.
The past is prologue. Today in Minneapolis ICE agents act more as occupying militia than as police. And boy do they love shattering windshields and dragging people out of their cars. The violence and spectacle and provocation are the point. Here’s Lydia Polgreen reporting what it was like to actually go to her hometown and see the occupation firsthand:
From afar, this tragic and possibly criminal act of violence could plausibly be seen as incidental to President Trump’s mission to deport undocumented people from the country. But when I landed in Minneapolis on Monday and saw the size, scope and lawlessness of the federal onslaught unfolding here, I understood that Good’s killing was emblematic of its true mission: to stage a spectacle of cruelty upon a city that stands in stark defiance against Trump’s dark vision of America.
The brutality is the point. A police riot seeks to create the conditions of violence and lawlessness that, by a certain logic, call for further police to be deployed. They create the conditions of their own necessity. (Or for the invocation of the Insurrection Act.)
The most hopeful thing I read this week was an account from a Minneapolis resident, Winston Hearn, of the mutual aid networks and bravery and love breaking out across the Twin Cities, despite it all. I loved this description of patrols and attempts to disrupt ICE (and I watched the linked video at least five times):
There are patrols in every neighborhood, at every school, watching for the unmarked cars that suggest the paramilitary terrorists are coming. Those patrols are supported by people who can check tags, relay information, track in real time through trusted networks. When ICE agents get brave enough to step out of their cars, the community swarms to make their jobs difficult. Here is a video with no violence that shows just how this works. People materialize to witness, to confuse, to chase off. To protect everyone that they can.
I found Hearn’s piece through Today in Tabs, where I also found a link to some free anti-ICE posters that I printed out onto vinyl sticker paper and cut out. I’m not sure exactly what I’m going to do with them.
Someone put these posters up around the neighborhood.
A 500-Year-Old Miniature Book of Hours
Vincent Poturica writes in to share his own encounter with a tiny book, which happened to coincide with reading my essay on “The Zen of Tiny Books”:
I’m in NYC and, yesterday at The Cloisters, took a couple pics of an astounding, tiny prayer book (from a Dutch Middle Age artist) that moved me to tears.
This “diminutive Book of Hours” was made by Simon Bening circa 1530-1535. It measures about 2½ by 2 inches. The catalog text goes hard on its enchanting tininess:
It was a reminder of the omnipresence of God, meant to be attached to its owner, or stored with precious possessions. There is a special magic achieved by Bening’s exceptional skill at creating a miniature world. The miniatures follow standard convention, but Bening consistently tweaks the presentation, making this manuscript exceptionally poignant and affecting.
I wish I was in New York…I’d go visit this book that so moved Vincent!
F.L.O.W.
Lisa has been wearing this t-shirt for a decade now:
Over the weekend, the kid asked what it was a picture of, and we both realized that we didn’t know. Was it the silhouette of a real portable library or was it just a fantasy of one, à la Moose’s Book Bus? Lisa had been following Feminist Library on Wheels on Instagram for many years but had never seen a picture of anything that looked like this glorious, bike-core contraption. So we scrolled back and back and back—and found the sacred machine!
I’m so glad to have you as a reader. If you’ve enjoyed this email, have you considered forwarding it to a friend?
