Dear Reader,

Today I’m delighted to share the first annual Lightplay Gift Guide. I had a lot of fun putting this together. Inspired by my pleasure in reading other folks’ gift guides, I decided to collect some of my own idiosyncratic taste and try to boil it down into a compact package. I hope it’s entertaining—and who knows, maybe you’ll find something for someone you love… or for yourself!

One quick request: will you please add your signature to this petition to keep the Mendocino Poets in the Schools program alive? I know that some of you receiving this email already know about MPITS, but for those who don’t, here it is in brief: since 1974 many thousands of students in rural Mendocino County (including yours truly as an elementary schooler) have received poetry lessons from local poet-teachers. Today the poetry program also supports a county-wide high school poetry slam, and every year hundreds of student poems are collected in a county-wide student poetry anthology. I myself taught in the MPITS program for seven years, and it helped me survive my twenties, learn to teach, and impact many hundreds of students in the community I grew up in. I’m forever grateful for this opportunity. Unfortunately, the Mendocino County Office of Education has announced, abruptly, that they plan to freeze the program this year due to some payroll issues they are having. This immediately impacts all the poet teachers and especially the program’s director since 2001, Blake More. Blake is a dear friend, and she has done so much for poetry across Mendo County for a quarter century now. This program deserves to keep on going. Please sign the petition!

Thanks, as always, for reading.

– Jasper

The Lightplay Gift Guide

For your browsing ease, I have sorted the gifts into five categories:

I. For Your Lifehacker Uncle
II. For the Writer in Your Life
III. Youthful Pleasures for All Ages
IV. For the Literary Political Junkie
V. For Cooks and Zinemakers

For full disclosure, I’m recommending a handful of books and one video game made by friends. I mean, what, are we supposed to only like things made by strangers and/or enemies? Anyways, you have been warned.

I. “FOR YOUR LIFEHACKER UNCLE”

Magnetic Wallet Phone Stand ($40)

This Japanese-designed marvel is a triple threat: it holds some cash and three cards, it’s a sturdy Magsafe phone stand (working both for vertical and horizontal), and it will make the gift recipient’s phone just heavy enough that they will be less likely to use it for long periods of time. Win-win-win! But for real, I love this thing and leave it attached to my phone all day, every day.

Chico Bags ($16)

The perfect stocking stuffer: stuff it with a stuff sack stuffed with a bigger sack: a bag in a bag in a bag. Having one or more of these on your person is an essential and cost-effective superpower—a real-life Bag of Holding.

(See also Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction”; chaser: the Between the Covers episode about the essay, with Lidia Yuknavitch.)

II. “FOR THE WRITER IN YOUR LIFE”

iClever IC-BK06 Wireless Keyboard ($40)

On the topic of magic devices that fit in the back pocket of a pair of jeans: this clamshell keyboard lets you turn your, uh, telephone (?) into a typewriter so futuristic it would have made Isaac Asimov gasp.

Electric Typewriter ($16 - ∞)

But maybe instead of turning a telephone into a typewriter, we should turn a typewriter into an … electric typewriter? But really! An electric typewriter takes the main problem with trying to write more than a few pages on a mechanical typewriter—finger fatigue leading eventually to carpal tunnel—and mostly resolves it. This was cutting edge tech in 1966, and it’s still pretty cool. Miraculously, the Mechanical Typewriter Resurgence™ hasn’t really happened, at least not yet, so you can still pick these heavy boys up for cheap.

(I got mine, a “Smith Corona Coronet 12 Electric Portable Typewriter (Untested),” for $15.99 plus shipping from Goodwill’s auction website.)

MD Notebooks ($10-20)

Disregard the previous two entries: longhand is where it’s at. These fancy Japanese notebooks are my current fave: lovely to glide a Pilot Precise V7 (fine) across, handsomely bound, and they look great if you illustrate / collage the cover and then protect it behind a layer of packing tape. Dreamy.

III. “YOUTHFUL PLEASURES FOR ALL AGES”

Giant on the Shore by Alfonso Ochoa and Andrés López, tr. Shook ($20)

A spare, moving picture book about a giant who never fully appears. The artist used their own footprint in this composition; the text also has an intriguing metatextuality. Despite or because of this high literary quality, the kid is riveted.

Path of Achra by Ulfsire ($10)

The only video game I have loved in the last decade. The gameplay is totally compulsive, and the world evocative and strange. It was created by a single creator, Ulfsire, who happens also to be a wonderful poet and teacher. If you don’t have a PC or don’t have time to get sucked into a video game, you can get a flavor of Achra on its lore website. Get this for the gamer in your life!

Hello Lighthouse by Sophie Blackall ($19)

My favorite picture book I read this year, Hello Lighthouse is a story about cycles of life and about how lighthouses work and about loneliness and longing. Spreads include entrancing cutaways and pleasingly geometric compositions and everything you could want from a lighthouse story. (Except a visit from the Old Ones.)

IV. “FOR THE LITERARY POLITICAL JUNKIE”

The President by Xander Beattie ($27)

A thriller about a corrupt president might sound exhausting today, but, au contraire, Xander’s debut novel, The President, is fun and alive. It has on its side that it’s gay and African and set in 2012 and formally inventive and full of twenty-something literary yearning. Plus, this edition (put out by the author) is quite cute, with flashy binding and an unusual pocket-size form factor. It could definitely fit in a stocking!

Agrippina the Younger by Diana Arterian ($19)

Through propulsive and by turns funny and gutting (sometimes literally) poems, we learn that Agrippina was far more than “Nero’s mother.” Though she was that, too. (He arranged her murder.) This is the only book of poetry I’ve ever read where I regularly consulted the family tree in the front. A potential eye-opener for your relative who “thinks about the Roman empire X times per week.”

A Subscription to N+1 (or The Believer, or Aperture) ($45 - 75)

A single magazine subscription can do real good in the world: it helps writers and editors get paid, it underwrites the creation of art and culture, and it brings a thoughtful and curated collection of writing into the subscriber’s home on a regular cadence. Here are three journals I get in the mail and read like a fiend:

• N+1 regularly publishes the sharpest writing on politics and art available today.

• Aperture is a must-read for anyone who cares about photography.

• The Believer is experiencing a second golden age, now that it’s back under the care of McSweeney’s; every issue has something amazing in it.

Whether it’s to one of these or to some other publication, I think a subscription to a quarterly journal can be a fun and impactful gift.

V. “FOR COOKS AND ZINEMAKERS”

Chuannan Hot Chili Oil ($6)

Soooooo gooooood. With all the emphasis on chili crisps over the last half-decade, I think many cooks have forgotten about the power of a good chili oil. Chili crisp is a condiment, but chili oil is a key ingredient in so many delicious dishes. Get it for someone who loves Chinese food. (Also good: Shuita Superior Mature Vinegar.)

Trade Coffee ($30-200)

Getting fresh coffee beans in the mail is both fun and practical. Trade arranges for small, independent roasters from across the country to send fresh-roasted beans to subscribers. The subscriber sets up the roast profile and cadence, and each bag is a delicious surprise. I have it so that every ten days a new roaster sends me a bag of freshly roasted, fruity, light-roast, single-origin beans. Pure pleasure.

Four-Waffles-At-A-Time Waffle Iron ($75)

Waffles are one of the great compensations of modernity. Even better: getting to eat waffles at the same time as your friends and family, rather than waiting hungrily for the waffles to finish one by one. So why not buy your favorite waffle-slinger an iron that makes four at once? And while you’re at it, turn them on to my world-famous banana waffle recipe.

Long-Reach Stapler ($27)

If the photocopier is the iconic tool of the zinemaker, the long-reach stapler is their secret weapon. This funny looking stapler makes saddle stitch binding a cinch. So if someone in your life has been talking about making their own zines, why not get them one of these bad boys? Call their bluff!

Last-minute notice here, but if you’re in LA and don’t have Friday night plans you should come out to the book party for Xander Beattie’s new-ish book The President (which you may remember from the gift guide above). It sounds like it will be an intimate party, with drinks, a reading, a conversation, and hopefully some good conversation. RSVP here to get the details. (I believe that today is the last day to RSVP.)

Because I myself am left ice cold by the “AI art” being shoved in our faces today, I was probably the perfect audience for this brief essay, “Alchemy,” by John Collinsworth. What a great metaphor, invoking just how stupid the literal attempt to turn lead to gold was. I especially appreciated this part:

I personally agree with this, but with the (big) caveat that all available evidence suggests that a whole lot of people don’t actually care about filling their lives with art. So many folks seem more than happy with different varieties of muzak providing a soothing background track to their lives.

Today we have muzak on the music streamers (see “ghost artists”) but also increasingly on the video streamers (I loved this Will Tavlin piece in N+1 about today’s Netflix) and even in novels (the Write a Book a Month Club—yikes).

Some people really like their AI slop! But art it ain’t.

During our trip to Chicago, we splurged on “high tea” at the Drake Hotel. It was ridiculous and fun. The best part was that for the first half of the meal there was a harpist playing, and then for the second half there were three professional carolers roaming the dining room, singing a tune for each table. (For us, Lisa requested “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen.”)

I noticed a sad trend, though: at many (most?) tables, when the carolers got to them, the diners each lifted their phones up to record videos. The carolers were maybe five feet away, and the phone seemed clutched like a shield, a tool to distance oneself from the intensity of being sung to, a way to get out of having to be present, to avoid having to experience the experience.

Bourgeois confession: I bought an Apple TV, one of those little streaming boxes that plugs into your TV. It came on Monday. (Part of getting older under capitalism is you have less time to do things like watch movies or make music but you compensate by spending money on better tools for these activities you no longer do much of.)

I don’t yet have a full opinion on the little box, but I did have a thrilling experience with it: I figured out how to program the volume buttons to go directly to my stereo. It turns out the way you do this is by holding up the stereo’s remote near the Apple TV remote, then pressing the stereo remote’s volume switches as cued by the Apple TV software. The Apple TV magically intercepts the signal, learns it, and now can reproduce it. Yes!

Over the weekend there was a snowstorm in Chicago—eight inches! This delayed our flight home by a day, and it also gave me the chance to make my first-ever snowman! (With, admittedly, help from my kid and his mom.) There’s something so satisfying about making a sculpture out of precipitation, and dressing it up.

Even better: getting daily melt reports from our hosts. So far not only has our snowman not melted at all, he’s actually gained a bit of snow!

I’m so glad to have you as a reader. If you’ve enjoyed this email, have you considered forwarding it to a friend?