Beautiful fly swatters • Elliptical writing and children’s literature • Swim at your own risk, obviously • 1970s typography • Estonian music and Lou Reed at age 22
Chris van Allsburg and elliptical writing. Rarely done with children’s literature anymore, contemporary authors feel the need to overexplain everything. Not so with The Mysteries of Harris Burdick. It’s the If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler of children’s books. This picture of a child skimming stones, drawn from a bird’s eye angle, is a visual that often comes to my mind. You feel like you’re a ghost, watching the story unfold from behind their shoulders.
A well designed fly swatter is worth your consideration. Often I’m laughed out of the room when I say this. Here’s my case. There are some domestic tools that we simply require as modern humans — a mop, a broom, a fly swatter, among them. You can visit the department store, or the online equivalent, and purchase the most culturally obvious solution. Or, you can overthink it, as I do.
Intentionality, with the most basic, mundane life choices can infuse a little poetry in one’s life. Organic materials are far more pleasing than plastic. If you have a beautiful straw broom, there’s no need to conceal it in a closet. So, yes, maybe it seems a little silly to spend money on a wood and leather fly swatter. Or maybe not.
Interestingly, after I wrote this module, I came across an article about a broomsquire, someone who is a professional broom craftsperson. Something is in the air.
Swim at your own risk. In recent years, I’ve seen several local groups attempt to organize informal swimming events in Chicago. They grow quickly, and then die quickly. The organizers appear to run into city issues or get spooked by safety concerns. In Copenhagen and Helsinki, a minority of the public swimming areas are monitored. People are trusted to use their judgment. In Chicago, it is prohibited to swim unless lifeguards are present. The city has over 20 miles (40+ kilometers) of freshwater lakefront. That’s a lot of lake. And a lot of real estate where it’s illegal to swim for much of the year. Few cities have as many opportunities for pristine open water swimming. This is a cultural and a policy issue. Cities are vulnerable in the courts.
Yes, swimming is dangerous and Michigan is a big lake. But maybe it’s more dangerous to regulate swimming out of existence. If Chicago were smart, they would re-evaluate their position. Bring less attention to fear, more attention to joy and good judgment.
Swim at your own risk, obviously.
By contrast, “did you know that in Scotland, you can go swimming inside a sculpture park?”
Lou Reed at age 22. The year is 1964. Later that same year, he would meet John Cale, also 22, at Pickwick studios. That was a formative moment. Reed was still coming into his own, combining American poetry and rock and roll, and was about to be catalyzed by the musical influence of Welshman John Cale.
Sneaky Pete — two minutes of raw energy, banged out in Pickwick’s basement studio with a cheap spinet piano. It’s the piano that caught my ear.
Duo Ruut, Estonian music. Two musicians, two voices, one instrument. Mesmerizing.
The best typographer you’ve never heard of. Based in St. Paul, Minnesota, Mark Simonson is responsible for many typefaces you’ve likely seen. His website is rich and weird in a way that websites seldom are these days. But, the thing that caught my attention were his type specimens for Bookmania. Recognized for its “swashy exuberance,” it’s a typeface that trended hard in the 1970s and is largely associated with album covers and recipe books from that era. Simonson’s swash cookbook is an obsessive deep dive into swash combinations (how characters fit together)
Typography is a practice that tends to attract fastidious obsessives at the margins of society. The New York and Swiss designers are quite well known. This typographer is sequestered deep in the midwestern plains, but deserves better recognition.
—Michael Neault, written during the week of hazy hazardous wildfire smoke in Chicago
