Despair is not our only option

Hey y’all!

I don’t know how it is for you, but I find it’s easy to fall into despair. At this point, it almost feels like watching the news on a regular basis is some sort of masochistic kink, because every day a new set of horrible things has happened. I’ve had to take news sabbaticals at times, because the exposure to all that is wrong in the world I cannot impact is overwhelming.   

In his book 4,000 weeks: Time Management for Mortals, Oliver Burkeman talks about a thought experiment he came across. Here he talks about it in an interview with Krista Tippett:
 
All the way through history, there have been some people who lived to 100, even when life expectancy was much shorter on average. And every day that somebody turned 100, there was a baby being born somewhere. So you could easily imagine these chains of end-to-end, 100-year lives. And if you do it that way, you find that, like, the Renaissance was what, six, seven lifetimes ago, and the time of Jesus about 20 or so lifetimes ago, and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs, 35 lifetimes ago, and the whole of human civilization, based on a conventional definition, 60 lifetimes ago. It’s like, it’s nothing.

Put this way, none of us are but a few lives removed from a world where most people never traveled more than 100 miles in their lifetime, and their knowledge of the world was limited to what they could personally see. 

I don’t think we have evolved enough as a species to handle the onslaught of information about the wider world – especially when it comes to traumatic events. It’s crushing. 

But just because we cannot fix everything does not mean we can fix nothing, and what we can fix deserves to be fixed. Which is why I loved the first link today, about New Yorker Craig Campanella, who has taken it as his personal mission to repair and replace missing basketball nets in public parks. 

“There are more important problems in the world, but this is something I can do that is helpful…”, Campanella said in the interview. 

Flooding in other countries is horrific. The crimes in the legislature are unspeakable. War crimes happen every day. And while I need to be concerned about that, and exercise any influence I have to prevent or stop those things, day to day I don’t have much influence about any of that. 
 
But a basketball net costs $11. There is a man in my neighborhood whose daily walk includes a trash grabber and a five gallon bucket, and what he can fix is the urban litter problem in our community. We rescue feral kittens and get them homes. 

We can all do something. Despair is not our only option. 

New York man makes it his mission to make sure public park hoops have nets. Not all heros wear capes. 

A never before publicly displayed Monet has appeared, and will be auctioned off at Sotheby’s Paris. It’s estimated to sell for at least $25 million dollars, which would make it the highest priced auctioned painting in French history. If you think you know Monet, this one may surprise you, since it is from his late in life abstract impressionist period. I think it’s lovely. 

The artist Mu Pan has a collection of acrylic paintings he calls “microMUniverse mandalas” on display at the Hashimoto Contemporary Gallery in NYC. These are fascinating to me – acrylic on paper, nearly all of them smaller than 15x15.  

An award-winning stop motion short film that involves a robot vacuum cleaner, a Chinatown senior center, and two anthropomorphized rabbits that hits on themes of love, loss, and meaning. I don’t think I understand everything they are trying to do here, but I feel the same way about the Beatles’ song “I am the Walrus”. I still think both the song and this short film are beautiful. 

Here’s a gift link to a NYT story about how, as a result of development and climate change, black bears are moving into the suburbs in Southern California, with humans having mixed thoughts. But the main reason I am sharing it is because of the excellent bear photographs and video that accompany it. These bears are just out there in LA, living their best life.     

In the last issue, I forgot the link to the collection of vintage restaurant menus. It’s here. As one person who wrote in to ask about the missing link said, “Well, at least we know AI did not put this newsletter together.” 

The most clicked link last issue was to the poem when your children ask me what i did while the planet was burning, by kai cheng thom.   

As I say in the headnote, I am in the middle of a huge renovation of LISB. This week alone I have spent more than 20 hours on it, not counting the hours it took to put this issue together. The question small publishers like me have to answer is, how does that work get paid for? How do I pay for the literally thousands of dollars a year it costs to publish this newsletter, not even counting my time? 
 
The obvious way is by locking the best stuff behind paywalls, using affiliate links and selling ads, along with your privacy. But we have gone a different direction: all this is paid for (and thus kept free) by a group of paying members.   

Paid membership starts at just $5 a month, and makes it possible for this email to be ad-free and AI-free for everyone. Members also get access to bonus essays, first dibs on things I decide to sell, and generous discounts, among other perks.   

FYI: I am currently building out a collection of handmade kitchen goods like cutting boards, serving trays and utensils I will be selling for the holidays, so there is never a better time to be a member (and thus get a discount) than now.   TK TK

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Take care, 

HH