odds and ends / 1.29.2026
Remy Charlip, via Camille Brown.
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Hiroshi Sugimoto: Glass staircase at Go'o Shrine, Naoshima, Japan, 2002.
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The sun's rays glanced off the earth at a low angle, bent and twisted through the atmosphere, and refracted in the icy air. Mirages, fogbows, sun dogs, mock moons, and other tricks of the light were so common the men learned not to trust their eyes. On windless days, when suspended ice crystals drifted slowly through the air, they formed prisms that refracted light and made it seem as if there were multiple suns in the sky. The most spectacular such illusion, known as a parhelic circle, caused four false suns to appear at the cardinal points of a halo around the real sun. When conditions were perfect, two perpendicular lines of light, vertical and horizontal, connected these illusory orbs, intersecting in the center to form an enormous talismanic cross. The sight filled even a man as scientifically inclined as Lecointe with reverential awe. "You feel there is something else besides the earth," the captain described. "This sort of religiosity makes you sense a God, not a specific God, but a vastly superior being."
Julian Sancton, Madhouse at the End of the Earth.
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What will become of all that has piled up within you, so much, so much, an enormous stock of memories and habits, deferred questions, frozen answers, thoughts, emotions, tender feelings, hardships, everything there, everything there, what will become of it all the moment life extinguishes within you? The disproportionate size of this pile—and all of it for nothing?
Elias Canetti, "Fifty Disguises: Selections from The Book Against Death." The Paris Review, 1/5/2022.
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INTERVIEWER
What happened when they arrested you?
OSWALD
They read me my rights and asked whether I knew I was breaking the law, and did I want to come easily or did I want to be an obstruction. And I said, “I’m happy to be arrested, because I don’t believe it’s an offense,” and that I didn’t want to come easily, and so I lay down and imagined my heaviest self. I was imagining I was made of gold or lead, just enjoying the difficulty the police were having picking me up. They drove us to some tents, where we gave our names and addresses and were given bail. There was a scene with the officer who arrested me, who kept saying that I was Section 12, and the officer who was writing it down, saying, “Are you sure?” Because Section 12 means up to fourteen years in prison. Section 13 is up to six months in prison or a fine. The officer kept saying, “Yep, Section 12,” but when I looked at my form a couple of weeks later, I saw that she had actually written Section 13. It was confusion. They didn’t really understand why they were arresting old women with signs.
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Movements need signals and symbols and performance as much as they need on-the-ground commitment.
Protest marches and rallies and strikes and daily calls to elected officials send signals and generate performance and create points of entry that lead to action. A signal from one person becomes action in another. Signals, virtuous or otherwise, help to rally people around a collective cause. So, let your signal be virtuous! Let it inspire! Voicing individual support or disapproval for something you care about creates a ripple effect that begins to change public sentiment, shift culture, alter voting choices, and rejigger patterns of patronage and consumption.
What I want to say to all of the folks with platforms, or without them, wondering if it makes a difference to say anything is, of course it does you giant ding dongs!
Erin Boyle, "Go ahead, send out a signal." Make/Do, 1/28/2026.
(Related: With a post, Erin and Garrett Bucks have raised $25,000 for rent relief in Minneapolis.)
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The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities.
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Tomorrow: a strike.
And be ready to help Springfield, Ohio, where a 30-day ICE surge is planned.
"get organized now"
Thousands of masked, heavily armed agents, some with minimal training, have been unleashed on the streets of an American state. They have been promised near-total legal immunity by the president, effectively unshackled from any constitutional constraints. They have been given limitless license to abduct anyone, not just the undocumented immigrants but American citizens who happen to look foreign, whatever that might mean.
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In Minnesota, the sound of whistles wafts through the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood, as community members alert their neighbors that ICE agents are patrolling the area. Volunteers in green vests are stationed near mosques and Somali-owned businesses in the area, which has a large Somali population, said Suleiman Adan, the deputy executive director at Cair Minnesota, a Muslim civil rights organization.
Adan said that community members have also shared that ICE has patrolled the Karmel Mall, where many Somalis frequent. “It’s like you’re looking for game,” he said about ICE’s tactics. “It’s like you’re hunting; who can I prey on today?”
“Right now, it’s like ‘to hell with the constitution’,” said Adan. “Freedom for whom is really the question.”
Melissa Hellman, "'It's like they're hunting': US citizens and legal residents report increase in racial profiling by ICE." The Guardian, 1/22/2026.
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Elizabeth Shockman, "ICE detains 5-year-old boy; school leader says agents used him as 'bait.'" MPRNews, January 21, 2026.
Shockman reports that the child and his father were going through the asylum process and includes this quote from their lawyer: "Every step of their immigration process has been doing what they’ve been asked to do, and so this is just … cruelty."
'This surge has changed nearly everything about our daily lives,' [Columbia Heights School Superintendent Zena] Stenvik said. 'Students are watching abductions on their way to school, on their way home and through their windows.'
'Imagine the trauma of a child being picked up by masked and armed agents, seeing their parents in handcuffs and being used to attempt to lure their mother out of the house and into danger. What has become of our country?'
Elizabeth Shockman, "ICE detains 5-year-old boy; school leader says agents used him as 'bait.'" MPRNews, January 21, 2026.
Shockman reports that the child and his father were going through the asylum process and includes this quote from their lawyer: "Every step of their immigration process has been doing what they’ve been asked to do, and so this is just … cruelty."
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Minneapolis has been heroic. Even after the murder of Good, people continue to show up, continue to organize, continue to resist. In a Somali neighborhood, a crowd prevented one man from being abducted; a singing patrol is among the many trying to protect the neighbors; violence is being documented across the region by ordinary people with phones and by journalists; and "six federal prosecutors in Minnesota resigned on Tuesday over the Justice Department’s push to investigate the widow of a woman killed by an ICE agent and the department’s reluctance to investigate the shooter." A Minneapolis minister, writes Bill Lindeke, says “You’ve probably seen the videos of agents saying to protestors and legal observers, ‘You saw what happened. Didn’t you learn your lesson?’ The only lesson learned is the love for our neighbors is growing three sizes each and every day.”
Rebecca Solnit, "Weak Violence, Strong Peace: Who We Are in this Crisis." Meditations in an Emergency, January 14, 2026.
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As [Victor] Fraenkel explained it, a lawless dictatorship does not arise simply by snuffing out the ordinary legal system of rules, procedures, and precedents. To the contrary, that system—which he called the “normative state”—remains in place while dictatorial power spreads across society. What happens, Fraenkel explained, is insidious. Rather than completely eliminating the normative state, the Nazi regime slowly created a parallel zone in which “unlimited arbitrariness and violence unchecked by any legal guarantees” reigned freely. In this domain, which Fraenkel called the “prerogative state,” ordinary law didn’t apply. (A prerogative power is one that allows a person such as a monarch to act without regard to the laws on the books; theorists from John Locke onward have offered various formulations of the idea.) In this prerogative state, judges and other legal actors deferred to the racist hierarchies and ruthless expediencies of the Nazi regime. ...The key here is that this prerogative state does not immediately and completely overrun the normative state. Rather, Fraenkel argued, dictatorships create a lawless zone that runs alongside the normative state. The two states cohabit uneasily and unstably. On any given day, people or cases could be jerked out of the normative state and into the prerogative one.
Aziz Huq, "America Is Watching the Rise of a Dual State." The Atlantic, May 2025.
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Ask any people who have lived in a country that became an autocracy, and they will tell you some version of a story about walls closing in on them, about space getting smaller and smaller. The space they are talking about is freedom. ... The only way to keep the space from imploding is to fill it, to prop up the walls: to claim all the room there still is for speaking, writing, publishing, protesting, voting. It’s what the people of Minnesota appear to be doing, and it’s something each of us needs to do—right now, while we still can.
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Wherever you are, get organized now. Figure out who your likeminded neighbors are. Set up your Signal chats. Get some whistles (I can spare a few if you need them). This administration has made it clear that Minneapolis is just the beginning, and when they come to your city, you’ll want to be ready.
Scott Meslow, "How much can a city take?" The Verge, 1/19/2026.
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One of my favorite books to read out loud when Hugh was small was Margaret Wise Brown's The Important Book. In it, she catalogs a number of things, whimsically distilled, and this line has been running through my mind: "The important thing about the sky is that it is always there. It is true that it is blue, and high, and full of clouds, and made of air, but the important thing about the sky is that it is always there."
The sky has not fallen yet, and it will not fall. And the important thing about that is that every one of us can find a way to help. Some can walk alongside and blow whistles and stand in the cold; some can drive and deliver and donate. Some can organize and coordinate; some can make calls and post signs. Some can make soup and bring neighbors together so they know who to trust; some can sing and make art so that we remember what we are fighting for—kindness, neighborliness, safety, plenty, generosity. There are so many, many ways to resist. The important thing is that we find one, and do it.
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Some resources:
A useful mnemonic: SALUTE.
And for folks in northeast Ohioans: a 1/29 training on building community defense.
mind the step
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so this is the sound of you
here and now whether or not
anyone hears it this is
where we have come with our age
our knowledge such as it is
and our hopes such as they are
invisible before us
untouched and still possible
W.S. Merwin, from "To the New Year."
imaginary outfit: jólabókaflóð 2025 + wish-listed books for 2026
The train snakes through the icy mountains, its steady, churning roar breaking the quiet of snow-stilled space. Inside, the traveler gazes idly out the window into the darkening world. An eight-rayed star and glittering snowflake shine from the shoulder of her structured copper cardigan, while wooden adornments dangle from her ears and circle her finger. Slouchy velvet trousers break for a gleam at the ankle, like the rare green flash of sunset, paired with a peculiarly sensible pair of soft shearling shoes. She taps one silvered nail against the glass, then reaches down into a startlingly capacious bag, crammed with things to read. She pulls out a gleaming metal book and opens a marble box of sharpened scented pencils. After ringing the buzzer for a pot of tea and a fresh pear, she turns her attention again to the bag.
Inside, there is Edmund de Waal's "book about archives that is itself archival," Bridget Penney's recreation of a book that "contained enclosures ... and that encompasses all that can be captured through the filter of the writer's gaze and mind," and writings by Jenny Erpenbeck on things that disappear. There is Paul Willem's The Cathedral of Mist, telling of "the emotionally disturbed architectural plan for a palace of emptiness; the experience of snowfall in a bed in the middle of a Finnish forest; the memory chambers that fuel the marvelous futility of the endeavor to write; the beautiful woodland church, built of warm air currents and fog, scattering in storms and taking renewed shape at dusk," and a novel by Maurguerite Young that David Shurman Wallace asserts "eschews any stable sense of reality." He described his emotions reading it:
As I waded through dense paragraphs of long, winding sentences filled with images of stars and waves and angels, of seagulls and silk and butterflies, of dreams and illusions and any other abstraction you can imagine, occasionally I felt angry—on a personal level—at what I took to be the book’s obstinacy, its willingness to reprise what it had said hundreds of times before, not to mention the seemingly endless detours that defy any obvious sense of structure. At other moments, I knew that I was immersed in something beautiful and strange, something too big to understand all at once.
There is also a rare collection of Young's essays with her 1945 piece, "The Midwest of Everywhere," because this is a place, too, that the traveler calls home:
For me, a plain Middle Westerner, there is no middle way. I am in love with whatever is eccentric, devious, strange, singular, unique, out of this world—and with life as an incalculable, a chaotic thing, meaningful above and beyond the necessary and elemental data of my subject ... I am told by commentators both cynical and wistful, those who have never inhabited my regionless region, that we of the Middle West have no Main Stream, no focus, no elite. 'True,' I would answer, 'the Middle West, though it may have a hidden Gulf Steam, has no Main Stream because it is oceanic'—that is, touching on all shores and limitless. There are no boundaries I know of. I have seen, on the grassy ocean, many a lurching ancient mariner—and once, in an Indiana cornfield, a dead whale in a boxcar.
The Middle West is probably a fanatic state of mind. It is, as I see it, an unknown geographic terrain, an amorphous substance, the ghostly interplay of time with space, the cosmic, the psychic, as near to the North Pole as to the Gallup Poll.
There are more hefty tomes to consider: a "death-defying feat of ambition ... a spectacular honeycomb of books within books" and a 544-page monograph on Celia Paul, which recalls to the traveler's mind an afternoon in an airy London gallery being held by painted eyes. A unforgettable exhibit of Surrealist and Romantic work is catalogued, as is "five centuries of stars, dreams, and plenilunes" and 2,000 Japanese rain words. Smaller books fill the corners—late ghost stories by Henry James, a book of "melancholic, wandering castles," another with photographs of hands, and one tense with high-stakes mountain drama.
The traveler thinks. What does she want to read? After all, it is Christmas Eve. Finally, she finds what she is looking for—a book of Yuletide hauntings.
Merry everything, friends.
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Other jólabókaflóðs (Yule book floods).
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TOGA PULLA Motif cardigan / Album di Famiglia velvet W & S trousers / Susan Hable ebony drop earrings / early Victorian carved bog oak mourning ring at Erica Weiner / Jean Gerbino cup and saucer, ca. 1950 / Lizzie Ames custom journal cover / Hender Scheme Mouton Henri shoes / Harry and David pears / Choosing Keeping x Perfumer H scented pencils / Maria La Rosa Verdino laminated socks.
candle, snowflake, gingerbread, angel
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Cecelia Glasher's sketches of snowflakes, ca. 1855.
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Fruit bowl carved by Robert "Mouseman" Thompson, ca. 1950s.
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From Listen and Hear by Kathleen Shoesmith, 1973, via stopping off place.
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A recipe for gingerbread ca. 1395 and gilded gingerbread and mold. The Fitzwilliam Museum.
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Peter Doig, untitled watercolor, 1999, via le jardin robo.
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Wilson Alwyn Bentley, snow crystal ca. 1910.
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Merry everything, friends.
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