the somber pleasure of condemning things

a TikTok, a zine, and a Rebecca Solnit passage on Puritans

Nov 22, 2024

A favorite piece of trash from my intersection during this morning’s crossing guard shift.

Greetings, earthlings.

Here are three things I loved this week:

1. This TikTok

Halloween feels like it was 15 years ago but this came across my feed and I laughed really hard alone on my couch and it felt good:

2. This zine

I picked up a bunch of amazing stuff last weekend at Vermont’s Non-Fiction Comics Festival including this camping trip-inspired mixed-media risograph-printed zine by Portland, ME-based artist and teacher, Sarah Shaw:

She writes: This project started out as a demo for a class I’m teaching this semester called “Sketch to Story,” all about exploring text and image through zines, art books, comics, poems, and visual essays. For this project, I wanted to make a zine that was less story-driven, and more focused on visuals and sensory details. I also wanted to experiment with the art of risograph printing by collaging photos and line drawings together.

Found Objects

Found Objects #19: A Mixed-Media Risograph Zine

I’ve been playing around on the risograph this semester, printing and assembling a zine inspired by a recent camping trip to Mt. Blue State Park. My goal was to capture those fleeting moments in nature away from the overstimulation of our daily lives. I also wanted to simply express the joy of hiking and camping…

8 months ago · 23 likes · 5 comments · Sarah Shaw

I love love love the mixture of sketches, photographs, and found materials as risograph prints. It’s a gorgeous treasure. I love zines!!!

3. Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark

I picked up this book from Crow Bookshop sometime in the week after the 2016 election. I was looking for comfort, direction, answers. I picked it up again this week.

I come from a lineage of Puritans and pilgrims who seem to only feel comfortable when suffering. My people are not comfortable expressing genuine gratitude, love, joy… we’re more comfortable complaining. I’ve spent my whole adult life trying to rewire my brain so that my resting state is a profound sense of abundance. Results are mixed. I do love to bitch. It’s in my blood.

With that in mind, and in this moment of once again searching for guidance on how to move forward and show up, this passage took the wind out of me:

”There's a kind of activism that's more about bolstering identity than achieving results, one that sometimes seems to make the left the true heirs of the Puritans. Puritanical in that the point becomes the demonstration of one's own virtue rather than the realization of results. And puritanical because the somber pleasure of condemning things is the most enduring part of that legacy, along with the sense of personal superiority that comes from pleasure denied. The bleakness of the world is required as a contrasting backdrop to the drama of their rising above.”

Oooof, Rebecca!

A couple of months ago my friend Grace introduced me to her friend, Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst, a scholar of religion, race and racialization, and history at the University of Vermont. Ilyse told me about her forthcoming book, Religion is Not Done With You, and gave me an advance copy that I read in a couple sittings, and blew me away.

About the book:

“Religion lurks in the floorboards of our daily lives, whether we want it to or not. A departure from more traditional approaches to “Religion 101,” Religion Is Not Done with You gives thought-provoking context to the basics of religious studies by challenging readers to consider the origins of their assumptions about religion and broaden their perspectives on what religion is and does.”

Ilyse and her coauthor had the idea to release an art print inspired by the banger of a line, “borders are lies we tell on maps and defend with bombs,” and to sell the print as a fundraiser for relief in Gaza. They asked me to collaborate.

So last month I returned to my beloved Directangle Press in Bethlehem, NH to make a 100 prints: