Doings
Intro
This is Time's Corner, a weekly newsletter by Christian Leithart. I’m the editor of Good Work magazine and the creator of Psalm Tap, a yearly colloquium for church musicians. By day, I teach, and by night, I edit this newsletter.
As you can see, Time’s Corner has joined the disorderly ranks of the Substack militia. TinyLetter, which I used before, was a great service as far as it went, but as TC grew, TinyLetter became more and more unwieldy. My main issue was that I couldn't easily preserve the format from one newsletter to the next, which means I wasted a lot of time nudging things around and sending myself test emails. Too much formatting, not enough writing.
The contents of Time's Corner will pretty much stay the same. Below you'll find the main article, followed by a short Dispatch from Broken Bow, an interesting link, a series of upcoming events, and a summary of what I've been reading, watching, and listening to. At the very end comes everyone's favorite part, the Thursday question. I hope you will all take the time to reply.
Doings
Good Work
In January, the first issue of Good Work (16 pages of quality content) was mailed to 211 subscribers. Each issue costs just over a dollar to print and send, and I'm grateful and humbled to say that the entire cost of printing and mailing was covered by donations. Thank you to those who trusted that the project would be worthwhile before ever seeing it in print.
Zine culture is a riot. At heart, a zine is an underground pamphlet, not answerable to the publishing barons that control print (and increasingly, social) media, and therefore a perfect vehicle for "transgressive discourse." Zine culture is full of pulp sci-fi, punk lyrics, feminist poetry, communist literature, and other discourses of impolite society.
Zines aren’t simply vehicles of rebellion, though. Thanks to their physicality, they are almost, in the words of Alison Piepmeier, the foundation of a miniature gift culture. Because they are printed and mailed directly to your doorstep, you feel a sense of intimacy with the author, in contrast to the distance and anonymity of the internet. As Marissa Falco put it in Issue #3 of her hand-written zine Red-Hooded Sweatshirt, zines carry “the smell of your house on the paper itself.”
I didn’t realize how fitting this medium was for Good Work until after production had started. In many ways, Good Work is countercultural. The public square is filled with rhetorical hotheads; Good Work is produced slowly by design. Educators teach their students to distrust tradition; Good Work embraces it. The art world encourages artists to color outside the lines; Good Work rebels by coloring inside them.
Good Work is also, by design, a physical, material gift. Social media is so disorienting in part because it’s constantly in flux. The timeline is constantly moving. Blogs are a little better, but they’re still designed to be in motion, focusing your attention on the newest material. Good Work arrives in your mailbox printed and stapled, and it won’t change when you set it down for a while. It will be there, like a warm paper blanket, whenever you want to cozy up again.
Blog
I’m a lazy blogger. Being lazy, I only post when I have something to say. Here are a few of my recent favorites:
The opening paragraph of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy's The Christian Future helped me clarify my life goals.
I wrote about education and working with your hands.
And here’s the round-up of books I read in 2022.
Dispatch from Broken Bow
Snapshots
Wrestling with a story in the foyer of the church where my daughter's scout group meets, I look up and see a sign above the church coffee bar: CONNECTIONS.
The evening moonrise through the backyard trees would make a good photo, but it's moving so fast through the sky, the shot is ruined before I can set up my camera and zoom.
My son, eighteen months old, presses his open palm against his mouth as he tries to blow a kiss to his mother.
Links
In my last newsletter, I mentioned Montaigne, but I wanted to make another plug. Basically, Montaigne lets you build a website using nothing but the Apple Notes app. You create a folder in iCloud, share it with the Montaigne email address, and voila! Whatever you put in that folder will show up on your site. I use it for reading notes, photos, and live-blogs of movies. The best thing about the service, apart from how easy it is to use, is that everything is hosted on your iCloud, so if the service goes down, you haven't lost anything.
Upcoming
The second issue of Good Work will be mailed to subscribers in April. Sign up to get your copy. It's free.
The fourth annual Psalm Tap will take place in Birmingham on July 19th. Registration opens soon. In the meantime, you can watch recordings of previous years’ talks here.
Up To
Reading: The Iron Pirate, by Max Pemberton. So-so.
Watching: Poker Face. I've been following Rian Johnson's work since Brick, so I feel like I know the guy. His movies are always interesting, and sometimes fun, but I feel like his great strength, like Shyamalan's, is casting.
Listening: Revisited King Charles's Loveblood this weekend. I'm so curious about where that album came from. Is it the ravings of a sex-maniac? Or the exultation of a bridegroom? Is it about love or lust? Why is there so much Song of Songs in it? What does "your own pair of trousers looks better on me" mean? And why, oh why, did the artist once tell a woman he missed her like “drought driven hippos who madly miss mud?”
Thursday Question
Thursday’s issue will be devoted to your replies to this question:
What have you been reading lately?
About
I’m Christian Leithart, a writer and teacher living in Birmingham, Alabama. I’m not active on social media, but you can read my blog here. Use the button below to share this issue of Time’s Corner, if you so desire. Thanks much for reading.