Leftovers: April 2026
What else has been kicking around
Here is everything that’s been of interest recently but never got the full essay treatment. As always, everything is a recommendation.
Reading
A little while ago, the podcast Exploration Live hosted their second book club (the first of which was Pride and Prejudice last summer). This time around, the book of choice was Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping (1970). The title had been on my to-read list for some time, and this was the push I needed to finally take the plunge.
Housekeeping has a reputation that precedes it; there is very little I could say here to fittingly underscore its well-documented power. It is a novel that transmits you to a dream state and often feels more poetic than prose. Robinson takes you out of the scene sometimes violently with her poetic interjections that often hit like a stake to the heart. There is grief, and memory, and family which all cut right to my core. And it is full of passages like this that make you want to put the pen down for good:
Everything that falls upon the eye is apparition, a sheet dropped over the world’s true workings. The nerves and the brain are tricked, and one is left with dreams that these specters loose their hands from ours and walk away, the curve of the back and the swing of the coat so familiar as to imply that they should be permanent fixtures of the world, when in fact nothing is more perishable.
Since finishing the book, it’s only grown on me.
Also, the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud. Specifically “Romance” and “Nina’s Reply”
Watching
Like many people of a certain age (I am 30 now…) I have been dabbling in the joy of bird watching for a little while now. I am no expert, and hardly even a hobbyist. But, as many have noted throughout history in art of all kinds, birds kind of fucking rule. It’s remarkably easy to get lost just watching the little guys and learning a new species or recognizing a new call scratches the brain in a particularly satisfying way.
So, naturally, the algorithm that rules us all presented me with Owen Reiser’s Listers on YouTube. Listers is an independently-made immersive documentary that follows Reiser and his brother as they spend a year diving as deeply into birdwatching as they possibly can. The Reisers are amateurs like me, who got into birdwatching simply because they have eyes and hearts. They are also hockey boys™ to their core. Their humor, language, and general unseriousness about everything is remarkably charming, especially when the facade fades away and they find themselves, against all odds, genuinely giving a shit.
For all of the fun and goofiness of the doc, its also worth noting that Reiser has a great sense of the right questions to ask. He interrogates the subject of birdwatching and its community by uncovering the good, the bad, and the ugly of the hobby and its most extreme hobbyists. He also fills the two-hour doc with some truly beautiful nature photography. It’s very easy to be intimidated by new hobbies, and too often they become competitive pursuits that take us away from the simple pleasures they provide in the first place. Listers is a good reminder that the only reason you need to do anything is simply that you think it might be cool.
P.S. Why is Listers not on Letterboxd? I have been able to log some truly dumb stuff on that app. Why won’t they let me tell the world about this wonderful little movie?
Also: The Drama, which I hilariously saw with my fiance the night before we got engaged.
Listening
I am saving much of the music I’ve been listening to recently for longer pieces down the line. So, I will instead recommend an artist that I’m just now diving into that I don’t think I could ever find the words to write about. Please acquaint yourself with the wonderful Swamp Dogg if you have not had the pleasure:
Shot:
Chaser:
Also: “Plastic Bag” by X-Ray Spex
Talk soon!!