The Lot: Substack as Zibaldone
The Lot?
That’s the name of this Substack. A capacious name, incorporating much, one might imagine.
But what?
What does The Lot incorporate? What will you find here?
Well, to begin with what’s obvious, The Lot includes everything I’ve posted so far under this heading over the past year, here on Substack.
And it includes, or will include everything yet to come.
A bit like a zibaldone.
A what?
A zibaldone.1
Plural, zibaldoni.
Italian.
Meaning: A heap of things, a miscellany, i.e., the Lot.
The means of production have undoubtedly changed over the past 700 years, but the idea is as old as the hills, and here it is again, on Substack.
The Lot includes all those words of all different pieces I’ve written over the past year on everything from the literary and the personal to the political—and back.
From the current state of Canada to the wonderment of fiction and science fiction. From Marie-Andrée Lamontagne’s magnificent novel En Laurentie to Seamus Heaney’s astonishing translation of Beowulf, by way of Ann Patchett’s promotion of backlist titles at Parnassus Books in Nashville, Tennessee.
From the process of translating The Bigamist to some fast friends, Jewish and Palestinian. And from an article by Christos Tsiolkas to a schism in early Zionism.
A miscellany, in some ways. A commonplace book, an intellectual scrapbook, “a heap of things, a zibaldone.”
All of which was written, noted, and compiled on my trusty Notes app, and much of that material then appears in The Lot.
A page from my Notes app, c. 2025, is text-heavy, with quotes from and hyperlinks to articles I’ve been reading, not to mention shopping lists, reminders about getting a light fixture repaired, poems and excerpts of poems, journal entries about David’s medical appointments, quotes from emails, and sundry images and illustrations, such as this one:
Zibaldone de Canal, Beineke Library, Yale. Venice c. 1350
A zibaldone often included documentary, devotional texts, poetry, notes about finances and taxes, medicinal remedies, favourite quotations, much besides.
The Lot includes poetry, not only lines from Heaney’s translation of Beowulf, but a poem by Paul Durcan, as well: “Staring Out the Window Three Weeks After his Death.”
Someone who knew Durcan, and his life and work, will know the identity of the man in the poem who died “three weeks ago.” I don’t know who that was.
I included that poem in The Lot three weeks after my husband David passed away. I loved the way Durcan writes about how, as he was staring out the window, he catches sight of…
…the hare of his soul
Springing out of the wood into a beachy cove of sunlight
And I thought—yes, that's how it is going to be from now on:
The hare of his soul always there, when I least expect it,
Popping up out of nowhere, sitting still.
Not sure if that counts as devotional, exactly, but it’s as close as The Lot will get to devotional.
I started The Lot almost a year ago, at a time before so much changed, and not for the better, so that countless people are now moving uncertainly in new directions. As you are.
And as I am, with the result that The Lot is heading into an uncertain future, too, one more little mushroom emerging after uncommonly heavy rain.
Jeremy Norman’s History of Information, https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=2786
