What can I expect?
The Miscellany is a new-media experiment combining journalism, the art of the essay, and a highly curated guide to culture in all its many forms.
So here is what you can expect. Intelligent biweekly newsletters from me, Brian Patrick Eha, a journalist, novelist, poet, travel writer, consultant, cryptocurrency investor, and photographer. The lengths and contents will vary—one week I may write about the painter Balthus, another a forgotten campaign of the U.S. Civil War—but I’ll aim to publish every other week. Here’s the basic format:
Beautiful fact (because the world is a beautiful place and we should celebrate it)
Musings (serious food for thought)
News and views (breakdowns and takes on a few recent headlines, from the worlds of business, culture, tech, and beyond)
Recommendations (great stuff to read, watch, and listen to)
End quote (an inspiring, amusing, or thought-provoking quote, usually with a link to an article about the person who said it)
In addition, I may share work I’ve written, photos I’ve taken, and notes on places I’ve traveled. Beyond that, I’ll be listening to reader opinions and growing The Miscellany organically in whatever direction seems best.
Why “The Miscellany”?
A miscellany is a collection of writings on various subjects in a single volume. It has similarities to the commonplace book or medieval florilegia (“flowers of reading”), and even the private diary, all of which tend to contain a wide variety of material which their authors for one reason or another wanted to preserve.
In 19th-century Japan, a miscellany was called a zuihitsu, defined by one writer as “something in which you write down things you have seen and heard, said or thought, the useless and the serious alike as they come to you. This includes matters in which one is quite well-versed, as well as shallow musings that one simply feels it would be a shame to forget.”
Many blogs are miscellanies, though by no means all. One of the most magnificent miscellanies ever written is Giacomo Leopardi’s Zibaldone.
What makes this newsletter a miscellany is that it contains a farraginous assortment of things I find interesting and worth sharing. Some of those things are my own writings, thoughts, and views on various subjects, while some are the products of other minds: stories, songs, articles, videos, lectures, and more.
And while I’ll certainly do my best to limit the quotient of “useless” content, I can’t promise to stick only to things in which I’m well-versed. It wouldn’t be a miscellany if I did.
Why subscribe?
When you subscribe, you’ll get full access to the newsletter and my archived posts. So tune in and turn on.
