Study Hall #4

This is the fourth installment of "Study Hall," a longer form comic I'm posting every other week. "Study Hall" is about the year I tutored at MCI-Concord, a medium-security prison just outside Boston. (Study Hall comics once were paywalled but it was annoying to do that so I'm just going to make it free.) To read the first three installments—and to see it in its entirety thus far—please click here.

Thank you for reading Study Hall! If you like this, or you like Mushroom Head generally, please share with a friend. Or subscribe for as little as a dollar a month, and the first month is free! Your support is not just token—it truly motivates me to keep making my work.

And now, three things that kept me going this past week.

1. A new song from artist, publisher, and musician Tod Lippy. "Florida Plates" captures the current political mood (or at least my mood): fatigued but determined. Or maybe fatigued but hanging on, because what else are you going to do. There is an emotional undercurrent to this wry but very enjoyable folky/country song, which left me feeling something that surprised me because of how deeply I felt it: hope.

2. This article on fading hippie culture in Northern California was pushed to me via a news aggregate, so I thought it came out this week, but it came out in 2021! Oh well, the photographs by Michael Schmelling are still worth checking out. A related investigation of California escapist culture that is also worth your time: Lyra Kilston's fun, image-rich book, Sun Seekers.

3. Megan H. recommended the book Reproduction by Louisa Hall. I've been reading it this past week and am now a few pages from the end. I described it to another friend, Nicole M., as having a narcotic effect: when I'm reading it I lose all sense of time, it goes down that easily, and I can't stop thinking about it after I put it down. It's also very timely, as it takes place over the past few years, and is about pregnancy and trying to get pregnant and IVF, which of course is very much in the news these days as some people are convinced that shapeless, infinitesimally small sacs of cells are actually [midwest preacher accent] schweet, teenshy bay-beesh.

That's all for this week. I'm off next week—I will be in California taking the nature cure myself. Oh, and thank you for all your responses to last week's letter! I should definitely post more content that shows me making an ass of myself (for better or worse I have a lot of such material to work with).

Til soon (in two weeks),

Claire