Today’s newsletter might be my favorite I’ve ever sent out:

I figured a letter sent out on such a Tuesday better be full of delight. Luckily, today we have the marvelous Lynda Barry with us. To celebrate the release of the paperback edition of her masterpiece What It Is, she answered a batch of my questions via the United States Postal Service…

No artist has had a bigger impact on my work, so you can imagine what this meant to me!

You can read the whole interview here.

Filed under: typewriter interviews

Today’s newsletter was an excuse to link these three books at my spot on the kitchen table — Roland Allen’s The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper, my late summer/fall diary (started on Oahu back in August), and Chris Ware’s Acme Novelty Datebook Volume Three, the final installment in his sketchbook series.

It was also an excuse to post these drawings from my sketchbook:

You can read the whole newsletter here: “On memory and notebooks.”

In the words of a reader, the newsletter is “super-juicy this week.” I had the most fun sharing a bunch of Halloween links:

2. Spooky reading: I really don’t think you can go wrong with the classics. I love Frankenstein, Dracula, and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde — as with many classics, they’re much weirder than you can even imagine. I also love short story collections — a big favorite of mine in recent years was Lafcadio Hearn’s Japanese Ghost Stories.

3. Spooky ear candy: If you’re throwing a Halloween party, I made a silly little “Monster Mash” playlist you can throw on. (I love this Halloween Nuggets: Monster Sixties A Go-Go box set.) I also recommend Walter Martin’s Halloween episode. If you just want some solo October vibes, check out my mix “The October Country.” And I told you about Cindy Lee’s Diamond Jubilee back in April, but it’s now available on Bandcamp. Probably my favorite album released this year — check out the song “Dracula.”

4. Spooky viewing: We watched the original 1942 Cat People with the kids and they seemed to dig it. I love those old horror movies produced by Val Lewton — we might try I Walked With A Zombie on them next year. Other hits with the kids are the classic Universal monster movies like Frankenstein and Creature from the Black Lagoon. I’ve heard Over the Garden Wall is good, but haven’t checked it out yet — there’s a new two-minute stop motion film coming soon to celebrate its 10th anniversary. If you need something lighter, there’s always It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown — preferably from a bootleg VHS rip with vintage commercials, since Apple TV owns the streaming rights now and it won’t be broadcast on TV. (I’ve stopped relying on streaming media for our holiday favorites and buy classics I know we’re going to watch again on physical media.) For really little ones, I recommend Room on the Broom.

You can read the rest here: “Digging deep.”

Couple of fun things: 

1. Over a quarter of a million people now subscribe to my newsletter. 

2. I sold my next book: 

These things aren’t unrelated: over the past decade, the newsletter has turned into a wonderful playground for me: a place where I can work out my ideas, share what I love, and show my work while I come up with the next thing…

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A post shared by Blanton Museum of Art (@blantonmuseum)

The Blanton filmed me talking talking about the museum:

I love to copy paintings when I’m here, because drawing makes you slow down and actually look at the thing… We spend a lot of time looking at images. We’re on our phones, we’re scrolling… but there’s something about being in the presence of a real work of art that someone has made with their hands, that someone has sweated over. Seeing it in person and seeing it at scale… it is unbeatable. It’s infectious! It makes you want to go home and make stuff! I mean, a good day at the museum for me is a day that I get out of there and I think, “I really feel like going home and writing!” or “I really feel like going home and drawing!” There is a kind of mania that happens when you’re in an art museum. You start seeing everything around you as art. And that’s the greatest thing that art can do: help you see your everyday world in a new light.

I included the video in today’s newsletter about a good day in the museum, or how I like to look at art.

I was interviewing Franz Nicolay about his book, Band People, and at one point I asked him, “Where do you think ambition comes from?”

Before he could answer, I blurted out, “I think it comes from a big hole in you!”

We laughed. He didn’t disagree.

Here’s Tony Schwartz on the two lessons he learned from being Donald Trump’s ghostwriter:

The first lesson is that a lack of conscience can be a huge advantage when it comes to accruing power, attention and wealth in a society where most other human beings abide by a social contract. The second lesson is that nothing we get for ourselves from the outside world can ever adequately substitute for what we’re missing on the inside.

Casually, and anecdotally, this is what I’ve often observed in my (thankfully limited) experiences around famous or quasi-famous people.

First, it’s hard to tell in the “suck-cessful” what’s ambition or drive or hard work or whatever you want to call it and what’s sociopathy.

Second, fame never fixes anything for anybody.

Because nothing from the outside will fill what’s missing on the inside.

Here’s another mixtape I made from a sealed, pre-recorded cassette I got for 99 cents at the record store. I tape over the cassette’s protection tabs and then I tape over the music and then I tape over the artwork.

I’ve made so many mixtapes this year that I think I’m starting to crack what I really love in a good mix.

Vibe.

What I really love in a mix is a vibe rather than a theme.

This comes up a lot this time of year when people post their Halloween mixes. All the songs are about witches or demons or whatever, but they don’t really cohere musically.

(I make exceptions for Bob Dylan’s brilliant Theme Time Radio Hour, which ruled completely, and also had a Halloween episode. Also: a radio show is different than a mixtape — the DJ can add context, switch the mood, etc.)

Anyways, I named this mix after Ray Bradbury’s collection:

“October Country . . . that country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and mid-nights stay. That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coal-bins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain. . . .”

I wanted it to sound like what October sounds like to me — in feeling, if not in lyrics. (To be honest, I barely listen to lyrics most of the time, which might be surprising to hear from a writer, but I’ve been a musician a lot longer than I’ve been a writer?)

SIDE A
– Chris Isaak, “Wicked Game”
– Tom Waits, “Down in the Hole”
– Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, “Little Demon”
– Ty Segall, “Girlfriend”
– Leonard Cohen, “Waiting for the Miracle”
– Scott Walker, “On Your Own Again”

SIDE B
– Depeche Mode, “Enjoy the Silence”
– Fever Ray, “Shiver”
– Thee Oh Sees, “Ghosts in the Trees”
– Ravyn Lenae, “Sticky”
– Keith & Tex, “Run to the Rocks”
– Bjork, “The Anchor Song”
– Charles Simic, “We Were So Poor”
– Portishead, “The Rip”

Originally, I had a wizards vs. witches thing going with the sides, and I was going to do Bjork, Fever Ray, and Ravyn Lenae and more on side B, but, again, I throw out concept and theme for vibe when I do these things.

The Charles Simic poem was kind of an accident — I was just looking through Spotify at my “Liked” tracks and tried to find a short snippet to fit the rest of the tape. (On the actual cassette, I play a tiny little portion of “The Rip” to end the side, but I think it goes nicely as a full song at the end.)

You can listen to the mix on Spotify.

I’ve made 11 of these things so far this year! If you want, you can listen to a big 10-hour playlist of them all.

Filed under: mixtapes

My latest typewriter interview is with Chase Jarvis, who has interviewed me many times over the years. You can read the whole thing here.

I guess this really is a series now? I’m sending out questions to a new batch of folks this week, so stay tuned. (You can read the others here.)

Today’s newsletter, “Human Resources,” is about what we can learn in art, business, and family life from how Duke Ellington ran his band, as detailed in Ted Gioia’s How To Listen To Jazz:

“Almost every important piece Ellington ever composed was written to showcase the key skills he heard in his band members. Music almost became a platform for Ellington’s management of human resources… Ellington’s executive skills could be compared to Benny Goodman’s, and the contrast was striking. Goodman was a perfectionist who was rarely pleased with the musicians he hired, and they burnt out on his intensity, many leaving the band after only a short stint. Ellington’s orchestra thrived, in contrast, because the boss didn’t demand perfection, and instead built everything in the ensemble’s repertoire on the demonstrated strengths of his personnel. I suspect that this approach to leadership could work in any environment…”

Many readers mentioned how much they liked the drawings, which pleased me, as they’re all over a decade old, many from when I was drawing a lot at Austin City Limits tapings.

You can read the newsletter here.

I usually don’t make art specifically for the newsletter, but I needed a top image for today’s edition, so I cut out Words from ads in the April 1935 issue of National Geographic.

Read the newsletter: “Verbify!”

First, off: “verbify” is a word. It means what it sounds like: use something as a verb.

In 2015, the late comedian Norm Macdonald tweeted about the time he met Bob Dylan.

According to Macdonald, they talked about all kinds of stuff, like their favorite books of the Bible. (Norm said he liked Job, Bob said he liked Ecclesiastes.)

At one point, Macdonald said, “I remember he talked over and over about verbs and about ‘verbifying’, how anything could be ‘verbified.’”

The writer Tony Conniff wrote a piece about Dylan’s use of verbs and used “Tangled Up in Blue” as an example:

They drove that car as far as they could
Abandoned it out West
Split up on a dark sad night
Both agreeing it was best

She turned around to look at him
As he was walkin’ away
She said this can’t be the end
“We’ll meet again someday on the avenue”

Tangled Up In Blue

“So much of the story,” Conniff writes, “is in the rich, vivid, and active verbs. It’s something you can find in almost any Dylan song.”

Of course, it ain’t like no other songwriter has ever talked about verbs before.

“When you’re writing a song,” said Chuck Berry, “nouns and verbs will carry you right through.”

UPDATE (9/20/2024): A reader sent me this Calvin & Hobbes cartoon about “verbing”:

Filed under: Verbs.

Today is the release of Amos Paul Kennedy, Jr.’s monograph Citizen Printer. 

In the foreword to the book, I write:

Kennedy’s work is evidence of the head, the heart, and the hands together at play. His is a physical process, done by a human body in time and space with the real materials of ink and chipboard and wood and machinery, pressing them all together into something new. In this digital age, it’s inspiring to see someone using their digits. Among the many images in this book that bring me joy, my favorite might be the photograph of his ink-stained hands… To hold a thing in my hands that he’s made with his hands makes me want to make things with my hands.

You can read the whole foreword in today’s newsletter, “A Man of Letters.”

I saw a trackback to my blog with this quote:

“The notebook is the place where you figure out what’s going on inside you or what’s rattling around. And then, the keyboard is the place that you go to tell people about it.”

Who said that? I thought. That’s pretty good.

It was me. Many years ago!

Still pretty true, although, I also figure out a lot of stuff at the keyboard, too.

(I’m a little less binary than I used to be, which I count as progress.)

My friend Alan Jacobs writes in response to a piece bemoaning the fact that nobody reads Arthur Koestler anymore:

You can curse the darkness, or you can light a candle. You can lament that people don’t know the value of Arthur Koestler’s work, or you can write an essay that seeks to call readers’ attention to his best writing. If young people today do not know of events or artists or thinkers or works that you think they would benefit from knowing, you can tell them. That’s one of the main things writers are for.

I am big on being a “curious elder” — and one way, I think, to expand the curious elder idea is to not just be curious about what young people are into, but to also share your curiosity about the world in a way that is generous but without expectation. To point out the things you think are good… just in case somebody, maybe even somebody younger, is looking for them.

(I should note I found the Peanuts comic by looking up the origins of the phrase.)

Related: “Be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.”

Friday’s newsletter, “Wondrous Variety,” started out with something I read in Clive James’ Cultural Amnesia: 

Humanism was a particularized but unconfined concern with all the high-quality products of the creative impulse, which could be distinguished from the destructive one by its propensity to increase the variety of the created world rather than reduce it. Builders of concentration camps might be creators of a kind—it is possible to imagine an architect happily working to perfect the design of the concrete stanchions supporting an electrified barbed-wire fence—but they were in business to subtract variety from the created world, not to add to it.

I was having trouble coming up with an image for the newsletter and then I remembered this photo I took in a Costco on Oahu.

Read the whole newsletter here.

Today’s newsletter begins:

It’s back to school season here in Austin. We dropped our youngest off at fourth grade this week and walked our firstborn to middle school. How is this possible? I’ve been keeping my mind off the inexorable passage of time by putting the finishing touches on a book proposal and carving stamps from Pink Pearl erasers. (I have always loved shopping for school supplies. If you need a little retail therapy, here’s a list of the gear I use in the studio.)

I named it after an old eastern saying that I can’t quite pin on anybody specific: “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.”

Here’s a bonus August mixtape inspired by the music our family listened to while driving around Oahu last week.

I made it from a sealed, pre-recorded cassette I got for 99 cents at End of an Ear. I tape over the cassette’s protection tabs and then I tape over the music and then I tape over the artwork.

This is the mix I really wanted to make for August, but I needed to go to the island first to make sure everything worked. (“Make Time Stop” should’ve been the September mix!)

SIDE A

– Richard Myhill, “Hawaiian Link”
– Janet Kay, “Silly Games”
– Heimo Rhonda, “Sunshine in Hawaii”
– Haruomi Hosono, “Saigono Rakuen”
– Raymond Scott, “Vibes & Marimba”
– Benjamin Rogers, “On a Coconut Island”
– Dominique Demont, “Un jour avec Yusef”
– Paul McCartney, “Ram On”
– Roedelius, “Wenn der Südwind…” (snippet)

SIDE B

– Señor Coconut, “Showroom Dummies”
– Martin Denny, “The Enchanted Sea”
– Harmonia & Eno, “When Shade Was Born”
– George Kulokahai and His Island Serenaders, “Aloha Oe”
– Raymond Scott, “Portofino 2”
– Gaussian Curve, “Impossible Island”

This tape was trimmed down from a 2 1/2 hour playlist I had on shuffle as we drove around the Windward Coast and the North Shore. The best way I’ve found to make a “vibes” playlist is to dump a bunch of stuff in there, and put it on shuffle, and anything that doesn’t fit, you just delete it as you go. 

When it comes to making an actual tape, however, I think you just have to start with the song you want to start with on side A and do one track at a time. (I was going to start with “Ram On” — it was really kind of a theme for our trip: I learned it on ukulele while we were out there and the 9-year-old even requested it — but it’s a song that works better for me towards the end of a side.)

Janet Kay’s “Silly Games” wasn’t on my original playlist, but I heard it by the side of the pool and I got excited because I love that song and started singing along and realized I haven’t put that one on a mix yet. (They were playing a lot of great Jamaican tracks at the resort we stayed at.) 

Everything on this mix is streaming for now, so you can listen on Spotify: 

This is the 9th mix I’ve made this year — if you’d like to listen to them all in one big batch, I made a 6+ hour playlist out of them.

Today’s newsletter was really an excuse to tell you about my vacation (and mess around with recall):

I’m adding the Windward Coast and North Shore of Oahu to my list of magical happy-making drives along the Pacific Ocean. Green mountains, palm trees, sunny beaches, swimming with sea turtles and dolphins, poke bowls, plate lunches, cold coconuts, shaved ice, McDonald’s drive-thrus that still do fried pies, lizards, mongooses, peacocks, horses, feral chickens, Banyan trees, ukulele shops, and watching every sunrise and every sunset. It was the best vacation we’ve ever been on.

I feel about Hawaii the way Mark Twain did:

No alien land in all the world has any deep, strong charm for me but that one; no other land could so longingly and so beseechingly haunt me, sleeping and waking, through half a lifetime, as that one has done. Other things leave me, but it abides; other things change, but it remains the same. For me its balmy airs are always blowing, its summer seas flashing in the sun, the pulsing of its surfbeat is in my ear; I can see its garlanded crags, its leaping cascades, its plumy palms drowsing by the shore, its remote summits floating like islands above the cloudrack; I can feel the spirit of its woodland solitudes; I can hear the plash of its brooks; in my nostrils still lives the breath of flowers that perished twenty years ago.

Read all about “The North Shore.”

We’re going to start a book club back up in the newsletter and I’m taking suggestions for what we should read.

Now, of course, is an excellent time to join the club and become a paid subscriber.