I made this blackout last week and put it at the top of Friday’s newsletter about getting in and out of trouble. Unfortunately, it was prophetic, because I was up at 4 a.m. this morning…
“When you read children’s books, you are given the space to read again as a child: to find your way back, back to the time when new discoveries came daily and when the world was colossal, before your imagination was trimmed and neatened, as if it were an optional extra.”
Whenever somebody says something nice about the blackouts, I think, “Oh, maybe I should make some more of those.”) Marc was interested in the source material for the poem he shared, and I had to admit to him, “I don’t ‘read’ the article first when I make these — I try to think of them as a raw field of words, like a word search puzzle.” (Almost every blackout I make is from the Sunday print edition of The New York Times — the ones in this email are all from the August 28, 2022 issue.
I’m turning 40 in a few months and trying not to think too much of it, but I am getting my bearings a bit.
Yesterday Elisa Gabbert tweeted, “I think I liked magazines more as a kid because the writing was by people older and wiser than me, with different generational interests. Now it’s just, like, writing by my friends, or people who could be? I’m supposed to pay for this? Lol”
I had a good laugh at this. It made me think that a good move at this age might be to start reading the NYTimes for Kids (which I already do) or Teen Vogue or AARP.
This would be the publication equivalent to Kevin Kelly’s advice, “When you are young, have friends who are older; when you are old, have friends who are younger.”
I do feel kind of lucky right now, to be in the middle: I have my kids and their friends for youth spies and for an elder perspective, I ride bikes twice a week with a 75-year-old who is still mad that Dylan went electric.
Everything changes, always, but I’m enjoying this age at the moment.
