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Chlorine (a mixtape)
Here’s another new monthly mixtape to play by the pool. I made several changes as I went. I swapped the sides (originally side A started with Barbara Mason and B started with Tommy James) and I changed the ending, swapping Mac Demarco’s “Salad Days” and Chuck Berry’s “Havana Moon” with a reggae cover of “Summer Breeze” and Doris Troy’s brilliant demo released as a single, “Just One Look.”
I made the mixtape from a sealed, pre-recorded cassette I got for 99 cents at the record store. I taped over the cassette’s protection tabs and then I taped over the music and then I taped over the artwork.
You can listen to the mix on Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube.
Filed under: mixtapes
Old books are time machines
Today’s newsletter was inspired by the response of Cressida Cowell, author of How To Train Your Dragon, to the NYTimes Book Review’s question, “You’re organizing a dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?”
Shakespeare, George Eliot and Homer, if such a person ever existed (it’s a bit contentious, that one). You have to invite the dead ones. Although one of the many wonderful things about reading is that this is what you are already doing. You are having a dinner party with people who died, sometimes hundreds or even thousands of years ago, and whose voices and feelings and intelligence and opinions are all captured in the extraordinarily brilliant and irreplaceable technology that is a book. Now that really is magic.
Auden called this “breaking bread with the dead.”
Typewriter interview with Laura Lippman
The latest participant in my series of typewriter interviews is writer Laura Lippman.
Come on, world
Solar return (a mixtape)
I celebrated my 42nd trip around the sun by working on my book, but I took a tiny break to make a new monthly mixtape to play by the pool. (Similar vibes to last June’s mixtape.)
I made it from a sealed, pre-recorded cassette I got for 99 cents at the record store. I taped over the cassette’s protection tabs and then I taped over the music and then I taped over the artwork.
You can listen on Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube.
Filed under: mixtapes
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