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Your next best friend
Here is an old blackout poem I stuck in Tuesday’s letter, “Your next best friend,” which is about making good friends — with people and books.
We spend a lot of our lives as readers on the search for new books. But how many great books are already waiting for us on our shelves? How many favorite authors would we form deep relationships with if we simply read or re-read a few more of their books?
I really like the way this one turned out. You can read the whole thing here.
The Inflatable Man
“The Inflatable Man” is a metaphor Meghan came up with on one of our morning walks. I thought maybe there was an essay or a newsletter in it, and went looking for them around town. Once I shot this footage, I decided to make a Weird Little Something out of it. I believe we should all make Weird Little Somethings once in a while.
On reading novels
Tuesday’s newsletter was “on sitting around and reading a novel” for nothing but the pleasure of it:
[The feeling] that you’re getting away with something […] is really important to the reading experience. Reading should feel a little subversive… because it is! To sit around and read a novel in the year 2025 is an act of resistance — you’re swimming against the current of the entire contemporary shitstream.
Readers left hundreds of recommendations in the comments of that one.
For a list of some of my favorite novels, check out a previous letter, “Big books for summer.”
Easter Eggs
This Easter I was reminded of this photo I took in east Austin, 2013. (The sign reads: “Don’t make your own easter eggs — ain’t nobody got time for that!“)
That’s one kind of Easter egg, but the other is a hidden feature or a message.
Not everybody knows this, but I hide Easter eggs in every one of my Friday newsletters — the “hey y’all” greeting and the “xoxo” signoff is always hyperlinked. (I can’t remember when I started this practice, but I know I stole from Laura Olin.)
Sometimes the links are random, but often they comment somehow on the list of 10.
Here’s the most recent Friday letter so you can see what I mean: “Art comes from other art.”
Don’t crush Lamar!
Our local school district is considering a plan to move hundreds of students into my son’s middle school, which, like many public schools across America, is underfunded, overcrowded, and already operating well over capacity.
If you live in Austin and you have a dog — or a Scottie! — in this fight, please consider dropping a line to superintendent Matias Segura (matias.segura@austinisd.org) and the AISD Board of Trustees (trustees@austinisd.org) and urge them to consider a plan that doesn’t include crushing a special school that is already stressed.
To stay up-to-date on what’s going on, the Lamar PTA president writes a really good newsletter.
If you’d like to spread the word, I made a flyer that you can download and print:
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