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Typewriter interview with Matthew Zapruder
I’ve now published a baker’s dozen of typewriter interviews! The latest is with poet Matthew Zapruder.
Scraps from my notebook
On Tuesday I usually take an idea or two from my pocket notebook and expand them into a long letter. But last Tuesday, I had all these half-baked ideas in my notebooks I wanted to riff on, so instead of writing one long letter, I wrote 10 little letters!
You can read them here.
A day too long (November 2025 mixtape)
Here’s another new monthly mixtape made from a sealed, pre-recorded cassette I got for 99 cents. I taped over the cassette’s protection tabs and then I taped over the music and then I taped over the artwork.
I actually snapped the tape while playing this mix back, but I managed to fix it (maybe only temporarily) with some transparent tape and an x-acto blade. Old school!
This mix exists because I wanted to build a tape off of the Time Out of Mind outtake version of Bob Dylan’s “Mississippi,” which is sort of what this November feels like to me.
Everybody movin’ if they ain’t already there
Everybody got to move somewhere
Stick with me baby, stick with me anyhow
Things should start to get interesting right about now
It’s weird when you make a mix in early November, because there are still Halloween vibes floating around. Very autumnal.
There are two Geese songs on there because I love those kids. I won’t gush again like I did a few weeks ago, but Meg and I saw them live last week and they were great. A band that can pull off covering The Stooges and New Radicals? Hell yeah.
side a
– Dylan, “Mississippi” (Time out of Mind outtake)
– Geese, “Cowboy Nudes”
– Donovan, “Get Thy Bearings”
– John Holt, “Ali Baba”
– The Magnetic Fields, “I Think I Need A New Heart”
– Toots & The Maytals, “Let Down”
– Jeremy Steig, “Howlin’ for Judy” (chopped by the end of side one)
side b
– Van Morrison, “Dweller on the Threshold”
– Velvet Underground, “I’ll Be Your Mirror”
– Sonny & The Sunsets, “ Green Blood”
– Geese, “Au Pays Du Cocaine”
– Grateful Dead, “Friend of the Devil”
– Cowboy Junkies, “Sweet Jane”
– Michael Hurley, “O My Stars”
I kind of like how sort of obvious side 2 gets. I think mixes get better sometimes when you stop being clever and just put songs on there you’d listen to a million times over, like when you were fifteen and making a mix.
You can listen to the playlist on Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube.
Filed under: mixtapes
The job of teenagers
From my letter, “Even the moon’s frightened”:
After one week, the scariest thing about having a teenager in the house is getting emails from tech companies essentially announcing, “Congratulations on your 13-year-old — HE’S OURS NOW.” (Bo Burnham: “They’re coming for every minute of your life.”) Also: I get annoyed by people who are annoyed by teenagers, so I scribbled this note to myself on the steering wheel of my car after school drop-off…
Also: I’m putting my teenager to work! Here’s a bit from my letter, “A day too long”:
My 13-year-old coder spotted a copy of Cory Doctorow’s Enshittificationon our coffee table and got a big grin on his face. I said, “You can read it if you want!” and he proceeded to do so. I asked him if he’d like to write a review for the newsletter. Like his old man, he likes to keep it brief: “A humorous, engaging, and political guide to the mishaps of the Internet. Frequent Internet users should definitely read this book.”
It struck me the other day that this is sort of the perfect time to be finishing this new book, because the days that inspired it, when the kids were really little, are long gone. We’re in this new teens/tweens phase now and I’m learning all kinds of new things from them. (Maybe not enough for another book, but you never know!)
The gathering of art
From my letter, “The Art of Messing Around”:
Priya [Parker] asked me if my newsletter had a title (it doesn’t) but the more I think about it, it’s funny that her book is called The Art of Gathering, because a title for this newsletter could be, The Gathering of Art. (At least, that’s what I’m trying to do.)
I’m in a big input phase right now — the heavy lifting on the next book is pretty much finished until the release next year, and I’m casting about for what comes next, or at least what I want to spend the rest of the year on.
I’ve been dreaming a lot and writing them down. From my letter, “What do you do with your dreams?”
I started writing down my dreams as a teenager, after I got my hands on Jack Kerouac’s Book of Dreams. He collected his dreams by scribbling in his notebook the minute he woke from sleep. Over the years, I’ve been on and off again with dream logging — lately, I’ve been writing them down in my diary again after I finished another James Hollis book.
The responses to that letter led me down all sorts of rabbit holes, from artists playing with the hypnagogic state, to the brain’s nightly cleanse, to this video of a Windows 95 screen defragging a hard drive.
I followed it up with another letter, “Dream, baby, dream,” which quoted Werner Herzog in Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams:
“If I abandon this project, I would be a man without dreams. And I don’t want to live like that. I live my life or I end my life with this project. It’s not only my dreams. My belief is that all these dreams are yours as well. And the only distinction between me and you is that I can articulate them. And that is what poetry or painting or literature or filmmaking is all about. It’s as simple as that. And I make films because I have not learned anything else and I know I can do it to a certain degree. And it is my duty, because this might be the inner chronicle of what we are. And we have to articulate ourselves otherwise we would be cows in a field.”
Music is the other thing I can’t get enough of. (Really, ever.) Just listening to a ton of music. Somehow this blackout, “Overheard on the Titanic,” just keeps getting realer and realer.
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