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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
Deadlines, deadlines, deadlines
I spent the first half of the year writing and drawing the next book, so I guess it makes sense that I’ve written so many newsletters about deadlines.
In March, I made a zine called Death & Deadlines:
I can really relate to this excerpt from Terry Teachout’s Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington:
“He was the most chronic of procrastinators, a man who never did today what he could put off until next month, or next year. He left letters unanswered, contracts unsigned, watches unworn, and longtime companions unwed, and the only thing harder than getting him out of bed in the afternoon was getting him to finish writing a new piece of music in time for the premiere. “I don’t need time,” he liked to say. “What I need is a deadline!”
Two weeks ago I wrote about the 5 things that work for me when I’m on deadline:
You spend most of your life as a writer being misunderstood by the people around you, but the one thing people seem to respect is when you say, “Sorry. I can’t. I’m on deadline.”
This week I wrote about the 7 types of deadline music:
The majority of my work in the studio has to do with words, so most of the time, I can’t listen to podcasts or audiobooks. (In fact, if there’s a podcast or an audiobook I really want to listen to, I’ll go out of my way to schedule time to work on something non-verbal, like a collage.)
After all that… I have hit my deadlines!
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