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Little rooms
Last Friday’s letter, “Little Rooms,” begins:
“Great things start in little rooms.” That’s André 3000 of Outkast in his Rock and Roll Hall of Fame acceptance speech, referencing Jack White of The White Stripes, who told young artists in his acceptance speech to “get your hands dirty and drop the screens and get out in your garage or your little room and get obsessed.” In my opinion, White’s “Little Room” is the greatest song ever written about success. Here it is in its entirety:
“Well, you’re in your little room
and you’re working on something good
but if it’s really good
you’re gonna need a bigger room
and when you’re in the bigger room
you might not know what to do
you might have to think of
how you got started
sitting in your little room!”
I followed that item with this line from Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation:
“I wonder if a single thought that has helped forward the human spirit has ever been conceived or written down in an enormous room.”
And ended with a line from my typewriter interview with poet Matthew Zapruder:
“To me poems / feel like rooms / you enter / again and again.”
After I sent the letter out, Scott Newstok sent me his “How to think like a sonnet, or, fourteen ways of looking around a room”:
What’s in a room? Whether it’s Emily Dickinson’s “mighty room” or Samuel Daniel’s “small room,” William Wordsworth’s “narrow room” or John Donne’s “pretty rooms,” we strive to “find room” in these “little room”s — a phrase invoked by Hayes, and before him Billy Collins, William Wordsworth, Thomas Campion, and John Donne. As Ted Berrigan self-reflexively queried, “Is there room in the room that you room in?”
I was surprised nobody asked why I didn’t mention Virginia Woolf.
And I remember, only now, that almost exactly one year ago, I wrote a letter about writing being a place that you enter.
It was called “Room to think.”
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!)
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