I had a nice conversation with Sarah Fay about the art of writing a newsletter.
Small things get big, big things get small
In my letter, “On working bigger (or not),” I shared some notes on scale, reduction, and enlargement, including an old theory I have about the web:
Online, big work gets smaller, while smaller work stays the same or gets bigger.
You can use this to your advantage. For most of my career, I have worked essentially in miniature, with almost every image I create happening in a small sketchbook or a page no bigger than a piece of typing paper.
It occurred to me very early on that if you take a little sketchbook doodle, scan it, and put it up on your blog, you essentially don’t lose anything in the transmission. (Unlike, say, looking at a tiny reproduction of Raphael’s School of Athens in an art history textbook or something.)
Read more here.
What I do when I finish a notebook
From my letter about what I do when I finish a notebook and start a new one:
The next silly ritual is selecting a “guardian spirit” for the inside cover of the notebook — a picture of someone to sort of give the notebook their blessing, start a vibe. I’m a Gemini (remember, we’re getting silly, here) so I often pick two spirits to sort of set up a creative tension. For my summer notebook I picked a picture of Napoleon (I was reading War and Peace) and a picture of Michael Palin with his bicycle from a copy of The Idler…
Read more here.
Filed under: guardian spirits
No Fun! (a 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. (Faith Hill’s Breathe.)
This one is kind of a sequel to “The October Country,” except I wanted it to kind of capture the misery of October in Texas — a dusty, hot October Country of torture, where you watch everyone else enjoy Autumn while Summer continues to rage.
I also wanted it to be just a little bit spooky and in the minor key, since it’s spooky season and all.
SIDE A
— The Stooges, “No Fun”
— The Kinks, “Nothin’ in This World Can Stop Me Worrying About That Girl”
— Althea & Donna, “Uptown Top Ranking”
— Joy Division, “Isolation”
— Suicie, “Ghost Rider”
— Frank Ocean, “Ivy”
— Mazzy Star, “Fade Into You”
— The Castaways, “Liar, Liar”
SIDE B
— The Make-Up, “Grey Motorcycle”
— Desmond Dekker, “Fu Manchu”
— Marty Robbins, “They’re Hanging Me Tonight”
— Outkast, “SpottieOttieDopaliscious”
— The Slits, “I Heard it Through The Grapevine”
— The Pixies, “Wave of Mutilation (UK Surf)”
— The xx, “Infinity”
Side A of the actual mixtape ends with a line from Ian McKellen reading The Odyssey:
…the recklessness of their own ways destroyed them all,
the blind fools, they devoured the cattle of the Sun
and the Sungod wiped from sight the day of their return.
Launch out on his story, Muse, daughter of Zeus,
start from where you will—sing for our time too.
And Side B ends with the first lines of Giamatti’s ode to baseball, “The Green Fields of the Mind”:
It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart.
You can listen to the playlist on Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube.
Filed under: mixtapes
The idea of autumn
Last Friday’s newsletter began:
In Texas, it looks like fall before it feels like fall. To scramble a line from Sylvia Plath’s journal, the worst of the summer is gone, with “the new fall not yet born. The odd uneven time.” Virginia Woolf said it well in a letter: “I feel entirely dehumanized by the sun now and wish for fog, snow, rain, humanity.” None of that is coming until at least Halloween down here, so we must settle for what C.S. Lewis in Surprised By Joy called “the idea of Autumn.”
And continued with Joy Williams on the truth-telling of fall:
“Fall is. It always comes round, with its lovely patience. If in the beginning it’s restless, at the end it’s resigned, complete in its waiting, complete in the utter correctness of what it has to tell us. Which is that we’re transitory. We’re transient, we’re temporary, we’re all only sometime.”
And a perfect passage from Patricia Lockwood’s memoir, Priestdaddy:
I have lived for the last eight years in seasonless places, where things do not die, but revolve in a constant tropic sun. I had forgotten how the fall sharpens pencils, gray and colored ones. I had forgotten that when you pay attention to the seasons, you are returned to school and all its feelings, the freedom of three o’clock and the nameless dread of Sunday night, when the sky looms over you like the deadline of some paper you haven’t even started. I want to drink cocoa out of a thermos; I want to go to a high school football game.
Read more in “The idea of Autumn.”
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