My latest typewriter interviews are with two cartoonists — one is a fully-drawn and pithy eye feast from Adam Koford, and the other a surprisingly wordy meal from Kevin Huizenga:
No urge to be doing
I used a quote from Patrick O’Brian’s Post Captain to start my letter, “No urge to be doing”:
“There are days… when one sees as though one had been blind the rest of one’s life. Such clarity – perfection in everything, not merely in the extraordinary. One lives in the very present moment; lives intently. There is no urge to be doing: being is the highest good. However… doing of some kind there must be.”
I am still in the kind of emotional and spiritual fallout that happens after I release a book, well-described by bell hooks in Teaching To Transgress:
Whenever I finish a work, I always feel lost, as though a steady anchor has been taken away and there is no sure ground under my feet. During the time between ending one project and beginning another, I always have a crisis of meaning. I begin to wonder what my life is all about and what I have been put on this earth to do. It is as though immersed in a project I lose all sense of myself and must then, when the work is done, rediscover who I am and where I am going.
It’s funny that hooks refers to an “anchor” because one of the recurring themes in O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin series is how much a sailor doesn’t know what to do with himself when he’s on land.
Hence the beginning of the greatest seafaring novel, Moby-Dick:
“Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off–then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship.”
I’m not quite there, I’m still enjoying my shore leave, so to speak, but it won’t be long until it’ll be time to get out to sea again.
Typewriter interview with George Saunders
A near-Herculean feat of transcription, if I do say so! Read it here.
Fogust groove (a mixtape)
“Fogust Groove” is a mixtape I made of a bunch of yacht rock and blue-eyed soul I played for my kids while we were driving around the coast of California last week:
I first heard these songs as a kid listening to my mom’s car radio tuned to “Sunny 95” (94.7 FM) out of Columbus, Ohio, so this mix is a bit of, in the words of the poet, “his nostalgic tale.”
You can listen to the mix on Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube.
Here’s a video of me making the mixtape:
Filed under: mixtapes
Typewriter interview with Julia Rothman
An author is never more vulnerable than when they have a book coming out, so I’ll often reach out to their publicists and snag them for an interview. In this case, the publicist reached out to me, and I’m very glad she did, because I’ve been a fan of Julia’s for a long time, and her answers are just as beautiful as her work.
I also love how she described the project on her Instagram:
“How cool that I got to be part of @austinkleon ‘s Typewriter Interview series. It comes through snail mail and you need to answer on the same papers and mail it back. I was so worried about making a creative family tree and I avoided it until the end. But ultimately it gave me a chance to look hard at what my biggest influences have been from childhood (the ground) to now (the branches). What a great exercise. (I realize I left some people off by mistake- esp Jason Polan)…”
It’s also a bonus when the interviewee is adept at using a scanner — Julia emailed me the images and I was able to post this one while on vacation! (The originals have reached me via snail mail since then and are now safe and sound in my files.)
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