Tuesday’s newsletter was about making indexes on the fore-edge of your books and notebooks. Some truly nerdery, which was fun to write about. Read the letter here.
June mixtape
Here’s another monthly mixtape I made from a sealed, pre-recorded cassette I got for 99 cents. (Loudon Wainwright III’s Grown Man.) I tape over the cassette’s protection tabs and then I tape over the music and then I tape over the artwork.
For this one, I was going for summer pool vibes. I started with the Junior Murvin track that I think I’ve played every day of this month.
All these songs are streaming online, so you can listen on Spotify or Youtube:
SIDE A
– junior murvin, “roots train”
– the marvelettes, “the hunter gets captured by the game”
– james brown, “super bad”
– donovan, “epistle to dippy”
– the everly brothers, “gone, gone, gone”
– junior murvin, “give me your love”
– prince, “the ballad of dorothy parker”
– deerhoof, “running thoughts”
SIDE B
– the knife, “heartbeats”
– wailers, “duppy conqueror”
– new order, “thieves like us”
– bacao rhythm & steel band, “PIMP”
– lefty frizzell, “always late”
– mulatu astatke, “tezetaye antchi lidj”
Listen to more monthly mixes.
Time is a spiral
Today’s newsletter is about “solar returns” and revisiting old work.
Here’s Richard Linklater in the documentary Dream is Destiny, talking about the non-linear nature of time:
You don’t want to come back to this exact same spot, but you can’t help it through life. It’s a spiral. You know? You kind of come back to a new spot. You’re farther down the line, but you’re in a similar position.
You can read the rest here.
Starting with an ampersand
Friday’s newsletter, “Ampersanding,” started with this collage that had an ampersand stuck in the middle of it.
I looked it up on Wikipedia and voila: “The ampersand [&] originated as the ligature of the letters et — Latin for ‘and.’”
Seemed as good of a way as any to start a newsletter, since the structure of the Friday newsletter is basically a collage: this and that.
The next book might wind up with an ampersand in the title. But it’s too early to tell…
What’s helping me write now
In the latest newsletter, I shared these photos of what’s helping me write, right now.
On my bulletin board:
- a calendar page to keep track of me something small, every day
- a note to my son from his fourth grade teacher;
- a notecard he hand-lettered for the Keep Going trailer when he was six
On my desk:
- A sage stick Meg bought me at the witch store that I like to sniff
- a cube timer I use to get my hour of writing in
- my beloved cigarette pencil (I buy them at Toy Joy)
All that is helping me keep my ass in the chair and quitting when the going is good is helping me make sure I show up tomorrow and do it again.
More in the latest newsletter on “Sticking With It.”
- ← Newer posts
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- …
- 323
- Older posts→