Today’s newsletter is about the shortest month and what to do with it.
Newspaper + Marker = Poetry. Buy the book.
The map is not the territory
After I posted Tuesday’s newsletter about how I hit an “invisible wall” at the edge of a map of my understanding, I came across these two familiar quotes:
1. “A map is not the territory.”
—Alfred Korzybski (via the comments)
2. “It’s not down in any map; true places never are.”
—Melville, Moby-Dick (misquoted in Bob Dylan’s Nobel lecture)
Filed under: maps
Analog Ctrl-Z
In today’s newsletter, I demonstrate how I use a dry erase marker and a transparency sheet to make poems like this one:
Trying to Teach Your Kids the Kind of Math They Teach in School Now
I made this blackout after observing my wife teach my kids math out of a workbook that uses techniques that confuse our Elder Millennial brains. Here’s a decent explanation for why Common Core math problems look so weird:
Statues
I have spoken to Batman
I made this one in 2016. (Draw a picture of Batman! Everyone can be Batman!)
Allowed to reopen
Newspaper Blackout is ten years old
This weird little book turned 10 years old this month. Kind of hard to believe. I made most of the poems on the bus to work and on my lunch break at my office job. Years ago I thought for sure it would probably be remaindered and go out-of-print. And yet, it’s still around after a decade. (Perhaps even more amazingly, I get a modest check for it once in a while…)
A few years ago I wrote about what I’ve learned from a decade of publishing. Not much to add to that, except:
1) Make sure when you publish a book you think you can live with it for a while.
2) Try to write books you want to read, yes, but also, if you can, ones only you can write.
3) Have a little fun with it, if you can.
There really is nothing like that first book…
A muse the muse can afford
This age we’re living in
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