Austin Kleon

Another cactus surgery

Here is Meghan after performing another cactus surgery on Giuseppe, our crested Mexican fencepost cactus, who had once again sprouted an offspring keeping G from growing:

In a newsletter from last summer, I wrote about cactuses and knowing what to leave in and what to leave out in your work. (We’re often encouraged to discard what doesn’t fit in our work — but what if you cut those things and plant them elsewhere?)

Here is Giuseppe (on the right) with all the offspring of Giuseppe:

You may wonder why the offspring aren’t crested! A crested cactus is the result of injury or mutation and not heredity, so the form isn’t passed down to the offspring. And the reason you want to cut off the offspring is because they will compete with the crested growth. (Succulents, man! Fascinating!)

Newsletters should be letters

An advertisement Jason Polan ran in The New Yorker

Today’s newsletter makes the case that newsletters should be letters:

People often ask me for advice on how to write a newsletter. I usually tell them some variation of what I wrote in Steal Like an Artist: “Write a newsletter you’d like to read.”

I have a few more tips, like “Pick a repeatable format” or “Be consistent at a regular frequency.”

But my current personal motto is: “Newsletters should be letters.”

What I love most about newsletters is the letter part — the epistle, the missive, the bulletin, the dispatch! What’s going on — in the studio, in my life, in my mind — that’s worth sending out? Worth opening? Worth reading?

I go on to suggest that maybe all writing — books, blogs, etc. — gets better when we just sit down and try to write a letter to the people we’re trying to reach.

“Every book is, in an intimate sense, a circular letter to the friends of him who writes it,” wrote Robert Louis Stevenson in Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes. “They alone take his meaning; they find private messages, assurances of love, and expressions of gratitude, dropped for them in every corner. The public is but a generous patron who defrays the postage.  Yet though the letter is directed to all, we have an old and kindly custom of addressing it on the outside to one.”

I ended with a list of suggested letter collections and epistolary novels.

I got a really wonderful batch of responses to this one. MVP reader Sara Bader, editor, quote collector, and author of The Book of Pet Love and Loss, Every Day A Word Surprises Me, and Art is the Highest Form of Hope sent me this marvelous photo of one of her bookshelves full of letter collections. (I have the E.B. White and Tove Jansson unread on my shelves, and I bought that M.F.K Fisher collection for Meg a few years ago.)

A few recommendations that are now on my list:

You can read the whole newsletter here.

Recently returned

Today’s newsletter began with me dreaming about buying one of these library-grade booktrucks and thinking about the “recently returned” shelf at the public library: 

In Elisa Gabbert’s latest collection, she writes about the magic of the “recently returned” shelf at the public library: “I like how it reduced the scope of my options, but without imposing any one person’s taste or agenda upon me, or the generalized taste of the masses suggested by algorithms. The books on that shelf weren’t being marketed to me; they weren’t omnipresent in my social media feeds. They were often old and very often ugly. I came to think of that shelf as an escape from hype. It was negative hype. It was anti-curation.”

At my local Yarborough branch of the Austin Public Library they give their booktrucks funny names:

They also keep their recently returned CDs and DVDs on special shelves, which leads me to fun discoveries like this: 

Browsing the recently returned CDs at the library, I came across the now out-of-print 2018 box set of The Beatles’ “White Album.” I’d heard the remixed tracks back when they were released, but never the Blu-ray Disc with the mix in surround sound. So good! I spent countless hours with the album when I was a teenager, mapping out the instruments and trying to figure out how they made it. I found myself obsessed with the album all over again, reading all the essays in the hardback book, and listening to all the session tracks. (Here’s Rob Sheffield on why the “Esher Demos” are so special.)

Read the whole newsletter: “Recently Returned.”

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