I usually don’t make art specifically for the newsletter, but I needed a top image for today’s edition, so I cut out Words from ads in the April 1935 issue of National Geographic.
Read the newsletter: “Verbify!”
Hands at work
Today is the release of Amos Paul Kennedy, Jr.’s monograph Citizen Printer.
In the foreword to the book, I write:
Kennedy’s work is evidence of the head, the heart, and the hands together at play. His is a physical process, done by a human body in time and space with the real materials of ink and chipboard and wood and machinery, pressing them all together into something new. In this digital age, it’s inspiring to see someone using their digits. Among the many images in this book that bring me joy, my favorite might be the photograph of his ink-stained hands… To hold a thing in my hands that he’s made with his hands makes me want to make things with my hands.
You can read the whole foreword in today’s newsletter, “A Man of Letters.”
Collective creativity
One of the diary-like joys of the Friday newsletter is getting to sit down after a week and figure out if the things in my life have been speaking to each other in any particular way.
Usually, the week is a miscellany — if not cacophony — but often a theme appears.
That theme this week is “collective creativity,” brought about by reading about Prince, jazz, and the work of being in a band. It’s a dense one, and good, I think.
To increase the variety of the created world
Friday’s newsletter, “Wondrous Variety,” started out with something I read in Clive James’ Cultural Amnesia:
Humanism was a particularized but unconfined concern with all the high-quality products of the creative impulse, which could be distinguished from the destructive one by its propensity to increase the variety of the created world rather than reduce it. Builders of concentration camps might be creators of a kind—it is possible to imagine an architect happily working to perfect the design of the concrete stanchions supporting an electrified barbed-wire fence—but they were in business to subtract variety from the created world, not to add to it.
I was having trouble coming up with an image for the newsletter and then I remembered this photo I took in a Costco on Oahu.
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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