A highlight of my year so far: The poet Mary Ruefle doesn’t do Zoom interviews or use a computer, so we conducted an interview via our typewriters. I typed a bunch of questions on individual pieces of yellow paper and mailed them to her home in Bennington, Vermont. She typed her answers underneath and mailed them back to me. You can read the complete interview in today’s newsletter.
A paragraph plea from today’s newsletter:
I am no saint, but I’ve been shocked lately by how saying “Hello,” “Please,” and “Thank you” to workers in service industries often elicits surprise and wonder and gets me treated like the Pope. I don’t know what is going on with most people, but it seems like a large number of us are becoming assholes, either downright mean or totally oblivious to others. I probably don’t need to tell you lovely subscribers this, but just in case: Try this week to acknowledge your fellow human beings and treat them with basic dignity and respect. The Golden Rule not only works wonders, it heals the soul! (“You’ve got to be kind.”)
Read the rest here.
People always ask me for recommendations when they visit my city, so in today’s newsletter I put a few walkable downtown-centric recommendations for folks who might be coming in for SXSW. (In short: use the hike and bike trail and get tacos at Veracruz.)
6. Walk the hike and bike a mile west from the convention center and you’ll arrive at our civic cathedral, The Austin Public Library. Take in the view on the roof and check out the Recycled Reads gift shop downstairs for souvenirs. If you’re tired, you can get queso and chips at Torchy’s, a smoothie at the JuiceLand, or a picnic at the Trader Joe’s nearby. If you have a bit more energy, you can either walk south on the pedestrian bridge across the river and hit Terry Black’s BBQ, or you can head north on what I call the Shoal Creek Book Walk and get to the corner of 6th and Lamar, where you can shop at the flagship Whole Foods, buy my books signed at Bookpeople, and possibly catch a free day show at Waterloo Records.
7. Another nice walk from the convention center is north along the Waller Creek Greenbelt and up to the brand-new Waterloo Greenway. Go a bit further north and you can hit Scholz Garden, where our best radio station, KUTX 98.9, is throwing a series of morning shows open to the public. A few blocks north of that and you can take in the Blanton Museum’s wonderful show of Anni Albers’ thread and paper work. A few blocks west is The Harry Ransom Center, the gem of The University of Texas. If you aren’t dead of heatstroke by then, you can walk back downtown through the Texas Capitol grounds (take a selfie with The Ten Commandments!) and down Congress Avenue.
8. Radio: We have great stations here. In addition to KUTX 98.9 FM, there’s classical KMFA 89.5 FM and our community KOOP 91.7 FM. I’d add those as favorites to the Radio Garden app before I came down.
I’m a middle-aged dad who doesn’t get out much, so take my recommendations with a grain of margarita salt.
One thing worth mentioning: A bicycle opens up the city in amazing ways for people visiting downtown. There’s a bike lane that runs from west 3rd to the Convention center, under 35, and east on 5th street that can link you up to a bunch of stuff.
Read the rest of today’s newsletter here.
I made a recent batch of lifted type collages that were inspired by my friend Alan Jacobs. During the early days of the pandemic, Alan wrote a piece called “Handmind in Covidtude” that quoted a character in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home:
It was a good thing for me to learn a craft with a true maker. It may have been the best thing I have done. Nothing we do is better than the work of handmind. When mind uses itself without the hands it runs the circle and may go too fast; even speech using the voice only may go too fast. The hand that shapes the mind into clay or written word slows thought to the gait of things and lets it be subject to accident and time.
You can read more and see the other pieces in the newsletter.
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