Inspired by reminiscing about shopping at Borders around the turn of the century (yes, really) I started a new thing called “Tuesday Trio,” where I will recommend one book, one record, and one movie. The first in the series is “Radioactivity.”
Little rooms
Last Friday’s letter, “Little Rooms,” begins:
“Great things start in little rooms.” That’s André 3000 of Outkast in his Rock and Roll Hall of Fame acceptance speech, referencing Jack White of The White Stripes, who told young artists in his acceptance speech to “get your hands dirty and drop the screens and get out in your garage or your little room and get obsessed.” In my opinion, White’s “Little Room” is the greatest song ever written about success. Here it is in its entirety:
“Well, you’re in your little room
and you’re working on something good
but if it’s really good
you’re gonna need a bigger room
and when you’re in the bigger room
you might not know what to do
you might have to think of
how you got started
sitting in your little room!”
I followed that item with this line from Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation:
“I wonder if a single thought that has helped forward the human spirit has ever been conceived or written down in an enormous room.”
And ended with a line from my typewriter interview with poet Matthew Zapruder:
“To me poems / feel like rooms / you enter / again and again.”
After I sent the letter out, Scott Newstok sent me his “How to think like a sonnet, or, fourteen ways of looking around a room”:
What’s in a room? Whether it’s Emily Dickinson’s “mighty room” or Samuel Daniel’s “small room,” William Wordsworth’s “narrow room” or John Donne’s “pretty rooms,” we strive to “find room” in these “little room”s — a phrase invoked by Hayes, and before him Billy Collins, William Wordsworth, Thomas Campion, and John Donne. As Ted Berrigan self-reflexively queried, “Is there room in the room that you room in?”
I was surprised nobody asked why I didn’t mention Virginia Woolf.
And I remember, only now, that almost exactly one year ago, I wrote a letter about writing being a place that you enter.
It was called “Room to think.”
Scraps from my notebook
On Tuesday I usually take an idea or two from my pocket notebook and expand them into a long letter. But last Tuesday, I had all these half-baked ideas in my notebooks I wanted to riff on, so instead of writing one long letter, I wrote 10 little letters!
You can read them here.
The job of teenagers
From my letter, “Even the moon’s frightened”:
After one week, the scariest thing about having a teenager in the house is getting emails from tech companies essentially announcing, “Congratulations on your 13-year-old — HE’S OURS NOW.” (Bo Burnham: “They’re coming for every minute of your life.”) Also: I get annoyed by people who are annoyed by teenagers, so I scribbled this note to myself on the steering wheel of my car after school drop-off…
Also: I’m putting my teenager to work! Here’s a bit from my letter, “A day too long”:
My 13-year-old coder spotted a copy of Cory Doctorow’s Enshittificationon our coffee table and got a big grin on his face. I said, “You can read it if you want!” and he proceeded to do so. I asked him if he’d like to write a review for the newsletter. Like his old man, he likes to keep it brief: “A humorous, engaging, and political guide to the mishaps of the Internet. Frequent Internet users should definitely read this book.”
It struck me the other day that this is sort of the perfect time to be finishing this new book, because the days that inspired it, when the kids were really little, are long gone. We’re in this new teens/tweens phase now and I’m learning all kinds of new things from them. (Maybe not enough for another book, but you never know!)
The gathering of art
From my letter, “The Art of Messing Around”:
Priya [Parker] asked me if my newsletter had a title (it doesn’t) but the more I think about it, it’s funny that her book is called The Art of Gathering, because a title for this newsletter could be, The Gathering of Art. (At least, that’s what I’m trying to do.)
I’m in a big input phase right now — the heavy lifting on the next book is pretty much finished until the release next year, and I’m casting about for what comes next, or at least what I want to spend the rest of the year on.
I’ve been dreaming a lot and writing them down. From my letter, “What do you do with your dreams?”
I started writing down my dreams as a teenager, after I got my hands on Jack Kerouac’s Book of Dreams. He collected his dreams by scribbling in his notebook the minute he woke from sleep. Over the years, I’ve been on and off again with dream logging — lately, I’ve been writing them down in my diary again after I finished another James Hollis book.
The responses to that letter led me down all sorts of rabbit holes, from artists playing with the hypnagogic state, to the brain’s nightly cleanse, to this video of a Windows 95 screen defragging a hard drive.
I followed it up with another letter, “Dream, baby, dream,” which quoted Werner Herzog in Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams:
“If I abandon this project, I would be a man without dreams. And I don’t want to live like that. I live my life or I end my life with this project. It’s not only my dreams. My belief is that all these dreams are yours as well. And the only distinction between me and you is that I can articulate them. And that is what poetry or painting or literature or filmmaking is all about. It’s as simple as that. And I make films because I have not learned anything else and I know I can do it to a certain degree. And it is my duty, because this might be the inner chronicle of what we are. And we have to articulate ourselves otherwise we would be cows in a field.”
Music is the other thing I can’t get enough of. (Really, ever.) Just listening to a ton of music. Somehow this blackout, “Overheard on the Titanic,” just keeps getting realer and realer.
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