Fossil records and paper trails
This week’s 10 things worth sharing
Loved reading and responding to the hundreds of comments in Tuesday’s open thread. Maybe we’ll do it more often than every season?
Here are 10 things I thought were worth sharing this week:
After visiting a museum that has gone “paperless,” I wrote about fossil records and paper trails.
As a result of that same visit, I’ve gotten really interested in trilobites, which has led me to the work of Richard Fortey, who’s written books such as Life: A Natural History of The First Four Billion Years of Life on Earth and Trilobite!: Eyewitness to Evolution. I enjoyed his interview on the BBC podcast The Life Scientific. (Also: I’m adding trilobite fossils to my Christmas list.)
One of my summer fantasies is to live on an island off the coast of Finland like Tove Jansson. (For now, I might just re-read The Summer Book.)
The Oakland library exhibits things found in library books.
I was surprised how deep I found these principles of clowning, although I shouldn’t have been, given how much I believe in the the comedy of survival and learning to play the fool. (Thanks, Kyle!)
My friend Wendy MacNaughton has added a “Grown-ups Table” to Draw Together. Her first two pieces of advice: Draw in front of the TV and start carrying your sketchbook everywhere.
“Teacher, Bureaucrat, Cop.” An education essay by C. Thi Nguyen I read in anticipation of my kids going back to school next week. (For more of Nguyen’s work, see #2 in this newsletter from the archives.)
Music: new Deerhoof live in the studio and the perverse, perfect 90s nightmare, Now That’s What I Call Rushmore! Also, this note on listening to records: “Albums are mixed in order to be reproduced. When that process truly was 100% analog… the master tape was deliberately mixed with more high end than desired, because it was predictable that some of that would be lost in the reproduction process toward pressed records. In other words, the original master tape is not how those analog albums were meant to sound.” (I think this is related to why I’ve been enjoying the recent Beatles remixes so much. One remix I’ve been dipping into is George and Giles Martin’s Love mashup that they made for Cirque du Soleil.)
Movie: I loved Prey, the Predator prequel set 300 years ago. (I recommend the Comanche dub.)
RIP cartoonist Jean-Jacques Sempé. RIP songwriter Lamont Dozier. RIP artist Jeanne Steig. RIP designer Issey Miyake. RIP writer David McCullough. RIP writer and editor Bret Stetka, whose widow, Amanda Petrusich, is one of my very favorite music writers. (You can make a donation in his memory to a college fund set up for their one-year-old daughter.)
Thanks for reading. This newsletter is a reader-supported publication. The best way to support it is to buy my books, hire me to speak, shop for some of my favorite gear (I get a cut), or become a paid subscriber:
xoxo,
Austin
I love paper. I prefer to write longhand unless I’m writing something with real volume. I can type faster than I can write, and it feels like it’s easier for me to hit the zone, that sweet spot where the words are pouring out of you when I’m typing. But it’s not as enjoyable as having time with my thoughts, feeling a pen in my hand, hearing the tip of a Blackwing scritch scratching as I move it along some nice, toothy paper. The same thing with E Readers. I don’t mind them, but I prefer a physical copy of a book. I think a lot of it comes from me being in front of a computer all day for my boring desk job - “If I have to stare at a screen for one more second today...” I know that my iPhone has messed with my attention span. There probably is something to the idea of going paperless removing our paper trails. Something tangible like a book just feels so much more personal, so much more alive. Like the Oakland library that displays things found in books-there’s not really a way you can do that with E Readers or websites. Anything interesting that someone enters in there would most likely end up buried in the comments section. Not to knock E Readers-if someone is reading a book, physical or E, that’s good enough for me. But I do think we’ve lost a lot to the electronic world. Paper reminds me of being young and carefree with a book in front of me, content to enjoy the world of the story in front of me and not constantly thinking about all the negativity that I have instant access to on the super computer that now lives in my pocket.
If you are ever in Ohio, you should check out Toledo’s fossil park. It’s a former quarry where you can go and dig through one of the only Devonian shale deposits in the world. It’s completely free and you can find Trilobites, brachiopods, crinoids, and horn coral. Here is their website: https://www.olanderpark.com/olanderpark/fossil-park/