Typewriter, tip, tip, tip
10 things worth sharing this week + signed books for the holidays
If you’d like to get a signed and personalized copy of one or all of my books for the holidays, you can order them now from Bookpeople! I’ll sign as many as you buy. Deadline for Christmas delivery is December 14th! I doodle a different drawing in each book — in Newspaper Blackout I draw a screech owl:
Here are 10 other things I thought were worth sharing this week:
Austin, Texas: You may remember Kelli Anderson’s wonderful typewriter interview. Kelli’s coming to First Light Books this Monday (11/24) to talk about her new book, Alphabet in Motion. Join us! (We must celebrate and be the weird that we’re losing so much of in our city. RIP Koriente. RIP Recycled Reads. RIP the oak tree that artist Steve Parker transformed into playable records!)
If you’re not in Austin, Texas and you want to hear me talk, I’m chatting with Author Insider Live on Monday (11/24) at noon central about how to keep making meaningful work in this noisy world. (In case you missed it, I wrote a book on the subject called Keep Going.)“In a world that’s on fire, what do we do with art? Like, what can music actually do?” I am a gigantic fan of Fela Kuti, so I’ve been looking forward to Jad Abumrad’s podcast series, Fela Kuti: Fear No Man. I finally listened to the first two episodes — on headphones! the mix is great! — and I’m hooked. (Favorite thing I’ve learned so far: allegedly, Fela’s band auditioned to be the house band on Disneyland’s Jungle Cruise ride… but they were deemed not African enough!)
“Never give up. Never surrender!” That’s not a Fela lyric, that’s Galaxy Quest, our latest pizza night hit with the kiddos. (If you're a fan of the movie, you might like Never Surrender: A Galaxy Quest Documentary.)
I typed this bicycle haiku for Grant Snider’s Haikomics Anthology:
“I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose.” To give my brain-attic a rest, I’ve been reading a bunch of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. I read A Study in Scarlet, I’m now reading The Sign of the Four, and I’m hoping to move on to The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, which is made up of the short stories that ran in The Strand Magazine and made the character famous.
Japanese Chill: I mentioned I wanted to read a book that had the same vibe as Hiroshi Yoshimura’s music or the movie Perfect Days. More than one person recommended Nantsume Sōseki’s 1906 novel, Kusamakura. The story is about an artist who retreats to a hot springs hotel in the mountains and meets a mysterious woman. (A fun complement to Sherlock, as the narrator spends much of his monologue discussing art-making and seems to have it out for detectives! “Once you start asking why, it all turns into detective work,” he says. “The usual novels are all invented by detectives… they’re utterly boring.”)
I started a new series called “Tuesday Trio,” where I pick a book, a record, and a movie that share a theme. I had a lot of fun with the first theme: “Radioactivity.”
If you celebrate Thanksgiving, or you just want to give thanks, help yourself to some free gratitude zines I made that you can download and print. (There’s also a video showing you how to fold them and a simplified version for the kids’ table.) Seeing folks make and share these for the past few years has grown my Grinch heart a few sizes.
I don’t know about you, but this new moon has been a doozy for me. Next week I plan to eat quite a lot of pie and take several naps. I will do so without guilt, thanks to Heraclitus:
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xoxo,
Austin
Love the typewriter article, and thx for the zine! Sadly, I just had to do some paring down of my paid Substack subscriptions ( boy do they add up!), but yours made the cut because I always find it gives me something profound to take along with me. Thanks for your hard work!
Its a real neat little shop. Its a long rectangle with repairs happening in the back and rows of shelves with typewriters for sale in the front. Typewriter art and zines are pinned to the walls. And the machines are luscious. Some real oldies going back to early 1900s. Mostly smaller portables from the 1940s through 70s. You can try them all out. The owners are right there to answer questions or direct you to a machine that might be more suitable. Customers do this also. A woman who watched my frustration with a qwertz keyboard pointed me to a similar machine with the more common qwerty. Sold! I left with a sweet little 1950s era Optima. portable. It was made in Holland. There is an umlaut over the letter U.