How I get into something new

3 tips for diving deep (online and offline)

“The Diver,” collage, 2019

Hey y’all,

First off, thanks for all the enthusiasm about my next book! It was a fun weekend.

My long-suffering editor suggested the topic of today’s letter. On one of our morning walks, she said to me, “You have a very particular way you go about getting into something that’s new-to-you. Why not tell people about it?” 

So, here are 3 things I do when I want to go deep on a new interest, beyond just searching Wikipedia and letting the algorithm show me what it wants me to see or thinks I want to see…

1. Filtered search.

Back when Twitter wasn’t a garbage fire, the first thing I’d do when I started investigating a new piece of culture — say an artist or a TV show — was perform a “People You Follow” search. Depending on the subject, the search might result in pages and pages of links, all handily selected for me by people I already find interesting. I still do this, but as more and more people make the completely reasonable and sane decision to delete their accounts and stop posting there, it becomes less and less valuable.

These days, I start with something much simpler: I search my email!

As, uh, recent current events have shown, your email essentially functions as a personal, searchable archive. I’ve had the same email address for over 20 years, and I archive emails more than I delete them, so searching for something like “Tolstoy” or “Sherlock Holmes” will turn up any number of items.

An email search also can remind me who I know who’s into a particular topic. When I know somebody who’s into something that’s new-to-me, I will search their website before texting or emailing to bother them about it. For example, if I was getting back into P.G. Wodehouse, I would search my friend Alan Jacobs’ blog:

 wodehouse site:https://ayjay.org

Or, if I was re-watching the films of Michael Mann, I might search my friend Matt Thomas’s blog:

michael mann site:https://submittedforyourperusal.com

What I’m aiming for here is items on a subject that have already been filtered through the attention of people I like paying attention to.

The other way to do this is to search publications I already like reading. For example, if I discover a writer, I will always look to see if there’s a Paris Review interview or a New Yorker profile or an obituary from The New York Times. (I was delighted last week when Ann Friedman said she was going to steal my idea to search for to search for your favorite contemporary author in the Bookworm archive.)

“The Diver,” collage, 2019

2. Multimedia immersion.

This is something we’ve learned from raising the boys: When they get into something, we try to load them up with every kind of media we can think of.

If you’re looking at an artist, for example, of course you’ll start with the medium the artist worked in. If I was getting into the musician Sun Ra for the first time, there are plenty of Sun Ra albums to listen to. But I would next ask: Are there any movies about Sun Ra? Books? Articles? Podcasts?

A quick search of my email tells/reminds me:

• In Viv Albertine’s memoir, she writes about how the Slits listened to Sun Ra’s “Space is the Place” when they were on tour and how much they were inspired by him (this was an export of my notes from the ebook, which reminds me I need to do that more and copy it into my commonplace book)

• David Toop writes about Sun Ra in Ocean of Sound

• There’s a brand-new American Masters bio on PBS called Sun Ra: Do The Impossible

• Hua Hsu wrote a profile of Sun Ra in The New Yorker in 2021

• My friend Warren Craghead listened to the whole Sun Ra catalog and posted a drawing and a review of each album

So immediately, I would have things to read, watch, and look at while I’m listening to Sun Ra! But of course, I could go much further.

A quick search of The Austin Public Library reveals that right now I could check out the documentary Sun Ra: A Joyful Noise, Paul Youngquist’s book A Pure Solar World, and a book about the cover art of Sun Ra’s record label.

Meanwhile, searching for “Sun Ra” in the Podcasts app of my phone reveals all sorts of episodes and whole podcasts devoted to Sun Ra. Browsing through, I think, “Oh, Sound Opinions, I know that show,” and searching their site, I find a playlist of songs about space.

Let’s not forget maybe the greatest place to search: YouTube. Somebody has uploaded the entirety of Space is the Place, Sun Ra’s 1974 Afrofuturist science fiction film. And here’s a 2014 Tiny Desk performance by the Sun Ra Arkestra with a 91-year-old Marshall Allen leading the band. (A search for “Marshall Allen” reveals that he’s still playing, that he just turned 101, and only last year released an album called New Dawn.)

This searching of YouTube reminds me of something Robin Sloan said last month, that I found, of course, by searching my email:

You have really got to start watching lec­tures with less than a thou­sand views on YouTube. The algo­rithm won’t get you there. Instead, go searching. Use random terms of interest; add “lecture”; filter for videos over 20 min­utes long. This, not the infi­nite Cheez-It box of ver­tical video, is the promise of the internet!!

Ok, let’s try it with Sun Ra. Boom! Somebody has uploaded Sun Ra’s lectures at Berkeley in 1971!

Maybe ten minutes of searching, and we have more Sun Ra than we can possibly handle in one week.