Leaving a paper trail

10 things worth sharing this week

“Little snail / facing this way / where to now?” —Kobayashi Issa

Hey y’all,

Spring is still springing in Texas, so I’m extending our 20% off paid subscriptions sale through the weekend. Going paid gets you an extra newsletter from me every Tuesday, commenting, and full access to the archives — literally hundreds of thousands of words I haven’t published anywhere else. The kind support of paid subscribers also keeps this Friday letter free for everybody:

Here are 10 things I thought were worth sharing this week:

1. If you’d like to learn some easy printmaking from a total amateur, you’re in luck: here’s my unofficial guide to block printing.
   
   

2. “Right away, walking made me feel better. Every morning, when I stepped onto the road, I got a little less angry. It’s easy to hate the world when it’s just an abstraction that lives in your phone. It’s harder when you are out there in it, really looking, interacting. Tiny moments felt hugely healing.” Sam Anderson walks the route of The Old Leatherman. (Sam is one of the few writers I save to read in print. Check out our conversation about why writing and drawing is all about the exploratory line, or, as Klee put it: “taking a line for a walk.”)
   
   

3. My next-door neighbors got a new roof on Tuesday, so Meg and I fled the vicinity and did something we never do: We went to First Light Books and sat around drinking coffee and reading a book. Have you ever tried this? It’s pretty fun! (At the register I picked up a copy of the winter issue of Bookforum, which has a gorgeous pansy collage by Joe Brainard on the cover. (I highly recommend his memoir, I Remember.)
   
   

4. Two different people two days in a row told me I needed to check out local Austin author Christopher Brown’s book, A Natural History of Empty Lots. I’m enjoying it so far, along with his newsletter, Field Notes. Brown will be appearing at First Light in May — while I was reading him out front, this magic moment happened:

   
   

5. Ear candy: The music in that little clip is “Over the Clover” from the recently reissued album Flora by the legendary Japanese ambient composer Hiroshi Yoshimura, who appears to be having a moment. Many of his recordings were context-specific, so “it’s really interesting to have a discovery like this album, where we truly don’t know what the intention was.” (My favorite album of Yoshimura’s is Surround, which was commissioned in 1986 as the soundtrack to prefabricated homes — I often listen to it on noise-canceling headphones when I’m trying to take a nap!)
   
   

6. Speaking of ambient legends: Brian Eno’s new book What Art Does is out this week. I haven’t picked up my copy yet, but I watched this tour of his studio, and I took my 12-year-old composer to see Gary Hustwit’s generative documentary Eno for a second time. (If you haven’t seen it yet, it’s live-streaming online this weekend — I wrote about it in my letter “Drawing Eno.”)
   
   

7. More ear candy: After hearing Post playing in the record store, I’ve been listening to the surround sound remixes of Björk’s catalog on Apple Music. (I love this 1995 performance on Later… with Jools Holland of “Possibly Maybe” with B.J. Cole on pedal steel.) And I can’t seem to stop listening to Panda Bear’s Sinister Grift — here’s a nice playlist he put together of “songs to start a Sunday peacefully.”
   
   

8. Eye candy: Owls in towels. (Thanks to Chris for this cuteness. Also: Let’s not kill 450,000 owls.)
   
   

9. TV: the first episode of The Studio was really good, and reminded me that I really need to make some time to watch Robert Altman’s The Player. There are, of course, plenty of good movies about movies. Some favorites of mine: Singin’ in the Rain, Sullivan’s Travels, Boogie Nights, Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, and American Movie. (A friend of mine in Hollywood swears that many movies are secretly about making movies, like There Will Be Blood.)
   
   

10. One year ago, I published a wonderful typewriter interview with poet Mary Ruefle, and since then I’ve published interviews with Lynda Barry, Elisa Gabbert, Chase Jarvis, Kelli Anderson, and Ross Gay. I hope you’ll check them out if you haven’t already — they’re very much worth your time. (More on the way!)
    

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“And seeing the snail which everywhere doth roam,
Carrying his own house still, still is at home,
Follow (for he is easy paced) this snail,
Be thine own palace, or the world's thy jail.”

xoxo,

Austin

PS. Here’s a behind-the-scenes peek at the studio after I made my unofficial guide to block printing: 

A paper trail? A snail trail? Yes! (The song playing in the background is Panda Bear’s “50mg.“) And here are the prints that made up the animation at the top of this letter: