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Waste books
Here is the reading shelf in our bathroom. For the past month or two, I’ve been reading a few pages of G.C. Lichtenberg’s The Waste Books in there every day.
Here’s how Lichtenberg himself described a “waste book”:
Merchants and traders have a waste book… in which they enter daily everything they purchase and sell, messily, without order. From this, it is transferred to their journal, where everything appears more systematic, and finally to a ledger, in double entry after the Italian manner of bookkeeping, where one settles accounts with each man, once as debtor and then as creditor. This deserves to be imitated by scholars. First it should be entered in a book in which I record everything as I see it or as it is given to me in my thoughts; then it may be entered in another book in which the material is more separated and ordered, and the ledger might then contain, in an ordered expression, the connections and explanations of the material that flow from it.
Read more in today’s newsletter about always having a book with you.
Make time stop (an August mixtape)
Here’s August’s monthly mixtape I made from a sealed, pre-recorded cassette I got for 99 cents at End of an Ear. I tape over the cassette’s protection tabs and then I tape over the music and then I tape over the artwork.
I was going to save this summer fading fast vibes mix for September, but I’ve decided these days not to save things, to make them when they’re ready:
It was a short tape (only 30 mins) so it was a short mix:
SIDE A
– the first few seconds of Led Zeppelin’s “Black Dog”
– waxahatchie w/ MJ Lenderman, “right back to it”
– big thief, “time escaping”
– durutti column, “sketch for summer”
– nick drake, “pink moon”
SIDE B
– the mamas and the papas, “got a feelin’”
– bob dylan, “went to see the gypsy”
– the feelies, “raised eyebrows” (faded out around 1:50)
– crooked fingers, “sleep all summer”
– thee oh sees, “golden phones” (faded out after about a minute to fill the tape)
A couple of these selections seemed a little obvious to me, but “Pink Moon” is the perfect song for filling 2 minutes at the end of a mixtape! (And it’s also a perfectly recorded song, no matter how many commercials you hear it in.)
It was a cheap tape that I hit a little too hard on the recording, so it runs a little hot.
I’m trying to extend the pool vibes from the “Firecracker” mixtape, so I don’t really plan on listening to this again until September, but you can listen to it any time here:
This is the 8th of these mixes I’ve made — if you’d like to listen to them all in one big batch, I made a 5-hour playlist out of them.
Filed under: mixtapes
Signed books
Here’s a photo of me at Bookpeople yesterday. A quick reminder that you can get all of my books signed and personalized and shipped anywhere from here in Austin, Texas. You can also order them and have them waiting for you if you plan on visiting soon. I usually go in on the first Friday of the month to do a big batch. Order here.
The finer things in life
Today’s newsletter began with this photo of Tacos Yo Soy on North Loop here in Austin, Texas. (Taken while riding my bike around.) It’s a dense Friday edition, full of good stuff. Read it here.
Anticipation and recall
I will often map out a Tuesday newsletter in my notebook, forget I made a map, and write it without my notes. Then when I go back flipping through my notebook, I discover everything I left out!
Today’s newsletter is about messing around with anticipation and recall to stretch out pleasant events and minimize unpleasant ones.
On the unpleasant side, I left out one of my favorite parts of the section of Katherine Morgan Schafler’s The Perfectionist’s Guide to Losing Control that inspired the letter:
We justify agreeing to get coffee with someone whom we don’t really want to see by saying something like, “It’ll just be half an hour and then I’ll leave.” No. It’ll be the anticipatory anxiety for the week leading up to that half hour, the half hour itself, and then the negative recall of how you felt annoyed and immediately resentful upon sitting down, didn’t want to be there, and couldn’t believe she said that, even though she always says stuff like that, and that’s why you don’t like hanging out with her in the first place….When it comes to agreeing to engage in events we don’t want to engage in, there’s nothing quick about quick catch-up drinks or quick calls or quick meetings.
This adds a layer to the question to ask yourself to avoid accepting invitations you’ll later regret: “Would I do it tomorrow?”
The time travel involved in this calculation is already tricky — who knows how I’ll feel about doing something five minutes from now, let alone five months from now? But if you think about the time leading up to the event and the time coming down from it, suddenly such obligations reveal their bloated shape.
(“The job never kills anybody,” says John Taylor of Duran Duran. “It’s the fucking stuff you do in between.”)
On the pleasant side, I was reminded of how important it is to have something to look forward to, no matter how silly.
All of this, by the way, is a form of playing with your experience of time: by exploiting anticipation and recall, you’re trying to effectively slow down and speed up certain events, and using your memory to shape the story you want to tell about your experience.
You can read the whole newsletter here.
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