Prince of analogue

Mark Haddon let it slip on his Instagram that he’s working on a typewriter interview for me:

before i even get started i need to celebrate the questions which are a) some of the best i’ve ever been asked (swipe for a selection) b) arrive *in the post* and c) come with a fabulous hand-made card. three cheers for austin kleon, prince of analogue…

This delighted me, of course. One of the ways I pitch people (that is, if I have to) on the typewriter interviews is to emphasize how easy and fun they’re supposed to be: I mail you the questions, you fill them out and mail them back. That’s it!

I saw a meme the other day that said, “Stamps are stickers with a job.” That made me laugh. I truly delight in sending things through the mail. It is a kind of magic.

Another kind of magic I’m addicted to is keeping a diary by hand. I’ve just taken a look at my tour diary from last month, which covered one of the hardest couple of days I’ve had in a while, and it’s incredible how it puts me right back where I was when I made the pages.

When I was putting together the Don’t Call It Art tour talk, I decided to throw in some pages from the 10 years it took to get the book together. Those pages put me right back in those days — much more than the (many) photographs I took, actually. (You can see more in my letter, “Diary of a book.”)

Here’s a doodle of guitarist Joel Paterson I made while watching Bob Dylan in Waterloo Park. (See my letter, “The air is getting hotter.”) I can’t seem to sit through any kind of live event anymore without a little notebook and pen in my hands — but even looking at something you scribbled in the dark seems to bring you back to a time and place…