My latest typewriter interview is with cartoonist James Kochalka. It’s fun and light and exactly like his comics.

James has long been an inspiration to me — in the P.S. I mention that James’ sketchbook comic American Elf was on my list of 7 books that helped me learn from my kids. I learned from James the other day that collections of the strip are totally out-of-print — not even available digitally! This is mind-boggling to me, but the publishing industry is what it is. (James runs new strips on his Patreon. My own personal archive can be viewed on my “american elf” Tumblr tag.)

Another fun meta way James and I are connected: I used his book The Cute Manifesto (also out-of-print) as the “dummy” book I made for Steal Like an Artist.

I also own one of James’ “Tiny Paintings.” Meg bought it for me a couple decades ago when we lived in Cleveland. It’s about the only snow I see on a regular basis in Texas…

I’ve been trying to go about the summer Friday newsletters with a sense of lightness, the way I make a collage out of scraps in my drawer — I pull out what I’ve saved, push it around until it makes sense (or nonsense), and glue it down. (Hit send.)

Last Friday’s letter was called “The very thing that drove you away,” and began:

Everyone, it seems, is on vacation. My bike gang is on vacation! My bandmates are on vacation! My barber is on vacation! My therapist is on vacation! Heck, you might be even on vacation. One day soon, I, too, will be on vacation, and when I am, I will think of Seneca quoting Socrates in Letters from a Stoic: “How can you wonder your travels do you no good, when you carry yourself with you? You are saddled with the very thing that drove you away.”

Today’s is called “Choose your own Odyssey”:

Will every single item on this week’s list refer, somehow, to The Odyssey? Yes, my friends…

As for the Tuesday letter, I have so many typewriter interviews that have come in, and I think I’m going to run one every week for the next month…

Earlier this month I had the pleasure of getting to chat about Don’t Call It Art with art coach Beth Pickens. I started off the conversation by describing the dream I had after seeing Bob Dylan live:

You can watch the whole thing here.

My most recent typewriter interview — a big hit with readers! — is with author and illustrator Mark Haddon, who said it was the most enjoyable interview he’s ever done and bestowed upon me my new title, “Prince of Analogue.”

Phillip Maciak:

There is something absurd about hearing a character in a movie utter the title of the movie they’re in out loud. It’s a moment that can be played for laughs, but it’s just as hard not to smirk when a film that takes itself seriously calls itself by its own name. Many filmmakers will go out of their way to avoid this moment of clunky announcement. You never hear, for example, Daniel Day-Lewis snarl, “Welp, there will be blood,” or Leonardo DiCaprio mutter, “You know, man, it’s always just one battle after another.”

That last sentence reminded me of an old Fresh Air interview with the director of those two movies, Paul Thomas Anderson:

Terry Gross: I kept waiting in the movie for somebody to say, “There will be blood!”

PTA: I had a friend, Terry, that any time he would go to see a film, and the title of the film was said onscreen, he would scream out, in the audience, this horrible obnoxious noise. He’d say, “Buc-KAW!” Really loud. So I just always remember… god, if I ever… my friend would scream from the back of the audience!

I told my kids that story years ago and from that point on whenever it happens in a movie we watch they’ll let out a loud “Buc-KAW!”

It just happened last night, in fact, when we watched What About Bob? and Julie Hagerty shouts, several times, “What about Bob?!?” They also did it last week when Richard Attenborough said, “Welcome… to Jurassic Park!” And come to think of it, it would be funny to note which pizza night movies get a “Buc-KAW!” or not. (Psycho, for example, has no “Buc-Kaw!” moment.)

I found this diary comic from (checks notes) five years ago.

In last Friday’s newsletter, I wrote:

In the “Who’s having fun?” section of Don’t Call It Art, I quote Ed Emberley saying, “I am determined to have fun doing my work… if I’m enjoying myself then that feeling is passed on to the reader.” Somebody who seems like she’s having a lot of fun right now is cookbook author Julia Turshen, who recently published a romance novel. (“I feel more relaxed about this than I’ve felt about anything in my career,” she says. “This just feels really fun.”) I recommend looking around you, especially in your field, and seeing who seems to be having fun right now. (And figure out if they have something you can steal!)

A reader then sent me a Slate post with the subhead, “Erling Haaland is having fun. Remember fun?”

And a headline from Bloomberg a few days ago: “The Great American Fun Shortage of 2026.”

(Then again, Iggy Pop was singing about having “no fun” in 1969.)

“It’s very difficult to be very lazy. It takes a lot of imagination to do nothing and you have to be sufficiently self-confident not to have a bad conscience. You have to have a taste for life, so that every minute is complete in itself and so you don’t have to keep saying ‘I’ve done this or that.’ You need strong nerves to do nothing. Being lazy also means that other people’s opinions don’t matter. Nor does the idea of always having to prove yourself.”
—Françoise Sagan

“I’m a really lazy bitch, but I have a punitive superego. The two go together.”
—Colson Whitehead

“I’m pretty lazy, but I’m very disciplined.”
—Hanif Abdurraqib

“Self employment, for me at least, is a never-ending contest between the world’s worst manager and the world’s laziest employee.”
—Daniel Akst

“Nobody really cares whether you do it or not. You have to make yourself do it. I’m very lazy and I suffer as a result. Of course, when it’s going well there’s nothing in the world like it. But it’s also very lonely. If you do something you’re really pleased with, you’re in the crazy position of being exhilarated all by yourself.”
—Robert Stone

“Now relieved of the financial need to write a line for 10 years, I may discover abysses of laziness within myself and do just that.”
—John Updike, letter

“To be silent the whole day long, see no newspaper, hear no radio, listen to no gossip, be thoroughly and completely lazy, thoroughly and completely indifferent to the fate of the world is the finest medicine a man can give himself. The book-learning gradually dribbles away; problems melt and dissolve; ties are gently severed; thinking, when you deign to indulge in it, becomes very primitive; the body becomes a new and wonderful instrument; you look at plants or stones or fish with different eyes; you wonder what people are struggling to accomplish by their frenzied activities; you know there is a war on but you haven’t the faintest idea what it’s about or why people should enjoy killing one another!”
—Henry Miller

Happy Friday. Let’s get lazy.

Here’s a new mixtape, which was really inspired by me being depressed and watching Deerhunter do “Nothing Ever Happened” live in 2011 and getting really obsessed with the late Josh Fauver’s short scale bass. (The title comes from one of my favorite Bob Pollard lyrics: “I climb up on the house / weep to water the trees.”) I tried to make a sequel to last year’s “Chlorine” pool party mix, but just didn’t get there. Felt fitting to end this one with a live TV version of King Krule’s “Out Getting Ribs.” (Of course, that’s not streaming, so you’ll only hear that if you listen to the YouTube playlist or come to my studio and listen to actual mixtape.)

By the way, if you find any of these TDK D90 cassettes they are handsome as hell and sound better than normal bias usually do — I hit this one real hard with the DB at around +3 for the peaks and it sounds gooood.

Listen to the mixtape on Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube.

The latest typewriter interview is with violinist and author Vijay Gupta. A reader said he wished I’d included audio of the musical notation, but I think it’s a nice little treat for those of us who’ve spent years learning to read music. Walk yourself over to your instrument and check them out for yourself!

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…