"He eschewed computers, often writing by fountain pen in his beloved notebooks."

"'Keyboards have always intimidated me,' he told The Paris Review in 2003. 'A pen is a much more primitive instrument,' he said. 'You feel that the words are coming out of your body, and then you dig the words into the page. Writing has always had that tactile quality for me. It’s a physical experience.' He would then turn to his vintage Olympia typewriter to type his handwritten manuscripts. He immortalized the trusty machine in his 2002 book 'The Story of My Typewriter'.... Such antiquarian methods did nothing to slow Mr. Auster’s breathless output. Writing six hours a day, often seven days a week, he pumped out a new book nearly annually for years...."

From "Paul Auster, the Patron Saint of Literary Brooklyn, Dies at 77/With critically lauded works like 'The New York Trilogy,' the charismatic author drew inspiration from his adopted borough and won worldwide acclaim" (NYT).

You can see by the headline that the obituary stresses the place — Brooklyn (even though Auster was born in New Jersey).  It quotes the author and poet Meghan O’Rourke:

Paul Auster purveys the notion that the Black Panthers originated the idea of an individual right to bear arms.

This is from a Guardian interview with Paul Auster, the novelist, who has a new, nonfiction book called "Bloodbath Nation."

In the book you say the second amendment, framing the individual’s right to bear arms, was largely ignored until just a few decades ago, when it began to be seen as a fundamental text about what it means to be an American. Why did this happen?

Because of the 1960s – the assassinations and the chaos. People were frightened. And also because of the Black Panthers, who were obviously not white conservatives, but they were the group who originally set forth the argument that gun ownership is a right and that it’s for self-defence. It is hugely ironic: the Panthers were wiped out but their ideas stuck and were adopted by the white right wing. Now, for many, the second amendment has an almost religious component to it. The right to own a gun is seen as a kind of holy grail.

Why shouldn't individual rights have "an almost religious component"? That's the way it looks in the Declaration of Independence.

"Nancy doesn’t tell us much about what it’s like to be a kid. What Nancy tells us is what it’s like to be a comic strip."

Wrote Bill "Zippy the Pinhead" Griffith, quoted in "Grown Men Reading 'Nancy'" by Dash Shaw in the New York Review of Books. I followed the "Nancy" craze at the time, so it's fun for me to stumble into reading about it today:

Nancy became a touchstone for artists to appropriate, distort, and transform. In Raw, Mark Newgarden’s 1986 comic Love’s Savage Fury depicted a Nancy whose minimal facial features rearrange while Bazooka Joe, a Topps bubblegum package mascot, eyes her across a NYC subway. Newgarden (who worked at Topps and co-created The Garbage Pail Kids) and Paul Karasik (a Raw associate editor and cartoonist who would go on to co-write the graphic-novel adaptation of Paul Auster’s City of Glass) then collaborated on a 1988 essay titled “How to Read Nancy” that deconstructed the elements of a single 1959 Nancy gag in nine ways across eight pages. By isolating elements of the comic, they explored how each piece supported the entire gag—for example, solely the dialogue of the strip; then solely the spotted blacks; then the arc of the horizon line, etc....

Three decades later, in an epic feat of comics fandom, research, and obsession, Newgarden and Karasik have expanded that essay into a 274-page book examining over forty elements of the same 1959 gag.

Whoa! Must buy.

This gag comic strip now joins the ranks of works of art that have entire books dedicated to them. What Newgarden and Karasik have done here is clearly, methodically, often hilariously explained the unique beauty and craft of comics..... [O]ne chapter of How to Read Nancy, titled “The Leaky Spigot,” focuses on the number of droplets placed around the spigot at the center of the strip. Four droplets communicate that there is a great deal of pressure pulsing through the hose. The greater the pressure, the more rewarding Nancy’s vengeance will be. Two or three droplets would not imply this strength of pressure. Five might suggest a malfunction, and would break the graphic symmetry of the design. Karasik and Newgarden also note that the droplets to the right are slightly smaller and therefore in spatial perspective. Every element of the strip is analyzed to this degree of fascinating and humorous detail.

It must have been hard for Dash Shaw to resist quoting the most famous thing anyone ever said about "Nancy": "It's harder to not read Nancy than to read it." I'm saying it because it's harder not to say it than to say it.

Paul Auster's new book, by the way, is Oracle Night, and you can hear him discuss it (on Fresh Air).

Two of my favorite painters are Victor Brauner and Yves Tanguy. I had never heard of either until the first time I saw and was completely enchanted by a painting of his in a Museum of Modern Art. I saw Tanguy's painting "Fear" at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in the 1960s. I saw Brauner's "Snake Dancer" at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris in the 1980s. I was interested to learn that they were roommates for a while, but then in no mood to think coincidences were cool after reading this:

That year he moved to Paris, lived briefly with Tanguy, and painted a number of works featuring distorted human figures with mutilated eyes. Some of these paintings, dated as early as 1931, proved gruesomely prophetic when he lost his own eye in a scuffle in 1938.

Here's a better description of the incident (from an article, linked today at Arts & Letters Daily, that is really about the new Paul Auster novel):

On 28 August, 1938, the Romanian painter, Victor Brauner, lost his left eye when he was struck by a glass thrown by fellow surrealist Oscar Dominguez. Such violence was not uncommon at parties attended by the surrealist group, but what distinguished this episode was the fact that it seemed to fulfil a prophecy, begun seven years before when Brauner painted the first of a series of canvases (Self-Portrait with a Plucked Eye), in which he was depicted as having suffered various injuries, all affecting the left eye.

In one, Brauner’s eye has disappeared; in another, it seems to have melted and is running down his cheek; in yet another, the eyeball has shattered in its socket. The surrealists made much of the incident, claiming it proved the magical, premonitory power of art and, though Brauner himself played it down, he is best-known, even now, as the painter who foresaw his own partial blinding.