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Hey y’all,

It’s the dog days of summer and there’s a lot going on. Here are 10 things from this newsletter you might’ve missed:

1. I shared this video on Instagram about which one of my books you should read first and much to my surprise it pleased the algorithm gods and took off:

   The wild thing about a social media site deciding to, you know, actually show the people who follow you the stuff you make is that you realize just how many of the people who follow you don’t really follow you because they never see you in their feed. Which is to say, I experienced a lot of this:

   

   So, please allow me to say it again: I have a new book out! It’s called Don’t Call It Art. It’s a book for when making things isn’t much fun anymore. It hit multiple bestseller lists. People have given it really great reviews. You can read all about it in the introduction. Here are 7 books from the recommended reading list and 2 deleted zines with bonus material. If you like my other books, you’ll like this one:

   

   Buy the book

2. Bertrand Russell said, “One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.” Here’s how you can get some cosmic perspective.
   
   

3. Some of the most helpful advice I’ve received is from Beth Pickens: “Artists are people who suffer when they’re not making art.” A book release can be really exhausting and creatively depleting, so I’m trying to pay extra close attention to the daily practices that help me keep going. Reading a lot — especially bromance! Lots of writing in my diary — even on tour! Rituals and routines and things to look forward to, like: every Friday I check my PO Box and answer mail.
   
   

4. “When so many of life’s problems are unsolvable, solvable problems are a wonderful distraction.” The comfort of solving a Rubik’s Cube.
   
   

5. How to have a great family movie night.
   
   

6. I’m on my third year of making a mixtape every month! “Weep to Water The Trees,” “March 2026,” and “I Shall Be Released!” are full of sad bangers, “In A (Summer) Funk” and “Love TKO” have smoother jams, and “Snow in April” and “About Time” are full of icy tunes. (Sometimes I like to listen to winter-y music in summer.) And yes, these are real mixtapes on cassette with artwork — here is my cassette rack filling up:

   

7. Not everybody knows that each of my Friday newsletters has a secret easter egg link in the “hey y’all” greeting and the “xoxo” signoff. If you’ve missed this and you’re bored, going back through the archives could keep you busy for quite a while.
   
   

8. A fun all-ages drawing game: How to make an exquisite corpse.
   
   

9. Lots of people ask me how I come up with the stuff I put in this newsletter every week. Here’s what I think is the best way to read the internet and how I get into something new.
   
   

10. I’ve published some really excellent typewriter interviews including some visually wild ones with Marc Bell and Jennifer Daniel. There are many more on the way. The latest is with artist Erik Winkowski and is not to be missed:

Thanks a ton for reading. If you’d like to support this hand-rolled publication, buy my books and become a paid subscriber:

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xoxo,

Austin

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Hey y’all,

Erik Winkowski is an artist, animator, filmmaker, and amateur musician. Paper Films is a place he shares short films, fragments, and visual experiments from his studio practice and life. (His pieces “Zinemail No. 1” and Zinemail No. 2” are two of the most interesting uses of the Substack platform I’ve ever seen.) This typewriter interview was conducted via the magic of the United States Postal Service. (For a plain-text version with links, see the P.S. below.)

Big thanks to Erik for being the 25th participant in this series of typewriter interviews.

Follow him on Instagram and subscribe to Paper Films!

Shout-out to paid subscribers who buy me the time to do all the email coordinating, typing, snail-mailing, scanning, transcribing, and editing that goes into these! You can make more of these happen with a click of a button:

Subscribe now

xoxo,

Austin

Here’s the plain text of our interview with links:

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Hey y’all,

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

1. “Never mind manoeuvres, always go at them.” Given my fondness for literary bromances and Peter Weir’s excellent film adaptation, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, I knew it was only a matter of time before I needed to try out Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey–Maturin series of historical novels. I’m now halfway through the first, Master and Commander (published in 1969!), and I have to admit I was unprepared for the level of detail! Parts of it are like reading Ulysses or something — the writing is great, but there’s just this constant stream of nautical terms I don’t know, which is sort of infuriating at first, but also brilliant because it puts you in the dizzying position of Maturin, who is new to the navy. (O’Brian’s first editor, in fact, urged him “to tone down the most obscure allusions, though the books remain crammed with Latin tags, antiquated medical terminology and an endless stream of marvelous sounding but impenetrable naval jargon.”) One reviewer called the books “Jane Austen on a ship of war.” (O’Brian himself was quite a character — he wrote a mammoth biography about his neighbor, Pablo Picasso!)
   
   

2. “About twenty-five years ago I stopped composing at the keyboard and switched over to fountain pen on paper. Since then I have written many thousands of pages that way.” Neal Stephenson on how to write by hand. My fountain pens are all clogged at the moment, so I’ll drop a spoiler: “In all honesty, the Pilot G-2 gel pens are going to give you 80% of what you could expect from a fountain pen for minimal cost.” (I’m currently writing in my diary with brush pens modded with color inks.)
   
   

3. A.M. viewing: Sometimes when I’m up in the middle of the night, I will watch a Jacques Tati movie, as they’re almost silent films. I loved Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday (1953) and Mon Oncle (1958.) I’ve been sleeping pretty well lately, but next time I’m up I’m going to start Playtime (1967).
   
   

4. After reading and enjoying Steven Hyden’s forthcoming book about The Strokes, I chased it with his book on Radiohead’s KID A. Both were formative records for me that came out when I was finishing high school and starting college — it was extra fun to read the books in this order because the seed for the Strokes book is actually in the KID A book. (Very pleased to announce that Steven and I are going to do a Substack live on September 14 — so much to discuss!)
   
   

5. “Hope is a method: If I do something about this situation, I might change it enough so that I can do something else about this situation.” Cory Doctorow on why he believes in hope, not pessimism or optimism. (I saw him talk about this while promoting his new book, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI.)

   

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6. A question from the mailbag: “Did you keep a bunch of your kids’ art? Do you have any suggestions for how to keep kids’ artwork? I have a four-year-old and it’s piling up — I want to preserve it, but I’m also running out of room…” 

   

   I cannot sing enough of the simple pleasures of date stamps. (I recommend the Trodat 5030 Professional. KA-CHUNK!)
   
   

7. Just for fun: Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail.
   
   

8. W.S. Merwin: “The palm is in no hurry / to be different / and it grows slowly / it knows how to be a palm…” I’ve started following The Merwin Conservancy on Instagram, as they share poems like “Eyes of Summer.” (What a dream it would be to visit on Maui someday!)
   
   

9. “Forget about being correct. The muse hates correct.” RIP singer-songwriter Glen Hansard.
   
   

10. “Here’s what I’m trying to do with my life and my work. I’m trying to fully integrate everything. So the transition from work to play to everyday life is all seamless. So that it’s all one thing. There’s no difference between living and making art…” A typewriter interview with cartoonist James Kochalka:

Thanks for reading. If you’d like to support this hand-rolled publication, buy my books and become a paid subscriber:

Subscribe now

xoxo,

Austin

PS. Tomorrow is August, a month I have very little use for, but here’s a 31-day “Practice and Suck Less” challenge if you want it:

Practice and Suck Less 31-Day Challenge

542KB ∙ PDF file

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Hey y’all,

James Kochalka is an award-winning cartoonist of classics such as Monkey vs Robot and American Elf. He’s recorded several albums under the name James Kochalka Superstar and developed animated cartoons for Nickelodeon and Cartoon Hangover. To celebrate today’s release of his latest book, Johnny Boo: On The Go, I’m excited to share this typewriter interview we conducted via the magic of the United States Postal Service. (For a plain-text version with links, see the P.S. below.)

Big thanks to James for being the 24rd participant in this series of typewriter interviews. If you liked this interview, buy a copy of Johnny Boo: On The Go and support him on Patreon.

Shout-out to paid subscribers who buy me the time to do all the email coordinating, typing, snail-mailing, scanning, transcribing, and editing that goes into these! You can make more of these happen with a click of a button:

Subscribe now

xoxo,

Austin

P.S. James’ sketchbook comic American Elf was on my list of 7 books that helped me learn from my kids.

Here’s the plain text of our interview:

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Hey y’all,

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

1. I saw Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey the way I love to see a movie: unplanned, on a whim, tickets purchased a few minutes before showtime, a bucket of popcorn and a smuggled bag of Reese’s Pieces between me and my best friend, sitting in the center of the third row. I loved Samantha Morton as Circe, dug Agamemnon’s getup and the Trojan Horse as heist movie (Michael Mann’s Heat is a key influence on Nolan), thought a lot about Julie Taymor’s Titus watching the Hades scene, laughed thinking about how Nolan called it “the ultimate dog story,” and could’ve sworn they used Bjork’s “The Anchor Song” during the homecoming scene. (It was composer Ludwig Göransson’s piece ”Odysseus,” which sounds like saxophones to me but might be an aulos?) I love seeing a big release when it comes out without reading any reviews and then just spending days listening and reading to what everybody thinks about it.
   
   

2. “We’ve reached a point where we get so few extravagant, ambitious studio movies that we’re expected to collapse with gratitude whenever we’re presented with one.” Hard to pick a favorite line from my favorite review of The Odyssey by my favorite film critic, Stephanie Zacharek, but I’ll go with this one: “Every once in a while, the goddess Athena (Zendaya) will appear at Odysseus’ side to judge his actions, mostly by offering a scowl of disapproval, the sort of face a wife makes when her husband loads the dishwasher wrong.” (Another funny line, from another review: “Homer’s Calypso is a great part. Nolan’s is some woman who runs a beach bar and is thinking of pivoting to psychotherapy.”)
   
   

3. “Before Zendaya played Athena, I did!” I enjoyed this conversation about the movie between translator Emily Wilson and writer Sarah Ruhl, especially when Wilson gets up and recites the poem in ancient Greek and English. Wilson discusses why you should read the “Sea Peoples” Wikipedia page before you see the movie, Claire Danes’ audiobook, her next book Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea: Journeys Through Ancient Literature, and why she put a “Misogynist Trolling” button on her contact page.
   
   

4. James Joyce’s Ulysses is the modernist novel most obviously inspired by The Odyssey, but I’ve already read Ulysses, so I’m reading Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. In her introduction to the beautiful annotated edition, Merve Emre points out that Woolf thought of “the writer and the reader as two strangers getting to know one another.” In Woolf’s essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” she writes, “Both in life and in literature, it is necessary to have some means of bridging the gulf between the hostess and her unknown guest on the one hand, the writer and his unknown reader on the other.”
   
   

5. Xenia (hospitality) is a key theme in Homer’s poem, and Emily Wilson emphasizes the distinction between xenophobia (fear of strangers) and the lesser-known xenophilia (love of strangers.) I love the last paragraph of her translator’s note for The Odyssey:

   

6. You never know what gods might show up in what disguises. In Greek mythology, a little owl traditionally accompanies or represents Athena. Y’all know I’m a little owl crazy and I love Penny Lane’s movies, so I’m extra excited for her upcoming documentary about Flaco The Owl, Wild Inside. (See her recent post about it, “What is it like to be an owl?”) The movie is showing in cities all over including here in Austin, TX on Sunday, August 9th at Austin Film Society. (They’ve got some good merch for the film — I ordered a poster!)
   
   

7. “Animals first entered the imagination as messengers and promises,” writes John Berger in About Looking. (Soon to be reissued by NYRB.) Much like in the days of Flaco, my whole family and the entire internet seems to be obsessed with Seattle legend Jimothy the Raccoon and watching an unlikely survivor thrive in the urban wild. Eurymachus, suitor of Penelope, may have scoffed, “Many birds go flying / in sunlight, and not all are meaningful,” but Jimothy seems to me an omen of some kind…

   

8. We solved another Magic Puzzle over the weekend, partly while listening to the Robert Fagles translation as read by Ian McKellen. (I’d like to hire Matt Berry to take a whack at the poem, especially any scene between Calypso and Odysseus.)
   
   

9. Pizza night blockbusters: Turns out there’s more sex and nudity in the movie Airplane! than in the entirety of Nolan’s Odyssey. (Tweens loved it, of course.) We’re also on a good Hitchcock streak: We’ve now watched The Birds, Psycho, Strangers on a Train, and North by Northwest, which looks absolutely glorious in 4K.
   
   

10. Will every single item on this week’s list refer, somehow, to The Odyssey? Yes, my friends, even my most recent typewriter interview 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.”  

Thanks for reading. If you’d like to support this hand-rolled publication, buy my books and become a paid subscriber:

Subscribe now

xoxo,

Austin

P.S. For better or worse, there are no references to The Odyssey in Don’t Call It Art. (There is, however, a reference to Odysseus in chapter one of Keep Going!)

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Hey y’all,

Mark Haddon is a writer and artist best known for his bestselling and critically acclaimed novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. His latest book is Leaving Home, an illustrated memoir “about escaping a place that never felt like home and learning to create somewhere that does.” This typewriter interview was conducted via the magic of overseas mail. (For a plain-text version with links, see the P.S. below.)

Big thanks to Mark for being the 23rd participant in this series of typewriter interviews. If you liked this interview, check out his new memoir Leaving Home and follow him on Instagram.

And big thanks to paid subscribers who buy me the time to do all the email coordinating, typing, snail-mailing, scanning, transcribing, and editing that goes into these!

Subscribe now

xoxo,

Austin

P.S. Here is a plain-text version of our interview with links:

Read more

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Hey y’all,

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

1. 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.”
   
   

2. “It’s very difficult to be lazy.” (To quote James Brown, “Watch me!”)
   
   

3. I like to read big books for summer, but I can also get down with “slim volume summer.” Some favorite short books of mine: I Remember by Joe Brainard, The Summer Book by Tove Jansson, Train Dreams by Denis Johnson, Slow Days, Fast Company by Eve Babitz, and True Grit by Charles Portis. (And what sort of self-promoter would I be if I didn’t mention that you can read most of my books on a single plane ride?)

   

   Buy my new book

4. It turns out America is having a shortage of fun. (To quote Captain Renault in Casablanca, “I’m shocked!”)
   
   

5. “You do not have to be good…” Next month PBS American Masters is premiering a new documentary about the poet Mary Oliver. (Did you know that filmmaker John Waters used to work in her bookstore?) I quoted her in the beginning of The Steal Like an Artist Journal:

   

6. Truth: “If you follow the data you will eventually just make mass appeal nothingness.”
   
   

7. Pixel Skylines is a site that collects urban backgrounds from old video games.
   
   

8. What happens in our house when a character says the title of the movie.
   
   

9. “If you think of yourself as an actor, or a dancer, or a singer, and you’re not singing and you’re not acting, or you’re not dancing, what are you? Most people are between jobs. What are you between jobs? If you think of yourself as an actor and you’re not actually acting, you’re kind of no one. This is how it’s possible to see yourself. The way out of that is to actually separate yourself from your profession. That’s what I do, that's not what I am.” RIP actor Sam Neill, who starred in our #1 pizza night blockbuster, Jurassic Park. (Time to put Hunt for the Wilderpeople in the queue.)
   
   

10. “Artists are people who suffer when they’re not making art.” I had another great conversation with art coach Beth Pickens:

Thanks for reading. If you’d like to support this hand-rolled publication, buy my books and become a paid subscriber:

Subscribe now

xoxo,

Austin

PS. I loved this photo of two sisters reading Don’t Call It Art — one in Korean and one in English!

Hey y’all,

Earlier this month I had the pleasure of getting to chat about Don’t Call It Art with art coach Beth Pickens as part of her Homework Club. It was a fun conversation that I wanted to be sure to share with y’all — I started off describing the dream I had after seeing Bob Dylan live:

And then Beth beautifully summarized what she’s discovered from working with artists (that might also explain why Dylan still gets up onstage at age 85):

Artists are people who are profoundly, deeply compelled to make their creative work. And when an artist doesn’t make their work, they become unwell. So everybody benefits from creative expression, but artists are people who actually need it in order to have a fully realized life. And so, no matter what, you have to be making your work, always. You have to have your creative practice.

She then outlined the 3 basic needs she thinks every artist has:

1. You have to make your work.

2. You have to have artist friends who want good things for themselves and each other.

3. You have to take in lots of stuff.

In regards to the last item, she read an excerpt from the “Problems of output are problems of input” section of Don’t Call It Art:

When I have problems with my output, it’s often time to work on my input. When I stall out, it’s time to start taking things in: reading books, watching movies, listening to music, going to art museums, traveling, taking people to lunch, and generally soaking up what the world has to offer. I try to be open and alert and on thelookout for that thing that will get me going again.

We also talked about the trick to getting bored and why boredom is so important:

Beth and I last spoke almost three years ago (!!!) in a chat about death, deadlines, and doing your art no matter what:

Here are my notes from that talk:

If you like these conversations and you’d like to join Beth’s Homework Club, the code MAGIC will get you a free month!

xoxo,

Austin

P.S. Here are some notes from Beth’s books, Make Your Art No Matter What and Your Art Will Save Your Life:

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Hey y’all,

If you loved Don’t Call It Art, a 5-star review on Amazon or Goodreads goes a long way!

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

1. To express and exorcise my summer misery, I made a new mixtape called “Weep to Water the Trees.” It was inspired by the vibe of two of my favorite live videos on YouTube: Deerhunter playing “Nothing Ever Happened” and King Krule playing “Out Getting Ribs”:

   

   You can listen to the mixtape on Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube.

   
   

2. Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop is my favorite book I’ve read this year. (It’s on my list of Bromance novels!) My favorite thing I’ve read this year that mentions the book is Patricia Lockwood’s essay about going to a “Tradcath” wedding. (She also references one of my favorite James Tate poems, “Goodtime Jesus.”)
   
   

3. 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!)
   
   

4. Dinner music we enjoyed as a family this week: King Sunny Ade’s Odu.
   
   

5. “It’s not every day that you get hired to draw your favorite thing.” A new artist is drawing the comic strip Nancy! Her name is Caroline Cash and I’ve started following her on Instagram: @cash_browns. (One of my fantasies is that Nancy goes on forever and one day Jules Kleon gets to draw it.)

   

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6. Good phone hygiene: “Open your most-used social-media app. Ask yourself one question about six of the accounts you follow: Does this expand me or shrink me? Not: Is it entertaining? Not: Do I agree with it? But: After I engage with this, do I feel more curious, more grounded, more kind—or do I feel smaller, more anxious, more numb? Unfollow the ones that shrink you. Bookmark the ones that genuinely expand your clarity, kindness, or courage.” (See also: the second of the 7 questions I ask myself.)
   
   

7. A game for sorting through a stack of neglected books on your shelf.
   
   

8. If you want to keep a diary but it seems like too much work, I highly recommend trying a One Line A Day diary. I gave my kids this canvas edition a few years back, but I’m buying a couple of these black canvas editions for when the old ones get filled.
   
   

9. Question from Jeff, a reader in Japan: Hi Austin, When you create your images for a book, may I ask if you use an iPad or are your drawings scanned into a digital format from pen and paper. Is there a reason you use one in particular?
   
   Answer: Pretty much every illustration and piece of lettering you see in one of my books was made with a marker on a sheet of typing paper, scanned into the computer, and manipulated with Photoshop.
   
   For example, here is the original artwork for Steal Like an Artist:

   Why do I work this way? I want my books to feel as handmade as possible, and the easiest way to do that is to actually make them with my hands!
   
   

10. “People are not hungry for your perfection: they are hungry for your love.” Do not miss my typewriter interview with violinist Vijay Gupta!

Thanks for reading. If you’d like to support this hand-rolled publication, buy my books and become a paid subscriber:

Subscribe now

xoxo,

Austin

P.S. My books are always hanging out in nicer places than I am…

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Hey y’all,

Vijay Gupta is a Grammy-nominated violinist, speaker, and founder of Street Symphony. Last month he published his first book, Restrung: A Memoir of Music and Transformation, which I had the pleasure of blurbing:

“Ten years ago, I was watching a 1996 episode of Reading Rainbow with my son when I found myself captivated by the intensity of a bespectacled 8-year-old violin prodigy. I desperately wanted to know what became of this kid—did he conquer the world or have a complete breakdown? The kid was Vijay Gupta, and Restrung is his story: a memoir about classical music, family, and surviving what we call ‘The American Dream.’”

This typewriter interview was conducted via the magic of the United States Postal Service. (For a plain-text version with links, see the P.S. below.)

Huge thanks to Vijay for being the 22nd participant in this series of typewriter interviews. If you loved this interview, you’ll love his new memoir, Restrung: A Memoir of Music and Transformation.

And thanks, as always, to paid subscribers who buy me the time to do all the email coordinating, typing, snail-mailing, scanning, transcribing, and editing that goes into them.

Subscribe now

xoxo,

Austin

P.S. Here is a plain-text version of our interview with links:

Read more

Hey y’all,

Heads up: I’m running a 20% off paid subscriptions summer sale through the weekend! Get a special email from me every Tuesday and join in the coolest comment threads on the internet:

Get 20% off for 1 year

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

1. “The air is getting hotter / there’s a rumbling in the skies…” My buddies and I rode our bicycles down to see Bob Dylan in Waterloo Park here in Austin, Texas on Monday, the Sarahan Dust blowin’ in the wind, birds flyin’ high by the light of the (full) moon, Mercury retrograde just like the night playin’ tricks on the bar register when you’re tryin’ to be so quiet. Bob did the whole set hooded in the back of the stage like some old blues wizard, plunkin’ on a piano, bringing the harmonica out a few times. Highlights for me were “Black Rider” and “Tryin’ to Get to Heaven.” The man is 85 years old, and, in the words of Tim Stegall in The Austin Chronicle, he “still treats the stage as a laboratory rather than a jukebox.”
   
   

2. “It sounds like Bob is embracing his crone phase,” is how Meg put it after I described the show on our morning walk. Here’s what Bob himself said about being (over) 80: “The best thing about being 80 is that you outlive the clocks that have been chasing you. It’s freedom from that lie that nothing was ever under control. You don’t chase the parade anymore. You’re an old king from some vanished country. You’re harder to program. You’re not rushing to become anything, and you’re not haunted by the things that you did. You’re haunted by how little of it really mattered in the way you thought it would.” 
   
   

3. “Every professional, in order to stay fresh and have an edge, has to retain a bit of that amateur spirit that all kids have.” I swapped words and pictures with David Epstein about creating like a kid again. (He previously swapped some words and pictures with me in his typewriter interview.)
   

   

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4. Anarchist calisthenics: “Every day or so break some trivial law that makes no sense, even if it’s only jaywalking. Use your own head to judge whether a law is just or reasonable. That way, you’ll keep trim; and when the big day comes, you’ll be ready.” (Or, in the words of Wendell Berry, “Every day do something that won’t compute.”)

   
   

5. “Bromance is a portmanteau of bro (or brother) and romance.” I recommended five Bromance novels and asked y’all for your favorites. Kimberly made a case for Frog and Toad, and I loved that so much that after starting Gustave Flaubert’s bromance, Bouvard et Pécuchet (the Polizzotti translation), I have been picturing the titular characters as Frog and Toad, respectively. (“Why should we read Bouvard and Pécuchet? They are we, and we are they.”)

   
   

6. Some summer mixtapes I’ve made, ideal for poolside listening: “Chlorine,” “In a (summer) funk,” “Solar Return,” and “Untitled (June 2024).”
   
   

7. Art shows I wish I could see: Matisse’s sleepless writing at Grand Palais and Yoko Ono at The Broad Museum. (I’m a fan of Grapefruit, and a still from Cut Piece is one of the guardian spirits of my current diary.)
   
   

8. “I am an average man who doesn’t want to be average, and art allows me to express that frustration.” RIP “paintoonist” Jerry Moriarty. (The Believer has dropped the paywall on his conversation with Chris Ware.)
   
   

9. “Tap into the fun of doing stuff for no good reason.” I talked to The New York Times about Andy Goldsworthy and how to make art outdoors.
   
   

10. Another assignment for the holiday weekend, from Don’t Call It Art: “Get offline as much as possible. There’s so much input to be found in the real world outside of the internet. Go old school. Listen to radio shows. Browse the recently returned stacks at your local library. Buy weird old books at thrift shops. Visit a museum you’ve never been to. Find a good record store and chat up the clerks. Interact with real people in meatspace.”
    

Thanks for reading. If you’d like to support this hand-rolled publication, take advantage of the 20% off summer sale and become a paid subscriber!

Subscribe now

xoxo,

Austin

PS. Thanks to Marni H. for sending this very funny scene from her reading life. (Made me think of Nina Katchadourian’s Sorted Books project.)

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Hey y’all,

It’s summer, let’s get a little silly and talk about bromance:

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Hey y’all,

Not sure how long it’ll last, but at the moment, my books Keep Going and Show Your Work! are $7 and $6 on Amazon.

Here are the 10 other things worth sharing this week:

1. Summer in Texas is never easy. You have to try hard to keep your thing together, stay cool, and remember the #1 rule of Funk: ”Keep it on the one.”

   
   I made a new mixtape to help called ”In a (Summer) Funk.” You can listen to it on Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube. (Best experienced poolside!)

   

2. “I think of every book of mine as a shipwreck in the sense that I start out with delusions of grandeur and a great big vision of a three-masted pirate ship or a battle cruiser or something, and then my vision of the ship smashes on the rocks, and I wind up building a dinghy out of the broken pieces. But as long as the thing floats and takes the reader where I want to take them, I’m okay.” I talked to my pal Wendy MacNaughton about my new book and creating like a kid.
   
   

3. The sentence I want to hear after a reader reads one of my books: “[It] made me want to make things again.”
   
   To show how a book evolves (or devolves!) over time, I shared a bunch of pages from the past 10 years of my diary: “Diary of a book.”

   

4. ”A couple years ago, my writer friend Austin Kleon encouraged me to write a [graphic] novel about being a doctor.” A tour of Grace Farris’s Austin home. (It’s so much easier to see the books that other people should write…)
   
   

5. Kate Bingaman-Burt is putting out a book of her daily purchase drawings called Proof of Purchase. (Her typewriter interview was a popular favorite.)
   

   

6. One of the funniest things about releasing a book is that every week I find a new quote or story that would’ve gone great in the book. The latest bit comes from artist Anish Kapoor, who would’ve fit perfectly into the “Permission to be Bad!” chapter: “I have three words written on my studio wall: ‘disobey,’ ‘disagree,’ ‘disavow.’ And I try to look at them every day. You know, be a stupid naughty boy.”
   
   

7. Documentaries: Gary Hustwit’s generative film about Brian Eno is now streaming on the Criterion Channel. (I wrote about it in my letter “Drawing Eno.”) Penny Lane’s documentary about Flaco the Owl, Wild Inside, just got a beautiful new poster and will have its premier in Central Park. (If you’d like to learn more about the art and business of making movies, watch my conversation with Penny and Penny’s conversation with Gary.)
   
   

8. Pizza night blockbuster: “You yell barracuda, everybody says, “Huh? What?” You yell shark…” We finally watched Jaws after my son Jules (11) watched the Jaws @ 50: The Definitive Inside Story documentary on Disney+ about a hundred times. It’s still great and sparked a good little discussion about thriller vs. horror. (Tonight we’re watching Rocky… on VHS!)
   
   

9. Getting art advice from Beth Pickens was one of the most helpful chats I’ve had in the past half decade. I’m talking to Beth again on July 1st about Don’t Call it Art (and the topic of failure!) as part of her Homework Club and she’s offered a free month code for y’all who want to join: Magic.
   
   

10. ”If you are on a long road and you finally think that you have accomplished something, there is this joy, but there is also the knowledge that the quest inevitably and necessarily goes on.” RIP jazz pianist Abdullah Ibrahim.
    

Thanks for reading. If you’d like to support this hand-rolled publication, take advantage of the 20% off summer sale and become a paid subscriber:

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xoxo,

Austin

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Hey y’all,

Earlier this month I talked to Jillian Hess about my four notebooks and shared the tour diary I kept on the road. I also showed a bunch of diary pages in my Don’t Call It Art book talks. I thought it would be cool to share them here, too.

I’ve kept some kind of notebook since I was in middle school, but I started keeping a bonafide diary late in 2016, after I read an abridged version of Thoreau’s journals. My boys were 3 and 1 at the time, and I was already thinking about doing a book about art and kids. I’ve chosen a spread from every year since then to try to show how my diaries helped my book Don’t Call It Art come into being.

2016: My diary has always functioned like a working notebook, with writing, drawings, collages, to-do lists, notes to myself, and clippings. In 2016, I was already playing with the idea that the boys were really the thriving artists in the house… not me! (You can also see some potential titles I was noodling on.)

This page from 2017 already contains the Picasso and Tweedy quotes that begin and end Don’t Call It Art. I used the story about artist Peter Chan’s dad and the recycle bin in my book Keep Going, which was actually me getting sidetracked from the art + kids book, so it contains a lot of art + kids material, like the “Your work is play” and “Make gifts” sections, where I talk about the boys and their drawings.

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Hey y’all,

Here are the 10 things worth sharing this week:

1. RIP artist David Hockney. I’ve had this newspaper clipping above my desk in multiple studios over the years. There are so many photos of him looking joyous, smiling, but I like his look in this one because it says to me, “What are you doing with your life? Why aren’t you working?” The photo had a prominent spot on my bulletin board when I was writing Keep Going, and I quoted Hockney in the last chapter from the article the photo was clipped from: “I’ll go on until I fall over.” (He did just that! Working from a wheelchair.)
   
   

   “The cause of death is birth,” he said. “The only real things in life are food and love in that order.” In the pit of the COVID pandemic, Hockney was a constant reminder: “Spring cannot be canceled.”
   
   My friend Wendy shared a lovely tribute to Hockney, which included one of my favorite quotes of his: “You need the eye, the hand, and the heart. Two won’t do.” One of my fondest art memories is meeting Wendy at the de Young in San Francisco in 2014 to go see Hockney’s “A Bigger Picture” exhibition. That show left a huge impression on me.
   
   “I wasn’t especially surprised,” Lawrence Weschler wrote of the death of his longtime friend and subject, “nor frankly was I all that saddened. If anything, as I kept telling the floodtide of sweet correspondents who kept showering me their heartfelt condolences across the days ahead, I was gladdened at the splendor of a life well-lived and the magnificence of a legacy well-left.” (I love Weschler’s book about Hockney.)

   
   “[Hockney’s] work was an argument for seeing as a form of collage,” wrote art critic Jerry Saltz. “We don’t see the world all at once. We gather it piece by piece. We assemble it in our minds.” I think this is the biggest lesson I took from him: it’s all about looking. (If I were forced to pick a favorite work, it would probably be Pearblossom Highway.)
   
   

2. Saltz said one more thing about Hockney that struck me: “It’s sort of astonishing how sophisticated Hockney’s art is while appearing effortless.” My friend Alan recently introduced me to the Italian word “sprezzatura,” which was defined in the 16th century by Baldassare Castiglione: “a certain nonchalance, so as to conceal all art and make whatever one does or says appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it.” Bob Gill linked looking easy to inevitability: “however difficult it is to make art, it should always look easy, never labored.” And Maya Angelou said, “It must look easy, but it takes me forever to get it to look so easy.”
   
   

3. Mason Currey on the best book on writing he’s ever read. (I’d never heard of it! But I will check it out because I believe every writing book is good.)
   

   
   

4. Father’s Day is Sunday! If you need a last-minute gift for a veteran or expectant dad, I’d highly suggest one of the Hot New Releases in the “Fatherhood” category on Amazon: My book Don’t Call It Art!

   

   You could also gift dad a subscription to this newsletter. (There’s even a handy gift subscription zine you can print out — no need to buy a card!)
   

   Give a gift subscription

   
   Speaking of zines, here’s a Deleted Zine I made for Father’s Day:

   

   

   Deleted Zine 09 Fathers

   1.84MB ∙ PDF file

   Download

   Download

   After you download the PDF and print it out, here’s a video with instructions for how to fold and cut the zine into a booklet:

   
   

5. Podcasts: Some really excellent parenting-related conversations dropped this week. “I haven’t had so much fun talking to someone in a while,” said Dr. Becky of our Good Inside episode. I talked to Kevin Maguire on The New Fatherhood about how children aren’t an obstacle to your creative life but an opportunity for it to grow. And Ben Tallon and I had so much fun talking on The Creative Condition that he posted a bonus 4-minute episode from our conversation after we stopped rolling about Mario Kart and safely destroying each other.
   
   

6. “Child is born / With a heart of gold / Way of the world / Makes his heart grow cold.” We watched Questlove’s newest documentary, Earth, Wind & Fire (To Be Celestial vs. That’s the Weight of the World). I need to make time to watch his appearance on Track Star: “Questlove Teaches Us How to Listen to Earth, Wind & Fire.” 
   

   

7. There’s a lot going on in this photo, so let’s start at the top: my neighborhood dad rock trio 2222 is playing our second-ever show at The Aristocrat Lounge on Saturday at 5PM if you’re in Austin and want to see me to push the “Permission to be bad!” chapter of Don’t Call It Art (and your hearing) to the limit. (I play bass and try to sing.)
   
   

8. My friend Winston Smith, the artist who wrote me the letter that changed my life when I was 13, made me one of his custom gold records (!!!) and he would be more than happy to make one for you. Amazing gift for the musician (or wannabe musician) in your life. Get one here.
   
   

9. I got an AKAI MPC Sample and a copy of Nancy For All Seasons for my birthday, and, much to my surprise and delight, my kids immediately absconded with both. My teenager has played with the MPC Sample for hours and hours — it looks like a toy, but it’s sturdy and pretty intuitive and would make a great first sampler for your aspiring beatmaker.

   
   

10. Don’t miss my latest typewriter interview with Jennifer Daniel. Several readers told me it was their favorite yet:

    

Thanks for reading! This month our air conditioner died and both our kids got braces, so if you’d like to support this hand-rolled publication, buy my books or get a paid subscription:

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xoxo,

Austin

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Hey y’all,

Jennifer Daniel is an illustrator, graphic designer, author, mother of twins, occasional contributor to The New York Times and The New Yorker, and the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee Chair. She writes a newsletter called Did Someone Say Emoji? and she’ll be showing her work June 18-21 at Work in Progress in New York City.

For a plain-text version of this typewriter interview with links — including the only kind of pen Jennifer uses — see the P.S. below.

Big thanks to Jennifer for being the 21st participant in this series of typewriter interviews!

Follow her on Instagram, subscribe to her newsletter, and go see her June 18-21 at Work in Progress in New York City.

Thanks, as always, to paid subscribers who buy me the time to do all the email coordinating, typing, snail-mailing, scanning, transcribing, and editing that goes into them.

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xoxo,

Austin

P.S. Here is a plain-text version of the interview with links (scroll to the very end for the only pen Jennifer will use):

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Hey y’all,

I am back home in Austin, Texas. Here are my 10 things worth sharing this week:

1. Don’t Call It Art is officially a national bestseller! Thanks so much to everyone who has supported this book. Austin, Nashville, and Cleveland were such fun events — great questions, fun signing lines. BookPeople, Parnassus, and Mac’s Backs have signed copies now. (Easy Father’s Day gift!) I’m delighted by the reader response so far, but especially by how many kids have apparently stolen the book off their parents’ coffee table and read it? (I heard from one parent who said their teenager discovered they have aphantasia from the ending of the book? Amazing.) If you got the book and love it, a 5-star review on Amazon or Goodreads goes a long way.
   
   

2. “If you’re in a rut, kids can show you the way out.” Elle Hunt did a deep dive into my work for The Guardian.
   
   

3. Cartoon pilgrimage: I spent a good part of last week visiting friends and family in Ohio, but I slipped away for a few hours to see the absolutely incredible Chris Ware and The Story of Comics exhibits at the newly-redesigned Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum in Columbus, Ohio. Here’s a little sneak peek inside and behind-the-scenes look at Ware’s installation. I really cannot recommend this place highly enough.
   
   

4. Podcasts: So many fun conversations I had with lovely people dropped this week! I talked to Walter Martin about the raw power of demos, Gretchen Rubin about punk rock and being bad, Jason Chatfield about Jungian mid-life stuff, Joanna Penn about paper reference books, Andy J. Pizza about the opposite of depression, Tim Bogatz about setting up a summer practice that can sustain you throughout the year, and Brendan O’Meara about Metallica and Marshawn Lynch. (We talked about my book, too, of course!)
   
   

5. After writing about my 4 notebooks for Noted, I thought it would be fun to share an unvarnished look inside my book tour diary:

   

6. Peak Gemini season: ”Hello, Syracuse and the world. My name is Prince and I’ve come to play with you.” Prince & The Revolution, live in Syracuse, 1985.
   
   

7. Book recommendations: I was so exhausted and busy traveling that I didn’t read much this week, but I did call into The Sound of Ideas to plug Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop and I helped my friend Ryan Holiday pick some big books for summer for Morning Joe. (I recommend Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove.)
   
   

8. Plane music: Nine Inch Noize. Rental truck music: Sturgill Simpson’s Cuttin’ Grass, Vol. 1.
   
   

9. “I believe there’s a charm in having something tangible to hold in your hands…” Tom Hanks visits Berkeley Typewriter, Japan loves zines, and fans turn to physical media.
   
   

10. “You don’t know for sure what you’re getting and that’s part of the excitement… not knowing and surprising myself.” RIP photographer Duane Michals, who “considered himself lucky that he didn’t have to ’unlearn’ what was taught in art school.” I love what he said about seeing Magritte for the first time: “That’s the great response: ‘What the hell’s this?’”
    

Thanks for reading! This hand-rolled publication is made possible thanks to the kind support of readers like you. The best way you can support my work right now is to buy the new book. Liana Finck says it’s a “smart and joyful book” and Alan Jacobs says it’s my best!

Buy the book

xoxo,

Austin

P.S. Shout-out to Ruby and Cleo in Cleveland, Ohio, who gave me drawing lessons, showed their work, and, for the brief hour we spent together, made everything in my book come true:

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Hey y’all,

Greetings from a hotel room in Cleveland, Ohio!

Writing about my 4 notebooks for Noted inspired me to bring a brush pen with two refills on my travels to Nashville and Cleveland to promote Don’t Call It Art.

I’m presenting the past handful of days unvarnished, with a little bit of commentary.

This drawing of me was inspired by striking reproductions of Pierre Roche’s “Delivrance” I saw on the side of a law office in Nashville.

I had a fun day in Nashville, sitting by the pool at the Chloe and speaking to a full house at Parnassus.

I had actually never seen a Christo and Jean-Claude prep drawing in person — this one was for the “Surrounded Islands” project.

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