A process to process

10 things worth sharing this week

Hey y’all,

If you have a dad or grad (or June Gemini!) and you need a last-minute present for them, you can always gift a subscription to this newsletter:

Austin, TX folks: Next Thursday I’m interviewing my friend Deb Chachra at Bookpeople. Come see us!

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

1. After I wrote about my friend Chris Glass emailing an old photo of my mom and me, he wrote a touching post about his daily method of going back through 20 years of his photo archives: “A process to process.”

   
   

2. For the first time in nearly 30 years, the members of R.E.M. sat down together for an interview to look back and reflect on their body of work. (That interview made me want to watch their VH1 Behind The Music episode and R.E.M. by MTV documentary. Here’s a nice excerpt about writing their album Out Of Time.)
   
   

3. A bunch of folks I know have new books out: Elisa Gabbert’s essay collection Any Person is the Only Self; Robin Sloan’s novel Moonbound; Ryan Holiday’s latest in his Stoic Virtues series, Right Thing, Right Now; and Liana Finck’s no-advice guide to motherhood, How To Baby.
   
   

4. Last Friday I went to the Ransom Center to see Joy Williams read from her forthcoming collection, Concerning the Future of Souls. It turned out to be one of the most enjoyable readings I’ve ever been to: I got there early so I could browse the Elizabeth Olds show; the reading started promptly at 7 p.m. — beginning with opener Jim Gauer reading from Novel Explosives — and wrapped up promptly at 8 p.m. without any tedious Q&A; and drinks and nibbles were served as folks waited in the signing line. (I quite enjoyed the house “Joy Williams” cocktail of white rum, maraschino liqueur, lime and grapefruit juice.) Kudos to my friend Matt Bucher and the other folks at the DFW Society for bringing it together.
   
   

5. Typewriter art: I’m working on a new batch of typewriter interviews like the one I did with Mary Ruefle, so I’ve been taking inspiration from the typewriter posts on Text-Mode.org, especially the cheeky ones like “Samurai on the Toilet.”
   
   

6. Shady characters: After I wrote about the ampersand in last week’s email, some of y’all pointed me to Keith Houston’s book Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks. (Houston has an excellent website and his latest book is about the pocket calculator, which made me think of this list of 251 words you can spell with a calculator.)
   
   

7. RIP singer Françoise Hardy. I always thought “Tous les garçons et les filles” was a bop, and would sometimes drop it on a mix CD to break things up. (Her memoir has a wild title: The Despair of Monkeys and Other Trifles.)
   
   

8. YouTube mashups: Conversations that never took place between people who never met. (Hard to pick a favorite, honestly!)
   
   

9. “The day you plant the seed isn’t the day you see the fruit.” Some lessons learned from gardening, drawn by Jake Foreman. (Might add a few of these to my growing file of plant-based metaphors for creative work.)
   
   

10. An assignment for you this week based on what’s been working for me lately: What would happen if you believed that it’s not inside you trying to get out, it’s outside you trying to get in?

Thanks for reading. This is a hand-rolled, ad-free, algorithm-free, completely reader-supported publication. You can help keep it going by becoming a paid subscriber:

xoxo,

Austin

PS. Shout-out to TeddyBoy the tuxedo cat, who, as you can see, has excellent taste in books. (Thanks, Judy!)