Anyone can be Batman

10 things worth sharing: a new book club pick, the wisdom of bell hooks, an update on Coconut the Owl, and more...

Hey y’all,

In case you missed it, Tuesday’s email for paid subscribers was about the tricky gaps in the creative process. If you know somebody hard to shop for, you could always gift them a subscription to this newsletter. (Or treat yourself!)

Okay, here are 10 things I thought were worth sharing this week:

1. Anyone can be Batman.
   
   

2. RIP writer bell hooks. This loss hurts bad. If you’re looking for a place to start, All About Love and Teaching To Transgress are two of my favorite books of hers. (In the former, she wrote of love as more of a verb than a noun and in the latter she wrote of the no man’s land of being in between projects.) I also love this 2015 interview, which I quoted in my zine, Angry and Curious. She said: “The function of art is to do more than tell it like it is — it’s to imagine what is possible.”
   
   

3. Read Like an Artist book club news: January’s pick is Tim Kreider’s We Learn Nothing.
   
   

4. A librarian finds a secret trove of zines inside a hollow library book.
   
   

5. This profile of actor Jeremy Strong touches on many of my pet interests: the creative process, comedy vs. tragedy, our American overemphasis on “authenticity” in art, etc. It also made Succession much more interesting to me.
   
   

6. People often ask me where they should start with poetry. I usually recommend subscribing to a daily newsletter like Poem-a-Day or Matthew Ogle’s Pome to figure out what you like, but if you want a quick catchup on contemporary poetry, poet Elisa Gabbert picked her 7 favorite volumes of 2021. (Her list was missing one of my favorites: Michael Robbins’ Walkman.)
   
   

7. The trailer for Everything Everywhere All At Once.
   
   

8. Filmmaker Dean Peterson on his pandemic hobby of picking up litter in his neighborhood. (Remember chapter 8 of Keep Going: “When in doubt, tidy up.”)
   
   

9. Fellow lovers of obituaries: this one is epic. Here’s the story of the son who wrote it.
   
   

10. Things were rough out there this week, so here are some photos of Mr. Coconut The Owl.

Thank you, as always, for reading. If you’d like to support this newsletter and get an extra email on Tuesday, consider becoming a paid subscriber:

Two weeks left in the year! We can do this.

Keep going.

xoxo,

Austin