Here are 10 things I thought were worth sharing this week:
“Artists must be allowed to go through bad periods! They must be allowed to do bad work! They must be allowed to get in a mess! They must be allowed to have dud experiments! They must also be allowed to have periods where they repeat themselves in a rather aimless, fruitless way before they can pick up and go on.”
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about creative propagation: I wrote about watching Meg perform cactus surgery and what we do with the thing that sticks out about our work.
I seem to be revisiting my teenage years of wanting to be a philosophy major: I’ve been reading Seneca’s Letters from a Stoic, Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, and researching Artistotle’s “The Doctrine of the Mean,” which I think I might make into a zine for Tuesday’s letter. (A Mean Zine?) All this reading is feeding into my theory of creative tensions.
Jessa Crispin on how the “superhero entertainment system” not only creates a lot of not-so-good work, it creates a not-so-great audience. (Bill Hader: “I remember going to a movie once and being, like, ‘Why are we going to this?,’ and this guy I was seeing the movie with goes, ‘Well, we’ve got to be part of the conversation,’ and I was, like, ‘No. I don’t want to be a part of a f***ing conversation.’”)
I thought a lot about the re-packaging of old properties and the selling of nostalgia when I read an advance copy of Box Brown’s book, The He-Man Effect: How American Toymakers Sold You Your Childhood. I think it’s Box’s best book and nonfiction comics at its finest: Well-researched, perfectly paced, clean lines, fun drawings. A+.
A Van Gogh painting gets renamed thanks to a chef/painter. (Thanks to reader Mary for this one!)
Summer is right around the corner, and I’m dreaming of escape. During the pandemic, I got really into castaways and people lost at sea and bonafide hermits and the lady who lived in a cave for 500 days. (A gentle reminder for myself and all of us: instead of going to those extremes, you could just keep a sabbath.)
“The fact is that anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.”
As I predicted last week, the owlets have fledged!!
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xoxo,
Austin
Good morning from Patience. Thanks for the plug! Patience is of the least showy virtues,
and unlike courage and loyalty, received no medals or tribute banquets. Plus, patience in practice can be so damn hard. We want everything immediately, including love, happiness and creative fulfillment. Being born with the name "Patience" was ironic in my case, since I was born utterly impatient. But patience came to me. It came in stealth mode and felt like stubbornness. It felt like passion. Which it kind of is, the word "patience" being rooted in the latin word for "passion." If you have passion and patience, failures wither away like the seasonal weeds they are. Wait a bit. Work and wait.
Just wanted to say... I love your newsletter. It opens my eyes and my sleepy brain. Thanks for sharing important thoughts and ideas, humor and wonder. I truly appreciate it.