Be a good date

10 things worth sharing this week

A blackout from Show Your Work!

Hey y’all,

Friends in Canada: I’m told my audiobook trilogy is only $5.99 on Audible until the end of the month.

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

1. If you want readers, be a good date.
   
   

2. The best thing I read this week was Kurt Vonnegut’s Timequake. Why did it take me so long to read the last novel by one of my very favorite writers? For some reason I had assumed it was “minor” Vonnegut, but even “minor” Vonnegut is major to me. Timequake is about everyone in the world coming back to life after a big traumatic event — sound familiar? — but it’s also Vonnegut trying to fit his moral worldview and how he thinks we should live into one last book. The ending, set under the stars at a clambake, is particularly beautiful. Ting-a-ling.
   
   

3. After my adventure last week of going through a stack of melted 45 singles, I went out and bought a refurbished tape deck. I christened it by listening to 20-year-old tapes of the short-lived radio show I did with my college roommate. If you’d like to travel back to 2003 and hear what we played here’s a Spotify playlist.
   
   

4. “Everything is for sale! Make me an offer! Thank you for shopping!” The weirdest, most delightful thing I watched this week is The Pricemaster, a 2003 lo-fi film about a group of art students in Denton, TX who throw a Marshall McLuhan-inspired garage sale. Comedy ensues. (If you don’t have 30 minutes, here’s a 2-minute taste.)
   
   

5. A master class in stealing like an artist: a breakdown of the most iconic samples in hip-hop from 1973 to 2023.
   
   

6. Poem: “Three Songs at the End of Summer.” (Every time I read a Jane Kenyon poem, I think, “I need to read more Jane Kenyon.”)
   
   

7. TV: Meg and I really liked Deadloch, a “feminist noir comedy set against a bucolic backdrop with a rising body count.” It’s dark and funny and genuinely suspenseful. (The creators say the working title was Funny Broadchurch.)
   
   

8. RIP voice actor Johnny Hardwick, who played Dale Gribble on King of the Hill.
   
   

9. “Walking with the net is like reading with a pencil in hand.” Lewis Hyde on why, even though he doesn’t catch butterflies anymore, he still walks with a butterfly net.
   
   

10. Your assignment this week from Rilke: “I beg you, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart.”

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xoxo,

Austin

PS. If you have a burning question you’d like me to answer in an upcoming Tuesday letter, drop it in the comments: