Fold, crease, tear

10 things worth sharing this week

My friend Steven making a zine

Hey y’all,

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

1. Last Friday my friend Steven visited the studio and I showed him how to make 8-page and 14-page zines from a single sheet of paper. (We practiced on a zine I made of his recent ordination and an older zine he inspired, What Does A Seed Look Like?) We spent a half hour or so catching up and folding, creasing, and tearing paper. At the end I said, “I haven’t made anything with my hands in a while… that’s probably why I’m sad!” (Like Beth Pickens tells us, when we are distanced from our creative practice, our quality of life suffers.)
   
   

2. If you’re wondering what the heck a zine is, one of my favorite books is called Whatcha Mean, What’s a Zine? You can see all the little zines I’ve made on this page. (I love Malaka Gharib’s zines that she posts on her Instagram, like “Looking But Not Seeing” and “On Motherhood.”)
   
   

3. Audrey Watters makes the case for a paper fitness journal. (Which is really a case for keeping any journal on paper, because paper is a wonderful technology and there’s just something about making things “with your own dirty little hands,” as the late David Carr put it.)
   
   

4. I’ve long been interested in commonplace books, but I’d somehow never heard of a Zibaldone, which is Italian for “a heap of things.” (“Throw it on the compost heap” is one of my favorite gardening metaphors for creative work.)
   
   

5. I’m trying not to waste my midlife crisis, but some weeks it’s hard going. I picked up another book by Jungian psychoanalyst James Hollis this week called A Life of Meaning. I love his books because he doesn’t have any answers, just really good questions. (I drew comic notes of his books The Middle Passage and What Matters Most.)
   
   

6. We’re thinking about getting a dog again, so I’ve been reading The Book of Pet Love and Loss by Sara Bader. (The section on John Steinbeck makes me want to re-read Travels with Charley.)
   
   

7. Jazz that sounds good at the dinner table: Thelonius Monk’s Criss-Cross.
   
   

8. If you like raunchy high school comedies, Bottoms made us laugh a lot. I liked that it made me feel a little old, like I was getting a peek into the humor of a different generation. The great Marshawn Lynch stole every scene he was in. (I know I’ve recommended it here before, but Marshawn Lynch: A History is well worth a watch. It’s streaming on Kanopy.)
   
   

9. Books for the kids: Our boys, 8 and 11, love Lauren Tarshis’s I Survived series of books and graphic novels about terrifying events in history.
   
   

10. “I tried to be empty here [taps temple] because it’s the best thing for creative process. If you don’t have any information you can make many things, you can go in all 360 degrees of direction.” RIP Damo Suzuki, former frontman of the German band Can. My favorite album of theirs is Future Days — I put “Moonshake” on my February mix. I can’t get enough of this b-side, “Shikako Maru Ten.” (If you dig those tracks and want to hear more, try this mix by Electric Adolescence.)
    
    

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xoxo,

Austin