Getting up from your desk

10 things worth sharing this week

“Sorry, We’re Lazy” sign acquired a million years ago from Aesthetic Apparatus

Hey y’all,

‘Tis the season for out-of-office replies. Here are the 10 things I thought were worth sharing this week:

1. “Writer’s block just means you got up from your desk.” Elmore Leonard is one of my all-time favorite writers and my ideal summer beach read, so I saved critic Anthony Lane’s excellent profile of Dutch in The New Yorker to read in print. (My highest readerly compliment.) I didn’t realize The Library of America offers a box set of Leonard’s novels! If I was going to recommend one volume to start with, it’d be Four Later Novels, as the first three — Get Shorty, Rum Punch, and Out of Sight — were all made into good movies (Jackie Brown, an adaptation of Rum Punch, is my favorite Tarantino movie), and the last in the batch, Tishomingo Blues, was Leonard’s personal favorite. (My other favorite adaptation is the TV series Justified, which was based on Leonard’s story “Fire in the Hole.”) Here’s a drawing I did twenty years ago (!) of Dutch’s 10 pieces of writing advice, “Easy on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points and Especially Hooptedoodle”:

   

2. This summer’s big book is finished! War and Peace was awesome and weird and I loved it. A few folks asked me what translation I read. I started with Pevear and Volokhonsky, assuming a contemporary translation would be better than an old one, but boy, was I wrong! I found things way, way easier-going when I switched to the Aylmer and Louise Maude translation. (I plan on reading Anna Karenina this winter — I’ll either go with the Maudes or Constance Garnett, or try out Rosamund Bartlett’s translation.)

   

3. “On the one hand, reading old books is a luxurious escape from your contemporary moment. On the other hand, it expands you in ways that make you more equipped to deal with your contemporary moment.” On breaking bread with the dead.
   
   

4. I approve this summer travel message: “Less phone, more sketchbook.” (Some inspiration: the family travel diaries of architect Carlo Aymonino — here’s an English translation.)
   
   

5. Reminder: Airplane mode can be a way of life.

   
   

6. Summer movies: I love the Criterion Closet Picks series, but why should fancy people have all the fun? I decided to start my own Kleon Closet Picks:
   

   (My summer movie picks are: Jurassic Park, Jaws, Moonrise Kingdom, and Forgetting Sarah Marshall.)
   

   
   

7. Ear candy: I made a short “Chlorine” mixtape for July, specifically for lazy poolside listening. You can listen on Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube. (The big playlist of all my monthly mixtapes is up to almost sixteen hours of music!)
   
   

8. Airplane music: I really liked Walter Martin’s “Music for Flying” playlist full of instrumental and ambient tracks. (Flying music I always have synced to my phone: Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works 85-92 and Volume II, a bunch of Miles Davis albums, and for when I really need to chill, the albums of Japanese ambient legend Hiroshi Yoshimura.)
   
   

9. RIP composer Mark Snow, who wrote the “X-Files” theme. “I was looking for something that boy scouts could hum at the campfire, as a scary song,” he told NPR in 2016. He got some help from his wife, Glynnis. ”You know, I’m a good whistler,” she said. “Maybe I could beef it up a little bit.’” A combination of her whistling and the “Whistling Joe” patch on the Emu Proteus/2 synthesizer ended up in the song. (We’ve been watching some carefully curated X-Files episodes with the tweens and they love it.) For fun, here’s Owen a few months ago playing the theme on the piano:

   
   

10. Summer wisdom: Aw heck, let’s go back and give the last words to Elmore Leonard, from a letter he wrote to his grandkid: “Really all you have to do is be yourself. Be cool.”

Thanks for reading. This hand-rolled, ad-free, AI-free, anti-algorithm publication is made possible thanks to the kind support of readers like you. To get an extra exclusive email from me every Tuesday, and keep Friday free for everyone, become a paid subscriber:

xoxo,

Austin

PS. Have I mentioned lately that I write books? An overseas publisher asked me if I’d record a video introduction to my trilogy for new readers, so I figured why not post it here, too?