Going wherever it leads

Running down the 10 things worth sharing this week

Hey y’all,

I think I did more waiting than laboring this week? I’m still trying to catch up on all your smart comments about my talk, “The Creative Tensions.” 

Before I forget: a professor recently asked if she could get a group discount subscription for her students. I’d never even thought of such a thing! So here’s an offer for 20% off a group of 4 or more:

Okay! Here are 10 things I thought were worth sharing:

1. It was a week of redacted documents in the news, so I got a lot of jokes about the FBI ripping off my blackout poems. The funny thing about that is that when I started I thought I was ripping off the FBI!
   
   

2. Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea tested my patience in a way no book has in quite a while. I went through several of the potential reactions, but I was somehow unable to take my own number one piece of reading advice. These are the most maddening books, the ones that get their hooks in you while also torturing you. My final verdict: I would have liked it more if there was less of it!
   
   

3. Three things to learn from a child and seven things to learn from a thief.
   
   

4. In less than two weeks I’m interviewing author Edward Carey at Bookpeople here in Austin, Texas about his new book, Plagues and Pencils: A Year of Pandemic Sketches. (For a teaser to the event I recommend the “Edward Carey” tag on my blog.)
   
   

5. I finally finished David Toop’s Ocean of Sound. For a collection of writing about some of my favorite music — Brian Eno, Erik Satie, Sun Ra, Kate Bush, Kraftwerk, Aphex Twin, etc. — it took me quite a while to get through. (I started it in the spring.) Maybe because it’s a non-linear book, very collage-like, it’s probably best digested in snippets. Worth a look, though, especially if you love ambient.
   
   

6. Vintage emergency broadcast tests by Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed.
   
   

7. A profile of Bob Dylan at the age of 23. (Written by the late Nat Hentoff.)
   
   

8. Music documentaries: Incredibly, I talked Meg into watching Anthem to Beauty, a Classic Albums entry about the making of the Grateful Dead albums Anthem of the Sun and American Beauty. (Streaming for free on PlutoTV.) We also watched Peter Bogdanovich’s 4-hour (!!!) documentary Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers: Running Down A Dream. (Streaming for free on Kanopy. You may need an intermission or two.) There’s a bit of interesting overlap between them. The metaphor of the band members as “fingers on a hand,” for example, and also the importance of cheap real estate to rock and roll: The Dead could get an old Victorian house with a dozen rooms in Haight Ashbury for $300 and the proto-Heartbreakers (then Mudcrutch) could rent a house on a 10-acre farm in Gainesville for cheap and even had room to throw DIY music festivals.
   
   

9. The most visually stunning thing we watched was Werner Herzog’s Lessons of Darkness, a 52-minute film about the fires in the oil fields of Kuwait after the Gulf War. Afterwards, Meg found this highly entertaining obituary of Coots Matthews, who was one of the firefighters. (Since the Soviet leader died this week, it’s worth mentioning Herzog’s documentary Meeting Gorbachev, although I prefer this short film.)
   
   

10. RIP the inventor of the Trapper Keeper — “few objects evoke Gen X or millennial childhood as powerfully.”
    

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xoxo,

Austin

PS. I’m heading to Bookpeople this morning to sign — if you’d like a signed and personalized copy of any of my books you can order from them online and they’ll ship them to you. Or, if you’re in Austin, sometimes they have a stack on sale…