Hope this finds you well

10 things worth sharing: lifted type collages, a novel about medieval nuns, fun music news, and more...

Hey y’all,

Let me start off with some downright delightful news: Coconut the Owl is back!!! My heart is full. Here are 10 other things I thought were worth sharing this week:

1. I’m making collages with type I lift out of magazines.
   
   

2. I got sucked into Lauren Groff’s Matrix, a novel about a medieval nunnery. It’s a perfect read for being up at weird hours, like the nuns praying when they’d rather be asleep. (Thanks a lot, daylight saving time.)
   
   

3. Speaking of, here’s Heraclitus on sleeping.
   
   

4. After a month, I’m halfway through Iain McGilchrist’s massive book about left and right brain hemisphere differences, The Master and His Emissary. I’ve been poking around his website a lot and came across this daily poem project on his YouTube.
   
   

5. I read Beth Pickens’ short but powerful Your Art Will Save Your Life in one afternoon. (If you haven’t read her, I might start with her newest, Make Your Art No Matter What.)
   
   

6. Book club news: My December pick is Lynda Barry’s What It Is. At the end of the month, I’m interviewing David Epstein about his book Range.
   
   

7. The Guardian used one of my poems for a column on erasure poetry. Somehow, Mary Ruefle and Tom Phillips weren’t mentioned. (It took me a minute to realize the poem they used was from my first book, Newspaper Blackout, which is, amazingly, still in print.)
   
   

8. Lots of fun music news this week: Big Boi has recorded a song with Kate Bush (!!!), Weird Al covered Sparks on accordian, a site called Radiooooo lets you hear music from different decades all over the world, even Hans Zimmer himself refers to his famous sound as “that low drone-y thingie,” and Taylor Swift fans are upset that she sounds like a man on vinyl. (In their defense, 45RPM 2xLPs are terrible.)

9. RIP writer and artist Etel Adnan. I’ve spent a good part of the week reading her poems and looking at her paintings and even her correspondence. (“I write what I see, I paint what I am.”)
   
   

10. Some holiday shopping links: I updated The Kleon Studio Gift Guide that has a lot of the gear I like to use. If you buy my books directly from Workman, you can get 30% off with the code CYBER2021 at checkout. If you want to get my books signed and personalized and shipped anywhere, Bookpeople has you covered. Finally, if know somebody who’d like it, you can gift a subscription of this very newsletter:

Thanks for reading! If you’d like to get a bonus email on Tuesdays and support my work, become a paid subscriber:

xoxo,

Austin