In a (summer) funk

20% off sale + 10 things worth sharing this week

Listen to my new mixtape on Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube

Hey y’all,

Not sure how long it’ll last, but at the moment, my books Keep Going and Show Your Work! are $7 and $6 on Amazon.

Here are the 10 other things worth sharing this week:

1. Summer in Texas is never easy. You have to try hard to keep your thing together, stay cool, and remember the #1 rule of Funk: ”Keep it on the one.”

   
   I made a new mixtape to help called ”In a (Summer) Funk.” You can listen to it on Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube. (Best experienced poolside!)

   

2. “I think of every book of mine as a shipwreck in the sense that I start out with delusions of grandeur and a great big vision of a three-masted pirate ship or a battle cruiser or something, and then my vision of the ship smashes on the rocks, and I wind up building a dinghy out of the broken pieces. But as long as the thing floats and takes the reader where I want to take them, I’m okay.” I talked to my pal Wendy MacNaughton about my new book and creating like a kid.
   
   

3. The sentence I want to hear after a reader reads one of my books: “[It] made me want to make things again.”
   
   To show how a book evolves (or devolves!) over time, I shared a bunch of pages from the past 10 years of my diary: “Diary of a book.”

   

4. ”A couple years ago, my writer friend Austin Kleon encouraged me to write a [graphic] novel about being a doctor.” A tour of Grace Farris’s Austin home. (It’s so much easier to see the books that other people should write…)
   
   

5. Kate Bingaman-Burt is putting out a book of her daily purchase drawings called Proof of Purchase. (Her typewriter interview was a popular favorite.)
   

   

6. One of the funniest things about releasing a book is that every week I find a new quote or story that would’ve gone great in the book. The latest bit comes from artist Anish Kapoor, who would’ve fit perfectly into the “Permission to be Bad!” chapter: “I have three words written on my studio wall: ‘disobey,’ ‘disagree,’ ‘disavow.’ And I try to look at them every day. You know, be a stupid naughty boy.”
   
   

7. Documentaries: Gary Hustwit’s generative film about Brian Eno is now streaming on the Criterion Channel. (I wrote about it in my letter “Drawing Eno.”) Penny Lane’s documentary about Flaco the Owl, Wild Inside, just got a beautiful new poster and will have its premier in Central Park. (If you’d like to learn more about the art and business of making movies, watch my conversation with Penny and Penny’s conversation with Gary.)
   
   

8. Pizza night blockbuster: “You yell barracuda, everybody says, “Huh? What?” You yell shark…” We finally watched Jaws after my son Jules (11) watched the Jaws @ 50: The Definitive Inside Story documentary on Disney+ about a hundred times. It’s still great and sparked a good little discussion about thriller vs. horror. (Tonight we’re watching Rocky… on VHS!)
   
   

9. Getting art advice from Beth Pickens was one of the most helpful chats I’ve had in the past half decade. I’m talking to Beth again on July 1st about Don’t Call it Art (and the topic of failure!) as part of her Homework Club and she’s offered a free month code for y’all who want to join: Magic.
   
   

10. ”If you are on a long road and you finally think that you have accomplished something, there is this joy, but there is also the knowledge that the quest inevitably and necessarily goes on.” RIP jazz pianist Abdullah Ibrahim.
    

Thanks for reading. If you’d like to support this hand-rolled publication, take advantage of the 20% off summer sale and become a paid subscriber:

xoxo,

Austin