In the soup

10 things worth sharing this week

Sign by @souppeddler

Hey y’all,

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

1. It’s still soup season. Last month I tweeted, “Soup has a few lessons to teach us. One is: Sometimes things get better tomorrow.” A few days ago The Soup Peddler here in Austin, Texas posted an elegant edit: “Soup teaches us some things get better tomorrow.” (Note: some things, not all things.)
   
   

2. “The broth is the soul...” I love Andy Warhol, but I think my favorite piece of art about soup is Tampopo, the 1985 Japanese dark comedy “ramen western” about a lone hero in search of the perfect noodle restaurant. If you’d like to disappear into another world for two hours, I can’t recommend it enough. (“First, contemplate the ramen…”)
   
   

3. “Poetry is everywhere; it just needs editing.” That’s the great James Tate, quoted at the beginning of Matthew Zapruder’s memoir, Story of A Poem. Zapruder shares the ongoing drafts of a poem he’s working on — very #showyourwork — while also meditating on his experiences with writing poetry and being the father of an autistic son. Could a book be more up my alley? The way he unpacks his feelings about giftedness, overachieving, language, disability, and difference really spoke to me. (I have a theory that you can tell whether you’ll like a book just by reading the epigraphs.)

   
   

4. I made 4 downloadable motivational posters to hang in your studio.
   
   

5. I’ve been thinking a lot about how the spiritual problems of a piece are often connected to the piece’s technical problems. In my latest draft, Meghan suggested a simple technical fix — literally moving certain material right up front — that solved the manuscript’s spiritual problems as well. (George Saunders: “All moral concerns in fiction reduce to technical concerns. And technical concerns drive us towards specificity and detail and truth.”)

   
   

6. "Oh, how I've been waiting for this book!” That’s my blurb for John Warner’s new one, More Than Words: How to Think about Writing in the Age of AI. John did a cool thing where he shared the books he talks about in the book and the books of people who provided him blurbs. (Of Steal Like an Artist, he said, “Inside is a book of advice, but more important is that it’s a book of philosophy, a way of orienting yourself around your work that immediately resonated with me. I started using it with my students right after that and have found its spirit infused in my day-to-day writing ever since.” Thanks, John!)
   
   

7. A few years ago I had a fun conversation with art coach Beth Pickens that I still think about. She has a new card deck coming out — The Artist’s Deck: Practical Cards for Everyday Creative Challenges — and she’s also selling a zine called Making Art During Fascism. (My favorite book of hers is Make Your Art No Matter What.)
   
   

8. Animation: We finally saw The Wild Robot, adapted from Peter Brown’s bestselling novel, and directed by Chris Sanders, who also directed one of our favorite pizza night blockbusters, Lilo & Stitch. Here’s an amazing detail from an interview with Sanders that I did not catch: The environment of the island is painted, but when the robot first appears, she is a computer generated object. “As Roz spends more time on the island, we replace her CG surface with a painted surface. And by the middle of the film, by the beginning of the third act, she is now a 100 percent hand-painted-surface character, just like the animals are. She literally begins to fuse with the island as she adapts and becomes a resident.”
   
   

9. “I sing my shadow. I’m singing the dark side of myself.” RIP singer Marianne Faithfull.

   
   

10. “February is the worst month of the year, but it’s an honest month! It’s a month that doesn’t hold up life any better than it really is.” I watch Kevin Killeen’s monologue every year, and every year it cheers me up just a little. “If you can live through February, you’ll live another year.” (“Spring cannot be canceled.”)

Thanks for reading. This hand-rolled, ad-free, AI-free, and anti-algorithm publication is possible thanks to the support of readers like you. If you want to help keep it going, buy my books, hire me to speak at your event, or, best of all, become a paid subscriber:

xoxo,

Austin

P.S. Teachers spoke, and I listened: I made some classroom-friendly variant of “Apply Ass To Chair” and updated my four motivational posters post with them. (A reminder, though, kids: you can’t spell “classroom” without “ass”! To balance things out, I also updated the post with a more vulgar version of “So what if it’s crap?”)