Is the artist crying?

10 things worth sharing this week

(What worked on my kids often works on me)

“Why are you giving drinks to the mice?”
—old Hungarian expression used when asking kids why they’re crying

Hey y’all,

The ebook of Keep Going is only $4.99 on multiple platforms, including Kindle. If you’re in a creative winter, or just need a little kick in the pants, it might help!

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

1. “Citrus does not come true from seed. If you plant an orange seed, a grapefruit might spring up.” I’ve been eating a lot of oranges, so I finally picked up John McPhee’s Oranges, which is just brilliant, and contains more than one metaphor for our growing compost heap.
   
   

2. “Slugs and snails can sleep for hours, days, weeks, and months.” After reading about the mystery of the medieval fighting snails, I picked up a book about meeting remarkable manuscripts and I read David George Gordon’s The Secret World of Slugs and Snails: Life in the Very Slow Lane. Fascinating creatures and good inspiration for surviving the rest of winter. (Thanks, Clive!)
   
   

3. “It took so much presence of mind to just not disintegrate into nothingness at the surreality of the experience…” Will Oldham spoke to Life of the Record about his classic Bonnie “Prince” Billy album, I See A Darkness. Oldham is so thoughtful and articulate, if you like that conversation, you’ll enjoy this book of interviews, Will Oldham on Bonnie “Prince” Billy.
   
   

4. “How can we know a dead person? How can we know a living person?” I’ve been a fan of Brad Neely’s for years and years — first for his insanely funny (and NSFW) Creased Comics videos like “JFK” and “The Professor Brothers” and then for his brilliant Harry Potter parody, Wizard People, Dear Reader. It’s taken him 20 years, but he finally released his first novel, You, Me, and Ulysses S. Grant: A Farcical Biography. (If you get the audiobook, he reads it in the same voice he narrated Wizard People!)
   
   

5. Stand-up comedy on Netflix: We laughed a lot at Jacqueline Novak’s Get on Your Knees, which is, to quote a profile in The New Yorker, “a ninety-minute show about fellatio.” (Two interesting takeaways from that profile: her decision “to channel her energies into one exceptional piece of work” instead of doing a bunch of little things and her resistance to the idea that she found her voice with the show: “I finally found my confidence, and the way to trick you into liking it.”)
   
   

6. Eye candy: If you just want to watch something light and chill and beautifully shot, you might try Delicious, a French period film about a chef that came out a few years ago. Pleasant way to spend a couple hours. (For pizza night with the family, I highly recommend Puss in Boots: The Last Wish.)
   
   

7. Ear assault: One of my favorite things is to kind of hate a record the first time I hear it, then play it again to see if it’s as bad as I think it is, and before I know it I’ve played it three or four times and I can’t stop listening to it. That happened this week with Geese’s 3D Country.
   
   

8. Ear-soothing ambient: Lou Reed’s Hudson River Wind Meditations, which he recorded for his own meditation and Tai Chi. (Speaking of wind meditations:

   Andre 3000 is going out on tour and performed on Colbert.)
   
   

9. RIP Mary Weiss, lead singer of The Shangri-Las, who have their own chapter in a book I recently saw on the library’s “NEW” shelf: But Will You Love Me Tomorrow?: An Oral History of the ’60s Girl Groups.
   
   

10. RIP director Norman Jewison, who made one of my all-time favorite movies, the romantic comedy Moonstruck. Here’s a remembrance from screenwriter John Patrick Shanley. If you’ve never seen Moonstruck, you are in for such a treat. A perfect movie for a cold winter night.

Thanks for reading. This newsletter is a hand-rolled, algorithm-free, completely reader-supported publication. If you’d like to support my work, buy my books, hire me to speak, or become a paid subscriber:

xoxo,

Austin

PS. Finished another winter diary, so it was time for another weigh-out!