It’s trying to tell you something

10 things worth sharing this week

Hey y’all,

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

1. Writer’s block is trying to tell you something.
   
   

2. “We are the music makers, / and we are the dreamers of dreams…” A list of Willy Wonka’s favorite literary quotations. (We watched Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory with the boys and I got so worried thinking about Charlie Bucket’s mid-life crisis that I wrote the Tuesday newsletter about it: “Quitting the Chocolate Factory.”)
   
   

3. “Will this enlarge me or diminish me?” I’ve been digging into the work of Jungian analyst James Hollis, who writes particularly well about mid-life. I really liked his book The Middle Passage, and now I’m reading some of his more recent books. (His appearance on The Art of Manliness is a decent introduction to his work.)
   
   

4. “Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.” Getting into Hollis has me going back to Carl Jung. I read his memoir Memories, Dreams, Reflections a decade or so ago and really liked it. It can be hard to know where to start with someone like Jung, so I got my hands on an .epub of his Collected Works and just started typing things like “tension” and “opposites” into the search box to see which essays came up. (I also splurged on a copy of The Red Book, which is so big it basically requires its own book stand.)
   
   

5. The funny context of the popular Emily Dickinson line, “I am out with lanterns, looking for myself.”
   
   

6. Ethan Hein’s musical borrowing syllabus, outlining a class on ownership, plagiarism, and originality. (I know a book he might want to add — ha!)
   
   

7. Sweet soul music: Written In Their Soul: The Stax Songwriter Demos is an incredible compilation. (Big thanks to Joe Regan, who I’ve joked before is an MVP in our comments.)
   
   

8. Ear candy: I’ve been listening to two new albums that are sort of polar opposites, mood-wise: The Clientele’s I Am Not There Anymore and Osees’ Intercepted Message. (Some shared DNA can be heard in this nice mix of 60s garage rock.)
   
   

9. “The things I’m into are things that fascinate me and keep me moving forward.” An interview with director Michael Mann. (I am almost always in the mood for Heat.)
   
   

10. Our assignment this week comes from Taylor Mac’s 24-Decade History of Popular Music: “An artist’s job is to dream the culture forward.”

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xoxo,

Austin