Life imitates comedy
10 things worth sharing this week
Happy Friday the 13th. I couldn’t resist starting off with this scene I discovered after getting back from dropping my kids off at school. Life imitates comedy.
Here are 10 other things I thought were worth sharing this week:
How to write a book. (I printed this out for my motivation corner.)
Iggy Pop on his mother’s love. (Compare with the father of 1/2 of Daft Punk.)
Reading: I’m slowly making my way through Tree Abraham’s Cyclettes, which reads to me like a mashup of the numbered structure of Maggie Nelson’s Bluets and the vibe of Keri Smith’s The Wander Society. (Sold to me by the author’s mood board — the power of showing your work!)
A few years ago, I wrote about reading more than one book at a time and letting them talk to each other. Someone asked me what that actually looks like in practice, so I wrote about a few times when two or more books led to a new piece of writing.
The hottest Gen Z Gadget is a 20-year-old digital camera. (I’m enjoying this strain of “the kids are alright” from the NYTimes. See also: “Luddite teens.”)
Music: Billy Nomates’ Cacti is out today. At the time of writing this, I haven’t listened to it — I’m going out to the actual record store to buy a copy! (I wrote about her in “A shed of one’s own.”)
Movies: I once took my pregnant wife to get a cheeseburger at an acclaimed restaurant in Austin and they wouldn’t serve us ketchup because “tomatoes aren’t in season,” so yeah, the horror/satire The Menu was definitely my cup of tea. (For pizza night with the kids: we liked Matilda (1996) directed by Danny DeVito and shot by cinematographer Stefan Czapsky, who also did a bunch of Tim Burton movies, like Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood, and Batman Returns.)
I didn’t watch the Golden Globes, but I caught the heartwarming acceptance speeches of Ke Huy Quan and Jennifer Coolidge, both of which are about resilience and luck and and just keeping going.
RIP poet Charles Simic. I wrote about his friendship with the artist Saul Steinberg.
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xoxo,
Austin
The phrase that guides all my studio work (writing, music, textiles) is "Work is love made visible" from the Kahlil Gibran poem "On Work". Your piece on AI made me think of it this morning - how the making of art, the crafting of things is so much about our expression of love for ourselves, others, and the world at large. AI cannot compete with the largess of that love, nor can grow our spirit/heart in the way our engagement in craft/art practices do. Product versus process. The process is of far greater value than anything we actually produce.
Head, heart, and hands: makes me think of Lynda Barry writing the entire book Cruddy by hand with brush and ink, which I learned of through you (though I'd read Cruddy many years before). It inspired me both to write out the text for my future graphic memoir with brush and ink, and also to write about the process myself in my newsletter. I love how Barry says "A kid learning to write the alphabet is actually learning to draw the alphabet." That really spoke to me.
Also! Thanks for the very instructive "How to Write a Book"! What could be simpler.