Like a snail on a cactus

10 things worth sharing this week

A scene from my neighborhood

Hey y’all,

Our crew is planning a trip to New Mexico this summer — Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Taos, and maybe more. Let me know if there’s something I shouldn’t miss.

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

1. For years, I prided myself on being an imperfectionist, but then I read Katherine Morgan Schafler’s The Perfectionist’s Guide to Losing Control. Turns out I had trouble understanding perfectionism, so I couldn’t identify it in myself! (I loved your comments on this letter.) I think the final word on perfectionism, however, should be given to Leonard Cohen: “I found that things got a lot easier when I no longer expected to win.”
   
   

2. “‘The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog’ is an English-language pangram – a sentence that contains all the letters of the alphabet.” Other pangrams: “How quickly daft jumping zebras vex! Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz. Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs.”
   
   

3. I enjoyed Brian Dillon’s book of essays about essays, Essayism, and plan on reading the other two books in the trilogy, Suppose a Sentence and Affinities. The first book is a centrifugal one: I wound up with a list of at least a dozen books to read. (One little warning: If you, like me, tend to judge a book on its opening paragraph, I recommend skipping the first paragraph in the first two books — by the third, he cuts to the chase.)
   
   

4. The Wikipedia entry for The Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” has an entire section devoted to the song’s effect on Brian Wilson.
   
   

5. Novel: I read R.K. Narayan’s The Guide after reading my friend Alan Jacobs on Narayan’s fictional town of Malgudi. Something the book made me think about is the structural problem of cutting back and forth in narrative space or time. This setup only seems to work for me if the actual sections of the book are chunked in a uniform way so I don’t get bogged down in one or the other — I found myself really bored by the backstory in this book, for example, because there was just too much of it. (I wish I had read it in paperback, so I could do a fore-edge index of the chapters to see how they’re structured.) I like Narayan’s sentences, but I felt like the novel would’ve worked better for me as a short story, so I might check out his collection Malgudi Days.
   
   

6. Music podcasts: I loved the Song Exploder about War’s “Low Rider” and found the first episode of Courtney Love’s Women quite a bit of fun.
   
   

7. Better than a podcast: Alec Guinness reads T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets.
   
   

8. RIP our Chemex, which I broke while doing the dishes. It was older than our sons! (File under: Items you think are overpriced but replace the moment they break.)
   
   

9. “The Wasteland's got its own golden rule: Thou shalt get sidetracked by bullshit every goddamn time!” I’ve enjoyed Walt Goggins in everything I’ve ever seen him in and the TV series Fallout was no exception.
   
   

10. A thought for your week: Creative work is the residue of time “wasted.” Of materials “wasted.” There is no such thing as waste.
    

Shout-out to my down-the-street neighbor Dave who Meg and I met when the car alarm on my ancient, hail-damaged, pollen-covered Honda Fit was malfunctioning after I had to jump-start it and couldn’t turn it off in fear that the battery might die again. “Are you Austin Kleon?” That’s me, I admitted over the blaring horn. “I read your newsletter!”

Dignity, always dignity!

Thanks for reading. This is a hand-rolled, algorithm-free, completely reader-supported publication. The best way to support my work is to buy my books or become a paid subscriber:

xoxo,

Austin

PS. My first book Newspaper Blackout turned 14 years old and is somehow still in print! (“There is nothing like / that / first book / “You put your guts into it.” / and hope.”)