Look away from the pit

10 things worth sharing: avoiding doomscrolling, the importance of the mailing list, showing your kids who you are, and more...

Hey y’all,

On Tuesday I did something I’ve never done before: I posted a 20-minute video walkthrough of my diary. Thanks to the paid subscribers who buy me the time to do weird, fun stuff like this! More to come.

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

1. Look away from the pit.
   
   

2. Please, for goodness’ sake, start a mailing list.
   
   

3. My February pick for our Read Like an Artist book club is Sarah Ruhl’s Smile: The Story of a Face. (Even if you’re not in the club, you can tune in on Thursday for my interview with Tim Kreider!)
   
   

4. Ideally, I like to read nonfiction during the day and fiction at night in bed. Sometimes it makes for wild combinations, like this week: William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience by day and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven at night. (No, I haven’t seen the show yet! No spoilers.)
   
   

5. My friend Alan Jacobs on “The Homebound Symphony,” or: what he’s trying to do with his blog. (A great recent post: John Ruskin on drawing a narcissus.)
   
   

6. If you are a Mac or iPad/iPhone user, the latest operating systems have a text recognition feature called “Live Text” that is so good it can actually recognize and copy/paste handwriting in my diary.
   
   

7. Ear candy: I’ve been writing all week to this dub playlist by SFJ (on shuffle) and picking through Teju Cole’s playlists, too. Haven’t listened to any of my CDs recently, but they’re back, baby!
   
   

8. I finally got to see Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time, a documentary I backed on Kickstarter so long ago my first grader wasn’t even born yet. I must admit I wish it had been a more conventional American Masters style doc that stuck to Vonnegut’s life and work: There’s so much wonderful footage of his early life, later lectures, manuscript drafts, his study, etc., I felt all that could’ve stood on its own without the awkward framing of the friendship between subject and filmmaker. So it goes. I’m now going to check out Ginger Strand’s The Brothers Vonnegut — she excerpted a nice piece about how Jane Vonnegut made Kurt Vonnegut a writer.
   
   

9. RIP fashion legend André Leon Talley. It’s a rare week that goes by when I don’t think of his mini-monologue from The September Issue: “So far, it’s been a bleak streak over here in America! You know what? It’s a famine of beauty. A famine of beauty, honey! My eyes are starving for beauty!”
   
   

10. RIP my grandmother, Arlene Kleon. I wrote about a lesson I learned from both of my grandmas: Show your children who you are.

Thank you for reading. This newsletter is a reader-supported publication. The best way to support my work is to buy my books, hire me to speak, or become a paid subscriber:

Hang in there, keep going, and I’ll see you next week.

xoxo,

Austin