Maycember rage

10 things worth sharing this week

Blind contour drawings of a video of the band Khun Narin

Hey y’all,

It’s heating up in Texas and “Maycember” is raging. Here are 10 things I thought were worth sharing this week:

1. “The computer used to mean the world to me. The computer was a portal to the world I wished to be in. Times change, and I no longer wish to be in contact with much of the world that’s in my computer. Yard work is a wonderful distraction.” Thoughts while pushing a wheelbarrow.
   
   

2. Yard work-related poems: William Carlos William’s “The Red Wheelbarrow,” Wendell Barry’s “XII.,” “ Seamus Heaney’s “Digging.” (“Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests. / I’ll dig with it.”)
   
   

3. “Because Crumb doesn’t own a computer or smartphone, he reads email on printouts provided by his assistant, Maggie. He then composes a response by hand, which Maggie types and sends. Hard copies of both messages are then filed in boxes.” Why R. Crumb Worked With a Biographer. I’m a big fan of the cartoonist’s work and Terry Zwigoff’s documentary, so I’ll have to get Dan Nadel’s biography.
   
   Fun thing: In 2009, I drew Crumb, Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly live in conversation at Bass Concert Hall:

   

   (There’s an American Masters documentary about Spiegelman I’ve been meaning to check out called Disaster Is My Muse.)
   
   

4. I love the “Spaniel rage” cartoons of Vanessa Davis. (Instagram: @squintables)

   
   

5. “There has to be an element of tension. There has to be fundamentally a different approach and disagreement at the heart of it…. There has to be the grit in the oyster around which the pearl is formed.” Roland Orzabal of the band Tears for Fears on the importance of creative tension in collaboration and how they made their massive hit, “Everybody Wants To Rule The World.” (One of my favorite covers is by Ted Leo and The Pharmacists.)
   
   

6. “You asked how it works. To be with someone in this business. This is how.” Meg and I enjoyed the spy thriller Black Bag. (Here’s director Steven Soderbergh: “[Genre] is just such a great delivery system for whatever ideas you’re interested in. Everybody wins. For an audience who likes that genre, if you’ve been respectful of the pillars of that genre, it’s operating on this kind of superficial level, they can read it there. And then there’s all this other stuff you can pack underneath that....”)
   
   

7. European artists in mid-century Texas: T.S. Eliot packed a Dallas arena and was made deputy sheriff, René Magritte went to the rodeo, and George Grosz painted cowboys in Dallas. (Send me more stories, if you’ve got ‘em!)
   
   

8. The creativity hack “no one told you” about: reading obituaries. (Actually, I told you about it, eleven years ago, in chapter one of Show Your Work!)
   
   

9. “I work with college students often. Do you know what brings their attention back to the surface after years of Zoom classes, Generative AI cheating, and smart phone usage? Zines. Freaking zines.” (We here at Kleon Industries approve of this message! Here’s an archive of my zines and how to make a zine from a single sheet of paper.)
   
   

10. Some writing advice that worked for me this week: “Open the document. Stay in the document.” (Get the poster.)

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xoxo,

Austin

PS. If you have a graduate in your life, the best gift is one of my books with a crisp bill as a bookmark or a gift subscription to this newsletter: