New dumpsters, old fires
10 things worth sharing this week
To quote Gil-Scott Heron: “If I knew where cover was / I would stay there and never have to run for it.”
Here are 10 things I thought were worth sharing this week:
Tolstoy learned to ride a bicycle when he was 67 years old. He’d just lost a son, and the Moscow Society of Velocipede-Lovers gave him a bike and a free lesson. He got really into it and rode it around after his morning chores. I learned this fact in Elif Batuman’s essay, “Who Killed Tolstoy?” (Collected in The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, a book that waited patiently for 15 years in my anti-library.) Tolstoy did a lot of things late in his life, like taking up tennis and driving his long-suffering wife Sofia crazy.
“‘If you can forgive me, then do,’ her look said, ‘I’m so happy.’ ‘I hate everyone, and you, and myself,’ his look replied, and he reached for his hat.” I’m more than halfway through Anna Karenina, currently reading part five. My Tolstoy summer continues! (Still liking the Rosamund Bartlett translation.)
Anne Trubek’s tips for how to read more include some of my favorites, like never bringing your phone to the bedroom and downloading a bunch of free Kindle samples so you can read promiscuously. (If you want more reading tips, check out items 4 & 5 from last week’s letter.)
“Berman said that he took some of that time to indulge a fantasy he’d had since childhood, of being able to devote entire days to reading and not much else.” Mark Richardson on one of my favorite songwriters, the late David Berman.
RIP The New York Times for Kids, which was the best part of the whole newspaper.
I made a mixtape of 60s rock for shooting pool with my dad in his basement. (He was born in 1954, so he was a teenager when they happened to be making some of the greatest music ever recorded.) You can listen to it on Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube.
“Why aren’t you a musician?” is a question James Victore asked me on his aptly-named podcast, The Right Questions. You can listen to our conversation on Spotify or Apple.
Netflix’s KPop Demon Hunters is a global sensation and the latest pizza night blockbuster in our house. It’s great to have brand-new stuff to watch with the kids, but we’ve also had a very high rate list this year with good ol’ 90s PG comedies they don’t really make anymore like Father of the Bride. (Did you know Diane Keaton loves to make collages?)
I celebrated a big anniversary this week: 20 years ago I started blogging and showing my work! (Here’s what I wrote a while back about what I’ve learned and why I keep going.)
“I can’t quit now or I might get old.” If you read just one thing this week, make it my typewriter interview with photographer Sally Mann.
Thanks for reading. This hand-rolled, ad-free, AI-free, anti-algorithm publication is made possible thanks to the kind support of readers like you. To keep Friday free for everyone and get an extra exclusive email from me every Tuesday, become a paid subscriber:
xoxo,
Austin
90’s PG movies! We’re on there with my 10yr old son! Got him into Shakespeare with 10 things I hate about you 😀
The perfect day where I live takes place in September. The sky is the clearest blue stretching for miles over low-slung green hills, poofy clean clouds are storybook art, and the thermals are excellent for gliders to circle silently above.
I play frisbee with Rupert, a Golden Retriever who lives for the game and will NEVER STOP. EVER. I don’t really fling the disc. It’s a heavy water frisbee and I throw it so it lands on its side and rolls far. It’s yellow and blue stripes but in Rupert’s mind I’m sure it’s a rabbit running for the woods. He pounces on it, like a fox catching prey in the snow, slams it to the ground, and victory rolls over it, big legs in the air, laughing, before hunting me down to do it again. Then again. And again. I develop a condition in that arm, from throwing that heavy frisbee hours a day and learn to throw it with the other arm too. Because priorities.