No thank you!
10 things worth sharing: a flourish of approval, books about the craft of writing, a great movie I saw, and more...
If you’d like to get an extra email from me on Tuesdays and keep these Fridays free for everybody, please consider becoming a paid subscriber:
Here are 10 things I thought were worth sharing this week:
Do you need a flourish of approval? (From the excellent Depths of Wikipedia.)
Tor.com’s 18 favorite books about the craft of writing. Some good ones are in there, but two of my all-time favorites are missing: Anne Lamott’s Bird By Bird (I read the “Jealousy” chapter every year) and Verlyn Klinkenborg’s Several Short Sentences About Writing. (“Who’s going to give you the authority to feel that what you notice is important? / It will have to be you.”)
Great movie: I’d seen the “plate of shrimp” clip from Repo Man before, but never the whole movie. Holy moly. I wish I could stick the VHS in a time machine and send it to myself in high school. Highly recommend the Criterion Collection Blu-Ray. (One of the things I loved about it was Robby Müller’s cinematography. He also shot one of my favorite movies, Down By Law. Next on my watchlist: Paris, Texas.)
Penguin Classics has launched a Marvel Comics collection with The Amazing Spider-Man, Black Panther, and Captain America.
A profile of Steve Keene, the wildly prolific painter who’s made album covers for Pavement, Silver Jews, and other bands. (He has a new book out: The Steve Keene Art Book.)
On art and parenting: how Anne Truitt’s diaries helped her reconcile being an artist and a mother and the “how to draw” books Picasso created for his daughter. (Last week I linked to a list of some of my favorite books about art and motherhood, and y’all recommended two unread books already on my shelves: Anne Lamott’s Operating Instructions and Rivka Galchen’s Little Labors.)
TV: We enjoyed Gary Oldman as Jackson Lamb in Slow Horses, though Nancy Pearl tells us that in the books by Mick Herron he is “a gazillion times” more “awful and irascible.”
Surround sound: I went to Costco the other day for the first time in years and got seduced by a cheap Vizio 5.1 surround sound system, which, for $200, sounds pretty good. (We’d previously only had good stereo monitors hooked up to our TV.) I went looking for good movies to test it out on: even the kids got sucked into Kraftwerk 3-D, Blade Runner 2049 was predictably awesome, and I’m planning on giving Mad Max: Fury Road a rewatch. But most surprising was the fact that pretty much every new TV series is mixed for surround, so even the worst show can sound pretty interesting. (Now if the stupid Apple Music app on Roku would do lossless or Dolby Atmos, I’d be a happy camper.)
Ear candy: I’ve been listening to Albert King’s Born Under A Bad Sign and Wall of Voodoo’s Call of The West.
RIP artist Duncan Hannah. I loved his memoir, Twentieth-Century Boy, which was put together using the diaries he kept in the 70s.
Thanks for reading. This newsletter is a reader-supported publication. The best way to support it is to buy my books, hire me to speak, shop for some of my favorite gear (I get a cut), or become a paid subscriber:
If you need a last-minute Father’s Day or graduation present, you can give them a gift subscription:
I’m off now to go estivate by the pool. See you next week!
xoxo,
Austin
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
If You Want to Write by Brenda Ueland is charming and intelligent encouragement:’
“…everybody is talented, original, and has something important to say.” She writes about the little drawings Van Gogh put in his letters to his younger brother. https://www.terriwindling.com/blog/2012/08/van-gogh.html
I love these paragraphs:
“But the moment I read Van Gogh’s letter I knew what art was and the creative impulse. It came as a feeling of love and enthusiasm for something, and in a direct, simple, passionate and true way, you try to show this beauty in things to others, by drawing it.
The difference between Van Gogh and you and me is, that while we may look at the sky and think it is beautiful, we don’t go so far as to show someone else how it looks. One reason may be that we do not care enough about the sky or other people. But most often I think it is because we have been discouraged into thinking what we feel about the sky is it important.”
If you're about to give FURY ROAD a rewatch, you've got to take a look at this oral history about the making of that opus. As someone devoted to the nuts and bolts of creativity, you'll adore this tale from the trenches, with George Miller proving the patron saint of artistic persistence. Here's the link: https://www.harpercollins.com/products/blood-sweat-chrome-kyle-buchanan?variant=39314534629410