Not knowing is the first step

10 things worth sharing this week

Hey y’all,

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

1. “If you scratch any interesting artist you’ll hear that one of the key components to how they do it is that they don’t really know what they’re doing.” Paul McCartney’s songwriting process.
   
   

2. Years ago, Wendy MacNaughton sent me this beautiful little limited edition book called How To Say Goodbye. For years, I’ve wanted to give it away to people who are dealing with losing a loved one. Now I’m happy to report that as of this week, it’s out in the world.
   
   

3. Patrick Dewitt wrote one of my favorite novels, a comic western called The Sisters Brothers. He has a new novel out that I’m quite enjoying called The Librarianist. (If you like his stuff, his appearance on Otherppl With Brad Listi is quite good. I didn’t know he loves Charles Portis and was friends with the late David Berman. No wonder I like him. Now if he’d just start a damned mailing list so I don’t have to hear secondhand when he has a new book out…)
   
   

4. Comics: I really liked cartoonist Dan Nott’s Hidden Systems: Water, Electricity, the Internet, and the Secrets Behind the Systems We Use Every Day. (Would pair well with Deb Chachra’s forthcoming How Infrastructure Works.) The listing of his influences in the acknowledgements is a pretty wonderful reading list that includes some of my own favorites: ”The brilliant picture books of Wanda Gág, Virginia Lee Burton, and David Macaulay; the narrative visualizations of time in the comics of Richard McGuire, Kevin Huizenga, and Sophia Foster-Dimino; the comics essays of Sophie Yanow and Sam Wallman; the stunning portrayal of invisible energies in the work of Ron Regé, Jr. and Lale Westvind; and, of course, Avatar: The Last Airbender.” (You can see more of Dan’s work here.)

   
   

5. Michael Bungay Stanier was visiting from Toronto this week, promoting his new book, How to Work with (Almost) Anyone. We hung out in the studio for a bit then drove down to End of an Ear to see Being Dead perform an in-store set. Fun hang.
   
   

6. You all probably know by now that Corita Kent is one of my favorite artists and is central to two chapters of my last book, Keep Going. A new book of her photographs was just announced called Ordinary Things Will Be Signs For Us. Someone asked me recently where to start with her work, and personally, I love Learning By Heart: Teachings To Free The Creative Spirit. (I’ll stop there — I could talk about Corita all day.)
   
   

7. Music: I love that a Taylor Swift vinyl was mispressed with the 90s electronic comp Happy Land, with bizarre stuff like Cabaret Voltaire’s “Soul Vine.” Talk about a collectible record! (“Honor thy error as a hidden intention.”)
   
   

8. Documentary: Wham! is a delight, exactly the kind of thing I love in a documentary. Tight, light, well-edited, and stylistically coherent. (It avoids two things I detest in contemporary documentaries: those ghastly animated re-enactments everyone does now and going on for too long.) Check out director Chris Smith’s filmography for more, going all the way back to the classic American Movie. I look forward to what he does next — he’s finishing up a Gene Wilder documentary and filming one on DEVO!
   
   

9. Filmmakers on films: Greta Gerwig discusses the films that inspired Barbie and Wes Anderson geeks out in a Parisian video store. I like how both, despite having a lot of artsy-fartsy influences, also acknowledge mainstream stuff, like Singin’ In The Rain, The Wizard of Oz, Witness, and Bridge of Spies. (I also enjoy thinking about how both Gerwig and Anderson’s recent movies are them playing with dolls and playsets.)
   
   

10. In the comments to my letter, “When does a diary pay off?” several of you asked if we could share our diary pages with each other. I opened up a chat to do just that. (Another favorite thing about revisiting notebooks: Old complaints and grievances.)
    

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xoxo,

Austin