Pandemic prayers

10 things worth sharing: blackout poems, ear and eye candy, and more...

Hey y’all,

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

1. I broke out my Sharpie and blacked out some pandemic prayers. 
    

2. I’m reading Carlo Rovelli’s collection of newspaper columns, There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness and Leonard Shlain’s Art & Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time, and Light. The books talk so well to each other that sometimes when I’m reading it’s hard to remember which one’s talking.  
    

3. I watched an old Shlain lecture about his book, The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image, which reminded me a bunch of things I’d read about Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. (Check out these Lynda Barry drawings done while watching McGilchrist lecture about the soul.) 
    

4. If all that sounds insufferably highbrow, I’m also floating around the pool while reading Quentin Tarantino’s novelization of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
    

5. I love Monty Don’s instagram.
    

6. Tamara Shopsin designed new covers for Charles Portis, the only author whose novels I’ve read twice. (We’re currently discussing Shopsin’s Arbitrary Stupid Goal in the Read Like an Artist book club.)
    

7. Eye candy: This “new” Vermeer is wild. (This Basquiat ain’t bad, either.)
    

8. Ear candy: I’ve been playing Bjork’s Homogenic a bunch. (Might pick up Emily Mackay’s 33 1/3 book about it.)
    

9. Podcast: I stole a ton from this conversation between Iain McGilchrist and John Cleese. (Beware: the second night is almost unlistenable due to a technical error in the recording, but the first is clear.) 
    

10. RIP historian James W. Loewen, whose book, Lies My Teacher Told Me, changed my life when I was a teenager. RIP painter Chuck Close. RIP singer Don Everly. (Been spinning Songs Our Daddy Taught Us.) RIP drummer Charlie Watts. (Crank Some Girls or watch Gimme Shelter tonight.) 

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xoxo, 

Austin