Productive procrastination

10 things worth sharing this week + my favorite working method

A page from Steal Like an Artist

Hey y’all,

The comments on my ode to flair pens and our resulting chat about our favorite pens is gonna cost me some serious dough. Really fun seeing all your photos — I think we’ll have to do another gear chat soon.

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

1. My favorite working method: “productive procrastination.”
   
   

2. Online event on February 7th: I’m zooming with writer Peter Turchi about his book of essays on writing fiction, (Don’t) Stop Me If You’ve Heard This Before. You can register here. (We last spoke in 2015 about his book A Muse & A Maze — here’s a condensed version of that interview.)
   
   

3. I’ve been thinking a lot about book design this week. The legendary graphic designer Carin Goldberg died and tributes poured in. (I knew her best for her classic Vonnegut covers.) The writer Dan Kois wrote about Lorraine Louie, the designer behind the wild 1980s covers for Vintage Contemporaries. (Kois has a new novel with the same title.) I’ve been re-reading Thinking With Type by the great Ellen Lupton, which is so good it will soon have a 3rd edition.
   
   

4. Beautiful books, continued: I’m reading a 75th anniversary edition of Edith Hamilton’s Mythology illustrated by Jim Tierney (he did the cover for Mouth To Mouth, one of my favorite books of 2022); I’m reading the 7-year-old Grimm Fairy Tales illustrated by the great Andrea Dezsö; and on a visit to the library, I came across Patricia Lovett’s lovely guide to Calligraphy and Illumination.
   
   

5. On comets being alive: “When they’re far from the sun, they’re sleeping, and when they get close to the sun, they wake up.”
   
   

6. Cory Doctorow on how platforms die: “First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.”
   
   

7. A profile of musician John Cale at 80. He has a new album out called Mercy. (I may re-read my PDF of the out-of-print What’s Welsh for Zen: The Autobiography of John Cale. A book due for a reissue!)
   

8. Soul legends: I caught two great documentaries about Roberta Flack and Sam Cooke on PBS. (My favorites of theirs are both live albums: Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway and Live At The Harlem Square Club, 1963, which I included in my 33 “perfect” records.)

   
   

9. A phrase I would like to see disappear from writing: “Don’t get me wrong.”

   
   

10. My favorite thing I wrote this week was about my inability to focus and how much I love sitting around a fire.

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xoxo,

Austin