Publish your enthusiasm

10 things worth sharing this week

Collages made while listening to Dune on audiobook

Hey y’all,

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

1. ”Publishing is making public your own enthusiasm.” A beautiful Show Your Work! type thought from the late editor Robert Gottlieb in Turn Every Page, the excellent documentary about his unique 50-year relationship with writer Robert Caro. Highly recommended.
   
   

2. “Once, men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.” I picked up Frank Herbert’s Dune this week and it’s basically the perfect novel for August in Texas. I’m reading the paperback in the pool and listening to the lushly produced audiobook on walks and in the studio.
   
   

3. “The great thing about painting and drawing, as opposed to thinking about it, is the resistance of matter.” I liked the random assortment of writings and interviews in Philip Guston’s I Paint What I Want To See. (They inspired Tuesday’s newsletter, “What’s The Matter?”)
   
   

4. ”The best sort of activity is one that combines mental effort with sensuous delight. That’s why I love drawing.” Here’s another Philip — the novelist Philip Pullman — on drawing.
   
   

5. Eye candy: I re-read Michael Pollan’s Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual illustrated by the wonderful Maira Kalman, whose paintings perfectly balance out Pollan’s borderline preachiness with color and humor.
   
   

6. Ear candy: We failed to take a real vacation this summer, so we’re trying to conjure last-minute escape vibes in the pool with this 3-hour mix of music they play at Disney’s Polynesian Resort.
   
   

7. “The universe is a giant womb of primordial darkness, and there are these tiny fires burning in it…” This FADER interview with the singer Anonhi provides some good context for her stunning latest album, My Back Was A Bridge For You To Cross. She also has interesting things to say about the coincidence of opposites.
   
   

8. Poetry: I’ve been re-reading Edna St. Vincent Millay’s A Few Figs from Thistles. (I believe most of her work is in the public domain, so you can enjoy it for free via Project Gutenberg.)
   
   

9. Two starred additions to our pizza night movie logbooks: Richard Linklater’s 2003 Jack Black-propelled comedy, School of Rock, and the brand-new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem. I was surprised by how genuinely great the latter is: Visually stunning (I love how much you can see the human hand in the drawings — lead character design by Woodrow White and style inspired by the Spider-Verse movies); kick-ass soundtrack with great classic New York stuff like ESG, Tribe, and Liquid Liquid and score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross; fun voice acting; and doesn’t take itself too seriously. We all liked it. A+ from me.
   
   

10. RIP actor Paul Reubens, who played Pee-wee Herman. I missed out on Pee-wee’s Playhouse as a kid — it’s most significant to me as an early gig for the artists Wayne White and Gary Panter — but I remember enjoying this 2016 profile of Reubens’s comeback which begins at his favorite Walgreens. (Related to one of my favorite subjects: finding creativity in mundane retail spaces.)

Thanks for reading. (Herbert: ”Arrakis teaches the attitude of the knife — chopping off what's incomplete and saying: ‘Now, it's complete because it's ended here.’”)

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xoxo,

Austin

the matter at hand