Some kinds of monsters
10 things worth sharing this week
The highlight of my week was reading the comments on all the objects we love and live with and seeing pictures of your spaces in the chat. I love our crew so much.
Here are 10 other things I thought were worth sharing this week:
I’ve been thinking a lot about what a gift it can be to subtract cutting-edge technology from our lives every once in a while. My computer is fried out and being repaired, so I’ve been listening to my tapes and records in the studio working on my new book with a clipboard, typing paper, and a Pentel Sign Pen. When I got a new phone last year, I told my kids our car is too old to talk to it (a fib), so I filled a binder of CDs and have them pick what we listen to. (They recently gave two thumbs up to a copy of Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue that I burned in high school.) Then I listen to local radio on the ride back home. I charge my phone in the kitchen at night so I have to read books before bed. Little subtractions like that end up being big additions.
“Being a writer is the best way I know how to get paid for being insane.” This 4-minute speech by author Fredrik Backman on “creative anxiety and procrastination” made me laugh.
“All my characters are conceived in desperation.” Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy is one of my all-time favorite comics, but it’s hard to find collections of the strip that are still in-print. Lucky for us, this week sees the release of Nancy and Sluggo’s Guide To Life, and two months from now we’ll get The Nancy Show: Celebrating The Art of Ernie Bushmiller, a catalog from the upcoming show at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum in Columbus, Ohio, which is hosting a Nancy Fest on May 24th and 25th. (Sadly, I can’t make it, but I recommend these books by the presenters: Bill Griffith’s awesome comics biography Three Rocks: The Story of Ernie Bushmiller and Paul Karasik and Mark Newgarden’s How To Read Nancy, which inspired my letter, “Study something you love in depth!”)
If you desire something a little more highbrow, my pal Alan Jacobs’ critical edition of W.H. Auden’ s 1955 collection of poems The Shield of Achilles just got a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly.
Feeling sorry for myself after a rough morning of writing, I put on the 2003 Metallica documentary Some Kind of Monster and half-watched while making collages out of kids’ drawings. I felt what Amanda Petrusich wrote in her 9,000 word profile of the band: “When I first saw the movie, I was twenty-four and found the incongruity of it—some guy in a sweater asking Metallica to talk about feelings—funny; now, at forty-two, I find it unbelievably poignant.” (The band members were all my age or younger when the cameras were rolling.)
“You just have to grab hold of what awakens a sense of loving curiosity in you.” Writer Henrik Karlsson on having more interesting ideas. (See previously: “A blog post is a search query to find your people” and “Have you tried making yourself a more interesting person?”)
“Life is so unnerving to a servant who’s not serving!” My 11-year-old played Lumiere (French for “light!”) in his 5th grade class’s production of Disney’s Beauty and The Beast, so the next night Meg and I finally watched Howard, a documentary about playwright and lyricist Howard Ashman. He penned the lyrics for the movies that started the Disney Renaissance before dying of AIDS at the age of 40. Even if you don’t watch the whole movie, watch the delightful footage of the recording session for “Be Our Guest.” (I’m going to try to suggest Jean Cocteau’s classic 1946 film, La Belle et la Bête, for one of our upcoming pizza nights. Eventually, we’ll be ready for Little Shop of Horrors.)
“I believe the finest films being done today are done by the original, innovative filmmakers who have the courage to take a chance and to gamble. So I say to you, ‘Keep gambling, keep taking chances.’” RIP DIY film producer and director Roger Corman. We enjoyed the documentary about his life and work, Corman’s World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel, but there’s also an older and shorter documentary about him, Roger Corman: Hollywood’s Wild Angel.
RIP musician David Sanborn. Among the many highlights of his career, he played saxophone on David Bowie’s ”Young Americans” and hosted the TV show Night Music, which was full of killer performances, like Pere Ubu doing “Breath.”
”A story is not like a road to follow… it’s more like a house.” RIP Alice Munro, who many considered to be the greatest short story writer alive. (One of her most vocal champions was comedian Norm Macdonald.) Sheila Heti wrote a nice remembrance, “I Don’t Write Like Alice Munro, but I Want to Live Like Her,” and The Paris Review has unlocked her Art of Fiction interview, in which she said, “It’s not the giving up of the writing that I fear. It’s the giving up of this excitement or whatever it is that you feel that makes you write.”
Thanks for reading. This is a hand-rolled, ad-free, algorithm-free, completely reader-supported publication. If you love this newsletter, you can help me keep it going and join the coolest creative community around by becoming a paid subscriber:
xoxo,
Austin
PS. Love this image of my books by @robert.mccombe:
I really loved that Sheila Heti piece on Alice Munro. Especially this part:
"A fiction writer isn’t someone who can write anything — movies, articles, obits! She isn’t a person in service to the magazines, to the newspapers, to the publishers or even to her audience. She doesn’t have to speak on the political issues of the day or on matters of importance to the culture right now but ought first and most to attend seriously to her task, which is her only task, writing the particular thing she was most suited to write."
Food for thought as we live in a time when everyone has an opinion on f-cking everything.
The first movie I ever worked on was a Roger Corman production called STREEKWALKIN. I ran into Roger 20 years later and admitted I had no idea what I was doing on that movie. "Son," he said with a laugh. "NOBODY knows what they're doing on my movies."
RIP Roger Corman.