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10 things worth sharing this week

Hey y’all,

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

1. I started reading Françoise Gilot’s memoir Life With Picasso from the beginning after years of admiring her work and dipping into the book for stories like the owl she rescued with Picasso. It’s really excellent. If you don’t have time for the book, here’s a nice New Yorker review: “How Picasso’s Muse Became a Master.” (Gilot died just last year at the age of 101.)
   
   

2. In Tuesday’s letter, “Every writing book is good,” I mentioned Lynda Barry’s What It Is, Anne Lamott’s Bird By Bird, and Verlyn Klinkenborg’s Several Short Sentences About Writing as favorites of mine and asked you for some of yours. Other favorites you brought up in the comments: Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit, Stephen King’s On Writing, Ray Bradbury’s Zen in The Art of Writing, and Jane Alison’s Meander, Spiral, and Explode.
   
   

3. David Milch’s disembodied writing process. (Milch was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2015 — he put out a memoir a few years ago called Life’s Work. If you’ve never seen Deadwood, you are in for a [#$*%@] treat. This video essay on the show is great.)
   
   

4. Eminem’s boxes of notes. One look at those and I could tell the rapper was a visual thinker — his lyric sheets look like mind maps without the circles and boxes.
   
   

5. An online toy for learning music theory: I spent a long time playing with aQWERTYon after reading Ethan Hein’s pieces about chords and scales.
   
   

6. Making mixtapes: inspired by reading Marc Masters’ High Bias: A Distorted History of the Cassette Tape, I’ve been buying sealed, pre-recorded cassettes for cheap at the record store, taping over the protection tabs, taping over the music (using the runtime as a constraint for the mix), then taping over the artwork. January’s mix featured a lot of music that isn’t streaming, but for February’s mix, I was able to duplicate the playlist on Spotify: “Music in the Key of Love.”
   
   

7. Ear candy: I found my way back to Electric Adolescence this week and marveled again at the wonderful mixes of Prince, Kraftwerk, Bowie, the best music of 2023, and much more. You could spend the rest of the year in those archives.
   
   

8. “The guitar can be the key that unlocks the cell.” RIP Wayne Kramer of The MC5. (Here’s a half-hour set of them in 1972 on Beat Club.)
   
   

9. “Baby, you got a stew going!” RIP actor Carl Weathers. (My personal favorite of his movies is Predator.)
   
   

10. A few reminders for the Valentine’s Day coming up: “Love is not mind-reading” and “We love because we care.”
    

Thanks for reading. This newsletter is a hand-rolled, algorithm-free, completely reader-supported publication. If you’d like to support my work, buy my books, hire me to speak, or become a paid subscriber:

xoxo,

Austin