Souvenirs of gratitude

10 things worth sharing this week

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Hey y’all,

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

1. “I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought,” wrote G.K. Chesterton, “and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.” In case you missed them in previous years, here are some gratitude zines I made free to download and print. I’ve loved how people have shared their completed zines with me in Thanksgivings past. To help carry on the tradition, I’ve updated the page with a video explaining how to fold them and a simplified version of the zine for kids. Please feel free to share them far and wide!
   
   

2. Vincent van Gogh once wrote to his brother Theo, “I’m concerned with the world only in that I have a certain obligation and duty, as it were — because I’ve walked the earth for 30 years — to leave a certain souvenir in the form of drawings or paintings in gratitude.” I like this idea of art as a souvenir of our time here, made in gratitude.

   
   

3. “From the way the Met’s treating it, you’d think it was the equivalent of your kid’s macaroni art taped up on the fridge door, but I just went today, and it’s astonishing— the most enjoyable exhibition I’ve seen in recent memory.” Tim Kreider on an exhibit of staff artwork at The Met.

   
   

4. If I could put one book in every American’s stocking this Christmas, it would be Keep Going, of course, but if I could pick two, I’d throw in Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. I’m not sure why it took me so long to read this short, powerful book — I think I thought it was just a diagnosis of tyranny, when it’s actually a guide to surviving it. If you started reading one chapter a day on January 1st, you’d be ready for the inauguration. (There’s a graphic edition I’m ordering for my kids.)
   
   

5. A gorgeous reissue of a book by one of my all-time favorite artists: “To escape fascist Europe, the artist Saul Steinberg drew his way to America. He made it to New York in 1942 already in contract with The New Yorker, but was soon called up to serve in the US Naval Reserve in World War II. This book, All In Line, is a memoir-via-drawing of this key time in Steinberg's life, when he began to find his line and his way as an American.” (Forward by one of Steinberg’s artistic heirs, Liana Finck.)
   
   

6. On Tuesday I asked, “Is there a tool that makes you feel closer to somebody?” Your answers included: kitchen knives, pocket knives, gardening forks, cupcake pans, hammers, drum sticks, paintbrushes, cameras, colanders, jackets, desks, drawing tables, brushes, pens, magnifying glasses, pressure gauges, whisks, cast iron skillets, spoons, baking sheets, sewing baskets, earrings, stamps, scissors, sewing machines, aprons, screwdrivers, bobbin winders, palettes, hand drills, bags, and much more. I loved reading these responses so much — talk about souvenirs of gratitude!
   
   

7. I’m grateful, lately, for animals. “With their parallel lives, animals offer man a companionship which is different from any offered by human exchange,” wrote John Berger in his essay, Why Look At Animals? “Different because it is a companionship offered to the loneliness of man as a species.” The squirrels in my yard usually drive me insane — digging in our plant pots and bombing our metal roof with half-eaten pecans — but lately I’ve been in envy of them and their ignorance of world affairs. I’ve been thinking a lot about W.H. Auden’s lines, “the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse / Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.” (No owls have showed up in our boxes yet this season, so I’ve had to settle for this video of highlights from the Athena’s great horned owlets.)
   
   

8. I’m grateful for children, the other innocents. If I were attending a large Thanksgiving celebration next week, I would want to sit in the company of the kids’ table. I would bring a bunch of paper and Slick Stix crayons and a copy of Ed Emberley’s Make A World and collaborate on drawings like Dave “Big Dutch” Nally’s. If we got bored, we could make an exquisite corpse — here’s a video I made with my kids during the pandemic on how to play the Surrealists’ game.

   
   

9. A documentary my whole family liked: Music By John Williams, now streaming on Disney+. (Disney does this very Disney thing where they produce interesting, well-done documentaries that essentially function as ads for Disney — a lesson right out of Show Your Work!) We also enjoyed Mickey: The Story of a Mouse. More pizza night adventures: I was not expecting the 1996 animated The Hunchback of Notre Dame to go so hard! Good one. I did some research on Victor Hugo and found out that he made incredible drawings — I especially dig this drawing of an octopus he made while writing Toilers of the Sea.
   
   

10. For your listening pleasure: I made a November mixtape called Dance in the Ruins, with a lot of British synthpop and soul songs. You can listen on Spotify and Apple Music.
    

Thanks for reading. This is a hand-rolled, ad-free, AI-free, anti-algorithm newsletter made possible by the support of readers like you. If you want to help keep it going, buy my books or become a paid subscriber:

xoxo,

Austin

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