Success means you get to do it again tomorrow

10 things worth sharing this week

Hey y’all,

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

1. RIP musician and engineer Steve Albini. I’ve spent countless hours listening to records he recorded. Surfer Rosa cracked open my middle school mind and made me want to learn to record drums in a big room. His sentences rattle around in my brain: At least once a season I think about the last line of his 1993 essay, “The Problem with Music” and the summary of his ethos in his letter to Nirvana: ”I would like to be paid like a plumber.” I love his diagrams and drawn layouts explaining recording techniques. I even squeezed his interaction with a failed X-Factor contestant into my book Show Your Work! Maybe most importantly, he seemed to me a model for aging — how to acknowledge your past mistakes and continue growing as a person. He will be greatly missed.
   
   

2. I’ve been writing a lot about likeness and likability lately — my hunch is that really knowing what you like makes you less worried about being liked or likable, which frees you up in your work. In my letter about drawings inspired Ralph Steadman I forgot to quote him on getting the nasty bits of you out in your work: “People have said, ’Oh, I thought you’d be a nasty piece of work because you’re so dark and trenchant,’ and I say, ‘No I’m not! I’ve got rid of it — it’s all on paper!’” (To quote Wendell Berry: “Do not think me gentle / because I speak in praise / of gentleness…”)
   
   

3. “A painting to me is primarily a verb, not a noun, an event first and only secondarily an image.” I’ve been reading a bit about the artist Elaine de Kooning, who is one of the painters featured in a book I just started, Mary Gabriel’s Ninth Street Women. (Many have recommended it to me as a great example of scenius.)

   
   

4. Essays: Elisa Gabbert sent me her forthcoming collection, Any Person Is the Only Self, and so far (I’m 60 pages in) it’s my favorite book of hers since The Word Pretty. Just yesterday I read her essay “On Jealousy,” which made me think that all writers should write an essay on jealousy, because it’s revealing information: tell me what you’re jealous of, and you tell me who you are.
   
   

5. I love Elisa’s idea for a book club: “The Stupid Classics,” or basically, short, well-known, old books you didn’t read in high school. Top of my list are books mentioned in the essay: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Whenever I read these kinds of books I discover that they’re often much weirder and more lively than I imagined.
   
   

6. In theaters: Fall Guy is a fun date movie with pretty people in love and lots of things blowing up.
   
   

7. “If the public is afraid of art, should we be afraid of what we have done to make the public afraid of art?” A lot of Keith Haring stuff has come up in my feeds lately: his time he spent in Iowa City and a playlist of his mixtapes and his street notes. I just remembered that I have a nice copy of his journals around here somewhere.
   
   

8. Playlists: Steve Albini’s 20 favorite songs of all-time and The Steve Albini Sound.
   
   

9. “I think the pressures are always the same—the only difference is the amount of money that’s involved. I mean, it’s a lot of pressure to produce something for $25 dollars when you really need $25. It doesn’t matter if the pressure is for $2,500 or $25,000—it’s the same pressure.” RIP artist Frank Stella.
   
   

10. A last word from Steve Albini for the ”you don’t need a vision” file: “I’ve lived my whole life without having goals, and I think that’s very valuable, because then I never am in a state of anxiety or dissatisfaction. I never feel I haven’t achieved something. I never feel there is something yet to be accomplished. I feel like goals are quite counterproductive. They give you a target, and until the moment you reach that target, you are stressed and unsatisfied, and at the moment you reach that specific target you are aimless and have lost the lodestar of your existence. I’ve always tried to see everything as a process. I want to do things in a certain way that I can be proud of that is sustainable and is fair and equitable to everybody that I interact with. If I can do that, then that’s a success, and success means that I get to do it again tomorrow.”

Every time I get to write another one of these letters, I feel like a great success. Thanks for reading this hand-rolled, algorithm-free, completely reader-supported publication. The best way to support my work is to buy my books or become a paid subscriber:

xoxo,

Austin

PS. To end on a lighter note, here’s another silly notebook weigh-out: