The art of imperfection

10 things worth sharing this week

Hey y’all,

Thanks for all the kind words about my studio! Looking forward to showing you inside next week.

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

1. One of my favorite things in art: “deliberate imperfection.”
   
   

2. I’m enjoying Yiyun Li’s The Book of Goose. I read a good deal of it Sunday afternoon, soaking in the bathtub after a long bicycle ride. Novels came back into my reading life this year in a big way — a trend that got started last year with Lauren Groff’s Matrix. I loved Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and Don Delillo’s White Noise. I really liked Antoine Wilson’s Mouth to Mouth and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven. Even though it drove me a little nuts, I was glad I read Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea.
   
   

3. This is the time of year I can’t help myself and I start buying a bunch of books. Recent purchases: an anthology of the black punk zine Shotgun Seamstress (a nice appreciation from Hanif Abdurraqib); P.G. Wodehouse’s Joy in the Morning; a new Joe Brainard monograph, The Art of The Personal; Heather Radke’s Butts: A Backstory; and my big splurge, the epic, gigantic, 27-pound box set of the first 50 issues of Love and Rockets.
   
   

4. If you want to find even more books to buy, I like paging through The Millions’ “A Year in Reading.” Two favorites: Elisa Gabbert and Emma Alpern, who shouts out two wonderful works by people who stutter: JJJJJerome Ellis’s book/LP The Clearing and John Hendrickson’s forthcoming memoir, Life on Delay.
   
   

5. Amanda Petrusich’s 9,000-word profile of Metallica in The New Yorker.
   
   

6. TV: one of my absolute favorite shows, the wild Chicago comedy South Side, is back for a 3rd season. I am shocked that more people don’t talk about this show! It’s so funny.
   
   

7. More TV: The spy show Slow Horses is back for a second season. (I enjoyed Jill Lepore’s profile of Mick Herron, who wrote the novels the series is based on.)
   
   

8. Cocktail: If you’re a White Lotus nut like me (creator Mike White was great on Fresh Air!), I recommend buying a bottle of Averna and fixing a Black Manhattan to drink along with the finale. I make it with this recipe my agent/mixologist Ted gave me: 2 ounces rye, 1 ounce Averna, a few dashes of bitters, and a maraschino cherry, with a tiny bit of the juice thrown in. Delicious.
   
   

9. RIP drummer Hamish Kilgour, who co-founded the wonderful New Zealand band The Clean.
   
   

10. I endorse: starting and ending the day with books, a.k.a. the bookends approach to reading.

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xoxo,

Austin

PS. My books make great stocking stuffers!!