The birds are in misery

10 things worth sharing this week

“Angry Birds,” newspaper + marker, 2026

Hey y’all,

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

1. It is so miserable in Texas right now that I’ve taken to reciting Werner Herzog’s monologue from Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams: “The trees here are in misery and the birds are in misery. I don’t think they sing. They just screech in pain…. It’s an unfinished country. It’s still prehistorical. The only thing that is lacking is the dinosaurs here. It’s like a curse weighing on an entire landscape. And whoever goes too deep into this has his share of that curse. So we are cursed with what we are doing here. It’s a land that God, if he exists, has created in anger…. Taking a close look at what’s around us, there is some kind of harmony, but it is the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder. And we in comparison to the articulate vileness and baseness and obscenity… we in comparison to that enormous articulation, we only sound and look like badly pronounced and half-finished sentences…” (Summer here will end one day… in November, probably.)
   
   

2. I gave the keynote at the Wild Wonder Nature Journaling Conference last night! I spent a good part of my preparation for the talk combing through various issues of this newsletter, including an explanation of my 4 notebooks (which are now only 3) and what I do when I finish a notebook, a tour diary and a diary of a book, a peek inside my pocket notebook, and thoughts on notebooks and memory and when a diary pays off. I also paged through my summer diary from 2023, which reminded me of my creative seasons and how this summer might as well be winter. (And, of course, I talked about what brand of notebooks I use.)
   

   

   A page from Keep Going

3. “Do you know how ant culture works? Alright, so an ant finds food and then just farts pheromones. And almost all the other ants are like, ‘Ooh, that’s food!’ And they go and they follow exactly where that ant is. They get the food and they get in a line and they go and they go and they go and they eat the food and it’s unsustainable because the food will run out and they die. So what ants have are a series of random ants. And the rando ants, they don’t follow the smell. They just go around. And those are the ones you see in your kitchen that you kill. Those are the ones that get stepped on. Those are the ones that are just all over the place. Why is that single ant there? Those are the artists in our culture. We are the random ants.” Mo Willems on the necessity of art.

   
   

4. Collage inspiration: John Stezaker’s fascinating unknowns.
   
   

5. “You must become an ignorant man again
   And see the sun again with an ignorant eye
   And see it clearly in the idea of it.”
   —Wallace Stevens, “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” 1942
   

   

   Kid-inspired lessons to make making fun again

6. “Kids shape culture, and their drawings show what captures their attention. I scraped over 100 million drawings and paintings from Artsonia, an online student art gallery, to explore almost 20 years of favorite characters, passing obsessions, and everyday life.” A really cool database of artwork by kids.

   

   My drawing of Batman, age 6 (see: “The Comfort of Drawing Batman”)

7. Instagram: I’ve never read a Louis L’Amour book, but I found myself watching these videos of his son Beau showing off his office, talking about how he typed with two fingers, his maritime maps, and how he didn’t mind his kids being around. (Great Show Your Work! style promo, if I do say so.)
   
   

8. Rock music: I had a chat with critic Steven Hyden about his new book, Is This It: The Never-Ending Rise and Fall of the Strokes (and Rock n’ Roll).
   
   

   
   

9. ”Mr. Max was everywhere. He was not, however, involved with the 1969 Beatles film ’Yellow Submarine,’ often assumed to be his work, in part because he often took credit for it.” RIP artist Peter Max.
   
   

10. RIP writer Annie Dillard. I have quoted her in several books, but my favorite quote — the one I try to keep in mind every time I write — is from The Writing Life:
    
    “One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water…”
    
    I quoted the rest in Show Your Work!:

    

Thanks for reading. If you’d like to support this human-made, hand-rolled publication, buy my books and become a paid subscriber:

See you in the fall,

Austin