The classics are weird

10 things worth sharing this week

See the uncensored version of this collage

High, y’all,

Father’s Day is Sunday. Gift one my books — most dads need Keep Going more than the others — or a gift subscription to this newsletter:

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

1. My favorite thing about reading “the classics” is that they’re almost always weirder than you think they are. For example: within 50 pages of War and Peace, a bunch of drunks tie a policeman to a bear and throw them in the river. (I try to read a big book every summer, so I figured why not read one of the biggest?)
   
   

2. Other classics that were much weirder than I expected: Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, R. Crumb’s adaptation of The Book of Genesis, and maybe the weirdest of them all, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick.
   
   

3. “Classics are books which, the more we think we know them through hearsay, the more original, unexpected, and innovative we find them when we actually read them,” wrote Italo Calvino in Why Read The Classics. Amongst his other 14 criteria for what makes a classic is an emphasis on re-reading: a classic is a book you can re-read over and over and find something new. (I’m particularly drawn to this idea: “A classic is a work which relegates the noise of the present to a background hum, which at the same time the classics cannot exist without.”)
   
   

4. My other feeling about “classics” — particularly in music — is that the artist was often pushing the absolute limits of what they could do with the medium, their spirit, the technology available to them, etc. They were taking everything that had been done before and pushing past it, and that’s why the work still sounds so fresh today. That’s certainly true of the two innovative American weirdos we lost this week…
   
   

5. “They’re trying to set the record straight. But a record’s not straight, especially when you’re not. It’s a circle with a spiral inside it.” RIP trailblazing bandleader and songwriter Sly Stone. To sample his genius, you simply cannot go wrong with Sly and the Family Stone’s Greatest Hits, which is one of the great party records. Or listen to one of my favorite albums, There’s A Riot Goin’ On. Watch Questlove’s Summer of Soul and Sly Lives! (Quote is from Sly’s memoir — more Sly links in items 3 & 4 of this previous letter.)
   
   

6. “When Brian Wilson completed the song ‘God Only Knows,’ he spoke of the impulse to fade the song out on a loop of the chorus, suggesting that it creates a sort of infinity spiral. A world where the song is still going on, always, somewhere…” RIP trailblazing bandleader and songwriter Brian Wilson. You’ve heard those Beach Boys songs a million times in commercials and movies, but when you really listen to “Good Vibrations” (cello and theremin in a pop song?) or try to play “God Only Knows” on the piano, you realize how profoundly weird those gorgeous songs really are. (Quote from Hanif Abdurraqib’s There’s Always This Year.)
   
   

7. Inside David Lynch’s archives.
   
   

8. “A lot of artists think that they’re struggling with a technology problem. But what we’re dealing with is an audience problem…. The problem is: Where is the audience? Where is the audience that is hungry for the human?” I talked to the Echoes podcast about what it means to create something beautiful in a time of AI.

   
   

9. “Comedy is not just for fun, happy times. Comedy is a survival mechanism.” I talked to Jason Chatfield about attention, showing up, and how to keep going.

   
   

10. Your assignment this week: Stay alive, get weird. (To quote another American weirdo: “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”) Or: Be the weird you wish to see.

Thank you falettinme be mice elf again. This hand-rolled, ad-free, AI-free, anti-algorithm publication is made possible thanks to the kind support of readers like you. To keep Friday free for everyone and get an extra exclusive email from me every Tuesday, become a paid subscriber:

Love & mercy,

Austin

A note-to-self from my bulletin board