The idea of autumn

10 things worth sharing this week + 20% off sale

Hey y’all,

To celebrate the arrival of autumn in the northern hemisphere, I’m offering 20% off paid subscriptions! Going paid gets you a special newsletter from me every Tuesday, membership in a community of thousands of creative people, and access to comments and the full archives. The kind support of paid subscribers also keeps this Friday letter free for everybody!

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

1. In Texas, it looks like fall before it feels like fall. To scramble a line from Sylvia Plath’s journal, the worst of the summer is gone, with “the new fall not yet born. The odd uneven time.” Virginia Woolf said it well in a letter: “I feel entirely dehumanized by the sun now and wish for fog, snow, rain, humanity.” None of that is coming until at least Halloween down here, so we must settle for what C.S. Lewis in Surprised By Joy called “the idea of Autumn.”
   
   

2. Joy Williams on the truth-telling of fall: “Fall is. It always comes round, with its lovely patience. If in the beginning it’s restless, at the end it’s resigned, complete in its waiting, complete in the utter correctness of what it has to tell us. Which is that we’re transitory. We’re transient, we’re temporary, we’re all only sometime.”
   
   

3. Yes, life is short and the world is crazy, but this weekend we have lots of baseball and a new season of Slow Horses on TV, a new Cate Le Bon album, and a new Paul Thomas Anderson movie. It’s not all bad!!
   
   

4. “I almost never make up anything. I just notice different things.” A profile of Patricia Lockwood and her new novel, Will There Ever Be Another You. This time of year I think about a perfect passage from her memoir, Priestdaddy:

   I have lived for the last eight years in seasonless places, where things do not die, but revolve in a constant tropic sun. I had forgotten how the fall sharpens pencils, gray and colored ones. I had forgotten that when you pay attention to the seasons, you are returned to school and all its feelings, the freedom of three o’clock and the nameless dread of Sunday night, when the sky looms over you like the deadline of some paper you haven’t even started. I want to drink cocoa out of a thermos; I want to go to a high school football game.

   Year-round, I quote a line from her last novel, No One Is Talking About This: “You’ll be nostalgic for all this, too, if you make it.”
   
   

5. Fall mixtape: last year’s “Autumn Leaves” mix is now available on Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube:

   

   For more fall vibes, check out Fluxblog’s autumnal playlists and Dusty Henry’s six ambient albums for fall. (I’m looking forward to his 33 1/3 genre guide, 20th Century Ambient. Until then, this flowchart isn’t bad — you can’t go wrong with Brian Eno, Aphex Twin, and Hiroshi Yoshimura.)
   
   

6. “We always think about Rembrandt as a genius who created things out of nothing. But he had a huge print collection, he was very aware of his predecessors, and he borrowed from them as well. I wouldn’t call it copying or plagiarizing. It was more like borrowing inspiration, and then changing it around.” Rembrandt’s mysterious dog is a good example of stealing like an artist.
   
   

7. RIP Scottish DJ and producer JD Twitch. Check out his mixes on SoundCloud and his mixtapes on the Optimo Music Bandcamp, such as Caverns of Dub.
   
   

8. Slate made a list of the 25 greatest picture books of the past 25 years. I can co-sign Mo Willems’ Don’t Let The Pigeon Drive The Bus, Hervé Tullet’s Press Here, and Raúl The Third’s World of ¡Vamos! books, but my list would include Jon Klassen’s The Hat Trilogy, Oliver Jeffers’ Stuck, BlexBolex’s Ballad, and Souther Salazar’s Destined For Dizziness.
   
   

9. RIP actress Claudia Cardinale, who starred in Once Upon A Time In The West, Fitzcarraldo, 8 1/2, and more.
   
   

10. “The goal: create a space where ideas bounce around, where mistakes are ok, where everyone feels like they have something to offer.” If you click on one thing this week, make it this delightful typewriter interview with Kate Bingaman-Burt.

Thanks for reading. To quote Kate, “This list will be different tomorrow—it just has to make sense in the moment.”

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xoxo,

Austin

PS. I finished Anna Karenina before the equinox! Here’s a little cartoon for my fellow Tolstoy heads: