The map is not the territory

10 things worth sharing: more maps, drawing without visualizing, books I’m reading, ear and eye candy, and more...

Hey y’all,

Once upon a time I did “office hours” over on the blog, and that seems like something that might be fun to reboot in this newsletter. (Although, it’ll be hard to top our recent open thread.) If you have a question for me, drop it in the comments and I’ll pick a batch to answer in the near future:

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

1. I can’t seem to stop writing about maps. After I sent out Tuesday’s newsletter about how I hit an “invisible wall” at the edge of the map of my understanding, I came across these two familiar quotes: “A map is not the territory” (Alfred Korzybski, via Michelle in the comments) and “It’s not down in any map; true places never are” (Moby-Dick, misquoted in Bob Dylan’s Nobel Lecture, which was just published as a 30-page hardcover).
   
   

2. Loved this piece about drawing with aphantasia and why we don’t need visualization to make visual art. (I wrote a bit about aphantasia a while back. New research suggests that we might be able to diagnose it with pupillary response.)
   
   

3. Comics: I’ve been reading Darryl Cunningham’s most recent (and terribly relevant) books: Billionaires: The Lives of the Rich and Powerful and Putin’s Russia: The Rise of a Dictator. Both will send a chill down your spine, and both were published by Drawn and Quarterly, one of my favorite publishers in the world. (They just sent me two brilliant forthcoming books from their catalogue: Nick Drnaso’s Acting Class and Kate Beaton’s long-awaited memoir, Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands.)
   
   

4. Paging through Maria Ward’s 1896 guide to Bicycling For Ladies (read some excerpts) I got really interested in her friend, the photographer Alice Austen.
   
   

5. I somehow slept on Nicole Rudick’s What Is Now Known Was Once Only Imagined, an “(auto)biography” of artist Niki de Saint Phalle that Rudick edited together with Saint Phalle’s own text and images. The project reminded me of Marvin Lowenthal’s The Autobiography of Michel de Montaigne, which he stitched together the same way, using Montaigne’s own writings. Yet another book done with a similar method is Ruth Scurr’s John Aubrey, My Own Life, a biography of the biographer, made up of his own diary entries.
   
   

6. I was about to read Alexandra Lange’s Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall but my wife Meghan stole it for herself. (What better endorsement is there?) Another mall-related classic I highly recommend: Zan McQuade’s “How I Learned To Love The Mall.”

   
   

7. Ear candy: I’ve been in a bit of a listening funk, so I asked Twitter what records they had on repeat. Popular favorite was the new Kendrick Lamar. I was delighted to see some reggae in there: the original Jamaican version of Bob Marley’s Catch a Fire and Desmond Dekker’s The Definitive Collection. (Wasn’t expecting to see Interpol’s Turn on the Bright Lights, which I bought [checks notes] 20 years ago. Phew.)
   
   

8. Eye candy: Yann Kebbi’s sketches from the set of a Mike Mills movie, Kafka’s drawings, Karl Lagerfield’s iPods, and the tide graphics in the Northern California Tidelog. (That last one discovered via Robin Sloan’s newsletter.)
   
   

9. Lots of people are about to travel for the summer, so I shared one of my favorite New Yorker cartoons about travel and people sent me this hilarious SNL bit with Adam Sandler about the limits of what travel can do for you.
   
   

10. RIP Vangelis, who composed the soundtrack for Blade Runner, probably one of my top 10 movies. (A deep cut for fans: The Tegos Tapes, 8 hours of music he recorded to accompany educational VHS tapes of his doctor friend performing microneurosurgery.) He said: “What we need today more than anything else is to invest in beauty.”

Thanks for reading. This newsletter is a reader-supported publication. The best way to support my work is to buy my books, hire me to speak, shop for some of my favorite gear (I get a cut), or become a paid subscriber and help keep Fridays free for everyone:

xoxo,

Austin

PS. It’s “dads and grads” season in bookstores, so a reminder: my books make great gifts!