The power of enjoyment

10 things worth sharing this week

A collage I made around a postcard drawing that Warren Craghead mailed me

Hey y’all,

As Ralphie says in A Christmas Story, “I could feel the Christmas noose beginning to tighten.” There’s plenty of last-minute ideas in my gift guide. Also, I’m knocking 20% off paid subscriptions to this newsletter until Christmas — gift it to a loved one or treat yourself:

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

1. RIP poet Nikki Giovanni. “Why shouldn’t I enjoy my own work?” she asked. “While I have always liked my career I have way more fun with it now. I've got nothing to prove, and I don't care what the critics say. When I finish writing a book, I don't push myself to start the next one; I enjoy having just written one….. A lot of people resist transition and therefore never allow themselves to enjoy who they are.”
   
   

2. “Deal writes by hand on a ‘hierarchy of paper.’ She’ll start out jotting lyrics on ‘plain white paper, or lined thin paper,’ and the best of her scribbles move to scalloped paper plates.” I loved this profile of musician Kim Deal, and I like her first solo album, Nobody Loves You More. (My favorite track is “Are You Mine?” — a song inspired by caring for her mother with Alzheimer’s.)
   
   

3. The holidays can be a tough time for people grieving and dealing with loss. I was deeply moved by my friend Steven Tomlinson’s recent appearance on Peaceful Exit, a podcast about death and dying.
   
   

4. Adrift on a Painted Sea is a short, beautiful memoir by cartoonist Tim Bird that masterfully incorporates his late mother’s paintings into his comic about her life story. (The book deservedly made this year’s list of NPR’s Books We Love, a great site if you’re looking for your next read.)
   
   

5. I sent Kristen Radtke’s online comic How To Watch A Baby to Scott McCloud because it reminded me of some of his ideas about the “Infinite Canvas” he wrote about in Reinventing Comics. (I highly recommend Radtke’s book Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness.)
   
   

6. This drawing and short story of a magical roll top writing desk sent me into a deep nostalgic longing for the tiny roll top desk I had in my room when I was growing up. (Adrian Neibauer put a thrift store roll top desk in his classroom and says his students love it — he also wrote a wonderful piece about the “Pit of Despair” we fall into sometimes and how my book Keep Going helps him crawl out of it.)
   
   

7. Watching: Meg and I enjoyed Netflix’s spy show Black Doves and the action comedy Thelma, which stars a 93-year-old June Squibb doing her own stunt work.
   
   

8. RIP South Congress Books. (“What an astonishing thing a book is,” said Carl Sagan. “It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.”)
   
   

9. “The universe is warped / that is why all of us seek each other / The universe is growing fast / that is why all of us are uneasy.” RIP poet Shuntaro Tanikawa — Japan’s most popular poet and translator of Peanuts into Japanese.
   
   

10. This week’s assignment: Consider taking a news vacation over the holidays. I recently told a buddy about my “bookends” approach to the day: When I go to bed, I leave my phone plugged in on the kitchen counter, and I read a book in bed until I fall asleep. When I wake up, I don’t touch the phone again until I’ve made breakfast, finished my coffee, and filled 3 pages of my diary. He’s giving it a try right now and says it’s going great.

Thanks for reading. This is a hand-rolled, ad-free, AI-free, anti-algorithm newsletter made possible by the support of readers like you. If you want to help keep it going, take advantage of the holiday sale and become a paid subscriber:

xoxo,

Austin

PS. At least one reader was scandalized by the subject line of last week’s email, but another reader sent me the comedian Ismo’s hilarious standup routine, “Ass Is The Most Complicated Word In The English Language.” Enjoy!

PPS. Here are a few pages from Keep Going to augment with this week’s assignment: